The Discovery of Heaven (63 page)

Quinten shivered for a moment when he suddenly saw the long line of large, black limousines all waiting outside. Across the street neighbors with their arms folded watched who came out of the mansion; the police had also appeared. Two motorcycle policemen at the head of the cortege, one boot on the road, looked coolly ahead with engines running as if they owned death.

The coffin was slid into the first car, the flowers and wreaths into the following two cars. On the instructions of a balding man with papers in his hands who was leaping back and forth, Quinten was allotted his place in the third following car, on a folding chair opposite Sophia, Diederic's son Hans, now ambassador in Liberia, and Hadewych; Onno had sat next to the chauffeur. They drove to Wassenaar at an otherworldly pace, with saluting policemen at every junction. At a church in the center of the village, where spectators were kept at a distance by crowd barriers, there were many large cars already parked; except for a television news team, photographers, chauffeurs, and large numbers of police, there were in fact few people to be seen. Organ music sounded from the open doors, but shortly afterward stopped.

When Quinten went inside, he was overwhelmed by the fullness and at the same time silence. Everyone in the packed church had stood up. The first two rows were empty; as he went to the pew the man with the papers directed them to, in the middle of the second row he saw the gray-haired queen standing in the middle of the third row. Not only had she turned her gaze on him, it was as though everyone were looking at him; but he had gradually gotten used to the fact that the whole world found him beautiful.

With the queen just behind him and Granny To just in front in her wheelchair, he heard the vicar and the psalms and songs, but he didn't listen. He hadn't thought about it for quite some time, but the queen was of course not his mother, because not only was she not sleeping, she was also far too old; apart from that, she had not given any sign of recognition. On one side of him sat Granny Sophia, on the other side Rudy from Rotterdam, the same age as himself. With one finger Rudy kept an elastic band pressed against his thigh which he kept stretching and letting go of with his other hand—until Paula, his mother, suddenly took it from him.

When it was finally over and he was walking behind the coffin between Onno and Sophia, along a narrow path between the graves, Quinten suddenly asked:

"Daddy?"

"Yes?"

"Why wasn't Mommy in that big advertisement in the paper?"

Onno looked at him and didn't know immediately what to answer. He had thought long and hard about it and talked to Helga and Dol about it. Both of them thought that Ada should be included, even if she was unreachable; but in his view she was not "unreachable," because that implied the possibility of her being reached, and that simply didn't exist. Could you say of a vegetable that it was "unreachable"? His sister had called that "playing with words," but he had retorted that he obviously had a different view of both words and play. Only his mother-in-law had agreed with him; no one had thought of Quinten. Flustered, Onno glanced at Sophia. It was the second time in his life that Quinten had said something about Ada.

"We mustn't disturb Mama at all." He heard it coming from his own mouth, realizing at once that it contradicted his real motive.

"Will she wake up otherwise?"

Onno looked at Sophia, appealing for help.

"No, darling," she said. "She can't do that ever again."

Quinten nodded without saying anything.

The old village cemetery was far too small to fit everybody. When they stood in a semicircle around the grave, the queen now hand in hand with Granny To, the stationary line still wound its way back along the paths into the church. Many people were carrying bouquets—still more flowers: why flowers, of all things? Wouldn't stones be far better? While the prime minister outlined the inestimable services the deceased had rendered to the country, Quinten looked at the coffin with his hand in Onno's. It was flanked by the six men in black; against the wall of the cemetery, four ancient gentlemen stood in line, each with a colored ribbon in his buttonhole. Between the pine branches he saw the darkness of the hole into which Granddad would soon disappear forever.

"Daddy?" he whispered, when the prime minister had finished. He looked up: only then did he see that Onno's cheeks were covered in tears. He did not dare ask anything else, but Onno said in a hoarse voice:

"Yes?"

"I'd really like to see Mama."

Onno closed his eyes and nodded in silence.

