The Discovery of Heaven

  He looked up. "Tell me honestly. Are you pregnant?"

  "Of course not, what do you take me for? Do you think I'm blackmailing you? But I want a child of yours, even if you don't want one. I'm thirty-six, and every year it gets more and more critical, as you may know. If I wait a couple more years, all I'll be capable of having are Down's syndrome children."

  "Oh, I know a very nice mongol, though." Because the hard coconut mat was beginning to hurt his knees, he sat on his haunches. "So it's a child with me or without me there, but in any case a child."

  "Yes."

  "And if I hadn't wanted to, what then? Would you have found someone else?"

  She looked down. "I don't know. You mustn't ask me a thing like that."

  "And you realize of course that I'll be seventy when your child is eighteen?"

  "No more ideal father than a grandfather—everybody knows that."

  "Well, that's settled then." He got up, put his arms around her large body, and kissed her. "Have your coil taken out tomorrow. Then I expect, of course, you'll want to get married."

  "I couldn't care less. I don't have to."

  "And your father, the vicar?"

  "If you ask me, he hasn't believed in God for a long time."

  "What kind of world are we living in?" cried Max, with a feeling that he was quoting Onno's tone.

  He emptied his glass in one gulp, the same way that one drinks water, then poured another one for himself. While they ate they discussed the consequences of their decision. If everything went well, Quinten would take his university entrance exam next year and perhaps go somewhere to study, although he hadn't given any indication of such an intention; at the same time their stay at the castle would come to an end. Sophia hadn't said either what she intended to do afterward, but from what he knew of her, she'd known for a long time what she was going to do.

  "Don't drink so much," said Tsjallingtsje, putting a fresh bottle on the table.

  "Of course I drink a lot. In fact I intend to drink far too much this evening. Do you realize that I will be a father for the first time if we succeed?" He rubbed his face with both hands. Suddenly the world had changed. All those seventeen years he had spent with Sophia and Quinten suddenly seemed to have blown away like a sigh of wind. Everything began anew, but now in an honest, unambiguous way. He got up and tottered slightly.

  "Don't you want some coffee?"

  "Excuse me, but I have to be alone for a moment. I'm going to the shed."

  "To the shed now? You're drunk, Max. Why don't you go and sit upstairs?"

  "Now, leave me alone."

  He gave her a kiss on the forehead, opened the conservatory doors, and went into the garden with the bottle and his glass. Night had fallen; above the trees the moon was in its third quarter. Halfway down the winding path between the bushes, he rested the bottom of the bottle for a moment on the gigantic erratic stone, which had worked its way out of the earth there and which came up to his waist; when he had controlled himself again, he turned on the unshaded light in the shed and sank into the worn wickerwork chair with a sigh. He left the door open. Once, the large space had been used for storage of some kind or as a workplace; perhaps a carpenter had once lived in Tsjallingtsje's house. At head height there were a couple of small windows.

  He poured himself another glass and was amazed at the mysterious-ness of existence. It was as if Tsjallingtsje's six words that she wanted a child of his had given his existence a new impetus, like a crack of the whip gave to a spinning top when he was a child. Since he had lived with Quinten and Sophia at Groot Rechteren in Onno's service, his personal life had been in past perspective; it was now as though she had turned him around 180 degrees, so that he was suddenly facing the future— where although he couldn't make out anything concrete, since it didn't yet exist, there was nevertheless something like a dark space-time full of teeming possibilities.

  At a stroke she had put an end to the tangled situation in which he had lived for seventeen years. Like a baby in a playpen. Quinten's playpen must still be somewhere in the storage room, folded up, like a dismantled bed. It was as though the prospect of a child, which would undoubtedly be his, now finally made Quinten Onno's son. In the paper he had read that a short while ago it had become possible to determine paternity unambiguously by means of DNA testing, but his former fears had long since receded. In appearance Quinten didn't look like either of them, only like Ada, as she had once been; and the arts-oriented nature of his interests pointed much more in Onno's direction than in his. The fact that music meant little to him simply confirmed that; he didn't even have a hi-fi in his room. Perhaps the incomprehensible boy didn't resemble anybody who had ever lived.

  When the motionless, gradually disintegrating horror in the hospital bed appeared before him, he rubbed both hands over his face, as though the image were sticking to his skin. He took a swig and had the feeling that he would be capable of putting an end to the existence of that living dead person with his own hands. But how? With a knife? And why not with a knife? Why, he wondered would a cry of horror go up in the world if it turned out that in some hospital other terminal patients were taken to the cellar, where they were beheaded by guillotine? Or where they were given a shot to the back of the head in a courtyard? Simply because of the association with executions? Or because of that it wouldn't become clear that killing was killing and not anything else, such as "falling asleep"?

