The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  Although they had no appointment and Ada was supposed to be at the consulate alone, the Cuban ambassador was prepared to receive them— which of course was not unconnected with the name Quist. To Max's disappointment, he was not a bearded desperado with a cigar clenched in his teeth and a pistol belt on his desk, but a refined gentleman in his late seventies, in a dark-gray suit with a waistcoat. He had thin white hair and the aristocratic pallor of a high functionary at the former Spanish court. Ada's visa was granted automatically by virtue of the letter of invitation, and the pianist could also come and report; he would notify the ICAP of their arrival today by telegram, and they could pick up their plane tickets here in a few days' time.

  After Ada had been led away by a secretary to complete the formalities, the ambassador told Onno that he'd met his father a few times at official functions. As the longest-serving diplomat in the Netherlands, he was the doyen of the diplomatic corps, which was also the reason Havana refused to let him retire every year; in his position he could maintain contacts with all sorts of colleagues who were forbidden by their governments to say a word to a Cuban ambassador. He was quite prepared to do it for Fidel—back then in New York he had collected the money for Fidel's Granma expedition, which had led to the revolution—but increasingly he would rather enjoy his old age in Cuba. Not that he was criticizing the Netherlands in any way, of course, or at most the climate.

  Onno saw his chance.

  "Yes," he said. "It must be marvelous there. If it hadn't been on such short notice, we'd have liked to go ourselves."

  "You'd like to visit our beautiful island in the company of your girlfriend?" he asked with feigned amazement. "Why don't you go another time?"

  "What do you mean ?"

  "We have beautiful women in Cuba, too."

  Onno looked at him with dismay. "But, Mr. Ambassador! I am unswervingly loyal to my girlfriend! I would never forgive myself if something so terrible were to happen."

  The ambassador smiled faintly. "Mr. Quist, what happens ten thousand miles away has not happened at all." He left Onno to his fate and turned to Max. "And you—why would you like to visit Cuba?"

  "Ah, in fact you've just given me the reason. Up to now I just wanted to go along as a friend of the family."

  The ambassador nodded. "The new Cuba sets great store by friendship. Cuba needs friends in order to survive." He looked from one to the other for a moment. "Of course you just happen to have your passports with you?"

  Ada and Bruno were going to stay in the Hotel Nacional; according to the ambassador it would be best if they arranged their own hotel at Havana airport, and after the sinister thump of the stamps, which countless times before all over the world had made the difference between life and death, time accelerated for all three of them.

  The Cuban Airlines flight, for which Ada and Bruno had first to go to Prague, turned out to be fully booked. The only other airline that flew to Havana from Europe was Iberia—only fascist Spain broke the blockade against Communist Cuba. Onno believed that this was because it was the mother country of the former colony. National character was still stronger than ideology: Franco was a Spanish king; Fidel Castro, a Latin American caudillo; de Gaulle, the umpteenth Louis; Stalin, czar of all the Russias; Mao, the emperor of China; and Queen Juliana a Dutch stadholder. His political friends, who wanted to get rid of the grandees, would themselves end up as grandees, because one couldn't escape Holland—but Max must treat that prophecy as confidential.

  "And what about you?"

  "Me? I shall become the most appalling grandee of all. All men of goodwill will tremble before me!"

  The duo rose from the ashes and Ada and Bruno had to devise and rehearse a program. Because it was too cumbersome for Ada to go to Leiden every day with the cello, and because Onno had no piano, Max gave them the use of his apartment, which he did not need during the day anyway. Ada was hesitant about the offer, but because a refusal did no one any good, she accepted. She was given the key, and on the first occasion she entered the rooms felt like someone visiting a house where there has been a death: everything untouched, everything still as it was when the dead person was alive. But in the company of Bruno, who immediately sat down at the grand piano, that soon disappeared.

