The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  Onno went too. Since he had reached an impasse with the Phaistos disc, he had gradually gotten more interested in politics; after all, even Chomsky was more preoccupied with politics than with linguistics these days, so he was in good company. His instinctive sympathies lay with the anarchistic provocateurs and revolutionaries, as did those of Max, but deep down he knew that their rabid views did not stand a chance.

  Holland hated radicalism; in the swampy delta of the Rhine estuary this kind of theorizing had been isolated and disarmed in theology, while practical people struck bargains—Max, with his dangerously foreign disposition, need have no illusions at all on that score: Erasmus called the tune here. In Holland there was only one path, and that was the middle path. And in politics it was power that mattered, nothing else. What else was left? The Social Democrats had become as ossified as the Christian parties. What about a splinter group like the Communists or the Pacifist Socialists? But, with respect, they were a completely different breed. It was true that a new left-wing Liberal party had been set up, which a few months ago, at the interim elections, had been very successful and already had seven members in the Lower House; but although it was led by the same kind of people as himself, even from the same generation, Onno found this group too lacking in a sense of history; moreover, he suspected it of trying to implement purely formal constitutional reforms in order to prevent socioeconomic ones.

  "You're not really going into politics, are you, Onno?" asked Max as they were on their way to the meeting.

  Onno looked at him uncertainly. "Do you think it's my destiny?"

  "Destiny? Surely you decide that for yourself?"

  "Do you think so? In any case, you're completely unsuited to politics, because for that you need come from a large family. You learn the craft in the life-and-death struggle with your brothers and sisters. If you haven't been through this school of intrigue and deceit and intimidation, you'll never make it. That means that I have excellent qualifications, but you're an only child—you've never had to fight for your parents' favor."

  "It was a very close thing. I had an older brother, but he died in his crib."

  "Just the sort of thing that would happen to you. You can't tolerate anyone around you. But as things stand at the moment, all you're fit for is to be king. Who knows?; if things go on like this, that position may yet become vacant."

  "Then I'd immediately appoint you to form my first and only cabinet, because after that I would abolish democracy and proclaim an absolute monarchy."

  Onno bent his back and folded his hands in entreaty. "Euere kaiserliche und königliche, apostolische Majestat, don't you think—"

  "That is my last word. The audience is at an end—there is the door. Or, rather, there is the window."

  "Sire, do I really have to .. ."

  "Jump!"

  "Damn," said Onno, and sat up. "I don't know if you know, but it is the Bohemian practice of defenestration that is welling up in your sick mind. In the Hradcany in Prague, disgraced politicians were always thrown out of the window." He suddenly looked disapprovingly at Max's elegant summer suit with its pocket handkerchief. "I must say you're very badly dressed for a subversive assembly."

  "Robespierre also followed the fashion of the ancien regime."

  "Yes, till his head was lopped off at his lace collar."

  "And you've got your sweater on inside out. You look ridiculous with that label at the back of your neck."

  "You'd do something like that deliberately."

  In the side streets dark-blue police buses full of armed provincials waited like patient cats next to the mousehole; there was a great melee around the revolving doors. The auditorium, a temporarily converted auction room, was decorated with red flags and posters of Marx, Lenin, Bakunin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and, of course El Che, the hero of heroes, who had given up his Cuban ministerial post and was now in the jungle, probably in Bolivia, participating in the guerrilla struggle whose object was the liberation of the South American continent.

  There was the kind of cheerful bustle to which everyone had by now become addicted. Between the cast-iron pillars of the surrounding covered galleries there were stalls, where revolution was extolled in all tastes and styles: Moscow-line Communists, breakaway Communists, Trotskyites, anarchists, Maoists, the Socialist Youth, the Red Youth, the Student Trade Union Movement, the Netherlands-Vietnam Medical Committee, Provo, the Netherlands-USSR Association, Netherlands-GDR, Netherlands-Poland, Netherlands-Romania ... Netherlands-Universe! The most chic stall at the revolutionary fair was undoubtedly that of the Committee of Solidarity with Cuba, because they had the use of Ernesto Che Guevara himself, whose portrait adorned even the shop windows of upmarket men's wear shops in the city. With a mixture of mockery and reverence, people looked at the well-known writer, the illustrious chess grandmaster, and the leading composer, sitting there on simple kitchen chairs conversing with two dark-complexioned men, admittedly without beards or cigars, but undoubtedly Cubans.

