Authors: Karel van Loon
‘Armin, don’t. It’s not true.’
‘So give me one good reason why I should believe you. One good reason! Do you know something I don’t? No? Well, there you go! Why did Niko have to name his son Bo, even though his
wife thought it was a weird name? Explain that to me, Ellen, if you know so much. Isn’t it just a bit too much of a coincidence? Huh?’
‘Don’t, Armin.’
‘Well? Answer me! You don’t want to believe that Monika could ever have done anything like that. That she could have fucked the guy you were so helplessly in love with. That breaks
your heart. But holy shit, Ellen, what do you think’s happened to my heart? I can’t hide from the truth, I can’t duck away from it the way you can. I can’t close my eyes!
You don’t know what it’s like to lose your son after thirteen years. You don’t know what that is, a parent’s love for a child. Oh God, Ellen, don’t! Don’t do
that! Not now! Jesus Christ!’
I left her with her tears. I went outside. Out into the rain. Rail-freight tracks used to run down the street where we live. Wagonloads of coffee and cacao and the cold carcasses from the
slaughterhouse came past here. Now it’s mostly moving vans, bringing in Ikea furniture for the young, ambitious couples who use this neighbourhood as a staging-post before the inevitable
single-family house. We live amid the remains of a glorious past, among people full of dreams about the future. It wasn’t so long ago that I still found that reassuring.
I walked until my feet hurt. Then I went back home. Ellen was still sitting on the sofa in the living room. But I went to bed without saying a word. I fell asleep right away. I dreamed I was
fucking Anke Neerinckx and Ellen was watching, and that she cried and cried and cried, but I went on anyway, until Anke came, screaming. The next morning I had a splitting headache. The next
morning, the place beside me in bed was empty and cold.
I go into Bo’s room. He’s still asleep, but when I sit down on the edge of his bed he wakes up.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. Ellen and I had a fight.’
He looks at me, his eyes still clouded with sleep. ‘Is it bad?’
‘I don’t know. No. It will be all right. It always turns out all right.’
But Bo doesn’t believe that. He hasn’t believed that since he was three and lost his mother. He’s worried. He won’t look at me. He sits on the edge of his bed. He’s
getting big, I think. He’s starting to grow hair on his calves. And suddenly panic strikes me to the heart. I can’t get along without him! I must never lose him! They can’t take
him away from me! They. They? Who?
‘Lately, you’ve been . . . different,’ he says. ‘Distracted.’ He’s still not looking at me. I follow his gaze. He’s looking at a plated lizard sitting
motionless on a rock, its head turned towards the pale morning light coming through the window. Bo has the patience of his favourite pets. Just as the lizards can wait for the moment when a
fly’s attention flags, Bo can wait for the moment when I lower my barriers.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘The tests from the hospital got to me more than I expected.’ I despise myself for lying to him – having to lie to him. ‘Maybe,’ I say,
‘we should go somewhere together, you and me.’
He looks at me. ‘The two of us? What about Ellen?’
‘Ellen can take care of herself. She needs some time to think. And she’ll be pleased not to see me for a while.’
‘Yeah,’ he says. And then, after a long silence, very guardedly, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’
The lizard turns its head a fraction toward the light. Then freezes again.
‘Where shall we go?’ he asks.
‘How long are we going for?’
‘A long weekend?’
‘The Wadden Islands?’
‘Which one?’
‘Ameland?’
‘Sounds good.’
‘Armin is crazy,’ she’d written in the sand on Ameland.
‘What’s it say?’ Bo had asked. He’d just turned three. He asked questions all day long. I told him what his mother was asserting about his father. He was in complete
agreement with her.
‘Armin is crazy! Armin is crazy!’ he shouted. And I threatened to feed him to the gulls, to toss him into the surf, to bury him in the wet sand. And he shrieked and laughed and ran
away from me as fast as his little boots would carry him. And the sea came and washed the letters away. And suddenly his face clouded over.
‘What’s wrong, Bo?’ Monika asked.
But he didn’t answer. He grabbed her hand, and together they walked back to the dunes. And I watched them as the water rushed around my ankles and thought: I’m as happy as a man can
be.
B
o and I are standing on the dyke at Enkhuizen. The water of the IJsselmeer is a deep, dark green. White horses and the dark shadows of clouds whip
across it in fast motion. On the far shore we can see the coast of Friesland and the steeple at Stavoren.
