The Discovery of Heaven

First Intermezzo

— Dear me, that was a close thing.

— You're telling me. The trouble with human beings is that we can lead them to the water, but we can't make them drink. For example, it's no trouble for us to make someone stand up and pace about his room, or to make him slip so that he breaks his neck; but to get someone to do something that runs counter to his feelings is less simple. People aren't puppets— they have a will of their own; before you know it, they've slipped through your fingers. Take the meeting of Max and Onno.

— Did you fix that?

— Who else?

— It might have been coincidence.

— Of course, but it wasn't.

— Quite a feat. If Delius had driven past thirty seconds later, Onno might have gotten a lift from someone else.

— Then everything would have fallen through. Thank you for the compliment, but that kind of thing is routine for my department; for us that is almost as easy as some mechanical operation or other — for example making a tree blow over, or a meteorite strike, say — although in those areas too we often face uncertainties. Of course it was part of an extensive plan of action, because we had first to ensure that Max went to Rotterdam on the day of Onno's father's birthday, and so on and so forth, but as far as that was concerned there was no resistance to be expected.

— But why would have everything have fallen through in that case? What was the point of the meeting? After all, it's only made matters more complicated. You could have left Onno completely out of it and simply have had Max meet Ada and have a child.

— In the first place, he would probably not have given her a child in that case; and in the second place, it will become clear that Onno's presence was essential for us to achieve our ultimate objective. When you're involved in a project like that, you work not only on the moment that is immediately present, but are constantly keeping in mind everything that has already happened, what must happen in the future, everything that can go wrong, and how that has to be coped with and what will in that case have to be prepared, if you are to avoid it slipping through your fingers. You can compare it with a war: in retrospect in the history books it's a nice, rounded story, the result of which is known; but while it was going on, you as a field marshal may have had your plan of campaign, but it was still largely a chaotic succession of events, stupidities, and unforeseen surprises, which demanded new decisions every moment. And in the third place. . Oh, I've forgotten. Excuse me, you have touched on an essential point that we should perhaps be clear about from the outset. You asked me to tell the story at length and in detail and I've started. But to be honest, I don't feel like telling the story and at the same time saying why it is like it is and where I've intervened and where I haven't and why.

— Have I touched on a sensitive spot?

— To start with I have no sensitive spots, because in our pneumatic domain we exist entirely of intelligence, and moreover..

— And moreover?

— Let's leave it. I don't mind justifying myself now and then, or explaining something more fully, but I don't intend to keep biting my own tail.

— You do have a tail, then?

— The story may have one.

— I don't know if you know but the Ouroboros, a serpent biting its own tail, is a symbol of eternity on that same earth.

— That's as may be, but if I can't tell the story in the way that is implicit in the events themselves, then you will simply have to make do with the announcement that the matter is settled. You can ask me a hundred questions, or a thousand or a hundred thousand; you can ask me. . for example, why Cuba had to be dragged in, and so on and so forth — that will all become clear. Take it from me that nothing has happened that wasn't absolutely necessary, at least as far as my interventions were concerned. It's no coincidence that I haven't once said "I" yet.

— Except for those three times, that is. And let me tell you this. The fact that you are also in the top rank of the Celestial Hierarchy doesn't give you the right to strike such a damn impertinent tone with an official who is just a little superior to you. Anyway, that's how things are here these days. It's starting to depress me, but that may also be partly due to your story. You know, none of us has a view of the whole Pleroma, but if you operate at the edge of the Eight, as we do, with a view of the demonic world of Darkness, things are harder for you than for those higher entities who are scarcely aware of it; and you even more than I are standing with your back to the Light and facing Darkness. If my memory serves me well, once or twice in the past you even appeared in that Archontic area, which cannot even claim to have been created by the Chief, as most of those windbags there believe, because that anthropic explosion of light, which was to lead to them, was the work of our center. Compared with me you are already almost one of them, although for them you are infinitely far removed — at least if they even have an inkling of your existence. Most of them know beings like us only in the shape of infantile fantasies like Superman or Batman. Would you like to know why that is? It's because by now they have almost all our powers themselves, in the shape of their technology. And that's our own stupid fault. For centuries we have been complacently been asleep here, and in the meantime Satan-El has been doing his work.

— Satan-El? What's that you're saying? In what form?

— All those characters are scum anyway: Belial-Satan, Beelzebub-Satan, Asmodee-Satan, Azazel-Satan, Samael-Satan, Mephistopheles-Satan, and so on and so on, they're all the same. But of course it was Lucifer-Satan again.

— What was the swine doing then?

— We only found out recently. Five hundred years ago, without our realizing it, he entered into a pact with mankind, a sort of diabolical counterpart of the Chiefs testimony.

— You must be joking! I only know the story that Mephistopheles is supposed to have entered into a pact with a certain Dr. Faust, that Faust is supposed to have sold his soul to him, but that seemed to me to belong more to literature.

— That is true, but there now turns out to be a very dangerous aspect to it. Can I refresh your memory a moment? The historical Johannes Faust was a traveling German magician from Württemberg, with an infamous reputation, like many others in the first half of the human sixteenth century. In 1587, when he had been dead for about forty or fifty years, his legend began with the appearance of a chronicle. Historia von D. Johann Fausten dem weitbeschreiten Zauberer und Schwarzkünstler, in which that story of the pact with the devil occurs. That Faust legend, we believe, goes back to a similar traveling character, fifteen hundred years earlier, who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, Simon Magus. He fell out with Peter, because he wanted to buy the Holy Ghost. That character, a Samaritan, had gotten it into his head that he himself was the Chief.

— Go on. Was Satan-El behind that, too?

— We assume so now. He was going with a Phoenician whore, whom he maintained was an incarnation of Helen of Troy.

— How can you claim such a thing?

— On earth you can claim all sorts of things, and there are always people who will believe you. But be careful, don't underestimate him. He said that the Feminine Principle was the first Idea in Thought — that is, in the Chiefs thought; that is, his own. That Principle next created us, whereupon we in our turn created the world. But according to him we do not want to be regarded as creatures, only as creators, and so we dragged our creator from Light to the Darkness of our creation and forced it into the physical shape of a centuries-old series of women, including Helen, and finally into a whore in the brothel in Tyre from where the Father, having descended to earth and become flesh, finally rescued the imprisoned Mother.

— What a story! Of course that bit about the abduction and all those women is a scandalous lie — but how did that magician find out the truth about creation? Did Lucifer tell him about all that?

— Can you think of another explanation?

— And what did he have up his sleeve in doing that?

— It was a red herring to disguise his real intention. Without anyone realizing it Simon Magus returned toward the end of the sixteenth century in the legend of Faust, the restless seeker after knowledge, who entered into a pact with the devil. The first literary adaptation was Christopher Marlowe's, The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus, which was performed in London in about 1590. That was the beginning of a continuous succession of adaptations of the theme, down to the present earthly day, the high point of which was, naturally, Goethe's version, in which Helen again appears. In one of the most recent versions, Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann, a syphilitic whore again crops up as the companion of the hero, and that was, significantly enough, inspired by a fatal whore in the life of Nietzsche, whom we were talking about just now. She was the cause of his fatal madness.

— I know all about that. At the time I even dispatched that creature to get him. People shouldn't pronounce the Chief dead. But where was Lucifer's red herring? What was he trying to distract attention from?

— The intention was to impress upon mankind that a pact with the devil was a literary matter: the noncommittal story of an imaginary individual thirsting after knowledge, who sells his soul. That was how it was possible for a dreadful, far from literary but very real event to go unnoticed until today — namely, that in that same last decade of the sixteenth century, also in London, Lucifer entered into a pact with mankind, a collective contract in which the whole of mankind sold its soul to him.

— Good God! How should I imagine that? Did someone sign that contract on behalf of mankind?

— Yes.

— Who was that?

— Francis Bacon.

— Francis Bacon?

— Francis Bacon. He has always been regarded as a man who prophetically foresaw the modern scientific and technological world. In a number of epoch-making works he sketched the outlines of a world in which science and technology would no longer be in the hands of a few individual amateurs, as was the case in his own days around 1600, but would have changed into an internationally organized, collective endeavor, subsidized by governments, with conferences and systematic publications. Only in that way could a full mastery of nature be obtained; and the scientific method would have to be that of induction, in which one progressed from the particular to the general, from empirical phenomena to natural laws, although you and I of course know that the only true method is the reverse one, that of deduction. At the end of his life he wrote Nova Atlantis, "The New Atlantis," which remained as a fragment and was published after his death. In it he sketches a central institute of a Utopian island called Bensalem, which he dubs "Solomon's House," but it is not something like the blessed temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, which is so dear to our hearts, not even something like a Christian church, but more like a modern research center, in which new biological species are manufactured.

— From a human point of view, that all seems obvious.

— So obvious that in the twentieth century he is scarcely mentioned on earth any longer. That's the danger of being absolutely right: virtually no one realizes that things were ever any different. Just imagine, in his day even scientific experiments were virtually unknown. That is why it has always astonished us that this rational founder of modern science and technology of all people should be surrounded by mystery. He is supposed to be the founder of freemasonry, he has been called a clandestine Rosicrucian and an initiate in numerous other secret societies. There has long been a Baconian sect, which with a lot of numerological hocus-pocus tries to prove that he wrote the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare. All nonsense, of course, but why is it that all this has become attached precisely to that cool, realistic combater of delusions? Not only has he been called the true author of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, but all kinds of acrostics have been dragged in to prove that the work of Edmund Spenser were actually by him — and of course, inevitably, that of Marlowe too. Bacon as the author of the first Faust play! It is claimed that at his funeral an empty coffin was consigned to the earth, because he is claimed to have lived for a further twenty-one years in Germany under another name.

— In Württemberg, of course!

— In the capital no less, Stuttgart. The so-called discovery finally woke us up, and we can now reconstruct the course of events. Baconians sometimes claim that he was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Leicester, but in reality he was born in 1561 as the son of Elizabeth's Keeper of the Great Seal. Because he was the youngest son, he was left penniless on his father's death; as a twenty-three-year-old lawyer he obtained a seat in Parliament. He was determined to become as rich and powerful as his father, but his career did not progress well. His bosom friend the earl of Essex, the queen's lover, did what he could for him, but Elizabeth did not trust Bacon. When all his attempts to secure his friend a high office had failed, the loyal Essex gave him one of his own estates as a consolation. That was in 1595. However, four years later Essex himself fell out of favor, a charge of high treason was prepared against him, and now Elizabeth suddenly intervened. She asked Bacon if he would be so kind as to draw up the indictment. And now the hour of the devil had struck — because, what do you think? He did it, although he knew that it would lead to the execution of his benefactor. The serpent promised him that he would rise even higher than his father, but for that he must first put his signature to the indictment and then publish a number of books, which would be dictated to him.

— Why did Lucifer choose Bacon, of all people? Had he already written anything?

— In 1597 he had published a collection of intelligent Essayes, which are still read, but are not anything that would have attracted the attention even of the devil. But much earlier, at the age of twenty-one, in 1583, he had published a pamphlet entitled Temporis Partus Maximus, "The Great Birth of Time." The fact that not a single copy of it has survived aroused our suspicions; and we now assume that it struck a tone that had made the devil prick up his ears. For some reason he later suppressed all copies of it. Be that as it may, after the prophet of the new age had signed the diabolical pact with mankind by putting his signature to the effective death sentence against his best friend, the stagnation of his career was suddenly over. In 1600 Essex was beheaded in the Tower, in 1607 Bacon became Attorney General, in 1613 Procurator General, and in 1617 he equaled his father's achievement by being appointed Keeper of the Great Seal. Two years later he confirmed his subservience to the devil by having an innocent prisoner tortured, because King James required a confession and a sentence; shortly afterward he became Lord Chancellor, the highest position in the land, thus surpassing his father. He was raised to the nobility as Lord Verulam, and later further elevated to become Viscount Saint Albans. Meanwhile he wrote the books that the devil dictated to him, and which were not prophetic but clever self-fulfilling prophecies intended to destroy mankind.

— That means that the opportunistic traitor not only did not write the works of Shakespeare or Marlowe, but not even his own.

— That's right. But Lucifer would not be Lucifer if he had left it at that. Even those who submit themselves to him and serve him must finally be destroyed. Because after Sir Francis had finally achieved more than he had ever dreamed of, the devil appeared to him one day in the shape of an official, from whom he accepted a bribe, which led to a trial for corruption, imprisonment in the Tower, and his complete social downfall. Five years later, at the age of sixty-five, he finally went to hell.

— Long live friendship!

— Your story too is yet another demonstration of what is missing — and it saddens me that that's how it must be. That's what I have always missed most against my better judgment, here in the Light. No shortage of love, bliss, goodness, wisdom, truth, peace, beauty, all in our service, but no friendship.

— You're not my friend?

— Or even your girlfriend. In organizations there are no friendships, and certainly not in ours, and even more certainly not between superiors and subordinates. Friendship exists only in the abyss. Do you know those famous, magnificent, elevated passages on friendship that Bacon wrote shortly before his death: No receipt openeth the heart but a true friend? Indeed, and the jugular vein! The man who had his best friend beheaded! Can you hear it? The laughter of the heartless devil, with his own temperature at absolute zero, resounds through all the halls of all eternities.

— Now I finally understand why I made such efforts for all those years.

— Go on. I'm listening.

20. The Hooblei

One of the first things they did, back in autumnal Holland — Che Guevara turned out to have been murdered in Bolivia on the very night of the excursion to Varadero — was to repay the expenses incurred in Cuba. Max was not very keen in retrospect; his alarm at Guerra's words had subsided with distance, and according to him everything had disappeared into the caverns of bureaucratic oblivion. But in Onno's view it was a question of morality, of Kantian practical reason, about which there could be no haggling. Max inquired about the cost per day with full board at the Amsterdam Hilton, which turned out to be a lot of money; they estimated the capitalist profiteering of Conrad Hilton and his henchmen on the Wall Street stock exchange at 50 percent, then divided the amount in revolutionary fashion by two and decided to regard the excursions and car trips as Cuban investments in their future propaganda on behalf of the island. They considered sending the money to the ICAP in the form of an anonymous dollar check; but Ada told them that the conservatory in Havana urgently needed a new stencil machine, which was unobtainable in Cuba, whereupon Max selected a splendid machine and had it shipped out with the message: Hasta la victoria siempre. — Dos amigos.

When he later reported what he had written, Onno nodded in agreement, but Ada shot him a short glance, which hit him like a blow to the head. He looked down and thought the same as she did. Dos amigos? Did a friend go to bed, or rather into the sea, with his friend's girlfriend, even though she had once been his own girlfriend? In his own words friendship was that condition in which one told the other person even what one would never tell anyone. Would he ever tell Onno what he had gotten up to in the Gulf of Mexico? Whether he told him or not, wasn't it in either case the end of true amistad? If he told him, it need not be replaced by enmity, it could be replaced by all kinds of things, but whatever happened, something else would replace it. But since he was not going to tell him, it had created an even more false situation: for Onno everything went on as before, but Max and Ada now had something to hide — they had both deceived him. It didn't change the actual situation at all, but Onno was now like someone who had invested his fortune in a Rembrandt drawing; the thief had replaced it one night by a faultless reproduction, and for the rest of his life he would have no idea that there was a worthless fake on the wall.

What Max and Ada on their side did not know was that Onno had had an adventure of his own. But he had been seduced — he had betrayed only his girlfriend, not his friend. Max salved his conscience with the thought that it had not actually happened in October but in June, as the belated payment of a debt for something that one had once bought and no longer possessed but that nevertheless had to be paid for, and a week later it had merged harmoniously with his other incredible experiences on the island, which were summarized by the aphorism that he had seen at Havana airport: "When the impossible becomes the everyday, a revolution is under way." He felt refreshed by the intercontinental excursion, and in the observatory's lecture room he gave an enthusiastic talk on the revolution in Cuba; it even attracted people from other faculties who were interested in hearing the report of an eyewitness. Because there were a few foreigners among them he spoke in English; an American colleague from the Goldstone radio telescope, who was working on the sun, got excited about the policy of strangulation being followed by his government. He was ashamed to be American!

Onno did his duty with his political friends. He also omitted to mention that he had been a delegate at a conference of radical revolutionaries; no one would believe the true story. However, he did explain that the main problem of the Third World was communication — not only the flow of goods, but also information: it was all totally inadequate, that's why the craziest things were possible there, and he could give astonishing examples of this, but that would take him too far at this point. And then there was the ideology! In Cuba you could learn the meaning of the word radicalism. In the United States the left wing of the Democratic party was still farther right than a right-wing party in the Netherlands, and there was no party taken seriously here as right-wing as the Republican party, let alone its right wing; but in Cuba the government was considerably farther to the left than even the Communist party in the Netherlands. American rage at the existence of that Red bastion off its coast was therefore understandable. For them it was quite simply the Red devil; this was the home of the new redskins who had to be gunned down from the hip; and for Dutch Social Democrats it still meant that the prevailing situation there should be closely observed with the necessary attention, albeit with judicious reserve.

"I'm going into town for a bit," said Ada.

She had put her head around the door of Onno's study; she had her coat on. He had a colleague with a mustache visiting him, smoking a large bent pipe; with his back to her Onno gave a wave of his hand, without turning around.

She was still struck by the amount of grayness in Amsterdam after all those dazzling tropical colors, but it was not really unpleasant. She was at home here. People looked surly and dissatisfied, it was chilly, the trees were becoming bare, and it was getting dark early again, but it was just this variation of the seasons that were unknown in the tropics: no autumn, no winter, no spring, in fact only summer. Were Chopin or Stravinsky conceivable in a climate like that? In any case they hadn't appeared there, and nor had anything else of importance been thought of or invented there, as far as she knew. Because she had the feeling that she would be better off to leave such considerations to Onno and Max, she put these thoughts out of her mind.

She didn't feel like taking the busy streets with trams running along them, and wandered aimlessly down the Spiegelstraat toward the center of town. She felt restless; suddenly she had become too impatient to practice, like when she wanted to do something and was expecting visitors any moment. Now and then she stopped at the window of an antiques shop and looked at a serene, gleaming gold Buddha with hands outstretched as though warding something off, at a lonely, grubby green Japanese bowl on dun-colored velvet, which no one would pick up if they saw it lying in the gutter, at antique glass and silver and at glowing seventeenth-century paintings. There was no end to the beauty of the world, nor to its cruelty. She had a painful feeling in her breasts — naturally, because she had let her posture at the cello become lazy; that had been her fault from her first lessons onward, when she was six. Tomorrow evening she was playing in The Hague with the orchestra, and a tour of the United States was scheduled for March. The artistic director had impressed on her not to say a word about her performance in Havana, preferably not to the other musicians either, because that might endanger the whole tour. Anyone who had been to Cuba had the plague, "the Red Death," in Poe's words.

She walked along the Keizersgracht toward the narrow cross streets with the barbaric names that she could never remember, Berenstraat, Wolvenstraat, where small shops sold things: colorful jewelry, semi-antique knickknacks, ivory cigarette holders, rusty thimbles, dolls with yellow lace collars. Her thoughts went back to her own favorite doll, Liesje: a little bald waif with a furtive look, which was precisely what gave her a character of her own.

At the same moment she remembered the sand-colored coconut mat on which she played and the legs of the table and the country-style chairs with the frayed underside of their wicker seats. Liesje was a doll and at the same time not a doll. When she pulled its arm out, the white elastic band in its shoulder became visible; when she let go, it snapped back against the body with a click and remained in an unpredictable position: "Hello!" or "Look, over there!" She could also twist the arms and legs backward into agonizing positions, but as soon as everything had been brought back within the bounds of possibility, Liesje once again became more than a doll. Then she was also a girl, just like Ada herself, a girl who understood her, and for whom she was what her mother was to her, so that she herself was at the same time Liesje. And both Liesjes were threatened by that appalling monster, which sometimes hid in the shadows of the curtains but also wandered around somewhere near the ceiling without ever showing itself, the Hooblei.

She remembered this with a start as she was walking across the stamp market, with the shabby philatelists at their stalls, the albums covered with plastic against the drizzle. She hadn't thought of it for ten or fifteen years. The dark threat of the Hooblei had hung over her childhood like a storm that refused to break. The Hooblei wanted to stuff her in a box. There was no one she could talk to about it, only Liesje, who willingly allowed herself to be stuffed into cardboard boxes in the bookshop in order to find out what it was like. And one day the Hooblei struck and Liesje was indeed gone for good, put out for the dustman by her father, with box and all, on the edge of the sidewalk. She still managed to run after it with her father, but was only in time to see how two streets farther on, the loading compartment of the dustcart moved into a vertical position with a screech while Liesje was ground up with all the dirt and rubbish of the world…

Wading through pigeons she crossed the Dam and, caught up in the current of warm air behind the revolving doors, she entered the Bijenkorf department store. She strolled aimlessly for a while between women smelling the backs of their hands or having thick red stripes put on them; she stepped onto the elevator and allowed space to sink slowly downward. It made her feel a bit sick; perhaps she should eat something. At a high table in the cafeteria she ate a mackerel roll standing up, and then walked to the toy department, where she subjected herself to the gaze of dozens of dolls, each one with a more stupid expression than the last. None of them was even remotely like Liesje.

On a shelf there was a contingent of Russian mamushkas in all sizes; brightly painted peasant women that could be opened by twisting the top, whereupon the next one appeared. Her eye lighted on a box full of little peasant women in the same style, also hand-painted, no more than two inches high, with only a pencil sharpener hidden under their skirts. A smile crossed her face. She decided to give one to Max for his birthday in November: a woman with such alarming genitalia — that would teach him. 1 guilder, 5 cents said the small label. She stood with it in her hands undecidedly. For some reason she had the feeling that it was already hers and that she would devalue that possession by paying for it, just as a man using prostitutes knows that the woman does not belong to him. She looked around, closed her hand over the doll, walked on, and a little later slipped it into the pocket of her raincoat.

Her deed filled her with amused satisfaction. She was reminded of Onno's argument that winning the 100,000-guilder prize in the lottery gave one deeper satisfaction than earning the same amount, and that was exactly why gambling should be prohibited. Even as a child she had never stolen anything from a shop, and she was surprised how easy it was. Touching the doll now and then, she went to the grocery department, where she immediately did the shopping for that evening. Since she had lived with Onno, she had understood her mother better; having to think every day of what to have to eat was worse than playing scales — and then she was lucky to have Onno, because at least he ate the same thing every evening. She paid for the macaroni and the ham and went to the exit. Dusk was already falling outside.

But when she had gone through the revolving door, a man suddenly barred her way.

"Would you mind showing me what you've got in your coat pocket?"

She looked in alarm at the identity card he held up in front of her, which showed his face, but differently from what she now saw: kinder, looking up in a relaxed way at something pleasant. Now she met a stony look. She handed him the pencil sharpener in embarrassment.

"Didn't they wrap it up for you? Could I see the receipt?"

"I haven't got one."

"Come with me."

People turned to look at her, trams and cars passed by, on the other side she read the sign DE ROODE LEEUW, and suddenly the matter-of-fact world of freedom disappeared over the horizon, because now she had to go back into the building.

"I'll pay for it," she said.

"You can't sort it out with me. After you."

Passing through an unobtrusive door behind the glittering cosmetics counters, they arrived in a concrete, neon-lit corridor, where in an instant the sweetness of existence had ended. Through a steel door she was admitted to a small, windowless room, which contained only a long table and a couple of chairs. She expected the man to follow her, but the door closed behind her and a key was turned in the lock.

She looked around her in alarm. She had been locked up! She suppressed a surge of despair. What could happen to her for one guilder and five cents? Of course this was the usual procedure — it was done to drum it into her; soon another official would appear, she would be given a telling off, would have to pay, and would be allowed to leave. But until the door had opened, it was still closed. She put her bag of shopping on the table and sat down. In a film she would now shout that she wanted to see her lawyer. Hordes of men, women, and children had preceded her here. The top of the table was made of grubby plastic; it had deep holes in various places. In the corridor she heard occasional voices, and the rattle of trucks bringing new goods for sale. She looked at her watch and thought of Onno, who was now conferring in his room and had no idea that she was shut up in the dungeon of a department store. She took a guilder and a five-cent coin out of her purse and put one on top of the other.

When after a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, still no one had appeared, a wave of terror suddenly went through her. It was past five-thirty — it would soon be closing time. Suppose they had forgotten her! Imagine having to wait here till tomorrow morning! She got up in a sweat and began walking back and forth, biting her nails. Should she pound on the door? Start screaming? But perhaps that was precisely what they were waiting for; perhaps she was being observed from somewhere. She scanned the cement walls to see whether she could find anything. But just when she had decided to wait precisely five minutes longer, the key was turned.

On the threshold stood the security man who had apprehended her, with a policeman.

"What is your name?"

With eyes wide, Ada looked at the man in the black uniform, with the black boots, and with the black truncheon at his side.

"Ada Brons," she stammered, not being able to believe that she had been reported to the police.

"Do you admit that you stole this?" he asked, pointing to the doll, which the security man was holding up.

Ada took the coins and offered them in her open hand. "Here's the money. I'm sorry."

The policeman shook his head. "I must ask you to come to the station with me."

"To the station?" she repeated, perplexed. "Why?"

"So you can be charged."

He put his hand under his uniform jacket, and to her dismay, Ada saw that he was getting out handcuffs. The sight of that gleaming polished steel tore her apart. Her resistance broke and, sobbing, she threw the money at the two men.

"You're crazy! Crazy!"

"Calm down, miss. Nothing will happen to you. These are just the rules."

When the handcuffs clicked shut around her wrists, her first thought was how she could ever play the cello again. The space between her hands was not even sufficient for a ukulele. While they walked down the corridors to a back entrance, the policeman carried her shopping bag.

It was already dark outside; in a courtyard stood a small police van with barred windows. Shortly afterward they drove to the Warmoesstraat police station, which was around the corner, on the edge of the red-light district.

