The Discovery of Heaven (45 page)

She had gotten up and was clearing the table. Although Max knew exactly that following a conception on October 8, 1967, nine months meant a birth at the beginning of July 1968, he asked casually: "Yes, in about two months, isn't that right?"

"No," said Sophia. "Probably much sooner."

"Much sooner?" he repeated in surprise.

As she was putting the plates on the draining board, she said without turning around: "Haven't you talked to Onno yet today?"

"Yesterday was the last time. Has something happened?"

"He phoned shortly after your call. I don't know exactly what's happening, but there seems to be a risk attached to Ada's condition. According to the neurologist, her E.E.G. gives scarcely any reading. In any case the doctors are considering delivering the baby by cesarean section very soon. They would have had to do that anyway, because of course she can't give birth anymore. I'm going straight there tomorrow; they're making a decision."

Max stiffened. Suddenly it was there: the moment of truth. Of course he had known for all these months that the moment was drawing irrevocably closer; but without being clearly aware of it, he'd constantly had the feeling that it would never be reached—just as in Zeno's paradox there was always a portion of the way still to travel: first half, then half of the second half, then the first half of the remaining quarter ... so that there would always be some time left. But now the leap had suddenly been made.

"Do you want coffee, too?" asked Sophia, holding the whistling kettle under the tap.

He stood up in confusion. He had the feeling that nothing was what it had been anymore, that he'd already made a decision but he was not letting it sink in yet.

"No," he said. "Thank you . .." He searched for words. "I have to go." She turned around. "What's the matter all of a sudden?" "I don't know ... I have to think. I'm sorry, it's rude of me but ..." he put out his hand. "Thank you for the meal. I'll call you tomorrow. I need to be alone for a while now." "Of course. As you like."

Sophia saw him to the door and he got into the Volkswagen, which he had finally bought. He drove off aimlessly. He wanted to think, but he only wanted to think when there was no one else around. No one can force themselves to have thoughts, but if they do have them it's possible to hold them back. The same applies to mental processes as to the metabolism. A line of Rilke's kept running through his head, like a dam holding back his thoughts:

You must change your life.

Night had already fallen, and on his way to Amsterdam, he took the turn-off to Noordwijk on impulse. He drove down the dark road through the dunes to the lighthouse, where he parked the car.

He turned off the engine and got out: the clunk with which he shut the door was like the period at the end of a sentence. The rush of the surf rose up like the first letter of the next sentence—audible silence, through which the beam of the lighthouse swept like something more silent than silence. There was a chilly sea breeze blowing; stars appeared and disappeared between black, scudding clouds. He breathed the salt air in deeply and went down the path to the deserted beach.

When he reached the sand, conditioned by countless summer days, he felt like taking his shoes off, but he turned up his collar, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and walked straight toward the water. Reaching the harder, damp sand left behind by high tide, he stopped for a moment and looked at the dark horizon, indicated by the cone of light that swept over it every few seconds at once slowly and quickly. Head bent, he began walking southward over the shells.

Cesarean section! It was obvious: he must sacrifice himself.
He
must bring up Ada's child—together with Sophia. Only by doing that could he really do something to atone for his previous act. Should it emerge, God forbid, in some way that the child was not Onno's but his, it would cause endless suffering and Onno would disappear from the picture, but at the same time he would understand what he, Max, had done—namely, that he had taken responsibility for the child at a time when he was
not
yet sure who the father was, and had taken the risk of organizing his life around a child that was not his. If it really did turn out not to be his, Onno would never know what had gone on. It would still not mean that nothing was wrong, because betrayal of the friendship could never be undone: the lie would be between them for all eternity—although only he would know that—but he would at least have done what he could. He suppressed the thought that the surgical delivery might perhaps go wrong, which would mean that everything was solved—but he suddenly found himself feeling that it might be a disappointment.

