The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

"What do you mean?"

  "That I'd prefer to get to know you."

  As she hesitantly loosened the belt of the robe, he put his hands over his eyes until she was lying next to him under the sheets. He raised himself on one elbow and looked at her. She saw that he wanted to say something, but although he said nothing, it seemed a moment later as though he had said it, and then he pressed his mouth to hers, took her firmly in his arms, and slid halfway across her.

  She began trembling and whispered: "Be careful, don't hurt me ..."

  Max realized at once that it was her first time. He would have to deflower her, and with anyone else he would have dreamed up some pretext to put a stop to things: a headache; an early start next morning. Every time he had undertaken this task, he had paid for it afterward: for months the girls who had been transformed into women went on ringing the doorbell and phoning, even when he had forgotten them. When a man deflowered a woman, he assumed a place in her life which could only be compared with that of the doctor who had brought her into the world, or of the one who helped her when she was dying. But now, with Ada, it did not occur to him to stop.

  She held him between her legs like her cello—and slowly, inch by inch, then back again, then a little further, she felt him penetrating her, while at the same time it was as though he enveloped her and she disappeared farther and farther into him. When she sensed that he had reached her hymen, she clung to him anxiously, while an image appeared to her, something like an eye, or the shutter of a camera. She wanted to call for her mother, but suddenly he was through and filled her completely.

  Sobbing and laughing, she began kissing him. He stopped moving. She could feel his blood pounding deep in her belly. He was obviously trying to control his excitement, and when that threatened to fail, he came out of her, lay next to her, and put an arm around her shoulder.

  "Perhaps we should leave it at that for today."

  His paternal tone amazed her, but she was grateful to him. She said nothing. The record had finished, and she listened to the howling of the wind among the trees in front of the house. Suddenly there she was in an Amsterdam bed with an astronomer, who had put an end to years of fretting and had ushered in a new period in her life. She snuggled up to him and sighed deeply.

  He too listened to the wind. He saw the house: light and warm inside, and outside, the damp, chilly night.

  "If we went up onto the roof now," he said, "and I squeezed a drop of ink out of my fountain pen and let it blow against a sheet of paper, how great do you think the chance would be of the sentence I don't want Ada to stay with me appearing in my handwriting?"

  "That's impossible."

  "The chance isn't nil, but the universe is probably too small to contain all the ink needed before it happens."

  8

  An Idyll

  In the weeks that followed, they saw each other every day in Leiden, where they walked through the Botanical Garden during the lunch hour, drank coffee in the observatory canteen, or had an Indonesian meal in town in the evening. On the weekends he took her with him to Amsterdam, sometimes with the cello in the back of the car. Those Saturdays and Sundays gave him a feeling of peace, which was new. He had had longer-term relationships a few times before, but they had not affected his restlessness in the slightest; even while those girlfriends were with him, he was dying to get away: out into the street, into the pub—not to drink, because he didn't do that, or to have a relaxed chat with someone, because he didn't do that either—but to look for something new.

  The thought that somewhere in the town there was a woman walking, or sitting alone at a cafe table while he was at home wasting his time with his girlfriend, was unbearable. Sometimes such a woman appeared to him in a kind of vision: he saw exactly what she looked like and where she was sitting, in what cafe, at what table. On occasion he had found a pretext to get out of the house and run there; but when she turned out not to be sitting there, that was only because he was just too late. Afterward, he would stand on tiptoe outside and scan the street in both directions.

  Of course, he had not suddenly changed into a monogamous lover: from Monday to Friday his time-consuming love life continued as before. But on the weekends, when Ada was there, the obsession left him. Not that he relaxed in front of the TV or read a thriller or did a household chore, because he had never understood what "relaxation" meant and he never would. The thought of playing a game, or a sport, or even going for a walk, was unthinkable. He took only study material with him on vacation, and left no church or museum unvisited; if he sunbathed, then it was not so much because he enjoyed it but because one had to get brown: it was less sunbathing than the exposure to light of his whole body according to a precise schedule, including his sides and the insides of his arms and legs. That was also work—because if he were not working or chasing women, he found himself peering into a threatening void that was more than just boredom. However, when he was chasing women he actually wanted to be working, and when he was working he actually wanted to be chasing women, with the result that he was never at peace. Whenever anyone brought this up, he usually answered: "Eternal peace will come in its own good time—I don't need an advance." Now, though, with Ada, he made love in a relaxed, almost bourgeois way, and afterward wanted nothing else, which sometimes worried him. Was he in the process of degenerating in the direction of marriage? At his insistence, Ada was now taking the pill.

  His conversations with Onno were also part of his obsession, but with Ada it was different. He wasn't in love. In a certain sense he was in love with all women except Ada. When he looked at a woman, he often had the feeling that his blue eyes could see to the bottom of her soul, as if looking into a clear bay; and perhaps it was true. Perhaps women felt the same and this was the key to his romantic successes, for which he was envied and hated in the pubs. But when he looked at Ada, it seemed to increase his distance from her. He understood nothing about her; for him she had the unfathomable look of a creature from another world, and that was precisely what bound him to her. He experienced her presence in his house not like that of a dog, which has no secrets from human beings, but like that of a cat, which is itself a secret—and to that extent he felt free and unthreatened. And just as a dog belongs to a human being but a cat belongs to a house, so she merged with the order in his apartment and became a part of it. Dogs knock over tables, scoop cushions from armchairs, and carry things out of the room with their heads held high; cats do not even touch what they touch—except perhaps sometimes when they dig their claws into the carpet.

