"I won't understand anyway."
"It's dead simple."
The row of reflectors, he explained, was aligned precisely from west to east, a hundred and forty-five yards apart, exact to within a fraction of an inch. Beyond that, however, it was a true straight line: over the distance of a mile the curvature of the earth had also been compensated for. Just imagine! And that accuracy was necessary, because the twelve mirrors had to be seen as one gigantic circular telescope with a diameter of a mile, the largest in the world. The idea was that because of the rotation of the earth, seen from space, the row of mirrors after a quarter of a day would be at right angles to its original position and after half a day in the reverse position; so by observing a radio source for half a day, you could achieve the synthesis that you wanted.
"Surely a child can understand that."
"I can hear everything you say, but it doesn't mean anything to me," said Sophia, while she held Quinten's wobbling head and wiped his mouth.
Max took a radio map off a desk and asked the technician: "What's this?"
He looked at it absentmindedly. "M 51."
"Here," said Max, and held it in front of Sophia. "This is what it looks like. The whirlpool nebula in the constellation of Canes Venatici. Thirteen million years ago."
But it was Quinten who took the paper in both hands and subjected the pointed mountains of waving lines of intensity to a close inspection.
"I'm curious to know what he's going to tell us," said the director with raised eyebrows.
When Quinten had given back the sheet, without crumpling it up or rubbing it on the ground in an uncoordinated way, Sophia put her arms around him and cuddled him and said: "What a strange child you are. You're just like your father."
The way in which she had behaved with Quinten from the first showed a completely different side of her nature, which had amazed Onno during his sporadic visits, but which Max recognized from the way she behaved with him at night — but then without saying a word. Quinten didn't like the hug and freed himself from it with dignity.
Max watched and, lost in thought, said: "I'm going outside for a while."
He put on only a scarf, stuck his hands in his pockets, and wandered onto the site. The air was still full of magically floating, glowing splinters. He needed to be alone for a few minutes, so that he could allow the change that he had just undergone to penetrate through him. There was a vague smell of Indonesian food; in an arid garden behind a hut a boy was repairing a bike. He remembered from the plans that a line of hospital huts had been demolished to make way for the mirrors. The camp was already no longer what it had been during the war, but even if everything were to disappear, it would still be the spot for all eternity. The house by the barrier, where he had just gotten out, had been the house of the camp commandant. It was still occupied; there were curtains and plants on the windowsill. Across the road along the railway line, which was once called Boulevard des Miseres, he walked in an easterly direction. When he had told Sophia just now about the exact west-to-east alignment of the instruments, his father's Polish triangle of Bielsko-Katowice-Krakow, a triangle with the same angles occurred to him, which also pointed directly eastward, with Auschwitz at its center. None of it meant anything, but that was how it was. And now he suddenly saw the map of Drenthe in front of him: an isosceles triangle with Westerbork camp at its center.
Here, on this road, perhaps on the spot where he was now walking, his mother had gotten into a cattle truck under the watchful eye of the camp commandant, after which the door was slid shut and the bolt fastened. Here her last journey had begun. He tried to reconcile that awareness with what he could see; but although the event had taken place on this spot, the two things remained as different from each other as a thought and a stone. The road was deserted, but the rails were empty, it smelled not of Jewish cooking but of nasigoreng. It was time, he thought, that tore everything to shreds. He looked around: the silent, majestic entry of the mirrors into the camp. From somewhere came the hammering of a woodpecker. He was sure of it — he belonged here; here was where he must spend his life.
He walked on, to the other end of the camp, where the rails ended in a decayed bumper. He crouched down and put his hand on the rusty iron, stood up and looked again at the row of antennas, all pointing to the same point in the sky. And suddenly he thought of the yellow star that his mother had had to wear on her left breast during the war. A star! Stars! All those tens of thousands here had worn stars; they had been forced into the wagons with stars on their chests, on their way from the small trapezoid to the great square. He remembered from the papers discussions on the question of whether there should be a monument to the deported in Westerbork. The survivors had been against it; everything should now be forgotten. But it was there anyway! What was the synthetic radio telescope finally but a monument, a mile in diameter, to the dead!
37. Expeditions
While life continued in Groot Rechteren and Dwingeloo in rural and astronomical calm, in Amsterdam Onno had embarked upon a lightning political career. Sometimes he had the feeling that the way in which it was happening was not connected solely with his qualities but also with the fate that had befallen him: as though all his political friends felt that he deserved it after his wife's accident — or in any case that they could not decently obstruct him too forcefully. At the beginning of 1969 he had been elected to the city council, and shortly afterward he became alderman for education, arts, and sciences.
"During my period of office," he had whispered to the mayor after his appointment, at a dinner in the official residence, "education will be principally geared to producing spineless yes-men. With Plato in mind, I will put poets mercilessly to the sword, and I shall bring science completely into line and put it in the service of my personal ambitions. I shall make myself hated like no previous Amsterdam alderman. While your statue is decorated daily with fresh flowers, my name will be spoken even centuries afterward only with the deepest revulsion."
Whereupon the gray-haired mayor had taken his hand from his ear and said: "Yes, yes, Onno, take it easy."
Everyone was worried that he would harm the party with his big mouth, but things went surprisingly welclass="underline" he had found his bearings in a few weeks, and in the council chamber he took a completely different tone — namely, the measured tone that he knew was the only effective one in Holland. A new life had begun for him. University administrators who refused to see him had to cool their heels in his waiting room; the chairman of the arts council was summoned; in The Hague he argued for Amsterdam interests at the ministry, he lobbied his party colleagues in the Lower House of Parliament, he made decisions, mediated, intervened, dismissed, appointed, joined battle with the students. Suddenly he had power, a secretary, civil servants who danced to his tune and a car with a driver, who took him from the town hall to the Kerkstraat in the evenings.
But there was no one there any longer. When he had closed the door behind him, he was greeted by a silence that seemed to emanate from two boxes: Ada's cello case in his study and the Chinese camphor chest in his bedroom, in which he had stored her clothes. But the thought of her and of Quinten was quickly buried under the dossiers that emerged from his outsize briefcase — partly because he knew that Quinten lacked for nothing and Ada was being well looked after in a nursing home in Emmen, although he had not been there more than twice. Measured by his interest in the cryptic signs on a certain plate in the museum of Herak-lion, his interest in the content of those dossiers was minimal — after all he could just as well be in charge of a different portfolio. But he had resigned himself to the fact that his life was evidently to be determined by brilliant beginnings, which were suddenly frustrated — in his family life just as in linguistics.