Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

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.

He looked up. "Tell me honestly. Are you pregnant?"

"Of course not, what do you take me for? Do you think I'm blackmailing you? But I want a child of yours, even if you don't want one. I'm thirty-six, and every year it gets more and more critical, as you may know. If I wait a couple more years, all I'll be capable of having are Down's syndrome children."

"Oh, I know a very nice mongol, though." Because the hard coconut mat was beginning to hurt his knees, he sat on his haunches. "So it's a child with me or without me there, but in any case a child."

"Yes."

"And if I hadn't wanted to, what then? Would you have found someone else?"

She looked down. "I don't know. You mustn't ask me a thing like that."

"And you realize of course that I'll be seventy when your child is eighteen?"

"No more ideal father than a grandfather — everybody knows that."

"Well, that's settled then." He got up, put his arms around her large body, and kissed her. "Have your coil taken out tomorrow. Then I expect, of course, you'll want to get married."

"I couldn't care less. I don't have to."

"And your father, the vicar?"

"If you ask me, he hasn't believed in God for a long time."

"What kind of world are we living in?" cried Max, with a feeling that he was quoting Onno's tone.

He emptied his glass in one gulp, the same way that one drinks water, then poured another one for himself. While they ate they discussed the consequences of their decision. If everything went well, Quinten would take his university entrance exam next year and perhaps go somewhere to study, although he hadn't given any indication of such an intention; at the same time their stay at the castle would come to an end. Sophia hadn't said either what she intended to do afterward, but from what he knew of her, she'd known for a long time what she was going to do.

"Don't drink so much," said Tsjallingtsje, putting a fresh bottle on the table.

"Of course I drink a lot. In fact I intend to drink far too much this evening. Do you realize that I will be a father for the first time if we succeed?" He rubbed his face with both hands. Suddenly the world had changed. All those seventeen years he had spent with Sophia and Quinten suddenly seemed to have blown away like a sigh of wind. Everything began anew, but now in an honest, unambiguous way. He got up and tottered slightly.

"Don't you want some coffee?"

"Excuse me, but I have to be alone for a moment. I'm going to the shed."

"To the shed now? You're drunk, Max. Why don't you go and sit upstairs?"

"Now, leave me alone."

He gave her a kiss on the forehead, opened the conservatory doors, and went into the garden with the bottle and his glass. Night had fallen; above the trees the moon was in its third quarter. Halfway down the winding path between the bushes, he rested the bottom of the bottle for a moment on the gigantic erratic stone, which had worked its way out of the earth there and which came up to his waist; when he had controlled himself again, he turned on the unshaded light in the shed and sank into the worn wickerwork chair with a sigh. He left the door open. Once, the large space had been used for storage of some kind or as a workplace; perhaps a carpenter had once lived in Tsjallingtsje's house. At head height there were a couple of small windows.

He poured himself another glass and was amazed at the mysterious-ness of existence. It was as if Tsjallingtsje's six words that she wanted a child of his had given his existence a new impetus, like a crack of the whip gave to a spinning top when he was a child. Since he had lived with Quinten and Sophia at Groot Rechteren in Onno's service, his personal life had been in past perspective; it was now as though she had turned him around 180 degrees, so that he was suddenly facing the future— where although he couldn't make out anything concrete, since it didn't yet exist, there was nevertheless something like a dark space-time full of teeming possibilities.

At a stroke she had put an end to the tangled situation in which he had lived for seventeen years. Like a baby in a playpen. Quinten's playpen must still be somewhere in the storage room, folded up, like a dismantled bed. It was as though the prospect of a child, which would undoubtedly be his, now finally made Quinten Onno's son. In the paper he had read that a short while ago it had become possible to determine paternity unambiguously by means of DNA testing, but his former fears had long since receded. In appearance Quinten didn't look like either of them, only like Ada, as she had once been; and the arts-oriented nature of his interests pointed much more in Onno's direction than in his. The fact that music meant little to him simply confirmed that; he didn't even have a hi-fi in his room. Perhaps the incomprehensible boy didn't resemble anybody who had ever lived.

When the motionless, gradually disintegrating horror in the hospital bed appeared before him, he rubbed both hands over his face, as though the image were sticking to his skin. He took a swig and had the feeling that he would be capable of putting an end to the existence of that living dead person with his own hands. But how? With a knife? And why not with a knife? Why, he wondered would a cry of horror go up in the world if it turned out that in some hospital other terminal patients were taken to the cellar, where they were beheaded by guillotine? Or where they were given a shot to the back of the head in a courtyard? Simply because of the association with executions? Or because of that it wouldn't become clear that killing was killing and not anything else, such as "falling asleep"?

Perhaps it was ultimately all a question of words. Endlosung was what the Germans had called the mass murder of Jews. What was more beautiful than the "final solution" of something, the definitive result, the decisive result of the division of zero? It was almost something like the physicists' Theory of Everything. With half-closed eyes he looked at the rusty red in his glass and thought of Onno. He'd like to talk to him about that — language as a way of disguising reality. Probably Onno would dismiss it as a hackneyed topic, over which only adolescents racked their brains, but then go on to say a few unexpected things about it. Where was Onno? What was he doing at this moment? Was he perhaps also thinking of Max? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Perhaps he'd banished him completely from his consciousness. Not just him but Quinten, Ada, and Sophia as well. Perhaps he wasn't even alive anymore. Perhaps he'd crawled into a cave somewhere on Crete, where his bones would be found in fifty years' time, and would be initially taken for those of the writer of the Phaistos disc, until it was discovered by using the C14 method that this could only be a Dutch politician, probably of Calvinist origin.