The image of Ada appeared before his eyes, the cello between her parted legs. "All things are numbers," Pythagoras had said. For him ten was the sacred number, which you could count on your fingers, like the Ten Commandments and the ten dimensions in the superstring theory. Ten was the "mother of the universe," and from long-forgotten boyhood reading he suddenly remembered Pythagoras's mystical tetractys, the four-foldness, the symbolic depiction of the formula "one, two, three, four," with which his pupils swore the oath:
As a true Greek, thought Max, Pythagoras of course rejected complete infinities, although in his famous thesis he had encountered irrational numbers—but Max himself needed them in order to interpret the observations of the VLBI, that is, the origin of the world: the Big Bang as infinite music! Suddenly he lifted up his head and opened his eyes. Because the light dazzled him, he got up unsteadily, turned off the lamp, and sank back into the chair.
Was it possible that the mathematics already existed for this? When Einstein needed a non-Euclidian, four-dimensional geometry for his curved space-time, it turned out to have been created decades before by Gauss and Riemann. If the world was first and last a realized infinity, then he himself might be able to turn to Cantor, the founder of set theory. Cantor! The singer! As a student he had occupied himself for a while with Cantor's shocking theory of transfinite cardinal numbers, the infinite number of complete infinite numbers, but that had been a long time ago. He remembered the vertigo that had overcome him on his visit to the Orphic Schola Cantorum: its alephs,
his Absolutely Infinite
.
He must immediately immerse himself in it again, but at the same time watch his step, because it had also driven Cantor mad. Because he was interested in the man who had ventured into such regions, he had read a biography of him, which he remembered better than the mathematics. Cantor was regularly admitted to the asylum; originally he had wanted to become a musician, a violinist, but on his own testimony, God Himself had called him and revealed his theory.
As for Pythagoras, mathematics for him was also metaphysics: all numbers were things. He was paranoid and suffered from severe depressions, was interested in theosophy, freemasonry, the teachings of the Rosicrucians, and wrote a pamphlet in which he demonstrated that Christ was the natural son of Joseph of Arimathea, while he also gave lectures about Bacon and demonstrated irrefutably that Bacon had written the plays of Shakespeare . . .
In the dark shed Max now had his eyes wide open. Again and again he brought the empty glass mechanically to his lips and put it back again; it was as though in the darkness the mists of alcohol cleared, but at the same time he knew that this was not the case. He suddenly saw an enervating drawing from a still more distant past, while he remembered immediately where it came from; from the translation of a popular book by Gamov, One, Two, Three . .. Infinity, which he had read when he was seventeen and which had played a part in his decision to become an astronomer. Gamov, he had later learned, had first made the Big Bang theory scientifically acceptable and in 1948 had predicted its echo, the cosmic background radiation observed in 1964, which finally established the theory. His hand-drawing in the book showed a topological distortion of a man walking on earth and admiring the starry sky: everything was turned inside out. If in reality the organs were all enclosed in the body, which was surrounded by the universe—with the only access to that outside world via the mouth, the alimentary canal, and the anus—now the internal had become the external: his intestine stretched out limitlessly like extestines, while the universe, full of planets and stars and spiral nubulae, had become the interior of the man, where he was still walking inside out on the earth and which his eyes were still looking at. Who was the wretched man? Himself, looking through the vanishing point into the negative space-time to the far side of the Big Bang? God? Or was it perhaps a woman? Was it Ada, in her womb the tumor that had taken the place of Quinten? Or was it his own mother, with him in hers? The mother of the universe . . . Ada and Eva . .. Women . . . only women . . .
Again he had fallen asleep. When he woke up he felt tired and happy. He was now in his fifties and he was still preoccupied with the same things as when he was seventeen. Had anything really happened in his life since then? There was no break, as there was with Onno; the boy he had been had no need to be ashamed of him. He got up and again thought of the child that Tsjallingtsje wanted by him. Of course: Octavia! He couldn't make the child tonight—he was too drunk for that; what's more, the coil was still in place. He opened the door and with the handle in his hand he stopped.
Where was Onno? Who had Onno become? How was it possible that he could deny his child so completely? And poor Quinten himself—who was farther away for him now, his mother or his father?
The house was dark, the garden lay silently in the moonlight. Janácek, he thought. Fairy Tale. Forcing himself not to stagger, he walked down the path to the erratic stone, on which he sat down to have a break. The March night was cool and damp. Was it all nonsense that he had thought up? Had the VBLI really seen the primeval singularity, perhaps seen right through it, into another, timeless world, which was therefore larger than the universe? Wasn't he forgetting something? How drunk was he, actually? How was it possible to demonstrate that none of this was the case?