The cross-shaped beams of the lighthouse moved constantly across his face, like helicopter rotor blades that kept the earth airborne in the universe. He must put his proposal to Sophia tonight, he thought, or at the latest tomorrow; if she agreed, then he would immediately tell Onno. If Onno agreed too, then he must leave Amsterdam and his life there as quickly as possible, give up the tenancy of his flat and go to Drenthe, look for a house around Dwingeloo and Westerbork for himself and his strange family: with a wife who is not the mother but the grandmother of his child, who might not be his child. Or had he gone mad perhaps? Would he be able to stick to it? Yes, he would be able to stick to it, because of course he wasn't sacrificing himself completely—calling it "sacrifice" was just another lie, and Sophia would know that, but this was an opportunity of giving his clandestine relationship with her a lasting form; the way things had been up to now could of course not continue without becoming ridiculous.

What would she say? After all her own life had reached an impasse, too. What was she to do there in Leiden, with a bookshop that she could not handle, and which was bound to fail? On the other hand, when the child was fifteen, in fifteen years' time, she would already be sixty, as she'd said, but he himself would only be fifty. Only? He was shocked by the thought. Would he be fifty in fifteen years' time? But by then everything would have changed, and he would wait and see what happened.

He thought of an anecdote that Onno had once told him during one of their walks through the town. At the beginning of the last century the second-rate German dramatist Kotzebue, who was in the service of the czar, was murdered by the nationalist student activist Sand; the student was sentenced to death and beheaded by the executioner Braun. However, Braun subsequently felt such remorse at having executed such an exalted person that he built a hut from the planks of the scaffold, where the student activists secretly met to honor Sand, to kiss the bloodstains and sing anti-Semitic songs.

The shells crunched under his shoes and a kind of intoxication took hold of him—not from the wine but from the complete change that was suddenly imminent; he felt like someone deciding from one moment to the next to emigrate far, far way under threat of war: to a country designated not by pointing his finger in any particular direction, but simply by pointing vertically downward toward the nadir, to the Antipodes: as far away as possible, to where trees grew downward, people and animals were stuck to the earth upside down, and stones fell upward.

Again it was as if he wanted to hold back his thoughts as he did in bed when approaching orgasm, because that increased the pleasure fourfold. He suddenly felt the need to visit his foster mother. He had lived with her and her husband for ten years, until 1952, after which he had moved to a rented room, working his way through college in Leiden. At the end of the 1950s they had moved to Santpoort, where his foster mother became a nursery school teacher; his foster father, once a geography teacher, was already seriously ill. Gradually he had visited them less and less; first every few weeks, then every few months, later only at Christmas, and finally not even that. Every visit meant a return to the war, which weighed more and more heavily on him the further the war receded. He had not been in touch for years.

He peered at his watch—in a flash of light from the lighthouse he saw that it was nine-thirty. What time did she go to bed? It was about twenty miles, so he could at least give her a call.

A little farther on, at the edge of the dunes, stood Huis ter Duin, a large brightly lit seaside hotel with a Mediterranean air, as though it were on the Boulevard des Anglais in Nice instead of near a sleepy village on the cold North Sea coast. He toiled up through the loose sand, found a door to the terrace that was not locked, and emerged into the middle of an exuberant party awash with gin, beer, and carnival songs.

On the stage sat a brass band in peasant costume, with black silk caps on the musicians' heads and red kerchiefs around their necks, and the worst bit of all was in progress: a "polonaise" with the merrymakers moving in a snake under the decorations, hands on each other's shoulders. As he stood there, still blinking at the light and noise, someone yanked him into the singing and dancing line, and before he knew it he was part of the ceremony. He had seldom felt so out of place, but with an indulgent smile he allowed himself to be carried along; if he were to protest, he might be slaughtered on the spot and thrown into the frying oil, among the sausages. He managed to slip away when they came to a door, and went to the reception desk in the lobby.

Heavy sofas and armchairs covered in linen material, with red-and-blue-flower prints, indicated that England lay across the waves. In the telephone booth he dialed her number in agitation. Was she still alive?

"Blok speaking," said a man's voice.