  When Max came home in the evening and found the two making music, and often Onno too, reading papers in his usual place, he was seized by a paternal feeling of contentment. A happy family! During the day in Leiden he looked forward to going home. Sometimes his arrival was scarcely noticed; but that superfluousness in his place did not worry him—on the contrary: to his own amazement it filled him with a sense of well-being. What was the source of this dislocation? Sometimes things were not even in their right place! He sat down somewhere, picked up a book on Cuba, and started reading as though he were their guest. He listened to the music, looked at Onno out of the corner of his eye, and reflected that the idyll would soon be over: the children would leave home and in the evening everything would be just as he'd left it in the morning.

  Ada, with the cello between her thighs, sometimes felt him looking at her, but did not return the look. Things were as they were. She belonged with Onno now, and that's how it would remain, and she knew that he knew—but what she didn't like was that something still seemed to be smoldering in him, despite himself—or was she fooling herself? Was it perhaps smoldering in her? She looked at Onno in his green armchair: a child in a giant's body.

  "Are you still with us?" asked Bruno.

  16

  The Conference

  Although Ada and Bruno had left three days before, they would only arrive one day earlier: they had a twenty-hour wait in Prague for a connection, and besides that the Cubans still flew old Russian turbo-prop planes, via Scotland and Newfoundland. Max and Onno went via Madrid, with just one stopover in the Azores.

  Everywhere in the plane they saw familiar faces, artistic and intellectual celebrities from all over Europe—writers, painters, philosophers, whom they recognized from photographs; there were also lots of North and South Americans, who as a result of the blockade had to take this roundabout route. They were told by the stewardess that there was some kind of cultural conference being held in Havana. Onno read Franco's party newspaper and Max looked out of the window at the unbroken carpet of clouds.

  Thick cumuli like white mountains, with light-gray lakes in their valleys, which might have had names—the earth might have looked like that. The farther south they traveled, the cloud cover became thinner—until suddenly the sea became visible, frozen into blue immobility. Max dozed off and in the sound of the engines heard wonderful symphonies consisting mainly of triads, which he could conduct at will.

  Land ahoy! Fasten your seat belts. Down below someone had planted countless matches upright in the earth, all of which cast their long, sharp shadows the same way: palm trees. They prescribed an arc across the bay and the white city, and landed at José Martí Airport. There were antiaircraft batteries all around the perimeter of the airport; against the control tower was a gigantic portrait of Che Guevara—that apostolic face with the beret, which here, where it belonged, suddenly took on a very different character. Below it in letters three feet high was the slogan:

  HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE

  When the doors opened, the October heat flooded into the plane like a wave of warm water. At the top of the steps Onno stopped for a moment and looked around.

  "This is it!" he cried. "El Dorado! Goodbye to the land of the cheeseheads!"

  The sun was low and orange on the horizon but still had a ferocity it never had in the north. Max momentarily placed the palm of his left hand on the concrete, which was still as hot as a griddle: a fried egg would be cooked within a minute.

  In the cool, air-conditioned arrivals hall an orchestra was accompanying the chaos with guarachas. An Aeroflot plane from Moscow had also landed, and everywhere people arriving and people meeting them were embracing each other, without it being quite clear where customs and passport control wer
e. However, there were lots of soldiers in green uniforms and military caps, some of them doing nothing more than swaying in time with the music. Waiters were walking around with large trays full of brimming glasses; when they took two and were about to pay, he shook his head amiably.

  A black girl in military uniform, with stiff, straightened hair, came over to them and asked what delegation they were. Onno said that they weren't a delegation at all, but two ordinary tourists from Holland who were looking for rooms, preferably in the Hotel Nacional. She asked for their passports and studied the visas, which were on separate stapled sheets, since otherwise they would not be admitted to the United States. She scanned a list with her index finger.

  "I don't have your names here."

  "That's right," said Onno.

  "No, that's not right. Holland, did you say? Have a seat there for a moment."

