The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  "No. Do you mind if I don't go with you?"

  "Oh, I thought so. You on the beach—it seemed odd somehow. What are you going to do today? Where are you?"

  "In church," said Onno solemnly, while he watched Maria filling their glasses with ice.

  "In church?" repeated Ada laughing. "Praying for the revolution?"

  "I want to see how it's done here. There's going to be a solemn high mass in a moment."

  "Listen, shall I come? Where's the church?"

  "You go on to the seaside with Max. It's your last chance. The day after tomorrow you'll be back in Holland in the gales and the rain."

  "You really don't mind?"

  "I'll see you both this evening. But call him right away. He doesn't know about it yet."

  "I will."

  "Okay. Pray for my soul."

  As he put down the receiver, he raised the glass that had been put next to him and took a large gulp.

  "What language were you speaking just then?" asked Maria, and sat down on the sofa.

  "The language of the heroic Dutch people."

  The irony of this reply was lost on her. "Holland has a splendid history." She nodded, lighting up a cigarette. "Was that your wife?"

  Onno sighed deeply. "My girlfriend. What on earth gave it away?"

  "Everything."

  "You women in Cuba are just as dreadful as everywhere else." He pointed to the photograph. "Is that your husband?"

  "Not anymore."

  He looked at her with relief, and expected her to show in some way or other that she understood that relief, but her face remained impassive. Suddenly he was seized by a new uncertainty. Perhaps she was a secret agent; perhaps it was her task to find out the truth about those two Dutchmen at the conference whom nobody had ever heard of, who never spoke, and had now not joined the Sierra Maestra excursion.

  "Why do those knights of the revolution still wear their beards from the guerrilla period?"

  "Because they've sworn not to shave off their beards or take off their uniforms until the revolution has come to the whole of Latin America."

  She got up and took a large photograph out of a drawer of the sideboard, which she handed to him.

  "This is my husband."

  Onno's face contorted with disgust. It was the same man, but now his naked body was lying on a bier, filthy and covered in blood, with black bullet holes in his chest, tangled, sticky hair and a beard, and one eye half open.

  "Christ!" he said and looked at her in dismay. "Where did this happen?"

  "In Bolivia."

  He didn't know what to say. He got up, put the photograph back in the drawer, slid the drawer shut, and sat down again. It was all clear now. As the widow of a dead hero she had been given privileges by his friends—a nice house, a car, gasoline coupons, and whiskey from early morning onward. Perhaps she had children, too. He wanted to ask if she had children, but he did not. He looked at her in silence. She met his gaze and then twice gently patted the place next to her.

  18

  The Vanishing Point

  Max was trying the get rid of his headache at the bar with black coffee and mineral water. He had had a strange dream about Cuba: white, completely covered in snow, it had been situated in a frozen polar sea— that was all he could remember. It was almost ten o'clock. Just when he was about to call Onno's room to ask where he'd gotten to, the telephone rang.

  The barman picked up the phone, looked at him and asked: "Compañero Delius?"

  It was Ada. Onno had gone to church and wasn't coming with them.

  "Your weird fiance prefers incense to sunshine," said Max. "What shall we do?"

  "It's up to you. How do you feel after last night?"

  "I've got a headache, and either it will get worse in the sun or it will disappear in the sea. Let's go. I was all geared up for it, and I can always sit in the shade. I'll be with you in ten minutes."

  He grabbed his bag of swimming gear and went to the lobby, where Guerra was sitting reading the Granma, the party newspaper. He was wearing a white embroidered shirt, which was also a jacket.

  "Tovarich Quits has a religious appointment," said Max. "He's sorry but he's gone to pray for the revolution. As far as I'm concerned, you can stay in Havana too. We'll find the way."

  But Salvador Guerra would not hear of it. It was Sunday, it would be crowded in Varadero, and without him they wouldn't find the right place; and anyway, they would need a meal too.

