Authors: Karel van Loon
‘Shall I put some sugar in your coffee?’
‘No, no, thank you.’
‘A piece of chocolate? Does wonders. After three pregnancies, I should know.’
She smiles at me. She has a lovely smile. Niko Neerinckx married a lovely woman. But I’d have expected nothing less. Anke is the kind of woman I would once have filed away as unattainable.
Too beautiful. The kind of beauty a lot of men go for, but the kind most of them also find intimidating. For Niko, she must have been the ultimate challenge. I bet she was involved with someone
else when he met her.
I take a piece of chocolate. She turns off the TV and settles down on the other half of the corner couch, in the spot where I saw her drinking coffee earlier. That it could be so easy! That I
would find out what I needed to know so quickly! My head is still spinning, but fortunately she doesn’t notice. She nestles down cosily amid the soft cushions of the couch, like a cat, her
legs pulled up under her.
‘So tell me, what was the story about that letter?’
F
or Rotterdam we make an exception, otherwise the city would cease to exist. But for the rest of the country we show no mercy: everything from
after 1945 has to go.
‘See that petrol station? Kiss it goodbye! That office block? Blow it up!’
Quonset huts, viaducts, electricity sub-stations, housing estates, warehouses, on-ramps, off-ramps, phone booths, hardware stores, apartment buildings, bus stops, traffic lights, golf courses,
control towers, ski slopes, billboards, ranch-style housing, middle schools, go-kart tracks, holiday villages, pig farms, ministries – raze, tear down, destroy!
We’re sitting in the train and we’re cleaning up the Netherlands.
‘What shall we put there instead?’ Bo asks.
‘For that road there, grassland. For that office building, a farm. For that housing estate, market gardens.’
We dig old ditches anew. Give rivers room to run. We tear neon signs and decorative awnings off old buildings. We renovate classic shopfronts, putting leaded glass back in the windows and adding
hardwood sills. We plough kilometres of asphalt under the Dutch clay.
Research for policy.
Forget it.
Nokia copiers.
Away with it.
‘Where are we going?’ Bo had asked.
‘Back in time. To the Holland Grandpa grew up in.’ In 1940 my father had just turned thirteen, twice as old as Bo is on this glorious spring day.
‘We’ll repopulate the ditches,’ I tell Bo halfway between Leiden and The Hague. ‘Now that the ground is no longer over-fertilized, the water is clear and
wholesome.’
‘There should be big fat pike in it,’ Bo says.
‘And rock bass,’ I say.
‘Water-stick bugs.’
‘Sticklebacks.’
‘Diving beetles.’
Bo has a predilection for robbers and bandits. The water-stick bug, which lies motionless just beneath the water’s surface, breathing through its snorkel, on the lookout for other water
bugs which it kills with one snap of its powerful jaws. The diving beetle, bold enough to take on fish three times its size. And its equally voracious larvae, not averse to devouring the occasional
salamander. (They use their hollow jaws to inject intestinal juices into their prey, then suck them dry.)
‘Minnows,’ I say.
‘Water spiders,’ Bo says.
‘Pond skaters.’
‘Whirligig beetles.’ (The whirligig uses the top half of its eyes to watch the sky, ready to dive when danger approaches; with the other half it peers down into the water, searching
for edible passers-by. When it dives, it takes a bubble of air with it to keep from drowning. Impeccable design, on the head of a pin.)
‘Black terns can nest here again.’
‘And storks can walk around.’
‘There won’t be as many blue herons, though.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘No, that doesn’t matter.’
In The Hague we pull ten thousand cars off the road.
‘What kind of cars were there in the 1930s?’
The Peerless V16, with its 7.6-litre engine and that long, gleaming bonnet. On Matheneserplein in Rotterdam you could see them through the window of the showroom of Peerless Motor Imports, which
shipped them in from Cleveland, Ohio. The Peerless was so expensive and so exclusive that in the late 1930s there were only thirty-eight of them on the road in Holland. When President Roosevelt put
an end to Prohibition and alcoholic drinks could once again be sold legally all over the United States, the manufacturer of the Peerless switched to brewing – there was more money in
that.
‘What else?’
Rapides from Belgium. Built in Antwerp, designed by Amsterdam engineer Silvain de Jong. The cheapest model was the 12hp, which sold for 5,400 guilders. In 1936 the Rapide factory went bust owing
to the brutal competition from American motor companies, Ford in particular.
