The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

Kloosterboer folded his arms. "Let's understand each other from the start, Mr. Delius. If there were any point, we would go ahead."

  Max and Sophia looked at each other for a moment.

  "And now?" asked Sophia. "Chemotherapy, radiotherapy?"

  "Not that, either."

  "And pain-killers?" asked Max. "I'd be interested to know if you are also giving her pain-killers?" He saw that Kloosterboer did not know what to make of that question, because there was not an immediate answer. "I mean, if you aren't giving her any pain-killers, what actually is your position ? How can you reconcile the two things?"

  The doctor's face stiffened. "I can quite understand your views, and your situation, but I cannot discuss the matter with you at all. You must understand my position, too."

  "We do," said Sophia, and stood up.

  Kloosterboer rolled his chair back. "I'll take you to your daughter's room."

  "Don't bother. We'll find the way."

  As they walked along the corridors, Max said that Kloosterboer was obviously a Christian fundamentalist, however much a man of the world he looked.

  "Perhaps he's just young," suggested Sophia, "and frightened for his career."

  Yes, of course. She knew the medical world better than he did. Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at the upright, graying abbess at his side, of whom he still understood nothing. She was starting to look more and more like her mother. So they would now finally have to talk about it.

  He slowed down. "Tell me, Sophia, what do you think should happen now?"

  "Ada's husband must decide."

  He shook his head. "Ada's mother must decide. Anyway, I remember that Onno wrote as much to you."

  "What did he write, then?"

  "That Ada is your flesh and blood, and that you have the last word if decisions have to be made about her. He can't have meant anything but a situation of the kind that we have now."

  She stopped and looked him straight in the eye. "They intend to let her die slowly, but I think a stop should be put to it. Very positively—with a morphine injection. But we shouldn't bank on that. At most there will be a staff meeting about this, or they will withdraw—"

  "Withdraw?"

  "Stop feeding her. But they won't do that, because what happens then is terrible for the staff to see. She will slowly dehydrate, until she's just skin and bone."

  Max shuddered. "In other words," he said, "she must be taken away from here, to a more enlightened hospital, where they are not so frightened that it will get into the papers. In Amsterdam."

  "If they let her go at least, if they don't make it a matter of honor. Don't talk to me about hospitals. Anyway, she doesn't even have to go to a hospital. Any reasonable GP will do it—anyone knows that, the public prosecutors too, but no one talks about it."

  He looked at her. "Do you mean that we should simply take her to the castle?"

  "Of course not," she said immediately. "With Quinten . . ."

  "And what shall we do with him? Should he know what's going on?"

  Sophia looked at him uncertainly. "What's the point of burdening him with that?"

  In the lounge, patients and nurses were watching a broadcast of a chess game; someone showed them the ward where Ada was. Max no longer remembered when he had last visited her, perhaps four or five years ago, perhaps even longer—but what he now saw, by the window, hidden behind a screen, he saw for the first time. He stiffened.

  In the whiter-than-white, snowy light her head reminded him of a cut-open coconut that, years ago, when he was still in Amsterdam, he had once forgotten to throw away and which was still in the dish on his return from holiday. Her stubbly hair had gone gray, deathly gray, framing her gaunt, blotchy face, her nostrils were red and inflamed by the feeding tube. One could scarcely see any longer that there was a body under the sheets. Her desiccated white hands were like a bird's claws; the tips of all her fingers were swaddled in bandages.

  "You never told me about this," he said in dismay.

  "You never asked."

  He found himself thinking that a stop should be put to this at once—in the next five minutes. He looked at the tarnished remains in the iron bed, while yellowing images rushed through his memory like autumn leaves blowing past: in her parents' house in the upstairs room, the cello between her legs, her fingertips on the strings, naked and cross-legged opposite him on his bed, her legs around his hips in the warm, nocturnal sea. . . . With ribs heaving, he turned away and looked out of the window at the blinding snow, with the sun shining on it.

