The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  No longer taking his eyes off the camp, he walked on over the railway bridge with heart pounding and saw the camp coming closer with every step: a black hole, from which nothing could escape. This was the altar, the real powerhouse of fascism. Was there a place on earth where as much good had been done as evil had been done here? If hell had this branch on earth, where was heaven's? There was no such place, because only hell existed, not heaven. This place was the exact opposite of paradise, even if there was no paradise. Only now did he realize that there were two entrances in the reddish brick building: one in the center, with the single-track railway running through it, and one on the left for other traffic. For hundreds of yards to left and right there were double rows of concrete posts with electrified barbed wire, twelve feet high, with watchtowers at short intervals. He was about to walk in through the center gate, shaped like the opening of a crematorium oven, but it was as if an invisible wall suddenly descended with a crash: he could no longer enter. The accursed ground, where millions had been murdered, had become sacred, and he could not set foot on it.

  On the threshold he looked at the churned-up expanse of rubble and weeds. It was the mess of a hastily abandoned bedroom, with an unmade bed, all the drawers and cupboards open and clothes all over the floor. There was no one there. Inside, the rails branched once and then again; in the long spaces in between, the selections had taken place between those who were to die immediately and those not until later. To the left of the Lagerstrasse were rows of wooden barracks, to the right only the chimneys. In the distance, at the end of the tracks, he could see the ruins of the blown-up crematoria and gas chambers to the left and right; the back of the oblong sacrificial dish was too far away to see distinctly. He squatted down and put his right hand on the rusty rails. She had ridden in over these. It was as though the motionless silence penetrated him—he did not enter the camp, the camp entered him. The butchers and their victims had all gone—his father as well as his mother: what else was he but the personification of the camp as a whole?

  He decided to walk slowly around the four and a half million-square yards. There was a dead person for every square yard of the way.

  13

  Clearing Up

  At the same time as Max was making his five-mile procession in Poland, Ada overcame her indecision and phoned Onno to ask where his friend had gone. Of course Max had treated her shabbily, but on the other hand that silly bosom friendship could not be overlooked; perhaps there had been something really important on the agenda that morning—though he might have mentioned it. In any case he was still in her thoughts, and perhaps she had reacted a little drastically.

  Onno sounded surprised, but could not help her. "Somewhere in Poland, or Czechoslovakia or Hungary. You know what he's like. Awful."

  What he was like? The meaning of the remark escaped her. "When is he coming back?"

  "In about three weeks, I think."

  "Did he talk about me?"

  "I had the impression that he was sorry things went wrong between you, and so am I for that matter. You were a positive influence on the idiot. But of course that was the purifying effect of music. How is your duo going?"

  "It doesn't really exist anymore. Bruno couldn't see the point. I've just auditioned for the Concertgebouw Orchestra."

  "And?"

  "I'm waiting to hear."

  "Why so suddenly?"

  "I need to start earning money. I want to leave home. And what about you? Aren't you going on vacation?"

  "Me? On vacation? Did you really think I indulge in such petit bourgeois pleasures? Shame on you! You're not on vacation either, are you?"

  "Because I can't afford it."

  "Where are you calling from?"

  "From the Concertgebouw."

  "Okay. Let's have a coffee at Keyzer's, on the corner. I'll be right there, and then I'll subject that bohemian horse thief of yours to the searing light of my analysis."

  From her table at the window she watched him approach from the Museumplein and cross the road. Max would have seen her at once, probably before she saw him, but Onno looked down at the cobblestones in complete self-absorption, or at least with his thoughts somewhere totally different from where he was. His large, ungainly figure inspired a vague physical distaste in her, but at the same time she found it touching. She could scarcely imagine a greater contrast than that between Max and Onno: Max, whom nothing escaped, who was everywhere at once, and Onno, who always focused on a single point and for whom the rest of the world did not exist.

  He seemed pleased to see her. For the first time she was even given a clumsy peck on the cheek.

