The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  "Him? Do you think it'll occur to him that we don't belong in that conference? He's just understood why he wasn't invited. Because we were invited. We've risen immeasurably in his estimation. He thought he was dealing with a couple of gullible scholars whom he could teach a lesson or two, but now he's realized that we're unspeakably important in the left-wing movement. He believes in world revolution, and if he puts the slightest obstacle in our path, he thinks that one day we'll settle accounts with him as he would have done with us. The first chance he gets he'll try and make up to us. Come to that, he may be in the Dutch Communist party, and that's why he's not welcome. Take it from me, they know that kind of thing here. What a day! How sweet revenge tastes! Imagine if I hadn't let you persuade me yesterday ..."

  "What a high-minded character you are," said Max as they showed their papers at the entrance. "Your moral indignation really strikes me as terribly sincere. Especially for someone who himself is staying free in a first-class hotel under false pretenses and is eating at the people's expense in a Third World country."

  "Shut up, you swine! I shall pay it all back twice over in one way or another. In any case, money changers will be driven out of the temple."

  At lunchtime the Dutch delegation was presented to compañero Salvador Guerra Guerra: a skinny man of about fifty, with thin gray hair, hollow cheeks, and wrists no thicker than broomsticks. He was entirely at their disposal, as interpreter, guide, and walking encyclopedia; he was also expected to have meals with them. The latter turned out to be especially important for Guerra. During lunch, which consisted of three courses and which was attended by all delegates, he told them that he had recently had a severe stomach operation: only in the Habana Libre could he hope to gain a little weight. Apart from that, he wasn't going to intrude; if they needed him, they could ask for him at the conference office. Not once did he inquire about their political status in Holland—that wonderful country, as he put it, with its wonderful revolutionary history, which four hundred years ago had been the first to rebel against Spanish domination. In Cuba that had happened only a hundred years ago.

  "Yes," said Onno to Max, "there's no answer to that. They've got a higher opinion of Holland here than they have in Holland itself."

  "Nevertheless," Guerra went on, "Cuba did surpass Holland to some extent ten years ago."

  In the evening, after dinner, which consisted of four courses with French wine, they went with Ada to the chamber-music festival, where that evening groups from a number of Eastern-bloc countries were performing. Guerra had said that there was a car with a driver available for their use at all times; but because they still had to get used to the idea that they could live like millionaires here, they had taken a taxi to the old town.

  In the concert hall they now also met Bruno, who already knew everyone and behaved as though he had been living in Havana for years. After the concert Onno took Ada to his room in the Habana Libre. As in the Hotel Nacional, there was a fat middle-aged lady at a table next to the lift, who looked at him reproachfully as though she were his mother, but he took no notice; when he gave her a wink, she began beaming with complicity.

  Max had stayed on a bit longer. His knowledge of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge in B major, Opus 133, performed by a Bulgarian quartet, had made a great impression on a Cuban girl studying medicine—a tall girl with long, slim fingers, which she placed high up on his thigh when he told her that the piece had originated from the conclusion of Opus 130.

  In order to analyze this further, they went to a bar, where it was as dark as in the farthest recesses of the universe. The only light was given off by glowing cigars and cigarettes; the waiter, who took them to their seats through the heat, the guitar music, and the invisible petting and giggling, politely pointed his flashlight straight at the ground. On the sofa against a tall wooden partition they drank their Son, the Cuban counterpart of Coca-Cola, and, accompanied by the incessant moaning and creaking in the neighboring booths, they went further into the Grande Fugue, tantôt libre, tantôt recherchée. In order to unveil the fugue's ultimate secrets, they then adjourned to a posada a few streets away. At the counter they were each given a towel and a bar of soap, with which they had to wait in the corridor for ten minutes: on one bench sat the men, from white to black, opposite them the women. When they had finished and Max was finally strolling back to his hotel through the nocturnal city, where everywhere people were still sitting in the street in front of their houses, with all their doors and windows open, it dawned on him fully for the first time that he was no longer in Europe. At the entrance he was again checked, and in the lobby he said hello to Angel, the waiter who served them and who had to be summoned with a "Pst!" He was now in a blue militia uniform, and polishing his revolver.

