The Discovery of Heaven (36 page)

There was a rather charged atmosphere. The Amsterdam style with which everything was being done here—the bride and bridegroom on a bike, the reception in a pub, artists everywhere, freethinkers and Reds, no sign of a clergyman; instead, a revolutionary document from the Napoleonic period—and now they were saddled with the son of a war criminal from the German occupation: their dismay was not entirely incomprehensible. Such things did not happen in The Hague. Of course everyone at this table knew who his father was, but hence also who his mother had been. People here knew everything— except who he was. Onno's brother Menno, the Groningen professor of law, about ten years his senior, offered him a chair with a friendly smile, and when he sat down among them he felt the weight of the family. He himself had no one in the world—family for him was something from a distant past—but suddenly here a power was assembled that helped him understand Onno better. This here was what he was reacting against, but with the strength of that same family of which he was irrevocably a part.

"Well, Mr. Delius," said Diederic, the governor, folding his arms and leaning back. "Did you find the ceremony edifying?" He was in his early fifties; Antonia, his wife, also a fairly formidable matron, appeared to be approaching sixty and could almost be Ada's grandmother.

Max realized with dismay that a new phase of ambiguity and secretive-ness had begun—how could he ever simply be himself again, without being reminded at every turn of something he could not say?

"I thought that text from the Batavian Republic was an original idea of Onno's. Particularly if you take the current political situation into account."

"The only problem is that the marriage of course will be completely invalid in that form," said the public prosecutor. He was thick-set and a little bloated, with thin, lank hair and sharp blue eyes. "That alderman will probably have to resign."

"Don't be so silly, Coen," said Dol. "Stop making a laughingstock of yourself."

She wasn't at all like her gangling sister, Trees. She was on the frail side, with an open, attractive face; obviously Mendel's law had ensured the reappearance of some refined ancestress. Max realized at once why she was Onno's favorite sister.

"Resign," growled Coen. "Resign."

"How about another glass of champagne," suggested Dol's husband, Karel, a brain surgeon at a Rotterdam hospital, as Max knew from Onno. He too looked out of place, with his sharp, gaunt features, which gave him the appearance of a diabolical scholar from the Frankenstein family, obsessed with destroying the world, though that was not what he wanted.

"Resign," repeated Coen once again, prompting Menno's wife, Margo, to burst out laughing.

"It's like the Council of Blood in the revolt against Spain here," she said.

"Are you a left-winger like Onno, Mr. Delius?" asked Trees. "Surely not. I hope you exert a favorable influence on him."

"Of course," he said. "I focus only on higher things. I'm an astronomer."

"Oh really?" Onno's mother leaned forward. "So you can foretell the future."

"To," said Quist. "Be quiet."

"Absolutely," said Max. "In a number of respects, at least. For example, when the next eclipse of the sun will be. But in other respects, no."

"What respects?"

"For example, whether or not a letter will arrive telling you you are about to make a long journey."

"That's a shame."

"You're telling me."

"I'd so like to go to the Galapagos Islands one day," said Mrs. Quist dreamily, looking at her husband. "It seems they have all kinds of strange animals there. Do you remember those turtles in Surinam, Henk?"

Quist nodded. "That was back in 'twenty-seven."

"They'd completely lost their bearings. After laying their eggs on the beach, they didn't return to the sea, but went farther and farther inland, where they were put into baskets by little Negro boys."

Max looked at her. She had Onno's classic straight nose. Until he was four, she had made Onno walk around in pink dresses and ringlets. Whose grandchild was she going to have? Her own, or that of a Jewess gassed at Auschwitz? And him, the prime minister? His own, or that of an executed war criminal?

In the little basement restaurant on the Prinsengracht that Onno had booked they ate leg of hare with red cabbage and drank Burgundy. All the relations had been packed off home and there remained a select group of mainly politicians, musicians, linguists, and a solitary astronomer. There were comic after-dinner speeches and toasts were drunk, which Onno endured with inflated self-satisfaction, putting his domineering arm around Ada's narrow golden shoulders. When someone alluded to his forthcoming fatherhood, he cried:

"I'm married to the daughter of my child's grandmother!"

"Do you think that's anything special?"