  Also everywhere in evidence were furtive-looking types who carried reassuring, seditious, extreme left-wing literature under their arms, but whose hairstyle and features told a different story: detectives; Internal Security Service; spies of the reactionaries. Finally, even the aisles were full of spectators, who were half lying over each other, and gradually the metaphysical sweetness of wafting hemp fumes began spreading.

  The evening was opened by a celebrated student leader, Bart Bork, a sociologist, who condemned American imperialism and urged the audience on to action. While he spoke, his lower eyelids were raised in a strange, leering way up to his pupils, which made a rather threatening impression, but everyone accepted this, since the threat was directed only at the enemies of the people. He spoke for too long, as virtually everyone always did, but he was rewarded by applause—after which an ensemble played music by Charles Ives and finally aroused the enthusiasm of the audience with militant tunes by Hanns Eisler, who, like Sleeping Beauty, had been kissed and awakened from a forty-year sleep by the spirit of the age.

  Next a guest from Berlin appeared at the lectern, Rudi Dutschke himself, and a different tone was struck. He was about twenty-seven, small, frail, but like an anchor taking hold in the seabed, the fanatical look in his dark eyes immediately grabbed the whole auditorium. A thick-set middle-aged lady, who might have been his mother, stationed herself next to him at a separate microphone and looked at him sternly. With a raw-edged voice he began speaking, staccato, off the cuff, waiting impatiently after each few sentences for the translation: it was clear that checking the flow of his thoughts was more of an effort than formulating them.

  With a theoretical frenzy alien to the practical Dutch, quoting Marcuse, Rosa Luxemburg, and Plekhanov, he revealed that radical change, subjectively not desired by the masses, was becoming objectively increasingly necessary. The late-capitalist working class, still exploited to the point where it had lost its identity, resigned itself unconsciously to its relative prosperity and to formally democratic structures, which served only to conceal the violent nature of imperialism. How, then, was the extraparliamentary opposition of students and intellectuals in the metropolitan centers—who after all did not participate in the production process—to break out of its isolation and create its necessary mass base? He asked this with an elegant gesture of his slender, sensitive hand; the translator imitated even that with her ring-covered fingers. This was to be found exclusively in the Third World. Only there was there a new proletariat, not perverted by false consciousness—and only out of solidarity with the liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin-America, with the present genocide in Vietnam acting as a catalyst, could a praxis be created as a radical negation of world capitalism that at the same time could be the first impulse toward a new anthropology, which would allow us to avoid the perversion of the revolution by the Soviet Union and its satellites, since it was there that the dictatorship of the proletariat had degenerated first into the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, then into that of th
e bureaucratic state apparatus, and finally into that of one man, Stalin, with the accompanying repression, brutality, torture, and cruelty; all this by way of a demonstration of the distinction—already made by Marx in his Okonomisch-philosophiiche Manuskripte—between despotic and democratic Communism.

  It had all been too fast for the translator, who was only able to stammer something about "perversion" and "Stalin," but Dutschke had been understood anyway. He received warm applause, which he did not acknowledge with so much as a nod of his head, descended from the platform to join his comrades in the front row—and suddenly there was an incident. It happened so fast that neither Max nor Onno were able to follow it. All at once the German ideologue was lost from sight, having been thrown to the ground by a screaming and kicking man. Other people came rushing up, and the whole auditorium rose to its feet. In the turmoil someone shouted that he knew the guy, an infamous fascist from West Amsterdam, whom he had seen the previous day at the Belgian frontier, but who, according to someone else, was a card-carrying Communist from east Groningen.

