Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"Where has that suddenly appeared from?"

Max told him about the visit to his foster mother, without going into the circumstances.

Onno bent forward and studied the couple. "You've got the top. half of your face from your father and the bottom half from your mother."

"Do you remember that you said something like that about my face before — the day we met?"

"No," said Onno, "but I'm sure I hit the nail on the head."

"Of course."

"Are you coming?" called Sophia.

She was sitting under a sun shade on the balcony over which Max had spread two bags of fresh gravel, giving Quinten a bottle. Both Max and Onno were struck by the unity that she formed with the child, as though she were really the mother. Both fathers saw a completely happy woman, who seemed never to have had a daughter.

Kern and his Selma also appeared.

"Max has already told me about you," said Onno, after he had introduced himself with a click of his heels, perhaps as a commentary on Kern's bare feet.

Kern gave the impression that he had not heard. With one hand, covered in clay and stone dust, he gestured toward Quinten, who, as he lay on Sophia's lap drinking, fastened the deep-blue pools of his eyes on the orange stripes of the sun shade.

"Whoever saw such a creature? This is completely impossible!"

"You've either got the gift or you haven't," said Onno proudly. "There are artists who create beauty in a dogged struggle with spirit and matter, like you, but I do it in a lascivious moment with flesh." As he spoke these words he suddenly felt a chill go through him, as though Ada's presence on the balcony were suddenly penetrating his body.

Perhaps because he could not bear Quinten's gaze, Kern had left shortly afterward. In a cooler covered in condensation stood a bottle of champagne, and after Max, with ballistic satisfaction, had made the cork prescribe its parabola into the moat — where the ducks made a beeline for it, flapping and half running over the water, before ducking and waggling their tails and turning their attention to more serious things — the Proctor family appeared. Clara behaved like a woman behaves when she sees a baby for the first time; but when the gloomy translator saw Quinten, something in his face changed: it lightened as if a veil had been removed. The effect of the child on Arendje was even more strange. As Max poured the glasses, he kept a wary eye on the little rascal, who ran to Sophia — in order to be able to intervene at once in case he tried to plant his fist on Quinten's nose.

Instead of that, he hugged him, kissed him on the forehead, and said: "Doesn't he smell nice."

Little Arendje tamed! Proctor looked back and forth between Quinten and Onno — and then said something that made Max's heart leap:

"He looks like you. He's got your mouth."

He couldn't have given Max a greater present. And yes, perhaps that was the case: perhaps he did have the same thin, classically arched lips. It was as though the last remnants of his doubt were washed away by those words like the dirty scum by a jet of water after one had washed one's hands.

After sufficient chairs had been pulled up, the company split into two by sex, with Quinten in the middle of the women. While the latter group swapped experiences with infant care, Onno told Proctor that his wife had been a cellist. He assumed that Max had told him about the accident and said:

"I was first going to call my son Octave in honor of her: after the simplest, completely consonant interval, on which all music is based. Have you already plumbed the Pythagorean mysteries of that simple one-to-two relationship?"

Max had told Onno about Proctor's withdrawn nature, and he could see that Onno was trying to find a way to get through to him.

Proctor made a vague gesture. "I know nothing about music."

"Who does? Music transcends all knowledge. But when I hear the name Octave in my mind's eye, I see a type that I wouldn't want to see as my son. More an elegant, rather effete philosopher on stiltlike heron's legs with a flower in his buttonhole and not the robust man of action that my son must become, as I am myself so signally according to everyone. So I moved from the completely elemental to the cunning two-to-three of the dominant. The pure fifth!"

That was new for Max, too.

Meanwhile, Proctor's brain had also been working, because he said: "The octave consists of eight, and God is also eight."

It took a couple of seconds to get through to Onno. "God is eight? How did you work that out?"

"You know a bit about languages, don't you?"

A bitter laugh escaped Onno. "To tell you the truth I don't really know anyone who knows as much about languages as I do. That's the reason why I couldn't call my son Sixtus. Not because that's a pitiful interval of three-to-five, but because the name derives not from sextus, the Latin word for 'sixth,' as everyone thinks, but from the Greek word xystos, which means 'polished.' "

"So you also know what the tetragrammaton is?"

"Please continue, sir."

Next Proctor reminded them that God's name Yod He, Wau, He was Jehovah. Because Hebrew, as Mr. Quist of course already knew, had no separate figures, those four letters also had the numerical value 10, 5, 6, and 5. Adding them together gave 26. If, following the rules of Gematria, you added the 2 and the 6 together, you got 8.

"You stagger me!" exclaimed Onno. "You are a gifted cabbalist! But if God is eight, what is five?"

"Of course it can be an infinite number—" Proctor began, but the last word was lost in a rattling cough that suddenly took hold of him.

"Not infinite," Max corrected him. "Very great. Although.. perhaps an infinite number, yes."

"And what is significant in this connection," continued Proctor after taking a deep breath and wiping his mouth, "is the number of letters in the alphabet."

"Of course." Onno nodded with an irony, which only Max noticed. "Twenty-two."

"In Hebrew, yes. But our alphabet has twenty-six." He looked at Onno with an expression that said he had unveiled the final secret.

"Ah-ha!" said Onno with raised eyebrows, and lifted an index finger. "Ah-ha! The same number as the numerical value of God! Dutch as a divine language! By the way, Mr. Proctor, you mustn't say 'Jehovah,' but 'Jah-weh,' with the accent on the e. 'Jehovah' is a bastardized Christian word from the late Middle Ages. It's even more sensible not to speak the name at all, because otherwise you might come to a sticky end. It would be better to say 'Adonai,' with the letters alef, daleth, nun, jod. At least if that has an acceptable numerical value, but it's almost bound to have."

"One plus four plus fifty plus ten," said Proctor immediately, "makes sixty-five."

"Makes eleven, makes two." Onno nodded. "Seems fine to me."

While Arendje counted Quinten's toes when he heard all those numbers and cried "Ten!" Kern appeared on the balcony again, now accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Spier.

With a friendliness that did not reveal whether it was pretended or real, they fulfilled their social duties.

"What a darling," said Mrs. Spier.

Mr. Spier looked intently at Quinten, stroked the soft spot on his fontanel with the tip of his ring finger, and then said, as though one could see by looking at him: "His initials are Q. Q."

"Qualitate qua," nodded Onno.

"That is rare. The Q is the most mysterious of letters, that circle with that line," he said, while he formed a slightly obscene gesture a circle with the manicured thumb and index finger of one hand and the line with the index finger of the other, "the ovum being penetrated by a sperm. And twice at that. Very nice. My compliments."

Like Proctor, he was obviously aware that Onno had a relationship with written characters. Max felt a little shiver go down his spine at his words, but Onno made a clumsy and at the same time elegant bow. Spier too gave a slight bow and took out a silver watch from his waistcoat pocket. Unfortunately they had to leave immediately — the taxi was already waiting for them on the forecourt to take them to the station: they were going on holiday to Wales, to Pontrhydfendigaid, as they did every year.