  "Apart from that, I'm responsible for your safety. We'll have to go through an area where terrorist commandos from Florida regularly land. May I introduce you . . . compañera Marilyn."

  He gestured toward a young blond woman approaching them, in a green uniform, heavy high-heeled shoes, holding a small but formidable submachine gun across her breasts, and with a refined, razor-sharp smile on her face. She was Ada's age and was distinguished from her film-star namesake by an intelligent, alert look in her green eyes, which, however, were slightly clouded.

  Max's headache immediately lightened. He shook her hand and knew that he must not say "Monroe," because everyone did that, of course. But he could not resist making an indirect allusion:

  "You look amazing. It seems there's even a doctrine named after you."

  She understood at once. The North American Monroe Doctrine, which prohibited external intervention in the Western Hemisphere, had again played a role five years earlier, during the Cuban missile crisis. She spoke fluent American English, and when he complimented her on it, she said that she was American, from New York, where she had studied art history, but that they need not go into that any further. She preferred not to lose her nationality; if her parents found out where she was and what she was up to, they wouldn't dare show their faces in the street anymore. So her surname was best left undisclosed.

  "Where do your parents think you are, then?"

  "Wandering around Europe visiting museums. Studying perspective in Italy, in Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca."

  "Which is important too, of course."

  "But in a different way."

  Glancing approvingly at her rear, he followed her outside, where Jesús was waiting for them in the car. With the Kalashnikov on her lap, Marilyn sat next to the driver and they drove to the Hotel Nacional along the quiet Rampa. Ada was already waiting on the terrace. With the warmth that only women can immediately show each other, she and Marilyn said hello through the driver's window. Guerra got out politely and allowed her to sit between Max and himself in the backseat. Soon they were driving into the country along the rocky coast.

  "What do you make of him," said Max to Ada, "the ex-Calvinist going to a Catholic mass in a Communist country. You just couldn't make up something like that."

  "It's only possible in Cuba."

  "Look. Even the earth here is red."

  On their right, sugarcane stood above head height in the red clay, an ideal hiding place for the scum that landed here. Because it was Sunday, he had expected that it would be busy on the road, but of course because of gasoline rationing people took the train; there was almost no traffic. Sugarcane leaves that had blown down were strewn across the pavement, and there was a strange silence over the land and the sea.

  Ada saw it too. "There's some doubt whether we'll be able to leave tomorrow. Bruno has heard that there's a hurricane off Haiti, which may come toward Cuba. Fancy."

  "That makes it the sixth this year."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because f is the sixth letter of the alphabet. It's not just people who learn the alphabet in these parts; disasters know it too. I must talk to Onno about that, but for the moment he's listening to the 'Kyrie eleison.' "

  For the first time he smelled her scent again and felt her warmth with his thigh, but it only gave him a sense of familiarity. He was sitting behind Jesús, so he could see part of Marilyn's face. Below her ears, along the curve of her jaw, downy hairs glowed like a tiny blanket of light. Paolo Uccello. Piero della Francesca. Kalashnikov. How
was he going to tell them about this in Holland when he got back? People there would be just as unable to understand what was happening here as what was going on in the GDR or in Poland.

  The unreliable condition of the car meant that the journey would take almost two hours. In the cooling breeze blowing through the windows Guerra told them about his role in the revolution, in which he'd taken part not in the mountains but in Havana. The urban resistance against the corrupt Batista regime, mainly by students and intellectuals, which had cost many lives, had always been in the shadow of the guerrilleros, but that was partly because many people said afterward that they had been in the urban resistance when they had not. It was almost impossible to check.

  "No one has ever dared claim," he said, bending forward and looking at Max, "that they fought in the Sierra Maestra when they did not, but in complicated situations there are always people who take advantage and pretend to be what they're not." He nodded and leaned back again.

