The 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!’
But how could Bo not be their grandchild?
Maybe that’s the biggest difference between motherly love and fatherly love: a mother is always a hundred per cent certain that her child is truly her child. A mother, therefore, never has to prove herself.
‘Where was that crack between the rafters, exactly?’
Her voice makes me jump, as though she’s submitting me to an interrogation. But when I look at her she’s wearing that friendly smile again, the smile that makes her so attractive. She’s a ‘pleaser’, I think to myself. As are so many beautiful women – her kind of beautiful women.
‘To tell you the truth, I don’t remember,’ I say. ‘I mean, I can still see the crack, but not exactly where it was in the attic. Where it was in relation to the steps, for example.’
I have no idea what kind of steps I’m talking about. Do they have a trapdoor with a pull-down ladder, or a real set of stairs? Is there a skylight? No, at least not on the side facing the street.
‘There’s a trapdoor, with one of those ladders, on the left side of the attic. Against that wall, as it were.’ She points to one corner of the living room.
‘Well, at least that hasn’t changed.’
We sip our wine in silence. And just when I’m thinking that it’s time to go (after all, I’ll be coming back, and I must pick my way carefully now, I want to see Bo – the other Bo!), she pushes herself up off the couch and says, ‘We took pictures before we renovated the place. Maybe you’ll recognize it then.’
She goes over to another antique colonial cabinet and comes back with a photo album. She opens the album in front of me on the glass coffee table (the mahogany base undoubtedly came from that same container on the quay at Rotterdam) and kneels down beside it. When I lean forward to look at the pictures, I can smell her perfume. Cacharel. Monika hated it. ‘Sickly sweet’, she called it. But I always thought it smelled good. I still do.
Anke Neerinckx turns the pages of the photo album with her neatly manicured hands. I see a man wearing paint-splotched overalls. Niko? I wouldn’t have recognized him. A child playing among piles of planks in a muddy garden. Bo?
‘Here,’ she says, and slides the book over a bit so that I can get a better look. ‘I bet you’ll recognize this. We found it when we steamed off the old paper.’ I see a wall with grey-and-green-striped wallpaper. Never have I seen anything so ugly.
‘I’ll be damned,’ I say. ‘How about that?’ And I laugh a little sheepishly. ‘My father had terrible taste. My mother did, too, come to think of it. God rest her soul.’
‘It was a lot of work,’ Anke says. A lock of her dark hair, which she has fastened up with an exotic hairpin (Sri Lanka?), has fallen loose. The tips of it brush against her cheek. She tries to push the lock away, but it falls back again. It’s a beautiful gesture, precisely because it’s so futile.
She shows me two more photos of rooms I’ve never seen before, but I nod in confirmation.
‘That’s right, that’s how it was. I’d forgotten, but now I’d recognize it anywhere. That’s how our house looked.’
And then it happens.
She turns a page. A photo slips out. The photo falls to the floor, face down. She picks it up. Turns back the page. There’s a white, empty square where the photo had been. She puts the picture back in place, slides the corners into the little paper triangles and closes the book. It all takes no more than a few seconds.
When we’ve said goodbye at the door (she holds out her hand, and I’m so dazed I almost forget to shake it: ‘Ring tomorrow, and we’ll arrange a time.’), when I’m down the street and around the corner, when I know for sure that I’m out of earshot, then I scream, ‘Monikaaa!’
I start running. I run straight through puddles, straight through traffic, straight through a crowd hanging around in front of the door of a disco or a mosque or a theatre, I have no idea, I run until I’m completely out of breath, and then I run some more.
It’s true.
Niko Neerinckx is the father of my son.
Why else would he keep a picture of Monika in the family album?