She was delivered to the duty officer's counter, where her handcuffs were taken off. A fat drunk woman with disheveled hair was screaming at a policeman, so young that he looked as if he had dressed up, and tried to involve Ada in her dispute; but she fell silent when two detectives brought in a semiconscious man, the front of whose shirt was red with blood. Ada was shown to Room 21, where she had to wait on a wooden bench in front of an ocher-painted door. When her handcuffs were taken off, her dismay and rage also disappeared. She felt as if she had fallen in the water but was now on shore.

Inside, she was received by a graying sergeant seated at a high black typewriter, which resembled the steps of a mausoleum. He looked at her paternally and asked her whether she had been guilty of this crime before. She was unable to explain to him why she had committed it now with such a trifling little thing. With a sigh, he put a black sheet of carbon paper between two forms straightened out on the table and put them in his machine.

When she observed that it was strange that there should be all this fuss over a guilder and five cents, he said: "It's not a matter of a guilder-five — it's about shoplifting. If a thousand people steal something worth one guilder-five and we do nothing about it, why should we prosecute someone who steals fifteen hundred guilders' worth? Or someone who's stolen fifteen hundred guilders?"

"That's true," said Ada. She had a feeling that the calculation wasn't quite right, but it seemed more sensible not to point this out.

"If we do nothing about it, then in ten years' time nothing will be done about someone who's stolen a bike or a car radio, and in fifty years' time nothing will be done about murder. You wouldn't want that to happen, would you?"

She thought of the orchestra. "Will I have to appear in court?"

"That could well happen."

"And what will I get?"

"A fine, I think, and possibly a suspended sentence as well. What's your job?"

When he heard that she was a cellist, he leaned back for a moment, took off his reading glasses, and looked at the ceiling with a thoughtful smile; it reminded him of something, but he said nothing. He took down all the facts, constantly pulling back one arm that stuck from the paper, checked on the spelling of the word mamushka, and pulled the sheets out of the typewriter carriage with a screeching jerk. Before he asked her to sign, he read the statement to her, in which she, the accused, Ada Brons, born July 24, 1946, in Leiden, a cellist by profession, stated that on October 27, 1967, in Amsterdam, she had removed from the premises of the Bijenkorf department store, with the purpose of unlawfully appropriating it, a mamushka-model pencil sharpener belonging to the Bijenkorf department store or some other person.

"You put the carbon paper in the wrong way," said Ada.

The sergeant looked at the second form: it was empty. The text was on the back of the first sheet in mirror image. He shook his head.

"Imagining that happening to me in my old age. It's time I retired. Do you know what?" he said, tearing everything in half with two large hands. "Let's say it never happened. I wish you well."

21. The News

"Can't you sleep?" whispered Onno.

"No."

It was a week and a half later. He had gone on working until after midnight and had gotten into bed beside her without putting the light on; he must have dropped off to sleep, but he had suddenly awakened again in the certain knowledge that her eyes were still open. He couldn't see her.

"Of course you're consumed by remorse because your life has taken a fatally criminal turn."

"That may be it."

He turned over onto his back, crossed his arms under his head, and stared into the darkness.

"Why is it that criminals should be beset by insomnia? Sleep is the sister of death, says the poet, but in that case murderers of all people should sleep very well. Conscience is obviously the opposite of death. Anyway, do you know why it is that human beings have to sleep?" he asked, "that we waste a third of our precious time on it? If you think about it, it's completely ridiculous and demeaning, lying there stupidly with your eyes shut — a typical prewar phenomenon. Just like unemployment in the 1930s."

"Well?"

"The stupid habit originated when our forefathers crawled out of the sea onto the land. At that time the sea had a temperature of 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit, exactly the same temperature as our blood is at present. During the day that was no problem, because then the sun shone on the primeval Quists and the primeval Bronses, but at night it cooled down and then they became lethargic, just like bats and such creatures still do during hibernation. We ourselves are now homoiothermal, but sleep is a legacy of our poikilothermal stage, if you see what I mean."

"How do you know all that?"

"It's a result of my wretched inability to forget what I've once read. My memory's my curse — but take heart, now and again I make up things and add them. For example, I could now invent the idea that the nature of dreams is a reminiscence of our earlier existence in the sea. Things are just as idiotic in them. Take that half-floating sensation in your dreams — you know what I mean? The only other place it happens is in water. Instead of Sigmund Freud, perhaps we should turn to Jacques-Yves Cousteau."

Ada said nothing. It was as if he were alluding to things he couldn't possibly know about. A number of coarse animal cries rang out in the street, emanating from the Germanic spirit of beer. Onno listened to the faint tick of the alarm clock and, having expounded his theory, felt himself drifting off again; an animal figure appeared before him and then slowly changed into something resembling a portable cage.

"Onno?"

He woke with a start. "Yes?"

"What time is it?"

"About two o'clock."

"Do you know what day it is today?"

"Monday. Why?"

"The sixth of November. It's your birthday."

He opened his eyes wide. "Bloody hell!" he said. "Thirty-four — I've made it!"

"Made what?"

"I've survived the age Christ died at."

They kissed, and while he still had her in his arms, Ada said after some hesitation: "I've got a present for you."

"It's not stolen, I hope?"

A slight shudder went through Ada's body. It was an effort for her to keep her voice under control: "As long as you like it. ."

"I won't look a gift horse in the mouth."

"I've missed my period."

Although he was a man of language, he had scarcely ever heard a sentence that heralded the possibility of a fundamental change in his circumstances. Sentences like "You're under arrest" or "You're seriously ill" or "I'm leaving you" had been spared him up to now, seeing that he did not misbehave, was healthy, and had never really become attached to a woman; he had never yet heard the news that people who were really close to him were dead. Occasionally he had heard sentences like "After the revolution you'll be a beachcomber on Ameland," and there was even one sentence that he could not decipher, but all in all his life — despite the war — still had a virginal quality. "I've missed my period…" — the sentence seemed to have a shape: dark and elongated, like a torpedo launched from the tube and disappearing into the waves. He wanted to turn on the light, but he lay there and stared in the darkness at the spot where the old school poster with the picture alphabet on it must be hanging.

"When were you due?"

"Over a week ago."

"Are you often late?"

"Never. Always bang on time."

"And you haven't forgotten to take the pill at all? Not even in Cuba?"

"I'm quite sure of it. Do you want to see the strip? All twenty-one have gone."

"No, please. And you don't have to convince me you haven't flushed them down the toilet. It's unbelievable! It's as big a mess in the pharmaceutical industry as everywhere else. If you really have a baby, we'll put it in a shoe box and send it to the complaints department at the factory. That'll teach them." He sensed that she gave a start; he put an arm around her and said in a different voice, "If you have a baby, Ada, we shall bring it up lovingly, but with an iron hand, the sole aim being that it shall honor its father."

"What do you really think, Onno?"

"To tell you the truth, I've no idea. It's obviously been on your mind for days, but how am I supposed to know what I think all at once?" He really did not know. It was a moment like when the hour of the great god Pan strikes in the classical landscape: the onset of the motionless, scorching midday heat. "For the whole evening I've immersed myself in the breathtaking problem of how social benefits should be linked to civil servants' salaries— and then you suddenly tell me you're pregnant. Good grief!" he cried. "Now I hear myself say it, it's suddenly dawned on me. You can't be serious! Is it true?"

"If you were to leave the room," said Ada, "I'd be sure that I wasn't alone."

He now remembered that on a number of times in the last few days he had noticed something strange in her eyes: as though she were looking not outward but inward, as though he were seeing her from behind a two-way mirror, like they had in shops and brothels. When she looked at him, it was as though she were not seeing him but only herself.

"That's incontrovertible proof. So I won't leave the room. The three of us will stay here forever, because the family is the cornerstone of society. It's just as well that they don't know in the party how right-wing and crypto-Christian Democrat I am deep down." To his own amazement the idea that he might become a father suddenly became attractive, like when a deskbound scholar unexpectedly has the offer of an around-the-world trip. It would turn his life upside down, but why should that always remain as it was?

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.

"Noble simplicity, silent grandeur," he said. "You see before you a personage beside whom you sink into total insignificance."

"You have a supernatural beauty," said Max. "It can only be that the spirit has been poured out into you."

"You have no idea of everything that's been poured out."

Onno sat down in his chair and said, "Brace yourself, Max." And when Max joined in the game and grabbed hold of the grand piano, he continued, "I'm going to be a father."

Max kept his hands on the smooth black varnish and looked at him. "It's not true."

"True, true, infinitely true!"

The full implications of those few words had not yet gotten through to Max, though he had had an immediate sensation like at the launch of a ship, when the bottle of champagne smashes fizzing against the bow and the ship slowly starts to move. It was as though his hands had stuck to the grand piano; his attitude belonged to a game that was suddenly no longer being played. He stood up.

"How long have you known?"

"We've known for certain since yesterday. A frog was crucified for my child. You'll see in eight months if you don't believe it. To your astronomical mind, which is totally focused on eternity, the infinitely tender creation of a new life means nothing, of course, but you're still the first person to hear about it — for reasons that are too disgusting to refer to."

Max felt sick. Had Ada told him what had happened in Varadero? That was surely impossible! And when the memory of that night in the sea came back to him, as he made a lightning calculation, a much more awful possibility suddenly dawned on him: whose child was it?

He went over to the cupboard where he kept the glasses and asked: "What do you mean?"

"Let's say that you introduced her to me. What did you think I meant? What's wrong with you? You look green around the gills, my friend."

Max realized that he was starting to panic. "It's a shock," he said, putting the glasses down. "I'm sorry. It may be because I occasionally thought of children when I was with Ada and that's now out of the question for good."

He went to the kitchen. That was another lie — Onno would tell Ada, and she would know that that was not the reason for his alarm, but she wouldn't tell Onno. Hands shaking, he took a steaming ice tray out of the freezer compartment, held it under the tap for a moment, and pushed the ice into a bowl. He had to get his thoughts in order, weigh everything carefully, see what he had to do, and at the same time he had to go in and have a conversation with Onno, which would not be about what it was about. He had destroyed the palace of their friendship, which Onno thought was still standing, without realizing that it had become a mirage.

"I had no idea," said Onno.

"Of what?"

"That you wanted a child with Ada."

"It's not exactly like that, but she was the only woman in my life with whom the thought of a child didn't immediately scare me to death. Forget it. Things are as they are."

"If things were other than they were, something very strange would be going on in the world."

Max put a rum-and-Coke down next to Onno, poured himself a glass of wine, and sat down opposite him. He forced himself to look at Onno. "Had she stopped the pill?"

"The pill! Don't talk to me about the pill. She could just as well have swallowed a peanut every day. Medical technology is still obviously in its infancy — just as my child will be shortly. But I have no regrets. I reacted very differently than I thought I would. I would certainly never have decided to have a child of my own accord, but now that it's been taken out of my hands by a quack manufacturer, I've discovered I'm a born father. That warm, profoundly paternal element in me must have often struck you too. Or didn't it?"

"Of course," said Max, having difficulty in adjusting to Onno's tone, which had not changed but for him already belonged to the past. He took a sip and said, "If my arithmetic is right, it happened in Cuba."

"In Havana, in the headquarters of the revolution, on that night of the eighth to the ninth of October, A.D. 1967, at about two in the morning. You two had gone to the beach that Sunday. I was unfortunately prevented from going by some religious-phenomenological field research."

They looked into each other's eyes. Max nodded; he knew that Onno knew that he was now remembering their telephone conversation, in which he had called himself a "moral wreck" and a "necrophiliac." But whatever had happened, one thing that was certain was that Ada — after what had happened between her and himself — had seduced Onno that evening: that was why she had wanted to sleep with him instead of in her own hotel. She had taken everything into account, and quite rightly, as it now appeared. Quite deliberately, she had contrived to make the paternity of an extremely improbable but not impossible child uncertain. Did her cunning know no bounds? He had never known her like this, nor had Onno. But one day the moment of truth would arrive, because who would the child begin to resemble? In alarm, he allowed the question to sink in. Now, if he had himself looked a little like Onno, then no one would hit on the idea that the child was not Onno's, if it was his — but what did Onno and he have in common?

As Onno sat there on the green chesterfield with his big, heavy body, alongside which his own elegant figure was almost ethereal — and particularly with his straight, classical nose and, beneath it, the curved lips of a small restrained mouth, which was indeed a little like a Greek statue's. From an art-historical point of view, his own face belonged more in the period of Mannerism, with his predatory nose and his rapacious mouth. In a certain sense his head would be better suited to Onno's body, and vice versa. Fortunately they were both dark blond with blue eyes. Just imagine if one of them had been Chinese, or black. .

"My daughter," said Onno, "will be the incarnation of the revolution. A second Rosa Luxemburg — or, rather, something like that woman in that painting by Delacroix, La barricade: leading the working masses with breasts bared and a rifle and the fluttering tricolore."

Of course, it might also turn out to be a girl — then Ada's share might predominate; but it might be better if it didn't turn out to be anything at all.

"And are you sure you want it?"

"Basically," said Onno, letting the ice cubes clink in his glass, "I'm in favor of abortion up to the age of forty, and euthanasia from the age of forty on. I shall do my utmost to have that included in the party program. But in this particular case I want to make an exception. I knew you would allude to abortion. You'll never have children, because you haven't got a father. But I've got a father, and not just any old father, and this is my chance of giving him a devastating blow on his home ground, because soon I shall be his equal and then he won't be able to tell me what to do anymore. I'm going to perform an abortion, yes! But on the son that I am, if you follow my meaning. I'm going to get rid of myself!" he cried with an exalted look in his eyes.

Max was becoming increasingly distraught. In the past he would have delighted in every word that Onno said; now it was as though he were being forced to drink champagne at a deathbed. It couldn't go on like this— something had to happen. He would have preferred Onno to leave now, so that he could collect his thoughts, but he had only just arrived and would stay for hours, until he had taken the status of paternity into the highest regions, reigned over by God the Father, who no longer had any authority over him, either.

"And what about Ada? What will happen to her musical career?"

"No problem at all, because I shall go into labor. Yes, don't give me that stupid look. In darkest Africa, which has retained its links with the primeval roots of humanity, it's generally accepted. The mother-to-be works the land in the scorching heat, singing as she goes, while the father-to-be lies groaning on the bed in the shadow of the hut. Confinement is a short incident. Ada will pick up her cello again, and I will push the baby carriage around the Vondelpark, sit on a bench, and talk with a retired civil servant from the Housing Bureau about the old days, while I rock the carriage to and fro with one hand. Later I'll take the toddler to the sandbox and talk to young mothers about diaper rash and baby powder, while our little darlings try to dash each other's brains out with stones. In the evenings when Ada plunges into the thundering depths of Mahler in the Concertgebouw, I shall have the impulse to throw the screaming child out the window; but when it finally falls asleep I shall wake it up because I'm frightened it's dead. In short, I shall merge completely with the imbecilic eternity of the elemental."

"And what about politics?"

"I've been delivered from that, too. While Holland sinks rudderless into chaos without me, I will penetrate to the ultimate philosophical insight that is given to only the few: the father is the mother!" He took a large swig and said, "Maybe eventually I'll start wearing dresses, and earrings that reach to the ground."

Max got up to do something at his desk, where there was nothing to be done. He arranged some papers that didn't need arranging and asked: "Are you planning to get married?"

"Yes, what did you think? That I was going to go on living in sin? It's already bad enough that our child will start doing arithmetic one day and won't arrive at nine months between our wedding day and its birth, in July next year. What on earth will it think of us!"

The naming of that date gave Max a new shock. It was now November — and time would continue, week after week, through winter and spring to summer, until that day of days irrevocably dawned.

"Yes," he said, not knowing what to say.

"I'll tell you something else," continued Onno. "We are announcing the engagement this afternoon. Our wedding will be in two weeks. The twenty-seventh."

"That's my birthday."

"I know, but that's the date they had free at the town hall. Perhaps you can arrange to take the day off. Of course you're going to be a witness."

Max felt as though he were being tortured. A machine had started that could not be stopped but which could not continue in this way. Something must happen — but what?

"Very honored, I'm sure."

"I say, you don't give the impression of being very edified by the fact that the urge to found a family has taken hold of your friend. Are you really paying attention?"

"To be honest, Onno," he said, sitting at his desk, "not completely. In Leiden we're busy processing some important measurements from Dwinge-loo, which keep running through my head. Would you mind if I give a colleague of mine a call?"

"If you consider the universe more important than my wedding, then you must phone now. Obviously you've lost all sense of proportion."

Max smiled and dialed his own number, which turned out to be engaged.

"Hello, Max here," he said to the stupidly repeating tone. "Is there any news yet? You can't be serious — a polarization of forty percent with a wavelength of ten centimeters? — That's sensational! But if that's right, then. . Of course. Of course. ." He didn't know what else to say. He was saying whatever came into his head. "And what if it consists of two double radio sources? Yes, why not? On the one hand the structure of the magnetic field is virtually uniform, but on the other hand if you take account of the Faraday rotation. . What did you say? Yes, that's a bit difficult," he said with a hesitant look at Onno. "I've got a visitor. But. ."

"Okay, okay, I'm going," said Onno, putting down his glass. "Off you go to your polarization."

"I'll be right there. I'll be in Leiden in twenty minutes."

However, he did not go to Leiden. He took Onno to the Kerkstraat in his car and then parked not at his apartment, but one street farther on, so as not to be caught out in case Onno and Ada went for a walk. So things had gotten this far! With a feeling of self-loathing that he had never experienced before, he went up the steps again and, without turning on the light, he continued pacing deep into the night following the set diagonals and perpendicular bisectors, now and then glancing at Onno's glass, which he had not completely emptied.

The following morning when he awoke, it immediately took hold of him again and did not let go for the whole day. From minute to minute the embryo was growing in the darkness of Ada's womb; thousands of new cells were being added and organizing themselves into a dreadful threat. Although important data from the Computer Institute were in fact coming in, he kept going over to the window of his office in Leiden with his hands in his pockets and looking out over the Botanical Garden, where the Dutch autumn had descended on the tropics.

For some time he had been repeating the same thoughts over and over. There was a 50 percent chance that it would be his child — that was a dreadful risk — and even if it turned out eventually not to be his child, he would still live for years in fear of an emerging likeness. As far as he knew, there still was no method of determining paternity at the pregnancy stage. But suppose that his paternity were to be evident on the day of birth, from his spatula-shaped thumbs. What would happen then? Or if gradually his own nose — that is, his mother's — appeared under a replica of Ada's eyes. What would happen then? Shouldn't he emigrate within eight months? Accept the fellowship in California on Mount Palomar after all? Hang himself? What would he do in Onno's place? Perhaps he would murder him.

He rubbed his face with both hands. Was it conceivable that he had wrecked his own life? How could the dignity ever return to it? He was now the moral wreck, up to his neck in lies and betrayal. He thought back to that night in the sea: what in heaven's name had possessed him? How could he have ever been so crazy! Onno had asked him to be a witness at his wedding in two weeks' time: that was as impossible as a refusal would have been. He was caught in a trap. There must be a fundamental change in the situation this week, tomorrow rather than the day after — but how? He would have preferred to be honest and confess his faux pas to Onno, fall at his feet, take his foot and put it on his neck and await his fate. Or perhaps he should do it in writing, in a more cowardly but more accurate way.

He sat down at his desk, took a sheet of squared paper, sharpened a pencil over the wastepaper basket, and began writing without much conviction:

Dear Onno,

I'd give many years of my life not to have to write this letter. Our friendship, which has now lasted for nine months, was the most precious thing I possessed. I'm not even sure whether "friendship" is the right word. Lots of men are friends, without my having the impression that it has much to do with our relationship; I too had plenty of "friends," of course, but that was always a completely different kind of thing. "Spiritual affinity," then? I don't thinly that word touches the core either, because what two souls are more different than ours? Perhaps, I've sometimes thought, we should think more of the affinity of lightning and earth, sometimes with me as the lightning, and sometimes you. I can't speak for you, but when I met you I often felt like a thundercloud that couldn't discharge. Or rather: after I'd met you, I realized that I'd felt like that. I'm aware that so far this sounds like a love letter, and in a certain sense it is. But of course it won't escape you of all people that I'm using the past tense. In a way that I will never forgive myself for, I have forfeited the right to say we are still friends. It's almost impossible for me to admit what has happened; most of all I would like to go on writing to the end of my days, simply to postpone it. Onno! The child that Ada is expecting may be mine.

The moment he had written this, he realized that he could obviously never send the letter. He had no right to reveal this on his own initiative, without consulting Ada. In that case he would, again for his own convenience, in a certain sense be doing the same to her as he had done to Onno. He was dependent on her; without her he couldn't do anything. So the first thing he must do was talk to her. But again that must be done behind Onno's back— whatever he did would drag him further and further into the mire. And apart from that he must manage to persuade her to abort her fetus. It was all equally disgusting, but doing nothing was also impossible. If he couldn't get her to come around, she might say that he must marry her in two weeks' time and act as the father — with a 50 percent chance that it would be Onno's child. That would also mean the end of the friendship, but if that was what happened, he wouldn't hesitate. He simply had to accept it as his fate. For that matter, if he hadn't seduced Ada that evening, she would not in turn have seduced Onno — so that even if it was Onno's child, it would not exist without him. Moreover, deep inside he felt a kind of acceptance of the fact that in that case he would have a child of Onno's.

But what would Onno do in that case? He was looking forward to his child and was preparing for his wedding. Perhaps he had already talked to his family about it. Suddenly everything would be taken away from him. That was also inconceivable. On the other hand it wasn't inconceivable that Onno would react in a similar way and be prepared to accept a child of his, though at the same time terminating their friendship. No, that was improbable — unless he really had slept with a woman that afternoon in Havana, when he himself had gone to Varadero with Ada. "I can't face myself anymore. I'm a moral wreck. I've spat in the holy-water font." In that case he would be caught up in a similar situation, and perhaps reason that without that escapade none of it would have happened, and that he would now have to pay for it with his friend's child. But no, for Onno there was perhaps something even more powerful at issue: for him his child might have to be first and foremost a Quist, a continuation of the dynasty — but for that of course it had to be really a Quist and not in fact a Delius. He himself did not have that feeling, and it required little effort for him to understand why not.

A young female colleague, who worked on polarization but looked more like a champion swimmer, poked her head around the door of his room and said that there were still problems with 3 C 296.

"I'm studying it too," said Max, tapping the letter with the eraser end of his pencil. "What would you say if it were to consist of two double radio sources? In that case the smaller one might coincide with the optical mist. Think of Centaurus A."

She stared at him for a moment, then raised a forefinger and disappeared.

This was the second time he had blurted this out for something to say, but it now dawned on him that it was probably true: at first sight it explained everything. Perhaps he had made an important discovery, on which he should start work immediately before it was taken out of his hands — but he wasn't in the mood for discoveries. First he must get to talk to Ada. He took the letter and tore it in two five times over; then he tore each half once more, after which he carefully mixed the clippings with the other rubbish in his wastepaper basket.

23. Heads or Tails

She was playing not for the audience but for her child — the sounds from the instrument between her legs, she thought, must penetrate deep into her abdomen and surround the little creature inside with beauty. After the last heroic bar, while the Czech guest conductor stood hunched up, as though he had had a sudden attack of colic, there was a moment's silence in the auditorium — and then the applause erupted, with hurrahs and, here and there, enthusiastic whistles. Slowly the maestro freed himself from his cramp; with a broad smile, shaking one hand with the other, he thanked the orchestra, his gaze meeting Ada's for a moment. With a flourish he took his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and mopped his brow ceremoniously, and only then did he turn his back on them, look at the balcony for a few moments with a triumphant snort, after which his head slumped forward as if he had been shot in the neck.

The audience rose to their feet and acclaimed him as though he were Franz Liszt himself — although a troublemaker like Mazeppa would be immediately arrested by the police in Amsterdam in the present circumstances, with a great degree of approval from the same audience. Tapping the side of her cello softly with her bow, Ada waited for him to turn around and, with an imposing gesture, baton in one hand, handkerchief in the other, make them rise like puppets. When she was on her feet, she realized that she wasn't looking into the audience but was staring over their heads, straight through the back wall to a point in the infinite distance.

In the orchestra's room under the stage she put her instrument to bed in its case; because there was a rehearsal the following morning she didn't take it home with her. Her friend, the clarinetist Marijke, asked if she was going along to the pub. In fact she would have preferred to go straight home, as she was feeling tired, but it was the kind of suggestion that only the strongest characters could refuse.

"Just for a bit then," she said when Marijke persisted.

Max was sitting on a collapsed red sofa next to the gas stove and reading the paper. He stood up in surprise.

"What a coincidence!"

Ada was not so sure it was a coincidence — on the contrary. Of course, he had looked in the listings to see when the orchestra's next performance was. He was still tanned from Cuba. They kissed each other on the cheek. She took off her wet coat and sat down next to him, while Marijke was swallowed up by the rapidly swelling crowd.

Now came what could no longer be put off. When Max heard that they had performed Mazeppa after the intermission as a kind of encore, he said that Prokofiev had obviously also listened closely to that highly romantic symphonic poem, because it always reminded him of the passage from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet that had been playing in the street in Havana, with Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. The two compositions merged in Ada's memory, and she heard what he meant. These days Onno could also explain everything to her about the Pythagorean comma, or about il diavolo in musica, or why the Mixolydian and Aeolian scales were each other's mirror image, but he would never be capable of an observation like Max's.

"Together," she said, "you and Onno know everything about music. But I sit there in front of a score counting and have to play the strings. That's something else."

Max nodded and looked at her. "Only the three of us know everything."

She realized immediately what he was alluding to. Head bent and looking at her hands on her lap, she said after a few seconds: "Maybe not even then."

Max bent one knee and turned ninety degrees to face her on the sofa. "Listen, Ada," he said softly. "Since Onno told me that you're pregnant, I've thought of nothing else. This is an absolute disaster."

"I'm very happy about it."

She could see that he was in a panic; but whatever he said, she knew that she wasn't going to budge an inch, and perhaps he sensed that. He made a few uncoordinated movements with his head and one hand.