  He had never been so absorbed by his work as in the past eighteen months. In the mornings, when he was not yet fully awake but was no longer asleep, precisely on the borderline, MQ 3412 immediately appeared in his brain—but in the shape of a chaotic tangle of data, diagrams, spectrums, radio maps, satellite X-ray photographs, absurd interpretations, whimsical fantasies, all hopelessly confused and entangled, like a ball of wool that the cat had been playing with and, moreover, surrounded by a halo of doom: it was all wrong, he was on completely the wrong track, it was pointless nonsense.

  However, he'd gradually come to understand that waking depression in himself. It had begun when he had got into the habit of drinking a bottle of wine every evening—recently sometimes even two—and when he went to sleep he was on the contrary convinced that he was on the threshold of a earth-shattering discovery. Over the years he had learned not to take any notice of all this. By the time he had cracked the joints of his thumbs and thrown off the blankets, the worst of the gloom had already receded.

  The same thing happened on Monday, March 11, 1985. That morning the first data from the VLBI, Very Long Baseline Interferometry, the telescope as large as the whole world, were due in. A number of young astronomers from Leiden had spent the night watching in Westerbork with the technicians; but he himself did not even call. At breakfast he first leafed through the morning paper, in a bad mood. Chernenko was dead; within four hours the Central Committee in the Kremlin had chosen a successor, a certain Gorbachev, but of course he wouldn't change anything, either. Nothing would ever change; the Cold War was forever. The remnants of a dream were still haunting him—an image of Ada: her organs were floating in the air outside her body, like in certain kinds of cross-sectional diagrams of the inside of engines, so that at the same time it looked like a still photograph of an explosion.

  "I'm going to have dinner at Tsjallingtsje's tonight," he said, getting up with a slight groan.

  "Will you be coming home?" asked Sophia.

  "Maybe, maybe not," he said. "I'll see." He ran one hand over Quinten's shoulders and said: "Do your best."

  As he drove through the hazy spring morning to Westerbork, he listened to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, conducted by Bohm. It was still indestructibly beautiful, but he did know every note of it, as by now he did of almost all music.

  Once he was in the busy terminal his depression lifted and he looked with the same curiosity at the computer printout that Floris gave him as he would have when he was half his age—except that there were not yet any computer printouts then. As far as his enthusiasm was concerned, it was as though time had stood still. On the other hand, one thing that was governed by the passing of time was the quasar—and he saw at first glance that something was completely wrong.

  "Good luck," said Floris sarcastically. "You might just as well throw it in the wastepaper basket."

  Because Quinten had discovered the historioscope at the age of twelve, Max had once sketched the portrait of a quasar for him: a mysterious, superheavy object at the limits of the observable universe that emitted as much energy as a thousand galaxies of 100 billion stars each, while the quasi-star was much smaller than even one galaxy. Probably there was a black hole in it, the most monstrous of all celestial phenomena. The most distant known quasar, OQ 172, was over 15 billion light years away; so that you could see from it what the universe was like 5 billion years after Big Bang, when it was only a quarter of the size it was now. A contemporary of h
is from Leiden— who now worked at Mount Palomar in California—had discovered that distance in four-dimensional space-time through the red shift in the hydrogen lines in the optical spectrum. When a jet plane approached, Max had explained to Quinten, the sound of its engines became higher, and after it passed over you, it became lower: first it retracted its sound waves a little, making them shorter, and afterward it stretched them, making them longer. The fact that the strongest spectrum line of OQ 172 had moved a long way from ultraviolet in the direction of the longer wavelengths of red, into the middle of the visible spectrum, meant that the thing was moving away in the expanding universe at over 90 percent of the speed of light.