At the age of four he had first said something about his mother; now he was almost twice as old. He did not even know anything about the accident; he also appeared to have forgotten that Ada's photograph was on the mantelpiece—no one had ever seen him looking at it. Everyone agreed that he should only go to see his mother accompanied by his father. A week later Onno got Mrs. Siliakus to cancel an appointment with Philips Laboratories; then she called the nursing home and on behalf of the minister of state requested that the drip feed be removed from Ada's nose temporarily the following afternoon. Although he still had very little time, he picked up Quinten from the castle, after which they drove at a hundred miles an hour down the provincial highway to Emmen. He still had a discussion with the management of the gas union in Groingen on his schedule; that evening he had to attend a state banquet in The Hague in honor of an African president whose name he had forgotten—without Helga, because concubines were not welcome at court.

They sat together on the backseat, but they still said nothing about Ada. When Onno asked what he had been up to, Quinten said that he had recently been in Theo Kern's studio. The sculptor had been working on some memorial stone or other; the letters that were supposed to go on it, he carved not from left to right, as you would think, but from right to left; he said that it was easier: he held the chisel in his left hand and the hammer in his right, so it was easier to work from right to left.

Quinten demonstrated and asked: "Could that be connected with the fact that people used to write from right to left? Because most people are right-handed?"

Onno opened his eyes wide for a moment and sighed deeply. "Yes, Quinten," he said. "Yes, that's probably a lot to do with it. From a political point of view too."

"I thought so."

"And who told you that people used to write from right to left?"

"Mr. Spier."

Onno suddenly had the feeling that one day he might be able to learn something from his son. Then he fell silent when he thought of the fact that he was contributing scarcely anything to his upbringing—even less than someone like Mr. Spier and the other residents of the castle. Of course, he could again resolve to devote more time to him, but again nothing would come of it.

When they were approaching Emmen, the driver looked in his mirror and said: "The police are after us."

Onno turned around. It was a small patrol car with a large light.

"Faster," he said.

"But, Minister . . ."

"Faster! That's an order."

The driver accelerated to a hundred and twenty. Behind them a siren began wailing, and at the entrance to Joy Court, the police car cut across them, as though it had overtaken them. Two excited policemen leapt out and a moment later realized who they were dealing with.

"Was that
you,
Mr. Quist?" said one of them flabbergasted.

"I wasn't sure you were genuine," said Onno. "I thought it might be a kidnap attack, here, with all those Moluccans and those train hijackings. . ."

"Oh, is that what it was," said the policeman, though with a rather suspicious look in his eyes. "Of course, excuse us, that changes matters."

"Doesn't matter, officers," said Onno magnanimously. "I expect you enjoyed the burn-up?"

"In one way, yes. But it was quite dangerous."

When they went inside, Onno said to Quinten: "That could have become very unpleasant for me."

Quinten was trembling a little with tension: that he would be taken to see his mother so suddenly was something that he hadn't expected. After that chase, the wheelchairs in the brick-lined hall seemed to be going even slower than before. The administrator of the hospital stood waiting for them, but Onno indicated that he preferred to be left alone; he knew the way.

The large elevator took them upstairs, and with his hand on the door handle he said: "You needn't be afraid."

Quinten saw his mother. There she was: exactly there in that place in the world, and nowhere else. Her black hair had been cut short. He stepped across the threshold and looked at the motionless sleeper—only the sheet moved slowly up and down. She was going a little gray around the ears.

After a while he asked: "Can Mama really not wake up anymore?"

"No, Quinten, Mama was already asleep when you were born. She can't hear anymore or see anymore or feel anymore—nothing anymore."

"How can that be? She's not dead, like Granddad, is she? She's breathing."

"She's breathing, yes."

"Is she dreaming?"

"No one knows. The doctors don't think so."

"How do they know?"

"They say they can measure it, with special instruments. According to them you can't even say that Mommy's sleeping."

"What, then?"

Onno hesitated, but then said anyway: "She doesn't exist anymore."

"Although she's not dead?"

"Although she's not dead. That is," said Onno, pulling a face, "Mama is dead although she's not dead ... I mean, what's not dead isn't Mama. It's not
Mama
who's breathing."

"Who is it, then?"

Onno made a helpless gesture: "No one."

"That's not possible, is it?"

"It's absolutely impossible, but that's the way it is."

Quinten looked again at the face on the pillow. The eyes were closed; the black, semicircular eyelashes looked like certain paintbrushes, which in Theo Kern's place stood in a stone mug and which in turn looked like Egyptian palm columns, which he had seen in a book of Mr. Themaat's. Her nose was small and straight, at the side a little red and inflamed, the mouth closed, the lips dry. So could something be still more incomprehensible than his dead Granddad, last week in the coffin? In the bed lay a breathing, living woman—and they were going to see his mother, weren't they?