  "What were you so deep in thought about?"

  "Do you really want to know?"

  "If it's not a secret..."

  "It's terribly secret, but I'll tell you anyway. About a magic square." He took a paper from the reading table, sat down opposite her and wrote in the margin:

  "Have a good look at that crucifixion. I was wondering what those diagonals xdx and mdm mean, but I haven't worked it out yet. Mdm is probably an abbreviation of 'madman,' but what does xdx stand for? Perhaps something from differential calculus, but Max is better at that than I am. So, how are things? The last time we saw each other was that idiotic evening when you played."

  "This is the first time I've been back in Amsterdam."

  "What happened between you to make you split up so suddenly? It seemed so idyllic."

  "Didn't he tell you?" asked Ada in amazement.

  "I didn't ask him."

  Obviously, thought Ada, they did not tell each other everything, as Max had maintained. "Then I'd prefer not to say."

  Onno nodded and stirred his coffee. "So here we are. Max is in search of his roots, and we're sitting here like the two orphans."

  "What kind of roots has he got there, then?"

  Onno looked at her in disbelief. "Has he never talked about it?"

  "He never talked much."

  Onno debated with himself whether it was right for him to tell her. It wasn't as though Max wanted to keep his story a secret, and because he believed that Ada had the right to know, he told her the facts—from the war up to their visit to the National Institute for War Documentation.

  When Ada heard about the visit, the penny suddenly dropped. Bring yourself off. At the same time she remained convinced that he wouldn't have reacted like that if anyone else had called to collect him to go to the Institute; it was because it was Onno who rang the bell—Onno, who might go away if he didn't open up immediately, and never, ever come back. But suddenly she understood that too: his parents had once left and never come back. She drank her coffee in silence. Max had suddenly become someone else—like when she opened the curtains in the morning and found that the familiar view had been covered in snow during the night: everything was the same, and everything was different.

  To her own surprise, she had missed him there in her quiet back room in Leiden, not physically, because that was still not very important to her, but simply his presence. Except that the presence now turned out to be at the same time an absence; in all those weeks he had not considered her worthy to be told who he really was. Or was it unreasonable to pass judgment on someone who had experienced things she could not even imagine? Just suppose her own father had had her mother murdered and then himself been shot... inconceivable. There was only a thirteen-year age gap between Max and her, but for her the whole war, which her parents were always talking about—and to which she owed her existence—was an event from a dim past. What it finally came down to was that she was superfluous to Max. She had had that feeling the whole time, and now she knew where it came from.

  She had made the right decision in leaving him, though it may have been for the wrong reason. He was locked up in himself, and he had not been prepared to give her the key, which Onno turned out to have in his pocket.

  "Do you want to go back to him?" asked Onno.

  "That's not possible now. Not because you've told me about this, but be
cause he didn't tell me." She could see that Onno felt uncomfortable and was wondering whether he had done the wrong thing. "And what about you?" she asked, in order to help him. "How are you? Are you making headway with your deciphering?"

  "Don't talk to me about it. Every morning when I wake up, my bankrupt existence stares out at me hollow-eyed."

  "Aren't you exaggerating a bit?"

  "A bit? Will you stop insulting me! I exaggerate terribly!"

  "So in fact you're doing fine?"

  A crooked smile crossed his face. "No, Ada, but I'm getting by."

  It touched her that he should mention her name. Had Max ever used her name when he talked to her? Using someone's name during a conversation was like a casual caress, like stroking their hair—had she herself ever called Max by his name?

  Onno told her that until he could get a handle on the Phaistos disc, he had decided to pass the time by changing the Netherlands. The time was ripe, and there wouldn't be another opportunity for a long time. That was why he had recently joined the Social Democratic party—not a bunch of heaven-and-earth-movers, admittedly, a rather embarrassing party actually, but ultimately the only one with a chance of real power with which one could just about associate oneself as a civilized human being. First of all, the party itself would have to be changed; he was part of the New Left, a small but select group of mutineers, journalists, and suchlike dubious figures, who were going to break the hegemony of the ossified Social Democratic elite, all those slavish followers of America with their hatred of Communists and their perverse love of Roman Catholics. At the same time, certain sinister student leaders must be prevented from seizing power; the old guard were no longer capable of doing that. In short, at present he spent most of his time in meetings.

