The Discovery of Heaven (40 page)

Max nodded. He didn't know what else to say and asked: "How old was your husband?"

"Forty-seven."

"And a fatal heart attack, though he led such a quiet life here among his books."

"No one knows the kind of life a person really leads."

Max nodded. "You could be right about that." He was silent for a moment. "There are also people who are constantly under terrific pressure who live to be a hundred. What were his last words?"

" 'That rain just goes on pelting down.' " With her arms folded, Sophia looked straight ahead for a while, as though she could see him again. "He'd been feeling nervous and anxious all day. He thought it was the weather."

They continued looking at each other. Max wanted to ask if he had had much pain, but that didn't seem appropriate. He bent over the photo album and saw the family at the base of a statue. At the foot of it was a giant-size winged lion; in a burst of high spirits, Ada had laid her head on a step, under a bronze claw, while her father shrank back with feigned alarm. Her mother was looking up at the statue, which was not visible on the photo.

"Venice?" he asked, and looked up.

"Two years ago."

"All three of you are in it. Who took the photo?"

"Someone who happened to be passing by."

He leaned back and looked at the shop through the open dividing door. In fact he wanted to leave, but he had the feeling that it wasn't possible yet.

"What will you do about the bookshop now? Are you going to continue it?"

"I don't want to think about that yet. First we have to get the funeral over with."

Max nodded. "Will you have to cope on your own, or does he have relatives?"

"I have a mother in the old people's home and a brother in Canada, but my husband has two sisters who could help. Anyway, Onno said that he'll involve his family tomorrow morning."

"You can rely on him for that. If I can be of any help to you in the next few days, I am always at your disposal," he said formally, getting up. "Well, Mrs. Brons, I won't keep you any longer."

She looked at him questioningly. "Where were you thinking of going? It's past four. Surely you're not going to take a taxi to Amsterdam?"

"I can go to the observatory. The director lives on the premises—he'll have a bed for me. Otherwise I'll sleep at the caretaker's."

Sophia got up. "What nonsense waking those people up. You can sleep in Ada's room. Why don't you go upstairs now and start by having a shower."

Yes, why not? He'd been frightened of finding a distraught widow, crying despairingly over the body of her husband; but it was as though his death had made her even more steadfast. He, too, hated the idea of having to go straight back into the street. And perhaps she would prefer not to be alone in the house tonight.

"Well . .. If I'm not being a trouble to you, I'd like to."

She turned off the lights and, upstairs, pointed out the bathroom to him—a small room with a washbasin, a folded ironing board against the wall, and a tall laundry basket. He would have preferred to take a bath, but there was only a separate square shower compartment with a white plastic curtain. He quickly took off his clothes, which were still not completely dry, threw them in a heap, and stood on the springy, zinc floor of the shower compartment; an attempt to clean it, obviously with some acid or other, had left white corrosion marks in the metal. But the modest jet from the shower was warm and filled him with a blissful feeling of rebirth, as though he hadn't been subjected to enough water today. An egg-shaped piece of pink soap hung from a rope, and with it he was able to finally wash everything away—not only the dirt, but also somehow the closeness of what had happened. When he opened the curtain, a bath towel was lying over the edge of the washbasin, and a folded pair of pajamas.

They were Ada's father's, of course. The legs were too short, but the flannel was soft and pleasant. In Ada's room, at the back of the house, her mother was making up the bed; the window was open. She glanced briefly at him.

"That makes a difference."

He had never been in here. Of course Ada had taken most belongings to Onno's, but her girlhood things had remained. Dolls and stuffed animals on the low bookcase filled with girls' books; small things and knick-knacks, boxes, bottles, on the wall a large poster of a melancholy bloodhound, but also a framed photo of Stravinsky; a bent music stand with a woollen rabbit. Everything looked neat; obviously, the room had been painted not long ago.

