Max's eyes had widened in dismay. He noticed that, at the prospect of seeing Sophia again, he was getting an erection under his napkin. What in heaven's name did that mean? Did it mean that he, like Ada and Onno, had not only never understood her, but not even himself?
Max drove from the observatory to the crematorium near The Hague in a Volkswagen borrowed from his garage. He really ought to have been in Dwingeloo, but when he had mentioned the accident, someone had filled in for him.
Here all hope went up in smoke. Just like three months ago, at Onno's wedding, it was rush hour here too — but now in order to undo something the foundations of which were constantly being laid in the town halls. The same black limousines, now without white ribbons on their side mirrors, drove in and out of the gate, and now not accompanied by confetti and laughter but, in a leaden silence, filled only by the soft crunch of ground-up shells under the tires. He breathed in the sea air deeply. Here too there were groups of people standing everywhere, but he saw no one that he knew. At the gate a man in a black suit, with a hat in his hand, asked him for which deceased he had come; because of his profession his face expressed such a boundless, universal, almost syllogistic sorrow at the mortality of all human beings, hence also of Socrates, that no one could match it with their individual sorrow. The service for Mr. Brons was in the small hall. The cortege had not yet arrived.
He walked down the wooded path, past the columbaria. In the niches of the brick walls the urns stood like in an eighteenth-century pharmacy; but at the same time it made an Asiatic impression on him. There was something Chinese about it, something from a culture that had been submerged for thousands of years. He would never have himself cremated; it was far too final for him. He and Onno had once come to the conclusion that you had to decide for yourself whether after your death you wanted to return to your father or your mother. If you wanted to return to your father, then you must go into the fire, because that was spirit; but your mother was of course the earth, the body. Since that conversation, Onno had known for sure that he would have himself cremated.
The sun shone low over the tops of the trees — and when the crematorium loomed up he saw above the low flat roof, against the dark background of the wood, thin pale blue smoke drifting slowly upward, like from a cigarette. He decided to walk around the building first before going in.
Around the back he stopped. Not because of the container of rubbish, which was standing there, because rubbish was inevitable everywhere; or because of the drivers, who stood laughing and talking by their parked hearses, since everyone had a job to do; but because of the square chimney that he recognized from Birkenau. Now too there was no smoke coming out of it, only scorching heat. At its base there was the hum of ventilators from a grille. He couldn't see it, but at the same time he did see it: how stokers under the ground took the coffins out of the descended elevators, carried them across a tiled floor in neon light, and pushed them, flowers and all, into the white helclass="underline" not thousands a day, true, two or three an hour, but that was what was going on down below.
In the waiting room of the small hall a small company had gathered. Onno's parents were there, and his youngest sister's husband, Karel, the Rotterdam brain surgeon. The others — friends and acquaintances of Brons's of course, freethinkers and anarchists, perhaps even teetotalers — he had never seen before. He could only remember Ada's father vaguely, but in some way they were like him: slightly shabby, like Social Democrats, but without their petit bourgeois air and plus a certain intellectual clarity, in the way they looked at things. They had read books — even if they were probably books that only they still read. They looked shyly now and then at the Calvinist prime minister, who had read mainly one Book.
Apart from that he knew only Bruno. The pianist had seen the announcement of the death and asked how Ada had reacted to her father's death.
"She didn't," said Max. After Max briefly told him what had happened, Bruno asked in shock whether she was still unconscious, but Max didn't know. He excused himself and said hello to Onno's family. They also took it for granted that they would talk not about Brons but about Ada. The brain surgeon confirmed hesitantly that even a long coma did not necessarily mean brain damage, but he would prefer her to wake up sooner rather than later. At least her brain stem, where the breathing center was located, was not damaged.
"Poor child," said Onno's mother. "And expecting, too. Isn't it appalling?"
"One doesn't talk like that, To," said Quist with granite authority. "God moves in mysterious ways."
"Yes of course, but. ."
"In the eyes of Providence there are no 'buts.' "
She was intimidated and fell silent.
"It was more as if the devil had a hand in it," said Max. "We had to stop for a tree that had fallen over, and just afterward a second tree fell on precisely the same spot."
Quist shot him a short glance, which he couldn't quite place: on the one hand it said that the devil was something for idolaters, or for Roman Catholics, which in practical terms amounted to the same thing; on the other hand there was a hint of something like sympathy, because Max had come to his wife's aid in a Manichean way in her Theodicean dilemma. Perhaps, thought Max, it was really true that you could only believe in God if you believed in the devil as well. If you believed only in God, you got into difficulties. In that case where did the gas chambers come from? Why did that tree have to fall exactly where it fell? Why was God's creation so faulty that later on a Messiah was necessary, too? "And God saw that it was good" — but it wasn't good at all. It was all wrong.
The doors of the hall were slowly opened by an attendant, who, despite his youth, was also completely shattered by grief. Max was the last to enter. The coffin, covered in flowers, was centrally placed in front of them, like a missile about to be launched. In the front row he saw Onno, his sister Dol, and Sophia with an old lady who must be her mother; the others were of course Brons's relations. Dol had had the idea of having them play the second part of the Dvorak cello concerto, which made Ada more present than if she had actually been there. It seemed to Max that the music was the only thing that moved in the room. He looked at the white-haired back of Ada's grandmother's head, the hair in a knot. Was that perhaps the great-grandmother of his child sitting there?
When the music had slowly ended, the broken young man took a step forward, and said, again with a hat in his hand:
"Mr. A.L.C. Akkersdijk will now say a few words."
Pulling papers out of his inside pocket, a graying man stepped forward and stood at the lectern. He folded them open, looked fiercely at those assembled, and said with great determination:
"Oswald Brons is dead."
This was someone who knew no such thing as doubt. Now he outlined Brons's contributions to the cause of free thought and the triumph of reason over all obscurantism, of scientific atheism over the dogmatism of the churches of all denominations, particularly in the Leiden chapter, where Oswald had given of his best. Max could see from the back of Onno's head that he was thinking of his father, who was now forced to endure this, too. He looked around. The clear hall with its brick walls was as clean and bare as a stream of cold water from the tap — it wasn't the functional architecture of modern death. But was the true architecture of grief perhaps still a dark church full of incense, with columns and statues and dark alcoves, in which candles were burning by dim paintings, executed gods and sacred accoutrements? Wasn't that much more functional emotionally? That had obviously been forgotten by the vegetarian iconoclasts of the Bauhaus and De Stijl.