Ellen rolls onto her side and pulls the duvet up over her bare breasts. The smell of sex hangs over us like a reassurance. Her feet are stroking mine. For the first time in weeks, the glass wall that’s separated us since we heard the test results has vanished. For the first time, when I came I didn’t think: how senseless!
I don’t know whether it’s ever been the object of study (can’t imagine it hasn’t), but I believe that people who have just been to a funeral have a much greater need for sex than usual. Death as aphrodisiac. Sex as a way to thumb your nose at the Grim Reaper: look at us celebrating life, you can’t keep us down!
‘What are you thinking about?’ Ellen asks.
‘About that other time, after another funeral.’
‘Do you still regret that?’
‘No . . . no, not regret. But.’
‘But what?’
‘But this time it wasn’t just the two of us, either.’
‘There were three of us.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you think about her, too?’
‘Yeah.
We’re both silent. Her hand strokes my side, my chest. I close my eyes and think about Monika. Ten years – and still not dead and buried. I feel a tear running down my cheek, hanging on my chin for a moment, hesitating, then dripping onto my chest. Ellen kisses my forehead, my eyes, my nose, my cheeks, my mouth. I pull her up close.
‘Go ahead and cry,’ she says. ‘Just cry.’
And I push my face into her hair. I kiss her neck. I kiss my own tears off her breast. I lay my head on her belly, which is moist and sticky.
‘Dear Armin, poor, dear Armin.’
‘Kiss me, just kiss me.’
And she kisses me and strokes me. She embraces me. She squeezes me. And then her heart breaks. Then the dykes break behind which she’s been hiding her sorrow for weeks. I feel her body bucking beneath the violent stream of emotions. I hold her tight. I stroke her hair, her back, I press her against me with all the strength I have in my body.
‘Go ahead and cry,’ I say. ‘Just cry.’
And she cries and cries and cries, and this time I can comfort her. At least I’ve achieved that much in the space of ten years: that I don’t kick her away from me, like a cornered animal.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed. Naked and sweaty and stunned.
‘Out of here!’ I screamed. ‘Go! Go! Go! Goddamn it, what are you doing here!?’ I picked her clothes off the floor and threw them in her face. ‘Get dressed!’
I hopped into my jeans, pulled a sweater over my head. She stayed on the edge of the bed, as though she was drugged.
‘Get dressed!’ I screamed again. I grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her to her feet. And she awoke from her state of shock and pushed me aside with gentle force and got dressed. Calmly and efficiently.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said at the door; then she turned and left. I tore the sheets off the bed and stuffed them into the washing machine. In the hall I found an earring that must have fallen in among the sheets and I picked it up and went into the bedroom and opened the window and threw the earring away. Then I undressed and had a shower and scrubbed myself with soap and water so hot I could barely stand it. Very gradually, I grew calmer, and after I’d dried off I put on Monika’s bathrobe and sat on the sofa and rang my mother and asked, ‘How’s Bo doing?’
‘He’s asleep. How are you doing?’
‘Good. Bad.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want to sleep over here?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
But I didn’t dare to go back into the bedroom again that night. I stayed on the sofa and buried my face in the folds of the bathrobe that still smelled of Monika, who we had buried that morning.
I’d bought ten bunches of white roses at the market on the Albert Cuypstraat. And Bo and I had cut the blossoms from the stems and put them in the little plastic bucket Bo played with wherever there was sand.
‘These flowers are for Mama.’
‘When do I give them to her?’
‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.’
And that morning, at the side of the freshly dug grave into which the undertaker’s men had just lowered the coffin, I said to Bo, ‘Shall we give her the flowers now?’
‘Okay.’
Bo had dipped his little hand into the bucket, and when the first rosebuds landed with a soft thud on the lid of the coffin I heard Monika’s mother burst into tears behind us, but we didn’t pay any attention and we went on tossing the flowers in until the bucket was empty and Bo took a step forward and said, ‘Bye, Mama.’ And I took him by the hand and together we walked back to the auditorium, to the coffee and the cake and the condolences. Monika’s parents accepted condolences, but condoled with no one themselves. All they did was pick up Bo for a moment. They almost squeezed him flat. Then they left without saying goodbye.
When it was all over, my mother said, ‘Come with us.’ And I said, ‘If I don’t go home now, I never will. But maybe Bo can sleep at your place tonight, so I don’t have to worry about him?’
And so Bo went with my parents. He nodded very understandingly when I said that Grandma and Grandpa Minderhout could take care of him today better than I could. I had someone call me a taxi. And Ellen, who had come with a colleague from Small World, said, ‘I’ll give you a ring this evening.’ But instead of phoning, a couple of hours later she was standing on my doorstep.
‘I was going crazy at home. But if you’d rather be alone, just say so.’
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ I answered, and I was, because without Bo and without Monika the house suddenly seemed an enemy, a place where memories were being shot at me from every corner, like poisoned arrows.
We cooked together, ate together, opened a bottle of wine together, stared at the TV together without seeing a thing, thought about Monika together without saying a word.
‘Can I sleep here tonight?’ Ellen asked.
‘Sure, that’s okay.’
And we crawled into bed and Ellen clamped onto me and I rolled her onto her back and lay on top of her and she spread her legs and pressed her pelvis against mine and I closed my eyes and thought Monika, Monika, Monika, and she dug her nails into my back and bit me on the shoulder and I shuddered from the pain and the pleasure and the rage and the sorrow and my hands slid under her buttocks and I forced my way into her, and she shivered and groaned and clutched at me as a drowning person clutches a rescuer and when she came all the strength poured out of her body and she began crying and I straightened up and looked at the teary face, and a desperate, irrational rage overcame me and I pulled out of her and jumped out of bed and she sat up, startled, naked and shivering and still sobbing, and I shouted and shouted and shouted.
Post-mortem sex is a complicated form of sadomasochism.
‘You mustn’t run away any more when we fight,’ Ellen says when the crying is over.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I was so afraid you were going to throw me out of the house.’
‘Me, throw you out? Why would I do that?’
‘To beat me to it. Because you’re afraid I’m going to leave you, because you can’t give me a child.’
I drop back onto my pillow.
‘Am I right?’
I sigh and nod. ‘Maybe you should find someone to make you pregnant.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I’m very good at it, you know. Raising other people’s children, I mean.’
She laughs, but only halfheartedly. ‘Poor Armin.’
I look at her. She looks tired. Sad, too. She’s thirty-four. She’d make a good mother. She is a good mother. For Bo. But Bo isn’t her child. I say, ‘You’re not too bad at it, either.’
‘At what?’
‘Raising other people’s children.’
‘Strange that never occurred to me before.’
‘What?’
‘That now we’re equals in that way. That we’re raising someone else’s child together.’
‘Her child.’
‘Yeah, her child.’