Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

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 his 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.