Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

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..