"Excuse me, isn't this Mrs. Hondius's number?"

"She doesn't live here anymore."

For the last year she had been in an old people's home in Bloemendaal, Sancta Maria. He gave Max the number. With his finger on the dial, about to dial the last digit, a 1, he hesitated. She had not notified him of her change of address. Obviously, she had given up on him after he failed to appear at her husband's deathbed. That awareness filled him with such shame that he did not dare to go on dialing—but he also knew that he would never see her again if he did not move his finger through those last ninety degrees. He jerked it down until it reached the steel rest.

The porter in Bloemendaal put him through and a moment later he heard her voice.

"Yes, who is it?"

"It's Max." There was a moment's silence.

"Really?" She asked softly. "Is that you, Max?"

"Were you asleep?"

"I never sleep at night. It's not something serious, is it?"

"I'm in Noordwijk, and I'd like to drop by for a moment. Can I?"

"Right this minute?"

"Is it a bad time?"

"Of course not, it never is for you. I'll wait for you downstairs in the lounge."

"I'll be with you in half an hour, Mother Tonia."

He walked quickly back to his car across the deserted promenade. As he drove toward Bloemendaal, taking a shortcut through Haarlem, he considered whether he should say anything about his scandalous absence when her husband was dying; but perhaps she understood without being told that he found the death of parents difficult, even when they were foster parents.

Sancta Maria, surrounded by an iron fence, built in dark brick in the somber aristocratic style of Dutch Catholicism, was on a quiet avenue opposite a wood. He parked the car on the paved forecourt, and as he opened the front door he was immediately eye to eye with the mutilated body of the founder of the religion—attached to the cross in the same attitude as Otto Lilienthal to the flying machine in which he had made the first glider flight.
Consummatum est,
thought Max; the engineer had not survived his experiments, either. The porter looked up from his paper in annoyance, glanced at the clock, and motioned toward- the entrance of the lounge with a jerk of his head.

In the wave of social change, a modern interior designer had created a successful impression of impending purgatory with harsh neon lighting and dreadful furniture in garish plastic. Everyone had obviously retired to bed. His foster mother sat alone at a table by the window and waved to him; he was seeing her without his foster father for the first time since he had moved out of their home. The only other person was a heavily built man of about sixty in a wheelchair, which was at a completely arbitrary angle in the room, as though someone far away had given it a push, after which it had come to a halt swerving and turning; there was a black patch over his right eye.

"Max! What a surprise!" She had stood up; she kissed him, her eyes moist, and held him away from her in order to be able to take a good look at him. "You've become more of a man, a real international gentleman."

He had to laugh at the compliment. "And you're the same as ever, Mother Tonia."

That was not completely true. She had grown smaller, with a more rounded back; her features were now more sharply etched than in the past, with a faint, refined smile in the corner of her mouth. But she still wore the same chestnut-colored wig, which left a narrow strip of dark shadow around her head: mysterious ravine between skin and wig, which as a boy had fascinated him more than the ravines in the books of Karl May. For as long as he had known her she had worn wigs and he had no idea what secret was hidden underneath; and since then he was convinced that he could always tell if someone was wearing a wig—until one day Onno had told him that he could only see it when he saw it and not when he couldn't. He had always called his real mother Mommy.

He sat down opposite her and she took his hands in hers. She stroked his spatula-shaped thumbs for a moment and looked at him.

"Your hands are just as cold as ever."

"That's always the way with hotheads."

"Tell me, how are things with you?"

"Good," he said. "Good."

Good? It was obviously out of the question to tell her about the fix he was in and how he was thinking of solving it; he didn't know how things were himself, and perhaps that was the reason he was here now. She wasn't really old yet, perhaps just turned seventy—his real mother would have been sixty now—but she was sitting here in this dreadful place waiting for death, her thoughts focused only on the past, while his concerns were only about the future. He told her about his work in Leiden, and said he would probably be moving to Drenthe in the near future, where a new telescope was being used.