Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"Do you want coffee, too?" asked Sophia, holding the whistling kettle under the tap.

He stood up in confusion. He had the feeling that nothing was what it had been anymore, that he'd already made a decision but he was not letting it sink in yet.

"No," he said. "Thank you.." He searched for words. "I have to go." She turned around. "What's the matter all of a sudden?" "I don't know… I have to think. I'm sorry, it's rude of me but…" he put out his hand. "Thank you for the meal. I'll call you tomorrow. I need to be alone for a while now." "Of course. As you like."

Sophia saw him to the door and he got into the Volkswagen, which he had finally bought. He drove off aimlessly. He wanted to think, but he only wanted to think when there was no one else around. No one can force themselves to have thoughts, but if they do have them it's possible to hold them back. The same applies to mental processes as to the metabolism. A line of Rilke's kept running through his head, like a dam holding back his thoughts:

You must change your life.

Night had already fallen, and on his way to Amsterdam, he took the turn-off to Noordwijk on impulse. He drove down the dark road through the dunes to the lighthouse, where he parked the car.

He turned off the engine and got out: the clunk with which he shut the door was like the period at the end of a sentence. The rush of the surf rose up like the first letter of the next sentence — audible silence, through which the beam of the lighthouse swept like something more silent than silence. There was a chilly sea breeze blowing; stars appeared and disappeared between black, scudding clouds. He breathed the salt air in deeply and went down the path to the deserted beach.

When he reached the sand, conditioned by countless summer days, he felt like taking his shoes off, but he turned up his collar, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and walked straight toward the water. Reaching the harder, damp sand left behind by high tide, he stopped for a moment and looked at the dark horizon, indicated by the cone of light that swept over it every few seconds at once slowly and quickly. Head bent, he began walking southward over the shells.

Cesarean section! It was obvious: he must sacrifice himself. He must bring up Ada's child — together with Sophia. Only by doing that could he really do something to atone for his previous act. Should it emerge, God forbid, in some way that the child was not Onno's but his, it would cause endless suffering and Onno would disappear from the picture, but at the same time he would understand what he, Max, had done — namely, that he had taken responsibility for the child at a time when he was not yet sure who the father was, and had taken the risk of organizing his life around a child that was not his. If it really did turn out not to be his, Onno would never know what had gone on. It would still not mean that nothing was wrong, because betrayal of the friendship could never be undone: the lie would be between them for all eternity — although only he would know that — but he would at least have done what he could. He suppressed the thought that the surgical delivery might perhaps go wrong, which would mean that everything was solved — but he suddenly found himself feeling that it might be a disappointment.

The cross-shaped beams of the lighthouse moved constantly across his face, like helicopter rotor blades that kept the earth airborne in the universe. He must put his proposal to Sophia tonight, he thought, or at the latest tomorrow; if she agreed, then he would immediately tell Onno. If Onno agreed too, then he must leave Amsterdam and his life there as quickly as possible, give up the tenancy of his flat and go to Drenthe, look for a house around Dwingeloo and Westerbork for himself and his strange family: with a wife who is not the mother but the grandmother of his child, who might not be his child. Or had he gone mad perhaps? Would he be able to stick to it? Yes, he would be able to stick to it, because of course he wasn't sacrificing himself completely — calling it "sacrifice" was just another lie, and Sophia would know that, but this was an opportunity of giving his clandestine relationship with her a lasting form; the way things had been up to now could of course not continue without becoming ridiculous.

What would she say? After all her own life had reached an impasse, too. What was she to do there in Leiden, with a bookshop that she could not handle, and which was bound to fail? On the other hand, when the child was fifteen, in fifteen years' time, she would already be sixty, as she'd said, but he himself would only be fifty. Only? He was shocked by the thought. Would he be fifty in fifteen years' time? But by then everything would have changed, and he would wait and see what happened.

He thought of an anecdote that Onno had once told him during one of their walks through the town. At the beginning of the last century the second-rate German dramatist Kotzebue, who was in the service of the czar, was murdered by the nationalist student activist Sand; the student was sentenced to death and beheaded by the executioner Braun. However, Braun subsequently felt such remorse at having executed such an exalted person that he built a hut from the planks of the scaffold, where the student activists secretly met to honor Sand, to kiss the bloodstains and sing anti-Semitic songs.

The shells crunched under his shoes and a kind of intoxication took hold of him — not from the wine but from the complete change that was suddenly imminent; he felt like someone deciding from one moment to the next to emigrate far, far way under threat of war: to a country designated not by pointing his finger in any particular direction, but simply by pointing vertically downward toward the nadir, to the Antipodes: as far away as possible, to where trees grew downward, people and animals were stuck to the earth upside down, and stones fell upward.

Again it was as if he wanted to hold back his thoughts as he did in bed when approaching orgasm, because that increased the pleasure fourfold. He suddenly felt the need to visit his foster mother. He had lived with her and her husband for ten years, until 1952, after which he had moved to a rented room, working his way through college in Leiden. At the end of the 1950s they had moved to Santpoort, where his foster mother became a nursery school teacher; his foster father, once a geography teacher, was already seriously ill. Gradually he had visited them less and less; first every few weeks, then every few months, later only at Christmas, and finally not even that. Every visit meant a return to the war, which weighed more and more heavily on him the further the war receded. He had not been in touch for years.

He peered at his watch — in a flash of light from the lighthouse he saw that it was nine-thirty. What time did she go to bed? It was about twenty miles, so he could at least give her a call.

A little farther on, at the edge of the dunes, stood Huis ter Duin, a large brightly lit seaside hotel with a Mediterranean air, as though it were on the Boulevard des Anglais in Nice instead of near a sleepy village on the cold North Sea coast. He toiled up through the loose sand, found a door to the terrace that was not locked, and emerged into the middle of an exuberant party awash with gin, beer, and carnival songs.

On the stage sat a brass band in peasant costume, with black silk caps on the musicians' heads and red kerchiefs around their necks, and the worst bit of all was in progress: a "polonaise" with the merrymakers moving in a snake under the decorations, hands on each other's shoulders. As he stood there, still blinking at the light and noise, someone yanked him into the singing and dancing line, and before he knew it he was part of the ceremony. He had seldom felt so out of place, but with an indulgent smile he allowed himself to be carried along; if he were to protest, he might be slaughtered on the spot and thrown into the frying oil, among the sausages. He managed to slip away when they came to a door, and went to the reception desk in the lobby.