  Max stiffened. Did Guerra know the truth about the Dutch delegation? Was he letting him know that? Or was he imagining it? Of course they knew! They'd known for a long time! If they didn't know something like that, their state could not exist at all! But they left things as they were, because it was a mistake on their part. They had known for a long while that they were not dealing with two promising resistance fighters but with an innocent astronomer and a clueless cryptographer who dabbled in bourgeois politics. "Leave it," someone had said, between putting a cigar in his mouth and lighting it, "they're children"; and the matter was settled by disciplining the black girl at the airport. He glanced at Ada, but she did not give the impression of having registered a hidden message. He would have liked to confess to Guerra now, admit that they were attending the conference under false pretences and of course would repay all the expenses, but suppose he was wrong: what would he be letting himself in for?

  Suddenly Jesús cried out: "Fidel!"

  Max felt as though an electric shock had gone through him. In front of them was a column of military vehicles. They were being observed calmly but intently from the rear car by two heavily armed soldiers, one with binoculars and one with a walkie-talkie. A gesture was made indicating that they should keep their distance. The situation in the Chrysler changed instantly.

  Jesús turned his head, pointed across his steering wheel, and said again, "Fidel!"

  Ada leaned forward, Guerra stretched his neck, and Marilyn sat up straight. Five hearts suddenly beat faster because a certain man was close by, a man like all other men, flesh and blood, with two eyes, two ears, two arms, and two legs—and at the same time a man like no other: the liberator of his people, history personified. Max looked over Jesús's shoulder at the slowly proceeding column. He saw antennas and here and there a leg half out of a car and the barrel of an automatic rifle. He was there somewhere: power was on the move.

  Guerra said that he always traveled like that, or rather that he was constantly roaming over the island in cars or helicopters. He had no kind of residence or department anywhere in Havana—that was his department, that was where all his intimates were; they knew everything and everyone, slept in barracks, with farmers, or in hammocks among the trees. That restless style was inherited from the guerrilla war; it had even driven Che out of the country. No one ever knew where Fidel was—he suddenly turned up all over the place—and of course that was also good for his safety, because there were lots of people who would like to see him dead.

  But when the soldier with the walkie-talkie gestured that they could pass, Max wondered whether this wasn't a frivolous decision. In the front seat of their own car, on the side of the column that they were now overtaking, there was an American woman with a weapon at the ready: how were they to know that this was not the execution of a diabolically planned CIA assassination attempt, with the cynical sacrifice of a cellist and a promising astronomer? Perhaps the explanation was that their watchfulness was not based on fear. However, hands kept appearing, motioning them to drive on faster. Max bent deep across Ada's lap so as not to miss anything, Guerra leaned back so as not to obstruct his view, but it all happened too quickly to see much.

  One military vehicle after another, including a mobile kitchen, an ambulance, a radio car, and suddenly a line of jeeps with comandantes and other officers. In a flash he saw him sitting in the front jeep: next to the black driver, wearing glasses with dark frames and reading papers, a submachine gun on an iron grille above his knees.

  The bay lay like a grail of deep-blue blood beneath the cloudless sky. Standing next to the car, Max and Ada looked open-mouthed at the scores of great white pelicans flying high above the waves with their long beaks and suddenly plummeting straight down into the water like depth charges, disappearing, and a little later emerging dripping and with thrashing pouches below their beaks, to continue their flight. It seemed as though those incessant, vertical movements, like slim, invisible columns, transformed space into an enclosed dome. Woods stretched down to the wide sandy beach. As though the trees did not cast a shadow but the shadow carried the trees. Not a leaf stirred. "This is out of this world," said Ada.

  Farther along, the beach was crowded, but here there were only a few left-wing artists and intellectuals with international reputations sitting in the sun. Hidden among the trees were charming but rather dilapidated bungalows, which, Guerra told them, used to be inhabited for two months a year by Cuban and American brothel-keepers and cocaine dealers but now served as guest homes for various organizations. The villas along the open beach were for public use.

