Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

Proctor was driven to distraction by this measure. Up to now it had seemed that the domestic upheavals had actually passed him by, of course because his mind was occupied with his great book on Vondel's Lucifer; but now he suddenly came charging down the stairs one afternoon with an ax and, with a roar, began hacking at the new partition door. It took Clara, Sophia, and Selma an hour to pacify the shuddering translator somewhat. He wasn't going to be forced to use the back door, he kept on repeating as he drank a glass of water; he'd been using the front door for twenty years, and a brute like that needn't imagine that he could direct him to the back door. He wasn't staying here one day longer!

Everyone expected a dreadful response from Korvinus, but he reacted with astonishing restraint; the same day he had the door repaired and didn't say another word about it. According to Max, the explanation was that he saw himself getting closer to his goal step by step and had to do less and less in order to undermine their morale; it was enough to turn off the electricity or the water without warning from time to time. Quinten assumed that he was also inhibited somewhat by the friendship between Arend Proctor and his son Evert, who were inseparable.

"The two of them also smashed up my hut," he said.

"How do you know it was them?" asked Sophia.

Quinten shrugged his shoulders. "I don't, but it was."

Although Marius Proctor had announced that he wasn't staying a day longer, he did finally stay: those blows with the ax had obviously sapped his willpower. He left only after the police had rung his bell on the terrace on New Year's night. There had been a serious accident. After having drunk too much in a disco, the two boys had stolen a car, skidded on an icy country road, lost control going around a bend, and crashed into a tree. Evert Korvinus, who was at the wheel, had been very badly injured but might perhaps survive. Arend Proctor was dead.

The news shook Groot Rechteren to its psychic foundations. For the whole of New Year's Day, Sophia and Selma supported Marius and Clara, neither of whom could handle their despair. Max had been conscious from an early age of the inescapable fact that anything could happen at any moment, but even he was beside himself for the whole day: it suddenly brought back the memory of another car accident, seventeen years ago. There was no sign of Korvinus. His wife — who suddenly turned out to be called Elsa— tried to make contact with Arend's parents via Sophia; but Proctor shouted at Clara that he would kill her if she spoke to the woman. Arend was dead, but her own son was alive, and, what's more, she had a second son! Quinten heard him screaming, with his voice breaking, that life was a dung heap, that there was no point to it all, that existence was one senseless mess!

As he stood listening in the hallway, Quinten wondered how one could say that. Perhaps you only said such things when someone died, or when you yourself died; but was it right or, on the contrary, quite wrong? Was there an ultimate truth in death or in life? If you found life absurd, shouldn't you find death precisely meaningful? It seemed as though Proctor were confusing everything. If he found Arend's death senseless, then surely he should find life meaningful! Anyway, what did it matter that Arend was dead? Why was he screaming like that? Perhaps it depended on the kind of person you were. His own father, from whom he had heard nothing for three years, had perhaps understood just as little of what it was all about. He himself was reminded of his mother's accident, and of the death of Aunt Helga, but apart from that, what had happened left him unmoved: they shouldn't have destroyed his hut.

That night he couldn't sleep with all the wailing going on above his head. He got out of bed and went to the window. The frozen moat lay beneath the icy light of the stars. Suddenly the roaring and commotion in Proctor's study assumed absurd proportions; a little while later he saw papers fluttering past his window, followed by umbrellas and still more papers, sometimes whole packs of them, which disintegrated in the air.

Once the Proctors had left, a week after Arend's funeral, Nederkoorn expanded into their flat. From then on Max's and Theo's flats were sandwiched between those of the rabble as if between the jaws of a serpent. But Max and Sophia agreed that out of solidarity with Theo and Selma, they could no longer go. Evert Korvinus, it transpired, had a lesion of the spinal cord and was paralyzed from the waist down and for the rest of his life would be confined to a wheelchair, Sophia heard from his mother. The demolition contractor would therefore be a little quieter for a while and would not try to sour the last year of their protected tenancy — if only because Elsa Korvinus had now, in addition, broken the rule of silence.

Max, completely absorbed by his work on quasar MQ 3412, which turned out to be behaving in an increasingly mysterious way, looked forward to the prospect of a year of peace and quiet — but that was not granted him. For months Ada's condition had been gradually deteriorating. First she had problems with her digestion; then she developed a chronic pelvic infection, as a result of her bladder catheter. But on an arctic day in February, when the oil stoves in Groot Rechteren could not warm their rooms even at the highest setting, Sophia came back from Emmen with much more serious news. She had gone to the director to talk about the mold in Ada's mouth; she had been told that Ada would probably shortly have to be transferred to the hospital. Hemorrhages had begun occurring even between her monthly periods, and according to the doctor in charge, it looked as though she had cancer of the womb.

While she was telling him this, her face again assumed that masklike expression that Max knew so well. The fact that Ada — that is, her poor body — had gone on having her periods every month all through those seventeen years shocked him more than the news of her illness. The latter, on the contrary, was something hopeful: the upbeat toward the end of her absurd existence.

He looked at Sophia in silence. After a little while he asked: "Do you suppose this is the moment of truth?"

Since Onno and he had embarked on their crazy campaign, at the time of Ada's cesarean operation, they had never talked about euthanasia again. He had never once spoken to Sophia about it, although it of course preoccupied her, too.

She did not reply, but he could tell from her eyes that she felt the same way.

Ten days later, in the car on the way to Hoogeveen hospital, they did not discuss it, either. When he closed the door and looked about him in the crunching snow, it amazed him that everything here was just the same as that evening of the accident, that calamitous February 27 when Onno and he had celebrated their common conception in Dwingeloo. Suddenly he also remembered the taxi driver who had refused to take him to Leiden, where Sophia had become a widow. The fact that Ada had now been admitted here for the second time gave him the sense of things having come full circle — and full circles always signaled radical changes. He was happy that he had made a date with Tsjallingtsje for that evening.

Kloosterboer, the doctor who had invited Sophia to come, confirmed the diagnosis. They sat next to each other facing his desk and looked at the young gynecologist, who with his short blond hair and bright-blue eyes looked more like a tennis coach.

"How far has it gone?" asked Sophia.

He nodded. "It's spread. There's no point in operating anymore."

"Well, well," said Max.

The doctor focused his eyes on him. "How do you mean?"

"Of course you're not going to operate on a woman who has been lying in a coma for seventeen years and living like a vegetable. Even if there was any point, there would still be no point."