The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  "But I'm possible!"

  "The fact that you are possible is certainly the ultimate mysterium tremendum ac fascinans. I have experienced a lot in the course of my practice—Little Hans, the Wolfman, all complete lunatics—but a phenomenon like you robs me of my last vestige of faith in mankind. I conclude from your revolting way of life that in your Sexualhysterie you would actually like to mount every woman that ever was but that your lewd priapic frenzy finds itself limited to the living. Those from the past have escaped your extraordinary appetite and those from the future will escape it. What you would prefer would be to possess every woman in space and time in one fell swoop, in the shape of the supreme woman: the primeval woman. Am I right in assuming, mein Lieber, that your mother's first name is Eva?"

  "Donnerwetter!" laughed Max. "That hit home! Now I understand why my Nervenarzt recommended that I consult you." He had once told Onno his mother's name, but the slant Onno had put on it gave him a slight jolt.

  "I can see right through you, Herr Generalkapellmeister."

  "But if Eve is my mother, verehrter Herr Doctor, am I Cain or Abel?"

  Now Onno seemed to be thrown, but not for long. He stopped and shouted: "The Lord will not see your sacrifice, seven times accursed one! Only mine shall be seen!"

  As he said this, with the aplomb of which only he had the secret, Max's eye lighted on a cover in the window of a secondhand bookshop. They were in a narrow street behind the Pieterskerk, which rose like the Jungfrau above the low houses of the old town center.

  "Look at that. Talk of the devil." He pointed to a copy of Alma Mahler's Mein Leben.

  "Come on," he said, putting his hand on the door handle. "I'll buy it for you, as a fee for your analysis."

  In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what—apart from the eternal innocence of animals—offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer, or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pieta: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap. No, the image of hope is someone passing with a musical instrument in a case. It is not contributing to oppression, or to liberation either, but to something that continues below the surface: the boy on his bike, with a guitar in a faded mock-leather cover on his back; a girl with a dented violin case waiting for the tram. The hallowed halls beneath concert platforms where orchestral musicians open their cases everywhere on tables and chairs and on the floor and take out their shining and glittering instruments, after which imprints of those instruments remain: negative clarinets, flutes, bassoons with their mouthpieces and connections, hollowed out of soft reinforced velvet; and while the space gradually fills with the muted cacophony of all the instruments thronging around the A like sparrows and seagulls and starlings and thrushes around a hunk of bread, the lids of the cases of double basses, as tall as a man, are opened like the doors to another world . ..

  Or the young woman, who after rehearsal lays her cello back in its case and closes the lid?

  She takes the score that has fallen apart off the music stand and arranges the sheets until the title sheet is nicely on top: Pohádka (Fairy Tale). Spiky, almost Japanese, black hair in a ponytail frames her pale face in a pure square; swaying like silk, it follows every movement of her head, always coming to rest in mathematical order. Her face is severe, the lips a little pinched, like those of someone who knows what she wants. Her pianist, a thick-set man with lank ginger hair and an expressionless face, is sitting hunched forward with his arms folded on the grand piano, his chin resting on them, and looks at her deep-brown eyes below the dark, sharply outlined eyebrows.

  "What are you thinking about, Ada?"

  His studio, a large rectangular space in a formal school building, is filled with his collections: rows of old portable gramophones on shelving on the wall, dusty trumpets, violins, and other musical instruments, crowded bookshelves, heavy tables from the flea market with scores of old salon music, rows of 78 records in damaged paper sleeves, worn Persian carpets on the floor, and a pair of large brown leather armchairs for sitting in, picking up a book, and cutting off from the outside world.

  "That the coda still isn't right. We simply can't perform like this."

  She is younger than he is, only recently graduated from the conservatory, where he teaches piano; but it's obvious that she takes the lead in the duo they comprise. He is a good pianist, which interests him less than many other things, such as the archaeology of popular music.

  He has set up a group for performing it, which people listen to with a hilarity quite out of keeping with the manner of the playing. For that matter he himself is incapable of laughter, or at least he never laughs; he has built his personality around the decision never to laugh. This is often laughed at, although people seldom cry about someone who never cries. He lacks the ambition to make his name as a pianist; the fact that he is performing with Ada has less to do with the music than with Ada, and she knows it, but she puts up with it. They have performed a few times, for student societies, but that has already produced a favorable review in the newspaper. She sees a great future for herself as a soloist, an international one, featuring cello concertos, famous conductors, concert platforms in Paris and Milan. Ros-tropovich! Pablo Casals!

  "Shall we have a bite to eat in town later?"

  She had been expecting some such question, and she is annoyed at him for embarrassing her yet again. Surely he must have realized by now that she's not interested in anything like that. Of course she can tell him she doesn't want to go to bed with him, but then he'll say that he didn't ask her, though of course that is what it comes down to. He'll think she's frigid, and maybe she is—despite being twenty-one she has never slept with a man— but it must be possible to work with someone without it immediately leading to this.

  Or does she have to put an end to their partnership if things are like that? What she'd like as a next step is to form a trio, or a quartet; the repertory for cello and piano is too small to be able to continue for long. What she's looking for are musically motivated people, but until she has found them she needs him.