They said goodnight and he got into bed. Next to him there was a cord against the wall; the switch near the ceiling was the same kind of parrot's beak as in his own childhood room, at his mother's. It made the same click and immediately the darkness overwhelmed him. Outside there was deep silence. He put his hands under his head and closed his eyes. Had it really been today that he had met them from the station? The crown of the tree came swishing down ...

He woke when she slipped in beside him under the blanket. At first he thought he was dreaming, because this was impossible. He wasn't dreaming. Suddenly he felt Sophia's arm around him and her warm body next to him, shaking with sobs. Her hair was loose. Yes, of course this was the impossible, completely unthinkable!

"What is it?" he asked.

"I'm sorry," she sobbed and buried her face in his neck. "Don't send me away. It's because of the way you looked with all those scratches and those ruined clothes. It's exactly how Oswald looked the day that I met him in the war, after a bombing raid . .. On the very day that he died. Of course he was an old fogey, but. . . And then Ada .. . perhaps it's better that he won't have to go through that now . . ."

He was alarmed by her words. Might it be fatal after all? In confusion, he in turn put his arm around her, both in fatherly consolation and seeking help, and under a thin rucked-up nightdress he felt her soft back, her full hips. What was happening? His body fitted exactly into the curve of her body, her breasts, her belly, like a musical instrument in its case. Unwittingly, he stroked her large naked buttocks, which were not those of a girl but of a mature woman, in her mid-forties—and as though his hand were seized and dragged down by a whirlpool, it slipped between them and landed in another tropical world of damp, hair, living flesh, that seemed to envelop it suddenly and completely in the darkness.

He began to shiver and kissed her. She pulled down his pajama bottoms and he disappeared into her unaided, as though her opening were everywhere. She kept her tongue out the whole time, right out of her mouth, while a dark growl came from her throat, and in the depths of her belly something seized the head of his penis each time—what was that secret? Her cervix? He thought of her husband for a moment, stiffening on his trolley in the morgue, who must have felt this too when he sired Ada, but he didn't think very much; the snapping soon took him to a climax, as though he were being pumped up. He caught his breath, and with a loud scream the whole scene exploded, and with a second and third and fourth scream he emptied himself into her. Sweating and breathless, he slumped back beside her, and before he had even realized it, she had got out of bed. He was just able to hear the door close.

He hadn't seen her. He groped for the cord of the switch and, dazzled by the light, closed his eyes. What had just happened was impossible! It must have been a hallucination, provoked by all the emotion and exhaustion! He felt his penis: still half erect and soaking wet. Perplexed, he wondered whether he had really slept with the grandmother of his child—in the bed of her daughter, who had just been in an accident, dressed in the pajamas of her husband who had just died. Those last two facts were certain in any case.

How could they look each other in the face tomorrow morning? Who had seduced whom? She had seduced him, of course! For the first time in his life he had been seduced. Perhaps she hadn't been to bed with her husband for years. Shouldn't he get up now, leave a note and go? But how should he start that letter?
Dear Sophia? Dear Mrs. Brons?
They were equally impossible. No heading at all? And it was as though the thought that he would have to put his damp clothes on again, and walk to the observatory through the Botanical Garden after all, was the final sign for his body to put an end to things for today. He had just enough strength to pull the cord.

He woke at a quarter past nine; the memory of the previous night immediately filled him with frenzied uncertainty. He cracked the top joints of his thumbs. He quickly got out of bed and drew the curtains. It was calm weather; only a few branches that had blown down and fragments of roof tiles recalled what had happened. His clothes were hanging over a chair: everything had been cleaned, dried, and ironed; even his shoes had been polished. In the bathroom Brons's shaving things were still on the washbasin, but he did not touch them. When he entered the room downstairs, Sophia was on the telephone. Her hair was up again; she nodded to him and pointed to the coffee pot, which was on the table.

While he poured himself a cup, he could hear that the conversation was about mourning and the funeral. She had behaved naturally to him; her eyes again had the look of the abbess, as though nothing had happened. If that was the attitude she had chosen, she was making things easy for him.