  She disappeared with the passports, the zipper of her seamlessly fitting trousers running directly between her luxuriant thighs. Onno took the opportunity to phone Ada. Max looked around and sighed deeply. This was exactly what he had wanted: something completely different, something with which he was totally unconnected. For him the journey was already a success. There were welcome signs hanging everywhere for the delegates to the Primera Conferencia de La Habana, as well as huge portraits of the bearded revolutionaries of the first hour, but not of Fidel Castro; he was able to translate a slogan in red letters as: "When the extraordinary becomes the everyday, a revolution is under way." He looked at the smiling musicians on the small platform and thought of the ill-tempered fussing at Eastern European borders. Did this have any connection with that?

  Onno came back and passed on Ada's regards; she would wait for them in the lobby. The black girl also reemerged.

  "Everything's okay. Would you come with me?"

  Their passports were not returned immediately. They had to find their baggage, and without any further checks, they arrived in the untidy square in front of the terminal, where the heat received them like a scorching block weighing on the earth. Meanwhile, in a paroxysm of colors, the sky was indulging in a sunset of a kind that in Europe could only be dreamed up by a crazed lighting technician, resulting in his immediate dismissal. Beneath it the traffic situation resembled a fairground bumper-car ride: rattling American limousines, none of them newer than ten years old, decrepit buses belching clouds of black smoke, each driver with his hand on the horn.

  "Jesús!" cried the girl, and waved.

  A dented black Chrysler came puttering toward them; the front windshield was cracked and one mudguard was missing. She gave the small mulatto at the wheel an envelope containing documents and told him to take los compañeros to Hotel Habana Libre.

  "But what kind of hotel is it?" asked Onno. "What does it cost?"

  "Don't worry, we've called them. Everything's been fixed. You're the guests of the revolution."

  Onno was about to say something, but flashing an angelic smile with her innocent white teeth, she disappeared into the airport building. They put their baggage in the trunk, and when Jesús slammed it shut, the open left front door fell into the street. He cursed, spat out the cigarette, started laughing, and together with Onno lifted the door onto the backseat. He was wearing a gray T-shirt full of holes, a shapeless pair of trousers, with sandals on his bare feet. The car moved off, rattling like an old coffee mill, while on the dashboard all the dials remained phlegmatically at zero. Max and Onno tried to find a place to sit among the feathers of the torn seat, and a little while later they were driving along the highway toward Havana. Because Cuba was obviously not keen on living in a twilight world, it had suddenly become almost completely dark. To the right and left of the road there were black and white schoolchildren, workers, and women cooling themselves with fans.

  "So now," said Max with his hair waving, "we are the Dutch delegation at the cultural conference. If we want, we can even claim our travel expenses."

  "Yes, and it's absolutely impossible. What are we to say if they ask us what kind of cultural ambassadors we are?"

  "Compañeros!" intoned Max rhetorically. "Revolutionary insights on the creation and development of the universe are also in accord with the dialectical laws of Marx and Engels! God knows," he said in a different tone, "it may even be true. There was a famous Soviet biologist, Oparin, a real Marxist, with pioneering publications on the origin of life to his name—and what applies to the origin of life may apply by analogy to the origin of the universe."

  "So you've got your speech ready. But what about me? What am I supposed to say?"

  "That you've made the extremely socially relevant discovery that the syntax of all modern languages reflects the mechanisms of oppression of class relationships, as is apparent from terms like subject, indirect object, and direct object. The bourgeoisie is the class of the subjectors, the right-wing intellectuals are their accomplices, and the working class is the object. In the languages of primitive communistic, classless societies this distinction did not exist, and that's why under socialism all cases should be radically abolished."

  "Interesting thesis! Could I perhaps also mention a Soviet scholar? What you're saying is a little like what was claimed by the linguist N. J. Marr, and J. W. Stalin personally wrote a not entirely stupid pamphlet against it. Compared with the writings of A. Hitler, at least, it's a marvel of intellectual acuteness." Onno looked anxiously outside. "We're making jokes about it now, but meanwhile we're caught in the trap, M. Delius. Perhaps we should say we're poets. No one can check up on us. Poems are untranslatable."

