Sem

Sem, the young son of Rebecca and Steef, appears in the novel through small, physical acts of care: being lifted from a buggy, soothed against his mother, or reaching for a hand. Though he is too young to understand the adults’ conflicts, his presence changes what those conflicts mean. For Eva and Peter, he is at once a child to cherish, a glimpse of the family life they want, and a reminder that parenthood binds people to another person’s needs.

Identity and Family Setting

Sem is Rebecca’s son and part of the household she shares with Steef. He is shown first as a baby in a buggy and later as a young child who can pull himself up by his mother’s legs, play with blocks, and protest when restrained. The narrative gives him no independent account of events; instead, his character takes shape through other people’s attention to him and through the ordinary demands he makes on their time.

His place in Rebecca and Steef’s life also informs their relationship to the neighborhood. Steef explains that Rebecca wanted to make contact with the neighbors for Sem’s sake, hoping to recreate the convivial atmosphere of their former neighborhood in Utrecht. The effort makes Sem more than a private family detail: the wish to give him a welcoming community helps draw the adults together, even as their connections develop in directions they did not initially anticipate.

A Child in the Adults’ Social World

Sem is present during gatherings that might otherwise be described entirely through adult conversation, music, or attraction. At one such evening, music makes Steef and Peter dance with exaggerated, eyes-closed energy, while Rebecca attends to their crying baby. She lifts Sem from the buggy and kisses his head; Peter fetches cold beers, and the room holds both adult exuberance and the practical tenderness of childcare. Sem’s crying does not stop the gathering so much as locate it within a household where celebration and responsibility continue side by side.

Later, the adults eat leftover pasta. Peter takes Sem onto his lap, and Eva finds that touching the child does not hurt as she had feared it might. She strokes his soft head and admires how sweet, innocent, and content he seems. Rebecca tells her that she hopes Eva will know the same happiness. The exchange brings Eva’s grief and longing into direct contact with a living child: Sem is not simply an emblem of what she lacks, because his warm, soft presence is also a particular comfort in that moment. When Peter says that they will pursue adoption, Eva agrees outwardly while keeping private her dream of bearing a child herself.

A Presence That Carries Conflicting Meanings

The novel later returns to Sem as a child held close enough for Eva to feel his damp, soft fingers curl around hers. By then, she reflects that the arguments surrounding his conception have long since been forgotten and forgiven. The immediate force of the scene lies in its contrast: the history of adult disagreement recedes while the child’s touch occupies the foreground. Eva’s thought that a child makes everything right expresses the emotional power Sem has for her, but it also sits uneasily beside the complications she and the adults around her continue to face.

That tension is made explicit when Rebecca asks Eva why she does not have a child with Steef. The question follows Eva’s contact with Sem and makes the child a point of departure for a possibility involving another adult relationship. Sem himself is not responsible for that possibility; his significance comes from what the adults project onto the visible fact of his existence. To Rebecca, he belongs to a family whose conflicts over his conception have become distant. To Eva, he embodies both the tenderness she can experience now and the pregnancy she continues to desire.

Care, Dependence, and the Pregnancy Test

Sem’s needs also prompt a less idealized account of parenthood. When Eva remarks on the burden of having a man so dependent on her that leaving would mean his death, Rebecca points to the additional dependence a child would bring. As she speaks, Sem is angrily squirming in her arms after throwing his blocks into the garden. Eva answers that at least parenthood would give her a reason to keep living; Rebecca counters that a child is not a means of holding a relationship together and may instead divide a couple. The exchange makes the child’s dependence concrete: it appears not as an abstract promise of happiness but as crying, thrown toys, and the work of lifting and soothing him.

Sem is again present when Eva takes a pregnancy test with Rebecca beside her. After two blue lines appear, Rebecca congratulates her and embraces her; Eva is simultaneously overjoyed and frightened. Sem, strapped into the buggy, protests and tries to free himself. Eva lifts his warm, solid body, but he cries loudly for his mother, and Rebecca takes him back and comforts him with practiced ease. The scene places Eva’s news beside the familiar pattern of Rebecca’s caregiving. Sem’s immediate attachment is to the mother who routinely answers his distress, while Eva’s experience of pregnancy opens a future whose consequences the adults have not yet shared with the men.

Narrative Significance

Sem has little dialogue and no stated awareness of the decisions made around him. His narrative importance instead comes from recurrence: he is the baby whose presence motivates Rebecca’s efforts to meet the neighbors, the child whose touch makes Eva’s grief briefly bearable, and the dependent person whose care complicates any romantic ideal of parenthood. The scenes do not give him responsibility for the adults’ hopes or choices. They use the ordinary fact of his childhood to expose the gap between wanting a child, imagining what a child might repair, and attending to a child who needs care now.