Or had nothing really happened? Had he dreamed it, perhaps? He sneaked a look at her. Was that the woman who last night had stuck her tongue out so far? Only now did it strike him that she had a good figure, fuller than Ada's, but in good shape everywhere; nowhere were its contours blurred with fat. There was a clear transition from her firm calves into slim ankles.

"That was Dol," she said, putting the receiver down, "Onno's sister. She's taken all the formalities off my hands. Did you sleep well?"

"Very well. And thank you very much for tidying up my things."

Onno had also already called. There had still been no change in Ada's condition; he would be coming to Amsterdam in the ambulance in the course of the morning. She herself would be going there that afternoon.

"Did you say that I'd spent the night here?"

"Yes. You did, didn't you? Would you like a fried egg?"

"Yes please, Mrs. Brons."

When she had disappeared into the kitchen, he thought: the woman's split into two completely separate halves. There was a daytime Sophia and a nighttime Sophia, who had nothing in common—a cool, unfeeling person, and a second one brimming with emotion. He remembered how Ada had sometimes talked about her as a disgusting bitch, but had she really known her mother? It fascinated him—but it was also clear to him that he mustn't make any allusion to what had happened last night.

He thought about everything that he had to do today. Of course he had to call Onno, then he had to go to the observatory: prepare everyone for the news that a week's observation material might have been lost. He had to call Dwingeloo; Floris must contact the police. He had to call his insurance company, and his garage. The car was not a write-off, there was probably nothing wrong with the engine, but he never wanted to see the thing again; they would have to clean it up and sell it. He took out his diary and was going to make a few notes, but the point of his pencil had broken off. While he was sharpening it, the shop doorbell rang.

"Would you go and see who it is?" called Sophia.

He walked to the front of the shop, up little flights of stairs and through the caverns. At the cash register stood a tall, thin man with a short black beard, who stared rather wildly into his eyes.

"Have you got anything on metempsychosis?"

Metempsychosis—that sounded like madness. Max looked around.

"Perhaps in the psychiatry section .. ."

"I mean the transmigration of souls," said the man, still staring at him.

It was on the tip of Max's tongue to say that they didn't have anything on migration, but Sophia had already appeared.

"We're closed. We're closed because of a bereavement." To Max she said, "Your egg's ready."

28
The Funeral

On the evening of that day, on his way to Keyzer's, where he had arranged to meet Max at seven o'clock, Onno looked in alarm at the Concertgebouw: he had completely forgotten to phone the orchestra! They were due to give a subscription concert shortly! When he asked the porter at the stage door whether anyone from the administration was there, Marijke came past with her clarinet. When he told her what had happened, the color drained from her face and she clutched the case to her, like a child in need of protection. She would pass on the message and visit Ada the following day.

"You needn't bother," said Onno. "At the moment she's not aware of anything that's happening around her."

"How do you know that? Anyway, I want to do it for myself, too."

He gave her the room number, pressed a kiss on her forehead, and went across the street, to where the restaurant was filled with dining concert-goers.

Max was sitting at a small table against the wall. "What's the news?" he asked immediately.

"Not too good."

Onno had been told by the neurologist that afternoon that Ada's electroencephalogram was fortunately not "flat," as he called it, but did show a "diffuse, seriously slowed pattern."

"I know those kinds of terms from my own subject," nodded Max.

"He said that for the time being they couldn't make any predictions. Only if it continues like this for two or three more weeks may they perhaps be able to call it an irreversible coma."

"And if you've got a flat E.E.G...."

"Then you're a vegetable."

They sat opposite each other in silence.

"But suppose ..." Max began hesitantly. "Ada's now in her fifth month . . . and if it takes—"

"It doesn't seem to make any difference to the child."

Suddenly Max realized that at the moment he was the only person who could still say what had happened in the Gulf of Mexico. But even if that remained the case, it still wouldn't help him. Even if she had not had an accident, Ada would never have talked about it.

"What then?" he asked cautiously.