The Discovery of Heaven (76 page)

In Dwingeloo she had heard about the fiasco with the VLBI, and obviously to console him, she set the table for a special meal; there was even champagne in a cooler. She was wearing a bright red ankle-length robe, making her look even bigger, and although she was the same size as he was, she embraced him like a larger person embracing a smaller one: she with her arms around his neck, he with his hands on her high hips, which immediately resulted in a change in his chemical balance.

"At least you know what becomes a disillusioned researcher," he said, taking off his coat. He sank onto the sofa and with a glass of pink champagne in his hand he told her about the worldwide astronomical debacle, which had cost hundreds of thousands of guilders, perhaps millions. "In fact isn't it wonderful that it's possible? Thousands of toddlers' playrooms could have been built, and if the experiment had succeeded, it would still have been no good to anyone. The fact that that's still possible, reconciles me a little with mankind. It means that
Homo sapiens
still hasn't grown out of his curious childhood. Only when shortsightedness finally takes over and the importance of things is seen as a function of their proximity will things be really going the wrong way. Listen to me: I'm speaking as though I'm writing."

"You mean that people should look farther than their nose is long."

"In my case, that's actually scarcely possible."

Perhaps it was the way she burst out laughing that attracted him to her. He couldn't remember ever seeing Sophia laugh so genuinely, or Ada; but Tsjallingstje's stern face was always ready to change into something completely different from one moment to the next, as though a light were switched on in a dark room. Perhaps a talent for laughter was true wit, more so than the ability for intellectual
tours de force.

While she was busy in the kitchen, he looked down at the evening paper, which was lying next to him. He read the headlines about the changes in Moscow. There, too, it was obviously a question of something like a red shift—or rather the reverse, a violent political shift: something was approaching humanity at great speed, since the expansion of the political universe had suddenly changed into contraction. He felt tired. He put his legs on the sofa, and when he closed his eyes for a moment he again saw the absurd measurement results. Perhaps it was because of the champagne, but for some reason he suddenly had the feeling there was nevertheless a meaning hidden in them.

At the table, too, it struck him that Tsjallingtsje had spent over her budget. There were oysters, with which they finished the champagne; when she then came out of the kitchen with venison steak and gave him a bottle of Volnay to uncork, he was certain that something else was going on.

"Out with it, Tsjal," he said, clinking glasses with her. "What is it? Have I forgotten a date?"

She looked at him over her glass. She gulped; he could see that it was an effort for her to say what she wanted to say.

"I hope you won't get angry with me, Max, but I'd really like there to be a date that we wouldn't forget."

"You're talking in riddles."

"I want a child by you."

He looked back at her without moving. The words ricocheted through his head like a burning arrow that had flown in through an open window. He had suspected previously that this was on her mind, but he hadn't expected that she would come out with it so directly and with such determination. Even before he knew what his reaction was to the statement, he got up and knelt down beside her, his arms around her waist and his face hidden in her lap. Tsjallingtsje began to cry. She took his left hand and pressed her lips to the palm, while she ran her other hand through his thick, graying hair. Max's head was spinning. Of course! That's what must happen! It was as though in the tumult a voice was constantly saying "Everything will be put right. Everything will be put right." He wanted to think, create some kind of clarity in himself. What he would most like to do would be to go into the garden through the open doors; but he couldn't simply abandon the festive meal.

He looked up. "Tell me honestly. Are you pregnant?"

"Of course not, what do you take me for? Do you think I'm blackmailing you? But I want a child of yours, even if you don't want one. I'm thirty-six, and every year it gets more and more critical, as you may know. If I wait a couple more years, all I'll be capable of having are Down's syndrome children."

"Oh, I know a very nice mongol, though." Because the hard coconut mat was beginning to hurt his knees, he sat on his haunches. "So it's a child with me or without me there, but in any case a child."

"Yes."

"And if I hadn't wanted to, what then? Would you have found someone else?"

