Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

Max could see through the open door that Tsjallingtsje had turned on the TV without switching on the light; the image flickered through the room as though there was a constant succession of small explosions. He had the feeling that he shouldn't really leave her alone now, but he wanted to think for a bit — or at least float on his thoughts, like on an air bed in the sea. At home Sophia was now also sitting alone in the room, just like Quinten was undoubtedly doing in his. Everyone was sitting alone in a room.

Recently he had been getting a little worried about Sophia: sometimes she sat motionless on a chair for hours, staring ahead of her with her hands in her lap; when he said anything about it, she started and looked at him as though she weren't aware of it herself. From his earlier vacations he remembered French and Italian families, in the evenings at long tables under pathetically twisted olive trees, themselves trees, with ancient great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers and all their branches of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nephews, nieces, and innumerable in-laws, down to infants at the breast, the tables covered with food and wine: he knew none of that. Only Onno's family tended a little in that direction. But those vacations were long ago, from the time of his fatal sports car. Since he had lived with Quinten and Sophia in the castle, they'd seldom gone abroad. Every other year, occasionally to the south of France or to Spain on a sudden impulse, when the weather gave them cause; anyway they could never have it better than at Groot Rechteren. He himself had no need for travel. Every year he had to go to a conference somewhere in the world for his work, and he was always glad when he was back.

Maybe that was also connected with the fact that he'd never been able to penetrate to the real peak of international astronomy. True, he knew everyone and everyone knew him and respected him for his work, but at the official closing dinner he never sat at the top table with the mayor or the minister, like his colleague Maarten Schmidt from CalTech.

As he refilled his glass — with one eye closed, in order not to fill a glass that wasn't there — he thought of the first time he had been to the south, a couple of years after the war, the overwhelming impression the light there had made on him, the color of the Mediterranean, which he had later seen again in the blue of Quinten's eyes.

In his student room in Leiden he sometimes saw those colors in his mind's eye, just after waking up but before he opened his eyes — when he opened them, then it was displaced by the gray Dutch morning. When he had been to the Riviera for the second time, he had thought of something to make up for that shock. When he woke up there, with his eyes still closed, he imagined that he was back in rainy Leiden and that the memory of the Mediterranean scene would be dispelled when he opened them. But then he opened them and it was really there! The sea the color of lapis lazuli, a blissful miracle! Instant displacement, faster than light! The sea… At night the sea was black — but he didn't want to think about that anymore. What was her name again? Marilyn. Her submachine gun. God and the invention of central perspective; the vanishing point, which since the fifteenth century nothing had been able to wriggle through, neither from one side nor from the other. She must be about forty by now, and of course she'd gone back to the United States long ago, to some provincial niche, where she had become a teacher of art history and the mother of three children, married to a well-behaved lawyer, who would have a fit if he heard about her revolutionary past.

Suddenly, in an even more distant past, he saw his mother's bedroom: the open drawers and cupboards, her clothes in a pile on the ground. That would never stop. As Onno was wont to say: "family is forever." Tsjal-lingtsje knew nothing about any of those things; perhaps he should tell her something about the grandmother and grandfather of the child that she wanted to have by him. What was it to be called? Octave? Octavia? After Onno's one-to-two ratio of the simplest perfect consonant interval? It seemed that nowadays you could determine sex during pregnancy by using an ultrasonic echo — in fact as new a principle as Quinten needed for his "historioscope." He looked at the house through the open door. The television was off; there was a light on upstairs in the bedroom. She was reading in bed, The Brothers Kammazov, which he had prescribed for her, and was waiting for him to come up.

Gradually, his head sank back and his eyes closed for a moment. He came to himself with a start and sighed deeply a couple of times. The smell of tarred wood. He poured himself another glass and sank back again; with his head against the chair he stared through the shed. It was though he could feel his life like a large object that he could put his arms around, like a dog that was much too large on his lap. Everything kept increasing, becoming more and more complicated, just as an acorn gave birth to an ethereal, symmetrical plant, which grew into a gnarled, twisted oak that retained nothing of its almost mathematical origin. And yet it had once had that form. How could one have been transformed into the other? And if that couldn't be explained, how could that transition have taken place? The problems, he considered, consisted not in what happened, because that was simply what happened, but in how what happened was conceivable. The universe had emerged from a homogenous origin — then how, in that case, could it look as it looked now, with a division of the solar systems as it was and no other way? Why hadn't anything remained homogenous? Why was the earth different from the sun? And the sun different from a quasar? How was it possible for a chair to be here and a rake there? How could he himself exist and be different from Onno? How could he now be thinking something different than he had just been thinking, and shortly something different from now? What had happened meanwhile? Or had the origin perhaps not been homogenous? Of course he knew the theories, on initial quantum fluctuations, but did they really explain the difference between him and Onno?

He looked at the planks of the shed. They resembled each other, but that's how they'd been made. Moreover, they weren't exactly the same; one of them was a little wider than the others, a little darker, a little lighter, and something appeared to be carved in one plank. He screwed up his eyes, but he couldn't see what it was. Because he felt he should know, he got out of his chair with a groan and went across to it. There were letters and figures, thin and almost illegible; he leaned against the plank with one hand and put the other over one eye.

Gideon Levi. 8.3.1943.

He put the other hand against the plank and dropped his head, exhausted. The shed came from Westerbork. Forty-two years ago a boy had carved that there with his pocketknife. After he had succumbed to the gas, someone had bought the hut and put it here in his garden. Through the small window, which he now also understood, he looked at the house. He wanted to tell Tsjallingtsje what had happened and that the shed must be demolished the very next day; but the light in the bedroom had gone out. Pale moonlight illuminated the front of the house. He looked around. The space was too small to have served as a barracks; perhaps it had been a school, or the sewing room. Perhaps his mother had been put to work here. Supporting himself on the planks, he found his way back to the chair, which he sank into with a flourish, and upturned the bottle over his glass.

After that he must have dropped off to sleep for a moment. He woke because it had become cold and damp in the shed; but he still did not stand up to shut the door. It was past twelve. He knew he was drunk and that he ought to go to bed, but he had the feeling that either beneath or beyond his drunkenness his brain was still working — perhaps less inhibitedly than when he was sober. With his eyes closed, rocking back and forth a little in his chair, he thought back to the computer printouts of that afternoon. Was the result really so absurd? He saw the sheets very clearly in front of him, as though he were really looking at them. And suddenly it was as though a great light were turned on in him: he understood everything!