The Discovery of Heaven (41 page)

"Yes, then there will be a problem. But there's no question of that for the time being. It only happened last night, do you realize? Her mother was there this afternoon—she used to be a nurse; she also said that she'd known cases of unconsciousness that lasted for weeks."

Onno could hear himself saying this—and at the same time he saw Ada's motionless face on the pillow, the horrible catheter in her nose, and himself sitting in their silent house that afternoon for minutes on end looking at her cello, like at a tombstone.

"In any case," said Max thoughtfully, "it seems there's no threat to the child."

"Everyone agreed about that."

The waiter handed them the menus, but Onno waved him away and said he wanted four rissoles and two glasses of milk. Max would have preferred to eat nothing at all, and ordered only a plate of vegetable soup. He had the impression that Onno was more optimistic than he was; he himself did not trust it—and of course that was because of what the same Sophia had said, last night.

"Off you go again," said Max, "with your milk and your rissoles."

Onno sighed deeply. "To be quite honest . .. but of course you must never tell anyone . . . this is not the worst thing. I'm the stock comic type of the married bachelor."

Max smiled. He was about to say that in that case he, who was Onno's opposite in everything, was probably the tragic type of the unmarried husband—but that was too ambiguous for him to manage to say. For his part,

Onno had of course immediately had the same thought, and he also knew that Max was thinking that, and he appreciated the fact that he didn't want to slip into their usual tone now.

Max spread the napkin over his lap. "How did your mother-in-law react when she saw Ada?"

"Incomprehensible. She looked at her daughter as though she were just any patient. No feeling at all, even though her husband has just died too. I ask you. No, what a mother to have. I never wanted to believe Ada, but now I've seen it with my own eyes."

"She was very nice to me, though," said Max, without looking at him, "I can't say any different. She gave me shelter for the night, pressed my trousers, and fried an egg for me. Perhaps she has difficulty in showing her feelings."

"Yes, yes. I could tell you a few of Ada's stories about her, but I won't. Maybe you know them too, for that matter. Anyway, Brons is being cremated on Monday—you'll be getting an invitation. Will you be coming, or will you be back in Dwingeloo?" His voice faltered. "What's wrong? You suddenly look as if you've pooped in your pants."

Max's eyes had widened in dismay. He noticed that, at the prospect of seeing Sophia again, he was getting an erection under his napkin. What in heaven's name did that mean? Did it mean that he, like Ada and Onno, had not only never understood her, but not even himself?

Max drove from the observatory to the crematorium near The Hague in a Volkswagen borrowed from his garage. He really ought to have been in Dwingeloo, but when he had mentioned the accident, someone had filled in for him.

Here all hope went up in smoke. Just like three months ago, at Onno's wedding, it was rush hour here too—but now in order to undo something the foundations of which were constantly being laid in the town halls. The same black limousines, now without white ribbons on their side mirrors, drove in and out of the gate, and now not accompanied by confetti and laughter but, in a leaden silence, filled only by the soft crunch of ground-up shells under the tires. He breathed in the sea air deeply. Here too there were groups of people standing everywhere, but he saw no one that he knew. At the gate a man in a black suit, with a hat in his hand, asked him for which deceased he had come; because of his profession his face expressed such a boundless, universal, almost syllogistic sorrow at the mortality of all human beings, hence also of Socrates, that no one could match it with their individual sorrow. The service for Mr. Brons was in the small hall. The cortege had not yet arrived.

He walked down the wooded path, past the columbaria. In the niches of the brick walls the urns stood like in an eighteenth-century pharmacy; but at the same time it made an Asiatic impression on him. There was something Chinese about it, something from a culture that had been submerged for thousands of years. He would never have himself cremated; it was far too final for him. He and Onno had once come to the conclusion that you had to decide for yourself whether after your death you wanted to return to your father or your mother. If you wanted to return to your father, then you must go into the fire, because that was spirit; but your mother was of course the earth, the body. Since that conversation, Onno had known for sure that he would have himself cremated.