  However, after only two days Max began to wonder what he was doing here. He became increasingly fed up with sitting for hours in an artificially lit room in this marvelous weather, listening to the translation of endless papers, behind him the incessant hubbub of the interpreters in their cubicles, while he wanted to walk through the city outside. Was it going to go on like this for five days? In the mornings, in his bathrobe, he took the elevator down to the large open-air swimming pool on the first floor, where the tape, which had not been changed since the 1950s, was already playing: "Sentimental Journey," "Don't Fence Me In." He played truant, lying in the sun till lunchtime, and during the afternoon sessions he passed the time by reading Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which he had put into his suitcase at the last moment—but he hadn't come to Cuba for that! The ideological and tactical wrangling didn't interest him, either. Apart from that the really interesting things, of course, did not come up in the committee meetings; they were discussed in hotel rooms, behind locked doors—or in the Central Committee building.

  However, he was particularly shocked by the Palestinian delegation, which wanted to wipe the state of Israel off the map and was applauded by everyone because of it. That was new to him. Israel! The child and pendant of Auschwitz! Of course Israel wasn't a branch of heaven, either, but did that mean that it had to be changed into a second branch of hell? Could it be that the far left and the far right were of one mind when it came to fighting the Jews? He remembered from the war how the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem had visited Hitler with a white blob on his head to discuss the extermination of the Jews in Palestine: General Rommel was already on his way with his Afrikakorps. Was "anti-Zionism" the latest euphemism for anti-Semitism, as "final solution" was for extermination? Had hell extended its tentacles as far as Cuba? If Israel was his mother, then surely it could not be that this fantastic island belonged to the world of his father.

  He did not want to think about that dilemma, and he did not talk about it. What made him stay was Onno, who said that he was learning a lot, although—being the Erasmian parliamentary democrat that he ultimately was—he felt lukewarm about all that radicalism. Apart from that there was the comfort, of course. The chauffeur-driven car, the bus trips into the country, the theatrical performances, late suppers in a rustic square in the old town, at rows of ready-laid tables, each sixty feet long, with music and speeches, or a visit to a show in La Tropicana, a gigantic open-air nightclub, where white grand pianos emerged from the ground, played by black men in white dinner jackets, singing "Guantanamera," and where fifty girls with ostrich feathers on their heads high-kicked and at the finale sung the "Internationale," while around them in the undergrowth hundreds of soldiers kept watch, since there was always a chance of attacks from infiltrators from Miami.

  When the time came for Ada's performance at the end of the week, Max was in bad shape. He'd had a high temperature all day long; he would have preferred to crawl into bed, but that was of course impossible, though no one would have taken it amiss. Onno had already left with Ada, and purely to help to build up Guerra's strength, Max had gone to the dining room, where he restricted himself to a fruit salad. Because no car was available, he took the smoking, juddering bus to the old town and was stared a
t by his cheerful fellow passengers.

  The small auditorium was hot and full to overflowing, and people were ' even sitting in the aisles; a number of composers had come too. Ada was nervous. All their rehearsals, their free journey, their hotel, the meals, the free entry to concerts and ballet performances, everyone's kindness, must now all be counterbalanced by less than half an hour's music after the intermission. They played Saint-Saen's Allegro apassionato, followed by Janácek's Fairy Tale, and everything went well. The attentive silence persisted for a moment after the final notes, and then gave way to applause, which while not overwhelming was still above the level of mere politeness.

  Afterward, daiquiris were served in the throng at the back of the platform.

  When Onno saw Max's face, both tanned and pale, he said, "Go on, have one. You'll feel better."

  Max clinked glasses with Ada and Bruno, and cautiously sucked the crushed ice with rum in it out of the low glass. He liked the taste. He emptied the glass, held it against his forehead for a moment, and took a second.

