The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  "And what is significant in this connection," continued Proctor after taking a deep breath and wiping his mouth, "is the number of letters in the alphabet."

  "Of course." Onno nodded with an irony, which only Max noticed. "Twenty-two."

  "In Hebrew, yes. But our alphabet has twenty-six." He looked at Onno with an expression that said he had unveiled the final secret.

  "Ah-ha!" said Onno with raised eyebrows, and lifted an index finger. "Ah-ha! The same number as the numerical value of God! Dutch as a divine language! By the way, Mr. Proctor, you mustn't say 'Jehovah,' but 'Jah-weh,' with the accent on the e. 'Jehovah' is a bastardized Christian word from the late Middle Ages. It's even more sensible not to speak the name at all, because otherwise you might come to a sticky end. It would be better to say 'Adonai,' with the letters alef, daleth, nun, jod. At least if that has an acceptable numerical value, but it's almost bound to have."

  "One plus four plus fifty plus ten," said Proctor immediately, "makes sixty-five."

  "Makes eleven, makes two." Onno nodded. "Seems fine to me."

  While Arendje counted Quinten's toes when he heard all those numbers and cried "Ten!" Kern appeared on the balcony again, now accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Spier.

  With a friendliness that did not reveal whether it was pretended or real, they fulfilled their social duties.

  "What a darling," said Mrs. Spier.

  Mr. Spier looked intently at Quinten, stroked the soft spot on his fontanel with the tip of his ring finger, and then said, as though one could see by looking at him: "His initials are Q. Q."

  "Qualitate qua," nodded Onno.

  "That is rare. The Q is the most mysterious of letters, that circle with that line," he said, while he formed a slightly obscene gesture a circle with the manicured thumb and index finger of one hand and the line with the index finger of the other, "the ovum being penetrated by a sperm. And twice at that. Very nice. My compliments."

  Like Proctor, he was obviously aware that Onno had a relationship with written characters. Max felt a little shiver go down his spine at his words, but Onno made a clumsy and at the same time elegant bow. Spier too gave a slight bow and took out a silver watch from his waistcoat pocket. Unfortunately they had to leave immediately—the taxi was already waiting for them on the forecourt to take them to the station: they were going on holiday to Wales, to Pontrhydfendigaid, as they did every year.

  Kern had meanwhile sat down astride an upright chair and against the back of the seat in front of him had placed a thick piece of cardboard to which a sheet of paper was fastened with a clip. Without taking his eyes off Sophia and the child on her lap, he made large sketching movements, gliding over the paper with just the side of his hand. In his fingers he had a stick of charcoal, but it was not yet given permission to leave a trace. He was obviously waiting for an order from the world of the good, beautiful, and true, telling him that the moment of irrevocability had come.

  36

  The Monument

  A man who was free, Max reflected one afternoon in autumn as he looked at the yellowing trees from his balcony, could not imagine that he could ever be imprisoned, just as a prisoner could never really imagine freedom. The slowness of the masses found its pendant in the slowness of spirit: anything that was not the case at a particular moment had the character of a dream. The result was that history was to be found in books but scarcely anywhere outside them—and what were books? Little things, seldom larger than a brick, but lighter, and almost irretrievable amid the myriads of other things that covered the surface of the earth, and on their way to becoming more and more insignificant in the electronic world, which was rising faster and faster out of abstraction.

  Everything was progressing, and everything that had happened could just as well not have happened. Dreams were remembered for a few minutes after waking up—and a little later they had been forgotten. Where was the battle of Verdun now, except in barely traceable and in any case unread books, and in the memory of a handful of old men, who in twenty years time would also be dead and buried, with nightmares and scars and all? Where was the battle of Stalingrad? The bombing of Dresden? Hiroshima? Auschwitz?