"Of course, you're a woman, you're pregnant, you're expecting a child, and of course you identify completely with that child. I understand that. It's probably something like an artist who's pregnant with a symphony, or a novel; they're not going to let anyone or anything get in their way, either. But at the same time that's the difference — because a work of art has only a mother, while your child has a father too. After all it wasn't an immaculate conception!"

"I'm assuming it wasn't — although I was using the pill."

"It was more of a doubly maculate conception. But who's the father? You don't know."

"And I don't want to know. You and Onno are the father. You two are such a unity after all, aren't you?"

"Ada, you're crazy! It will all come out one day who it is, Onno or me. I hope to God that it's Onno — then it will be all right, that is. . all that will happen is that we'll have been living in fear for years, or I will at any rate. But supposing a duplicate of me is born, what will happen then? What will we have done to Onno then? How are we supposed to go on? That will be an inconceivable catastrophe, won't it!"

"These things were sent to try us," said Ada, folding her arms. "I'm quite aware what you're getting at, but you can save yourself the trouble. I'm not having an abortion."

Max moved slightly closer to her. Other people were now sitting at their table too: an untidy man with a gray beard, who had clearly decided to have a wild old age and was trying to impress a young girl with a story from the war, while her boyfriend listened rather uncomfortably. Now and then all three of them had to bend forward under the pressure of the throng behind them. The smell of wet hair and coats mixed with smoke and beer formed a gas that no one would have been able to stand for more than a minute at home; amid the screaming and laughter Max and Ada need have no fear that they were being eavesdropped on.

"But for God's sake, can't you see that there's no other way out! You can tell Onno you've had a miscarriage — and after a few months you'll be pregnant again if you want to be."

Ada took a sip of her white wine, which had been brought by a waiter who had become as thin as a pencil stroke from having been mangled by bodies evening after evening.

"No, I won't be."

"What do you mean?"

She put down her glass and looked at him. "I won't get pregnant again."

"And why not?"

"I have a presentiment."

"Based on what?"

"I don't know."

"Do you mean because of the abortion, perhaps? Listen, obviously we won't have it done by an old lady with an enema — I'll make sure of that. Maybe we can even have it done in the Academic Hospital in Leiden."

"It's got nothing to do with that, but I know for certain that this is my only chance of having a child."

She felt sorry for him. Perhaps he was the father of her child, perhaps not; in any case he had a dreadful time ahead of him. Everything that Max had thought of she of course had thought of herself; but even if the sky were to fall in, she was determined to have her child. Everything would sort itself out somehow in the end, even if the child was Max's — if necessary at the cost of her marriage and Max and Onno's friendship: that was all of secondary importance. Perhaps Max would want to spend the rest of his life with her in that case, perhaps not; perhaps she would have to cope by herself — it didn't matter. She would face that when she came to it: as long as her child was born. The source of this determination was a mystery to her. In the past she had only known it in regard to her musical career, but when a world-famous young cellist of her own age had recently performed with the orchestra, in the Elgar concerto, with a Stradivarius, she hadn't thought for a moment: I'd like to be sitting there.

"But that's completely irrational, Ada. Countless women have had abortions and had children afterward."

She looked at him. "If you're so rational, why don't you simply tell Onno the truth?"

Max emptied his glass helplessly. "I started writing him a letter, but I tore it up."

"Why?"

"I felt I couldn't do it behind your back."

"Well, now I'm in the picture."

"Do you think I should do it? What do you think the consequences will be for you? You didn't tell him, either."

"No," said Ada. "And not just because I felt I couldn't do it behind your back. I'm prepared to take the risk. The truth's a toss-up: heads or tails. If we tell him, everything will be wrecked for certain."

"Unless we get married."

She put her hand on his for a moment and smiled. "Even then. In that case we'll only get into a new quagmire."

"Exactly," nodded Max. "Quagmire—that's the word. Morass. Whatever we do it will be a disaster. And even if we do nothing and it turns out to be Onno's child, even then our relationship with him will be all wrong. Like when you know someone has cancer but they themselves think they're healthy."

"And that will be just as true if I have an abortion," said Ada. "And that's another reason why I am not doing it. My child is the cause of everything, but at the same time it's the only ray of hope. Eventually we'll all be dead, and then all our problems will have disappeared, but he'll still be alive somewhere, and his children and his children's children."

"How do you know it's going to be a boy?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Onno thinks it's going to be a girl. He's even thought of a name."

"A name?" repeated Max in dismay. "Is he already thinking of names? But in that case it's already there!"

Marijke squirmed her way between the bodies and set down two glasses of wine in front of them.

"Are you okay here?"

Ada glanced at Max, who sighed and gestured.

"We're doing the best we can."

The man opposite them, leaning aside for someone trying to take his coat off, complained that these days the trams in Amsterdam were always as full as this in the rush hour; you couldn't use public transportation anymore.

"So what are we going to do now?" asked Max.

Ada shrugged her shoulders. "Nothing."

"Have you met his family yet?"

She nodded.

"And?"

"He's presented me to his parents very officially. We've been to tea. It's wheeled in on a cart by a housekeeper, after which the lady of the house pours the tea herself."

"And how did they react to you?"

"I couldn't really make it out. They were cordiality itself, but I don't know how much of it was sincere. According to Onno I went down well. He himself was as nervous as if he were making his first visit. His mother didn't strike me as exactly a genius, and his father was a bit intimidating. He didn't say much. He was very friendly, but behind it there was something completely different. When I said so afterward to Onno, he said that I'd seen that he's a politician. According to him they're glorified street fighters, with brains that are really muscles — people who know how to settle scores with their enemies."

"And then he said," added Max, "that it was characteristic of him too, that he would also crush his enemies to the last man." He remembered the way Onno had settled accounts with Bart Bork in the park in Havana. His eyes began stinging a little. Onno was completely a part of him, but it was an Onno that would no longer exist for him.

"Very possibly. I can't remember."

Ada looked at her watch. She wanted to go home; Onno was waiting for her. Just like that afternoon in The Hague, she experienced her presence in the crowded pub as in the kind of portrait that you can have taken of yourself at the fair: behind a pasted-up, life-size photo of the queen, with a crown and ermine mantle with the face cut out and you having to stick your own through the hole. Deep inside she felt the presence of something else — not only localized in her womb, but even more in her whole self. At the same time it was still completely part of her, as Max had said: it was her and not her. Her personality contained a part of herself as something else, which was nevertheless completely herself, just as on the platform her part belonged to the indivisible orchestral sound.

24. The Wedding

When Max had found the wedding invitation in his mailbox, in which Onno Matthias Jacob Quist and Ada Brons announced their forthcoming marriage — both sets of parents had been passed over, which must have been a severe blow, particularly in The Hague — a great sense of resignation came over him. Untruth had now gotten its hooks into his life and would always remain there. His life had broken irredeemably in two: a white section up to that evening in the Bay of Pelicans, and a black section afterward. It had never occurred to him that such a thing could happen — and now it had happened, not in the form of an illness or a disaster that was no fault of his own, but because of his own actions: in a certain sense he was the very opposite of a murderer, but the remorse came down to the same thing.

In the past he would wake up like a trapeze artist falling into the safety net: he would leap out of bed and survey the day stretched out before him. Now he made a sound as though wanting to vomit and would have preferred to stay under the covers. Regularly there were girlfriends under there with him, but less frequently than in the past; after all, that insatiability had been the cause of everything. The harmonious triad he had formed with Onno and Ada had changed once and for all into a dissonant chord by a composer of the Darmstadt school.

Onno thought it very discreet of him that as a former boyfriend of Ada's he preferred not to act as a witness at his wedding: "Your noble character throws a pleasant light on my capacity to choose my friends."

The wedding day, Max's birthday, brought a melancholy reminiscence of summer; it was windless and the sun shone mildly from a cloudless pale-blue sky. In the afternoon Max, without an overcoat, walked to the town hall, which had been hidden away in the center of town on a seedy side canal full of whores after the monarchy had driven the republican citizenry from its proud municipal palace on the Dam. There wasn't an obvious entrance; only Amsterdammers were able to find the obscure brick gateway to the inner courtyard. Here the continuation of the Dutch nation was in full swing: a bustle of wedding parties coming and going, black limousines with white ribbons on their side mirrors turned in and out of the gate; all around were young petit bourgeois in rented morning coats, with brown shoes, collars that were too large, and gray top hats, only wearable by people who had attended the Ascot races for generations, brides in white carrying bouquets, sometimes accompanied by stumbling bridesmaids, posing for photographers, while handfuls of confetti were scattered over them with shrieks of laughter. Everywhere there were groups of people huddled together, and after a quick inspection he had located the one belonging to Ada and Onno.

Actually, there were two groups. One consisted very obviously of Onno's family, which he was seeing for the first time: ten or twelve distinguished-looking people, ladies with hats on, pearl necklaces, and lots of bright-red and navy-blue with white polka dots. They looked with skeptical amusement at the working-class Amsterdam goings-on. One of them was undoubtedly a brother: as large and heavy as Onno, with the same face, but everything transposed into the well groomed and well adjusted. The much smaller, slightly stooping but sturdy old gentleman with a hat and walking stick, who now took a watch out of his waistcoat pocket and glanced at it, was of course his father; it was already obvious from the way in which the others grouped around him. His mother was a strapping woman, taller than her husband, with white hair and a straight back.

Taking off his hat, a chauffeur held open the door of a recently arrived car, from which an unmistakable Quist also emerged and joined them with his wife: obviously Onno's eldest brother, Diederic, the provincial governor. He now also suddenly saw Ada's parents: they stood next to the group, looking rather out of place without merging with it, like fat rings in soup. The other group, alongside but some distance away, was obviously the group of apostles of the New Left: giggling men of his own age, though perhaps still somewhat intimidated by the physical proximity of one of the icons of the old Holland, reaching back into the sixteenth century, the Holland that they wanted to abolish.

Max hesitated. Whom should he join? He had met Ada's parents on only one occasion, and apart from that he knew none of them — while no one had had a more intimate relationship with the bride and bridegroom than he had. He slowly strolled in their direction and when he caught something in passing about "the Cypriot syllable sequence," he realized there was a third group, comprising Onno's linguistic colleagues. And there was even a fourth one — he suddenly saw Bruno and then Marijke too. There were the musicians. He greeted Bruno, whom he hadn't seen since they said goodbye at Havana airport.

"Do you still think of Cuba occasionally?" asked the pianist with a deadpan expression.

"Every day."

"I had hoped that Ada would get fed up with Onno there so I could be the bridegroom here today. Now I'm a witness."

"I'm not even that," said Max, while thinking: just imagine if she'd been to bed with him too.

"It's a black day for us."

A little later Onno turned into the gateway: on a bike, with Ada on the back. To applause he slid from the saddle, as triumphantly as a circus artist jumping off his nine-foot-high unicycle, and acknowledged the applause with a bow.

"Forgive us for being a little late, but we had to buy a bridal outfit first. Doesn't she look marvelous, my bride-to-be?"

Ada was wearing a simple black dress with a gold lame jacket over it, which was not a perfect fit but gave her the look of a precious jewel. Onno himself looked as he always did, with a red tie; according to Max, he hadn't even washed his hair.

"Can I?" asked Marijke. She took hold of Ada's lower arm and bit the price tag off the sleeve.

After Onno had locked his bike, he cried: "I'll introduce you all to each other soon. Right now we have to tie the marital knot and be quick about it!"

The dark, paneled wedding room was actually too small for the marriage party. Max stood at the rear looking at the backs of Ada and Onno. Besides Bruno, Ada had her father as a witness; Onno had a woman who was probably his younger sister, and one of his political friends. A fellow party member of theirs, the alderman for public works, acted as the registrar for the occasion. He announced that at the request of the bridegroom he was not going to read the normal text but that of the Batavian Republic, which had not been used since 1806. He took a brown parchment off the table, glanced over his semicircular glasses at the Calvinist patriarch in the front row, and read:

" 'Ceremony, as used at Weddings at the Municipal House in Amsterdam since the joyful Revolution of the nineteenth of January 1795. Bridegroom and Bride! Since we assume that you have not made a rash choice, are uniting with honorable intentions, and have obtained the blessing for that union from Him, to whom you owe everything; we also make no objection to complying with your lawful request by setting the seal of the law on your mutually declared love and promises of faithfulness. Before doing so, however, we shall briefly remind you of your duties.

There was some hilarity in the room. The Social Democrat rebels tried to read something in Quist's face, but it remained as impassive as a stone; likewise, the provincial governor, the public prosecutor, and the professor of criminal law, whom they of course knew by sight, gave no sign of life. After the alderman in true patriot fashion had urged them to industry, honesty, good behavior, modesty, obedience, and thrift, and had warned them of the corrupting influence of being too forbearing to their children, he asked:

" 'Dost thou, Bridegroom, take thy Bride, here present, as thy Lawful Wedded Wife?' "

Onno threw back his head and cried with pathos: "I do!"

Not everyone in the room began laughing, but most people did. The alderman, too, found it hard to keep a straight face.

" 'Dost thou, Bride, take thy Bridegroom, here present, as thy Lawful Wedded Husband?' "

"I do," said Ada softly.

There was something in her voice that silenced everyone. Max felt an unexpected catch in his throat. He had difficulty in controlling himself, and would have preferred to leave the room, but that was of course unthinkable. Ada and Onno had to take each other's right hand, and as they stood there, the language of the revolutionary past continued:

" Do you therefore now admit, in the presence of an omniscient God, and in the hearing of your Fellow Citizens gathered here, that you have accepted each other in marriage, and, following the duties presented to you, will live together until death do you part?' "

"I do."

"I do."

" 'May God, who is love itself, make you keep your promise; may He protect you from domestic displeasure, may He crown your union with the greatest of his blessings; and be with you in all the circumstances of your life!' " The alderman looked up, took the glasses off his nose and said, " 'Be mindful of the Poor.' "

"Fantastic," whispered one of Onno's political friends. "Be mindful of the Third World."

Max was overwhelmed with emotion: wasn't he the poor fellow they should be mindful of? But no one was thinking of him, or must think of him, except for Ada perhaps. He saw Onno put a wedding ring on her finger; when the alderman waited for Ada to do the same to him, he said gruffly:

"Men don't wear rings."

They signed their names, and after the formalities had been completed they shook hands with the alderman, after which there was an opportunity to congratulate them. Max waited until the first crush was over. Without a word, he kissed Ada three times on her cheeks. When he shook Onno's hand, he realized that this was the second time: the first had been in his car, that first evening, as they were passing Leiden and introduced themselves. The hand was white and warm and dry.

"Congratulations, Onno."

"Thanks very much, Max. Happy birthday."

"Thanks very much. How do you feel?"

"Determined. I shall become the most narrow-minded of heads of family. All your fault."

In the evening there was a dinner for close friends, but before that everyone was welcome in a pub next to the town hall, where tables had been reserved and champagne was waiting. There, too, the groups did not mix. The musicians clung together, as did the scholars, while the politicians ignored the tables and mounted the bar stools, where they ordered beer; Ada sat with her parents, who had detached themselves from the Quists.

When Onno saw Max, he took him to the corner at the back, where his family had nestled. "Now you must finally come and see what fate has allotted me."

At their table he pointed to Max with his forefinger, like an auctioneer, and said: "This is my friend Max Delius."

"Oh, so you're him," said a lady approaching fifty, who a little while later turned out to be Onno's eldest sister, married to the public prosecutor. She had something large and formidable about her that seemed endemic in that family; there was something rough about her face, something masculine, that frightened him a little.

"Yes, Trees, that's him," said Onno in annoyance. "All it needs is for you to peer at him through your lorgnette." He gave Max no opportunity to shake hands, because now he pointed out his parents, his two brothers and their wives, and his youngest sister and her husband. He called her Dol, and she was the only one for whom he had a kind word. Then he left Max alone with them.

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.

Onno looked contemptuously around him.

"So you think you can plumb the depths of the universe in this hole." He cupped a hand behind his ear and listened. "I can't hear the echo of that Big Bang of yours at all. All I can hear are stupid cows in the distance, wanting milking."

"So you can actually hear it," said Max.

The hood of his car was open, and small boys were bending over the dashboard to see how fast he could go. Because of the changed circumstances, it was now Onno who had to force himself sideways into the narrow space behind the seats. They drove out of the village along a provincial road, lined by tall elms; the sky, monochrome-gray like tin, hung over the alternating farms and woods. Max pointed out the large erratic stones, from the Ice Age, which were piled into small pyramids at the entrance of every farm. They worked themselves to the surface from the depths, he told them, whereupon the farmers hit them as they plowed.

"Am I right in thinking," asked Onno, "that stones fall upward here?"

"Not once they reach the surface."

"Ah, mother earth!" said Onno with something like paternal pity in his voice.

Max was about to say he had also heard that with war veterans, bullets sometimes appeared from their backs after twenty years — but it was no longer possible to talk to Onno in this playful way. The barrier was now right next to him, under that black curve. He cast a glance in his mirror, in which he could see Onno looking around with his hair waving, obviously enjoying the ride. Behind him, still in the mirror, they were driving backward on the wrong side of the road: yes, that was what their relationship was like now.

They passed farm cottages, also with erratic granite blocks in their small front gardens, drove through a village, and after a few hundred yards signs appeared on a woodland path forbidding all motor traffic. That was because of the radio waves transmitted by the spark plugs, explained Max; the telescope was so sensitive that even such a minimal signal was enough to interfere with reception.

"And what about your spark plugs?" asked Ada.

"They're insulated."

"So it might happen," suggested Onno, "that you think you've discovered a new spiral nebula when it was simply a moped trespassing on the site."

Max made a skeptical gesture with his hand. "Okay," he said. "That might be possible. I hope you haven't got an electric razor with you."

"So that it's not beyond the realms of possibility," Onno persisted, "that what you radio astronomers regard as the universe is simply the traffic situation in the surrounding area."

Max had to laugh despite himself. "God knows."

"You've put your finger on it! The earth is flat and the stars are tiny holes in the firmament, through which the light of the Empyrean, the abode of the blessed, shines. And anyone who maintains anything different, like you, is on the slippery slope."

Suddenly a portion of the mirror became visible above the trees: a gigantic framework twenty-five yards in diameter, a transparent parabola of gray steel, as out of place in the rural environment as an oath in a sermon.

"It's not an eye at all," said Onno. "It's an ear."

At a complex of low-rise service buildings, Max turned off his engine and an unrestrained silence descended upon them. The birds in the wood simply made it deeper; from the other direction, where it was more open, came the scent of heather.

Ada got out, took a deep breath, and looked around. "How marvelous it is here."

"Yes," said Onno, lighting a cigarette and inhaling deeply. "That's the marvel of numbness. Nature is the sleep of the intellect. Only in the city does the spirit awaken."

"I wouldn't mind living here, though. If necessary, with a little less intellect."

"Shame on you! Nature is for children."

"That's what I mean."

With a groan Onno had also clambered out of the car and gave her a kiss.

"You're a darling, but you're making a terrible logical error. For her own safety, our daughter must become a real city child. You can tell that from all those children from the provinces. At the age of fourteen they sneak off to Amsterdam and then walk into every trap at once. They know which toadstools are poisonous and that they mustn't walk through the tall grass barefoot, but they haven't a clue about the vipers in the city. If they've grown up in the city, they know exactly what they have to be careful of. And believe me, in fourteen years' time it will be a lot more dangerous in Amsterdam than it is now, because everything always gets worse. Could you live here?" he asked Max. "Nothing was ever thought of in the country, was it? After all, you think up in Leiden what you test out here."

Max had listened to him in desperation. What he had said about that "daughter" was of course a game, but as a real father he had obviously already thought about the best environment for Ada's child.

"Really live here all the time? I'd prefer to give up astronomy. I'd feel like a banished criminal. I won't say a word against Drenthe, but of course it's the Siberia of the Netherlands." He looked at the sky. "I think I'll put the top up."

With the help of Onno, he pulled it up, and after securing the handles and press studs, he took them to the guest suite, where he had asked the caretaker to reserve a bedroom. In the communal living room, furnished with wicker chairs and plywood sofas, he introduced them to a young colleague from Sydney, who was too fat for his age and was sitting working at the dining table. Max told them in English that he was here to combine the Australian data on the distribution of neutral hydrogen in the Milky Way with that of the Northern hemisphere, thus producing a complete map.

"Something like this," he said, pointing to one of the papers, on which was a diagram that, according to Onno, looked like a Rorschach test but in Ada's opinion was like a view of the brain from below.

"What do you know about brains?" asked Onno. "That's my specialty."

"I once saw a photograph of one."

After they had unpacked their bags in the bedroom, they went to the low hall in the main building, where astronomers, technicians, administrative personnel, and students working their way through college had gathered around a cart carrying tea and biscuits. Some of them knew Onno and Ada from their visit to the Leiden observatory — that was the very first day, Max suddenly realized, when he had plucked Ada from the "In Praise of Folly" bookshop. He saw her sitting at her cello again, musicienne du silence, her father with paint on his face — and later: "Be careful, don't hurt me. ."

He showed them his office, as tidy as the one in Leiden, the metrological department, the instrument-making workshop, and the other workshops, where the lights were on, after which they went outside through the back entrance. A hundred yards farther on stood the colossal telescope, silently focused on a point in the dark sky. Max himself still felt a mysterious effect emanating from the instrument, which he knew so well — not comparable with any other technical structure. The wind had come up somewhat, and while they walked toward it along the path, he said that the wind was, of course, because of the contact with the most distant and earliest things in the universe that was taking place there. On the edge of the heath, which extended to the horizon, the reflector towered above them, as transparent as a fallen leaf in winter, in which only the veins had remained. The monster rested on feet, between which was a service hut; the whole construction was supported by four wheels on a circular track.

"If you ask me, those are kitchen brushes," said Ada, pointing to the brushes, which had been tied provisionally with string at the front and back of each wheel to keep the rail smooth.

"From the household store in Dwingeloo," said Max, nodding. "It ultimately comes down to that kind of thing. That's how it is in science, but no one must know."

"It's just the same in politics," said Onno. "All improvisation and making do. People believe in masterminds and devilish plots, but if they were to hear how policy is actually made, they'd get the shock of their lives. It's just the same as at home. I think it's the same everywhere when you look behind the scenes. It's a miracle the world still goes around."

In the service hut, where a couple of observers were sitting at the panels, he inquired what was being observed, or eavesdropped on, at the moment.

"I think they're calibrating," said Max. "What are we doing, Floris, 3C296?"

A man of his own age, perhaps a little younger, said without taking his eyes off his meters: "Yes, but there's interference from somewhere. It's probably one of those bloody weather balloons from Cuxhavn, with its thirty-eighth harmonic. Why don't we call the air base at Leeuwarden and get them to shoot the damn things down?"

"They cause just as much interference."

That really was the problem, said Max; Onno was right about his moped. Once you had the information on punch cards, you had to first work out what you'd really measured and make sure you'd gotten the astronomy out of it.

"Excuse me, but I think that I'll have to lend a hand. Why don't you two take a walk across the heath, and I'll see you at about dinnertime. I've reserved a table at what you might call a gourmet restaurant in the village. And remember, if a storm starts, you must lie flat on the ground and crawl back. That's the kind of thing you don't know when you are a city person."

But the moment he said this, he was struck as though by lightning by the realization that this would be the solution to his problem: if Ada were to meet her end in that way — and he wanted that thought to be immediately burned out of his head.

It hadn't been necessary to reserve a table; because of the bad weather they were the only ones in the restaurant. In the dark, primitive space, full of vague paintings and prints and iron pots on the walls, they chose a table as far away as possible from the windows, against which gusts of rain blew now and then. Max lit the candle and listened to Onno's argument about the difference between rotten weather in the city and rotten weather in the country. In Onno's view you got wetter from the rain in the country— weather didn't belong in the city at all; on the other hand people in the country became depressed because of it, while in the city it was simply inappropriate.

"You don't give me the impression of being depressed at the moment, though."

"No, not me of course, because I'm above all that. I dwell in the regions of pure reason, on which the weather conditions have no influence. But you — you seem depressed to me. Is there something wrong?"

"Of course not," said Max. He looked uncertainly at Ada, whom he had just now wished dead. "What could be wrong with me?"

"That's what I'm asking. Perhaps you come here too often. What's going to happen to you when that installation in Westerbork is finished?"

"I'll see about that nearer the time."

"How far have they gotten?"

"The twelfth mirror will be finished this year."

"That's sure to be a fantastic sight," said Ada. "One of them is already impressive enough."

"I think so too."

Onno looked at him searchingly. "Do you mean you've never been to see them yet?"

"No. I mean, yes. I've not been to look yet."

"Isn't it near here?" asked Ada.

"Fifteen miles farther on."

"Very close, then."

Onno placed his hand on hers for a moment, and Max could see that this was not only a gesture of tenderness but also an instruction to be quiet. Obviously she didn't realize what Westerbork meant to him: he had never told her; but probably she had been told by Onno meanwhile and had simply forgotten the name. It wasn't exactly pleasant to find himself treated with such circumspection, like a patient.

"But I know the site backward. I have all the plans in my head, and I can take you to the parade ground or the punishment barracks blindfolded."

It looked increasingly as if he were going to become telescope astronomer in Westerbork — that is, the astronomer who worked regularly with the technicians on the spot — and he would see what happened then. Perhaps it was best to put it off until there was no alternative, just as one shouldn't first feel how cold the water was with one's toe but simply dive in. Perhaps it had been obscured for the last few months by the problem he had inflicted on himself.

Not even the neat black suit could change the coarse face of the waiter, whose grandparents had probably been born in a turf hut. But he opened the champagne expertly, without making the cork pop. Max tasted it, waited until he had poured the glasses — with Ada putting her hand over her glass — and then proposed a toast.

"To our simultaneous conception!"

Ada looked at him in astonishment. Had he told Onno about this? "What on earth do you mean?"

He realized immediately what she thought he meant — but before he could answer Onno said:

"I told you about that, Ada, but you weren't listening. You thought: yes, yes, I'm sure that's true. That's what we're celebrating here; the silent, holy night of Van der Lubbe, the most influential Dutch politician who ever lived."

