During the coffee break, while all the staff gathered in the hall of the main building around the trolley with the shiny urn, Max talked to an electronics engineer who was responsible for the wiring of the synthetic radio telescope; soon he would have to go Westerbork on the shuttle bus, because there had been new teething troubles. He spoke with such a soft, modest voice that Max could scarcely hear him in the hubbub. On an impulse he offered to take him there in his own car, seeing that he had to go there himself. He had suddenly said it: this was the moment, with Quinten and Sophia. Over the months, during the long evenings at the castle, he had told Sophia more about his life than he had ever told her daughter — possibly because their formal relationship somehow made it easier for him than an intimate one.
Three quarters of an hour later they were driving along the provincial road. Sophia, who was in the backseat with the child, perhaps suspected that the accident had happened somewhere here; but when they passed the spot Max only glanced at it quickly out of the corner of his eye. The open space where the trees had been was now filled with two young alders, supported by wooden poles, to which they were attached by strips of black rubber, obviously cut from car tires, in the form of a figure eight. They did not speak. The engineer leafed through a folder of papers on his lap, Quinten had fallen asleep, and suddenly Max was reminded of his walk through the clammy Polish heat, from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II — as though that were a counterpart of the route from Dwingeloo to Westerbork. A feeling of nausea seized him, which not only issued from that memory but mainly from what lay behind it. He did not think of it for weeks or months, but it always suddenly reappeared in an unchanged state, without the decay to which even radioactive material was subject.
"You have to turn right here," said the engineer when they were at the village of Hooghalen.
"Sorry, it's the first time I've been here."
"You can't be serious."
"But it's true."
"Are you really interested in astronomy?"
"Maybe not."
He saw a sign pointing to a neighboring village of Amen — as though the whole area had been prepared for centuries for what would one day happen there — and suddenly there was a sign to the Schattenberg estate. He drove down a woodland path, flanked on the right by rusty train rails. Now and then they passed Ambonese in traditional ankle-length Indonesian dress, supplemented for the Dutch winter with woollen scarves and woolly hats; sometimes whole families, whose members walked not alongside each other but one behind the other, with the father at the head, and the youngest child at the back. A moment later Max realized with a shock what the rails along the road were: laid by the Germans and ending at Birkenau.
He stopped at a barrier in the barbed-wire fence, got out, and looked at the camp with bated breath. From the plans and blueprints, which he had looked at repeatedly in Leiden and Dwingeloo, he knew that it was a trapezoid approximately a third of a mile long and a third of a mile wide.
What he saw was a large forest-framed space, the freezing air filled with minute icicles that gleamed in the sunlight; there were rows of dilapidated huts, set carefully at right angles like in Birkenau, as if they were still on the drawing-board — an inhuman pattern that seemed to have served as a model for postwar housing developments. Smoke still rose from some chimneys, but most of the huts were obviously no longer occupied; a few had burned down, and here and there huts had disappeared. Children were playing; somewhere someone was cycling along who undoubtedly would have a great deal to say about what went on in Indonesia during the Japanese occupation but knew nothing of what had taken place here.
Straight in front of him the rails continued to the other end of the camp — and parallel with them, farther to the right like. . yes, like what? — like a vision, a mirage, a dream over a distance of a mile, the procession of huge dish aerials, entering the camp on one side and leaving it on the other. His eyes grew moist. Here, in this asshole of the Netherlands, they entreated the blessing of heaven like sacrificial altars in the total silence. At the same moment he felt the pressure that had weighed on him for the past few years lifting: the pressure of having to work in this accursed spot. Suddenly he could think of no place on earth where he would rather work than here. Wasn't everything that he was gathered together here, as in the focal point of a lens?
Without looking at Sophia, he got back in the car and drove slowly to the new low-rise service building, suddenly unable to stop talking. Agitatedly, occasionally half turning around, he told them that the camp had been set up by the Dutch government in 1939 for German Jewish refugees — the first Jewish camp outside Germany — but that the cost had been recovered from the Jewish community in the Netherlands. So that when the Germans arrived, they had the refugees neatly collected in one place. Subsequently, over a hundred thousand Dutch Jews were transported to Poland from this place — proportionately more even than from Germany itself. After the war Dutch fascists, of which Drenthe was full, were imprisoned in it. For a while it was a military camp, then Dutch citizens expelled from Indonesia were accommodated in it, and finally the Moluccans, who were now, reluctantly and with regular police intervention, being forced into more or less normal housing developments. In order to prevent their return to the camp, everything was deliberately being allowed to fall into disrepair. By establishing the observatory here, the government hoped that the name Westerbork would lose its unpleasant connotations.
When he had once said this to Onno, Onno had said that his eldest brother, the provincial governor of Drenthe, was bound to be behind it.
"Imagine the Poles setting up a conservatory in Auschwitz so that the name Auschwitz would sound less unpleasant! It would be hilarious if it were not so sad. You sometimes wonder if people really know the sort of world they're living in. Did you know, for example," he asked the engineer, "that Westerbork council sold a lot of those huts to neighboring farmers and sports clubs? All over Drenthe young soccer players are getting changed in those huts that once inspired terror. Business is business! But the things are Jewish property, and I've not read anywhere that the proceeds were transferred to the Jewish community. They are still being ripped off!"
He banged his steering wheel excitedly, and the engineer turned and exchanged a short glance with Sophia.
In the control building, on the other side of the line of telescopes, it was warm and there was the smell of fresh coffee. Smiling with surprise, the director of the installation, a technical engineer who had once worked for an oil company, appeared.
"We thought we'd never see an astronomer here." His dark-brown eyes met those of Quinten. "Well, well, the daughter of the house has come too!"
It took a while for Max to explain that Quinten Quist wasn't a daughter but a son, and not his but his friend's, and that Sophia Brons was not his wife or the mother of the child but the grandmother.
The director made a gesture indicating that it made no difference to him, and led them into the computer area. Sophia took off Quinten's coat and cap and handed him a little doll, which he haughtily ignored. Max shook hands with the technicians, who were sitting around at the monitors and whom he knew from Dwingeloo. He was shown his office and went with the director to the reception area, humming and groaning with the ventilators, isolated in a Faraday cage. When they returned to the central terminal, he stood for a while at the large semicircular window with a view of the mirrors and the huts.
When he remembered Sophia's presence, he turned around, pointed to the telescopes, and asked: "Do you know how they work?"