"Can't you hear it is?!"

A few times Max met an inquiring look: shouldn't he, as a bosom friend, also say a few words? But he made a slight gesture of refusal with his hand and shook his head. He must hold his tongue. If things went wrong, then anything he might have said now would be counted as extra salt in the wound. Perhaps his silence would be interpreted as evidence of good taste, because the bride was an ex-girlfriend of his, or as a sign of resentment at not being the bridegroom—he would just have to put up with that.

Even after coffee the drink continued to flow; people changed places and finally started mixing. Brittle linguists and bony politicians demonstrated that they also knew something about music, and delicate musicians that they knew nothing about linguistics and were not interested in politics; politicians assured linguists that
they
were in fact the true "linguists," since they used nothing but words, so that all things considered there was nothing left for the linguists. What were they doing here, anyway? Hadn't Onno himself realized that? Whereupon the linguists inquired if they had decided where they stood on the issue of surplus manure. As the atmosphere got livelier, the volume rose, and somewhere someone launched into "Arise, ye wretched of the earth!" in a stentorian voice, and shouted that it was better than Schubert's
Erlkönig;
Max had his first chance to exchange a few words with Ada. He had seen that she was drinking only water.

"Fine," she said, when he asked how she was feeling. "And you?"

"I feel like someone who's trodden on a land mine and heard the
click:
he knows that if he takes another step he'll be blown sky-high."

"Just wait and see. What's the point of getting so worked up? There's just as great a chance that everything will turn out fine."

"But, Ada, that wedding, all these people, this party—while only you and I know that it may all be a lie, phony, nonsense, fraud. How can you live with that?"

"I'm living with my child."

"When I think of Onno—"

"Quiet, here he comes."

A full glass of rum-and-Coke in his hand, Onno surveyed him from head to toe.

"When I see your pitiful appearance, I have to think back to the dreadful time when I was still a bachelor. What a nightmare! In my mind's eye I see a desolate landscape with a single bare tree in the biting wind, into the teeth of which a lonely, stooping pilgrim dressed in rags, with a long staff, is laboring on his way to his mournful end. And now look at me," he said, puffing out his chest. "I have just attained the highest state of human self-fulfilment: marriage! My flesh is as fragrant as the Rose of Sharon, because I am married! As the lily among thorns, so am I among the sons. My lips drip like the honeycomb, my shoots are a paradise of pomegranates, for I am married. I am a walled garden, a sealed fountain!" he cried—and, inspired by the silence that had fallen, he stretched out an arm to Ada. "Behold, thou art fair, o my bride! Thy eyes are the sun rising above the fishermen cycling palely out of town with their worms. Thy voice is the singing of the first birds in the roof gutters. Thy hair shines like oil lying in the street where cars have been parked in the watery early morning light. Thy teeth are as the milk that schoolchildren drink at playtime, your lips a scarlet pool of blood at lunchtime, recalling the lady who has been run over. Thou art all fair, my love! Thy laughter is as the gold leaf of the sirens in the ear of factory girls. Thy breasts glow like the first neon signs, unseen in the falling dusk. Thy navel is the orange fire of the setting sun in the windows of the department stores. Thy belly is hidden like the shop window behind the rattling steel shutters that the jeweler lowers to the ground over his treasures after six o'clock. Awake, O south wind, and come! Thou art as the late evening, when the actress in her tunic cries: 'Wretched one! Woe, didst thou never hear who thou art!' And thy sleep is ... I haven't a clue. Thy sleep is the wakefulness of the small boy on whom croaking madness is descending!"

Exhausted, he put his glass to his lips. And amid the applause that was his reward, Max felt the urge to pray that it would be Onno's child—but that was pointless, because it was already certain whose child it was. Even if God existed, he could do nothing to change it.

25
The Mirror

Mid-February was the first anniversary of their friendship, but Onno was too busy with politics to remember and Max did not remind him. It was a fitful winter—in Czechoslovakia indeed the "Prague Spring" broke out early—interspersed with a few extremely cold days. Sometimes the impending danger vanished from his mind for hours, but then it suddenly loomed up in front of him again like a cliff out of the fog. At work, too, he sometimes found his attention wandering from the papers on his desk and himself staring at the second hand of his wristwatch, turning with inexorable jerks, but actually advancing down a possibly infinite straight line, along which the event would take place one summer's day.

