The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  "The official opening is tomorrow morning at nine o'clock, and we'd like to know immediately what working parties you are thinking of sitting on."

  As they walked back toward the hall and pinned on their badges, Onno said: "There's bound to be a working party on the New Man. I know an enormous amount about that, because I'm one myself. In a glowing speech I shall give Rousseau the honor that is his due, albeit as an insignificant dwarf in the mighty shadow of Marx and Engels. Man is basically good—he is only made bad by bad circumstances, which hence must be improved."

  However, once they had found a seat on a soft sofa and opened the packs, they found that the working parties were not devoted to the cultural and philosophical aspects of this lofty aim but to its practical side: the Armed Struggle; Urban Guerrilla Warfare; the Role of the Peasants in Seizing Power; the Communist Parties.

  They looked at each other open-mouthed.

  "My God," said Onno.

  "This isn't a cultural conference at all."

  They began rummaging through the papers, and a minute later everything became clear. The conference was a highly political meeting of guerrilla organizations from Latin American and African countries and the Vietnamese Liberation Front on the one hand and on the other hand Black Power from the United States and of revolutionary student groups from the Western European countries, consistently ignoring, as emerged from the lista oficial de participantes, official party Communists loyal to Moscow; Maoist groups had obviously not been invited, either. It was an extremely exclusive meeting for the flower of the revolution, as this had been achieved only in Cuba. There was no Dutch delegation listed. The girl at the airport was for some reason obviously convinced that they were delegates; and because Holland was not on the list—while it was obviously a country that needed liberating—she had put it down to bureaucratic carelessness and included them.

  Now they saw something that might have struck them earlier: not only were the cultural celebrities with whom they had shared the airplane nowhere to be seen in the lobby, but neither did any of those present have the weak, defenseless, clownlike features that artists and intellectuals tend to sport. The white, black, and yellow faces showed expressions of steely determination, although there was occasionally a glimpse of a certain melancholy—perhaps because their steeliness was rooted, hopefully, not in evil but in good. For that matter, some of them looked like ascetic saints in an El Greco painting. They were also senior Cuban officers, comandantes— majors, that is, because all higher ranks had been abolished after the revolution—heroes of the first hour—about forty—in battle dress without insignia but recognizable from their beards and from the bustle around them: they had succeeded in doing something that the others still had to achieve.

  "So now," said Max, "we've been promoted to leaders of the revolution in Holland."

  As soon as he'd said this, he was overcome by a fit of giggling. He dropped sideways onto the sofa and gasped for breath: their new status amid the most dangerous and most wanted men and women in the world, now assembled here in one room, films that showed the same atrocities in one unbroken loop, music ... it was as if suddenly a vein had been tapped deep inside him, from which living water suddenly burst. The tears ran down his face, but Onno fiddled nervously with the badge on his lapel.

  "Don't laugh, you idiot! We've got to put this right straight away, explain everything and beat it. We're in mortal danger, man."

  "Live dangerously?" said Max, sitting up with a red face.

  "What do you think will happen when they find out that we don't belong here at all? Look. These are not the kind of guys you play around with. Just suppose they get the idea that we're from the CIA."

  "And you were going to change Holland."

  "Yes, but not like that!" said Onno, pointing to the stockade of weapons. "I'm a revisionist social fascist, concerned only to prevent revolution and keep the proletariat in eternal servitude—a worm, a hyena, a capitalist lackey, in the pay of the CIA, and I'll finish up on the rubbish heap of history. That kind of vulture is put up against the wall here without mercy."

  The last sentence just slipped out. He glanced quickly at Max, but he nodded and smiled.

  "And quite right, too. Perhaps you can look at it another way. You're a good Dutch Social Democrat, who wants to change Holland in the only way that's possible in Holland, namely the Dutch way. That will be very well understood here, I think—especially if it results in development help for Cuba. And just so you know, compañero, I'm going to sit on the fourth committee. I'll see how it goes. I'd never forgive myself if I shirked this one. Anything can happen in life—this is another example of it. Maybe the Americans will bomb the hotel tomorrow morning during the plenary session, and that will be that, because of course Moscow would prefer to be rid of these kinds of people. If you ask me it's pure Trotskyism here."

