A Father's Affair by Karel van Loon

for that, too.)
    In their eyes, the only good thing that I’d ever done, or at least that they thought and I thought and everyone thought I’d done, was to beget Bo. When Bo was born they were both
still in their late forties, but their fondest wish was to be grandparents.
    ‘They’re pleased that they finally have a boy to ruin,’ Monika said. ‘It’s what they always wanted. A daughter was only second best.’
    For Monika’s parents, having only one child wasn’t a matter of free choice, the way it had been with mine. (My mother thought thirty-nine was too old for a second child, and my
father never seemed to want a second one very badly. He’d proved what he was capable of. That was enough for him.)
    ‘My parents went to every doctor in the country,’ Monika said. ‘But they never found a cause. Back then, of course, doctors couldn’t do what they can today.’
    One afternoon, when her parents were visiting us and had finished criticizing our small flat, and the way we took Bo everywhere we went, and our rather piddling employment, and our lack of
material possessions, and our political opinions, and our views on marriage – when at last there was nothing left to criticize and they were just about to leave, her mother suddenly said,
‘If I was still young, I’d have IVF. Then I could have a little boy, too.’
    That night Monika lay in my arms and wept. And I said to Bo, ‘Make sure you stay away from those creepy people.’ But of course he didn’t listen to me. Grandpa and Grandma
Paradies became his favourite grandparents.
    ‘So, little fellow,’ Monika’s mother says to Bo, ‘Did your father finally work up enough courage to face us again?’
    But Bo doesn’t hear her. He’s already on his way to the little room off the kitchen, where Grandpa Paradies is working on a model of a Dutch East India Company ship. He leaves a
trail of sand on the newly polished floor. In a minute he’s bound to knock over the model ship or create even greater havoc, but they won’t be angry with him, not his favourite grandma
and grandpa. They’re only angry with me. As a matter of principle. Or out of cowardice. But that’s usually the same thing.
    ‘Hello,’ I say to the woman at the door, and she kisses me stiffly and with palpable reluctance.
    ‘Hello,’ I say to the back of the man seated at the table, but he doesn’t hear me, he listens only to his grandson telling him something about a gold coin and pirate treasure
and about the taste of sand. (The street close to the railway station had been dug up. Bo had seen something glittering in the yellow sand. It turned out to be a chocolate coin, and he insisted
that he be allowed to eat it. The sand had crackled between his teeth.)
    The visit lasts four hours and thirty-five minutes. We talk a little. We eat a little. We laugh a little. When I ask how they’ve been getting on since the funeral, they don’t answer
me. About me and how I’m getting on they ask nothing at all. Only about Bo do they want to know everything there is to know, and the less I say the more questions they ask, and the more
questions they ask the more I want to go away, away from this horrible house with its walls of brick siding and its false beams on the ceiling and its fake Dutch masters and its framed diplomas
from the retail-trade school and the butchers’ school and the yellowed awards from the trade federation for the meat and poultry branch, and that one photograph, that one photograph I
can’t look at but have to keep looking at – that photo showing Monika as a angelic girl, her red hair neatly combed, the edges of the picture blurred in a romantic soft focus. (‘I
was thirteen and had just lost my virginity. I hate that picture,’ Monika said. But of course not when her parents were around.)
    After that last visit they came to Amsterdam a few times. But when I kept refusing to honour those visits with a return one, they finally sent me an outraged