If something like that were possible, then at least an enormous red shift must have taken place—so great that it did not occur to anyone. The maximum that had been measured up to now, in OQ 172, had a value of 3.53; the lyman-line had found its way into visible light. For MQ 3412 they were now looking somewhere between 4 and 5, but perhaps you should look around 20, or 50. Or 100! No one in his right mind would look there, not even Maarten. What would such a shift be good for? He tried to calculate, but he was no long capable. Somewhere on the shortwave band, probably. Perhaps some radio ham had once received a singular voice: "I am the Lord thy God!"—after which he had turned the dial in boredom because he thought he was dealing with a weirdo on the air! Obviously not a second Moses!
Max raised his arms, threw back his head and began laughing loudly.
The thunderous impact with which a white fireball, like a rocket from the sky, hit the stone on which he was sitting scorched all the trees and plants in the garden. It shattered the windows of Tsjallingtsje's house, the curtains caught fire, and the explosion woke up the whole village. Everywhere dogs began barking, cocks crowing. For miles around, lights went on in panic and out of the windows people began shouting to each other that it must be a gas explosion. The following day even the erratic stone seemed to have partly evaporated.
That was how Max finally made the world press—not because of his cosmological hunch, which remained unknown, but because of the unbelievable coincidence of his being in the place where he was. As far as was known, the only person who shared his fate was a seventeenth-century Franciscan monk in Milan. The direct hit had left nothing more of the unfortunate Dutch astronomer than is left of an ant when two flints strike.
Experts assumed that the meteorite had been the size of a fist. Only tiny fragments had been recovered, from which it could be deduced that this was a stone meteorite, an achondrite, over 4 billion years old, probably originating from the area between Mars and Jupiter.
In accordance with international custom the celestial body was named after the nearest post office: the Westerbork.
50
The Decision
Four days later, at the funeral in the churchyard of Westerbork—to the strains of Janácek's Fairy Tale—Quinten did not dare ask himself what was in the coffin that was descending into the earth. Surrounded by astronomers and technicians, he glanced at Sophia, who stood arm in arm with Tsjallingtsje. Was there anything in it? But what had happened only got through to him with a jolt a month later.
Sophia and he had been invited by Theo and Selma Kern to dinner for Easter. Sophia had provided the wine, and around a great dish of pot-au-feu with horseradish they were talking about the gigantic Easter bonfire that the baron used to light
every year on the grounds near Klein Rechteren—a tradition that had not been continued after his death. According to Kern, the reason was that there were no other country noblemen living in the area; they were more to the south, in Overijssel and Gelderland. Gevers had been the northernmost nobleman. Since the old baroness, together with Rutger and his hundred-square-yard curtain, had recently moved in with her daughter in The Hague, who ran a flourishing beauty salon for a select clientele, the rabble would shortly appear in Klein Rechteren too and destroy it.
"I'm a simple man of the people," he said. "My grandmother was a water-and-hot-coal seller in Utrecht, with sand on the floor, but if I have to choose between the nobility and the rich rabble, then I don't have to think for very long. Of course the aristocracy is also rabble, everyone is rabble, but they at least have style."
"You're getting old, Theo," said Selma.
"You're telling me. And just as well."
Quinten looked at him. The sculptor sat on his chair like a gnarled, snow-covered pinecone; his bare right foot was lying on a white linen pouf, the ankle swollen and the skin purplish, as though he had stepped in a jar of blackberries. Did the aristocracy have style? Quinten was reminded of Roskam's father, who had had to bury his cap on the orders of Rutger's grandfather. Yes, perhaps that was style—but a particular kind. On the other hand, the baron had left him lots of money because he had looked after the grave of Deep Thought Sunstar and had taught Rutger to weave. Perhaps the thing was that the aristocracy really thought there were two kinds of people: on the one hand themselves, with the queen at the head, and on the other side ordinary bourgeois people—in the same way that there were men and women. He would like to talk to his father about that, but he had disappeared.
"Do you remember the Easter eggs that you and Arendje always hunted for under the rhododendrons?" asked Selma.
How could he forget something like that? Again he could feel the branches on his back as he crawled over the ground, over the damp, withered leaves, between which a suddenly a bright color glowed, completely formed, like when he had a liberating brainwave while he was thinking about something. The troubling thought that Arendje would find more eggs than he did .. .
"I always kept the most beautiful ones," said Sophia. "Shall I get them?"
When she had left the room, Theo said to Selma: "Do you know what Max once said to me? 'A chicken is the means whereby an egg produces another egg.' I don't know in what connection, but I've never forgotten."
"Poor Max . . ." sighed Selma.
A little later Sophia put a large, old-fashioned candy jar with a wide neck and a screw top on the table. While she told them that the jar came from her mother's bequest, Kern stared at the colored contents and it was as though he could scarcely control his emotions.
"All of those were painted here in this room, QuQu," he said, "while you were tucked up in bed. By all of us here at the castle."
After Selma had cleared the plates away, Sophia carefully laid the eggs on the table one by one. Quinten did not know that she had kept them all, but he recognized his finds almost without exception. She arranged them neatly in four rows of eight. Kern took his foot off the pouf, put on a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses, and bent forward.
"Can you see who painted what?"
