A Father's Affair (16 page)

But I will not give up the chance to dig even further into his private life!

Call it vengefulness or call it perversion, but when Anke and I had searched fruitlessly that afternoon for the imaginary letter in the crack between the rafters, when we’d looked at her
photos and she said she had to pick up the children from school, when I stood up and put on my coat and stood at the door and turned to her, she’d given me a look that was both innocent and
sly (because it was the look of a young girl in a woman of thirty-five) and said, ‘If you’re ever in the neighbourhood again, be sure to drop by. I enjoyed it.’

And I said, ‘I’ll do that.’

The biggest cliché in the mythology of modern sexuality is the lonely housewife who drags the window-cleaner, the plumber or postman into bed. But it could have evolved
into such a cliché only, the sexologists assure us, because it reflects daily practice in our sex lives, which are in turn the direct result of our selfish genes. A man with a good job at an
insurance company may offer the stability that is, historically speaking, one of the most important factors for the successful raising of progeny, but otherwise a man like that is probably not a
winner. He can’t compete physically with outdoor men, with men who earn their livelihood with their bodies and their hands, rather than with their heads (or with overhead projectors,
spreadsheets, computer programs, video cameras and monitors).

Window-cleaners, plumbers and postmen are the ideal opponents for a good spermatic war – not least because the chance of discovery is minimal.

So how does Erik Aldenbos, the alter ego with which I have invaded the life and home of Anke Neerinckx, fit into all this? Does Anke Neerinckx want to go to bed with him? Are her genes sending
her down the garden path of adultery and deceit, or do they recognize in him, childless after all, an inferior sperm donor, and is she therefore lacking in any lust for him whatsoever?

I’d never realized how pleasant it could be to suddenly have a second identity at one’s disposal. To no longer have to be Armin Minderhout, with a dead, adulterous sweetheart, a
child not his own and a woman who wants to marry him but whom he can never provide with offspring. Erik Aldenbos is the poor man’s alternative to buying a one-way ticket to the far side of
the world. (That thought as well, of buying a one-way ticket to the other side of the world, has been raising its head ever since I first heard the words ‘Klinefelter’s
Syndrome’.)

On a sunny spring day, just before noon, Erik Aldenbos is standing in front of the home of Anke Neerinckx. Under his arm he has a wooden box containing two bottles of an
exceptionally fine white Bordeaux: Château Anniche 1992. A firm, fine-dry wine, more floral than fruity, and with a heady bouquet owing to the use of the Sauvignon grape. This time he phoned
first. Whether it was convenient. (Whether her husband was at home.) It was convenient. (He was
not
at home.)

She opens the door wearing a pair of light summer trousers and a loose T-shirt. Homey, easy, but at the same time well considered, carefully coordinated. The soft blue of the shirt goes well
with the colour of her eyes. She’s wearing linen shoes, somewhere between espadrilles and slippers. She is a housewife, but a housewife of the world. I present her with the box of wine and
think: this is a B-movie. B-movies always have a happy ending, but I almost never watch them all the way to the end.

The table is set with black plastic place-mats, rough ceramic plates and a set of sturdy, emphatically designed stainless-steel cutlery. The wine glasses rest on clear blue bases. On the
yellow-plastered wall above our heads an old station clock is ticking away.

‘Cheers,’ she says, once the butter is on the table, and the fresh salmon, and the capers, and the olives, the chorizo and the ciabatta, the little dish of currant jam with the
silver spoon her grandmother had left her and, of course, the fresh croissants.

‘To the good life.’

‘To living on the edge at home.’ And we touch glasses and drink and laugh and eat and the sun shines through the window and above our heads the clock is ticking and she wants to know
who I am, and I am slowly becoming curious myself, and so I start down the treacherous road of truth, lies and fabrication that should lead to the answer to the question: who is Erik Aldenbos, and
will he fuck Anke Neerinckx?

‘What do you do for a living?’ she asks.

‘I’m a freelance editor for a scientific publisher.’

