The Discovery of Heaven (32 page)

She gave him a kiss on the cheek. "I was frightened you'd say that we'd have to get rid of it."

"Have to get rid of it?"
he repeated, with horror in his voice.
"Me get rid of my child?
I might want to get rid of you, but certainly not my child! Get rid of a Quist—whoever heard of anything so scandalous? And of course we're getting married, because a Brons is no good to me."

They were still lying in the dark, as though they didn't dare face each other in their new situation.

"I don't care what it's called. As long as it's a normal, healthy baby."

"Healthy, yes, normal, no. For that matter the chance doesn't seem to me very great genetically. Abnormally gifted, with a wide range of interests, dazzlingly beautiful—that's what she'll be."

"She? Do you want a girl?"

"I don't want anything, but it's bound to be a girl. Real men have daughters." Suddenly he started groaning.

"What's wrong?"

"I'm thinking of the scandal in my family. A Quist marrying a pregnant woman is unheard of; my parents will never get over it. Perhaps it's time I introduced you." He felt like smoking a cigarette, but he didn't want to see the light of the match. "Do you know who else it will be a nice surprise for?"

"Max," said Ada rather flatly.

Of course, for the last few days the thought of Max had occurred to her repeatedly, like a fish breaking the surface of a pond, but she had kept suppressing it; for now she wanted to think only of her child and not of the father. Onno groped for her hand, and for a while they lay next to each other in silence.

"What if I'd said we would have to get rid of it?" he asked. "Would you have done it?"

"Not in a million years."

He turned onto his side and put his other hand on her belly. "How big do you think it is now? A sixteenth of an inch? An eighth of an inch?"

"About the size of a globule of frogspawn, I think. The same as you at that age."

"Would you mind moderating your language? Me a globule of frog-spawn . .. you must be out of your mind. I emerged spontaneously from my mother's fontanel, in full regalia, with shield and spear; my father fainted at the sight, the planets left their orbits, and all over God's creation strange portents were seen." He leaned on one elbow and asked in the direction of her face, "Listen, are you sure it's all true? What will you do if you have your period tomorrow?" As he was saying this he realized that it would be a disappointment to him, too.

"I'm not going to have my period tomorrow."

"Have you been to a gynecologist?"

"Not yet."

"You're going to the gynecologist tomorrow. And if you're not pregnant, you're going to stop the pill." He could tell from the pillow that she was nodding. "When's it due? The lunar calender won't present any problems to you as a pregnant woman."

"The eighth of July."

"So it happened . . ."

"On our last night in Havana."

Onno stared into the darkness.

Again he saw her shadow appearing in the doorway of his hotel room with the light of the corridor behind her—submerged far away below the horizon in Cuba. The greatest miracle of all was surely memory. How could Max's Big Bang lead to memory? To everything that existed, okay, but how could it lead to the memory of everything that had existed up to and including the Big Bang itself? Maria, who had twice patted the place next to her, whereupon he had obeyed her orders like a lap dog—rendered defenseless by misunderstandings, the lying telephone conversation with Ada, and the gruesome photograph of the body on the bier.

She had taken him into her bed, where the spirit of the man with the beard and the big hat was still present, had raped him, and then—past saluting soldiers—delivered him back to the hotel, where he had lain in the bath for hours and spent the rest of the day sighing and groaning and reading the letters of Walther Rathenau to his mother, in a Spanish translation, a crumpled old edition, which the previous guest—some anarcho-syndicalist radicalinski, of course—had left on his bedside table. Disgusted with himself and consumed by guilt, he had gone to bed early and forced himself to sleep; after the telephone conversation with Max he did not wake again until Ada, who was supposed to be sleeping in her own hotel, suddenly arrived and crept into bed with him. It was as if she had had a premonition of his deceit and wanted to make it invisible, like putting a layer of paint over the primer. That alone deprived him of the right to demand an abortion—even if he had wanted to.