While they studied the menu, he told her again — and he described the occasion on which Max had worked it out for him. "Mrs. Hartman, can Onno come out to play?" Max had already almost forgotten. It was a year ago, but it seemed something from the distant past.

"How is Helga?" he asked. "Have you seen her again?"

"Never. She's sitting dutifully at the Art Historical Institute keeping the catalog up to date."

They ate wild boar, and Onno expanded on his domestic political adventures, while Max and Ada listened politely. A Great Leap Forward was being made, he said, in which what his father and his friends had prevented in 1945 was finally being achieved — that was, going hand in hand with a rabid wave of democratization, which was not devoid of plebian features: no one was allowed to achieve any more than anyone else — and if you simply promoted that and meanwhile you yourself aristocratically achieved what no one else achieved, then you were assured of power to the end of the century.

"Machiavelli did not live in vain," said Max.

"Oh, Machiavelli!" cried Onno. "A name that is mentioned too rarely!" After coffee Onno asked for the check, but the waiter said that everything had been settled.

"You're my guests," said Max, getting up. "I'll have a meal on you sometime in Amsterdam."

26. Fancy

It was still pouring rain, and now there was a strong wind. They rushed to the car. Driving down the dark, abandoned roads they reached the observatory in ten minutes. The lights were still on everywhere. Observations were still being made, and the Antipodean was still sitting at the dining table in the guest suite. It was ten-thirty and Max asked if they wanted to go to bed yet — if not, he still had some wine and rum-and-Coke in the kitchen. Ada said that she would have a glass of cola, even if it might not be a good idea for a pregnant woman; but Onno thought alcohol was deadly to harmful bacteria and therefore extremely good for growing embryos. It was as though Max could see the colorful pile of books on pregnancy and childbirth that was of course at Ada's bedside.

Outside, the storm was getting worse and worse and they sat comfortably around the open hearth, in which there was no fire. Onno now made a distinction between "large weather" and "small weather": the weather could be so bad that it fell below zero and became good again. Thunder and lightning, breached dikes, floods — you couldn't say that they were "bad weather"; Max then told them that Dickens gave a dinner for his friends every Christmas Eve, in which a hired tramp had to stand outside in the snowstorm under the window and shout every few minutes, "Brr! How cold it is!" — so that the people inside enjoyed the warmth and the goose even more.

"What a bastard," said Ada.

"Not at all," said Onno. "That's perfectly all right dialectically. It shows that in his way of living, he was a great writer."

"You two have strange ideas of greatness."

"So what is the mark of greatness according to you?"

"Modesty."

"Ada!" cried Onno, grabbing his head in despair. "Anything but that!"

"I mean it. If you ask me, Bach felt very small compared with music."

"But meanwhile he did write one masterpiece after the other. Very modest. Anyway, what is 'music'? Without Bach and the other composers music would not even exist. Or do you think that 'music' is something that is simply floating up in the sky somewhere?"

"Perhaps, yes."

"All women are Platonists," said Onno, shaking his head.

"And what about Max, then, with that telescope here?" asked Ada, turning to him. "Don't you feel small when you look at that enormous universe?"

"I think," said Max cautiously, "that you're confusing two different things. Einstein was also a modest man, you always read, but meanwhile he did tell us how the universe is made. Onno's right: how modest is that, actually? You may say that he didn't brag about it in his everyday life, but it wasn't necessary. But then you are seeing modesty only as a psychological category—"

"And psychology is always uninteresting," interrupted Onno. "Anyway, how modest was Freud? Read the documents and tremble."

"To be honest," said Max, "as a boy I never understood how anyone could feel small compared with the universe. After all, man knows how overwhelmingly large it is, and a few other things besides — and that means he is not small! The fact that man has discovered all this precisely proves his greatness. The amazing thing is rather that this insignificant being can contain the whole universe in the tiny space under his skull — and, what's more, can reflect on it, as we are doing now. That makes him in a certain sense even greater than the universe."

"Yes," said Onno to Ada with a smile. "You should listen to that closely."

The flue of the open hearth was humming like an out-of-tune organ pipe in the storm.

"Of course you can imagine," said Max, pouring another glass, "someone saying that man must feel small compared with his own greatness, since he has it from God."

"But that makes him a masochist," interrupted Onno. "And he's overlooking the fact that God is a product of mankind."

Max studied the deep red color of his wine and was silent. The Ego and His Own. He was occupied with extragalactic research — the signals of cosmic events that had occurred billions of years ago in the young universe; but those paled into insignificance alongside the event that perhaps awaited him, on a small planet in an insignificant solar system, on the periphery of one of the scores of billions of galaxies. But that awareness did not lead him in any sense to something like "a sense of relativity." On the contrary, the birth of a human being was not an insignificant event in the measured immeasurability of the universe but rather an event of metacosmic proportions — even without God. Especially without God.

Floris came in dripping wet, and with disheveled hair.

"We shall have to secure the telescope, Max, otherwise we'll have to hunt for it on the heath tomorrow. It's gale-force ten, and according to the meteorologists in De Bilt, it's going to get worse — they're expecting gusts of wind of nearly a hundred miles an hour. It appears to be the last remnant of a hurricane from the Caribbean that's been roaming the ocean for a couple of months. Can you come and lend a hand? We've already positioned it with its back to the wind."

Onno and the Australian put their coats on too. Ada said that she was going to bed; she had her score of Das Lied von der Erde with her and was going to work on it for a bit.

"Right!" cried Onno when they got outside.

In the howling storm trees were waving and swishing, as if wanting finally to shake themselves loose of their chains.

The rain pelted in their faces, and they bent forward as they walked down the path toward the telescope, where the beams of flashlights were moving about and ten or twenty people were at work. The mirror was slowly turning into the horizontal position. Blocks were being lugged up and clamped to the wheels; someone shouted that the azimuth motor must be turned off; someone else screamed that Floris must now go up top to turn off the elevation motors. The whole procedure went by the book, which provided for such contingencies — and half an hour later people looked with satisfaction at the reflector, pointing immovably at the zenith, like a majestic sacrificial bowl.

Everyone assembled in the laboratory, drenched to the skin, to talk things over and to listen to the director's speech of thanks.

"Look at my brand-new chestnut-brown suedes," said Max, and pointed to his muddy black footwear.

"Serves you right," said Onno.

The caretaker's wife had made hot chocolate, which she poured out of a huge gray enamel kettle into thick white mugs, which gave everyone the hilarious feeling of being back home with Mom and Dad after a well-spent day.

"I'm going to become an astronomer, too," said Onno with pleasure. "There's real human warmth here."

At that moment a girl called: "Is there a Mr. Quist here?"

"Yes?" said Onno in amazement.

"Telephone for you."

"This can't be true," said Onno, getting up.

Max didn't believe it, either. It was nearly midnight — who would want to reach him here at this hour? Perhaps there was something wrong with his father or his mother.

A little later Onno came back. From his face Max could see that there had indeed been bad news.

"Ada's father has had a heart attack. That was her mother. It seems to be fairly serious, and she asked if we can go straight to Leiden. He's been admitted to the Academic Hospital as an emergency case."

"There are no more trains," said Max, and also got up. "Let's go. I'll drive."

They went through the building to the guest suite. Ada was already asleep, with her face on one side, her forefinger in the closed score. While Onno woke her, Max went to his own room to pack his things. He thought of Ada's father, whom he could scarcely remember, felled by a blow to his chest on a stepladder in front of his bookcases. Obviously anything could happen at any moment; everyone lived from day to day in a sort of blind faith that everything would remain as it was, and then suddenly it all changed. He quickly fetched the punch cards for the Computer Institute and went to the lounge with the two bags, where a little while later Ada and Onno also appeared.

"Christ, Ada," Max said, kissing her on the forehead. "What a mess. Has he had heart trouble before?"

"I think he has, but he didn't want to admit it. Men are always so tough, aren't they? Let's get going."

None of them had an overcoat. Outside, Max ran through the storm to his car, which he drove close to the door of the guest suite. Because the top was up, Onno now had to fold himself behind the two seats to a quarter of his size; Ada offered to change places with him, but he wouldn't hear of it. The rain pelted on the cloth top, and with his headlights on high beam, Max turned onto the sandy road.

The wood moved as though made not of plants but of animals; everywhere there were branches that had blown down in the mud, which he had to avoid. Hunched over his steering wheel, occasionally wiping the mist off the windshield with his forearm, Max peered at the road. The path gave way to an asphalt road, on which the cloudburst produced myriads of dancing mice: thick bubbles with feet, a largely absurd polka, since he could register only a fraction of the bubbles. The lights were off in virtually all the houses in the village; on the pavements there were large puddles that the drains could not cope with and which he caused to shoot into front gardens with a sound of sharpening knives. When they passed the restaurant he suddenly had a quick vision of the interior: the waiter and the cook had gone home, the lights were out, but in a fathomless dark abandonment the tables and the chairs and the pots on the wall were still there.

On the provincial road, where no lights were on at this hour, he had to grip the steering wheel tighter to keep control of the car. The asphalt gleamed from the water, but fortunately the car was weighed down by the weight of Onno on the rear axle, and by Ada, who counted for two. It was raining so hard that the wiper had virtually no effect on the curtain of water hitting the front windshield. Immediately correcting for each gust of wind, Max tried to keep the white line in the middle of the road in view, which his headlights changed into cones full of dazzling pearls.

"I'm sorry," he said, glancing at Ada. "I have to drive slowly."

"Look out!" she cried.

Right across the road lay an uprooted tree, which had fallen across the road from the left. He braked but immediately felt that the tires were losing contact with the asphalt. He declutched and swung the wheel; while Ada grabbed his shoulder, he came to a halt with his front wheels in the right-hand shoulder, a few feet from the towering scene of havoc.

"Good God" he said. "That was a close shave. We'll have to go back."

He shifted into reverse and tried to get off the shoulder, but the front wheels had sunk too far.

"We'll have to push, Onno."

He turned the engine off and opened the door, which was immediately almost wrenched out of his hands. He tipped the back of his seat forward to let Onno out.

"Should I help?" asked Ada.

"For God's sake, stay where you are," said Onno.

"And we have to hurry," said Max, shutting the door, "before another car comes along."

In the howling pandemonium they went to the shoulder and in the light of the headlights grabbed the bumper. Now sinking up to his ankles into the mud in his new shoes, Max counted to three — but at the same moment a second thing happened. Out of the din of the storm and the pouring rain a new noise emerged: a dark wheezing, which turned into deep cracking and rustling. Max looked around, up, and then suddenly saw a dark crown coming toward him from the other side of the road, like a giant hand. He grabbed hold of Onno and pulled him to the ground with his own weight. With a thundering crash, the tree hit the road and the car, which absorbed the impact for them.

Although the tumult did not subside, it was as though a total silence had suddenly fallen. The headlights had gone out; branches hung over him. Max groped for Onno.

"Onno!"

"Yes, yes, I'm okay — but Ada!"

They struggled to their feet and looked aghast as they saw the tree trunk lying across the white top of the car, still visible under the bare branches.

"Christ, no. ." said Onno "This isn't true. . Ada!" he screamed.

As quickly as they could, slipping, hurting themselves, they extricated themselves from the tangle and tried to reach the doors by clambering up, but it was impossible.

"Ada!" Onno screamed again.

There was no answer. Everything was twisted, of course. Half lying, Max squeezed his arm through the branches and tried to pull down the car's top but couldn't get a grip anywhere.

"We need help!"

Gasping for breath, he looked around. A hundred yards farther on, in the fields, there was a farmhouse where some lights were on. Just when he was about to go in that direction, there was the light of a flashlight on the other side of the ditch and a voice called:

"God Almighty! That's the second one within ten minutes! Is there anybody there?"

"Hello! Would you please go and get help!"

"The police have already been phoned!"

"We need an ambulance at once!"

The light of the flashlight swung around and moved in leaps and bounds toward the farmhouse.

In despair, using all his strength, Onno tried to force a way through the branches, but it was hopeless: the car was caught as if in a cage.

"Christ Almighty!" he roared. "Ada! Our child!"

Max stiffened. Her child.. For the second time that day, that monstrous thought rose up in him — he tried to suppress it immediately, but it was already there, and now not because of a joke about lightning, but when she was perhaps already really lying dead there under that mountain of wood. He felt as if a shiny black cloth were being laid around him, following all his contours, like a second skin. At the same moment he had to be sick. He turned and vomited up the wild boar. When he stood up, he saw that Onno was leaning over the branches with his face on one arm, sobbing.

A fire engine approached from the direction of Dwingeloo, with its siren sounding and its red revolving lights, followed by a police car with a blue revolving light. A little later a bright searchlight flashed and suddenly men in oilskins were swarming everywhere. Red-and-white tapes were stretched across the road; shortly afterward there was the screech of electric saws, which sliced through the branches like knives through bread.

No one asked Max and Onno anything. Onno looked at what was happening, but at the same time he walked to and fro in a daze, in a loop like a caged tiger. Max helped pull away the branches and wanted to say something to him, but didn't know what; in his mouth he had the bitter taste of vomit. The luggage compartment was dented; the punch cards could probably also be written off. The three revolving lights remained on. The pulsing signals modulated into a cruel pattern, which expressed exactly what he felt. There was still a storm and pouring rain, but it seemed to be abating a little.

As the inside of the car was uncovered, he saw Ada doubled up under the flattened top, which had provided no protection at all — motionless, her face on her knees; the trunk had not landed on her place but right next to her, on his. He looked for no longer than a second — he immediately averted his gaze — but Onno staggered forward and leaned over the hood, at which a policeman grabbed him roughly by the shoulder.

"Please get out of here. Are you enjoying it?"

Obviously, they were being taken for curious locals.

Onno turned around, trembling. "It's my wife."

The policeman let go and took hold of him in a different way, with two hands on his shoulders.

"Come on."

"Is she still alive? Ada! Can you hear me?"

"Come on, sir."

While the fireman carefully pulled away the top and laid blankets over her, an ambulance, with screaming sirens, dazzling headlights, and revolving lights approached at high speed from the opposite direction. Two paramedics jumped out, and one ran to the back to get the stretcher. The other leaped over the branches, crouched down beside Ada, and put a stethoscope in his ears.

"She's pregnant," said Onno.

The paramedic glanced up, took off his stethoscope, and got to his feet.

"She's alive," he said.

Max took a deep breath and put his hands over his eyes. A moment later he looked into Onno's dripping, filthy face and hugged him.

Ada did not regain consciousness even in the ambulance. Max had sat next to the driver, who refused to say what he thought; when he got out at the hospital in Hoogeveen, he saw that Onno's relief too had given way to a new concern. Ada was quickly wheeled inside, and they were taken by a nurse to a washroom, where they could clean up a little. In those light, silent, immaculate surroundings, they were shocked at how they looked in the mirror: clothes torn, drenched through, and covered in mud and green stains from the tree bark, their faces and hands covered in blood and scratches. It looked not as though they had just come from a catastrophic storm but somehow from a different time.

"I hope it's going to be all right," said Onno. "What an absurd mess. The fact that we were in the exact spot where that bloody tree fell. What's the sense of it all?"

Max rinsed his mouth out and didn't answer at once. He realized that Onno was now experiencing for the first time in his own life the absurd mess of existence. The fact that anything could happen at any time was for him as axiomatic as the fact that the weather was good one day and not the next. That's how things were on earth. It was much less the case in the heavens, where much stricter rules applied: the sun always rose, and not sometimes not, or only a day later — which one could not even say in that way — but always exactly at the moment predicted. There was no danger from that direction. But they had nothing to do with life on earth, and perhaps that was why he had made a profession of that inhuman reliability.

"On the other hand," he said, "if she had been sitting in the back, in your place, she wouldn't have survived."

Onno splashed water in his face with two hands — and suddenly he stiffened. He slowly stood up and looked at Max in the mirror wide-eyed.

"Max. ." he said softly, almost whispering. "Ada's father.."

Max's mouth dropped open. "Christ! I didn't give it a moment's thought."

They looked at each other in astonishment.

"That's all we need" said Onno. "What are we going to do now?"

"You have to call."

"Call? Imagine the woman. Her husband has a serious heart attack and has to go into the hospital. The telephone rings and she gets the news that her pregnant daughter has had an accident and is in a coma. She won't survive it."

"What are we to do, then?"

"You've got to go there and tell her carefully. I'm staying here, with Ada, that's for certain."

"And how am I to get there?"

"In a taxi. At my expense."

"It'll cost a couple of hundred guilders. Do we have that much with us?"

"If not, we'll borrow it here."

Max looked at his watch. "It's a quarter past one. We should have been in Leiden about now. It'll be nearly three before I get there. But okay, of course I'll do it."

They went to the waiting room, where they pooled their money and got someone to call for a taxi. The driver of the local firm was already in bed but would be there in about twenty minutes. While they waited, a blond young man in a white coat, who turned out to be the duty doctor, appeared. They couldn't say very much yet. She was still unconscious, but it looked as if she had not broken anything; blood pressure, pulse, and breathing were good. Everything seemed to be okay with the child too.

"Thank God," said Onno.

"We now have to wait for the neurological examination."

"And when will that be done?"

"At once. We've got the neurologist out of bed."

Because the taxi was still not there, Max went to the ward. Ada's head lay on the pillow; her eyes were closed. A drip had been attached to her arm. The curve of her belly under the blanket was like a tidal wave. There was something about the expression on her face that struck him, that seemed familiar to him, that he couldn't place. But a moment later he suddenly realized: it was the expression she had when she played, when she lost herself in the music.

27. Consolation

When the taxi driver saw Max, he said he wouldn't dream of taking him like that.

"You can walk, friend. I just got new seat covers."

Perhaps he thought Max had been in a fight. Only when Max had gotten the local paper from the porter and put it on the backseat was the man prepared to drive him. Max was shocked at his rudeness, but on the other hand he was glad, because now he didn't have to sit next to him out of politeness and make conversation, no doubt about soccer, of which he didn't even know, or want to know, the rules.

Again the rain and the high wind. He still couldn't really take in what had happened. When the car turned onto the highway, he closed his eyes to allow it to sink in: the tree suddenly across the road. . the shoulder. . Ada's head on the pillow, her black hair on the white linen. . the dazzling searchlight in the raging night, the sirens and the revolving lights. . the mud, the branches… he is cycling along the Rapenburg and a woman in a summer dress draws alongside on her bike. She asks where the tram stop to Noordwijk is. Very close, he says, first on the left. Is the tram cheap? It's easiest to go on the bike; it isn't far. But perhaps I'll have a long wait at the bike shed? It'll be okay. It's hot, but he has his raincoat on. It's already twenty five past four. In the Botanical Garden he is struck by the first trees coming into leaf: the top half of their crown is covered by a thick pack of snow, dazzling white in the summer sun. Look! He cries, and stops, but it doesn't seem to interest her; she cycles on to the beach, completely self-absorbed. .

He woke with a start. Through the car window he caught a glimpse of the terrace of the Capitol in Havana — which immediately afterward shrank to become the entrance to the Academic Hospital in Leiden. His clothes were still clammy and damp. It was raining, but the storm had died down, or perhaps there hadn't been a storm here; he paid the bill and went inside without saying goodbye.

The night porter, who surveyed him suspiciously from top to toe, had a message for Mr. and Mrs. Quist — and asked who he was. Once he decided to believe Max's story, he said that Mrs. Brons had gone home ten minutes ago. She was going to wait for her daughter there.

"And Mr. Brons?"

"He died at about twelve-thirty."

Max turned away, looked at him again, turned away again, and looked at him again.

"Would you be kind enough to call the hospital in Hoogeveen for me?"

He realized that the formality of that sentence helped him control himself.

The porter did as he had been asked and handed Max the receiver.

It took a little while before he got Onno on the line.

"Mother?"

"No, it's Max. I'm here in Leiden at the hospital." He hesitated for a moment. "There's worse to come, Onno." And when there was a silence: "Ada's father is dead."

"You can't be serious!"

"It's as if none of this is real."

"My God, I'm going mad. It's unbelievable! The poor guy, is he really dead?"

"It seems it happened at about twelve-thirty, apart from that I don't know anything, either."

"And what about my mother-in-law? How's she coping? Have you already told her what's happened to Ada?"

"I haven't talked to her yet. She waited for us, but now she's at home; I'm going straight there. How is Ada?"

"She's with the neurologist, they're taking X rays."

"I'll be off, then. Take care. Try and get a bit of sleep tonight."

"Yes, they've made up a bed for me here in Ada's room. I'll make sure she's transferred to Amsterdam tomorrow."

"Your mother-in-law will be calling you shortly."

"Thanks a lot, Max. It's fantastic what you've done for me."

"Shut up, you know I'm glad to do it."

Max handed the receiver back to the porter, who hung up.

"Can I make a note of the number of that hospital?" When he'd done that, he asked, "Would you order a taxi for me? I'll wait outside."

"You take care, too." said the porter, picking up the receiver again.

On the terrace Max took a couple of deep breaths. What a night! But now it had hit them, and on other nights other people were the victims, and tonight countless other people were being struck too — there had never been a day or a night or even a moment when something like this was not happening to someone, for as long as humanity had existed. Doom roamed the earth constantly, like a swallow through a swarm of gnats, with sharp twists and turns, its beak wide open.

When he got out of the taxi at "In Praise of Folly," the rain had finally stopped. There was a light on in the shop. Somewhere farther off in the silent town there was the sound of students coming from their club celebrating noisily; all through those hours they had been bawling away in their ravaged, oak-paneled domain. As soon as he rang the bell, Sophia Brons appeared at the back of the cave of books. Her face was taut, but her eyes showed no sign of redness.

When she opened the door and saw him, she seemed to be alarmed for a moment. She looked quickly left and right down the street.

"You look a sight! What's happened? Where are Ada and Onno?"

"We had an accident on the way here, but don't be alarmed, everyone's alive."

"An accident?" she repeated. Her cold, dark eyes looked at him in a way that made him feel immediately guilty. "And her child?"

"All fine. They're in Hoogeveen hospital. I came by taxi. I've just been at the Academic Hospital, and heard the terrible news about your husband. How awful for you."

She looked at his scratches and ruined clothes again.

"Everything comes to an end," she said with a taut mouth. "Come in."

Onno did not know his mother-in-law very well: this was not the kind of woman who needed to be treated with kid gloves and would be devastated by a telephone call. He followed her through the labyrinth of legibility to the back room. Poetry. Technology. Theology. On the low table he saw an opened photo album, and next to it a pair of black reading glasses. Above the brown corduroy sofa hung a large portrait of the writer Multatuli, which he hadn't noticed the last time, in the Romantic, conquering pose of a Bavarian king, a coat with a cape attached over his shoulders like an ermine mantle, focusing on truth with watery eyes.

"A cup of coffee?"

"I'd like nothing better."

While she poured the coffee, he told her what had happened. When he mentioned with concern that Ada was still unconscious, she stopped stirring her cup and said:

"Still? For more than three hours?" She thought. "Fortunately she's still young. I've known patients who were in a coma for days or weeks, without permanent effects."

He looked at her in amazement. "Were you in nursing?"

"Ages ago. In the war."

"Anyway, I don't know what things are like now. I just called Onno from the hospital, and the neurologist was with her. Shall I call Hoogeveen for you? I've got the number."

She pointed to the telephone. "Go ahead."

"Onno knows about your husband," he said as he dialed the number. "He was very shocked, and he said that he would make sure that Ada was transferred to Amsterdam tomorrow." When he got through, Max handed the receiver to Sophia.

"Mrs. Brons here," she said. "Thank you very much — thank you, Onno. I don't know. I'd gone to a lecture on Thoreau and Gandhi. When I got home, he was on the floor in the kitchen, unconscious. — Yes. Yes, don't worry. — So I heard. He's here now. — Yes. — Yes. — Yes. — Yes. — Of course. — Yes. — Oh.—Yes. — Yes. — Yes. — Let me know what happens. — Fine. — Of course. — I'll see you tomorrow."

She put the receiver down.

When she sat down again and said nothing, Max asked: "Well?"

"The X rays are good. No fracture of the base of the skull or anything like that. We'll have to wait. Tomorrow she'll be admitted in Amsterdam, probably at the Wilhelmina Hospital. They'll do an E.E.G. there."

Max nodded. He didn't know what else to say and asked: "How old was your husband?"

"Forty-seven."

"And a fatal heart attack, though he led such a quiet life here among his books."

"No one knows the kind of life a person really leads."

Max nodded. "You could be right about that." He was silent for a moment. "There are also people who are constantly under terrific pressure who live to be a hundred. What were his last words?"

" 'That rain just goes on pelting down.' " With her arms folded, Sophia looked straight ahead for a while, as though she could see him again. "He'd been feeling nervous and anxious all day. He thought it was the weather."

They continued looking at each other. Max wanted to ask if he had had much pain, but that didn't seem appropriate. He bent over the photo album and saw the family at the base of a statue. At the foot of it was a giant-size winged lion; in a burst of high spirits, Ada had laid her head on a step, under a bronze claw, while her father shrank back with feigned alarm. Her mother was looking up at the statue, which was not visible on the photo.

"Venice?" he asked, and looked up.

"Two years ago."

"All three of you are in it. Who took the photo?"

"Someone who happened to be passing by."

He leaned back and looked at the shop through the open dividing door. In fact he wanted to leave, but he had the feeling that it wasn't possible yet.

"What will you do about the bookshop now? Are you going to continue it?"

"I don't want to think about that yet. First we have to get the funeral over with."

Max nodded. "Will you have to cope on your own, or does he have relatives?"

"I have a mother in the old people's home and a brother in Canada, but my husband has two sisters who could help. Anyway, Onno said that he'll involve his family tomorrow morning."

"You can rely on him for that. If I can be of any help to you in the next few days, I am always at your disposal," he said formally, getting up. "Well, Mrs. Brons, I won't keep you any longer."

She looked at him questioningly. "Where were you thinking of going? It's past four. Surely you're not going to take a taxi to Amsterdam?"

"I can go to the observatory. The director lives on the premises — he'll have a bed for me. Otherwise I'll sleep at the caretaker's."