‘How much did a Ford cost’
You could buy a Ford V-8 for as little as 1,025 guilders. The convertibles were a little more expensive: 1,190 guilders and up. For 135 guilders extra you got a built-in car radio. When the war
broke out, there were 937 Fords on the road here. Other carmakers could only dream of sales like that.
‘It must have been really quiet on the streets,’ Bo says.
‘In a lot of villages,’ I say, ‘you could drive through only if the local constable walked along in front of you, to warn pedestrians.’
‘Did Grandpa’s family have a car?’
‘Grandpa Minderhout’s didn’t. But the Paradies family’s did. And Grandpa Paradies’s mother owned a motorbike. She was the first woman in Holland with a
motorbike.’
‘Too bad we never see them any more, Grandma and Grandpa Paradies,’ Bo says.
‘Yeah,’ I say.
When we get to Rotterdam, we keep our mouths shut. Bo knows about the war and the bombardment. That’s why we leave Rotterdam alone – it wouldn’t be right to
wipe out the city all over again. The train stops at Rotterdam Central. Passes through Blaak station. Then we rattle over the old Hef Bridge. The river is as slate-grey and busy as ever. The view
of the glittering water summons up deep longings, for distant shores, unfamiliar cities. We like Rotterdam, Bo and I. Sometimes we even go to Feyenoord’s home games. (A few years after this,
the railway tunnel under the Meuse was opened. The most beautiful stretch of track in the Netherlands became a useless hunk of rust. At Feyenoord, a former Ajax player was appointed trainer. The
old stadium had never seen such half-baked football.)
Right before we get to Dordrecht, we send a huge shipyard to the bottom of the Merwede.
‘Took care of that one.’
We plough under a tract full of miserable twigs trying to pass for fruit trees, without so much as a by-your-leave. We replace them with standard trees: Triomphe de Vienne, a peach of a pear
that’s almost disappeared from the Netherlands, because it bruises too easily, and also because it ripens just when the supply of pears is at its peak, and therefore when prices are at their
lowest.
At the Biesbosch wetlands we let the tidal waters flow back in, so that the woods make way for reeds again.
‘Too bad for the beavers.’
‘A real pity.’
A fisherman checks his fish wheel and pulls a salmon out of the net.
‘How can you know where you want to go,’ I say to Bo, ‘if you don’t know where we came from?’
And Bo presses his nose against the window and blows up the refinery at Moerdijk. A chip off the old block, I think proudly – I thought proudly.
T
he story of the letter is an old one I borrowed from Monika. A historical event processed into a crock of lies, sort of like the Gulf War.
When I (Monika) was eight, I wrote a letter to my mother. I was at home alone with my mother a lot, because my father worked in a city far from us and came home late at night.
I’m an only child. When I was alone with my mother, she ignored me as much as she could. She preferred it when I read a book or played quietly in a corner, as long as I didn’t make any
noise and didn’t bother her by asking questions or telling stories about what had happened at school.
Nothing much ever happened at school, though, and I’d learned a long time ago not to ask my mother questions. She never understood what I meant, or else she didn’t understand that I
didn’t already know the answer to my own question. Whatever it was, she never gave me a normal answer. So I saved all my questions for a friend at school, who then asked his mother, or who
sometimes even knew the answer himself, which made him very proud and made me proud too, because it meant our friendship was that much closer.
Seeing as I was never allowed to ask my mother anything, I decided one day to write her a letter. That wasn’t easy, because in a letter you have to write the truth very carefully. If the
person you’re writing to doesn’t understand what you mean, terrible misunderstandings can arise – that much I realized even then. So I took a long time writing the letter. Every
day it became a little longer. Every day there were more things about which I thought: I want my mother to know that, to know what I think about that. The letter also contained more and more about
what I thought of her and of my father. I remember reading some of those sentences ten times over, to be absolutely sure they said exactly what I meant.
One day I decided the letter was finished. I wrote, ‘This is what I wanted to say.’ And I signed my name at the bottom.
It was time to give the letter to my mother, but I didn’t dare. At first I kept it in my school notebook. But my parents sometimes checked my homework unexpectedly, so that wasn’t a
safe place. I decided that the best place to hide it was in the attic. I used to play in the attic a lot, with a chest full of old clothes. Above that chest was a place where two rafters crossed.