‘Married, engaged, divorced, single?’

‘Single.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s nicer to be one of two than to be alone.’

‘You think so?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Not necessarily. It depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On the other person, to start with. I mean, the other person has to be worth it.’

‘Worth what?’

‘Everything you have to give up.’

‘Do you have a lot to give up?’

‘I should be asking you that. Did you have a lot to give up?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘And now you’re going to tell me that you get a lot back in return.’

‘That’s right.’ And she laughs and takes a bite of her croissant, and a little jam sticks to her upper lip and after a while she licks it away with the tip of her tongue and
takes a sip of wine and asks, ‘Have you ever loved anyone enough to want to share your life with them?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what went wrong?’

‘She left me for someone else.’

‘You know,’ she says with sudden fervour, ‘when I was eighteen, I knew one thing for sure: I was never going to let myself be reduced to the clichés that all the people
around me had been reduced to. And now look at me.’

‘How did you meet your husband?’

‘On a trip. He was the tour guide. What a cliché.’ She laughs mockingly.

‘You were with your boyfriend at the time,’ I say. ‘The two of you were trying to save your relationship by taking a trip together.’

She looks at me in amazement. Then bursts out laughing. ‘Yeah, exactly! My God, is it so predictable? Oh, that’s terrible!’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘When you’re eighteen, telling yourself that you’re never going to become like all those other stuffy people is just as much a
cliché as becoming like them in the end. The things pop stars say about love are just as empty as the marriage of the average teenager’s parents – the only difference is that the
teenager doesn’t know that yet.’

‘So what are we supposed to do? I mean, what do we do when we finally work that out? Are we supposed to just give up on love, write it off, put it out with the rubbish?’

‘We have to reinvent it,’ I say, with no idea what I mean by that.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘There’s the kind of love our parents have, or at least the image children have, and have always had, of that kind of love. A love based on agreements, on a practical urge to
survive. It’s a love that young people feel doesn’t deserve to be called love. It’s a pragmatic love, so at best only a halfway form. And then there’s the kind of love young
people have: unconditional love, the great, compelling, all-consuming love, the love that’s been sung about in a hundred thousand number-one hits. But that’s also a halfway form at
best, because it’s a utopian love. And utopias, once realized, immediately become their opposite. The way great, compelling loves, once they become something lasting, always turn into a hell.
Read Pinter. That’s why romantic heroes have only one way of surviving: by dying young. If Romeo and Juliet had been given the chance to marry, they would never have found a place in world
literature. Or it would have to have been in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
’

‘So?’

‘So what?’

‘Well, you said we have to invent love all over again. But how do you do that?’

‘The love our parents have and the love experienced by young people have one thing in common,’ I say, with no idea what’s coming next. ‘They’re both selfish. Maybe
the love we have to reinvent is a love that’s no longer self-centred. Maybe love looks completely different from what we suppose. Maybe it doesn’t come from us at all. Not from our
hearts, as romantics believe, or from our brains, as the rationalists think, or from our genes, as the biologists say. Maybe love is nothing but that which gives life. And you can take part in
that, or you can seal yourself off from it. You can help it along, or you can struggle against it. But then again, maybe this is all a bunch of nonsense.’

(‘God is love,’ I’d told Bo when he was still very little, ‘and love is God.’ But later, after Monika was dead and I’d told him about God’s Dark Room in
the House of Knowledge, he came back from school one afternoon and said, ‘There’s a boy in my class who says God is a big beam of light, sort of like the sun but different. And if you
do something wrong, he gets angry, and he roars, just like a thunderstorm. Is that true?’ And I said, ‘No, that’s not true.’ And he asked, ‘So what is it?’ And I
said, ‘We can’t know God. God is a mystery that can’t be solved.’ The same goes for love.)

Did Erik Aldenbos go to bed with Anke Neerinckx?

No.

Could he have?

Yes, says Erik Aldenbos, unhindered by the self-examination that inevitably follows the discovery that your own child isn’t yours.