  "If you ask me, you're doing it to get at your brothers. What does your father make of it?"

  "There you are again," laughed Onno. "Never tell a woman anything, because she'll misuse it in order to understand you. Deep down I'm sure that he thinks it's marvelous that there should be a Quist involved with the Reds, but he'd rather bite his tongue off than admit it. And the Socialists like having a Quist in their midst, too. I bear it all with the serene dignity that is so characteristic of me. In politics you must use the weapons you have, just as in love. All within the bounds of decency, of course."

  "So you see less of Max than you used to."

  "Yes," he said. "I see a bit less of Max than I used to." He lit up a cigarette and said, "I don't think I can explain it to you, because I don't really understand it myself, but to my dying day I shall be grateful to him for the fact that he exists."

  "The same goes for him, as far as you're concerned. I know that." She looked at him for a moment. "But why are you suddenly making such a solemn declaration?"

  "From saturnine melancholy."

  "Has something unpleasant happened between you?"

  "No, not at all. It's just something to do with time. We've known each other for six months now, and in the last few weeks I find myself being constantly reminded of a saying of Hegel's when I think of those first months: 'What a splendid sunrise it was.' Hegel wrote that as an old reactionary about the French Revolution, which had inspired him as a young man—at a time when everyone talked of nothing but the horrors of the Jacobin terror. But two months ago that saying never occurred to me, and that it should happen now, with that ominous past tense, is obviously a sign that something is changing. I see less of him because of my political activities, but it may also be partly the other way around, if you understand what I mean. Anyway, it's the same old story, nothing special, action is followed by reflection, a love affair by marriage. We shall always stay good friends—even though the bastard stole my girlfriend."

  "Stole your girlfriend?" repeated Ada, more shocked than surprised. "And you said nothing unpleasant had happened. When was that, then?"

  Onno laughed and said that it was always better not to take him too literally. He told her with amusement about his relationship with Helga, which Max had put an end to by pretending to be a playmate. In fact it had been high drama, of course. It was like the play in Hamlet, he said, the "play within the play," in which the king is confronted with his crime, the difference being that in Shakespeare it is deliberately staged by a cunning stepson, whereas Max had done it in his playful innocence.

  "And who clears your room up now?"

  "No one," said Onno with a comically strangled voice and screwing up his face, as though about to burst into sobs. "No one. I'm alone in the world."

  "Poor boy," said Ada with a little laugh. "Shall I give your room a cleaning, then?"

  "Yes, miss," said Onno, nodding in a way that used to be described in children's books as "eagerly." "Yes please, miss."

  "Shall we go, then?"

  He gave her a searching look. "Are you still joking?"

  "Not at all. I'd like to see the kind of place you live in. I've heard so much about you ..."

  "Max has never seen how I live, or, rather, do not live."

  "I'm not Max."

  They looked at each other. Everything was suddenly changing—like a tree blown over by the wind, pulled out of the earth roots and all, teeming with insects. No, she wasn't Max, and he wasn't Max either—and at the same time she was Max, and so was he.

  While Max completed his rectangular path of mourning around the mega-scaffold in Poland, Ada was amazed about what she was suddenly doing, and Onno about what he was allowing to happen. He lugged her cello across the Museumplein and said that he now finally understood why Max had broken it off. They walked to the Kerkstraat through the Rijksmuseum arch. He went down the four steps to the basement, opened the door of the former tradesman's entrance, and let her in.

  "This is quite impossible," he said as he led the way over the cracked marble slabs of the dark corridor. One of the walls was almost hidden by the pile of red and green paraffin cans.