  "But, Max," said Onno. "What if my father hears about this? His son in devilish Havana as a delegate at a conference of the world revolutionary elite!"

  "The fact that it's an elite would appeal to him. You're crazy if you let this chance escape. You'll get to know people, and you'll have a chance to see politics from a different angle than that Dutch nursery school of yours. Apart from me, you'll soon be the only person who knows what he's talking about in this kind of matter. Perhaps in a few years a lot of these fellows will come to the Netherlands on a state visit, Onno Quist, and perhaps you'll then have to review the guard of honor with them."

  "Okay, okay," said Onno in resignation, opening his information pack. "I'll let you talk me into it once again. But the results will be your responsibility. Anyway, the ambassador here is married to a second cousin of mine, one of the Van Lynden girls, so that may help if things go wrong. And as a Jacobin, I'm obviously not going to sit on a wishy-washy committee like you, but in the first one, La lucha armada! The Armed Struggle!"

  After registering and changing currency at the cashier's, they took off their badges and walked out into the sultry evening. Obliquely opposite, in a park, there were long lines in front of a large ice-cream parlor, Coppelia, which looked like a flying saucer that had just landed. On the grass next to it a manned anti-aircraft battery had been set up; and on the roof of their own hotel they saw the long barrel of a cannon.

  "What can be better," said Max, "than the threat of catastrophe?"

  "Peace, you imbecile, peace."

  "I didn't say catastrophe, but the threat of catastrophe. Perhaps politics can ultimately be reduced to aesthetics, just like science. Perhaps the ultimate criterion in the world isn't truth, but beauty."

  As they walked along the busy Rampa, which sloped gently down toward the sea, Onno stared pensively at the paving stones, his tongue between his teeth—ideas were always more real to him than what was visible. Max, on the other hand, who had blurted out the thought, absorbed everything greedily. Everywhere families were out walking under the palms; an electronic composition blared from loudspeakers on the lampposts. It reminded him of Luigi Nono's music for Peter Weiss's Die Ermittlung, which he had a recording of at home, but it was virtually impossible to remember electronic music; moreover, countless portable radios were competing with it. "Me! Me!" boys shouted at passing mulatto girls, sometimes of such staggering beauty that they took away not only Max's breath but even his lust: it was too beautiful, it was art, one had no need, indeed no right, to add anything to it—the key to eroticism was precisely deviation from perfection.

  Policewomen in green uniforms and white berets, no older than seventeen, tried to bring some order to the chaotic traffic at junctions. On the side of a movie theater there was a neon sign thirty feet high, advertising not a commercial product but a political one: the map of Vietnam, with colored facts flashing on and off about American airfields and naval bases, the numbers of soldiers, the campaigns, the occupied and liberated areas, and a bomber flying overhead, releasing dotted lines that ended in bursting red stars, whereupon the airplane suddenly disappeared in a red glow, followed by
the latest total of aircraft shot down: 2,263.

  "Gracias, tovarich!" a man called to Onno cheerfully, and raised his hand.

  Onno thanked him with a gracious bow.

  "They think we're Russians."