  "Do you mind if I just go home, Bruno? I'd prefer to put in bit more practice."

  "The two things aren't mutually exclusive, are they? You have to eat, after all."

  She nods. "That's true. But you know how it is."

  "How is it, then?"

  She doesn't want to be having this conversation at all. Of course this is what it is like in ten-year-old marriages, when one can no longer see anything in the other person: insistence, hope, despair—with a threat of violence on the horizon.

  "Just leave it." She's ready to go, one hand on the handle of the case, the other clenched in an unhappy fist, with the four fingers wrapped around her thumb so no one will see that she bites her nails, though of course that makes it all the more apparent. "See you tomorrow."

  Carrying the cello case in her arms like a sarcophagus, she descends the stairs into the street. Bruno's studio is not far from her parents' house, where she still lives, and on the way she has a sudden flashback from a dream of the previous night: a lush bay, with a thin, high amber cloud above the sea in the form of an ancient, gnarled tree trunk, which slowly changes shape; she tries to hold on to it, to remember more—she catches a glimpse of a black figure, strangely elongated horizontally, with a pointed hat and a long lance—but the horn of a braking car and a finger pointing to a forehead puts an end to it...

  She walks down the side alley to the back of the house and goes in through the kitchen door, where her mother is trussing the pale, decapitated carcass of a chicken with a white thread. She is tall and slim, slightly taller than her daughter, with a straight, disciplined back. Her own eyes meet Ada's from beneath a head of black hair, which is worn up, but with a colder look, more suspicious, without there being any special reason.

  "How did it go?"

  "Well."

  "Cup of tea?"

  "Yes, please."

  Sh
e is about to go upstairs, but her mother says: "You can't go upstairs now. Daddy's painting your room."

  Ada takes her foot off the bottom step in annoyance. "Why the hell is he doing that? Did I ask him to?"

  "Don't be so horrid all the time. He's doing it for you. Sit and wait downstairs. He'll be finished in an hour or so."

  "Why did he suddenly take it into his head to paint my room? Hasn't he got anything better to do?"

  "You'll have to ask him. I don't know either. He went upstairs and said that your room was badly in need of a coat of paint."

  "Crazy people are a pain," says Ada, and lugs her instrument into the back room, which doubles as a dining room and a living room.

  She'll be glad when she's away from here and can live as she wants to. The good intentions are the worst thing, because they make you powerless. Her mother is a bitch, but her father is a well-meaning freethinker, with no malice in him. If only there were some malice in him, then he would at least be able to understand malice. His wife, for instance. Ada's dearest wish now is for a place of her own, where she can be completely alone. She wants to rehearse, travel, perform, have triumphs—but always to return to her apartment, with the doorbell and telephone disconnected, the radio and television switched off, or maybe completely absent; to be able to devote herself completely to music and reading poetry, or simply to doing nothing at all for hours on end and to thinking, without someone suddenly taking it into their head to paint her room. But for the time being she doesn't have the money; even her father can only just makes ends meet.

  It makes her jump when her mother puts a cup of tea and a slice of cake next to her.

  "What are you thinking about, Ada?"

  "Nothing."

  "How did it go with Bruno?"

  "Fine." She notices with irritation that her mother is still looking at her. "What's wrong?"

  "Why don't you go out with him? He's such a nice boy."

  "Oh, Mama, please stay out of it. Do you ever go out with Dad?"

  "Come on, don't get so worked up right away. It would do you a lot of good to relax occasionally."

  "Just leave that to me."

  Once her mother is out of the room, she opens the score and studies the music, pencil in hand. She holds the sheets upside down for a moment and even then she can see that it is marvelous. It is not just that she can "hear" what she sees, it is rather that she sees what the listener sees when he listens: a structural beauty, which exists in space as the sheet of a score but as heard music only in time. This is why she is not that keen on novels, which are read in silence, but does like poems, which have to be given a sound. Not that she thinks all this in so many words; but what is going on in her mind as she looks at the music, beating an imaginary time now and then with her left hand, is based on it—just as a child can speak its language without knowing the grammar.

  She puts the score on the floor, lifts the cello from its case, and screws on the spike. While she is tightening the bow, she goes to the dividing door and pushes it open with her shoulder; the small space is oppressive. She takes the instrument between her legs, tunes it, and looking sideways at the music she begins playing, at the same time hearing what Bruno is not playing, and occasionally humming it.

  Max opened the door of the shop and, without letting go of the handle, stopped in his tracks. As he listened he put up his forefinger.

  "Janáček," he said after a few seconds. "That's not a record. Someone's playing."

  No bell sounded. He put his finger to his lips, and they entered quietly. The sound of the cello hung in the narrow space, which was piled with books. They not only filled the roughly made shelves up to ceiling but were also stacked high on the left and right and in the center. A jungle of books, with narrow paths through it. Onno stopped, but Max pushed forward, up steps, down steps, past piles of books, boxes, magazines—architecture, girls' books, Jewish studies, travel guides—around a corner, up another couple of steps ... and saw Ada sitting in the back room: in a loose-fitting, long-sleeved white blouse and a small stand-up collar, her head turned away and the cello between her parted legs. Her left foot was placed elegantly a little in front of her; her full black skirt was pushed back, and he saw a slim knee and then the transition from her stockings to the light flesh of her thighs.