Bo takes the binoculars and looks. The wind almost throws him off balance.
‘Come on,’ I say. We walk down the dyke to where the water sloshes against the black basalt. Now the dyke is between us and the worst of the wind. Bo raises the binoculars to his
eyes again.
‘There’s a blue car driving along the dyke,’ he says.
‘What make?’
But he can’t see it that well.
Bo has big red blotches on his cheeks, and when he hands me the binoculars his eyes are glistening. He laughs a high, giggly laugh. ‘Hee hee! Hee hee hee!’
A flight of cormorants comes in low over the water, heading in our direction. Through the binoculars you can see them fighting their way into the wind.
‘Bo, look,’ I shout, ‘cormorants!’
But Bo has already walked away. He’s squatting on the basalt blocks, plucking something from between the stones with his thin, boyish fingers. That’s the way it’s been for
years: I look at the fowls of the air, Bo looks at what’s crawling beneath his feet. To see what’s happening in the world right in front of us, we need other people, the way the blind
need guide dogs.
I’d explained it to him at home, at the kitchen table. I took a compass and drew a circle on a piece of paper. ‘Imagine this is the earth,’ I said. ‘Then this would be
the North Pole, this is the South Pole, and here’s the equator,’ and I put an
N
at the top of the circle, an
S
at the bottom, and I cut the circle in half with a
horizontal line.
‘The experts tell us that the distance from the centre of the earth to the surface is about six thousand four hundred kilometres. That distance is called the radius. But of course
it’s more useful to know, for example, how far it is from the North Pole to the equator. In order to work that out you have to use a formula they say was invented by Pythagoras, an old Greek
philosopher. The formula goes like this: the circumference of a circle is equal to two times the radius, multiplied by the number pi. What’s the number pi? Pi is a letter in the Greek
alphabet, sort of like our “p”. But pi is also a number with a lot of numbers after the decimal, and it pretty much equals 3.142.’
‘Oh,’ Bo said.
‘So, if the circumference of the circle is equal to two times the radius multiplied by pi, then it’s easy to figure out the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Because then
it’s two times six thousand four hundred, times 3.142, divided by four.’ I gave Bo the calculator and let him do the arithmetic himself.
‘The distance from the North Pole to the equator,’ he said solemnly, ‘is ten thousand and fifty-four point four kilometres.’
‘Very good,’ I went on. ‘At least, if Pythagoras was right. Let’s check up on him.’ I took a ball of string out of the cupboard and cut off a piece. ‘Lay that
over the circle as carefully as you can.’
The tip of his tongue protruding from between his lips, Bo did as he was told. Then we used a ruler to measure the length of the piece of twine needed to enclose the circle. And then we measured
the radius of the circle.
‘Now we’re going to divide the circumference we just measured by two, and then by pi, or 3.142. And what do we get?’
‘That’s exactly how long the radius is!’ Bo shouted in delight.
We drew two more circles, on blank sheets of paper, both different sizes. And again we used the string to measure the circumference and the radius. And once again, Bo entered the measurements on
the calculator and did the arithmetic. And each time the result was on the button.
‘That’s why they called pi a divine number,’ I said. ‘Because it lets us make amazingly accurate predictions about the circumference of a circle, based only on what we
know about the radius. And that’s not all. The number pi is built into all kinds of natural phenomena. In the numerical relationship between musical notes, for example. And even in the
spacing between the new leaves on a twig. But you’ll find out about that in due time. Right now we’re going to use it for something else.’
I poured us something to drink. A glass of cola for Bo, a whisky for myself.
‘So now we know that if you walked from the North Pole to the equator, you’d cover ten thousand kilometres. And if we regard the North Pole as the highest spot on the globe, how many
kilometres do you have to walk downhill, relatively speaking?’
‘Six thousand four hundred!’
‘Exactly! But now comes the hard part. If we put you here at the North Pole’ – I drew a little stick figure beside the
N
– ‘it seems at first as though the
earth barely curves down at all. But the further you go, the steeper it gets. By the time you reach the equator, you’re walking almost straight down. That’s what the experts call
globe-theoretical decline. Calculating that decline is really complicated, but if you know the radius, the outcome is just as predictable as the circumference of the circle – you just use a
different formula. According to scientists who’ve done those calculations, a point here on Earth which is eight kilometres away from you, for example, is also about four metres lower. They
say that’s why, when a ship is sailing away from you, you can see it slowly disappear over the horizon. You’d almost think the ship was sinking into the waves, the way the ancient
Greeks thought the sun disappeared over the western rim of the earth. They thought a big wagon with fiery horses was waiting there each night to take the sun to the other side of the world, so it
could rise again in the east the next morning.’