The sun shone low over the tops of the trees—and when the crematorium loomed up he saw above the low flat roof, against the dark background of the wood, thin pale blue smoke drifting slowly upward, like from a cigarette. He decided to walk around the building first before going in.

Around the back he stopped. Not because of the container of rubbish, which was standing there, because rubbish was inevitable everywhere; or because of the drivers, who stood laughing and talking by their parked hearses, since everyone had a job to do; but because of the square chimney that he recognized from Birkenau. Now too there was no smoke coming out of it, only scorching heat. At its base there was the hum of ventilators from a grille. He couldn't see it, but at the same time he did see it: how stokers under the ground took the coffins out of the descended elevators, carried them across a tiled floor in neon light, and pushed them, flowers and all, into the white hell: not thousands a day, true, two or three an hour, but that was what was going on down below.

In the waiting room of the small hall a small company had gathered. Onno's parents were there, and his youngest sister's husband, Karel, the Rotterdam brain surgeon. The others—friends and acquaintances of Brons's of course, freethinkers and anarchists, perhaps even teetotalers—he had never seen before. He could only remember Ada's father vaguely, but in some way they were like him: slightly shabby, like Social Democrats, but without their petit bourgeois air and plus a certain intellectual clarity, in the way they looked at things. They had read books—even if they were probably books that only they still read. They looked shyly now and then at the Calvinist prime minister, who had read mainly one Book.

Apart from that he knew only Bruno. The pianist had seen the announcement of the death and asked how Ada had reacted to her father's death.

"She didn't," said Max. After Max briefly told him what had happened, Bruno asked in shock whether she was still unconscious, but Max didn't know. He excused himself and said hello to Onno's family. They also took it for granted that they would talk not about Brons but about Ada. The brain surgeon confirmed hesitantly that even a long coma did not necessarily mean brain damage, but he would prefer her to wake up sooner rather than later. At least her brain stem, where the breathing center was located, was not damaged.

"Poor child," said Onno's mother. "And expecting, too. Isn't it appalling?"

"One doesn't talk like that, To," said Quist with granite authority. "God moves in mysterious ways."

"Yes of course, but. . ."

"In the eyes of Providence there are no 'buts.' "

She was intimidated and fell silent.

"It was more as if the devil had a hand in it," said Max. "We had to stop for a tree that had fallen over, and just afterward a second tree fell on precisely the same spot."

Quist shot him a short glance, which he couldn't quite place: on the one hand it said that the devil was something for idolaters, or for Roman Catholics, which in practical terms amounted to the same thing; on the other hand there was a hint of something like sympathy, because Max had come to his wife's aid in a Manichean way in her Theodicean dilemma. Perhaps, thought Max, it was really true that you could only believe in God if you believed in the devil as well. If you believed only in God, you got into difficulties. In that case where did the gas chambers come from? Why did that tree have to fall exactly where it fell? Why was God's creation so faulty that later on a Messiah was necessary, too? "And God saw that it was good"—but it wasn't good at all. It was all wrong.

The doors of the hall were slowly opened by an attendant, who, despite his youth, was also completely shattered by grief. Max was the last to enter. The coffin, covered in flowers, was centrally placed in front of them, like a missile about to be launched. In the front row he saw Onno, his sister Dol, and Sophia with an old lady who must be her mother; the others were of course Brons's relations. Dol had had the idea of having them play the second part of the Dvorak cello concerto, which made Ada more present than if she had actually been there. It seemed to Max that the music was the only thing that moved in the room. He looked at the white-haired back of Ada's grandmother's head, the hair in a knot. Was that perhaps the great-grandmother of his child sitting there?

When the music had slowly ended, the broken young man took a step forward, and said, again with a hat in his hand:

"Mr. A.L.C. Akkersdijk will now say a few words."

Pulling papers out of his inside pocket, a graying man stepped forward and stood at the lectern. He folded them open, looked fiercely at those assembled, and said with great determination:

"Oswald Brons is dead."