She looked down. "I don't know. You mustn't ask me a thing like that."

"And you realize of course that I'll be seventy when your child is eighteen?"

"No more ideal father than a grandfather—everybody knows that."

"Well, that's settled then." He got up, put his arms around her large body, and kissed her. "Have your coil taken out tomorrow. Then I expect, of course, you'll want to get married."

"I couldn't care less. I don't have to."

"And your father, the vicar?"

"If you ask me, he hasn't believed in God for a long time."

"What kind of world are we living in?" cried Max, with a feeling that he was quoting Onno's tone.

He emptied his glass in one gulp, the same way that one drinks water, then poured another one for himself. While they ate they discussed the consequences of their decision. If everything went well, Quinten would take his university entrance exam next year and perhaps go somewhere to study, although he hadn't given any indication of such an intention; at the same time their stay at the castle would come to an end. Sophia hadn't said either what she intended to do afterward, but from what he knew of her, she'd known for a long time what she was going to do.

"Don't drink so much," said Tsjallingtsje, putting a fresh bottle on the table.

"Of course I drink a lot. In fact I intend to drink far too much this evening. Do you realize that I will be a father for the first time if we succeed?" He rubbed his face with both hands. Suddenly the world had changed. All those seventeen years he had spent with Sophia and Quinten suddenly seemed to have blown away like a sigh of wind. Everything began anew, but now in an honest, unambiguous way. He got up and tottered slightly.

"Don't you want some coffee?"

"Excuse me, but I have to be alone for a moment. I'm going to the shed."

"To the shed now? You're drunk, Max. Why don't you go and sit upstairs?"

"Now, leave me alone."

He gave her a kiss on the forehead, opened the conservatory doors, and went into the garden with the bottle and his glass. Night had fallen; above the trees the moon was in its third quarter. Halfway down the winding path between the bushes, he rested the bottom of the bottle for a moment on the gigantic erratic stone, which had worked its way out of the earth there and which came up to his waist; when he had controlled himself again, he turned on the unshaded light in the shed and sank into the worn wickerwork chair with a sigh. He left the door open. Once, the large space had been used for storage of some kind or as a workplace; perhaps a carpenter had once lived in Tsjallingtsje's house. At head height there were a couple of small windows.

He poured himself another glass and was amazed at the mysterious-ness of existence. It was as if Tsjallingtsje's six words that she wanted a child of his had given his existence a new impetus, like a crack of the whip gave to a spinning top when he was a child. Since he had lived with Quinten and Sophia at Groot Rechteren in Onno's service, his personal life had been in past perspective; it was now as though she had turned him around 180 degrees, so that he was suddenly facing the future— where although he couldn't make out anything concrete, since it didn't yet exist, there was nevertheless something like a dark space-time full of teeming possibilities.

At a stroke she had put an end to the tangled situation in which he had lived for seventeen years. Like a baby in a playpen. Quinten's playpen must still be somewhere in the storage room, folded up, like a dismantled bed. It was as though the prospect of a child, which would undoubtedly be his, now finally made Quinten Onno's son. In the paper he had read that a short while ago it had become possible to determine paternity unambiguously by means of DNA testing, but his former fears had long since receded. In appearance Quinten didn't look like either of them, only like Ada, as she had once been; and the arts-oriented nature of his interests pointed much more in Onno's direction than in his. The fact that music meant little to him simply confirmed that; he didn't even have a hi-fi in his room. Perhaps the incomprehensible boy didn't resemble anybody who had ever lived.

When the motionless, gradually disintegrating horror in the hospital bed appeared before him, he rubbed both hands over his face, as though the image were sticking to his skin. He took a swig and had the feeling that he would be capable of putting an end to the existence of that living dead person with his own hands. But how? With a knife? And why not with a knife? Why, he wondered would a cry of horror go up in the world if it turned out that in some hospital other terminal patients were taken to the cellar, where they were beheaded by guillotine? Or where they were given a shot to the back of the head in a courtyard? Simply because of the association with executions? Or because of that it wouldn't become clear that killing was killing and not anything else, such as "falling asleep"?