  "Why? Aren't you allowed female visitors by your landlady?"

  "My landlady is an unbelievable trollop herself. I always have to lock the door at night."

  "You're acting as if I'd asked you to go to bed with me."

  "Haven't you?"

  "Perhaps," said Ada, to her own surprise.

  Onno stopped and turned his eyes heavenward.

  "What further witness is needed? This is the final proof of the unfathomable immorality of womankind! Even the miracle of music is obviously powerless to help."

  Ada heard herself talking, lightheartedly, like a woman of the world.

  She scarcely recognized herself; it was suddenly as though she were seeing herself in the mirror in coronation robes. She sensed that she was master of the situation—she, a little provincial from Leiden, here in Amsterdam with an internationally famous scholar from a distinguished family. She was in charge. With Max she had never been in charge—such an idea had not even occurred to her; he had graciously tolerated her, as one tolerates a cat on one's lap, before gently pushing her away. But now the cat had a bird in its jaws.

  She hesitated on the threshold to Onno's room. It was certainly just as well that Max had never seen this. The chaos was complete. Beneath the narrow window in the front room, through which passersby on the pavement could be seen only up to knee height, stood a desk piled high with papers, open books, magazines, jumbled newspapers, folders, stencils, bank statements, envelopes, bills, everything topsy-turvy and garnished with overflowing ashtrays, an empty milk bottle, an open bag of sugar, a portable radio, a piece of butter on aluminum paper that had turned orange—and this continued over the floor and along the walls with their crooked bookshelves, a sagging sofa and an oil stove, into the back room, where it was rounded off by a mattress with sheets the color of the ancient varnish on the murals in the Sistine Chapel.

  "Yes," said Ada, going in, "if anything is quite impossible, then this is it."

  "Are you suggesting it's untidy?"

  "What can I say? It's a bit different from your friend's place."

  "Bu
t then I don't live with the feeling that I may have to take flight at any moment," said Onno. "For him anything can happen at any moment, so he has to be able find what he wants to take with him immediately. I can never find anything."

  Ada picked up an antique brown folio with a damaged leather spine from the floor and read the title, which was printed in a dozen different typefaces: Vollständiges Hebräisch-chaldäisches Rabbiner-Wörterbuch zum alten Testament, der Thargumim, Midraschim und dem Talmud, mit Erlduterun-gen aus dem Bereiche der historischen Kritik, Archäologie, Mythologie, Naturkunde etc. und unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Dicta messiana, als Verbindung der Schriften des alten und neuen Bundes.

  "Good story?" she asked, looking up.

  "Better than you'd think. It's the kind of book that the fairies compile for me, at night when I'm asleep."

  There was a modern brochure in it as a bookmark: "Socialism & Democracy." Putting it carefully on a pile, she was suddenly reminded of her father's shop, which gave her a homey feeling. She opened the window and her eye was caught by two shiny photos pinned to the windowframe: a kind of hopscotch field spiraling inward in a clockwise direction.

  "Is that it?"

  "That's it."

  Humming, with an air as if she were simply reading what was written, she ran her eyes over the signs. Onno looked at her frail figure against the light, eye to eye with the thing that had tormented him for so long. Why not? he thought. It was over with Max, and he hadn't been devastated; come to that, even in her time he had had all kinds of other girlfriends. Onno was not a lecher who simply chased everything in skirts; he had always let himself be seduced, and that was what happened with Helga. It wasn't frequently that someone took a fancy to him; but when it happened, he was not only defenseless, but experienced the other person's will as his own love for her—and that's what it was. He was in love with Ada—as she stood there with her black hair looking at the hieroglyphics—but he must give himself time. He had never seen her without Max, not only not in the flesh, but not even in his imagination: she was a part of him, and that must be gotten rid of first. He certainly wasn't going to leap into bed with her today, in Max's fashion—and anyway, it needed a change of sheets first.