This was someone who knew no such thing as doubt. Now he outlined Brons's contributions to the cause of free thought and the triumph of reason over all obscurantism, of scientific atheism over the dogmatism of the churches of all denominations, particularly in the Leiden chapter, where Oswald had given of his best. Max could see from the back of Onno's head that he was thinking of his father, who was now forced to endure this, too. He looked around. The clear hall with its brick walls was as clean and bare as a stream of cold water from the tap—it wasn't the functional architecture of modern death. But was the true architecture of grief perhaps still a dark church full of incense, with columns and statues and dark alcoves, in which candles were burning by dim paintings, executed gods and sacred accoutrements? Wasn't that much more functional emotionally? That had obviously been forgotten by the vegetarian iconoclasts of the Bauhaus and De Stijl.

To conclude his address, Akkersdijk quoted a bitter aphorism of Multatuli's, with his voice changing as if into that of a vicar reading a verse from the Bible. He folded his manuscript, and somewhat in conflict with his ideology, he looked at the coffin and said gruffly:

"Au revoir, Oswald."

Music again took over the space. After half a minute Max wondered what they were waiting for now—then he suddenly saw that the coffin had almost disappeared into the ground. The flowers were disappearing too, and slowly two doors slid shut. They were now setting to work in the basement, sweating men with beer bellies and cigarettes between their lips; he would have liked to go outside to see smoke suddenly coming out of the chimney. He thought of Ada. While her father's body was being destroyed, she was lying in bed unaware of anything. Or was there such a deep, subterranean bond between a daughter and her father that it still registered in some way or other? Perhaps the same kind of bond as that between herself and her unborn child—or between a son and his mother?

When the process in the underworld was obviously complete, the young man again took a step forward and beckoned toward the family; at the same time double doors opened at the side, and the smell of coffee immediately spread like the incense of the realm of the living. The family stood in a row and Max was the last to give his condolences. Without saying anything he squeezed Sophia's hand, aware of her warmth; but although she must be able to see that on his face, she did not react at all. She introduced him to her mother, who, resting on a stick, looked at him with the same cool eyes and said:

"You were driving, I hear. How terrible it all is."

He nodded without saying anything. Brons's mother was in tears, and because of that his father could scarcely keep control of himself; but as the generations progressed, grief became more bearable: the youngest nephews and nieces, at the end, were in an unmistakably cheerful mood.

Behind him, the line had broken up and he asked Onno how Ada was today.

"The same." He excused himself, he had to go to his father and mother to make up for the havoc that A.L.C. Akkersdijk had wrought. "What I am putting the pair of them through ... I shall be severely punished for it one day. Besides, we're going back to the Statenlaan shortly, to my parents' place, but that's only for close family. I can't really invite you."

"Of course not. I'll call you tomorrow."

He took a coffee and a cake from the buffet and wandered into the crowd, exchanging a few words now and then. Sometimes he cast a short glance in the direction of the widow, but she did not look at him. Of course not. He was making a great mistake, and he must put it out of his mind. It had been an isolated incident; under the pressure of disaster she had let herself go for once and now she was back under control. She was again the unattainable woman that she had always been. Maybe she had by now really convinced herself that it had never happened.

Nevertheless, when people were about to leave, he made sure that he happened to be in her vicinity.

As she was helping her mother up, she asked him: "Haven't you missed your pencil sharpener? You left it behind last week."

"Oh, was it at your house!"

She looked at him coolly. "See you again sometime. Thank you for coming."

"Goodbye, Mrs. Brons."

Max would have liked to get back his pencil sharpener that same evening, but that was of course not possible. His thoughts constantly wandered the following day: from system 3 C 296 to Mrs. Brons's greedy internal biting. It had of course been a disguised invitation! "See you again sometime." Or was he fooling himself? Perhaps all she was thinking about was indeed that pencil sharpener. But did one really mention something as trivial as a forgotten pencil sharpener immediately after the cremation of one's husband? If it had been a fountain pen, or a very special pencil sharpener. But it was an ordinary gray thing costing a few cents, which he had not even missed and of which he had five or ten at home, as he did at the observatory.