  "If you can have two enemies like that," said Onno laconically, "you must be profoundly right."

  Max's thoughts were with Ada, who was about to perform. He considered going backstage and suggesting that the duo change places with the orchestra which was to round off the evening, but stagehands were already pushing a grand piano onto the stage and setting down a chair and a music stand. While the attacker, still cursing at the top of his voice, was being conveyed to a side door with his arm twisted painfully behind his back, Bruno and Ada appeared. She held her cello. The sight of them had an immediate calming effect and everyone sat down, at least insofar as they were not forced to stand; the guest speaker seemed happy not to have incurred many injuries, because he remained in the auditorium.

  Ada, now in jeans and a white shirt from Max's wardrobe, took the cello between her legs and arranged her score—she placed the bow on the strings, looked at Bruno, raised her head for the opening .. .

  Janáček. At the very first notes it seemed to Max as though a rent had been made in all the political and transitory goings-on here, a rent through which something eternal was glimpsed, as though he were turning around in Plato's cave. Onno was right in his view of music—it was not of this world—and Max thought of what the German activist was now thinking, having just been kicked and beaten. Perhaps of Lenin's words: "I too should like to be moved by the Appassionata, but this is no time to be moved by the Appassionata, it is a time for chopping off heads." The music—perhaps not Eisler's, but that of Schubert or Janáček—was obviously the voice of the blackest reaction, archenemy of progressive humankind, public enemy number one. The audience, which a moment ago had been in violent tumult, listened like a well-trained concert audience. Many were undoubtedly hearing something of this kind for the first time in their lives: while at home on the radio such dreary music was always turned off and replaced by something catchy, they were now receiving an artistic knighthood.

  Max looked proudly at Ada as she bowed and returned for another curtain call with Bruno.

  "Take very good care of that girl," said Onno. "You don't deserve her at all."

  There was some truth in that, thought Max. The whole evening his eyes had been wandering toward the back of a head in the third row, with unruly curly red hair; the woman to whom it belonged seemed to feel this, because now and then she looked to one side, not directly at him, but nevertheless in such a way that he must be at the edge of her field of vision, because he saw that she was not looking at what she was seeing but that she saw what she was not looking at, namely him. There was nothing for it. It was bound to happen, whether he wanted it to or not.

  The grand piano and the music stand had disappeared, and the forum discussion was taking place at a long table. The forum consisted of the left-wing elite of the Cuba Committee—the writer, the chess player, and the composer—joined by a distinguished-looking old lady, who had been a nurse with the Reds in the Spanish Civil War and had still not regained her Dutch nationality. The chairman was a generally respected journalist and publicist, himself no longer very young, a former anarchist and now an anarchist once again. Each member made a short statement, after which a discussion arose on the points that the rabid German had in fact already discussed exhaustively.

  The old lady drew attention to the fact that the obvious primary interest of the pharmaceutical industry in a capitalist economy was that patients should not get better, and it was clear what consequences that had for the quality of medicines and hence of public health, whereupon the serial composer raised his hands above his head and praised Chinese medicine, which under the inspirational leadership of Chairman Mao could dispense with anesthetics even in serious operations.

  At that moment Onno could suddenly no longer contain himself and shouted: "You hysterical fool! In ten years' time you'll be as right-wing as an American general!"

  "I must disagree," said the composer, laughing.

  Whereupon Onno stood up and declared with great dignity: "I don't want to be disagreed with, I want to be knocked down."

  Things began to go with a swing. The writer, too, had to put up with an interruption. When he expressed his concern, without too much conviction, that the workers were leaving the intellectuals in the lurch, someone shouted:

  "Why don't you piss off, mate! Go and cut sugarcane in Cuba."

  "I have cut sugarcane in Cuba."

  "Yeah, for a fraction of a second—for the cameras."

  The writer leaned back with a superior smile and said no more.