  On the other side of the street, in an open white pavilion, hung a huge painting of the head of Fidel Castro. It consisted of welded sheet iron, with a bunch of rockets between his teeth and a red rose by way of a cigar, the armored head threatened by a bloody eye, with an upturned chamber pot for a helmet, while all around black figures were being beaten to death; the whole thing was covered with sickles, hammers, numbers, buttocks, cigars, fishes, eggs, skulls, books, eyes, and snakes. When Max pointed it out to Onno and said something about "socialist surrealism," they suddenly heard ominous roaring from another world in the pandemonium of music and traffic. A wide staircase, below which orange flamingos stood on one leg in a pool, led up to the next floor of the pavilion. On the terrace stood a cage containing two lions; next to it, a cage with a lamb. Just behind hung an enormous reproduction of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel: the old gentleman waving with his outstretched arm, Adam raising himself laboriously, receiving the spark of life in his outstretched finger via multicolored arcs of light, which flashed from God to his creature like in a Leyden jar—accompanied at full volume and by a constantly repeated stirring passage from the second suite of Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet, the part about the Montagues and the Capulets.

  "I'm dreaming!" cried Max. "I'm dreaming!"

  "Ada!"

  At the entrance to the Hotel Nacional, a huge building in the old style, she suddenly appeared from a stream of unknown faces, ran to meet them, and fell into Onno's arms. He kissed and cuddled her like a child, encouraged by the passersby. Max gave her a fraternal kiss on both cheeks.

  "What do you think of it here!" she cried, proud and excited.

  The twenty-four hours that she had been in Cuba already seemed to have made a different person of her: her face radiated an enthusiasm that neither of them had seen in it before. Arm in arm with the two of them, she told them about their reception by someone from the friendship institute, their visit to the conservatory, where they were also able to rehearse, their meetings with Cuban and foreign colleagues. Bruno had arranged to see a habañera orchestra in the old town tonight.

  "It's one huge party here!"

  This hotel was not cordoned off like theirs. In the crowded lobby they now saw not only the German writers, French philosophers, English poets, and Italian composers, but the space was also part of the street: the twittering townsfolk, whole families with small children, walked in one door and out the other.

  "It's just like socialism here," said Onno.

  Ada had also seen the writer who had been on the panel that evening in Amsterdam, and the chess grandmaster, who was there for the Capablanca tournament.

  "Everyone's here, the whole world. All the left-wing intellectuals."

  "You can drop that 'left-wing,' " said Onno, "because the alternative is a contradiction in terms."

  On the large terrace at the back of the hotel Onno ordered his first authentic Cuba libre; Ada and Max had milk shakes. When Ada heard what had happened to them, she started laughing.

  "Everything's possible here. It's like the fairy tale where an ugly frog is transformed into a handsome prince."

  "When we come to power in Holland shortly," said Max, "we shall decree exactly the same kind of semitropical climate as they have here."

  "Exactly," said Onno. "Now you're talking. Politics may be aesthetically conditioned, but it's definitely meterologically conditioned too."

  "It's fantastic you're here. I've missed the pair of you."

  "Not Max, I hope?" queried Onno.

  "In a different way."

  The night stayed warm. The terrace bordered a great, parklike garden, which led down to the sea. The crowds thinned a little, and Onno announced that he had something important to discuss with Ada, but it was strictly confidential and could only be discussed in private. He would see Max the following day at the opening session.

  "Oh yes," said Max. "The New Man as an animal."

  Once they had gone off to her room, he strolled into the darkened garden. The motionless sky was framed in the vaulting beneath the gigantic, twisted trees, while other trees, on the contrary, seemed ethereal, with their filigree foliage as delicate as Brussels lace—it was so exotic, and at the same time so familiar to him because of his view of the Botanical Garden from his office in Leiden. The whole island was one huge botanical garden, but without nameplates. At the end, at a lower balustrade, he looked out over the sea. He was met by a cooling gust; the lights of fishing boats here and there on the water; the pandemonium of the city was virtually drowned out by the soft rush of the surf.

  Here he was. This was where life had brought him, to this paradisal spot. He thought of his life's history, his parents, his journey to Poland—and then of the words of the Cuban ambassador: "What happens ten thousand miles away has never happened." Had Auschwitz never happened here? The irrepressible starry sky. He was exactly on the Topic of Cancer, the pole star was low in the sky; but the trees behind him obscured his view of the Southern sky, which he had never seen.