  When she put a book on the table, it lay there precisely as he himself would have put it down: with the title upward, not on another book that was smaller, not at an angle, and along the golden section between the ashtray and the edge of the table, parallel to that edge. She would never forget to fold the newspaper. When he looked up from his desk and saw her sitting on the sofa, reading poems by Rilke, she was sitting exactly as she should sit. He had never known someone to have the same natural feel for relationships as himself, without having to make an effort and without it turning into petty-minded neatness. They did not talk much, and he liked that too. Musicienne du silence. You could chat with anyone, he believed; being silent together without it becoming embarrassing was a lot rarer. Only when Onno was around was there nonstop talk. If he had something to do at his desk, then Onno had long conversations with Ada, in a rather paternal tone, since that was the only way he could show his sympathy—or perhaps it was more the tone of a father-in-law. It always struck Ada that Max too said much more to her when Onno was there: it was as though she became a different person for him in Onno's presence. Without Onno, for example, he would never have explained so patiently to her that in modern science, what is observed can no longer be seen separately from the observer, since the observer changes what is observed by observing it. Max knew that kind of thing didn't interest her in the slightest, but he still did it, for Onno's benefit in fact—and she preferred him as he was without Onno.

  Sh
e was not very talkative, either. She could sit for hours at the open window overlooking the Vondelpark, where children and dogs were being taken for walks, where hippies in Oriental dress danced past, singing and adorned with flowers, and where the same boy was always practicing juggling on the grass, learning nothing but how to bend down. On the other side, almost invisible from the park behind bushes and trees, there was a low building containing chapels of rest, to which hearses drove up several times a day and which tearful people went in and out of. For some reason she found this panorama ideally suited to Max: she felt a similar stark juxtaposition of life and death in him. In fact he was always in a good mood, but somehow that was so striking because it was set against a dark background, in the same way that a diamond is displayed on black velvet at the jeweler's.

  Only when Max once asked her did she tell him anything about her parents, about their meeting during the bombing of Leiden and how they later set up a secondhand bookshop. She had never felt that she was the child of those two people who were so completely different from her, but rather that she was their foster child, a foundling, who in fact had nothing to do with them. Not that she had any romantic ideas in that direction, because she needed only to look in the mirror and she saw her mother.

  "The reverse probably also happens," said Max, "where someone thinks that his parent are his parents, and they aren't."

  After that first occasion he had never met her parents again. He, too, felt that he had nothing to do with them, and Ada did not ask him—although her parents had indicated a few times that they would like to meet her boyfriend. He knew that she was grateful to him for taking her out of the house for at least two days a week. And as far as his own parents were concerned, had she asked him about them, he would have told her his story: when she did not, he left things as they were.

  Domestic happiness was in the air! He was in the habit of pacing through the rooms when he was thinking, but he never did so when he was not alone; Ada was the first person who did not inhibit him from doing this. The pacing was not simply walking back and forth, just as it is not with caged polar bears or lions, but was determined by a precise geometrical pattern, of which he was himself vaguely conscious and from which he did not deviate one inch. It was formed by the three invisible lines projecting from his furniture: the extensions of the diagonals and the center lines. His chairs, tables, and cupboards, combined with the angles of the corners of the room, were the focus of a complicated network, like an imaginary garden in Lenotre style, which allowed him to step on many points in it, but not all. While he was pacing with his hands behind his back, he sometimes found himself thinking about the future.

  When the Westerbork facility was finished in a few years' time, he would probably have to go to Drenthe more frequently than now. He contemplated the bleak evenings there, with nothing to do for miles around. Yokels playing billiards, odd girls, whom he could hardly understand and with whom he dare not try anything, for fear of being murdered with pitchforks and rakes. Wouldn't it be nice if Ada came along now and then? They could rent a pied-a-terre somewhere, in the local solicitor's house, and furnish it to their taste. Ada would have her work too, of course, and in a car you could be in Amsterdam in an hour, or an hour and half...

  Since Bruno had realized that Ada had a boyfriend, he was routinely unable to attend rehearsals; because of this she was learning a new piece by Xenakis for solo cello, Nomos Alpha. This did not disturb Max when he was working—on the contrary: the fact that she was occupied, too, relieved him of the responsibility of having to say something to break the silence. Now and then they even made music together. During the war his mother had occasionally given him piano lessons, and later his foster parents had sent him to a music school, but his playing was not of a very high standard; he had bought the grand piano on impulse, at an auction—perhaps just to see it being carried into his house, thereby putting something right. When he did occasionally play with Ada, completely different things happened. She had been to the conservatory in The Hague. She was a professional musician; she knew that making music was not about expressing emotions but about evoking them: and that could only succeed when it was done professionally—that is, dispassionately, like a surgeon operating, regardless of theatrical grimaces conductors and soloists often pulled when they knew they were being watched. At home or in rehearsal, they never pulled those faces, nor did orchestral musicians, because those were the faces of listeners.