  In the winter of 1968, six months after they moved into Groot Rechteren, Max went to Westerbork camp for the first time. All twelve mirrors were now ready, as were the computer programs; a start had been made with experimental observations. His arrival was not really necessary, but in Leiden—where he still had to go regularly—even the director had already asked him in surprise whether he hadn't been to take a look at his new workplace yet. It finally happened on the day that he showed Sophia the observatory at Dwingeloo. During the furnishing of Groot Rechteren she had spent the night there a few times, but she hadn't viewed the observatory on those occasions; technical things didn't interest her. One bright, cold morning he persuaded her to wrap Quinten up warmly and come with him. Why he wanted her to, he didn't know himself. While he showed her the buildings and the mirrors, he thought constantly of that day with Ada and Onno, now nine months ago; but he did not refer to it, and she didn't ask about it. Not much had changed since then—except that there were now unused electric typewriters all over the floor with the cables wound around them, while computer screens had appeared on the desks.

  Quinten sat earnestly on Sophia's arm during the tour, and to everyone's delight he looked around with his blue eyes like a personage that was not displeased with the course of events. He was now seven months and had never yet cried, but had never yet laughed either—in fact had scarcely uttered a sound. Sophia was sometimes worried that he had suffered damage in the accident, but the doctor said that he was obviously an extraordinary child; there were no indications apart from that, that he was not normal.

  During the coffee break, while all the staff gathered in the hall of the main building around the trolley with the shiny urn, Max talked to an electronics engineer who was responsible for the wiring of the synthetic radio telescope; soon he would have to go Westerbork on the shuttle bus, because there had been new teething troubles. He spoke with such a soft, modest voice that Max could scarcely hear him in the hubbub. On an impulse he offered to take him there in his own car, seeing that he had to go there himself. He had suddenly said it: this was the moment, with Quinten and Sophia. Over the months, during the long evenings at the castle, he had told Sophia more about his life than he had ever told her daughter—possibly because their formal relationship somehow made it easier for him than an intimate one.

  Three quarters of an hour later they were driving along the provincial road. Sophia, who was in the backseat with the child, perhaps suspected that the accident had happened somewhere here; but when they passed the spot Max only glanced at it quickly out of the corner of his eye. The open space where the trees had been was now filled with two young alders, supported by wooden poles, to which they were attached by strips of black rubber, obviously cut from car tires, in the form of a figure eight. They did not speak. The engineer leafed through a folder of papers on his lap, Quinten had fallen asleep, and suddenly Max was reminded of his walk through the clammy Polish heat, from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II—as though that were a counterpart of the route from Dwingeloo to Westerbork. A feeling of nausea seized him, which not only issued from that memory but mainly from what lay behind it. He did not think of it for weeks or months, but it always suddenly reappeared in an unchanged state, without the decay to which even radioactive material was subject.

  "You have to turn right here," said the engineer when they were at the village of Hooghalen.

  "Sorry, it's the first time I've been here."

  "You can't be serious."

  "But it's true."

  "Are you really interested in astronomy?"

  "Maybe not."

  He saw a sign pointing to a neighboring village of Amen—as though the whole area had been prepared for centuries for what would one day happen there—and suddenly there was a sign to the Schattenberg estate. He drove down a woodland path, flanked on
the right by rusty train rails. Now and then they passed Ambonese in traditional ankle-length Indonesian dress, supplemented for the Dutch winter with woollen scarves and woolly hats; sometimes whole families, whose members walked not alongside each other but one behind the other, with the father at the head, and the youngest child at the back. A moment later Max realized with a shock what the rails along the road were: laid by the Germans and ending at Birkenau.

  He stopped at a barrier in the barbed-wire fence, got out, and looked at the camp with bated breath. From the plans and blueprints, which he had looked at repeatedly in Leiden and Dwingeloo, he knew that it was a trapezoid approximately a third of a mile long and a third of a mile wide.