  I'm going mad, he thought. I want to be fingered and stroked by that woman just like that.

  She had not seen him. He went back on tiptoe and whispered: "Duty calls. I'll see you in a little while in the Gilded Turk."

  Onno nodded pityingly. "Adieu, unfortunate one."

  Max's heart was pounding. Each time was as new as the first. He positioned himself so that he could not be seen. While he listened and looked at her, something changed in him. His excitement did not disappear, but it was as though a space gradually opened up behind it, like when the curtain rises in the theater. Although she was so totally absorbed, it was as though the music actually consisted of audible silence, a silence with a shape like a geometrical figure, which she drew around herself.

  Now and then she stopped for a moment and looked for something in the score with the tip of her bow: then there was a silence within silence. Her face framed in black; the gleaming reddish wood of the waisted sound box between her legs, her left hand at the neck; next to her the open case. A line of Mallarmé occurred to him: "musicienne du silence .. ." Why should a line of Mallarmé occur to him? He wanted to go to bed with her, but that was nothing unusual, that was his daily bread—the unusual thing was that a line of Mallarmé should occur to him. Lines of Mallarmé did not normally occur to him. If he wanted, he could always dig up a couple, of course, such as "Un coup de dés n'abolira pas le hasard"—but that was really more of a title; it reminded him of what Einstein had said about dice, perhaps here in Leiden: "The Good Lord doesn't play dice."

  Hidden among the books, he observed her. He could hear someone stumbling about above his head. Did he want something more besides going to bed with her a few times?

  On impulse, he suddenly stepped into the room.

  She started so violently when he appeared that her body trembled. She looked at him, wide-eyed. The reaction of her body, as though it were something stronger than herself, over which she had no control, bound him even more closely to her.

  "I want to buy a book," he said, "but no one came. So I simply eavesdropped on you. Fairy Tale."

  That was the title of the piece: he obviously knew it. But she was even more astonished at the natural way in which he spoke to her. Men were always a little frightened of her, as she herself was of her mother, but this one didn't seem worried in the least. "Eavesdropping is very rude, if you ask me."

  Max burst out laughing. "And that's a musicienne talking! The hi-fi system as bugging equipment!"

  Her mother came into the room with a meat knife in her hand: a handsome, buxom woman, with something severe about her; she had a broad lower jaw and a tight mouth. Dressed in a black nun's habit she would make a perfect abbess.

  "Do I hear voices?"

  Ada pointed to Max with her bow. "There's a customer."

  "Hello."

  He was looked at disapprovingly by dark eyes beneath black eyebrows, which were raised slightly at the sides. "Isn't the bell working?"

  She apologized and called upstairs along the corridor: "Oswald! Someone in the shop!"

  "Nice shop," said Max, going down the steps and looking around. "But you live here, and of course you never browse."

  "My father usually knows what I want."

  His eye was caught by an art book with color illustrations: the dazzling, jewel-encrusted eggs of Fabergé, which the Czar usually gave as a gift to the Czarina at Easter.

  "Do you know Fabergé?" he asked without looking up.

  "Is he a composer?"

  The way in which she answered immediately convinced him that he was on the right track. "Something like that. A jeweler."

  While he was leafing through the book, the bookseller appeared: a nondescri
pt man of about fifty, with wavy gray-blond hair, slightly shorter than his wife; only his mouth was like his daughter's. He also apologized; the bell had not been working just now. Max said that he wanted the Fabergé book and also the one by Alma Mahler in the window. Laughing shyly, the secondhand bookseller looked at his hands; perhaps the gentleman would like to get it for himself. There was paint on his face too. As Max went toward it, he read on the shop window, back to front:

  He showed the prices on the flyleaves and said that there was no need to wrap them up. After he had paid, he looked at the back room again. The girl was still sitting in the same position with her cello. She met his glance. He went up to her and handed her the book on Fabergé.

  "For you. A present for the coda."

  No, really, she started blushing. She put the cello down and got up to receive it.

  "How nice .. ." she said, laughing. Her two front teeth at the top were slightly wider and longer than the others.

  Max turned to her father. "May I carry your daughter off for a cup of coffee?"

  While he was trying not to get paint marks on the cash register, the scene had somewhat passed him by. He muttered that she must make up her own mind.

  Max put out his hand. "Delius, Max."

  Ada put her own hand in it. "Ada Brons."

  7

  The Observatory

  The Gilded Turk was nearby, on the Breestraat. In the street Max had offered her his arm, ironically, like a cavalier of the old school; she had put her hand in it, and now, to her own astonishment, she was suddenly walking through town with a total stranger, chatting about Janáček. Hopefully, Bruno wouldn't see her.

  Max warned her about his friend, who was waiting for them: a brute of a fellow, whom she should take with a pinch of salt.

  In the large pub the afternoon rush was on; at the back a group of students in blazers were bragging noisily, beer glasses in hand.