Why else had they driven here? So was it his mother or not? And if it was his mother and at the same time not his mother, who was he himself? His thoughts spun around—and suddenly it was as though, like with a dynamo, a soft glow lit up in his head when he suddenly saw the light of the Easter bonfire behind the trees: the towering bonfire of dried twigs collected by everyone in the area, which the baron lit every year on a field near Klein Rechteren and which hundreds of people came to look at.

"Mama's locked up," he said, thinking of Piet Keller for a moment.

Onno gave him a chair and sat down himself. He was suddenly bitterly aware that his family had been reunited for the first time: father, mother, and son, and no one else.

Quinten looked at him across the bed. "How did it happen, Daddy?"

Onno nodded and told him the whole story in broad outline. Almost the whole story—he left out the fact that Ada had first been Max's girlfriend. He told him about the friendship between himself and Max, how they had gone around together day and night, so that Quinten should understand why Max of all people had become his foster father. He told him about Ada's musical gifts, about her playing in one of the best orchestras in the world. When he came to their visit to Dwingeloo and the accident in the stormy night, the memory suddenly came back with full intensity, so he had to fight to control himself.

"After that you were in Mama's tummy for three months. That was very strange—it was even in the papers afterward."

Quinten looked at the white outlines of Ada's body under the sheet. "Was I in
that
tummy?"

"Yes."

Pensively, hands on knees, he rocked back and forth with his upper body. "But if I was in there, then I wasn't really in
Mama's
tummy anymore?"

Onno made a helpless gesture and did not know what to say. The paradox made everything true, so that nothing was true anymore. "Don't try to understand, Quinten. It's impossible to understand."

While everything looked so ordinary in the room, Quinten felt surrounded by mysteries, of which he himself was a part. It was as though in that body, inside, there was a boundless space.

"Can I touch her?"

"Of course."

He laid both his hands on hers and—for the first time since his birth— felt her warmth. Could she really not feel it? He looked at her face but it remained as motionless as that of a statue in Kern's studio.

"I'd so like to see her eyes, Daddy."

Her eyes! Onno sat up in bewilderment. He hadn't seen her eyes for eight years, either: should he fetch a nurse, or could he lift up an eyelid himself? With a feeling that what he was doing was right, he leaned over the bed, put the tip of his middle finger on an eyelid, and carefully raised it. Together they looked at the deep brown, almost black, eye that saw nothing— as little as the eye that seems to form in the sky in a total eclipse of the sun.

That evening Quinten could scarcely keep his eyes open at dinner, and immediately afterward he went to bed and found himself in the dream that was never to leave him .. .

Suddenly there are buildings everywhere: the universe has been transformed into a single architectural complex, without beginning or end. Nowhere is there a living being to be seen. Completely alone, but without a feeling of loneliness, he wanders around through a limitless series of rooms, colonnades, staircases, galleries, alcoves, pillars, footbridges, doorways, vaults, which extend in all directions—past pompous facades covered with statues and ornaments that reveal themselves as interior walls, through cellars that at the same time are lofts, across roofs that at the same time are like foundations. Because the interior has no exterior, no daylight can penetrate anywhere; but even though there are no lamps lit, it is not dark. And although he does not meet anyone and it is not clear either where he has come from or where he is going, wandering through the dimly lit world edifice fills him with happiness: all that material built, joined together, piled on top of itself, spreads out and envelops and encloses him like a bath filled with warm honey. Everywhere there is a total silence; only now and then is there a momentary swishing sound, which reminds him of the wingbeats of a large bird. Suddenly he is standing in front of a closed double door made of ancient wood, decorated with diamond-shaped patterns made of iron. It is bolted with a heavy, rusty sliding padlock, as large as a loaf. The menacing look of that device overwhelms him with dismay. It is as though the door is looking at him, and at the same moment he hears a hoarse voice saying:—
The center of the world.
The words sound calm, like when someone says "Nice day today"—but at the same time they flood him with such a sulfurous fear of death; he knows there is only one way of saving his life: waking up . ..