Vaderschap als reden om te blijven leven

Fatherhood as a reason to stay alive is a changing idea in the novel, shaped by infertility, reproductive deception, competing claims to parenthood, and extreme violence. For Peter, the prospect of a child begins as an answer to longing and loss, becomes entangled with betrayal and a threat of murder, and finally interrupts his suicide attempt. The child does not erase the killings: Peter understands continued life as both responsibility and punishment.

Longing, infertility, and the imagined child

Peter and Eva initially approach parenthood as a shared hope. After deciding to try for a child, they have sex almost daily and imagine that each encounter might have conceived their baby. Their optimism meets repeated disappointment: pregnancy tests offer no lasting confirmation, and apparent faint positives are followed by bleeding. At a consultation, their doctor treats a year of unsuccessful attempts as no immediate cause for alarm, but recommends temperature tracking to identify ovulation. The resulting routine makes conception more deliberate and sex less spontaneous.

The strain exposes different stakes within their shared desire. Peter wants a child with Eva, but resists entering medical treatment because he wants their child to arise from love rather than a medical procedure. He also misses their former intimacy, objecting to sex reduced to a few days timed around ovulation. Eva, by contrast, says that her desire for a child is too powerful to abandon, and argues that medical help might reveal a simple, treatable problem. Her hope is not abstract: she insists that the possibility of pregnancy makes investigation worthwhile.

Medical examinations find no apparent problem with Eva’s reproductive organs, while two sperm tests reveal that Peter has too few sperm and that those present barely move forward. The diagnosis makes conception through treatment, rather than unassisted sex, their remaining prospect. Fatherhood is therefore tied to a question Peter cannot easily separate from love: whether becoming a parent through medical intervention can still feel like the intimate beginning he wants. The tests turn the hoped-for child into both a possible future and a measure of what the couple cannot control.

Reproductive choices and competing claims

Later, Eva and Rebecca plan for Eva to conceive through partner-swapping, without consulting Peter or Steef. Rebecca proposes timing the encounter around Eva’s ovulation and repeating it if necessary; when the condom is raised as a safeguard, she says it could leak. The plan makes the child’s possible conception a secret arrangement rather than a choice shared by all those who may become parents. It also places biological fatherhood, pregnancy, and the decision to raise a child on different sides of a concealed act.

After a condom accident, Steef brings Eva a morning-after pill. He accepts responsibility for the accident and describes an intimacy between them, while insisting that he does not want another child. He says Sem was conceived against his will, that he tries to be a good father, and that his instability and attachment to freedom make him unsuited to fatherhood. His account complicates any simple equation between biological paternity and willing, secure parenthood: he is already a father, yet speaks of that identity as something he did not choose and cannot fully inhabit.

When Steef learns that Eva and Rebecca arranged the pregnancy, he calls it the theft of his semen and condemns their decision to dispose of him as though they could decide on his behalf. He argues that children need a father and invokes his own experience as grounds for that claim. His anger is not merely about genetic connection: it is also about consent, exclusion, and the presumption that others can determine his role in a child’s life. At the same time, his earlier insistence that he does not want another child exposes the conflict between asserting a right to choose and being drawn into a situation others chose for him.

A child inside the armed confrontation

During the confrontation, Peter points his gun at Steef. Steef’s fear is visible in his protective raised hands and frightened sounds, but Peter remains consumed by resentment, even as Eva pleads with him to recognize that they are having a child. Peter rejects the claim: to him, the others are trying to pass off the child as his. In this moment, fatherhood does not bring reconciliation; the disputed child becomes part of the argument over betrayal and possession.

Eva’s appeal nevertheless changes the immediate stakes. She tells Peter to think of the child and asks what use a father in prison would be. Peter sees Steef cower, and the sight gives him pleasure, but the appeal has entered the scene: it frames his next choice in terms of what his violence could mean for a child. When he aims again, he cannot pull the trigger. The image of Lieve, dead in a hospital container, returns to him, and he recognizes that a child is involved. Lieve’s stillbirth gives the word child a history of grief for Peter; the possibility of a living child cannot simply replace that loss, but it prevents him from completing this particular killing. Rebecca then shoots him.

Survival as responsibility and punishment

After the shooting, Peter turns again toward violence. Injured and cold, he sees the weapon near Steef and thinks of taking it up, then later tries to aim it at his own heart. The possibility of dying has not disappeared; his hand is simply unable to lift the gun high enough. Only when he hears a child crying in the kitchen does the scene turn decisively away from suicide. The child is crouched beneath the counter, clutching a stuffed rabbit, and Peter’s attention shifts from the weapon to the small figure he can see and hear.

Peter then understands that he has committed acts for which he must remain alive and face the child’s eyes. He describes living for the child and paying for what he has done. Fatherhood thus becomes neither a reward nor a claim of innocence: it is an obligation that binds survival to accountability. His attempt to reach out and apologize is physically limited by his injury; he can only whisper that he is sorry. The child stops crying long enough to put a pacifier in his mouth and stare at Peter, a brief exchange that offers contact without suggesting that the harm has been repaired.

The motif’s force lies in this unresolved ending. Earlier, Peter’s desire for a child is undermined by infertility and by his insistence that conception should express love. Later, a child is invoked in arguments over consent and paternity, and then becomes the reason Peter does not complete his suicide. But the novel does not make the child a device that cancels violence or guarantees Peter’s redemption. The child’s presence gives him a reason to live; what that reason requires is a future lived with the knowledge of what he has done.