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.
Heavy sofas and armchairs covered in linen material, with red-and-blue-flower prints, indicated that England lay across the waves. In the telephone booth he dialed her number in agitation. Was she still alive?
"Blok speaking," said a man's voice.
"Excuse me, isn't this Mrs. Hondius's number?"
"She doesn't live here anymore."
For the last year she had been in an old people's home in Bloemendaal, Sancta Maria. He gave Max the number. With his finger on the dial, about to dial the last digit, a 1, he hesitated. She had not notified him of her change of address. Obviously, she had given up on him after he failed to appear at her husband's deathbed. That awareness filled him with such shame that he did not dare to go on dialing—but he also knew that he would never see her again if he did not move his finger through those last ninety degrees. He jerked it down until it reached the steel rest.
The porter in Bloemendaal put him through and a moment later he heard her voice.
"Yes, who is it?"
"It's Max." There was a moment's silence.
"Really?" She asked softly. "Is that you, Max?"
"Were you asleep?"
"I never sleep at night. It's not something serious, is it?"
"I'm in Noordwijk, and I'd like to drop by for a moment. Can I?"
"Right this minute?"
"Is it a bad time?"
"Of course not, it never is for you. I'll wait for you downstairs in the lounge."
"I'll be with you in half an hour, Mother Tonia."
He walked quickly back to his car across the deserted promenade. As he drove toward Bloemendaal, taking a shortcut through Haarlem, he considered whether he should say anything about his scandalous absence when her husband was dying; but perhaps she understood without being told that he found the death of parents difficult, even when they were foster parents.
Sancta Maria, surrounded by an iron fence, built in dark brick in the somber aristocratic style of Dutch Catholicism, was on a quiet avenue opposite a wood. He parked the car on the paved forecourt, and as he opened the front door he was immediately eye to eye with the mutilated body of the founder of the religion—attached to the cross in the same attitude as Otto Lilienthal to the flying machine in which he had made the first glider flight. Consummatum est, thought Max; the engineer had not survived his experiments, either. The porter looked up from his paper in annoyance, glanced at the clock, and motioned toward- the entrance of the lounge with a jerk of his head.
In the wave of social change, a modern interior designer had created a successful impression of impending purgatory with harsh neon lighting and dreadful furniture in garish plastic. Everyone had obviously retired to bed. His foster mother sat alone at a table by the window and waved to him; he was seeing her without his foster father for the first time since he had moved out of their home. The only other person was a heavily built man of about sixty in a wheelchair, which was at a completely arbitrary angle in the room, as though someone far away had given it a push, after which it had come to a halt swerving and turning; there was a black patch over his right eye.
"Max! What a surprise!" She had stood up; she kissed him, her eyes moist, and held him away from her in order to be able to take a good look at him. "You've become more of a man, a real international gentleman."
He had to laugh at the compliment. "And you're the same as ever, Mother Tonia."
That was not completely true. She had grown smaller, with a more rounded back; her features were now more sharply etched than in the past, with a faint, refined smile in the corner of her mouth. But she still wore the same chestnut-colored wig, which left a narrow strip of dark shadow around her head: mysterious ravine between skin and wig, which as a boy had fascinated him more than the ravines in the books of Karl May. For as long as he had known her she had worn wigs and he had no idea what secret was hidden underneath; and since then he was convinced that he could always tell if someone was wearing a wig—until one day Onno had told him that he could only see it when he saw it and not when he couldn't. He had always called his real mother Mommy.
He sat down opposite her and she took his hands in hers. She stroked his spatula-shaped thumbs for a moment and looked at him.
"Your hands are just as cold as ever."
"That's always the way with hotheads."
"Tell me, how are things with you?"
"Good," he said. "Good."