Carefully putting one sort with another, Quinten began to change the places of the eggs. Suddenly he had the feeling that they should actually be in eight vertical rows of four rather than in the four horizontal rows of eight. There were Kern, Max, Proctor, Themaat, and Spier and their five wives— that made ten people; but Elsbeth Themaat and Judith Spier would probably not have joined in—they never came upstairs. It would be nice if there were four eggs from each of them, but there was only one from Mr. Spier: on the otherwise unpainted white shell there was an elegantly red painted A? on one side, and a blue Q? on the other. The capital italics obviously referred to Arendje, but now he was suddenly reminded of Ada. He assigned three eggs to Themaat, with pale geometrical patterns: diamonds, circles, triangles. The somber, dark-brown ones, sometimes black with zigzagging lightning bolts, were of course by Proctor, while it was probably Max who had limited himself to plain, bright colors, which now in some way contained his death. There was no mistaking Kern's work: expertly painted clown's faces, flowers, and animal heads. Clara had also made it simple for him by depicting umbrellas in all states of openness. He had more difficulty with Selma and Sophia. The remaining eggs were all abstract in design, with dots, stripes, and bands. He decided that the beautiful ones were by Selma and those with the clashing colors by Sophia.
The others looked in silence at what he was doing. After he had finally arranged the eggs by person, Kern said:
"You don't have to say any more." He glanced at it for a moment, then looked up and said to the two women, staring at the constellation on the table, "That's what's left of our community."
At the same moment Quinten realized that this was the truth. After the death of Max, only these three old people were left, of whom his grandmother, at sixty-two, was the youngest. Upstairs was Nederkoorn, below Korvinus, and soon it would be completely over. What was there to keep him here any longer? Everything around him had been destroyed, everyone was dead, had left, was inaccessible; even Kern's dovecotes had been empty for six months. Suddenly he got up and went to his room without saying anything.
He put his bronze box on the table. Because the key of the padlock had disappeared one day from between the loose bricks behind the oil stove, he had straightened a sturdy paper clip and, according to Piet Keller's lessons, had made a skeleton key with it. He carefully unfolded his father's letters and looked at the last sentence, although it was just the same as he remembered: Forgive me and don't look for me, because you won't find me. So it was something of a last wish that Quinten should not look for him! In fact it didn't say at all that he didn't want him to—just that he should save himself the trouble, because it would be to no avail. He looked at the case with his mother's cello in it. Now he was certain. He was going away. He was going to find his father.
"But where are you going to look for him, then?" asked Sophia the following morning at breakfast. "He could be anywhere. Do you know how large the world is?"
"In any case he's on earth. That excludes lots of other places."
"That's true," said Sophia. A smile appeared on her face, and she looked at him with a shake of her head. "You've virtually already found him, haven't you?"
"Yes." Quinten nodded and looked back at her, but without a smile.
They were sitting on the balcony. For the first time this year it was a mild spring morning. In the moat below, the ducks were noisily celebrating the change of season.
"But what if you find him and he doesn't want to have anything to do with you? Are you aware of what's happened to him? He's become a different person. I thought that it would turn out okay too and that he'd turn up again, but he's been gone for four years. He knows where he can reach you, doesn't he, and he hasn't done so, has he?"
"If he sees me and he still doesn't want to have anything to do with me, then I shall know. Then he'll really have become a different person, as you say, and a different person doesn't interest me. A different person isn't my father. Then I'll be finished with it."
"And your school," asked Sophia, without looking up from the apple she was peeling. "What'll happen to that?"
"I know enough. And anyway, the most important things that I know, I didn't learn at school."
"But, Quinten, you're almost there. Another year, and you'll have your high school diploma. Aren't you afraid that you'll be terribly sorry if you don't finish high school? That'll change the course of your whole life. You do want to study, I assume?"
Quinten looked at the bare trees on the other side of the moat. He could still look right through the wood; soon it would again become an impenetrable wall. In the distance a car was driving along the road to Westerbork. His father had once asked him too what he wanted to "be." "An architect
," Max had said—but the idea of doing this or that for the rest of his life, and nothing else, still seemed idiotic to him. He wasn't born to gain certainty; he could leave that to others. Something completely different was waiting for him—that was the certainty that had come to him six months previously in the field near Klein Rechteren.
"I don't think so," he said.
Sophia tried again. "You won't be seventeen until next month. Keep at it for another year, then you'll be eighteen; and afterward you can do what you like for a year. Or two years. Then you can still always decide if you want to study or not. But if you stop now, you'll have decided once and for all."
"I'm going to look for Dad," said Quinten.
He was sorry for his grandmother. In order to keep up appearances she got up, brushed the crumbs and remains of bread into her other hand, and threw them over the balustrade, which immediately unleashed a flurry of quacking down below. She too was alone. Her daughter had been struck down by a terrible accident, her companion killed by a meteorite, and now she was being abandoned by her grandson, too. What else was there to do? Moreover, in a few months' time she'd be out in the street—with all her things, those of her daughter, and those of Max.