The Discovery of Heaven
Page 25
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."
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!"