  What he saw was a large forest-framed space, the freezing air filled with minute icicles that gleamed in the sunlight; there were rows of dilapidated huts, set carefully at right angles like in Birkenau, as if they were still on the drawing-board—an inhuman pattern that seemed to have served as a model for postwar housing developments. Smoke still rose from some chimneys, but most of the huts were obviously no longer occupied; a few had burned down, and here and there huts had disappeared. Children were playing; somewhere someone was cycling along who undoubtedly would have a great deal to say about what went on in Indonesia during the Japanese occupation but knew nothing of what had taken place here.

  Straight in front of him the rails continued to the other end of the camp—and parallel with them, farther to the right like . . . yes, like what?— like a vision, a mirage, a dream over a distance of a mile, the procession of huge dish aerials, entering the camp on one side and leaving it on the other. His eyes grew moist. Here, in this asshole of the Netherlands, they entreated the blessing of heaven like sacrificial altars in the total silence. At the same moment he felt the pressure that had weighed on him for the past few years lifting: the pressure of having to work in this accursed spot. Suddenly he could think of no place on earth where he would rather work than here. Wasn't everything that he was gathered together here, as in the focal point of a lens?

  Without looking at Sophia, he got back in the car and drove slowly to the new low-rise service building, suddenly unable to stop talking. Agitatedly, occasionally half turning around, he told them that the camp had been set up by the Dutch government in 1939 for German Jewish refugees—the first Jewish camp outside Germany—but that the cost had been recovered from the Jewish community in the Netherlands. So that when the Germans arrived, they had the refugees neatly collected in one place. Subsequently, over a hundred thousand Dutch Jews were transported to Poland from this place—proportionately more even than from Germany itself. After the war Dutch fascists, of which Drenthe was full, were imprisoned in it. For a while it was a military camp, then Dutch citizens expelled from Indonesia were accommodated in it, and finally the Moluccans, who were now, reluctantly and with regular police intervention, being forced into more or less normal housing developments. In order to prevent their return to the camp, everything was deliberately being allowed to fall into disrepair. By establishing the observatory here, the government hoped that the name Westerbork would lose its unpleasant connotations.

  When he had once said this to Onno, Onno had said that his eldest brother, the provincial governor of Drenthe, was bound to be behind it.

  "Imagine the Poles setting up a conservatory in Auschwitz so that the name Auschwitz would sound less unpleasant! It would be hilarious if it were not so sad. You sometimes wonder if people really know the sort of world they're living in. Did you know, for example," he asked the engineer, "that Westerbork council sold a lot of those huts to neighboring farmers and sports clubs? All over Drenthe young soccer players are getting changed in those huts that once inspired terror. Business is business! But the things are Jewish property, and I've not read anywhere that the proceeds were transferred to the Jewish community. They are still being ripped off!"

  He banged his steering wheel excitedly, and the engineer turned and exchanged a short glance with Sophia.

  In the control building, on the other side of the line of telescopes, it was warm and there was the smell of fresh coffee. Smiling with surprise, the director of the installation, a technical engineer who had once worked for an oil company, appeared.

  "We thought we'd never see an astronomer here." His dark-brown eyes met those of Quinten. "Well, well, the daughter of the house has come too!"

  It took a while for Max to explain that Quinten Quist wasn't a daughter but a son, and not his but his friend's, and that Sophia Brons was not his wife or the mother of the child but the grandmother.

  The director made a gesture indicating that it made no difference to him, and led them into the computer area. Sophia took off Quinten's coat and cap and handed him a little doll, which he haughtily ignored. Max shook hands with the technicians, who were sitting around at the monitors and whom he knew from Dwingeloo. He was shown his office and went with the director to the reception area, humming and groaning with the ventilators, isolated in a Faraday cage. When they returned to the central terminal, he stood for a while at the large semicircular window with a view of the mirrors and the huts.

  When he remembered Sophia's presence, he turned around, pointed to the telescopes, and asked: "Do you know how they work?"

  "I won't understand anyway."

  "It's dead simple."