For Ada too, beside him, the darkness had filled with that last evening. She had no reason at all to think that she would become pregnant by Max, because she was on the pill; but during their night drive back to Havana, when scarcely a word was spoken, she was beset by a feeling of uncertainty for which there was no basis but which she could not shake off.

She was exactly at that time in the month when she would be fertile if she were not using the pill. Suppose the pill-maker had dozed off! She had read somewhere that it happened once in every so many million times: that would be just her luck. All her life she had been unlucky like that. On the other hand, she hoped that it would happen—not because that would mean it was Max's, but because she wanted a child; she would be out of musical circulation for a few months, but her place would be kept open.

It was four or five days since she had been to bed with Onno—neither of them were as sex-mad as Max—and if fate had struck, then he must also have slept with her during her fertile period. Not just because there must be a possibility that Onno, whom she wanted to stay with, was the father, but also because in that case she would not know which of the two of them was the father. She could then truthfully say to Max that she didn't know. She had gotten out of the car at the Habana Libre. She had said that she wanted to spend her last night with Onno, whom she had not seen all day—and because most delegates were in the Sierra Maestra, she was admitted, thanks to the mediation of Guerra. On the twenty-second floor Max had pointed out Onno's room to her, after which he had suddenly grabbed his head in his hands and disappeared into his own room without a word.

Both of them were remembering that night, when they had lain next to each other just like now. Ada had said that she had missed him, and asked what it had been like in church. Onno had said that it had been very interesting, full of middle-class folk who had fallen on hard times, and that he had missed her, too. They had never made love so passionately, not even the first time. It was as though only on that night did they taste true, pure love . . .

"So it happened then," said Onno. "I know exactly when."

"So do I."

Ada did not know that Onno was lying in the darkness feeling just as ashamed as she, and Onno did not know that the same was true of Ada. Perhaps, he thought, true pure love, like all flowers, flourished best with its roots in muck and mud. Perhaps that was a law of life that held everything together: the day, which was day only by the grace of the night. But if the day was defined by the night, then wasn't there an element of night at the heart of the day? Was the day really the true, pure day? Was there a black cuckoo at the heart of the sun? He must put that to Max sometime. If that were the case, and true purity did not exist, the only consolation was the realization that night was not pure night either—and hence death might not be absolute death. If death was inherent in the nature of life, then wasn't life also inherent in the nature of death?

"I should have known that that time would produce a child," he said.

Ada had felt something of the kind, just as she had a few hours earlier with Max. Perhaps having such an experience twice canceled out the effect of the pill, just as a minus times a minus made a plus. Perhaps it also meant that she was pregnant by both of them—and hence by neither. Was that the line she should take? Was she pregnant by the friendship between the two of them ?

"You're going to be proved right after all with your plans for our side room," she said.

He nodded, although no one could see him.

"You're right. The best thing in emergencies is to keep your feet on the ground. We'll have to buy a crib and a playpen and a rattle. This business is going to be pretty expensive. Later, of course, she'll want a hi-fi system. It doesn't bear thinking about. What will your parents say?"

"They'll be delighted. My father, at any rate."

"Why not your mother?"

"My mother's mad."

"You've got a cheek. You've been a kind of mother yourself for the last five minutes, and suddenly you know it all. Why is your mother supposed to be mad? In my opinion, your mother's not mad at all.
My
mother's mad."

"I don't know your mother."

"But I know your mother."

"You think so. Shall I tell you something about her?"

"That depends. Not if it's going to embarrass me when I bump into her at our fairy-tale wedding."

"I've never told anyone."

"Not even Max?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "He was never really interested in me."

If there had been a light on in the bedroom at this moment, she might not have told Onno either; but because of the darkness enveloping her, she lost the sense of where she herself stopped and the rest of the world began.