  Suddenly he heard low voices. He glanced to the side and twenty yards farther on in the dark saw a small group of soldiers around a rapid-firing cannon, with its barrel pointing at the horizon. When he raised his hand, they returned his greeting. He sighed deeply, and an intense feeling of happiness flowed through him.

  17

  Hot Days

  The official opening ceremony of the conference the following morning was conducted by the president of the republic—not to be confused with Fidel Castro, who was to address the final plenary meeting—followed by a reception in the Palace of the Revolution. In the coffee break Max and Onno strolled out of the hotel to gain some impression of the city in daylight.

  Their eyes, adjusted to the artificial lighting in the conference room, were blinded by the chaos of sun in the street: it was as though it penetrated their skin and created a twilight even deep inside their bodies. There were vultures flying high in the sky: the black birds soared above the scorching city like printer's braces in lazy circles and loops, without once moving their wings. Behind the barriers on the other side there were again groups of curious people, focusing their eyes on them and trying to remember what heroes from what country they were—of course the papers had been full of this conference for weeks, with biographies of the delegates. Although ice cream was for vicars, Max wanted to buy an ice at Coppelia; but if he had joined the line, he would probably have missed his lunch. While they talked about the president's speech, in which he had made clear the results that the Cuban people, the revolutionary government, and the Communist party expected from the meeting, they walked into the shade of the park.

  A little later, behind a tree, they saw a scene the illegality of which rose like stench from a suppurating wound. An elderly Cuban gentleman, with a white panama on his head and even wearing a tie, was exchanging money with a young man who was obviously foreign, whom they could see from behind. When the gentleman noticed them, he immediately stuffed the bank notes into his pocket. Max and Onno were about to walk on, as though they had not noticed anything, when the young man turned his head to the side to see what was wrong.

  Onno stopped and could not believe his eyes. Was this possible? Was providence really giving him this gift? His heart raced.

  "Bork!"

  The student leader was struck by his name like a stone in the head. He jerked around and stared at Onno in astonishment. Obviously, he was too surprised to walk away, and Onno strode over to him, followed at a distance by Max. He'd got him, he'd got him in his power, the hour of vengeance had come! What joy! Hands on hips, he stood straight in front of him.

  "Call off your deal this instant, you creep! This instant, do you hear me?" He told the trembling Cuban in Spanish that he needn't be w
orried but that the deal was off, and then, turning back to Bork, said, "You contemptible swine! Playing the left-wing leader in Holland and changing money on the black market in Cuba. What's to become of you?"

  Bart Bork was as astonished as he was, but when he saw the conference badge on Onno's lapel he was completely dumbstruck. The gentleman, who also looked at their badges in alarm, was given back his pesos, and when he groped for the dollars in his pocket, Onno told him he could keep them and should now beat it as fast as he could. Hereupon he raised his hat politely and disappeared. Reveling in his power, Onno turned back to Bork:

  "Of course you know whose signature is on those banknotes, don't you, you wretched shit? Have a good look when you get the chance: Che. He's in the Bolivian jungle right now, with a rifle, but here you are doing dirty capitalist deals behind a tree. What would you think if that became known in Holland? We won't even talk about Cuba, because if we did, things could look bloody nasty for you. I won't say anything about it, but I'm wondering what you're doing here—and shall I tell you right away what I think? I think you came here on a charter on your own initiative and tried to force your way into the conference, but couldn't. You don't belong here. All your international pals are in the Habana Libre, but you're not, you're somewhere in a shabby youth hostel at your own expense—and that's just right for a beachcomber in Cuba."

  The score had been settled. Onno looked at his watch and said to Max, "The committee sessions start in ten minutes."

  They left Bork standing there without saying goodbye.

  "Well," said Max, once they were out of earshot. "I've never seen you like that."

  "I will look back on this day for the rest of my life with deep satisfaction."

  "Aren't you afraid that he could get us into trouble with the conference organizers?"