Sophia got up. "What nonsense waking those people up. You can sleep in Ada's room. Why don't you go upstairs now and start by having a shower."

Yes, why not? He'd been frightened of finding a distraught widow, crying despairingly over the body of her husband; but it was as though his death had made her even more steadfast. He, too, hated the idea of having to go straight back into the street. And perhaps she would prefer not to be alone in the house tonight.

"Well.. If I'm not being a trouble to you, I'd like to."

She turned off the lights and, upstairs, pointed out the bathroom to him — a small room with a washbasin, a folded ironing board against the wall, and a tall laundry basket. He would have preferred to take a bath, but there was only a separate square shower compartment with a white plastic curtain. He quickly took off his clothes, which were still not completely dry, threw them in a heap, and stood on the springy, zinc floor of the shower compartment; an attempt to clean it, obviously with some acid or other, had left white corrosion marks in the metal. But the modest jet from the shower was warm and filled him with a blissful feeling of rebirth, as though he hadn't been subjected to enough water today. An egg-shaped piece of pink soap hung from a rope, and with it he was able to finally wash everything away — not only the dirt, but also somehow the closeness of what had happened. When he opened the curtain, a bath towel was lying over the edge of the washbasin, and a folded pair of pajamas.

They were Ada's father's, of course. The legs were too short, but the flannel was soft and pleasant. In Ada's room, at the back of the house, her mother was making up the bed; the window was open. She glanced briefly at him.

"That makes a difference."

He had never been in here. Of course Ada had taken most belongings to Onno's, but her girlhood things had remained. Dolls and stuffed animals on the low bookcase filled with girls' books; small things and knick-knacks, boxes, bottles, on the wall a large poster of a melancholy bloodhound, but also a framed photo of Stravinsky; a bent music stand with a woollen rabbit. Everything looked neat; obviously, the room had been painted not long ago.

They said goodnight and he got into bed. Next to him there was a cord against the wall; the switch near the ceiling was the same kind of parrot's beak as in his own childhood room, at his mother's. It made the same click and immediately the darkness overwhelmed him. Outside there was deep silence. He put his hands under his head and closed his eyes. Had it really been today that he had met them from the station? The crown of the tree came swishing down…

He woke when she slipped in beside him under the blanket. At first he thought he was dreaming, because this was impossible. He wasn't dreaming. Suddenly he felt Sophia's arm around him and her warm body next to him, shaking with sobs. Her hair was loose. Yes, of course this was the impossible, completely unthinkable!

"What is it?" he asked.

"I'm sorry," she sobbed and buried her face in his neck. "Don't send me away. It's because of the way you looked with all those scratches and those ruined clothes. It's exactly how Oswald looked the day that I met him in the war, after a bombing raid.. On the very day that he died. Of course he was an old fogey, but. . And then Ada.. perhaps it's better that he won't have to go through that now. ."

He was alarmed by her words. Might it be fatal after all? In confusion, he in turn put his arm around her, both in fatherly consolation and seeking help, and under a thin rucked-up nightdress he felt her soft back, her full hips. What was happening? His body fitted exactly into the curve of her body, her breasts, her belly, like a musical instrument in its case. Unwittingly, he stroked her large naked buttocks, which were not those of a girl but of a mature woman, in her mid-forties — and as though his hand were seized and dragged down by a whirlpool, it slipped between them and landed in another tropical world of damp, hair, living flesh, that seemed to envelop it suddenly and completely in the darkness.

He began to shiver and kissed her. She pulled down his pajama bottoms and he disappeared into her unaided, as though her opening were everywhere. She kept her tongue out the whole time, right out of her mouth, while a dark growl came from her throat, and in the depths of her belly something seized the head of his penis each time — what was that secret? Her cervix? He thought of her husband for a moment, stiffening on his trolley in the morgue, who must have felt this too when he sired Ada, but he didn't think very much; the snapping soon took him to a climax, as though he were being pumped up. He caught his breath, and with a loud scream the whole scene exploded, and with a second and third and fourth scream he emptied himself into her. Sweating and breathless, he slumped back beside her, and before he had even realized it, she had got out of bed. He was just able to hear the door close.

He hadn't seen her. He groped for the cord of the switch and, dazzled by the light, closed his eyes. What had just happened was impossible! It must have been a hallucination, provoked by all the emotion and exhaustion! He felt his penis: still half erect and soaking wet. Perplexed, he wondered whether he had really slept with the grandmother of his child — in the bed of her daughter, who had just been in an accident, dressed in the pajamas of her husband who had just died. Those last two facts were certain in any case.

How could they look each other in the face tomorrow morning? Who had seduced whom? She had seduced him, of course! For the first time in his life he had been seduced. Perhaps she hadn't been to bed with her husband for years. Shouldn't he get up now, leave a note and go? But how should he start that letter? Dear Sophia? Dear Mrs. Brons? They were equally impossible. No heading at all? And it was as though the thought that he would have to put his damp clothes on again, and walk to the observatory through the Botanical Garden after all, was the final sign for his body to put an end to things for today. He had just enough strength to pull the cord.

He woke at a quarter past nine; the memory of the previous night immediately filled him with frenzied uncertainty. He cracked the top joints of his thumbs. He quickly got out of bed and drew the curtains. It was calm weather; only a few branches that had blown down and fragments of roof tiles recalled what had happened. His clothes were hanging over a chair: everything had been cleaned, dried, and ironed; even his shoes had been polished. In the bathroom Brons's shaving things were still on the washbasin, but he did not touch them. When he entered the room downstairs, Sophia was on the telephone. Her hair was up again; she nodded to him and pointed to the coffee pot, which was on the table.

While he poured himself a cup, he could hear that the conversation was about mourning and the funeral. She had behaved naturally to him; her eyes again had the look of the abbess, as though nothing had happened. If that was the attitude she had chosen, she was making things easy for him.

Or had nothing really happened? Had he dreamed it, perhaps? He sneaked a look at her. Was that the woman who last night had stuck her tongue out so far? Only now did it strike him that she had a good figure, fuller than Ada's, but in good shape everywhere; nowhere were its contours blurred with fat. There was a clear transition from her firm calves into slim ankles.

"That was Dol," she said, putting the receiver down, "Onno's sister. She's taken all the formalities off my hands. Did you sleep well?"

"Very well. And thank you very much for tidying up my things."

Onno had also already called. There had still been no change in Ada's condition; he would be coming to Amsterdam in the ambulance in the course of the morning. She herself would be going there that afternoon.

"Did you say that I'd spent the night here?"

"Yes. You did, didn't you? Would you like a fried egg?"

"Yes please, Mrs. Brons."

When she had disappeared into the kitchen, he thought: the woman's split into two completely separate halves. There was a daytime Sophia and a nighttime Sophia, who had nothing in common — a cool, unfeeling person, and a second one brimming with emotion. He remembered how Ada had sometimes talked about her as a disgusting bitch, but had she really known her mother? It fascinated him — but it was also clear to him that he mustn't make any allusion to what had happened last night.

He thought about everything that he had to do today. Of course he had to call Onno, then he had to go to the observatory: prepare everyone for the news that a week's observation material might have been lost. He had to call Dwingeloo; Floris must contact the police. He had to call his insurance company, and his garage. The car was not a write-off, there was probably nothing wrong with the engine, but he never wanted to see the thing again; they would have to clean it up and sell it. He took out his diary and was going to make a few notes, but the point of his pencil had broken off. While he was sharpening it, the shop doorbell rang.

"Would you go and see who it is?" called Sophia.

He walked to the front of the shop, up little flights of stairs and through the caverns. At the cash register stood a tall, thin man with a short black beard, who stared rather wildly into his eyes.

"Have you got anything on metempsychosis?"

Metempsychosis — that sounded like madness. Max looked around.

"Perhaps in the psychiatry section.. "

"I mean the transmigration of souls," said the man, still staring at him.

It was on the tip of Max's tongue to say that they didn't have anything on migration, but Sophia had already appeared.

"We're closed. We're closed because of a bereavement." To Max she said, "Your egg's ready."

28. The Funeral

On the evening of that day, on his way to Keyzer's, where he had arranged to meet Max at seven o'clock, Onno looked in alarm at the Concertgebouw: he had completely forgotten to phone the orchestra! They were due to give a subscription concert shortly! When he asked the porter at the stage door whether anyone from the administration was there, Marijke came past with her clarinet. When he told her what had happened, the color drained from her face and she clutched the case to her, like a child in need of protection. She would pass on the message and visit Ada the following day.

"You needn't bother," said Onno. "At the moment she's not aware of anything that's happening around her."

"How do you know that? Anyway, I want to do it for myself, too."

He gave her the room number, pressed a kiss on her forehead, and went across the street, to where the restaurant was filled with dining concert-goers.

Max was sitting at a small table against the wall. "What's the news?" he asked immediately.

"Not too good."

Onno had been told by the neurologist that afternoon that Ada's electroencephalogram was fortunately not "flat," as he called it, but did show a "diffuse, seriously slowed pattern."

"I know those kinds of terms from my own subject," nodded Max.

"He said that for the time being they couldn't make any predictions. Only if it continues like this for two or three more weeks may they perhaps be able to call it an irreversible coma."

"And if you've got a flat E.E.G…."

"Then you're a vegetable."

They sat opposite each other in silence.

"But suppose…" Max began hesitantly. "Ada's now in her fifth month. . and if it takes—"

"It doesn't seem to make any difference to the child."

Suddenly Max realized that at the moment he was the only person who could still say what had happened in the Gulf of Mexico. But even if that remained the case, it still wouldn't help him. Even if she had not had an accident, Ada would never have talked about it.

"What then?" he asked cautiously.

"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.

The fact that he did not visit her the following evening, either, but forced himself to get into his car and drive to Amsterdam, was because he could not yet comprehend what he might be getting himself into. Hadn't he gotten himself into enough of a mess already by now? The first time it was Sophia Brons who had taken the initiative, under extraordinary circumstances; in a certain sense it had never happened. But on the second occasion the initiative would be his. That would be a new beginning, and if it was effective, then everything would change. Then there would be a third time too, and a fourth. How much of a secret could it remain? Imagine Onno getting to know about it! Moreover, her daughter might shortly have a child that looked remarkably like her lover; what then? Then it would be a double disaster, and perhaps not entirely devoid of danger. And as a man of science he could not completely exclude the chance of an even further compounded disaster: that Sophia would become pregnant by him.

But there was no stopping it. The memory of the greedy biting and the thrilling circumstances of that night, now a week ago, had destroyed any interest in other women for him. Like someone who had stopped smoking and thought of nothing but cigarettes all day long, he wandered through the observatory, went into the garden, came back, paced up and down his room, went for a coffee, had conversations that he immediately forgot, and when most people had already gone home, he went for a meal at the Indonesian restaurant, where he had often been with Ada. He drank three carafes of sake and at nine-thirty he went to the telephone and dialed the number that he had in his diary under Ada's name.

"Mrs. Brons speaking."

"It's Max Delius. I'm calling about my pencil sharpener."

"It's here on the table."

"Would you mind if I dropped by to pick it up? Or is it too late?"

"It's not all that late."

"Then I'll be right over."

Trembling, he paid the bill and drove to "In Praise of Folly." He parked his car half on the curb and determined not to take any initiative, as was his usual custom; he would see what happened.

Sophia opened the door with the black reading glasses low down on her nose.

"Hello, Max."

"Hello, Mrs. Brons."

He followed her through the bookshop, which gave the appearance of being open for business again. In the living room the television was on, with the sound turned off. In a square, in Rome by the look of it, the police were beating up demonstrators.

"What's going on?"

"Oh, that. I don't know, I wanted to see a Greta Garbo film that's on in a moment. Have a seat — or do you have to go right away?"

While she made him coffee in the kitchen, he turned the sound up and sat down on the sofa. Since Ada's pregnancy, politics had actually passed him by; of course he read in the paper about everything that was happening, and there was plenty, but he read it like he read the advertisements or the economic news: it didn't penetrate the area that he had inhabited almost exclusively since then; and it did not do so now, either. As Sophia came in with the coffee, the opening titles of Anna Karenina appeared.

At home he had a portable set, with an extendable, V-shaped indoor antenna, but it was seldom on; he couldn't remember once having watched television with Ada. But now, in this back room behind a bookshop, in deepest secrecy, that most petit bourgeois of all pleasures suddenly revealed an unknown, exciting side, like an innocent boot to a shoe fetishist.

Sophia sat cross-legged in the small armchair, stirred her coffee, and watched the unfolding drama. They did not speak. He had read the novel about ten years ago, but he didn't have the impression that the film had any more to do with the book than the photo of the disaster with the disaster itself. Palaces, dazzling uniforms. The impenetrable face of Garbo, the despairing sing-song note in her voice. He looked at Sophia now and again out of the corner of his eye, at her beautiful, slim ankles. The function previously performed by the stove, around which the family sat, he reflected, was nowadays fulfilled by the television set. Television was the modern fire. He was going to say that to her, but he had the feeling that he must hold his tongue.

When the whistling and hissing of the fatal locomotive and the lugubrious clouds of steam gave way to the news, Sophia turned off the set and asked if he would like anything more to drink. "A glass of wine perhaps?"

"If I'm not keeping you.."

"I never go to bed that early, but you have to go to Amsterdam."

"I can be there in half an hour. It's quiet on the road at this time."

Was she playing a game — or precisely not? After she had poured him a drink from an opened bottle of Rioja, they talked about Ada. She had been to the hospital again that morning: there was no change in the situation, and the doctors had become noticeably more gloomy. Because she had made no secret of the fact that she was a qualified nurse, they talked to her differently than to just any relation. She was given details of laboratory results, examination of motor functions, eye reflexes. Only weeks afterward could a more or less accurate prognosis be given, but there was still hope and there would continue to be for the time being. In medical literature there was even a case known of a forty-year-old man who had been in a vegetative state for a year and a half but nevertheless woke up and began speaking again, although he was largely paralyzed and completely dependent on other people.

Max nodded. Of course, she was now thinking the same as he was: how things were to go on should Ada not regain consciousness. He wanted to broach the subject, but did not dare. In answer to his question as to how the bookshop was going, Sophia said that it was open in the afternoons, but that it could not continue for very long; when someone came and browsed and wanted to buy a book, she sold it at the price that her husband had written in pencil on the flyleaf. But when someone took a pile of books out of a bag to sell them, she didn't know what to do and sent them away.

There was a silence.

"What was Ada like as a child?" asked Max.

Sophia glanced at her hands.

"Should I tell you? Once, just before Oswald and I had to go somewhere, I had an argument with her. She was about eleven or twelve. She had been spreading a terrible story about me: that I had put the cat in a box used for books and drowned it in the Rapenburg canal — when we didn't have a cat at all. Oswald was allergic to cats. When we got home in the afternoon, we found a note here on the table that said she had run away from home and that she was never coming back. The day before we had pancakes for dinner, and as you know you always make too many pancakes; all the leftover pancakes had disappeared. We didn't think it would be too serious, but when she hadn't come home by dinnertime, we began to get alarmed. We called everybody she knew, and later that evening Oswald went to the police with a photo. Of course we stayed up, and in the middle of the night Oswald couldn't stand it any longer. He was quite beside himself, and he got his bike and went to look for her. Even after he had gone a few streets away I could still hear him calling out her name. But half an hour later I suddenly had a strange feeling — I don't know what it was. I went up to the loft and opened the door of the lumber room. She was lying there asleep, with her coat on. Next to her were the pancakes, in a knotted tea towel."

"And your husband cycled through Leiden for an hour calling out her name?"

"Yes. By the time he got home, she had long since been put to bed. She hadn't even noticed that I'd undressed her."

"And the next day?"

"We didn't talk about it anymore."

There was not a sound outside. Max emptied his glass — and on an impulse he decided no longer to be the first to say anything. He poured another glass for Sophia and himself and looked at his pencil sharpener, which was lying on the table. Fairy Tale. There he was sitting in that back room where he had seen Ada for the first time, and a little later her mother.

Time passed, and silence enclosed them like a warmer and warmer bath. At the edge of his field of vision he could constantly see her figure, with the secret deep in her lap. For a few minutes he glanced at her, and for a second she looked back at him, but without expression. He gave no sign of understanding either; he knew for certain that if he had smiled now, he would have destroyed everything.

After the silence had lasted for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, he was certain that he was going to lose. He had met his match. She would sit there in her chair saying nothing until the following morning.

With his heart pounding, he glanced at his watch and said: "It's getting late. I'll think I'll be going."

She also looked at her watch. "Do you have to be back in Leiden tomorrow morning?"

"I'm afraid so."

"And you've been drinking. If you like you can stay over here."

"Well… if I'm not disturbing you…" Brons's things turned out to have disappeared from the bathroom.

29. Irreversibility

In the weeks that followed, he visited Sophia every few days. Each time, he called up first to announce his arrival, because even making a date seemed too intimate; and every morning he thanked her formally for her hospitality. They talked a little, read a little, or watched television; when it was finally really too late to go to Amsterdam, it was all the same to her if he stayed over. And then each time the door opened in the dark and she crept under the covers with him; after letting herself go completely, she disappeared again without him having seen her. Since that first time she had not spoken again, which was also the sign for him to say nothing more in bed. He had never experienced anything so mysterious, but in some way it answered a deep wish of which he had never been conscious. He had attained the unattainable woman!

No one must know; he must never speak to anyone about it — first and foremost not to her. If he once gave an indication that he knew, it would be over at once. She must remain the two women that she was, the daytime Sophia and the nighttime Sophia — if he were to link the two, a short-circuit would immediately disable the mechanism. He must not even use her first name until she had invited him to. Psychiatrists would find it perverse, he considered — Freud would have found it hilarious — but because her mystery was absolutely complementary to his, like a nut to a bolt, he became completely addicted to the situation — quite apart from her long tongue, and the glowing, subterranean biting. If in other cases his desire for the same women always decreased exponentially, it now seemed to be growing even more intense each time after a month. He no longer looked at other women — which had the incidental advantage of a considerable gain in time.

Onno had already asked him a few times where on earth he had been for the last few weeks — he seldom got any answer when he called the Vossiusstraat — to which Max replied that there were regular evening meetings on the program of the new telescope in Westerbork, which was due to be inaugurated that same year. Onno was quite prepared to believe him; he himself did little else but attend meetings anymore. After Berkeley, Amsterdam, and Berlin — where Rudi Dutschke had meanwhile been shot — the students had now revolted in Paris, too. That immediately had another, more serious dimension, in view of the fact that there it was taking place in a revolutionary tradition; the revolt promptly spread to the workers, who occupied their factories, and suddenly things began to get serious in Europe. L'Imagination au pouvoir! A new epoch was about to begin, and in the Netherlands too the new guard must be ready to take over power. In mid-May, in order to bring himself up-to-date, Onno went to Paris for a few days with some comrades-in-arms, where in the crowded cafes around the occupied Sorbonne he saw various activists he knew from Havana, orating with Cuban authority, the illuminated look of victory in their eyes. But, as he told Max after his return, he didn't make himself known to them in the presence of his Dutch friends: they did not need to know precisely what he had been up to in Cuba in order to be able to use it against him one day.

"Nice profession you're in," said Max.

"You're telling me. Politics are conducted by glorified gangsters, and I'm the meanest gangster of them all. Not a job for gentle-natured, unworldly spirits like you."

But world events were passing Ada by. Max had not seen her again since the night of the accident; he felt a resistance to visiting her, and because he didn't have to feel guilty on her account, he didn't feel guilty anymore. Sophia never inquired whether he had been to the Wilhelmina Hospital yet; but when Onno called up one Sunday morning and asked if he would go with him, Max could not refuse. And an hour later they were walking through the streets of the extensive complex of somber buildings, which dated from the last century. Even outdoors in the windless spring morning there was the smell of Lysol, mixed with that of oranges.

She lay in a remote wing with six other coma patients in a ward painted a dirty yellow. It was visiting time, and silent or whispering relatives were already sitting by every bed; most patients had bandages around their heads. A male nurse was sitting reading at a table, under a monthly calendar with a large photo of the pyramid of Cheops. Ada was lying on a sheepskin; her head, with a catheter in her nose, was turned slightly aside on the pillow. She was breathing peacefully, eyes closed, as though she were asleep — and at the same time one could tell in some way that it wasn't sleep. The expression on her face had changed, but it was difficult to say in what way: there was something eternal about it, as though it were slowly making way for an image of itself. Her arms lay next to her body, the hands motionless. What had unmistakably changed in any case, grown, risen, was the wave under the blanket. She was now in her seventh month, and what was growing there inside her was no image, but a creature of flesh and blood. It was as though she only continued to exist to give birth to that, like a helpless queen bee kept alive by drones.

Max and Onno, standing on either side of the high, tightly tucked bed, looked at each other.

"The statue gives birth to a human being," said Max softly, immediately sensing that he was going too far.

Onno shivered. That expressed exactly what he had been feeling all those weeks. She had been reduced to an oven, which was different in kind to the bread that was rising in it. Would the moment ever come when she opened her eyes? Today again nothing had changed, and a short while ago he had virtually lost hope, but he did not want to admit it to himself; and the problems that probably lay in store for him, he only wanted to think about when it was certain. He had the vague feeling that by assuming this he was in some way bringing the irrevocable closer.

"Everyone is convinced," he said, "that the people in those beds can't hear anything, and yet everyone is sitting whispering."

"So that they won't hear," Max added. "So perhaps they can hear something."

"Do you really think so?"

Max shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know. We're whispering too, aren't we? Why are we here, for that matter? Perhaps deep down we're convinced that those patients here can take in everything but simply can't express it." Onno opened his mouth, but closed it again — whereupon Max said, "Yes, I know about that E.E.G. too, of course."

Marijke had also said something like that, Onno remembered, but of course that was utter nonsense. He was going to counter by saying that in that case the dead also obviously heard everything, because people whispered in rooms where someone had died too; but Ada's presence prevented him — so that perhaps it was not such an absurd notion after all. Moreover, he knew that Max would immediately push his theory to the limit, just as he always pushed everything to the limit, and would also be ready on this occasion to widen the border area between life and death into an expanse of no-man's-land. From what Onno knew of him, with his rather homosexual tendency to symmetry, he would take a postmortem period of nine months — thus immediately explaining the deeper reason for the period of mourning.

Max, for his part, didn't really believe his theory either — but he too was quite sure that he would not dare to whisper in Ada's ear, "Your father is dead, and I am having an affair with your mother." He read the card on the flowers that stood next to the bed:

"From Bruno." He looked at Onno. "An absurd gesture. Waste of money."

"He did it for himself."

"Worse still."

When Onno realized that Max's answer implied that he was sure that Ada would never wake up, he said: "Or perhaps he hoped that she would come to and immediately see his flowers."

There was a silence in the ward. The motionless patients, with the visitors looking at them: the living dead.

"It's like a museum in here," whispered Max.

At the same moment as Onno, he took Ada's hand in his: Onno the one with which she had controlled the strings, Max the one with which she had held the bow. They both felt that the hand, although warm, had become a thing. Here and there rust erupted through the white paint of the bed.

"Let's go," said Onno after a few moments.

They laid the hands back in place, Onno pressed a kiss on Ada's forehead, and they went to the door. As Max put his hand out toward the handle, it moved downward and a doctor in a white, open jacket appeared, letting Sophia through. They stared at each other in surprise.

"Good heavens," said Onno. "Hello, Mother."

"Hello, Onno. Hello, Max."

"Hello, Mrs. Brons." Max shook hands with her, knowing for sure that no one could tell anything by looking at either of them.

The doctor, a small, balding man, was wearing a pair of glasses with double lenses, the front pair of which was turned up, so that he seemed to be looking at right angles into the sky. After Onno had introduced him as Ada's neurologist, Dr. Stevens, they returned to the bed.

Max had a strange feeling. Suddenly all four of them, or in fact all five of them, were together. But who were they? Onno simply thought he was in the company of his friend, his mother-in-law, and the mother of his child. But at the same time he was in the company of the mistress of his friend, who himself was perhaps the father of the child that his wife was expecting and who could therefore no longer be rightfully called his friend, and nor could his wife be called his wife. Sophia knew a little more than Onno, but not everything, as Max himself did.

Sophia ran her hand through Ada's hair and then loosened the sheet a little at the foot end.

"She'll get club feet like that," she said, without looking at Stevens. And then with an impassive face, "The news is not good, Onno."

Onno looked at the neurologist in alarm.

"Well…" said the latter, glancing at Max.

"Go ahead, I have no secrets from my friend."

"We've just been talking about it. The E.E.G. has deteriorated seriously in the last few days, and there are other indications that you must be prepared for the fact that your wife is in all probability in an irreversible coma."

Onno stared at him, then glanced at Ada and left the ward. Max hesitated, but then followed him into the corridor, where Onno was staring out of the window across the bleached roadways of the hospital site.

"I knew it," he said. "I knew all along. We all knew. What in heaven's name are we going to do now?"

In his eyes Max saw complete, unbearable despair — which at the same instant seem to leap across to him, like a summons, a demand!

When Onno phoned his youngest sister that same afternoon to give her the bad news, she told him that members of the family had been telephoning and talking things over for days, discussing what was to happen if Ada were to remain in a vegetative state. That immediately irritated him beyond measure: he would decide for himself. But on the other hand the solution must come from that direction; he understood that too. "Family is forever," he was in the habit of saying — and when Dol suggested organizing a family council, he agreed. In the evening she called back with the message that their father wanted to invite the vicar along too, to which Onno replied that in that case he wanted it called off.

Of course everything had been prearranged by the clan. It would only seem to be a consultation; it was clear to him at once how it would turn out. In the immediate family there were only two couples with small children: that of Diederic's oldest son, Hans, and that of Trees's oldest daughter, Paula. He had never been very interested in those secondary branches; he occasionally saw their offspring at parties, but they had always grown and changed so much that he couldn't remember who was who, and he didn't really care.