  On the shady veranda of a bungalow, lunch was served by a Chinese Cuban in a white coat: gazpacho, grilled swordfish, with a dry white wine, which everyone drank apart from Marilyn, sweet hazelnut ice cream, and coffee. As he was about to go and put on his swimming trunks, Max asked Ada if she had also gotten the impression that he and Onno had been seen through as impostors.

  "Don't be silly," she said. "It's just your guilty conscience."

  "Do you think so?"

  "Of course, but you two will have to set things straight one day."

  "I hope you're right."

  Her remark had reassured him, as had the wine. There was a diving mask on the chair, and as soon as he was undressed he ran across the red-hot, velvety sand toward the surf and dived into the sea with the mask over his arm. Used to the cold North Sea and cool Mediterranean, he was not prepared for a lukewarm dip. He resurfaced with a cry of pleasure and immediately fell back again. This couldn't be true! Life had originated in a sea like this! He waved to Ada, who was spreading her towel, but she indicated that she would be coming in a moment. He frolicked about in the water like a little child in a paddling pool, jumped up, dived, and had already forgotten that a short while ago he had had a headache. He put on the mask and in an instant the world that he had only known in his dreams unfolded, swaying silence, movement that had become vegetable, light wandering around on stilts, spectral colors transformed into fish, into which a gigantic pelican plunged like doom through the blinding roof of the sky and scooped up its prey; but his mask, which dated from before the revolution, filled with water and he had to return to the sunshine.

  Marilyn had rid herself of her weapon and was sitting next to Ada in a bikini on a towel. Obviously, other people provided security here.

  Guerra had stayed on the veranda, where he was talking to Jesús and the Chinese waiter, who had put his legs up on the table; a fat black woman in a white apron was sweeping the floor tiles. Max sat down on the other side of Ada, next to Marilyn. The bare, downy skin of her arms and legs and belly, without a submachine gun, was different than if he had never seen her with one. Then she would have simply been a young woman in a bikini, like Ada; but because of its absence, the submachine gun was somehow even more present than when it had been there. Was that what attracted soldiers to a certain kind of woman: the fact that they finally had to disarm themselves for her? Was it perhaps also a kind of justification for the women who had slept with German soldi
ers during the war? Were they really resistance fighters unjustly shorn of their hair after the liberation? While the enemy was on top of them, he couldn't shoot!

  He did not like thinking about the war. He lay on his back, folded his hands under his head, and asked in English: "What would Fidel do now?"

  "Certainly not sunbathe," said Ada. "He's never done that."

  "I've seen him. My life is fulfilled. From now on things can only go downhill."

  Marilyn turned her head over her shoulder and gave him a searching look. "What kind of joke is that?"

  "Why do you think it's a joke? Perhaps it's not a joke. Perhaps it's a joke that's not a joke."

  "You sound like Onno," said Ada.

  He looked up into Marilyn's eyes and saw that he must be a little careful. He had found repeatedly that in Cuba the revolution was not devoid of good-humored features, but he had noticed little of that among the foreigners at the conference, just as he had not when he had been in Eastern Europe—and here was an American. At the same time, it titillated him and he felt like teasing her.

  "Perhaps we should see everything in perspective."

  "What perspective?"

  "Eternity."

  This time she seemed to understand him even better than he had intended. She turned onto her stomach and said didactically:

  "Eternity and perspective are incompatible. Shall I tell you something, Dutch Max? Perspective was discovered in the fifteenth century. Up till then God had always fitted very naturally into the space of the painting, a Madonna and child for example, but that space itself was unnatural. He simply sat on a throne in the blue sky, above the Madonna, with some circles and stars around him; or on the left you had St. Dionysius wearing an elegant mitre in a dungeon and on the right later after his head had been chopped off, and in the center Christ, naked on the cross hundreds of years earlier, surrounded by the twelve apostles in bishop's robes: all of that quite naturally in one impossible space at one impossible moment. But with the discovery of central perspective, natural space and natural time were defined. Someone on a chair in the sky would fall down, and things that followed each other could not happen simultaneously. So that was the beginning of the end of eternity."