‘But what really happens,’ Bo said, ‘is that the earth spins around like a ball, and the ship doesn’t disappear into the sea and the sun doesn’t really go down or
up.’
‘Exactly!’
Bo took a sip of cola and said, ‘Is that all you were going to teach me? I already knew the earth is a ball. And that ships don’t sink on the horizon, but drop away ’cause the
sea is curved, just like the land.’
‘All right, but I haven’t finished yet,’ I said. ‘You see, there’s a real problem here. After all, globe-theoretical decline increases with distance, as we saw with
that circle we drew. At eight kilometres, the decline is only four metres, but at sixteen kilometres it’s not eight any more, it’s twenty. And at twenty kilometres it’s
thirty-five. In other words, based on calculations that assume a round earth, it should be impossible to see a dyke, a house or even a church steeple at any great distance. Tomorrow we’re
going to try it for ourselves. How about going to get your atlas?’
Bo slid off his chair and ran to his room. He didn’t even have to turn on the light to find the atlas.
‘Turn to the map of Holland. You see Enkhuizen? And Stavoren?’
Bo pointed to the two towns on the map.
‘What’s the distance between them?’ Using his ruler and the scale at the bottom of the map, Bo had no trouble calculating the distance.
‘A little over twenty kilometres.’
‘Good. That means the globe-theoretical decline must be a little over thirty-five metres. Which means that from Enkhuizen, even on top of the dyke, you shouldn’t be able to see
Stavoren. Tomorrow we’ll go to Enkhuizen, to see if the theory really explains reality.’
‘Dad, does this mean the world is actually flat?’ Bo asks in the car on the way home.
‘I don’t think so, Bo. Everyone agrees that the earth is round. At least, almost everyone. You can see it in pictures taken from outer space. But the important thing to remember is
that people think they know a lot of things, but mostly all they do is believe them. At school they teach you that the world is round, so everyone says they know it’s true. I once asked my
geography teacher why you can see Stavoren from the dyke at Enkhuizen. “But Armin,” he said, “that’s quite simple.” He started by drawing something on the board. That
was just after class started. By the end of the period, the board was covered with arithmetic. The teacher’s face was red as a beet, sweat was running down his face, but he still hadn’t
been able to answer my question. Two days later I ran into him in the hall. “Ah, Armin Minderhout,” he said. “About the dyke at Stavoren. I’ve been thinking about it, and
the answer, of course, is that you can see it from Enkhuizen because of reflections in the atmosphere. It’s a fata Morgana, in fact. A bit silly of me not to think of it before, but at least
now you can relax. Take it from me, the earth really
is
round, not flat, not the way you seemed to think there for a moment.” And Bo, that’s exactly what people do: they assume
things are a certain way because some authority has told them so, and because other people agree that it’s true. Whether it really is, whether things really are the way we believe, most
people don’t have the foggiest. Don’t ever forget that.’
M
y father is dead.
The phone rang.
‘Am I speaking to Mr Minderhout? Mr Minderhout, your father is dead.’
It’s my father’s neighbour, a retired civil servant who had worked for the national tax office and used to help my father fill in his tax return each year in exchange for a bottle of
good wine.
‘He’s sitting across from me in his chair at the window, your father,’ he says. ‘I was taking Boris for a walk. I saw him sitting here and I waved, but he didn’t
wave back. I thought: he’s probably daydreaming about Marijke again. He misses your mother every day, is what he says. But when I went past again he was still sitting here like this. And he
still didn’t see me. So I thought: there’s something wrong. I went around to the back of the house. The door was unlocked. I told Boris, “Boris, stay!” Poor mutt
didn’t understand. But I thought: I don’t want that animal around. I had a feeling about it. The lamp in the living room was still on. So I turned it off. He must have been sitting here
all night. His glass of wine’s still on the table. Half full. Or half empty. Depends on how you look at it. A Burgundy. Your father still has a couple of very nice Burgundies.’