Between the rafters was a little crack. I hid the letter in there. And then, the way kids do, I forgot all about it.
That was the story Monika told, and the story I’m now telling Anke Neerinckx, the wife of my son’s father – for there’s no longer any doubt in my mind
that he’s the one who impregnated Monika.
Bo!
keeps hammering away in my head.
Bo!
What a nerve!
‘Two weeks ago,’ I tell Anke, ‘my mother died. And suddenly I remembered that letter. It’s become very important for me to know what was in it. To know
the way I saw her.’
‘You never completely get away from them, do you?’ she says. ‘Your parents.’
You can hear a pin drop. Outside a car tears through the puddles. The tyres hiss. It sounds as though the rain has eased up.
‘Have some more coffee,’ Anke says. ‘Or would you like something stronger? To get rid of the chill? It would be a good excuse for me to have a drink too. I never drink when
I’m home alone.’
‘Are you alone often?’ I ask, and regret it immediately. ‘Excuse me,’ I say quickly. ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’
She laughs. ‘Pretty often. Niko, my husband, spends a lot of time abroad. He’s a cameraman and director. He has his own video-production company. I have red wine, white, beer,
whisky, cognac, Blue Curaçao, young Dutch gin and Baileys.’
‘Were you going to open a bottle of wine?’
‘I’d love to. Preferably red.’
‘Sounds good. I’ll join you.’
She brings the bottle of wine into the living room. Takes two glasses from an antique cabinet.
‘Niko brought this cabinet back from Sri Lanka. One day there was suddenly a whole container full of colonial furniture on the quay at Rotterdam.’
She asks if I know anything about wine, and shows me the bottle. A Corbières.
‘Nothing special, is it?’ she asks.
‘No, nothing special, but a good wine. A slightly acid aftertaste, with just a hint of soil.’
‘Bleccch,’ she shudders.
‘I’m talking through my hat. I don’t know anything about wine.’ (For a moment there I consider telling her about my father’s wine collection. But I’m afraid
of making mistakes, afraid I’ll contradict myself if I talk too much about myself. So I don’t.)
She uncorks the bottle and fills two glasses.
‘Bo, Sam and . . . ?’
‘Pim,’ she says.
‘Nice names.’
‘Thank you. They’re nice children.’
‘Bo,’ I say. ‘Did your husband have a special reason for naming him Bo?’
‘I think he knew a little boy by that name. I’m not really sure. He just thought it was a nice name, he said. Nice and short. Some people think you spell it B-e-a-u, but it’s
just plain Bo: B-o.’
Monika’s parents were very upset about the name we’d chosen. ‘Bo?’ her mother said on the phone. (Monika was still in bed, recovering, and had made it
clear with a look that she didn’t want to talk to her mother.) ‘How do you spell that? B-e-a-u?’
‘No, just plain Bo: B-o,’ I said.
‘Bo.’ The way she pronounced it made it sound like
Boh.
‘Boo!’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Boo! Just kidding.’
‘Could I speak to Monika?’
‘She’s asleep.’
‘You’re lying, and I know you’re lying, but that’s just your nature. I can only hope that Boh won’t take after his father.’ And then, as if shocked by her own
nastiness at this joyous moment, she added, ‘Well, you know we don’t keep up with the times, not like the two of you. I’m sure you two know what’s best, don’t
you?’
The greatest injustice in the whole history of Bo and my infertility is that it wasn’t Monika’s parents who actually lost their only grandchild, it was my father. Never for a moment
have I considered telling him about it – it would break his heart. (Since my mother died, his heart can’t take much. He still works every day in the shed behind their house –
which has now become
his
house, a fact he hates. He fixes up old furniture, which he then donates to rest homes or the Salvation Army. Sometimes I think it’s his way of trying to win
himself a place in heaven, or in one of those rest homes. But I don’t tell him that. In the evening he drinks a glass of red wine and reads a book, or watches a football match on TV. When I
visit him with Ellen and Bo, he perks up completely. That makes me sad.)
In the last few weeks I’ve often thought: if Monika’s parents were the ones whose blood ties with Bo had been so abruptly severed, I would have been
more
than pleased to
tell them. I would have hopped into the car, wearing my best suit, and I would have rung their doorbell with a broad grin on my face. And if they didn’t open the door, I would have painted
the news in huge letters on the street: ‘
BO ISN
’
T YOUR GRANDCHILD
!
HA HA HA
!’