His nephew Hans, at present first secretary in the Copenhagen embassy, with whom he had never exchanged more than a few words, was on the threshold of a promising career in the diplomatic service; partly by virtue of being a Quist, he was predestined for ambassadorial posts in the most awful countries, possibly eventually achieving the highest state of diplomatic bliss: London. He was married to a banker's daughter from Breda, whose father had the notion of calling her Hadewych. His niece Paula, whom he didn't really know either, had chosen a freight-shipping magnate from Rotterdam, Jan-Kees, who had brought three children from a previous marriage: a clumsy, jovial man approaching forty, who had a loud voice and smoked cigars.

Two days later a heavyweight delegation had assembled at his parents' house in The Hague. With the light behind him, next to the lectern with the Authorized Version of the Bible on it, old Quist sat in his winged armchair and surveyed his children and grandchildren. Women were in the majority. Diederic and his Antonia were not there — they were paying an official visit to Indonesia — but their Copenhagen Hans and his Hadewych were; since Hans had to visit the Foreign Office anyway, he had taken the opportunity. As Onno had expected, Paula and Jan-Kees had also turned up. Like Hadewych, Paula was Ada's age, perhaps a little older, and expecting her second child. Only Sophia did not belong to the immediate family circle. After Coba had served tea and gingersnaps and had left the room, Onno assumed that his father would open the meeting, like the chairman of the cabinet — but it was his mother who said:

"The poor child. I didn't sleep a wink last night. Is there really no hope, Onno?"

He shrugged. "Nothing seems to be a hundred percent certain in medicine, but according to the doctors we must assume that things will stay as they are. You can ask Karel."

"I phoned the Wilhelmina Hospital yesterday," said his brother-in-law the brain surgeon. "I'm afraid that's how it is. And perhaps," he said, with a quick glance at Onno, "this may be the lesser evil. A protracted coma like this would be bound to have dreadful consequences, such as complete loss of memory or complete change of character."

Complete loss of memory. Complete change of character. The words sank into Onno like bullets. No one had said that to him before — not Karel and not the doctors in the hospital; obviously everyone had been hoping recently that she would not wake up.

"It's dreadful for you, too," said Mrs. Quist to Sophia. "First the death of your husband and now this dreadful fate befalling your only child."

Onno looked at his mother-in-law. Since he had once turned up at the ward and had seen her filing Ada's nails, which were no longer bitten, he had softened his harsh judgment of her. It was obvious that she felt ill at ease in this company, but she sat up straight and held her ground.

"I've always known that life is a bit like the weather. It can change completely at any moment."

After these words, which did not testify immediately to Christian sentiments, there was a moment's silence. From the distance, where there was roadwork going on, came the sound of jackhammers. Onno hoped there wouldn't be some soothing quotation from the Heidelberg catechism; fortunately, everyone turned out to have enough of an instinct to avoid this. Anyway, he reflected, it applied mainly to weather conditions in the Netherlands and not those in the Sahara; but he kept that to himself.

"Things are as they are," he said — with the feeling that this tautology contained the ultimate wisdom. "Perhaps we shouldn't talk about our emotions this afternoon but about the question of what we are to do next. If everything goes well, our child will be born in two months, in July. And according to the people who should know, there's no reason to suppose that it won't go well, as far as that's concerned. But after that?"

"Of course," said Trees, his eldest sister, adjusting her silk scarf, "no one expects you to start washing diapers."

Onno heard the unmistakable silent addition". . while you're still in diapers yourself — but he let that pass, not only because this was not the moment to get prickly, but also because he didn't entirely disagree. He would put the safety pins not just through the diaper but also through the baby, be lost in thought and let it fall off the chest of drawers, pick up the telephone and meanwhile let it drown in the bathtub.

"Of course not," said her husband. "That's women's work. These days you hear different opinions, but the fact is that women have children and men don't. They only have it on hearsay. So let's keep it simple. Onno's child is due shortly, he can't look after it himself, so who is going to look after it?"

In saying this, Coen had reduced things to their essentials — probably he had lots more to do this afternoon. With raised eyebrows, the public prosecutor looked around the circle, so the first one to raise a finger would be assigned the child by right, and the matter would be settled; they would go on discussing the weather, be given another cup of tea by Coba, and then they would simply head off home.

"We haven't got any children," said Dol, "and I'd like nothing better than to take on yours, Onno. I'm almost forty, so it would still be possible. We've had a long talk about it, but we finally think that it's better for the baby to have younger foster parents. Isn't that right, Karel?"

The surgeon sat with the tips of his outspread fingers touching; he took them apart for a moment and allowed them to return to the original position. That gesture made him look more than ever like Count Frankenstein.

"Of course it would be best to be brought up in a family with other young children."

Onno nodded and looked at Sophia. "It seems right to me."

"It must go where it has most chance of developing its full potential," said Sophia.

That sounded fairly obvious, but Onno also heard a distant echo of Solomon's judgment "Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other." He looked at the two couples, Hans and Hadewych and Paula and Jan-Kees — but first Margo spoke, the wife of his brother Menno, the professor, who had been prevented from coming himself because he had to account for his actions at a student meeting. As always her eyelids were swollen and red-rimmed, as though she had been crying, but actually she was good-humored.

"Ours are already in high school, and to tell you the truth, I can't bear the thought of having to wash diapers again. And from what I know of Onno, he wouldn't want his child to grow up in Groningen anyway. Isn't that so? To you that would be the depths of the provinces, and it would also be too far away for you."

"No one has to apologize for anything at all here," said Onno. "I'm not asking anyone for anything."

"Right," said Jan-Kees. "Then we'll offer it to you." He put his cigar in the ashtray, stretched his legs, crossed his legs, and put his hands at the back of his neck. "I've already got a house full of children, so yours won't make any difference. We live in a place in the country near Rotterdam, with quite a nice garden because I've got a transshipment company that makes a bundle. I may be right-wing, but I look after my workers, and anyone who doesn't play ball gets the boot. We will bring up your child completely in your spirit, you can leave that to me, because before I belonged to high society, I was a Socialist myself. And it won't cost you a penny. Well? Have we got a deal or haven't we? Your turn."

This was business Rotterdam-style. There was a slightly embarrassed silence, but Onno liked what he heard. Of course Jan-Kees was being provocative, maybe out of embarrassment; he was pretending to be what he ultimately was; but the fact that he was pretending to be like that meant that at the same time he was not.

"You're being terribly tactful again," said Paula, smiling apologetically at Onno.

"Yes, don't you think?" said Jan-Kees.

"Very," said Coen, his father-in-law.

"But we mean it, Uncle Onno. We'd like to do it," said Paula.

The fact that his child would grow up in a reactionary environment was no problem for Onno — the same thing had happened to him; many of his progressive friends also came from more or less well-to-do circles. But Jan-Kees was of course a vulgar money-earner, devoid of any cultural interest; he also had something unmistakably animal about him, with his pointed teeth and his heavy, dark beard, which came bursting out of his face. On the other hand his Paula made a sweet, defenseless impression, sitting there with her fat tummy in her ankle-length black, gold-embroidered Afghan tent dress. Physically, she wasn't anything like her formidable mother Trees, but she was probably the boss at home. There had to be something of a lion-tamer in her.

"We're also prepared to help you," said Hadewych.

The second bid was on the table.

"Not all at once!" laughed Margo, dipping her gingersnap in her tea. She immediately put her hand to her mouth and looked around in alarm. "I'm sorry," she said.

Perhaps Hadewych had been supernaturally predetermined by her name, perhaps she had modeled herself on it, because in any case she did indeed look like a medieval mystic. Her face had the dark complexion that the Spanish troops had left behind in Brabant four hundred years ago, with two large brown eyes, which seem to shine with ecstatic illumination.

"We haven't got a villa in Kralingen," said Hans, "nor have we got a garden with a swimming pool, but we do have a comfortable flat in Copenhagen. That is, for as long as it lasts. Of course, I don't know what our next post will be. I can imagine that being a problem for you. It will always be farther away from Amsterdam than Groningen."

He was the opposite of Jan-Kees in everything. He had satin-soft blond hair combed to the side and light blue eyes, was twenty-six or twenty-seven and already fitted out from top to toe in the uniform of the foreign service: in a suit of the correct shade of gray, not too dark but most of all not too light, a blue striped shirt, a dark blue tie with modest white polka dots, and black brogues. But he made a pleasant, intelligent, albeit rather wan impression— and he had immediately indicated the fundamental problem: his nomadic existence.

Lost in thought, Onno looked around the circle. Trees turned and looked at Coen, who was moving his left wrist very slowly out from under his shirt and looking down without moving his head to see what time it was. His mother sighed deeply and with a slight shaking of the head looked at Sophia, who, impassive as ever, was moving her forefinger back and forth through a loop of her coral necklace. The two couples, who had made their offers, seem to be avoiding each other's eyes, like people applying for the same job.

Suddenly Onno gave a start. "I don't have to decide now, I hope?"

Immediately everyone started talking at once.

"No question of that."

"Just imagine."

"Of course not."

"The very idea!"

"Just think about it calmly," said Dol. "You've got at least two months."

"Basically, yes." Karel nodded.

Finding himself suddenly dependent on the good offices of his family, Onno had difficulty in finding words of gratitude. He felt particularly weighed down by the awkward position of rivalry in which the families of Hans and Jan-Kees had placed themselves willingly for his sake. Just imagine if he had had no family, like Max — what would he have done then?

"I've often behaved badly to you all," he forced himself to say. "I apologize for that."

He meant it, and at the same it disgusted him to hear himself talking like that. Heads were shaken and dismissive gestures made; but his mother's face began glowing, and to set the seal on Onno's genuflection his father said:

"Right. Let us pray."

There was silence, cigars were put away, heads were bent, hands folded. Even Onno caught himself inclining his upper body somewhat. Only Sophia did not change her attitude; but she stopped playing with her necklace. In the silence Coba opened the door to come in and pour some more tea; she paled, and quickly closed it again.

With eyes closed, Quist said:

"Lord God, Heavenly Father, Thou seest us gathered here together in Thy sight in our wretchedness. This life — which is nothing more than a constant death — has become even darker to us because of Thy unfathomable decision on Ada's fate. But we know that Thou can do all things and that none of Thy thoughts can be cut off. Give us Thy blessing and lighten our hearts. Pleading for Thy fathomless mercy, we pray Thee, Almighty and Eternal God, to give strength and wisdom to our prodigal son, who has been found again. Amen."

30. The Scaffold

Max knew about the meeting and waited restlessly for the report. He would have preferred to contact Onno or Sophia immediately, but it didn't seem wise to show too much curiosity. The following day Onno phoned him in Leiden and announced that he would be coming that evening.

Whereas Onno usually sank immediately into the green armchair, he paced constantly to and fro in Max's room, telling him how things had gone, and that he had finally abased himself, humiliated himself, for which he had been immediately rewarded by being commended to God.

"What kind of dishonorable, slavish religion is that? How was that seedy character from Nazareth ever able to defeat proud Jupiter?"

"But those dishonorable Christians have offered to take your child."

"Do you mean that wouldn't have happened among the heathen Romans? That has nothing to do with religion — it's tribal. You know nothing about it, because you have no family, but it even happens in the animal kingdom. It's blood ties."

"No, I have no family," said Max, looking at him. "I know about it to the extent that I was once also taken in by Christians, though I did not belong to their tribe."

As he said this, he realized that this would also perhaps apply to Ada's child in turn, if it were not of Onno's tribe. When Onno returned his glance, he realized that he had made a blunder.

"Right," he said with a generous gesture. "Unselfish love of one's fellow men exists, let's leave it at that. It's just that when I woke up this morning, I still didn't know what to do. How in heaven's name do I choose? Each option is as bad as the other. One option is worse than the other, and the other is worse than the first. According to narrow-minded spirits, that's logically impossible, but that impossibility is true in this case."

"So why don't you say that one is better than the other and the other better than the first?"

"No, because neither of them are good. At least not good enough. Take Jan-Kees and his Paula. They live in Rotterdam, in a huge house, where I can go every Wednesday afternoon to pick my child up and take it to the zoo. In a way I like them, but they're not my type, or Ada's; I don't want our child brought up there. Hans and Hadewych are better in that respect, but they can be transferred from Denmark to Zambia at any moment, and then from Zambia to Brazil, and then from Brazil to the Philippines, with our child being dragged from one international school to the other and having to say goodbye to its friends every four years. On the other hand, of course, it would see a bit of the world and learn lots of languages, but I would be bound to become a stranger to it: a kind of uncle in faraway Holland. It would only be here for a few weeks in the summer vacation — I don't care for that, either. Now, if Jan-Kees had been in the foreign service and Hans and Hadewych lived in Kralingen, I'd know what to do; but life doesn't seem to be as benevolent as that. So what am I to do now? There's no other option. What would you do if you were me?"

He sat down and Max got up. With his hands in his pockets, he went over to the window and looked out into the dark evening without seeing anything. He knew that the back of his head and his back were transmitting the message that he was thinking calmly, but his heart was pounding and he felt torn. What would he do if he were Onno? Perhaps he was Onno — that is, Onno himself did not know who he might be. How long must it go on like this? Wasn't it time to cut through this knot of lies and deceit once and for all? Shouldn't he turn around, now at this moment, and finally say, "Onno, the child that Ada is expecting may be mine. ." — the words that he had once wanted to write to him, had written but not sent. The thought that he could not do it without Ada's knowledge no longer applied. Nothing happened without Ada's knowledge anymore, since everything happened without her knowledge. It was just that he couldn't bring himself to do it anymore; he had let things go too far. And yet he couldn't simply wait and see and trust that everything would come right. Something had to happen!

Suddenly he made out his reflection in the dark glass. He straightened his tie and ran his hands through his hair, and was reminded of an evening when he had gone to the theater with Onno, to see Oedipus the King; during the intermission, as they were drinking a cup of watery coffee in the foyer, Onno had asked, "Are you always looking in the mirror, you vain sod?" — to which he had replied, "Yes, I always look in all mirrors: in order to calibrate them."

He turned around, put his hands back in his pockets, and sat down on the windowsill.

"You could employ a housekeeper, a full-time help."

"Me have my child brought up by a housekeeper? And then find myself probably lumbered for twenty years with an unfortunate woman who sits in the kitchen crying every evening? I wouldn't dream of it. Anyway, how much do you think that would cost? As you know, as a result of my noble character I devote myself solely to scholarship and the public good, so I earn virtually nothing; I live on a small allowance from my inheritance. But anyway, I could do something about that. For example, I could go out to work, although it goes against the grain. Teaching third-year students the alphabet. I could get a job at some university right away, maybe even in Holland."

"But it needn't be longer than the first five or six years, need it? After that it could go to a good boarding school."

"A good boarding school! Is my child really to be thrust from security into insecurity at the age of six so that for the rest of its life the whole world will be insecure? The English method? Is that really what you'd do in my place?"

Max rubbed his face with both hands.

"No," he said.

"Of course," said Sophia, when Max phoned the following afternoon and asked if it would be okay if he dropped in for coffee after dinner. "You can have dinner here if you like."

That was new.

"Are you sure I'm not disturbing you?" As he heard himself saying that last word, he had the feeling that he was taking things too far, but that turned out not to be the case.

"You know how it is yourself. If there's food for one, there's food for two, and if there's food for two, there's food for three."

"That's true. If there's food for a hundred, there's also food for a hundred and ten. It's hard to understand why there's still hunger in the world."

He took a bottle of Chianti with him and, seated opposite each other at the kitchen table, they tucked into their steaks. While he listened to her view of The Hague family council, he was again seized by the excitement that the situation always aroused in him: an audience with the unattainable Mother Superior, the bride of Christ, soon about to change in the darkness into voluptuous, vociferous Circe.

He had repeatedly asked himself how the transition took place. He tried to imagine what was going on inside her: she hung her clothes over a chair, washed, got into bed, and turned out the light. Was that the moment? Was it the falling darkness that changed her from the one into the other? Or was there no moment of transition at all — was it simply a malicious game, the effect of which she had once discovered with a certain kind of man, like Brons and himself? But what did he have in common with Brons? Well, perhaps susceptibility to this game, but there ought to be a few other shared characteristics — and there were not. With Brons, of course, it had not happened like this at all; it only happened like this with him, and it wasn't a game.

He was convinced that in some way her nocturnal existence really didn't exist for her during the day, just as one couldn't remember one's dreams in the daytime. He was her dream and so he must remain. If he were to say to her during the day that they had had another exciting night, then perhaps she might really not know what he was talking about and throw him out with his weird talk. Her go to bed with him, her daughter's ex-boyfriend— where did he get that idea from? He should act out that kind of male fantasy with the whores!

He listened to her and nodded, wiped his mouth, took a sip of wine, and looked from her moving mouth to her eyes and from her eyes to her moving mouth. He was listening more to the timbre of her voice than to what she was saying — because he already knew that from Onno; for the first time he heard something of a sob in it, a despairing undertone, which might have nothing to do with emotion but only with the structure of her vocal chords. She told him that after the meeting was over she had taken the train with Onno. Between The Hague and Leiden she had said to him that of course she could also take care of the child.

"I said that's the traditional role of the grandmother, after all. If the parents have to go out, a grandmother is called to come and baby-sit."

Onno had said nothing to him about that conversation. He thought of his own mother for a moment, who might have been the other grandmother of Ada's child — the union of life and death.

"And how did Onno react?"

"He was noncommittal, but I could see that he didn't think it was an ideal solution, and it isn't. I'm nearly forty-five, so you can work it out: by the time the child is fifteen, I'll be sixty. It might be possible, but despite all his progressive ideas, Onno suddenly becomes very old-fashioned about that: he believes that there should be a man in the family. Apart from that, I get the feeling he doesn't like me very much. Nevertheless, he'll have to decide quickly."

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.

"You in Drenthe? Max! A bon viveur like you stuck out in the fenlands? You're not going to tell me that you've gotten married in the meantime, without letting me know?"

"When I get married, you'll be a witness," he said, reflecting that he might even be having a child without letting her know. "No, I'm sacrificing myself for science. It's a very special telescope."

"I can still see you sitting in your room with your celestial map. 'I'm going to lay bare the secret of the universe,' you said at the table once."

"Did I?" He smiled affectionately. "They put that kind of thing out of your head at the university. The first thing they destroy there is the impulse that made you want to study a particular subject. The really great geniuses, like Einstein, are all amateurs — and not only in the natural sciences."

"It's better to be happy than a great genius."

"Perhaps. But the annoying thing is just that Einstein was probably happy as well."

"And you?"

"It would be nicely symmetrical if I were both not a genius and unhappy, wouldn't it?"

She slowly shook her head. "You haven't changed at all, do you know that? Who on earth gives an answer like that?"

"You're right."

He thought it over. Of course it was nonsense to say that he was happy, but did that mean that he was not? Logically perhaps, but psychologically? For the last few months he had probably been really unhappy, or at least hopelessly caught in the trap that he himself had built. Happy, unhappy.. those were not the terms in which he was used to thinking about himself: that was more something for girls, to use Onno's expression. But from the moment that he had made his decision tonight, though everything had remained the same — ruined for good, that is — it had also suddenly changed, turned on its head to become its opposite, like when a marathon runner derives strength and perhaps even something akin to pleasure from his deathly exhaustion. He may even have become a marathon runner because he is addicted to the pleasure of exhaustion.

"God knows, yes, I suppose I'm happy."

His foster mother drew back her hands and looked down. "That bloody war," she said.

The remark astonished him, but he did not react to it. He took hold of her hands in turn.

She looked at him. "We haven't seen each other for so long, Max. . Why have you suddenly come this evening of all evenings?"

"Because I've made an important decision tonight, Mother Tonia, which may determine the rest of my life. But you mustn't ask me what it is, because it may not happen at all. When I'm sure, of course I'll let you know. I don't know… I suddenly wanted to see you again. Of course I should have done it long ago, I've failed you, but—"

"Don't say any more."

He was silent: At the next table there was a chessboard with an unfinished game on it. Doubtless it would be continued the following morning by two old men, who were now lying in their beds thinking about their next move, leading to a devastating checkmate with the knight and the queen, who would transmit their lines of force across 666 squares to the opposing king like deadly rays. The man in the wheelchair did not move; he had bent his head and was looking at his white hands, folded in his lap. In some ways he also resembled a castled king, waiting to be checkmated.

In the doorway, under the crucifix that was also hanging in here, a young woman appeared and said that it was the children's bedtime. She was tall and slim, in her late twenties; two blue eyes looked at Max from beneath thick, dark-blond eyebrows — and at the same moment he realized that he could take her into the woods across the road later if he wanted. He also saw that she immediately saw that he knew that — but he didn't want to. That was over. As if he had known her for years, he gave her something like a wink with both eyes by way of apology. She blushed a little and went over to the wheelchair.

"Are you coming, Mr. Blits? Time for beddy-bye."

Max and Mother Tonia got up.

"Come with me to my room for a moment," she said. "I wanted to show you something, but I couldn't find it immediately."

As they passed the wheelchair and Max exchanged another melancholy look with the nurse, Mr. Blits fixed him with his one eye and said: "Swine!"

"Ho, ho, Mr. Blits, what's this? Are we going to get silly?"

"Mr. Blits is quite right," laughed Max. "I'm a bad sort."

They took the elevator, and as he entered the small apartment he had a shock. He knew everything from their house in Amsterdam, and later the one in Santpoort, but here it had been reduced to its essence, like a concentrated extract. Immediately on the right was a kitchen the size of a tablecloth, leading to a tiny living room, which was linked to an equaly modest bedroom by a curving hallway.

On the sofa covered with that unforgettably hard, stiff material and dating from the 1920s or 1930s, he had read his first book on astronomy, a translation of Jeans's The Mysterious Universe; two vague pieces of material lay over the threadbare arms. Above it hung the reproduction of Brueghel's Fall of Icarus, every detail of which had penetrated his very soul: the immense space of land and sea, the plowing farmer, whose red shirt had now faded to a gentle pink, the shepherd leaning on his crook as though nothing were happening, with his back to the event on which everything hinged and which was taking place like a futile incident: an insignificant leg barely protruding from the waves. On the low table in front of the sofa was the cut-glass bonbonniere, which he had never thought of since, but which was more familiar to him than most of what he had at home; in the small bookcase were the familiar spines. Everyman's Encyclopedia.

A fairy-tale feeling came over him, like an archaeologist who has suddenly uncovered a classical site: suddenly all those antique things were gathered together, in these few square feet in Bloemendaal. There were things in his life that were still more ancient: from the plundered royal tomb of his parents' house — which he could only vaguely remember and which perhaps also still existed somewhere in the house of the thieves who had followed in the footsteps of the murderers, or in those of their widows or their children; but those would never come to light.

On the television set there were two framed photographs: one of his foster father and one of himself. For all those years, during which he had made no contact, his portrait had stood there and Mother Tonia had looked at it? Hondius, in waistcoat and watch chain, looked at him sternly. Why didn't you come, Max? He turned away in embarrassment. His foster mother, down on one knee in the bedroom, was looking for something in a cardboard box, which she had pulled out from under her bed.

Against the wall he saw the mahogany chest with the two opening doors, the symmetrical grain of which still formed the frightening head of a gigantic bat. On it, next to a sewing basket, was another head, of smooth wood, with no face, like in a De Chirico painting. It was clearly not intended for his eyes, since she obviously put her wig on it at night; perhaps it used to be in a box, because he had never seen it before. But who did she have to hide anything from here? Above the door, Christ on the cross again, dressed in nothing but a diaper.

"Yes, I've got it," she said. Supporting herself on the edge of the bed, she struggled to her feet and brought him a large, bent, dog-eared photograph, torn here and there around the edges. "Is this familiar?"

"It's them!" he exclaimed.

There they were, arm in arm: his father and mother. Incredulous, open-mouthed, he looked at the couple. The yellowed black-and-white photo, more a formal portrait, must have been taken before he was born, by a professional photographer, perhaps on their wedding day in 1926. In a tailor-made suit of chiseled perfection, his father was looking into the lens, now replaced by his son's eyes, which immediately recognized his own; he had not put down the cigarette in his right hand. On his left arm his wife, age eighteen, sixteen years younger than himself, close to him, a hand on her hip, the dark hat on her head, and beneath it two indescribable eyes, the color of which he did not see and which he did not remember, combined with his own nose and mouth. He looked up and put his finger on the photograph.

"It's them," he said again, not yet recovered from his surprise. "This is the first time I've seen a photo of them."

"I suspected as much. You're like both of them."

The thought that his child would be as like him as he was like his parents entered his mind only momentarily.

"How did you come by this?"

"I found it among my husband's papers, when I had to clear up before I moved here. I saw at once that it couldn't have anything to do with his family; they were not such worldly people. That photo must have been among the things that we were sent after your father's death."

"Why did your husband never show it to me?"

"I don't know. Perhaps he didn't want to confront you with what had happened and was going to give it to you later, which he was never able to do. ."

She fell silent. Did she perhaps mean that Hondius had meant to give him the photograph on his deathbed? Max did not take his eyes off the photograph.

"May I have it?"

"Of course."

It was a mystery to him. So this photograph had come from his father's cell, which meant that it was one of the few things he had taken with him when he was arrested — why? He had driven that woman there on his left arm to her death, which had brought him in front of the firing squad, him, the Mortal Ego. So why should he have a photo of someone who didn't exist and hence could not die? Did that mean she did still exist for him? So had she died after all? How explicable was a human being? How explicable was he himself?

31. The Proposal

The following morning Max woke up in his own bed with the memory of something glittering and glowing. He kept his eyes closed for a moment and saw that it was Mother Tonia's silver scalp, which was hidden by her wig— and for a moment the boundless halls of his dream of that night, with their corridors and chambers, their momentous messages and dizzying vistas, opened up again and then immediately closed forever, as if the country of a departing traveler were not only to disappear below the horizon but to cease to exist. .

He opened his eyes. Everything was in its place in the soft light that shone through the orange curtains. Nothing had changed, and at the same time everything had changed: somehow it had lost its permanence, which allowed it to be the same tomorrow as today and the same the day after tomorrow as tomorrow. It was as though he no longer lived here, as though his soul had already departed. Ten o'clock. Because it was Saturday he had not set his alarm; he did not have to go to Leiden. He got out of bed, opened the curtains, and dialed Sophia's number. She was on the point of leaving for Amsterdam, to go to the hospital.