Perhaps it was ultimately all a question of words.
Endlosung
was what the Germans had called the mass murder of Jews. What was more beautiful than the "final solution" of something, the definitive result, the decisive result of the division of zero? It was almost something like the physicists' Theory of Everything. With half-closed eyes he looked at the rusty red in his glass and thought of Onno. He'd like to talk to him about that—language as a way of disguising reality. Probably Onno would dismiss it as a hackneyed topic, over which only adolescents racked their brains, but then go on to say a few unexpected things about it. Where was Onno? What was he doing at this moment? Was he perhaps also thinking of Max? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Perhaps he'd banished him completely from his consciousness. Not just him but Quinten, Ada, and Sophia as well. Perhaps he wasn't even alive anymore. Perhaps he'd crawled into a cave somewhere on Crete, where his bones would be found in fifty years' time, and would be initially taken for those of the writer of the Phaistos disc, until it was discovered by using the C14 method that this could only be a Dutch politician, probably of Calvinist origin.

Max could see through the open door that Tsjallingtsje had turned on the TV without switching on the light; the image flickered through the room as though there was a constant succession of small explosions. He had the feeling that he shouldn't really leave her alone now, but he wanted to think for a bit—or at least float on his thoughts, like on an air bed in the sea. At home Sophia was now also sitting alone in the room, just like Quinten was undoubtedly doing in his. Everyone was sitting alone in a room.

Recently he had been getting a little worried about Sophia: sometimes she sat motionless on a chair for hours, staring ahead of her with her hands in her lap; when he said anything about it, she started and looked at him as though she weren't aware of it herself. From his earlier vacations he remembered French and Italian families, in the evenings at long tables under pathetically twisted olive trees, themselves trees, with ancient great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers and all their branches of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nephews, nieces, and innumerable in-laws, down to infants at the breast, the tables covered with food and wine: he knew none of that. Only Onno's family tended a little in that direction. But those vacations were long ago, from the time of his fatal sports car. Since he had lived with Quinten and Sophia in the castle, they'd seldom gone abroad. Every other year, occasionally to the south of France or to Spain on a sudden impulse, when the weather gave them cause; anyway they could never have it better than at Groot Rechteren. He himself had no need for travel. Every year he had to go to a conference somewhere in the world for his work, and he was always glad when he was back.

Maybe that was also connected with the fact that he'd never been able to penetrate to the real peak of international astronomy. True, he knew everyone and everyone knew him and respected him for his work, but at the official closing dinner he never sat at the top table with the mayor or the minister, like his colleague Maarten Schmidt from CalTech.

As he refilled his glass—with one eye closed, in order not to fill a glass that wasn't there—he thought of the first time he had been to the south, a couple of years after the war, the overwhelming impression the light there had made on him, the color of the Mediterranean, which he had later seen again in the blue of Quinten's eyes.

In his student room in Leiden he sometimes saw those colors in his mind's eye, just after waking up but before he opened his eyes—when he opened them, then it was displaced by the gray Dutch morning. When he had been to the Riviera for the second time, he had thought of something to make up for that shock. When he woke up there, with his eyes still closed, he imagined that he was back in rainy Leiden and that the memory of the Mediterranean scene would be dispelled when he opened them. But then he opened them and it was really there! The sea the color of lapis lazuli, a blissful miracle! Instant displacement, faster than light! The sea ... At night the sea was black—but he didn't want to think about that anymore. What was her name again? Marilyn. Her submachine gun. God and the invention of central perspective; the vanishing point, which since the fifteenth century nothing had been able to wriggle through, neither from one side nor from the other. She must be about forty by now, and of course she'd gone back to the United States long ago, to some provincial niche, where she had become a teacher of art history and the mother of three children, married to a well-behaved lawyer, who would have a fit if he heard about her revolutionary past.