Would the ultimate revenge be to fuck the wife of the man who fucked your wife?

No. The ultimate revenge is
not
to do it, even though you could have. (I tell myself in the train all the way back to Amsterdam. I don’t succeed much longer than that.)

‘W
as Niko Neerinckx at the funeral?’

‘Oh, Armin, do you still think he’s the one who did it?’

‘I only asked whether he was at the funeral.’

‘Of course he was. Everyone from Small World was there.’

She’s right. They were all there. Except for two tour guides who were in Africa at the time. Monika had taken her last trip just before that. Within a few weeks she was going to start a
new job.

I was the one who had rung Small World the day Monika died. That afternoon, two of her colleagues were going to come to the hospital. I rang to say it was no longer necessary. All the phone
conversations I had in those days are still fresh in my mind. It was as though I had shut out all other impressions and registered only those conversations, with painful precision. What made the
greatest impression on me was the silence at the other end, every time I said what had happened.

‘You don’t have to come to the hospital. Monika passed away this morning.’

Silence.

‘She regained consciousness for amoment, yesterday. She said: “I’m going to die. I’m sorry.” And she never woke up again.’

Silence.

‘Monika is dead.’

Silence.

‘She sighed once. Deeply. Then it was over.’

Silence.

I used different words each time, but each time the reaction was the same. Except with Monika’s mother. She hung up right away.

My mother was silent for a long time. Then she starting sobbing quietly. ‘Oh, Armin. Oh, Armin, oh, Armin.’ Then my father came on the line. ‘Tell me it’s not
true!’ ‘It’s true.’ ‘Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!’

There was a lot of crying at the other end of the line.

But I couldn’t cry.

Not even when the ‘Erbarme dich’ from the
St Matthew Passion
sounded in the auditorium, right after Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’, and resulted
in a lot of suppressed sobbing and sniffing. (Ellen still can’t hear Bach’s loveliest aria without tears in her eyes. We sit together on the sofa, and when Peter has denied his Lord for
the third time and the evangelist tells how the cock crows and the cowardly disciple recalls the words of Jesus – ‘
Ehe der Hahn krähen wird, wirst du mich dreimal
verleugnen
’ – and how he goes and weeps bitterly, I take her hand and caress it and caress it and caress it until it’s over and the choir comes in to comfort us both.

For Bach, you don’t have to be a believer. It’s enough to have a heart that hasn’t turned to stone.

‘Niko Neerinckx has a son named Bo.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Exactly what I said: Niko Neerinckx’s oldest son is named Bo.’

‘Niko Neerinckx isn’t Bo’s father, Armin.’

‘He has a five-year-old son named Bo. And he keeps a picture of Monika in his family photo album.’

‘What are you talking about? Where did you get that idea from? How do you know all this?’

‘I paid a visit to his wife. Her name’s Anke. Anke Neerinckx.’

‘His wife? When? What the hell are you trying to do, Armin?’

‘Find some answers. I saw Robbert, too, Robbert Hubeek, the guy Monika was with before she met me. It wasn’t him, in any case. And it wasn’t her doctor, either.’

‘Her doctor? You suspected her doctor?’ Ellen burst out laughing.

‘It’s not that strange.’

‘But it wasn’t him?’

‘No.’

‘So what did you ask him? How did you broach that one? Are you my son’s father?’

‘Exactly. But he wasn’t. I also asked him whether she’d confided in him. Whether she’d ever said anything about there being someone else. But she hadn’t.’

‘And now you’re suddenly sure it was Niko Neerinckx.’

‘Yeah. Niko Neerinckx is the father of Bo. Of two Bos, to be exact.’

‘My God, Armin. And you told his wife that?’

‘No. Not yet.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t. He’s not the one, Armin. Monika didn’t have anything going with Niko. She wasn’t interested in him at all. I’m very, very sure about
that.’

‘Come on, Ellen. If you don’t know who it is, if you never even suspected that Monika cheated on me, then how would you know who she fell for and who she didn’t? What do you
really know about her, Ellen?’