  Quinten had shown only moderate interest—in the last analysis, Max reflected, he was still a real arts man, just like his father. Moreover, MQ 3412 refused to conform to the pattern of the almost two thousand quasars now known. And the VLBI now turned out to have a serious teething problem, probably a defect in the incredibly sensitive communications between the hundreds of mirrors in scores of countries on different continents; or perhaps there was something wrong with an atomic clock somewhere, so that the things had not been put into the computer with absolute synchronicity. Max looked at the calculations as though at an unbelievable juggling trick for which one would actually prefer not to know the explanation. This time MQ 3412 had decided to move at infinite speed, as appeared from the desolate radio spectrum.

  "In other words," said Max "our tachyonic friend is at all points on a line simultaneously with an energy of zero."

  "A. Einstein would have raised his eyebrows at that," said Floris.

  Max spent the rest of the day in meetings, telephoning as far as Australia, reading and sending faxes and discussing things with the engineers. One of them suggested that the mistake might be theirs. Gas was being extracted from the earth beneath Westerbork, which may have caused minute subsidences, so that the mirrors were no longer absolutely perpendicular; a few months ago a small earthquake had been recorded near Assen, with a force of 2.8 on the Richter scale. It was decided to recalibrate everything and to contact the gas board in Groningen. It struck Max as remarkable that an event deep in the earth, in the perm, might have disturbed one's vision of the edge of the universe.

  Toward evening he withdrew into his little office in order to look at the data at his leisure, but he couldn't make head or tail of them. It was though a monkey at a typewriter had tried to write a sonnet. But he was also reminded of a revolutionary experiment that had been conducted three years before in Paris. It related to a fundamental conversation in the 1930s between Einstein and Bohr—that is, between the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, which had never gotten along very well.

  Einstein's putative experiment was tested in 1982, and it turned out that Bohr was right. Even then there seemed to be instantaneous, infinitely fast signals—that is, faster than light; since no one doubted that this was impossible, it indicated something in reality that no one had foreseen. Could it be connected with this? But how? Maybe the solution would only come with the VLBI in space, dish aerials on satellites, enabling a telescope to be built with a cross-section of 62,000 miles—but that would take ten years, and by that time he would probably have retired.

  Around him there were tables, cases, and shelves overloaded with piles of papers; as usual with his things, though, the order among them was immediately visible. One wall was taken up by a green blackboard, on which formulas and diagrams were written in different-colored chalks—not scribbled down higgledy-piggledy in brilliant frenzy, with carelessly erased sections, but in a harmonious composition, as in a work of art.

  He put the papers into a folder, rested his chin on his hands, and looked out the open window. On every side his view was blocked by the giant black skeleton of a mirror. They were calibrating. In the complete silence he heard at short intervals the soft hum of the mechanism with which the rotation of the earth on its axis was being compensated, in order to keep the observed object in focus. What kind of sinister irony was it that under the former Westerbork concentration camp it turned out that they were extracting gas?

  Dusk was already falling, but in the distance visitors were still walking around the site—not looking at the telescopes, but at something that was no longer there. If those directly involved had wanted nothing more to do with the camp, in the new Jewish generation voices had recently been raised in favor of restoring it to its original state. The barrier was back in its old place and a watchtower had been restored by the buffers. There had even been a case made for ousting the observatory. If they really persisted in this, he would write a letter to the editor of the New Israel Weekly, extol the synthesis radio telescope as a "Jewish observatory," and argue that it could only be destroyed if after the complete restoration of Westerbork camp the ninety-three trains also appeared at the Boulevard des Miseres, to bring the people back from the gas chambers.

  49

  The Westerbork

  Over the years Max's relationship with Tsjallingtsje had assumed the calm character of a marriage. While she still cried out "Oh God!" when she came, the stationer's above which she had lived had been taken over by a large publishing firm, which needed her rooms for storing cut-price English art books. He had arranged for her to move into a rustic Hansel-and-Gretel-type house on the edge of the village of Westerbork, where a shy electronics engineer from Dwingeloo had entertained young farmhands until he retired.