  But after one mouthful he was suddenly drunk. It was as though a net had fallen over him, a net curtain, but at the same time he emerged from the daze in which he had been in all day long.

  "Nazdrovye!" he shouted, and downed this glass too, feeling an urge to throw it over his shoulder, as he had seen a cube-shaped Russian general do in the Tropicana.

  From that moment on, events quickly became increasingly confused for him. The two Cubans they had met in Amsterdam loomed up and disappeared again; his girlfriend of a few days ago offered her cheek for him to kiss and a moment later had gone. He slurped the ice-cold white mud and felt it slipping down coolingly through his chest, while he surveyed the throng contentedly. Suddenly people made as if to leave. No one could yet see that anything about him had changed. Onno said that Bruno had organized an excursion; he must put his glass down now, because they were going to a Santería ceremony. A Santería ceremony? Okay, let's go to a Santería ceremony. As long as there was daiquiri there.

  But there wasn't any. They drove to a poor street in a suburb in rattling cars, with Max wedged in the backseat between three or four people he did not know. They got out in front of a wooden house with an open front door between peeling pillars. It was so full in the small rooms that they could scarcely get in. Max stood on tiptoe; something terribly occult was going on.

  From the back room came the sound of a crescendo of drumming and singing; on an uptight wooden chair, flanked by candles, an emaciated black man in a light-blue flowered dress was shaking as though surges of current were being pumped through his body, while two black women were trying to keep him under control. In a trance he blurted out words and sounds, which Onno said were completely unrelated to Spanish but more like Nigerian, Yoruba, or whatever it might be. Obviously, an African spirit had taken possession of him, but on the other hand it couldn't be that heathen, because above his head there was a kitschy image of the Virgin on a pedestal, while above that was a portrait of Fidel Castro. But perhaps it was everything at once, ignoring the law of the odd man out, to the eternal shame of those who thought they understood anything.

  Down and chicken feathers flew through the air. The drummers and women singers worked themselves up into a state of frantic ecstasy, which now also transmitted itself to some black men and women in the audience, so that people quickly had to give way to avoid flailing arms and legs. Max was forced into a corner, and with eyes too heavy with rum to focus properly, he suddenly found himself looking into the eyes of the Dutch writer who had sat on the forum panel in Amsterdam and who was standing beside him.

  "So we meet again?" said Max. He tried to focus his eyes on him, but he was too close; there were two identical writers refusing to merge. Only because he had had too much to drink, did it occur to him to ask: "How the hell is it possible for someone to dream up a novel?"

  "I never dream up anything," said the two mouths coolly. "I remember. I remember things that have never happened. Just like you do when you read my novel."

  Very early the next morning—the conference was coming to an end—the delegates took their buses to the airport. From there they were going to Oriente, the sweltering province in the extreme southeast of the island. Here there were two days scheduled in the Sierra Maestra, the mountains where eleven years ago the rebels had begun their struggle with twelve men sitting around a table. Although there was a rumor that el líder máximo was to appear, Max and Onno remained in Havana. Ada's plane was leaving the following afternoon—they themselves were going three days later—and they had decided, despite Onno's protests, to spend her last day on the beach in Varadero. Guerra would ensure that the car was ready at ten o'clock, after which they were to pick her up from the Hotel Nacional.

  At half-past nine Onno was sitting, as agreed, in the shady bar that divided the swimming pool from the dining room. Max was obviously still sleeping off his hangover. It had become quiet in the hotel. There had been a thunderstorm that night, and the swimming pool attendant was fishing leaves and insects out of the water with a net; the barman was checking the bottles in his racks on a list. The only other person sitting at the other end of the bar was a woman with a glass in front of her: whiskey, from the look of it. Onno thought of his conversations with the delegates, which he was mostly able to conduct in their own languages, on the mad tumult raging everywhere in the world, of which only a fraction had penetrated to him in Holland—at least he tried to think of it, because although the woman didn't look sideways at him, he felt an almost tangible link between them. It disturbed him and he wondered what was happening. What was this? Feeling as if he were already being unfaithful to Ada, he asked for the bill. He would phone up to Max's room and say he was waiting in the lobby. While he was signing—and again wondering how he was going to pay for all this—he felt the woman looking at him. He met her gaze, and with a smile he made a slight sideways movement of the head, signaling that he was sorry but there was nothing to be done—he was simply a mug.

