The Discovery of Heaven (10 page)

He showed the prices on the flyleaves and said that there was no need to wrap them up. After he had paid, he looked at the back room again. The girl was still sitting in the same position with her cello. She met his glance. He went up to her and handed her the book on Fabergé.

"For you. A present for the coda."

No, really, she started blushing. She put the cello down and got up to receive it.

"How nice .. ." she said, laughing. Her two front teeth at the top were slightly wider and longer than the others.

Max turned to her father. "May I carry your daughter off for a cup of coffee?"

While he was trying not to get paint marks on the cash register, the scene had somewhat passed him by. He muttered that she must make up her own mind.

Max put out his hand. "Delius, Max."

Ada put her own hand in it. "Ada Brons."

7
The Observatory

The Gilded Turk was nearby, on the Breestraat. In the street Max had offered her his arm, ironically, like a cavalier of the old school; she had put her hand in it, and now, to her own astonishment, she was suddenly walking through town with a total stranger, chatting about Janá
č
ek. Hopefully, Bruno wouldn't see her.

Max warned her about his friend, who was waiting for them: a brute of a fellow, whom she should take with a pinch of salt.

In the large pub the afternoon rush was on; at the back a group of students in blazers were bragging noisily, beer glasses in hand.

They found Onno at the reading table, with the usual glass of milk and a half-eaten rissole next to his newspaper.

"There you are," said Max, putting the book down beside him.
"Mein Leben.
For you."

"Right." Onno looked up to thank him and saw that he had company.

"Onno Quist," said Max. "Ada Brons."

At the same moment a waiter dropped a tray of crockery somewhere, followed by applause and cheers from the students. Onno stood up and shook hands with her, after which he shot Max a look very like the one Max had given his rissole. They pulled up chairs, and for a moment it looked as though Onno was going to continue reading his newspaper out of moral indignation, but he finally decided not to. He leaned back, crossed one leg over the other, revealing the bluish-white flesh above his short socks, and in the manner of a complacent country psychiatrist asked: "Have you two known each other long?"

"We have never not known each other," said Max, and looked at Ada in expectation of a sign of agreement.

When none came, Onno took a liking to her. "I fail to understand how a sensible girl like you can stand an eternity with someone like this. But perhaps he has a secret side that he has always managed to keep hidden from me. What can I get you?"

"A mineral water, thanks."

"Water," repeated Onno, pulling a face in disgust. "Water is for brushing your teeth."

"That's right," said Max. "You should think of that more often."

Ada did not know what to say. She had to get used to the style of these two. Their tone was quite studentlike, and yet different from what she was familiar with from hearty Leiden types, for whom the tone was the only content of the conversation. Perhaps it was more boyish: the crazy exaggeration of little boys during recess at kindergarten. If it went on like this, she would find them a wearisome pair. Of course they were teasing each other because they were crazy about each other. There was a lot of violence in that Onno. Max was different, lighter: if Onno was a rock, then Max was water. The way he had whisked her off had been irresistible, but a little routine— of course he had done it hundreds of times before. He also looked a little too smart. Or did that mean he was a man of the world? Of course she herself was a tight-assed bitch.

They were talking to each other again, about their secret sides, which surpassed each other in fearsomeness; she was simply along for the ride. Of course they found her bourgeois, and they were quite right: she wasn't good enough. Soon her hand would be kissed, she would be given a flashing aphorism to contemplate, and then dismissed.. .. Suddenly her eyes began stinging. She mumbled an excuse and went to the toilet. With the door locked, she sat down on the seat. What was happening to her? She'd known him for ten minutes and she was already crying at the thought that she might not see him again. She knew nothing about him except that he was well-informed musically; she had not even yet been able to ask him if he was a musician himself. Was she in love, or perhaps just oversensitive because she was expecting her period?

Every period meant no baby yet again, but she had only just had her period. What was it, then? He wasn't good-looking. He wasn't ugly, either, but he was certainly very unusual. Perhaps it was the way he looked at her, so directly and openly. He had appeared in her life as unexpectedly as a falling star, a meteor entering the atmosphere—when it burned up you had to make a wish. Her wish was that he would not burn up and disappear! The thought of having to go home shortly, to her cello and her parents, and of everything continuing as before, was suddenly unbearable. But in that case she must get back quickly, before they disappeared!

After she had gotten up, Max leaned over to Onno with one hand on the back of her chair and said, "I'm not going to ask you what you think of her, because you know nothing about these matters."

Making a sound as if he were about to be sick, Onno looked at Max's hand on the warm chair back. "I've got my eye on you, you lecher."

Was that all it was? Or could it be something different from what Onno, or he himself, was thinking?

"Have you ever wondered," Max asked, "why it is that you find a chair on which somebody else has just been sitting warm, but never your own chair, after getting up for a moment?"

"Interesting question. And why is that?"

"There have been articles about it. The reason is that everyone produces his own individual warmth. Warmth is not simply heat, as used to be thought, not simply the Brownian motion of inanimate molecules; everyone gives off warmth, which is a function of their unmistakable personality. And it can be proved. If we get up, I look the other way, and you swap our chairs, or not, just as you like, then I'll tell you which one was your chair."

"Lunatic!" cried Onno. "Get up at once!"

Max got up and turned away. Watched with alarm by three ladies having tea, Onno began sliding their chairs about and making misleading movements with them.

"Right," he said with an inviting gesture. "Sit down. Which was my chair?"

Max pointed to Ada, who was approaching between the tables.

"We must get going, otherwise there'll be no one there. Observatories are always shut at night. Are you coming with us?" he asked her.

"Where to?"

"It's a surprise."