  At the same time, Max had had the end of Groot Rechteren in mind and the moment when Quinten would leave home, after which Sophia and he would go their separate ways. At the bottom of the overgrown garden a wooden shed took up the whole width, was in fact much too large for this spot, but it could be turned into a studio for him; even now he sometimes sat there when he wanted to work undisturbed. He had never talked to Tsjallingtsje about it, nor had he suggested anything in that direction; but because she knew that he had promised to bring up the child of his friend, who, moreover, had disappeared four years ago, she of course knew that a new situation would arise afterward.

  In Dwingeloo she had heard about the fiasco with the VLBI, and obviously to console him, she set the table for a special meal; there was even champagne in a cooler. She was wearing a bright red ankle-length robe, making her look even bigger, and although she was the same size as he was, she embraced him like a larger person embracing a smaller one: she with her arms around his neck, he with his hands on her high hips, which immediately resulted in a change in his chemical balance.

  "At least you know what becomes a disillusioned researcher," he said, taking off his coat. He sank onto the sofa and with a glass of pink champagne in his hand he told her about the worldwide astronomical debacle, which had cost hundreds of thousands of guilders, perhaps millions. "In fact isn't it wonderful that it's possible? Thousands of toddlers' playrooms could have been built, and if the experiment had succeeded, it would still have been no good to anyone. The fact that that's still possible, reconciles me a little with mankind. It means that Homo sapiens still hasn't grown out of his curious childhood. Only when shortsightedness finally takes over and the importance of things is seen as a function of their proximity will things be really going the wrong way. Listen to me: I'm speaking as though I'm writing."

  "You mean that people should look farther than their nose is long."

  "In my case, that's actually scarcely possible."

  Perhaps it was the way she burst out laughing that attracted him to her. He couldn't remember ever seeing Sophia laugh so genuinely, or Ada; but Tsjallingstje's stern face was always ready to change into something completely different from one moment to the next, as though a light were switched on in a dark room. Perhaps a talent for laughter was true wit, more so than the ability for intellectual tours de force.

  While she was busy in the kitchen, he looked down at the evening paper, which was lying next to him. He read the headlines about the changes in Moscow. There, too, it was obviously a question of something like a red shif
t—or rather the reverse, a violent political shift: something was approaching humanity at great speed, since the expansion of the political universe had suddenly changed into contraction. He felt tired. He put his legs on the sofa, and when he closed his eyes for a moment he again saw the absurd measurement results. Perhaps it was because of the champagne, but for some reason he suddenly had the feeling there was nevertheless a meaning hidden in them.

  At the table, too, it struck him that Tsjallingtsje had spent over her budget. There were oysters, with which they finished the champagne; when she then came out of the kitchen with venison steak and gave him a bottle of Volnay to uncork, he was certain that something else was going on.

  "Out with it, Tsjal," he said, clinking glasses with her. "What is it? Have I forgotten a date?"

  She looked at him over her glass. She gulped; he could see that it was an effort for her to say what she wanted to say.

  "I hope you won't get angry with me, Max, but I'd really like there to be a date that we wouldn't forget."

  "You're talking in riddles."

  "I want a child by you."

  He looked back at her without moving. The words ricocheted through his head like a burning arrow that had flown in through an open window. He had suspected previously that this was on her mind, but he hadn't expected that she would come out with it so directly and with such determination. Even before he knew what his reaction was to the statement, he got up and knelt down beside her, his arms around her waist and his face hidden in her lap. Tsjallingtsje began to cry. She took his left hand and pressed her lips to the palm, while she ran her other hand through his thick, graying hair. Max's head was spinning. Of course! That's what must happen! It was as though in the tumult a voice was constantly saying "Everything will be put right. Everything will be put right." He wanted to think, create some kind of clarity in himself. What he would most like to do would be to go into the garden through the open doors; but he couldn't simply abandon the festive meal.