  Max, on the other hand, was so far from being a musician that it was almost impossible for him to make music—not because it did not affect him, but because it affected him too much. He had an extensive record collection, four yards of records from Machaut and Dufay to Boulez and Riley, but he almost never put anything on for himself. As soon as he struck a note on his grand piano, and then the octave, it already affected him too deeply: it opened a fathomless shaft in him, making him dizzy. When the piano tuner was there, he pretended to look through the newspaper; in reality he was racked by emotions, almost more than when a great soloist was at work, because now it was harmony itself resonating in a pure medium without the intervention of a composer—just like at home the dough always tasted better than the cake itself, but one was not allowed to eat it, although he said a thousand times that he did not want cake. Milk, eggs, butter, flour, and sugar—it was true that in the oven the divine mixture was transformed into a work of culinary art, but at the same time it was ruined. Scores of times he repeated the first four bars of Schubert's Fantasie in F for four hands on the piano with Ada: what happened? A bed was laid down, a few simple notes sounded—and immediately an absolute beauty was attained: what was most exalted, most complex, most incomprehensible in the form of what was simplest. Even after the hundredth time it had lost none of its radiance and yielded nothing of its secret.

  "What is it?" cried Max in despair. "What is it in heaven's name? Suddenly it reminds me of something. Yes, I've got it: Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave." He got up, took out the record, and put it on the turntable. "Here, listen, at about bar one fifteen." He raised his forefinger. "Can you hear? It's almost the same, on just the same sort of bed!"

  Ada kissed him on the cheek. "You have a merciless ear," she said.

  He put his arm around her shoulders. "At least I can talk about it to you, even though you haven't a clue yourself—but no one has. Do you know what Onno once said when I started talking about music? He shook his great head with those quivering cheeks and said, 'Music is for girls.' Well, the girl in question is here. That was good intuition."

  "Why is music supposed to be only for girls?"

  "You mustn't take him so literally. Once when I bought an ice cream, he said, 'Ice cream is for vicars.' Music doesn't exist for him. He regards it as meaningless sound. For him only words have meaning. What he has against it is probably the flight from reality that it represents for many people, a kind of escape clause to the effect that if all else fails, there's always music. Perhaps he actually finds music a kind of cowardly consolation.

  "He once told me that in the Middle Ages the Greek mousike techne— the 'art of the muse'—was derived from the ancient Egyptian word moys, which means 'water.' This made Moses the discoverer of music, because according to the same erroneous etymology, his name was supposed to mean 'rescued from water.' You know—the rush basket in which he was found in the Nile as a baby: the same Moses who struck water from the rock and who had God create the world with a word in Genesis, after which his spirit moved over the waters. Everything always fits. So in fact you're practicing the Mosaic art."

  "I'm sure I am. Show me your thumbs."

  He put his hands in hers: they were well formed, like the rest of his body, not too broad and not too slim, but his thumbs were both short and spatula-shaped. "I invent it all by sucking on my thumbs," he said.

  "Who do you take after?"

  "No idea. Maybe my father. Maybe myself. That's why I can just span an octave but can't go any further. What's the name of that pianist who had an
operation on his hands in order to be able to span larger chords and then couldn't play anymore?"

  "No idea," said Ada, putting his hands in his lap. "And why is ice cream for vicars?"

  "Because they have to spoil themselves, of course, seeing that no one else does."

  Ada stared at him and nodded. "You love him, don't you?"

  "Of course I love him."

  Max's eyes suddenly moistened. Ada was amazed to see it happen. She did not know what to make of it, but suddenly she had the feeling that she was the mother of the pair of them.

  "Do you two tell each other everything?"

  "Everything." Fortunately she did not ask if he loved him more than her. "We even tell each other what we would never tell anyone. That's friendship."

  9

  The Demons

  When the sun had reached its solstice and touched the Tropic of Cancer— that is, at the beginning of summer—a political and musical happening was staged, to round off the turbulent season and in happy expectation of even more turbulent times. Since the riots of the year before, Amsterdam, as Onno put it, had been occupied by invading Dutch troops: uniformed farmers' sons from Christian homes had temporary control of the city, and the main issue was now its liberation, followed by the irrevocable overthrow of the Netherlands by Amsterdam. One of the organizers of the festival had evidently once heard a performance by Ada and Bruno, because they were invited to perform. It was to be her first engagement in Amsterdam, and although it wasn't a real concert, it was still a great honor. Ada was apprehensive about playing her kind of music for the kind of audience that could be expected there; but of course they must give it a try, and she persuaded Bruno to pick up where they had left off.

  Everyone would be there, Max assured her. Politics was the new popular entertainment, in a way that it had not been since the war and as it would not be for a long time to come; he estimated the interval at twenty-two years: 1945; 1967; 1989.. .. Before the concert Ada went for a meal with the other musicians; she arranged to meet Max afterward in the greenroom and stay over at his place.