While she was telling him this, her face again assumed that masklike expression that Max knew so well. The fact that Ada — that is, her poor body — had gone on having her periods every month all through those seventeen years shocked him more than the news of her illness. The latter, on the contrary, was something hopefuclass="underline" the upbeat toward the end of her absurd existence.
He looked at Sophia in silence. After a little while he asked: "Do you suppose this is the moment of truth?"
Since Onno and he had embarked on their crazy campaign, at the time of Ada's cesarean operation, they had never talked about euthanasia again. He had never once spoken to Sophia about it, although it of course preoccupied her, too.
She did not reply, but he could tell from her eyes that she felt the same way.
Ten days later, in the car on the way to Hoogeveen hospital, they did not discuss it, either. When he closed the door and looked about him in the crunching snow, it amazed him that everything here was just the same as that evening of the accident, that calamitous February 27 when Onno and he had celebrated their common conception in Dwingeloo. Suddenly he also remembered the taxi driver who had refused to take him to Leiden, where Sophia had become a widow. The fact that Ada had now been admitted here for the second time gave him the sense of things having come full circle — and full circles always signaled radical changes. He was happy that he had made a date with Tsjallingtsje for that evening.
Kloosterboer, the doctor who had invited Sophia to come, confirmed the diagnosis. They sat next to each other facing his desk and looked at the young gynecologist, who with his short blond hair and bright-blue eyes looked more like a tennis coach.
"How far has it gone?" asked Sophia.
He nodded. "It's spread. There's no point in operating anymore."
"Well, well," said Max.
The doctor focused his eyes on him. "How do you mean?"
"Of course you're not going to operate on a woman who has been lying in a coma for seventeen years and living like a vegetable. Even if there was any point, there would still be no point."
Kloosterboer folded his arms. "Let's understand each other from the start, Mr. Delius. If there were any point, we would go ahead."
Max and Sophia looked at each other for a moment.
"And now?" asked Sophia. "Chemotherapy, radiotherapy?"
"Not that, either."
"And pain-killers?" asked Max. "I'd be interested to know if you are also giving her pain-killers?" He saw that Kloosterboer did not know what to make of that question, because there was not an immediate answer. "I mean, if you aren't giving her any pain-killers, what actually is your position? How can you reconcile the two things?"
The doctor's face stiffened. "I can quite understand your views, and your situation, but I cannot discuss the matter with you at all. You must understand my position, too."
"We do," said Sophia, and stood up.
Kloosterboer rolled his chair back. "I'll take you to your daughter's room."
"Don't bother. We'll find the way."
As they walked along the corridors, Max said that Kloosterboer was obviously a Christian fundamentalist, however much a man of the world he looked.
"Perhaps he's just young," suggested Sophia, "and frightened for his career."
Yes, of course. She knew the medical world better than he did. Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at the upright, graying abbess at his side, of whom he still understood nothing. She was starting to look more and more like her mother. So they would now finally have to talk about it.
He slowed down. "Tell me, Sophia, what do you think should happen now?"
"Ada's husband must decide."
He shook his head. "Ada's mother must decide. Anyway, I remember that Onno wrote as much to you."
"What did he write, then?"
"That Ada is your flesh and blood, and that you have the last word if decisions have to be made about her. He can't have meant anything but a situation of the kind that we have now."
She stopped and looked him straight in the eye. "They intend to let her die slowly, but I think a stop should be put to it. Very positively — with a morphine injection. But we shouldn't bank on that. At most there will be a staff meeting about this, or they will withdraw—"
"Withdraw?"
"Stop feeding her. But they won't do that, because what happens then is terrible for the staff to see. She will slowly dehydrate, until she's just skin and bone."
Max shuddered. "In other words," he said, "she must be taken away from here, to a more enlightened hospital, where they are not so frightened that it will get into the papers. In Amsterdam."
"If they let her go at least, if they don't make it a matter of honor. Don't talk to me about hospitals. Anyway, she doesn't even have to go to a hospital. Any reasonable GP will do it — anyone knows that, the public prosecutors too, but no one talks about it."
He looked at her. "Do you mean that we should simply take her to the castle?"
"Of course not," she said immediately. "With Quinten. ."
"And what shall we do with him? Should he know what's going on?"
Sophia looked at him uncertainly. "What's the point of burdening him with that?"
In the lounge, patients and nurses were watching a broadcast of a chess game; someone showed them the ward where Ada was. Max no longer remembered when he had last visited her, perhaps four or five years ago, perhaps even longer — but what he now saw, by the window, hidden behind a screen, he saw for the first time. He stiffened.
In the whiter-than-white, snowy light her head reminded him of a cut-open coconut that, years ago, when he was still in Amsterdam, he had once forgotten to throw away and which was still in the dish on his return from holiday. Her stubbly hair had gone gray, deathly gray, framing her gaunt, blotchy face, her nostrils were red and inflamed by the feeding tube. One could scarcely see any longer that there was a body under the sheets. Her desiccated white hands were like a bird's claws; the tips of all her fingers were swaddled in bandages.
"You never told me about this," he said in dismay.
"You never asked."
He found himself thinking that a stop should be put to this at once — in the next five minutes. He looked at the tarnished remains in the iron bed, while yellowing images rushed through his memory like autumn leaves blowing past: in her parents' house in the upstairs room, the cello between her legs, her fingertips on the strings, naked and cross-legged opposite him on his bed, her legs around his hips in the warm, nocturnal sea. . With ribs heaving, he turned away and looked out of the window at the blinding snow, with the sun shining on it.
He had never been so absorbed by his work as in the past eighteen months. In the mornings, when he was not yet fully awake but was no longer asleep, precisely on the borderline, MQ 3412 immediately appeared in his brain — but in the shape of a chaotic tangle of data, diagrams, spectrums, radio maps, satellite X-ray photographs, absurd interpretations, whimsical fantasies, all hopelessly confused and entangled, like a ball of wool that the cat had been playing with and, moreover, surrounded by a halo of doom: it was all wrong, he was on completely the wrong track, it was pointless nonsense.
However, he'd gradually come to understand that waking depression in himself. It had begun when he had got into the habit of drinking a bottle of wine every evening — recently sometimes even two — and when he went to sleep he was on the contrary convinced that he was on the threshold of a earth-shattering discovery. Over the years he had learned not to take any notice of all this. By the time he had cracked the joints of his thumbs and thrown off the blankets, the worst of the gloom had already receded.