The Discovery of Heaven (42 page)

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.