"I've got my coat on."

"Is Onno coming too?"

"I think so. Why?"

"I have to speak to you for a moment, but without Onno. It's important."

"Has something happened? You disappeared so suddenly yesterday."

"Yes, something has happened, but I can't tell you over the telephone."

"Where shall we meet?"

The obvious thing for him to do would have been to invite her to his flat, ten minutes' walk from the Wilhelmina Hospital, but he had the feeling that that would be crossing a forbidden boundary.

"How about the station buffet? That may be easiest for you."

"But I can't possibly say exactly what time I'll be there."

"I understand. Don't hurry, I'll be there from one o'clock onward. We can have a bite to eat."

"See you this afternoon, then."

On his desk lay the photograph of his parents. He looked at it for a while and decided to have it framed later. He ran a bath and in the hot water tried to think about the future, but there was not much point until he had spoken to Sophia. It was not impossible that she would look at him in astonishment and ask him if he had taken leave of his senses; that would probably mean an immediate end to their secret relationship. But perhaps things might be different, and in that case he must take immediate steps to ensure his appointment in Westerbork and his living accommodations. Although. . ultimately everything depended on Onno. He must decide. It concerned his wife and what was at least officially his child; he was under pressure from his family, and there was some doubt whether he could come to terms with a scheme that he might be inclined to class as surrealistic. Max was aware that he must rely on the very friendship he had betrayed.

At about twelve-thirty, with the photo in a folded newspaper, he went downstairs, took the morning paper out of the mailbox, and walked in the direction of the Central Station. In the window of a photographer's on the Leidsestraat was a shot of a car crash from the 1920s: a yellowed little snap of two cars that, absurdly, had collided in what was still a virtually car-free world, enlarged by technical wizardry into a large, shiny photograph that looked as though it had been taken yesterday. In the shop a girl offered to transform his damaged photo in the same way; but what mattered to him was not only what was depicted but the object itself, that original paper, that substance, which had been in the possession of his father and mother. There must be traces of molecules from their hands on it.

He walked down the Damrak to the Central Station, which blocked off the harbor front like a dam. It was as if the town council of Venice had hit on the idea of building a station on the Molo, behind the two pillars on the Piazzetta, which would have obscured the view of the lagoon. Amsterdam, he thought, might be the Venice of the North, but Venice was fortunately not the Amsterdam of the South. Ever since he'd had a car, he'd only been in the station once: when he'd made his trip to Poland. Just as he always used to, he glanced to the left before going into the station concourse: at the ramp for goods traffic, along which the 110,000 Jews had been driven to the goods wagons.

The gigantic, semicircular roof of steel girders — so constructed in order to absorb the smoke and steam of locomotives — had always felt like the inside of a Zeppelin, but now it reminded him of the ribs of a whale that had swallowed him up. He felt something akin to stage fright. In the buffet, with its dark paneling and carving and murals, he sat down at a table by the window.

Because the station blocked the view of the wide world, like a seal set on Holland's vanished maritime power, it had a magnificent view of its own; the busy square branching out in all directions, with churches, hotels, and seventeenth-century gables reflected in the water, on the other side affording an almost obscene view deep into the city. As he looked at it he had the same kind of feeling as this morning when he woke up: perhaps it was no longer his city. Apart from his scientific work, everything had happened there, from his birth up to the conversation that he was shortly to have.

He ordered coffee from a waiter in a white full-length apron and opened his newspaper. In Paris, de Gaulle had made a statement that he would remain in office as president, whereupon riots had broken out again in all French cities, with several deaths and thousands of casualties. He read only the headlines and the leads — not because he was unable to concentrate, but because it still didn't interest him. Since he had been in Cuba, he was preoccupied solely with his personal problems, which he had caused, and with those of radio sources in the distant past of the universe — everything in between, like the war in Vietnam and the revolution in Europe, was less and less real for him; he left that to Onno. He read an article about the rapid development of the silicon chip, in which he was later to be involved, with the constant squeaking of the restaurant door in his ears, shrill guards' whistles filling the belly of the whale, the thundering of arriving trains, reducing speed with reluctant grating. Now and then an incomprehensible voice blared from the loudspeakers.

"Have you been waiting long?"

Sophia was standing looking down at him. He got up, said hello, and took her coat, which was cold on the outside and warm on the inside.

When they were sitting opposite each other, she said: "Well, it's been decided. Next Thursday at the latest they're going to get the baby out."

He nodded. "Did they say why?"

"They don't say everything even to me, particularly when Onno's there. They discussed it at length; they say they're doing it to be on the safe side, but I don't know what that means. You can imagine that all kinds of things have gone haywire in that body of hers. She's also getting bed sores. She has to be turned every three hours, iced and blow-dried."

The way in which Sophia said that body, when she herself had given birth to it, sent a chill through him. Turned. Iced. Blow-dried.

"But can she survive such a severe operation?"

Sophia looked at her hands. "Who can say? We've just spoken briefly to the surgeon, but of course he's not giving anything away. He says that there needn't be any risk to her life. In any case there's no problem at all for the child: it's already over seven months."

Max reflected that it might be best if Ada did not survive, and that Sophia was probably thinking the same thing at that moment; but he didn't have the courage to say it.

"What about Onno?"

"He understands that there's a risk, of course, but he said that he'd rather be a father sooner than later."

Max could hear him saying it: with an expansive gesture, to which the surgeon had no reply, though he knew more about it than Onno. He always created misunderstandings; the doctor probably now thought that he lacked seriousness.

"If all goes well," he said, "it will mean that the child will need a roof over its head in a few weeks' time. Has Onno made his mind up yet?"

Sophia looked at him in bewilderment. "It's as though you never see him anymore. Is there something wrong between you?"

"No," said Max, returning her look. "Why should there be? The last time I spoke to him was the day before yesterday." He looked down and folded the newspaper.

"We were just talking about it in the tram," said Sophia, "but he still hasn't decided. He asked my advice."

"And what advice did you give him?"

"In my opinion he shouldn't let the child be dragged around the world by civil servants; he should choose his niece Paula in Rotterdam. Besides, one day he'll meet someone else and then he can still take it back."

Max had not considered that possibility. Yes, even that was of course conceivable; but it wouldn't happen. He remembered what Onno had said to him the very day after the accident: that he didn't find being alone the worst thing about it, since he was the classic comic type of the married bachelor. He would certainly meet another woman one day, but he'd never live with anyone again; for him that had been an incident, like when a miser who once buys shares then loses his money, after which he puts his capital on deposit forever, even though his speculative friends tell him that saving with a bank is pouring your money down the drain. For Onno it was once bitten, twice shy.

"Did you tell him that?"

"Of course not."

Max shook his head. "From what I know of him, he'll stay a bachelor for the rest of his days — that is, live like a bachelor."

A waiter was standing in silence by their table looking from one to the other, with his ballpoint pen and notepad in his hand. Used to such rudeness, they both ordered a small open sandwich, even though that would probably be equally unsavory. With his fingernail, Max drew bars across a stain that had not been properly washed off the tablecloth.

"But what if," he said slowly, without raising his eyes, "you and I were to do it…"

"Do what?"

"Take care of Ada's child."

It had been said. Suddenly it was there, like a thing, a meteor that had penetrated the atmosphere. He looked into her eyes and tried to read from her face the effect his proposal had had, but he saw no emotion at all.

"Us look after Ada's child? You and me? And how do you picture that?"

It was on the tip of his tongue to say "In heaven's name let's stop this play acting, Sophia. It's gone on long enough; I'm crazy about you, I can't live without you, and you know that; even when I take your coat, I'm thinking of the dark ritual of our nights in Leiden, and the same goes for you." But supposing he'd said that, and she'd then said, "Yes, of course, you're right, we must put an end to this pretense" — would he still have wanted her to move in with him with Ada's child? Of course not. He knew perfectly well that it was precisely the incomprehensible secrecy to which he was wedded heart and soul: that which they not only kept hidden from the world but from each other, and she perhaps even from herself.

"Since your husband's death," he said, "you've been running 'In Praise of Folly,' but if you ask me that won't last. I will probably have to move to Drenthe shortly — I'm going to be appointed telescope astronomer, in Westerbork. Next Thursday your daughter is going to give birth to my best friend's child. These are the facts, aren't they? Ada is no longer of this world, Onno has to find a home for his child, I don't like the thought of living alone in the provinces, and there's nothing left for you in Leiden. All five of us are alone — so let's throw in our lot together. You told me that the grandmother is traditionally the one who looks after the children, and that you had offered yourself to Onno in that capacity, but that he felt that there should be a man in the family. Well, that'll be me. It won't be your average family, but it will have some features of one. In a higher sense it might be even more of a family than normal families."

What he meant by this last remark was not immediately clear even to himself, but that might come later. Sophia turned her head away and looked outside. Her remorseless profile suddenly reminded him of that of a woman in a painting by Franz von Stuck, Sphinx, of which he had once seen a reproduction: a nude lying on her belly, with a raised upper torso, and fingers curled into claws, in the attitude of a lion, on the shore of a dark mountain lake into which a waterfall is plunging. He could not see what was going on inside her, but at least she had not dismissed it out of hand.

She looked at him. "Do you know what you're saying?"

"I don't know always what I'm saying, because then I'd never say anything important; but what I've just said I've considered from all sides. I know it would completely change my life, and yours too. But we owe it to Ada. Or perhaps we don't owe it to her, but in that case we have to do it although we don't owe it to her." He put the paper aside and stretched his back. "That's what I wanted to say to you. Of course everything would have to be arranged at short notice; I must find a house with sufficient room for the three of us, some old vicarage perhaps. You should wind up the bookshop, but that's all solvable. My salary isn't that fat, but there are families who have to live on less; and anyway everything is cheaper in the country, particularly when you get it from the farm." He made a gesture with his hand. "I can imagine that it's come as a big surprise and that you'd like to think about it calmly for a day or two, so—"

"I don't have to think about it," she said, and looked him straight in the eye.

"Because?" He looked at her tensely.

"For the last few months my life… I mean… if Onno agrees. ."

He had an impulse to take her hand in his, but controlled himself. For the first time he saw something like a chink in her armor. "Is he at home now?"

"I think so."

"Then I'll drop by to see him in a moment. I'll let you know at once how he reacts; I think it's better if I go alone." He saw how he surprised her with his decisiveness. "You must always make big decisions quickly, otherwise you'll never get around to it." He laughed. "Onno will be very surprised — even by the fact that I'm dropping by to see him. It's never happened."

Unlike Max, Onno had the gift of being able to switch his attention completely from one moment to the next, like someone going from one room into the other and closing the door behind him. The news that his child would be delivered in five days' time and that he must now reach a decision quickly had preoccupied him until he put the key in the lock. He agreed with his mother-in-law that the choice of Hans and Hadewych would be the worse one, but because he wanted to make not a less bad but a good choice, he still could not bring himself to cut the Gordian knot. Once inside, in his study, his eye was caught by the party papers, in which shortly afterward he was immersed.

When the bell rang, he got up automatically and opened the door, without interrupting his thoughts. When he saw Max on the step, he came to himself in amazement.

"This is very unusual," he said.

"Thank you for the heart-warming reception. I know that you don't belong to the species host, but I need to discuss something with you."

"Salve."

Max followed him to the basement, which after a short period of modest tidiness had again succumbed to the second law of thermodynamics. The chaos caused him almost physical pain. Lost for words, he looked at the mess. He himself could spend minutes carefully arranging the instruments at the edge of his desk, the magnet, the compass, the tuning fork, to the millimeter — here, there was not even the beginning of an awareness that there was such a thing as order.

"Are you really human?" he asked.

"Yes, it leaves you speechless, doesn't it? Only the very strongest can live like this. Upstairs it's a little tidier, but I only go up there to sleep these days."

That he was probably human, after all, was apparent from Ada's cello: the case lay on two upright chairs, standing facing each other next to his desk, like a body on a bed. Onno led the way to the back room, where his bed had once been, and cleared a corner of a sagging sofa; books, newspapers, a pair of gray socks, a toaster, were pushed aside, and in a flash Max also saw the book on Fabergé, which he had given Ada that first day.

"I was at the Wilhelmina Hospital this morning. It's going to be on Thursday, at four-thirty. Oh you don't know yet: the doctors—"

"I do know. I talked to your mother-in-law. That's why I'm here."

Onno had sunk into a small armchair, which dated from his student days and which he bought from a secondhand shop; at the sides there were stripes and scratches in the brown leather, perhaps from a long-dead cat that had once sharpened its claws on it. Had Max talked to his mother-in-law?

He looked at Max with raised eyebrows. "You talked to my mother-in-law?"

Someone may know someone else for years, but if he's asked what color the other person's eyes are, he often doesn't know, because people don't look at someone's eyes but at them. For the first time Max saw that Onno had a brown ring around his blue irises.

"Yes."

"We're listening."

Everything depended on the right tone. Max had not prepared what he was about to say, because then he would have to remember what he had prepared, when it was not a matter of remembering the right things but of saying the right things in the right way.

"Listen, Onno, I won't beat around the bush. The day before yesterday you told me about your dilemma, deciding who the child should live with. Because I had the feeling that I might be able to help you in some way, I contacted your mother-in-law yesterday. She told me two things — first, that the child is going to be delivered next Thursday by cesarean section, because Ada's condition may become critical."

"Which might be the best for everyone. And second?"

"Second, that she had also offered to look after the child herself. But you didn't want it to go to a single woman."

Max waited for a moment to see whether Onno had already realized, but there was no indication that he had.

Onno listened to him with the slightly unpleasant feeling that he was being intruded upon, even if it was by his best friend. Not only in his immediate family were they talking about him behind his back, about things that directly affected his life. He hadn't the faintest idea what Max was getting at.

"That's right." He nodded. "So?"

"I arranged to see her and I've just met her, in the station buffet. I've come straight from there."

What in heaven's name was going on here? Onno sat up. "Isn't that slightly odd? She didn't tell me anything about having arranged to meet you."

"You weren't supposed to know." Max struggled for words. Now he was about to say it for the second time. "Brace yourself, Onno. I suggested to her that she and I should look after your child."

Onno stared at him numbly. What he had just heard could not be possible. "Say that again."

"It's now more or less certain that I'm to become telescope astronomer in Westerbork, and in the foreseeable future I will probably move to Drenthe permanently."

"What on earth are you saying? I remember you saying that you'd feel like an exiled criminal in Siberia there."

"Things have changed for me, Onno. Your mother-in-law is prepared to move in with me, so that your child would be in good hands."

Onno felt as if he were seeing a city collapse and subsequently rise from its ruins in the shape of another city — Amsterdam changing into Rome, the palace on the Dam into St. Peter's. Once before he had had such a sensation. Years ago one winter evening, snow had deadened every noise and every sound in the city and he sat bent over his photos of Etruscan inscriptions: suddenly he saw everything shift into a new constellation, turn on its head, flip, and suddenly his discovery had been made. The sudden metamorphosis of his friend into his child's mentor and that of his mother-in-law into Max's house companion hadn't yet entirely sunk in, but wasn't it the ideal solution? Goodbye to all those cousins and their spouses!

Or was it complete madness, too crazy for words? Max with his dreadful mother-in-law in Drenthe. Surely that would be impossible. He, the frenzied satyr, under one roof with the icy Sophia Brons — what had gotten into him? How had he hit upon the idea of effacing himself in that way? Had his past caught up with him, as a foster child himself? But he had offered it to him; he was sitting there waiting for an answer. Was it perhaps simply friendship?

"Max…" he began — it was as though the resonance of his voice sent tears into his eyes. "I don't know what to say.. "

"Then don't say anything. Or rather say it's okay, and then we'll have it over with."

Onno got up and went out of the room. At the basin, he threw water over his face with both hands. While he was looking for a towel, which was not there, he asked himself whether he could accept the offer. Could he be the cause of such a radical change in Max's life? Maybe Max felt partly responsible, since he, Onno, would never have met Ada without him. Or was the accident involved, because Max had been at the wheel, although he was entirely free of blame? He wiped his face on a sleeve and went back in.

Max had stood up too and was looking at the sheets of squared paper with linguistic diagrams on them that were pinned to the wall; the Phaistos disc was obviously not yet out of Onno's system.

"My ears are still buzzing," said Onno. "Are you sure you're not letting your sense of humor run away with you?"

Max burst out laughing. "I don't think I've ever been as serious as today."

"Perhaps it's been staring us in the face all along, but please help me understand. What's gotten into you? I couldn't stand one day with that creature. What am I to make of it? Is there something going on between you and her, perhaps?"

"Ha, ha," laughed Max. "Don't make, me laugh."

"You're capable of it, but probably there are limits even for you."

"I imagine," said Max with great control, "that I shall live there like a vicar with his housekeeper and her grandchild. She'll cook my food and iron my shirts, collars never toward the point but always away from it. I'll get by sexually somehow — I'm sure to bump into someone."

"But why should you do all that for me?"

"Not just for you. I've had enough of the kind of life I've been living up to now myself. I don't have to go to Westerbork if I don't want to, do I? But I'm going to turn over a new leaf in my sex life too; anyway, it's a practical impossibility to live like a beast in the country. Let me put it like this: in a certain sense it suits me very well. I want to work with that telescope, and otherwise I would have been on my own, in rooms with the local lawyer. Commuting from Amsterdam every day would of course be crazy, certainly in a Volkswagen; and anyway, there are often things to do at night. I'll start an affair with the surgical nurse at Hoogeveen Hospital and then with the German teacher at Zwolle High School. I can teach her a thing or two. And eventually something beautiful will develop between your mother-in-law and the antiques dealer in Assen."

"But supposing you do meet someone, someone you want to start a family with?"

"Then of course I'll take your child with me. But I can't see that happening. Anyway, the unexpected is always possible — even your cousins Hans and Jan-Kees could get divorced."

"Dear God," cried Onno, raising his hands. "You've reminded me. My family! How am I going to tell my family?"

That was it.

"Does that mean that we're going to do it?"

"Of course we're going to do it! I'm sure that Ada would have thought this was the best thing too."

That remark had a big impact on Max. He hadn't thought about it yet, but there could be no doubt about it; it was as though he could see her, nodding with eyes closed. He put out his hand, and Onno looked at it for a moment before shaking it.

"Champagne!" said Max. "La Veuve!"

"I wish I had." Onno shook his head gloomily. "I don't even have any beer here. I've sunk completely back into barbarism."

"Let's go out for a drink, we have to celebrate this. It's my treat."

"You go on. I need to be alone now. I need to stare numbly into space for a long time to get over the shock. And then the three of us must meet as soon as possible; there are bound to be all kinds of snags, but we'll solve them. The child is being born one and a half months prematurely, and according to the doctors it will definitely have to stay in the incubator for four or five weeks. Plenty of time to settle everything."

32. The Dilettante

When Max had gone, Onno went upstairs and dropped onto his bed. Suddenly the mists had cleared and a future again lay in front of him like day after night. Max had convinced him, but it was still not completely clear to him; after all, bringing up a child was a matter of about seventeen years— that meant Max was basically tying himself down until the year 1985, when he would be fifty-two. Fifty-two! Good God! By that time life will be more or less over; his own, too. At least perhaps not over, because why shouldn't someone live to ninety, but certainly changed from afternoon into evening. And meanwhile Max would be doing other things besides bringing up a child — namely, scientific research; bringing up a child would help him in this, since it brought order into his existence.

His child was perhaps precisely what Max needed in order to do really important astronomical work, since otherwise he would waste a large part of his time charming another thousand women out of their panties — which would be all well and good if you could remember it, so that you could look back on it all with satisfaction on your deathbed. But of course you forgot; all that would be left will be an enormous pile of laundry, in which one pair of panties was indistinguishable from the other. Apart from that, when you were ninety, what good to you was the knowledge that you had lain on top of countless eighty- or seventy-year-olds? Or on centenarians? You would sit dribbling on a park bench and an old woman would come by, her body twisted into a rheumatic angle, talking to herself, supporting herself on a black lacquered stick, and you would think: I was once in the sack with that girl. Terrific triumph.

But perhaps Max didn't want to remember it at all; perhaps he wanted to leave and forget women continually because he had once been left and forgotten. At any rate it would never happen to him, Onno himself. He had been to bed with eleven women, all of whom he remembered exactly: Helga had been the ninth, Ada the tenth, Maria from Havana the eleventh; and since the accident there had been no one else.

However, now that Max had reached this point, he reflected, there were of course other conceivable ways of changing his life — without Sophia Brons.

Max was taking her as part of the bargain; he himself could not bear the thought of having that woman around him the whole time, but Max obviously didn't feel intimidated by her. However much of a bitch she might be, he was also giving back meaning to her life. No, Max was trying to represent his offer as an act of egoism, to make it easier for him, Onno, to accept; but it was and remained first and foremost an unselfish act of friendship, for which Onno would be grateful to him all his life. He could now devote himself to his activities with a clear conscience, without wrestling at the back of his mind with the doubt whether he had done the right thing. The club of rebels had recently put him up as a candidate for the party executive, and a decision was due soon; if that went ahead then he would have to concentrate fully on his responsibilities.

Suddenly he jumped off his bed, went to the telephone, and dialed his youngest sister's number. He wanted to make it definite immediately, so that there would be no way back.

"Dol? It's Onno."

"Just a moment, I just got in. Let me give the dog some water. — Yes, I'm here now."

"Listen carefully, Dol. I know I'm taking you by surprise, but I want to get it off my chest immediately. My friend Max has just been here — you know, my best friend, Max Delius — and he's offered to bring up my child together with my mother-in-law. I just wanted to tell you."

"Good heavens, Onno, wait a moment, not so fast. What on earth are you saying?"

"That my problem has been solved. Max is getting a job at the new radio telescope in Drenthe, and he's going to live there; my mother-in-law is going to move in with him as housekeeper, and there'll also be room for my child. It couldn't be better. It's all wrapped up."

Stuttering, Dol tried to say something. "But Onno… wait a moment.. you can't just. ."

"Oh yes I can!"

"Don't be so idiotic. You can't decide this in the blink of an eye."

"I already have."

"How do you see it working? Have you thought through all the implications? Are you sure that you won't regret it? Anyway, I don't think this is something to discuss on the telephone. Can't you—"

"There's nothing further to discuss, I'm just letting you know. Hans and Paula will both get a nice note from me, thanking them for their offer — and I can't see what other implications this solution is supposed to have. I can't see into the future, but why should I regret it?"

There was a few seconds' delay before Dol replied. "Because… I don't really know how I'm supposed to say it.. it's not what I think, but I can imagine someone thinking. . look, of course I can't say anything against your mother-in-law, but—"

"Well against who, then?" he said, feeling himself getting angry. "Or rather, against who else? Out with it — say what you mean."

"Well, I don't want to offend you, Onno, but your friend Max… he struck me as a very interesting man, good-looking too, but… he isn't one of us, is he?"

"Et tu, Brute!" cried Onno in fury. "You mean that he's the son of a Jewess and a war criminal, the son of everything that God forbade and not the son of decent Christian folk who plundered the colonies for centuries! That's what you mean! And that a fellow like that isn't eligible to bring up a Quist! No, but now I am absolutely sure. I'm glad you said it. Thanks a lot for your help."

The following morning, Sunday, he was sorry about his outburst and called her again. His brother-in-law came to the phone; Dol was taking the dog for a walk. He accepted Onno's excuses on her behalf; with hindsight she had understood. Anyway, he began, yesterday evening they had been over to the Statenlaan. . but because Onno realized at once that Karel was trying to bring up the question of Max again in that roundabout way, he interrupted him and said that he didn't care what his parents had said, because his decision had been made: this was what was going to happen and nothing else — it was pointless coming back to it. The family would simply have to learn to live with it. Next he was on the phone to Max and Sophia, and they agreed that he would come to Leiden in the course of the afternoon with Max; Max would pick him up from the gate of the hospital.

Why he visited Ada for a moment every day — recently usually outside official visiting hours — was not completely clear even to Onno himself. He did not need to do it for Ada's sake: it was more a visit to a grave than to a sickbed. However, paradoxically, in that grave a dead body was not slowly but surely starting to decompose, but on the contrary an unborn body was taking shape. As he stood next to her with his arms folded, the ward nurse came up to him and said that Dr. Melchior, the surgeon, had asked whether he would drop by; he was in his room, in the wing opposite.

"By the way, now I'm talking to you: can we have your permission to cut Ada's hair a little shorter? Up to now we've left it more or less as it is, but for reasons of hygiene. . Given the circumstances it will soon grow again."

Onno realized that he could not refuse, just as he could not demand that she should be made up every morning. He nodded, pressed a kiss on Ada's black, silky hair, and left the ward without so much as exchanging a glance with the nurse.

He wondered what Melchior wanted from him; he had spoken to him only yesterday. On his way there he again noticed that the staff looked at him in a special way: everyone knew by now who he was and the state his wife was in. It was as though some of them wanted to see how someone felt in his situation, while most of them gave the impression that they wanted to help him by looking at him.

With his fleshy, round face, his hump, and his deformed leg, the little surgeon came out from behind his desk and shook Onno's hand. He was wearing a white short-sleeved gown.

"Have a seat," he said. "We can keep it short. I wanted to speak to you alone for a moment, without your mother-in-law." He folded his large hands on the top of his desk and looked penetratingly at Onno, while he obviously carefully weighed his words. "Yesterday you inquired how risky next Thursday's operation would be."

"I understood from you that the chances were quite good."

Melchior nodded and allowed another silence to fall, during which he did not take his light-blue eyes off Onno. Onno looked back at him in bewilderment, getting the feeling that those pauses contained the real message rather than his words.

Slowly, the surgeon said: "In general that is the case. But complications can always arise, which may be fatal."

"We're aware of that," said Onno. "My mother-in-law perhaps most of all — she was in medicine herself. There was no need to keep that from her."

