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 had 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.