Good? It was obviously out of the question to tell her abo
ut the fix he was in and how he was thinking of solving it; he didn't know how things were himself, and perhaps that was the reason he was here now. She wasn't really old yet, perhaps just turned seventy—his real mother would have been sixty now—but she was sitting here in this dreadful place waiting for death, her thoughts focused only on the past, while his concerns were only about the future. He told her about his work in Leiden, and said he would probably be moving to Drenthe in the near future, where a new telescope was being used.
"You in Drenthe? Max! A bon viveur like you stuck out in the fenlands? You're not going to tell me that you've gotten married in the meantime, without letting me know?"
"When I get married, you'll be a witness," he said, reflecting that he might even be having a child without letting her know. "No, I'm sacrificing myself for science. It's a very special telescope."
"I can still see you sitting in your room with your celestial map. 'I'm going to lay bare the secret of the universe,' you said at the table once."
"Did I?" He smiled affectionately. "They put that kind of thing out of your head at the university. The first thing they destroy there is the impulse that made you want to study a particular subject. The really great geniuses, like Einstein, are all amateurs—and not only in the natural sciences."
"It's better to be happy than a great genius."
"Perhaps. But the annoying thing is just that Einstein was probably happy as well."
"And you?"
"It would be nicely symmetrical if I were both not a genius and unhappy, wouldn't it?"
She slowly shook her head. "You haven't changed at all, do you know that? Who on earth gives an answer like that?"
"You're right."
He thought it over. Of course it was nonsense to say that he was happy, but did that mean that he was not? Logically perhaps, but psychologically? For the last few months he had probably been really unhappy, or at least hopelessly caught in the trap that he himself had built. Happy, unhappy . .. those were not the terms in which he was used to thinking about himself: that was more something for girls, to use Onno's expression. But from the moment that he had made his decision tonight, though everything had remained the same—ruined for good, that is—it had also suddenly changed, turned on its head to become its opposite, like when a marathon runner derives strength and perhaps even something akin to pleasure from his deathly exhaustion. He may even have become a marathon runner because he is addicted to the pleasure of exhaustion.
"God knows, yes, I suppose I'm happy."
His foster mother drew back her hands and looked down. "That bloody war," she said.
The remark astonished him, but he did not react to it. He took hold of her hands in turn.
She looked at him. "We haven't seen each other for so long, Max . . . Why have you suddenly come this evening of all evenings?"
"Because I've made an important decision tonight, Mother Tonia, which may determine the rest of my life. But you mustn't ask me what it is, because it may not happen at all. When I'm sure, of course I'll let you know. I don't know ... I suddenly wanted to see you again. Of course I should have done it long ago, I've failed you, but—"
"Don't say any more."
He was silent: At the next table there was a chessboard with an unfinished game on it. Doubtless it would be continued the following morning by two old men, who were now lying in their beds thinking about their next move, leading to a devastating checkmate with the knight and the queen, who would transmit their lines of force across 666 squares to the opposing king like deadly rays. The man in the wheelchair did not move; he had bent his head and was looking at his white hands, folded in his lap. In some ways he also resembled a castled king, waiting to be checkmated.
In the doorway, under the crucifix that was also hanging in here, a young woman appeared and said that it was the children's bedtime. She was tall and slim, in her late twenties; two blue eyes looked at Max from beneath thick, dark-blond eyebrows—and at the same moment he realized that he could take her into the woods across the road later if he wanted. He also saw that she immediately saw that he knew that—but he didn't want to. That was over. As if he had known her for years, he gave her something like a wink with both eyes by way of apology. She blushed a little and went over to the wheelchair.
"Are you coming, Mr. Blits? Time for beddy-bye."
Max and Mother Tonia got up.
"Come with me to my room for a moment," she said. "I wanted to show you something, but I couldn't find it immediately."
As they passed the wheelchair and Max exchanged another melancholy look with the nurse, Mr. Blits fixed him with his one eye and said: "Swine!"
"Ho, ho, Mr. Blits, what's this? Are we going to get silly?"