"So I've heard." Melchior again inserted a silence. "But you know, a mother…"

Suddenly Onno felt the blood draining from his face. Was he understanding him correctly? Was the man prepared to pull the plug? If he were to say to him now that an unexpected fatal outcome might ultimately be the best for everyone, first and foremost for Ada, to the extent that there was still such a person as Ada, would the required complication occur on Thursday? Some hemorrhage, or a cardiac arrest, with fatal consequences? Thursday was the day when that would be possible; if it didn't happen, then the opportunity would have been missed and her body might remain in its present state for months and perhaps years, before it died a natural physiological death.

It would be a long time before that would change in the Christian-dominated Netherlands, without someone risking a prison sentence and being struck off the medical register; that was another reason for changing society. He got up and went to the window, where he looked out without seeing anything. He was now in conversation with the doctor, but he must not indicate with so much as a word that this was happening; if he were to utter the word euthanasia, Melchior would dismiss that suggestion in alarm and the operation would proceed faultlessly. If Ada were to die on the operating table and suspicions were to arise so that people like his brother-in-law Coen could take him to court, on the basis of laws that his brother Menno taught, then everyone could swear under oath that there had been no question of terminating a life. The judge might have his own opinion, but the upshot would be acquittal, acclaimed by the enlightened section of the nation.

What was he to do? He now suddenly had to decide on her life. He couldn't possibly do it! He felt the responsibility weighing on his back like the sack of anthracite on that of a coalman from his childhood. But was her life "her" life anymore? Was there still a subject called Ada lying fifty yards away from here on a sheepskin? The day before yesterday he had asked the neurologist if her E.E.G. was completely flat — to which Stevens had replied that it was indistinguishable from a flat E.E.G. But he also thought of the conversation he had had a week ago with Max at Ada's bedside, when they had said that everyone, despite all the E.E.G.'s, instinctively whispered at all those bedsides.

He turned around. Melchior was leafing through a pile of large index cards, which had been bound into a temporary notebook with tape; he gave the impression that he had already forgotten the topic of conversation. Onno looked at his watch.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Someone's waiting for me at the gate. Shall we continue this conversation another time?"

"As you like. There isn't that much to continue."

"What's wrong?" asked Max. "Why aren't you saying anything?"

Surrounded by tentative gray-haired Sunday drivers, they were making their way along the highway to Leiden.

Onno groaned and looked sideways at him. "Can I trust you?"

Max laughed uncomfortably. "Is it conceivable that I should say no?"

"Then swear you'll never tell anyone what I'm going to tell you in deepest secrecy."

"I swear."

"Not my mother-in-law, not my child, or anyone else — even later. Raise two fingers of your right hand and repeat it."

Max took his right hand off the steering wheel, raised two fingers, and said: "I swear."

Onno then told him what had just happened. Max, too, was shocked by the sudden emergence of extreme seriousness. Deciding on life and death— like Onno he had never dreamt that it might become an issue in his life. That was something for doctors, military people, politicians, not for astronomers; so it was still more Onno's territory than his.

"When I said that we might continue our conversation another time, he said there wasn't much to continue. Of course he wasn't talking about our conversation, but about Ada's life. He looks like Quasimodo, the bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, but I know from my brother-in-law that he's a top man at his job. What would you do in my position?"

Perhaps Max was in his position. Suddenly his brain was operating quickly and efficiently. "I'd want to find out," he said, "whether the neurologist and the surgeon are really one hundred percent certain that Ada is brain-dead, that there's not one ounce of individuality left in her. Because even if there's just a tiny bit left, it's murder. I'm inflexible on that point. Suppose there's only as much left as a one-year-old child; then you can't do it. You can't murder babies, either. But if there's really nothing left at all, zero percent, just a vegetable, then it means nothing. Then you can."

"You talked differently last week. I got the impression that in your view not even the dead should be killed, so to speak."

"That was fantasy." Max nodded.

"But how can I find out what Quasimodo really thinks? I can't just ask him, because then the whole thing would be called off at once. And I can't approach that neurologist Stevens, because Melchior didn't inform him, of course."

At that moment Max had an idea.

"Do you know what we'll do? Ask casually if Ada is going to be given a local or a general anesthetic. If he says he won't be anesthetizing her since she has no perception left, then that would settle it, but if he says 'local' or 'general,' you'll know the score."

"This marks the exact scientist!" Onno exclaimed. "But if I ask him he'll probably smell a rat anyway, because he doesn't strike me as stupid. Perhaps it'll be better if I involve my brother-in-law on some pretext — he's a brain surgeon as you know; all these butchers know each other. Or maybe not," he said, shaking his forefinger. "He may say that a cesarean section is never carried out under local anesthetic, that he doesn't need to ask the surgeon. But he'll have been immediately alerted, because everyone has obviously considered that possibility, certainly good old Karel, who in terms of character might be persuadable, if he weren't such a holy Joe. No one else must be involved!" He looked sideways again. "I know a better way. You must find out."

Max glanced at him, then looked back at the road. "How do you see that happening?"

"You must get friendly with the surgical nurse a day before and find out from her if they're going to use an anesthetic — if necessary in bed, without regard of persons. So that disgusting promiscuity of yours will finally have some point for a change."

Max smiled. Now that promiscuity might have some point — even though Onno was only half serious, of course — it no longer existed. "Success doesn't strike me as guaranteed."

"Bashful all of a sudden?"

"Listen, she may be a lesbian; you never know with nurses. I could tell you things. .. There has to be a surer way of getting a result. Suppose I read up a little on the technical side of the anesthetics business—"

"Anesthesiological. Anesthetics are the substances."

"… so that I can see whether equipment is switched on and that kind of thing. Then on Thursday I'll simply wander into the operating room by mistake a quarter of an hour beforehand. Things like that are always possible in Amsterdam. Then I'll let you know; as the husband, you'll accompany the stretcher to the door of the operating room, where they won't let you through. Then you can ask to see the surgeon for a moment and privately give an indication of your decision."

Onno looked pensively at the little imitation three-wheeled car ahead of them that would not budge from the outside lane.

"Right," he said. "That's what we'll do, compañero. What would I do without you?"

"Nothing, it seems."

When the three of them had met for the first time that afternoon in the back room at the bookshop, with tea and biscuits, Onno's main problem was in getting used to their new status: Max as foster father, Sophia as foster mother, himself as a grass widower. He felt embarrassed by the situation, but Sophia was businesslike as always; she seemed to have adjusted completely to the changed circumstances, like someone who had simply changed jobs. But Max was aware that only she and he knew that the relationship they were entering into with each other was a facade, hiding a completely different relationship; and that too was in turn of course a facade, behind which there was nothing but chaos and uncertainty. Now that plan they had hatched on the way here had been added to that awareness; he felt as if he himself were falling under something like an anesthetic. What he would have liked most was to stay over at "In Praise of Folly," in order to sink into the arms of the nighttime Sophia, but of course that was out of the question now that Onno was there.

"Goodbye, Mrs. Brons."

" 'Bye, Max."

The next conclave was on Tuesday evening at Onno's, but there really had not been that much more to discuss. They had soon reached an agreement on the financial side of things, and the sale of the bookshop had meanwhile also been agreed upon. Onno had not had to think very hard: from the inexhaustible reservoir of his family a second cousin had emerged who had always been a bad sort but who was now the director of a large real estate firm. Onno had called and told him to get an extortionate price for the premises without charging a commission, as otherwise he would report him to the police. And as far as accommodation in Drenthe was concerned, Max had talked to the director of the observatory, who had smiled mysteriously and said that he might know of something nice. That sounded promising, at least not like a two-bedroom house in a new development. It also meant that his appointment as telescope astronomer was virtually settled.

Afterward, Sophia did the backlog of cleaning, vacuumed, and put on the washing machine, which reminded Onno of Ada's first visit: she was more like her mother than she realized, or had realized. While Sophia busied herself upstairs, Max suggested that they really ought to tell Onno's mother-in-law about their anesthesiological plan. In the first place she knew about these things, and in the second place it concerned her daughter. But Onno felt that was precisely why she should be kept out of it: as a mother she would never have a hand in the death of her child, even if there was nothing left of that child. Max was not so sure, but he could not give away the fact that he knew her better than Onno. The main reason why she should remain ignorant — and on this point Max agreed — was that Melchior's position must not be jeopardized in any way: he was the only one who was sticking his neck out and was ready to break the great taboo, and he had made his veiled proposal precisely in the absence of Sophia.

On Wednesday morning — after staying the night in Leiden, since it was ridiculous driving back to Amsterdam again — he went to the Academic Hospital. He had devised the plan of presenting himself as a writer of medical novels doing background research who would like a look at the operating room, where he would be given an explanation of how the anesthetists' equipment worked. But once on the terrace he remembered that disastrous night three months ago, and his courage suddenly failed him. He decided to go to the medical faculty library first.

While next to him two students whispered about the Carre theater in Amsterdam, which was probably going to be occupied tomorrow after a musical performance — led by the writer and the composer whose paths he had already crossed a few times and who, it seemed, had just returned from the rebellious ferment of Paris — he leafed through manuals of anesthesiology and studied illustrations of equipment. Then he asked a surly lady with her gray hair worn up in a bun and a pencil behind her ear to point out where the literature on obstetrics was.

While he immersed himself in the techniques of cesarean sections and looked at the gory insides of wombs, where infants were being retrieved from damp, dark caverns, apparently against their will, he was struck by the mirror-image similarity between the work of surgeons and his own. Just as he, starting from his own body, looked into the depths of the universe, where everything became increasingly incomprehensible, they took the opposite direction and penetrated that same body, where they encountered similar mysteries, culminating in enigmatic neurons and DNA molecules, whose operation was perhaps ultimately determined by quantum processes. The fact that the dimensions of the human body were almost exactly halfway between those of the universe and those of the smallest particles was in line with that fact. Man was the axis of the world — that was not a theological dogma: you could measure it.

However, he encountered an unexpected problem. The cesarean section, a routine operation lasting no more than half an hour, was usually carried out under general, but sometimes under local, anesthetic; in the latter case only the lower half of the body was anesthetized, with a lumbar injection. That meant that even if the equipment was not switched on, no conclusions could be drawn from it. If the red lights were not on, that meant that on Thursday he would have to locate within a few seconds a particular hypodermic syringe among scores of other syringes, scissors, hooks, clamps, forceps, scalpels, and whatever else might be ready to ensure that everything went according to plan. That was of course impossible. Nor was there any point in finding out on some pretext or other whether there was an anesthetist in the operating room. Of course there would be one; it was inconceivable that he would get a telephone call telling him that he could stay home today, since the patient couldn't feel anything anyway. Blood pressure and heart function all had to be monitored, whether anesthetic was administered or not.

Max closed the book with a bang, which earned him an icy look from the librarian. She had of course seen long ago, over the top of her glasses, that it was a layman struggling there with the Anglo-Saxon folios bound in red and blue linen, with gold lettering. Of course hypochondriacs regularly came here in order to self-diagnose their imaginary illnesses. He felt ridiculous, like a general practitioner who imagined in the observation room in Dwingeloo that he could see at a glance whether the mirror was being used for espionage purposes.

A ten-minute conversation with an expert in the Academic Hospital would make everything clear; but if it went wrong and got into the newspapers, then that person might report to the court and give an affidavit on that strange conversation the day before the fatal operation that had caused an uproar in the whole of the conservative Netherlands. Murder! He would be traced — because the librarian had once seen him coming out of the observatory while out walking with her friend through the Botanical Garden— and Melchior would wind up in jail. There was simply no way of finding out quickly without a risk. Unless he were to immediately take a plane to a distant country, Italy for example, and introduce himself in the hospital in Rome as a German writer working on a short story about a pregnant woman in a coma, who.. No, even that was probably too risky. Such a spectacular case might even make the world press.

33. Cesarean Section

Onno and Sophia had seen it before, but when the three of them entered the ward the following afternoon, Max stopped on the threshold in shock. Ada's hair had been cropped. She looked like the girls and women whose hair he had seen cut off by men, foaming at the mouth, because they had consorted with Germans: "Jerry's whores" in the eyes of the mob, who until the Battle of Stalingrad had had a much cozier arrangement with the Germans, apart from cheerfully taking off their panties. The rectangular frame around her face had disappeared and had revealed a round, defenseless head, which only now seemed to have departed finally into the realm of inaccessibility.

At a quarter to four, two nurses appeared to wheel Ada, bed and all, to the operating room. The previous evening Max had called Onno and informed him about his medical fiasco, whereupon Onno had immediately concluded that the uncertainty about Ada's mental existence remained and that she should therefore remain alive. Max pressed his lips to her forehead and wondered how he would have felt if the decision had been different.

Onno, too, was relieved that it had gone like this. Looking back on it, he doubted whether Melchior had actually meant it all as he had interpreted it, though he would never dare to say that to Max. Perhaps he had had him carry out an absurd mission. While Max and Sophia went to the lounge, he accompanied Ada through the corridors and in the elevator upstairs, with one hand on her belly. In a room outside the operating room proper, a man of his own age was washing his hands; he was wearing a green short-sleeved smock, with a cap of the same color on his head. Onno introduced himself and asked if he could speak to Melchior for a moment.

"Can't you tell me?" asked the man. "My name is Steenwijk. I'm the anesthetist."

Onno looked at him in shock. He had a walnut-colored complexion, which was a little darker around his eyes. Onno realized that he was suddenly in a situation where he might yet find out what he wanted to know.

"Anesthetist?" he repeated. "Are you putting my wife under an anesthetic?"

"Of course."

"But I understood from Dr. Stevens that she can't feel pain anymore."

With a vague smile Steenwijk shook his head.

"That's a separate matter. The sensation of pain is a matter for the cerebral cortex. But what we must avoid in the interest of the child during the operation are possible reflexes from the brainstem. And that is intact, as you know; after all your wife is breathing. Anyway, my instinct also tells me that we have to do it."

Onno looked at him for a moment and then nodded. At one fell swoop all the nonsense had been dismissed. Steenwijk's last sentence about his instinct echoed in his head. Did that mean that in his view, too, something of Ada still remained?

Although he was no longer certain that Melchior had actually alluded to euthanasia, he said, feeling ridiculous: "Please tell Dr. Melchior that he must remember his Hippocratic oath and do everything to save my wife's life."

Steenwijk similarly did not answer immediately. Had he understood?

"I'll tell him, although it really ought to be unnecessary." He looked at Onno with a slightly melancholy expression and said, "You have my sympathy. You can wait next door."

"My friends are downstairs."

"As you wish."

Max and Sophia were sitting at a round bamboo table with a glass top in wicker garden chairs, surrounded by patients in bathrobes over striped pajamas and nightgowns, their bare feet in slippers. Some were playing cards, others were reading illustrated magazines, doubtless from months or years ago, but most of all they were smoking; with the blissful absorption of prisoners who were finally allowed into the fresh air, the smoke was inhaled into lungs, so that the tips of the cigarettes glowed red. On a cupboard stood a television set that had been switched off.

Calmly, as though she were waiting for a train, Sophia was also leafing through a magazine; beside her chair was a carryall. Max looked at his watch: four o'clock. Although he too was outwardly calm, inwardly he was trembling with fear. He suddenly felt as though time were a hollow cone, within which he had for months been driven from the base, which was as wide as the world, toward the point, which he must soon pass through — and perhaps he also realized that image was an echo of the usual space-time diagram in relativity literature: the "light cone" of an event. Within an hour the catastrophe might be a fact, if somehow it became immediately apparent that he was the father.

Onno joined them and said: "I've just spoken to the anesthetist."

Max looked up with a jolt, but immediately realized that he must control himself so as not to let Sophia know what they had been talking about.

"And?" asked Sophia.

Without looking at Max, Onno reported the conversation to her, but actually of course to Max as well — after which Max suddenly realized that he had behaved even more absurdly with his research yesterday than he already suspected. He felt like a little boy who thought that the station-master's whistle set the train in motion and was now having it explained to him in a few words that it was not really like that. He was ashamed — not so much as a friend in Onno's eyes, because he had other reasons for that, and Onno had also seen some merit in the plan, but particularly as a man of science: just imagine if his colleagues were to hear about this. How had he taken it into his head to research a question of life and death in a few hours on his own initiative, in a completely unknown field, which other people studied for ten years! Were the tensions getting too much for him? Perhaps he should start being a little more careful.

A nurse asked if they would like a cup of tea; only Max refused. Sophia thought that Ada would have a general anesthetic, administered by drip; under normal circumstances, with a local anesthetic you had to sit up and bend forward with your head between your knees, which in her condition was of course impossible; it could also be done lying down, on one's left side. But she still did not think they would do that. Onno said that the most important thing was that there was nothing wrong with the baby, and he wasn't completely sure about that, even though the doctors maintained there was no reason to worry. Sophia assumed a pediatrician would be present — at least that had been the case in her day, but that was long ago. Now and then their conversation flagged. They were aware that Ada was now lying on the operating table under a huge lamp and was being opened up.

"Everything is about to change," Onno suddenly said solemnly. "The child will change from an embryo into a human being, Ada from a daughter into a mother, you from a mother into a grandmother, and I from a son into a father." He looked at Max. "You're the only one who won't change. Just like you."

Max nodded. He had an impulse to pray that he would remain as unchangeable as a stone.

"Every thirtieth of May from now on," said Sophia after a while "we will celebrate a birthday. Wait a moment, that means that it will be a Gemini."

"A Gemini!" repeated Onno with horror, and looked at her in disbelief. "You can't be serious."

"What do you mean? The end of May is Gemini, isn't it?"

"The end of May is Gemini…" repeated Onno again, with sarcastic emphasis. "You're not going to tell me that you believe in that nonsense? You're like my mother; she combines astrology with Christianity, and you obviously combine it with humanism. Astrology as an overarching world religion. But okay, go ahead, it's all excused because of its ancient roots. Max's profession wouldn't even exist without astrology."

"Our ancestors, the astrologers." Max nodded. Gemini, he thought — and at the same moment he remembered Eng and Chang, but he kept that to himself. Imagine if Siamese twins were really born upstairs — or nonidentical twins. In a sense one would be Onno's child and the other his own; was such a thing possible?

"And you," Onno asked Sophia, still with a sardonic tone in his voice. "What 'are' you?"

"Virgo."

"That's what I like to hear, Mother. That makes a totally respectable impression on me."

Whenever Onno said "Mother" to Sophia, Max felt sick, as though that made him something like Onno's "father."

"I don't believe in it at all," said Sophia, and pointed to the astrology column in the magazine on her lap. "I just happened to see it here."

A step at a time an emaciated, aristocratic-looking gentleman in his fifties came in; the plastic tube hanging from his nose was attached to an upturned bottle on a tall stand on wheels that he pushed along beside him like a bishop pushing his crosier. Although it was as though his body were filled only with a rarefied gas, he didn't give the impression that he intended to die — rather, that he had something better to do and that he was mainly annoyed by this stupid delay in the hospital; that probably seemed to him something more for the bourgeoisie. His dark-blue dressing gown, obviously silk, was edged with white braid; a white handkerchief protruded from the breast pocket. Without deigning to look at anyone, he put on the television and sat down at the table next to theirs. A woman in a harsh pink bathrobe and a huge plaster over one ear, like Van Gogh, said that there was nothing on at this hour. As though he had received a compliment, the gentleman made a slight bow, calmly lit a pipe, which contrasted strangely with his catheter, crossed his legs, and looked expectantly at the screen. Heraldic coats-of-arms had been embroidered in gold thread on his blood-red slippers.

Max and Sophia, who were sitting with their backs to the set, were talking about the war, about the improvised situation in those days in the hospital in Delft.

But then Onno suddenly said: "Be quiet for a moment."

Charles de Gaulle had appeared in a special broadcast. The awkward-looking general, lumbered with his colossal body, which was somewhat like Onno's, looked straight into the camera and addressed the French people. Despite the bloody events of the last few weeks, he said, he would not resign as president of the republic; he declared the Assemblee Nationale dissolved and announced general elections; if the riots continued, then very forceful measures would be taken. It was a live broadcast without subtitles; a soft woman's voice gave a simultaneous translation — but in Dutch it was no longer the same: France speaking to France, in French. It was as though that language were the only real presence, on the one hand crystalized as the general, on the other the French people. Perhaps, thought Onno, the fact that the speaker in all his monumentality at the same time had something of a small boy about him, who was allowed to put his father's suit on for a short while — the suit of the King of France — as though under the table little Charles was still wearing his short trousers, with bare knees covered in scabs from healing wounds.

"Right!" said the man at the table next to theirs, and got up.

The speech had lasted no longer than five minutes.

Onno gave Max and Sophia a perplexed look. "Shall I tell you something? It's over. At this moment the whole of right-wing France is taking to the streets. The party's over."

Max had not been following it; he was less able to concentrate on politics at this moment than ever, and he listened without interest to Onno, who said that in his view a new age had dawned with those few sentences, because by nature of his profession he had an infallible instinct for that kind of thing; the 1960s were over, imagination had been ousted from power, and from today on the world was going to be a less enjoyable place. But they themselves had the same kind of memory as the previous generation had of the 1920s— and it was doubtful whether the next generation would have such a thing.

"Speaking of the next generation.. " said Sophia "Do you remember why you're here? You're going to be a father."

With a jerk, Onno returned from world politics to the lounge. He looked at his watch. "Let's go. We can wait upstairs too."

A huge iron service elevator, obviously not intended for visitors but for stretchers and coffins, took them slowly to the second floor. In a narrow space next to the operating room a varnished wooden bench had been screwed into the wall; on the opposite wall hung a poster with a sunny Greek coast: deep blue bays between foam-edged rocks, behind which Ada was now being operated on.

They sat awkwardly next to each other, Sophia in the middle, her carryall at her feet.

"What is it that you're lugging with you everywhere?" asked Onno.

Without saying anything, she opened the zipper and with one hand took out a tiny white gown and a pair of tiny socks.

"In the incubator it won't be necessary for the time being, but if everything goes okay, I'll put the things in Ada's bedside cupboard shortly. That's what she would have done herself."

"You're fantastic," said Onno, opening the gown between his fingers and looking at it like a biologist at a newly discovered species of animal. "Fancy your thinking of that.. "

The sight of the microscopic wardrobe reminded Max of the shadow that in B-movies was cast by the approaching villain, of whom only the feet, wearing shiny shoes, were shown.

"Well, well—les boys!"

In the doorway stood the journalist who just over a year ago had been pulled across the table in the pub by Onno for attacking his friend.

"I don't believe this!" said Onno. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm doing my job. I've got an article to write on what's going on here."

"How do you know what's going on here?"

The journalist shrugged his shoulders. "Where does a newspaper get its information from?"

"For God's sake, beat it. Publicity is something I can do without. Of course you were called up by some male nurse anxious to make a few guilders on the side."

"There's no point in asking me, Onno. I'd rather be sitting in the pub too."

"I'm not Onno to you."

"Okay, Dr. Quist, let's keep calm. I can understand that you're a bit overwrought. What's going on inside you at the moment?"

"The uncontrollable desire to smash your face for hour after hour! And if you don't clear off this minute I'm going to do just that."

When Onno made to get up, with the smock still in his hands, the journalist shrugged his shoulders.

"Okay, I'll do it without you," he said, turned on his heel, and disappeared.

Onno threw the smock furiously into the carryall. "Those sensation-seeking scum.."

"Don't get excited," said Max. "The fellow has already been sufficiently punished by being who he is."

Suddenly Sophia put her hand on both their arms. "Quiet a moment. ."

There was the scarcely audible sound of a child crying on the other side of the wall.

A little later a nurse put her head around the door and said with a smile: "The stork has been here! An angelic little boy! Mother and child are doing fine!"

The fact that it was a boy was hidden by a diaper — but establishing the sex meant little. They stood speechless in front of the incubator while doctors, assistants, and nursing staff looked over their shoulders. No one had ever seen such a baby. Newborn infants tended to look like boxers at the end of the final round: swollen, eyes puffed and closed, reeling from the violence they had been through — but what was lying there in the sealed glass space was really like a precious museum piece in a display case, more like a putto, such as could be seen in Italian Renaissance paintings: all that was missing were the wings.

It was not balding and wrinkled in the way some infants immediately prefigured their old age, but had strong black hair with a deep mahogany glow, which covered its whole scalp as though it had just come from the hairdresser's; its skin was firm and seemed bathed in the light of the full moon. Nor did it have the bloated monstrousness that could be found beautiful only when seen through the eyes of maternal and paternal instinct; its cheeks were full, and in the thighs and at the wrists there were slight folds of skin, which in an adult would indicate obesity. But there was no trace of endearing chubbiness; everything was perfect, like a work of art worthy of the name. At the same time this caused it to radiate a certain aloofness, as though it did not need anyone. The small nipples, the slim fingers and toes, looked as if they had been engraved with a fine etching needle; although it had been born a month early, not only the ears but the nose and mouth too had already developed into more or less their final shape.

However, most striking of all were the eyes. They were wide open, and the space between the dark lashes was completely filled with lapis lazuli, a color blue that none of them had seen before in a human being. It reminded Max of the color of the Mediterranean — but only at a particular moment, when after driving for days through Belgium and France he caught the first glimpse of it, between the scorching hills near Saint-Raphael: Thalassa! The incredible blue of that moment; he now saw it in two places in that pale, strange face. His fear of an immediately evident likeness had immediately disappeared — he could obviously relax for the first few years. He had looked immediately at the nose and the thumbs, but there was nothing of himself to be recognized in them, either. There was no discernible likeness to Onno, either, and from Ada it had only the black hair and the black, sharply etched eyebrows and eyelashes, which made the blue of its eyes even deeper.

"What a beautiful child," said Sophia. "That's going to cause him problems in the future." Suddenly she turned around and asked the faces behind her, "How is my daughter?"

"She's still in there. Everything is going according to plan, but it will be a little while yet."

Onno and Max were not thinking of Ada.

"What's his name?" asked Max.

Onno looked at him proudly. "You must know the story of the man who said to a colleague of yours that he understood how astronomers could determine every possible property of the stars with their instruments — but how had they discovered their names?"

"That is indeed our most brilliant achievement." Max nodded.

"Quinten," said Onno.

De Profundis

De Profundis