  The row of reflectors, he explained, was aligned precisely from west to east, a hundred and forty-five yards apart, exact to within a fraction of an inch. Beyond that, however, it was a true straight line: over the distance of a mile the curvature of the earth had also been compensated for. Just imagine! And that accuracy was necessary, because the twelve mirrors had to be seen as one gigantic circular telescope with a diameter of a mile, the largest in the world. The idea was that because of the rotation of the earth, seen from space, the row of mirrors after a quarter of a day would be at right angles to its original position and after half a day in the reverse position; so by observing a radio source for half a day, you could achieve the synthesis that you wanted.

  "Surely a child can understand that."

  "I can hear everything you say, but it doesn't mean anything to me," said Sophia, while she held Quinten's wobbling head and wiped his mouth.

  Max took a radio map off a desk and asked the technician: "What's this?"

  He looked at it absentmindedly. "M 51."

  "Here," said Max, and held it in front of Sophia. "This is what it looks like. The whirlpool nebula in the constellation of Canes Venatici. Thirteen million years ago."

  But it was Quinten who took the paper in both hands and subjected the pointed mountains of waving lines of intensity to a close inspection.

  "I'm curious to know what he's going to tell us," said the director with raised eyebrows.

  When Quinten had given back the sheet, without crumpling it up or rubbing it on the ground in an uncoordinated way, Sophia put her arms around him and cuddled him and said: "What a strange child you are. You're just like your father."

  The way in which she had behaved with Quinten from the first showed a completely different side of her nature, which had amazed Onno during his sporadic visits, but which Max recognized from the way she behaved with him at night—but then without saying a word. Quinten didn't like the hug and freed himself from it with dignity.

  Max watched and, lost in thought, said: "I'm going outside for a while."

  He put on only a scarf, stuck his hands in his pockets, and wandered onto the site. The air was still full of magically floating, glowing splinters. He needed to be alone for a few minutes, so that he could allow the change that he had just undergone to penetrate through him. There was a vague smell of Indonesian food; in an arid garden behind a hut a boy was repairing a bike. He remembered from the plans that a line of hospital huts had been demolished to make way for the mirrors. The camp was already no longer what it had been during the war, but even if everything were to disappear, it would still be the spot for all eternity. The house by the barrier,
where he had just gotten out, had been the house of the camp commandant. It was still occupied; there were curtains and plants on the windowsill. Across the road along the railway line, which was once called Boulevard des Miseres, he walked in an easterly direction. When he had told Sophia just now about the exact west-to-east alignment of the instruments, his father's Polish triangle of Bielsko-Katowice-Krakow, a triangle with the same angles occurred to him, which also pointed directly eastward, with Auschwitz at its center. None of it meant anything, but that was how it was. And now he suddenly saw the map of Drenthe in front of him: an isosceles triangle with Westerbork camp at its center.

  Here, on this road, perhaps on the spot where he was now walking, his mother had gotten into a cattle truck under the watchful eye of the camp commandant, after which the door was slid shut and the bolt fastened. Here her last journey had begun. He tried to reconcile that awareness with what he could see; but although the event had taken place on this spot, the two things remained as different from each other as a thought and a stone. The road was deserted, but the rails were empty, it smelled not of Jewish cooking but of nasigoreng. It was time, he thought, that tore everything to shreds. He looked around: the silent, majestic entry of the mirrors into the camp. From somewhere came the hammering of a woodpecker. He was sure of it—he belonged here; here was where he must spend his life.

  He walked on, to the other end of the camp, where the rails ended in a decayed bumper. He crouched down and put his hand on the rusty iron, stood up and looked again at the row of antennas, all pointing to the same point in the sky. And suddenly he thought of the yellow star that his mother had had to wear on her left breast during the war. A star! Stars! All those tens of thousands here had worn stars; they had been forced into the wagons with stars on their chests, on their way from the small trapezoid to the great square. He remembered from the papers discussions on the question of whether there should be a monument to the deported in Westerbork. The survivors had been against it; everything should now be forgotten. But it was there anyway! What was the synthetic radio telescope finally but a monument, a mile in diameter, to the dead!