"Mr. Blits is quite right," laughed Max. "I'm a bad sort."
They took the elevator, and as he entered the small apartment he had a shock. He knew everything from their house in Amsterdam, and later the one in Santpoort, but here it had been reduced to its essence, like a concentrated extract. Immediately on the right was a kitchen the size of a tablecloth, leading to a tiny living room, which was linked to an equaly modest bedroom by a curving hallway.
On the sofa covered with that unforgettably hard, stiff material and dating from the 1920s or 1930s, he had read his first book on astronomy, a translation of Jeans's The Mysterious Universe; two vague pieces of material lay over the threadbare arms. Above it hung the reproduction of Brueghel's Fall of Icarus, every detail of which had penetrated his very soul: the immense space of land and sea, the plowing farmer, whose red shirt had now faded to a gentle pink, the shepherd leaning on his crook as though nothing were happening, with his back to the event on which everything hinged and which was taking place like a futile incident: an insignificant leg barely protruding from the waves. On the low table in front of the sofa was the cut-glass bonbonniere, which he had never thought of since, but which was more familiar to him than most of what he had at home; in the small bookcase were the familiar spines. Everyman's Encyclopedia.
A fairy-tale feeling came over him, like an archaeologist who has suddenly uncovered a classical site: suddenly all those antique things were gathered together, in these few square feet in Bloemendaal. There were things in his life that were still more ancient: from the plundered royal tomb of his parents' house—which he could only vaguely remember and which perhaps also still existed somewhere in the house of the thieves who had followed in the footsteps of the murderers, or in those of their widows or their children; but those would never come to light.
On the television set there were two framed photographs: one of his foster father and one of himself. For all those years, during which he had made no contact, his portrait had stood there and Mother Tonia had looked at it? Hondius, in waistcoat and watch chain, looked at him sternly. Why didn't you come, Max? He turned away in embarrassment. His foster mother, down on one knee in the bedroom, was looking for something in a cardboard box, which she had pulled out from under her bed.
Against the wall he saw the mahogany chest with the two opening doors, the symmetrical grain of which still formed the frightening head of a gigantic bat. On it, next to a sewing basket, was another head, of smooth wood, with no face, like in a De Chirico painting. It was clearly not intended for his eyes, since she obviously put her wig on it at night; perhaps it used to be in a box, because he had never seen it before. But who did she have to hide anything from here? Above the door, Christ on the cross again, dressed in nothing but a diaper.
"Yes, I've got it," she said. Supporting herself on the edge of the bed, she struggled to her feet and brought him a large, bent, dog-eared photograph, torn here and there around the edges. "Is this familiar?"
"It's them!" he exclaimed.
There they were, arm in arm: his father and mother. Incredulous, open-mouthed, he looked at the couple. The yellowed black-and-white photo, more a formal portrait, must have been taken before he was born, by a professional photographer, perhaps on their wedding day in 1926. In
a tailor-made suit of chiseled perfection, his father was looking into the lens, now replaced by his son's eyes, which immediately recognized his own; he had not put down the cigarette in his right hand. On his left arm his wife, age eighteen, sixteen years younger than himself, close to him, a hand on her hip, the dark hat on her head, and beneath it two indescribable eyes, the color of which he did not see and which he did not remember, combined with his own nose and mouth. He looked up and put his finger on the photograph.
"It's them," he said again, not yet recovered from his surprise. "This is the first time I've seen a photo of them."
"I suspected as much. You're like both of them."
The thought that his child would be as like him as he was like his parents entered his mind only momentarily.
"How did you come by this?"
"I found it among my husband's papers, when I had to clear up before I moved here. I saw at once that it couldn't have anything to do with his family; they were not such worldly people. That photo must have been among the things that we were sent after your father's death."
"Why did your husband never show it to me?"
"I don't know. Perhaps he didn't want to confront you with what had happened and was going to give it to you later, which he was never able to do . . ."