  Perhaps it was ultimately all a question of words. Endlosung was what the Germans had called the mass murder of Jews. What was more beautiful than the "final solution" of something, the definitive result, the decisive result of the division of zero? It was almost something like the physicists' Theory of Everything. With half-closed eyes he looked at the rusty red in his glass and thought of Onno. He'd like to talk to him about that—language as a way of disguising reality. Probably Onno would dismiss it as a hackneyed topic, over which only adolescents racked their brains, but then go on to say a few unexpected things about it. Where was Onno? What was he doing at this moment? Was he perhaps also thinking of Max? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Perhaps he'd banished him completely from his consciousness. Not just him but Quinten, Ada, and Sophia as well. Perhaps he wasn't even alive anymore. Perhaps he'd crawled into a cave somewhere on Crete, where his bones would be found in fifty years' time, and would be initially taken for those of the writer of the Phaistos disc, until it was discovered by using the C14 method that this could only be a Dutch politician, probably of Calvinist origin.

  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 h
ad 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!

  In a split second everything had come together—but what was it? He knew the answer, but it seemed as difficult to unravel as the question. The so-called infinite velocity of MQ 3412 was not an error, as his colleagues all over the world thought, but revealed a constellation that had not occurred to anyone! It was like the discovery of penicillin by Fleming: his assistant had put away a petri dish with a staphylococcus culture in it to throw it in the wastebin, because it had gotten mold on it; but Fleming himself had another look and saw that it wasn't the bacteria that had attacked the penicillin, but the penicillin that had attacked the bacteria—which subsequently saved the lives of millions of people and won him the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize! There was no Nobel Prize for astronomy, but there was for physics. His thoughts wandered to Stockholm, where he would be standing on the platform in a tailcoat, on that circle with the inscribed N, in his hands the gold medal, received from the hands of the king—or at least he could expect an honorary doctorate too, in Uppsala ...

  He put aside these fantasies and forced himself as far as he could to think through his discovery. The supposed infinite velocity pointed to a distortion of perspective! It was like with the vanishing point: at the horizon the rails met, so that no train could get through, because it would be destroyed at that point—and on the other side of it there was nothing else. And yet trains passed through it, both from one side and from the other. Quasar MQ 3412 wasn't a quasar at all! Or perhaps it was a quasar but everyone regarded it as something that it wasn't, since another object in a geodetically straight line was behind it, still farther away, which was covered by it. Perhaps that was not a black hole but the primeval singularity itself: the point in the firmament where the Big Bang could still be seen!

  Perhaps last night the VLBI had received signals from the ot
her side right through that vanishing point, which had tunneled right through from that vanishing point—or rather: through the vanishing point! Black holes too, from which theoretically no information could emerge, turned out on closer inspection to leak like sieves. In a negative space-time suddenly all those infinities had become visible, those which theoreticians invariably encountered in their mathematical descriptions. Shorter than 10-13th second from the zero moment, Planck time, the hypermicroscopic universe was a theoretical madhouse; for the zero-moment calculations arrived at a paradoxical universe with a circumference of zero, hence a mathematical point, and at the same time with infinite density, infinite curvature of space-time, and infinitely high temperature. There, both the general theory of relativity and the quantum theory collapsed.

  Everyone agreed that a new, overarching theory was necessary to be able to continue the discussion; the occurrence of infinities was always regarded as a sign that something was fundamentally wrong with the theory—but they really existed then; they'd been observed twenty-four hours ago! It was just that no one thought of interpreting it like that: the whole of cosmology was the victim of an optical illusion! And wouldn't it in fact be idiotic if the beginning of the universe were not linked with infinities. If something emerged from nothing, then that was of course an infinitely different matter than when something emerged from something else—the incomprehensibility was precisely the esssence of the fact that the world was there and not not there! He sat up. Now he must go to sleep and tomorrow immediately work this out and publish it as soon as possible, before someone else hit on the idea.

  Instead of getting up, he held the bottle over his glass once more. When nothing more came out of it and he was about to put it down, it fell from his grasp. He put out an arm to pick it up but got no farther. As he let his arm hang down, his chin dropped onto his chest. Suddenly it occurred to him that in the last few months a similar new theory was causing excitement in physics, since it could perhaps finally reconcile quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity: the great unification— the long-sought-after Theory of Everything! This summer a large conference was going to be devoted to it in Bari—shouldn't he go? Up to now elementary particles, like electrons, had always been regarded as pointlike, zero-dimensional, which of course also meant that their energy in that point was infinitely great, and hence also their mass; strangely enough no one had ever worried about those infinities, but by now he was no longer surprised about that bungling and selective indignation: it was no different in science than in politics. The new theory suggested that elementary particles were not zero-dimensional but uni-dimensional: super-small strings in a ten-dimensional world. Not only all particles, also the four fundamental forces of nature and the seventeen natural constants, could be explained by the vibration of otherwise completely identical strings. Strings! The monochord! Pythagoras! Had science arrived back where it had begun? Was music the essence of the world?