They were having dinner in the room behind the bookshop, braised steak with potatoes and endives; her father was telling them that as a boy he had had a friend who wanted to become a great chemist, whom he was allowed to help in preparing experiments. The boy had a laboratory in his attic, read popular biographies of great chemists like Lavoisier and Dalton and Liebig, and one birthday he was given a real white lab coat with a stand-up collar. In their bedroom his parents had a wardrobe with a full-length mirror in one of its doors, in which you could see yourself the moment you entered the room. When they were out, he would sometimes go downstairs to their bedroom in his fascinating coat, where he would rush to meet himself with his hand extended—like the great chemist, able to spare just a minute or two for his visitor, who had come all the way from America to consult the Nobel Prize winner.

"And did he become a great chemist?" Ada had asked.

"No, he didn't. But he did become a great businessman. He's a divisional director with Philips now and drives around in a car with a chauffeur. It's all a question of attitude."

"That's right," her mother had said. "Just look how far
your
attitude has gotten you. First a drab little museum keeper, and then an even drabber dealer in secondhand books, all stinking of death."

Brons looked at his wife as if he had been struck with a whip—and when Ada saw the look in his eyes, she had dropped her knife and fork and had flown at her mother. She grabbed her wrists and forced her back against the wall.

"Apologize!" she had screamed. "Apologize at once!"

Ada's chest was heaving. A chink had opened up, she said, which had revealed the true nature of their marriage. Her father was still playing the same role in it as he had with his friend the great chemist.

"If you ask me, she's really a lesbian but doesn't know herself."

"Horror, horror!" cried Onno, pulling the blanket up to his chin. "You dared to force my daughter's grandmother up against the wall! And how did it end?"

"She looked at me as if she would like to murder me. My father intervened. I went to my room, and there was never another word said about it. I think that afterward she pretended to herself that it never happened."

"Then she has an enviable gift. It's the key to a long life."

Outside there was now a dense silence, floating on the scarcely audible hum of airplane engines—perhaps very high up, or a long way away, on a runway at Schiphol.

"Perhaps you shouldn't tell Max until we know for certain," said Ada after a pause.

"Of course not." Again he remembered that without Max not only would he not have met Ada, but he would not have had this child. In some way or other something like this had been in the air from the first moment. He remembered the dark green sports car coming toward him along the Wassenaarseweg, signaling and pulling over to the side of the road in a rapid movement. He almost had to kneel down to see that clown's face at the steering wheel. It was less than a year ago. "What shall we call her?" he asked.

"I haven't given it any thought yet," said Ada with a little laugh.

"What about Elisabeth?" she asked a little while later. "Then we can call her Liesje."

"Now, that's the most idiotic custom of all," said Onno, "giving your child a name that you've no intention of using. If you're going to call her Liesje, you should christen her Liesje. Of course Elisabeth is nicer—it's the name of the mother of John the Baptist. But I think that our child should have as symmetrical a name as we have, and we can achieve that by changing Onno, according to Quist's law of phonology, into Anna. That's a good religious solution too, because it's the name of the grandmother of our Lord and Savior. On his mother's side, that is; little is known about his paternal grandmother—at least I've never heard anything about the mother of God. The feminists will have to work that one out. Come to that, Freud's daughter was also called Anna. It's what great men call their daughters."

"And what if it's a boy, after all?"

"Then we shall change Ada, via the transposition of alpha and omega, into Odo."

"That sounds a bit like a knight in a boys' book."

"Good point. We won't do that, then. Anyway, we don't need to think about it, because it won't be a boy. It's going to be a girl—with wonderful long ringlets. If it's a boy, we'll think up an impossible name." He gave her a kiss. "Thanks very much. I'm very happy with your present."

22
What Next?

Once science had duly confirmed intuition, Onno phoned Max in Leiden and asked him if he had any plans for that evening. It surprised Max a little, because Onno usually gave only ten minutes' warning before dropping in. At nine o'clock the sound of his stumbling footsteps resounded through the stairwell, and on the threshold, with clumsy elegance, he assumed the pose of a classical god, an Apollo Belvedere: arms outstretched and head slightly averted.