"Just wait and see," Ada had said. He thought back to the image that had occurred to him during the wedding dinner: standing on a land mine with the pin taken out. He imagined an American soldier, on reconnaissance in the Vietnam jungle.
Click.
He stopped, dead-still. One more step and he would be blown to pieces. What was he to do now? He had lost contact with his patrol, and there was no point in screaming amid the deafening screeching of monkeys and parrots and cockatoos. Nor could he fire a shot, because the recoil would set off the explosion. Beneath his feet, covered by a thin layer of earth, he could feel death: a flat iron pressure cooker, assembled by women's hands somewhere in China or the Soviet Union. He must think hard—but there was nothing to think about. He must wait. Perhaps someone would happen to see him standing there, hopefully not a Vietcong: a motionless American in the tropical forest. He thought of his life, which had suddenly come to a halt, like a film stuck in the projector. Why had he always done his homework? Everything around him was moving, but he had turned into the statue of a GI, heavily armed, with helmet and backpack. His head was still moving, his chest was moving up and down, in his body his heart was beating and his intestines were working, but the weight of all that now determined the moment of his death. He didn't dare discard anything, because that would change his weight; nor could he reach his water bottle without danger. Hour after hour went by. Sweating, bitten by insects, his tongue thick and dry like a mouthful of flour, he thought of his girl, at home in Oakland, on the bay—night fell with scarcely any transition, his legs began trembling gently with exhaustion. If they gave out, or if he fell asleep, it was all over for him. Should he turn his submachine gun on himself, or was there still hope? Had he been wrong, perhaps? Could it have been the mating sound of some giant beetle or other? Was he not standing on a land mine at all, perhaps, and should he simply walk on?

Max in his turn had forgotten that the twenty-seventh of February was the day of their joint conception.

"We have to celebrate that," said Onno on the telephone. "Anyway, I need to get away for a bit and talk to a normal human being for a change."

"Do you mean me?"

"You see how warped I've become."

"Where shall we do that?"

"What would you say to the Reichstag in Berlin? Or do you have a better idea?"

"I can think of nothing better," said Max, looking in his diary. "Trouble is, I shall still be in Dwingeloo for the whole of that Tuesday. What would you say about coming to Drenthe on the train? Then I'll collect you from the station in Wijster and show you the works, so that you can make yourself popular with a large subsidy when you're in power."

"On the contrary, drastic cuts are needed. Mirrors, mirrors, nothing but mirrors; you're all just like the military. And what is the social use of all those mirrors?"

"Nil, thank God."

"I'll have someone work out how many nurseries could be built for the price of one mirror."

"So you'll be left holding the babies," said Max, immediately thrown by the ambiguity of that remark.

"If you ask me, they're just distorting mirrors, and you're all killing yourselves laughing all day long at the stupid government."

"Please don't tell anyone. Come and have a look on Tuesday—you'll kill yourself laughing. If you like, you can stay over in the guest room, then we'll drive back together the following morning."

"Agreed. Of course you don't mind if I bring Ada with me? I scarcely see her anymore; if things go on like this, my marriage will also be on the rocks. I see the same thing all around me."

"All three of you are welcome."

It had been abnormally warm all week. That afternoon, as Max sat waiting alone on the open platform of the country station, it was oppressive, without a breath of wind. The sky was overcast, and there looked to be a storm on the way. With the middle finger of his right hand he stroked the small bald patch on the back of his head, which he had discovered to his alarm a few weeks ago. It was oval, just under half an inch long, and invisible under his hair; the fear of suddenly going bald had stayed with him for days, but when the spot did not increase in size, it had gradually lessened.

He looked at the slowly approaching short train. A yellow caterpillar. It contained what he loved most in the world and what threatened him most. When Onno gave Ada his hand as she got out, with a carryall in the other, Max saw for the first time that her belly had grown larger. She was wearing an ankle-length black dress, with strips of white lace around the high collar and the long sleeves. Below the waist she suddenly expanded, because her center of gravity had shifted, causing her to lean slightly backward.