  However, as he walked to the telephone box in the lobby, he saw her coming down the stairs after him. He immediately realized what had happened. She'd interpreted his movement of the head completely differently, namely as "Come on, let's go"—done subtly to deceive the barman. After a moment's hesitation he went up to her; he was caught in a trap, there was no escaping—but he no longer really wanted to escape. She was in her thirties: a full-figured, luxuriant woman, dark blond, with deep-brown eyes and a skin the color of hazelnuts.

  "Let's go," she said earnestly.

  He could tell from her accent that she was Cuban. She looked well groomed, rather bourgeois; but maybe she was a gusano, as they were called here, a counterrevolutionary "worm," who would prefer to flee to the United States as soon as possible. But how could she get into the hermetically sealed hotel? He nodded and went outside with her. Was it all so simple? Of his own accord he would never have dared make that gesture of the head with the meaning that she had given it. That was more in Max's line.

  He put out his hand and said, "Onno Quist."

  "María."

  As he sat next to her in the car, which was in reasonable condition, he wondered what had gotten into him. He had to go to the beach very shortly, it was Ada's last day, this was impossible, he had to go back at once. But it had become impossible. The soldier in the drive saluted as they passed.

  "I have to make a phone call," he said.

  "You can do that at my place. We'll be there in no time."

  She glanced sideways and smiled sadly. It was Sunday, the streets were empty, and a few minutes later they were driving along a chic boulevard with grass and trees in the central divider, occasionally alternating with large signs with slogans on them like WHEREVER DEATH SURPRISES US, LET IT BE WELCOME. There were embassies here and in the past wealthy people had lived here, but now the well-appointed properties had been largely converted into student lodgings and all sorts of university institutes. Here too branches and leaves that had blo
wn down were strewn everywhere. They got out at a small detached house with a well-maintained garden.

  The front door opened directly onto the white, tiled living room, which by Dutch standards was virtually empty. The walls were also bare, except for a framed photograph above the sideboard: a man of about forty with a wide smile, in uniform and wearing a beard, with a large broad-brimmed hat on his head, like those that sugarcane cutters wore, with his arm around Maria's shoulders, who was also smiling, cringing a little from the violent vitality next to her.

  When Onno saw the beard, the revolutionary sign of nobility, he had the feeling that he should flee at once, out the front door and down the avenue as fast as his legs could carry him: at any moment the man would come in and gun him down, after which he would blow the smoke out of his pistol barrel and burst out laughing. For once he had embarked on an adventure and had landed in a situation like this. My own fault, he thought. I've got my just deserts. He had landed himself in a fix and now he must simply take the consequences. Wherever death surprises us, let it be welcome. Dr. h.c. Onno Quist, The Hague, November 6, 1933—Havana, October 8, 1967.

  He sat down on a wicker chair and phoned Hotel Nacional. While he waited to be put through to Ada's room, Maria asked if he would like a whiskey.

  "I'd love one!" he said, so emphatically that she burst out laughing.

  When he heard Ada's voice he felt ashamed and again felt sorry. He was going to say that he'd walked into town, that he'd got lost and that he would be at the hotel in a quarter of an hour, but he did not.

  "Hello?" she repeated.

  "Hi, it's me."

  "Hello! I suppose Max's overslept, hasn't he? He had far too much to drink yesterday. Doesn't matter, I'm sitting on the balcony in the sun."

  "No, it's not that, or partly that. He hadn't arrived a moment ago."

  "What's wrong, then? Aren't you in your hotel?"