First times aren’t something you forget easily, but the rest . . . My memory’s like the filing system of some boozed-up cataloguer: it’s full of gaps and improvisations, the drawers have fallen on the floor, the cards have been hastily swept together. Sometimes months go by with no filing activity at all, then the work turns feverish but sloppy. I have a filing cabinet full of memories, but where are the ones that can help me answer the questions that keep me awake these days? Who is the father of my son? With whom did my late beloved betray me? And when? And above all: why? How can it be that I never noticed a thing, that I never had the slightest suspicion? Or is it that the suspicion actually was there, but the drunken filing clerk swept those memories under the carpet, tossed them out the window, incinerated them in the stove?
I look at Bo, who I know better than anyone else in the world, and I see a stranger. I look at Ellen, who I love more than anyone else, and I have to avert my gaze.
Ellen says she wants to marry me.
‘Ellen,’ I say, ‘you want a child. You want a child of your own, and I can’t give it to you. Find another man before it’s too late.’
‘I want to have your child,’ Ellen says. ‘I don’t want some other man’s baby. And I especially don’t want another man. I want you.’
‘That’s what you say now, but what will it be like in a year, in two years?’
‘How am I supposed to know, Armin? Do you know what you’ll want in two years’ time? How do you know you won’t be sick of me? Or that you won’t be in a midlife crisis and run away with a twenty-one-year-old?’
‘Jesus, Ellen.’
‘Yeah, Jesus, Armin.’
‘But marriage. Why for God’s sake do you want to get married?’
Monika and I never got married. Getting married wasn’t something you did back then. At least, we didn’t. We loved each other, and the State had nothing to do with something as intimate as love. That went without saying. And so we didn’t marry, not even when the baby came – in those days, you didn’t brush aside your principles that casually.
We gave Bo his mother’s surname (Paradies) – that went without saying, as well. After all, she’d carried him for nine months. And she was the one who breastfed him. That a child automatically received its father’s name was a symptom of the despicable patriarchy under which we lived. Like Cruise missiles. And capitalism. (The civil servant at the public registrar’s office didn’t go along with our choice of surname. ‘That’s only possible when the child isn’t officially recognized by the father,’ he said. When I called him a pen-pusher and a lackey, he refused to deal with our application any more. Finally, one of his female colleagues was called in to settle things – I mutteringly agreed to go along with what the law prescribed. But the next day we placed an announcement in the paper: ‘Born: Bo Paradies.’ Our parents didn’t read De Volkskrant. That saved a lot of bellyaching.)
The house on the Ceintuurbaan was really too small for the two of us and the baby. There was no nursery – and everyone knows that a baby has a right to a nursery.
‘You two will just have to move,’ said Monika’s mother, in whom I’d never detected any affection for her daughter, but who felt that she – and no one else – had the right to determine how her daughter’s life should be run.
‘You could always buy a place,’ my father said.
‘But Dad,’ I said, ‘think of all the work we put into this house. And, besides, where else in Amsterdam could you find a house with a view like ours?’
No, Monika and I didn’t want to buy a place (you could just see us signing a mortgage with a bank that invested in South Africa!), and we didn’t want to move. Bo slept between us in the double bed. We changed his nappies on the couch, on the kitchen table, on the counter, on the floor, on the bed, on the desk between typewriter and telephone. We lugged him around in a sling.
‘Like hippies,’ said Monika’s mother, for whom the Sixties and Seventies had been one long nightmare.
‘Like Negroes,’ said her father, who thought everyone who hadn’t been born in Limburg province was a foreigner, and every Negro a monkey.
‘I think it’s rather sweet,’ my mother said. And my father said, ‘If it makes the two of you happy, it’ll make the boy happy too. And in the long run, that’s what counts.’
And I thought to myself: did he ever say that to my mother about me? But I didn’t ask.
The first time Monika breastfed Bo, I sat there crying like a baby.
‘It’s the hormones,’ Monika said.
The next day she asked, ‘Do you want a taste?’
I was appalled. But a little later I tasted it anyway. Very cautiously.
‘Nice,’ I said.
‘Liar,’ she said.
‘It’s for babies, anyway, not for grown-up men.’
Monika said, ‘It excites me. ‘ And I asked her, ‘Does it excite you when Bo does it?’ And Monika nodded.
The last few years I haven’t thought much about those days. Only when I see a girl with short red hair, or yellow shoes. Or a man carrying a baby in a sling. But the last few days I haven’t thought about much else.
‘Give it time,’ Ellen said.
‘The pain has to wear off,’ Ellen said.
‘Let’s go somewhere for a week, you and me, just the two of us.’
‘Go somewhere, you and Bo.’
‘Go to Ameland for a week, by yourself, nice long walks along the beach.’
‘I want to know who the father is,’ I said. ‘Who the culprit is. Who’s going to tell me that on Ameland? You think his name’s written in the sand at the foot of the lighthouse?’
(There’s a picture of Monika on the beach on Ameland. In the sand at her feet is written: ARMIN IS CRAZY. She’s looking triumphantly into the lens. Her hair is ruffled by the breeze. Our last vacation together.)
‘So what do you know, Ellen? What do you know that I don’t? What did Monika tell you? She must have told you something? Girl-talk, don’t kid me, I know you talked about those things. Women do that. Who was it, Ellen, come on: who, who, who?’
But Ellen insists that she knows nothing.
‘I was in Ecuador then, remember?’
‘Yeah, but later, after you got back. She must have said something. Sort of skirted around it, maybe. A little hint, something you didn’t pick up on at the time. Jesus, Ellen, the two of you were intimate back then. The two of you shared fucking everything. And now you’re trying to tell me she never said a word about that? Don’t lie to me, Ellen. I can’t stand any more lies! Oh, Jesus Christ, Ellen, don’t start crying. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that, but shit, Ellen, what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do with this?’
Later that evening: ‘Will you marry me?’
‘Yes.’