  "What can they do to us? We haven't forced our way in anywhere, we've been pushed in, by that sweetie just now. We are simply what we are: I'm an astronomer; you're a linguist. We'll see."

  Onno shook his head and sighed deeply. "It's irresponsible, extremely irresponsible .. ." Suddenly he raised one hand and cried: "Live dangerously!"

  They drove into the city. Sparsely lit old streets, squares inlaid with marble, white churches in Spanish baroque style, statues from the colonial period. Decay was obscured by the heavy traffic of wrecks thundering along, the shabby but teeming street life, and the lines outside the shops, where skin colors extended across a spectrum from the blackest African black to the whitest Iberian white. Music blared out everywhere from windows and portable radios: cha-cha-cha, salsa, drumming. They passed old forts and a snow-white statue of Christ nearly a hundred feet high.

  "Must be the Cuban image of Lenin," observed Max.

  At the harbor, full of rusty Russian ships with hammers and sickles on their funnels, they turned onto a broad boulevard. On the left, where thousands of people were walking about, everything was lit; to the right lowered the darkness of the sea. Everywhere on the heavy stone balustrade, erected as a barrier against hurricanes, courting couples and old men playing chess were sitting above the surf below. Again there was music everywhere. Signs announced that across the water, a hundred and fifty miles beyond the horizon, in Florida, the enemy was lying in wait, el imperialismo yanqui. At the end of the long boulevard a modern district began, with high-rise buildings and better street lighting, even neon signs, where black faces no longer predominated in the street.

  At the entrance to the drive of a tall, modern hotel Jesús had to show the papers; on the other side of the street, behind a barrier, stood a curious crowd. The papers were in order, because with the chilly wave of the hand that police all over the world are masters of, whether in the service of communism, capitalism, or fascism, they were allowed in. They got out of the car under a wide awning with the words Habana Libre on it. One could still see that it had once said Habana Hilton, but that had been erased. At the hotel entrance, too, people looked ominously to and fro from the photos in their passports to their faces, giving them the feeling that they might have smuggled in their faces.

  "They take good care of cultural ambassadors here," said Max.

  With Jesús ahead of them, they carried their cases through the cool, busy lobby to reception. Whil
e their papers were again being taken out of the envelope, they looked around the sumptuous space in astonishment.

  Silent films were being shown on two large screens on either side, accompanied by loud, lively Cuban music tempting one to dance: one screen showed fighting in Vietnam, bombs raining from gray B-52's, helicopters spraying villagers with bullets, airplanes burning fields with napalm, an American sergeant spending minutes kicking to death a Vietcong soldier, tied up and lying face-down on the ground, and then, casually holding the submachine gun in one hand, firing a bullet into the back of the head, a bullet in the back, and finally a bullet in the backside for fun, so that each time the body jerked a few inches farther in the sand. By way of comparison, on the other screen American policemen were clubbing black demonstrators with truncheons. In the middle of the lobby, which was also decorated with slogans and huge photos, for example of monkeys drinking Coca-Cola, something resembling a huge totem pole was raised up to the ceiling, slung with machine guns, rifles, revolvers, sten guns, hand grenades, and anything that could sow death and destruction.

  "A completely original view of culture prevails here," said Onno.

  Max burst out laughing. "Maybe it's a conference about the birth of the revolution from the spirit of futurism."

  They registered, and a girl from the organization asked whether they wanted to freshen up before going to the conference office. However, Onno wanted to get everything over with quickly and then go immediately to Ada, who would be amazed that her two friends were suddenly representing Dutch culture in Cuba. They left their luggage and followed the girl to the gallery, which used to house boutiques selling crocodile-leather bags and snakeskin shoes. Some of them were boarded up; others had changed into storage areas for carpenters and painters. The name Cartier was still vaguely legible on the window of the office. Amid shouting and jostling, the girl arranged their registration, handed them conference packs with the title "Primera Conferencia de La Habana" and badges with their names typed on them: MAX DELIUS, HOLANDA, DELEGADO; ONNO QUITS, HOLANDA, DELEGADO.