Walking down the Rapenburg between them, alongside the venerable academic canal, she gained some idea of the company she was in—albeit through solving little puzzles and puns on "storming heaven's gate" and enigmatists. At the university building they turned right and went into the Botanical Garden, where she had last been as a child, with her father. As though sensing this, Max took her hand in his. It was May; many trees and shrubs were already green. The conifers were already gloomily displaying their tropical origin through their exotic shapes (just as black people remain black in the North but lack the deep glow that they have in the African heat). The nameplates by each tree and plant prompted Onno to remark that they were obviously in paradise, where Adam had carried out his task of naming.

"Man was created to be a gardener!" he cried with an expansive gesture.

At the end of the garden, the observatory came into view: a two-story main building, surmounted by a dome, with low extensions on the left and right—everything in light colors, stylistically halfway between a nineteenth-century harbor office and a Renaissance-style church. At the back there were two smaller domes. But all those telescopes, Max informed them, were by now relics that were only used on weekends by amateur astronomical associations; the light and dust of the town made serious observations impossible. They themselves only processed the measurements of the radio telescope there.

When they went in, he was greeted by colleagues, who were busy disentangling punch cards in the stairwell: someone was holding one end on the second floor while others, on the banisters of the first floor and on the ground floor, tried to disentangle the long strands of brown spaghetti. They were soon to be fed into the computer at the Central Computer Institute, where someone would have to take them by bike.

"Can't you do it in your lightning racer, Max?"

"Of course."

The lecture room was also a complete mess: the previous day the ceiling of the library above had collapsed; students and technicians were busy taking the books off the pile of shelves and plaster.

"I feel exactly the same myself sometimes," said Onno.

In the corridor a lady shouted to him through an open door that Floris had phoned him from Dwingeloo; he had measured the HI66-recombination line at 1424.7 MHz.

"Thanks, Til."

Max gave them a guided tour, explained about the old instruments, and told Ada that all the matter in her body had actually been produced on stars; whereupon he took her hand and gallantly kissed it.

"As long as you don't think the same goes for my matter," said Onno, "because that was produced by my own dear mother."

In the computer room they were given an inquisitive nod by a slim, aristocratic gentleman of about seventy, with a balding skull and sharply etched features. Max seemed momentarily rather intimidated. That was the director, he told them as they went upstairs to the first floor—who had not only demonstrated that the Milky Way rotated, but also that it had a spiral structure.

In his office, with a view of the Botanical Garden, he told them about the research program that he himself was engaged in, the distribution of neutral hydrogen in the central part of the Milky Way, but Ada didn't understand a word of it. She looked at the orderly stacks of files on the shelves behind his desk and at the diagrams and formulae on the green chalkboard. It was a mystery to her that this was the same man who had just whisked her off—and she wondered whether she would ever be able to understand people. She listened to their conversation in silence.

Onno had inquired in a haughty tone whether in this building, where obviously everything went wrong, some doubt was perhaps being cast on God's creation. With an apologetic gesture, Max said that, unfortunately, they had known for the last three years that while there had been a beginning between fifteen and twenty billion years ago, it had been the result of a Big Bang: the explosion of a mathematical point with infinite density and an infinitely high temperature, from which not only all energy and matter, but also all space and time, derived. The echo of that explosion had been observed in 1964.

"So that before that sacrilegious Big Bang of yours there was nothing," said Onno.

"Exactly. No time, either."

"So nothing exploded."

"You could put it like that."

"So there was no Big Bang. There you are. The mocking laughter at that ridiculous theory will resound through astronomy for years. Don't listen to that idiot," said Onno to Ada. "Heaven and earth were created by God on Friday, April 1 in the year 4004 B.C., at a quarter past ten in the morning, and afterward he saw that it was good—or at least not bad for a beginner."

Max laughed. "You're capable of becoming a believer on purely logical grounds."

"Yes!" cried Onno ecstatically. "God is logic! Logic is God! Yes, I believe it—because it is absurd."

"Do you remember what you once told me about the 'paut' of the gods? About the god creator, who created himself from his creation?"

"I won't tell you anything anymore, because you'll always use it against me."

"Rid yourself of that fear of paradoxes. Shall I tell you what may be written on that disc of yours?"

"Now I'm really interested."

"What it says is: what is written here is illegible."

"Very good." Onno grinned. "Very good. Maybe it was written by Epimenides, who said that all Cretans are liars."

Ada's head was spinning. It was as though she were watching an intellectual fencing match: the masked fencers leaped back and forth with their glinting foils flashing between them, too quick to follow. How would she ever be able to keep up? Perhaps she didn't need to; perhaps it wasn't even required. Perhaps it had to remain their own private domain.

While Max phoned Floris in Dwingeloo about the most recent measurements, Onno went over to the window, put his hands in his pockets and said, half to himself, half to her: "This isn't a botanical garden at all, this is a
horus conclusus,
if you know what that is."

"I'm sorry, I've only been to the conservatory."

"The 'closed garden' where a unicorn lives. That's a kind of terrible wild animal that can only be caught by a virgin, after which it rests its head in her lap. In iconology that stands for the Immaculate Conception." He turned around, smiled at her, and said, "Be careful, my girl."

Everyone, herself included, obviously took it for granted that she would go with them to Amsterdam. When Max asked whether she needed to phone home, she said, "Of course not."

"Won't your parents be expecting you for supper?"

"Perhaps."

His car was waiting in the forecourt. The seats were folded forward, and she had to squeeze in sideways behind the two seats as best she could. A strong wind had come up, and after the drums of punch cards had been delivered to the Computer Institute, they drove out of town. On the way Onno asked cautiously whether it would be a problem having to go to Westerbork eventually when the mirrors were ready.

"Is it near the old transit camp?"

"It's on the site of the camp," said Max, feeling a stiffening in his cheeks. "They're housing Moluccans there now."

"When will they be finished?"

"Probably at the end of next year."

Onno nodded.