  "What a creep," said Max.

  Onno nodded. "You're a bit like him."

  At that moment someone in the auditorium stood up and said in a thunderous voice: "I'm a worker!"

  All heads turned in his direction. It was true. There he stood. No doubt about it: a worker. Heavy industry, probably. Blast furnaces. A beret with a stalk on his head, his heavily lined face ravaged by exploitation, his hands held slightly open at hip height, ready to cope with any chore. There was applause here and there; the old lady bent over her microphone and invited him to have a seat at the table. The chairman tried to prevent this, but the worker was already on his way, chin aloft, exuding deep contempt for everyone who was not a worker.

  "He's a nutcase," said Onno. "Anyone can see that. He hasn't done a day's work in his life."

  Anyone with any experience could tell that the evening was now about to go off the rails. The worker did not deign to look at any of the members of the forum panel; he pulled the old lady's microphone toward himself and, with a fixed expression, began explaining that the Jesuits had constructed an underground network of tunnels under the streets and squares of Amsterdam, from where they planned one day to launch a merciless attack. He had written countless letters on the subject to the city council, the government, the queen, and the United Nations, but never—

  "I thank you for your lucid statement," the chairman interrupted. "And now for a completely different subject: the recent attack by Israel on—"

  "Be quiet when I'm speaking," said the worker, without so much as turning his head. While the members of the panel looked at each other in astonishment and the mood in the audience became more and more high-spirited, he went on unperturbed: "It is no accident that the general of the Jesuits is a Dutchman. He has his headquarters in Spain, which since the Revolt of the Netherlands and the Inquisition—"

  Now again someone stood up in the auditorium and shouted: "For God's sake stop that nonsense, mate!" He was proof that a large amount of flesh could also contribute to intellectual superiority, because even the worker now fell silent. The excessively fat, bald man, a well-known restaurateur, turned with outstretched arms to the audience, which egged him on with acclamations. "What good is all this rubbish to us? Doesn't everybody know that Amsterdam is the New Jerusalem, blessed with the refined hyper-biogeometric ethics of Dante, Goethe, and Queen Esther with her thirty-six Essenes and thirty-six Saddikim and with the new, all
-renewing, Messianic Pythagorean world mathematics, the primeval mathematics of the wisdom of the prehistoric world, as an interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, namely the new Jewish laws of harmony of prime numbers and the prime pairs of Moses, David, and Solomon—the new bio-algebra, bio-geometry, and bio-mechanics of William of Orange, Spinoza, Erasmus, Simon Stevin, Christian Huygens, Descartes, and Rembrandt, and the new plastic mathematics of Teilhard de Chardin, Mondrian, Steiner, Thomas Aquinas, Mersenne, Fermat, Aristotle, Nicolaus Cusanus, Wittgenstein, Weinreb—"

  But he was not allowed to complete his list: at the back of the auditorium a door suddenly flew open, through which the earlier attacker again charged in.

  "Where's that stinking German bastard?" he screamed, looking around in bewilderment. "Give him to me and I'll kick the shit out of him!"

  With this he suddenly crossed a critical borderline: the auditorium capsized and submerged in thunderous laughter. The chairman crossed his arms, leaned back, and looked calmly at the pandemonium.

  "It is no accident,"—the worker now resumed his revelations completely unperturbed—"that Princess Irene married a Catholic three years ago, a French creep who wants to be king of Spain."

  "Augustine!" shouted the restaurateur. "Einstein! Euclid!"

  "Give the bastard to me! I'll cut his head off!"

  "Princess Beatrix for queen of Israel!"

  "Good idea! Republic! Republic!"

  And shortly afterward, those organizing the proceedings showed that they had had a brilliant brainwave because, blowing on saxophones, trumpets, clarinets, bassoons, and tubas, the musicians entered from both wings—playing a loud but slow, strangely Oriental melody, while at the same time from the back of the auditorium, along the central aisle, a man with a sheep was seen to be making his way toward the platform.