The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  "Shall I put them back?" asked Quinten.

  "Can they see that you've been digging there?"

  "I pushed the leaves back on top."

  "Very good. It's October now, and by the time the ground is visible again it'll be February or March next year. And all the traces of your digging will be gone. The stuff will have just disappeared; that's their problem. Perhaps they only dig up their goods after three or four years, because if you ask me they don't look nearly old enough yet. No, there's probably no problem. Throw that rubbish straight in the dustbin."

  "What villains!" said Quinten indignantly. "Shouldn't we report them to the police?"

  "Absolutely," said Onno. "Legally that's our duty, in fact. But I suggest not doing it, because it's not pleasant work. Naturally it's shameful that I should say so as a minister, but the police can't blame us for not having the idea that we had immediately, of course."

  Obviously, the police had other channels for discovering the truth, because a year later a blue police van suddenly appeared at the orangery, policemen in sweaters without hats on threw the contents of the display cabinets into plastic garbage bags, and, under the silent gaze of almost all the residents, Etienne and Mr. Verdonkschot were arrested. Quinten shivered when he saw them getting so helplessly into the van. He looked up at Sophia and whispered, "Daddy's always right"—at which she put a finger to her lips. Just imagine, he thought, that this had happened because his father had reported them. Etienne gave him a wave from behind the barred window.

  The following day it was even in the national papers. This made the position of the two friends at Groot Rechteren untenable, and the baron immediately gave them notice to quit. Piet Keller's wife looked after the goat for another week, but after their move it disappeared too and the orangery remained uninhabited.

  Quinten missed the animal most. Weeks later he sometimes sat down on the large stone and saw Gijs leaping toward him in his lopsided way—but he wasn't there. The sky was empty, and the emptiness and the absence so unfathomable and complete that he could scarcely bear it. It was as though the whole world were affected by it—the woods, the castle, everything was filled with Gijs's impossible absence in that spot, so everything that was there in some way wasn't there, actually couldn't be there, or wouldn't be there. Who was he going to talk to now? Once he had burst into sobs on the stone, and decided not to go there anymore.

  He had a similar feeling when at the end of the summer there was a plague of wasps. There were screens over all the windows, but it was as though they penetrated the thick walls. There were scores of them buzzing in every room on the ceilings with their black and yellow bodies: that nasty color combination, with which they proclaimed that there was no mercy to be expected from them. Actually that was pretty stupid of them, thought Quinten; if you were a villain, you didn't flaunt it, and you really ought to clothe yourself in soft blue or pink. But of course it was to frighten off greedy birds. No one understood where they suddenly appeared from; apart from that, it looked as though there were more wasps inside than outside, so the screens were probably having the reverse effect.

  One afternoon when he was wandering through the back attic he suddenly stopped and cocked his head to one side as he listened. He was aware that the whole time there was a scarcely audible trembling in the air, almost more a feeling than a sound. Here too there were wasps buzzing close to the beams, but the sound was coming from somewhere else: from the direction of Gevers's storage rooms. He stopped at a closed door. He knew that it led to a small room, really more a cupboard, where the washerwoman had perhaps once slept, but which now contained only a few rusty bed springs. Cautiously, he pushed down the handle and slowly opened the door. He froze. It was as though he were seeing something holy, that he was not allowed to see.

  The wasp's nest hung from the ceiling like a huge drop from another world—slightly off-center but completely in accordance with the Golden Section, which Mr. Themaat had taught him. It seemed to be made of dusty gold. Hundreds of wasps were walking over it, slipping in and out of the opening and flying back and forth through the room, almost without buzzing, as if not to disturb the queen who was laying her eggs there in the dark interior. Suddenly they no longer seemed dangerous, just modest and charming. The window was closed. When he gently closed the door it was as though the vision of the secret had nestled deep inside him, as though he had swallowed it. In the front loft he met Arend—who was now in sixth grade and didn't want to be called Arendje anymore. When Quinten told him about his discovery he went there in disbelief, opened the door ajar, and cried, "Christ Almighty!" quickly closed the door, and fetched his father. "Very good, QuQu," said Proctor, and immediately took steps.

  Half an hour later, to Quinten's dismay, the farmhand from a neighboring farm appeared in the stairwell with a spray of pesticide on his back. When he got upstairs he asked for a broom, opened the door, and immediately knocked the nest off the ceiling, took a couple of quick steps backward, and for ten or fifteen seconds sprayed a thick mist of poison gas inside, after which he aimed particularly at the fallen nest, made another sweeping movement through the whole room, and nodded to Proctor with a smile, indicating that he could close the door. After that everyone had looked in astonishment at Quinten, who had suddenly gone pale and had to be sick.

  Because the farmer had said that it would be best if everyone kept out of the room for a week, Quinten was the only person who still thought about the nest. Because he had blurted out the secret with such fateful results, he felt he had something to make up to them. Meanwhile the wasps had disappeared from the castle, and from the stuffed bottom drawer of the kitchen cabinet he had taken a plastic bag. When he got upstairs, the stuffy room had lost its enchantment. Around the shattered nest the floor was strewn with dead, dried wasps. The whole state had been wiped out—he had heard from Piet Keller that the population of wasps was called a state. The nest was now pale, like old packing paper; it felt like it too. He took it in both hands. It was very light—it had almost the opposite of a weight, like a gas-filled balloon. He put it carefully in the plastic bag. Outside, he borrowed a spade from Mr. Roskam, buried it under the brown oak tree, and marked the mass grave with a stone, which he could see from the castle.

  41

  Absences

  Quinten was seven when Max suddenly lit a candle twice in two weeks. First Quinten heard that his great-grandmother, old Mrs. Haken, had died; and then that his grandfather Hendrikus Jacobus Andreas Quist, prime minister, Grand Cross of the Order of Orange, Grand Cross of the Order of the Dutch Lion, Grand Cross of the Order of Orange-Nassau, etc., etc., had passed away peacefully at the age of ninety-four. In the three-column announcement of his death, followed by ten more in which he was mourned, among the long list of members of the family was the name Quinten Quist, Westerbork. Max showed it to him, at the same moment regretting that he had done so: it might lead to a difficult question. But it didn't come; it had obviously not occurred to him. When he'd gone to bed, Max spoke to Sophia about the fact that Ada Quist, née Brons, Emmen, had not been listed in the notice. She thought that this was right, because her daughter no longer existed. Onno had called her about it—she'd forgotten to say; she had agreed with him.

  Quinten did not attend the cremation of Sophia's mother. Max agreed that he should not be burdened with sadness about someone of three generations ago, whom he had scarcely known; but there was no question of his staying away from the funeral of Onno's father. He had been to see his grandparents in The Hague a few times, and he saw the rest of his family too, incidentally, at birthdays and parties. Occasionally, a cousin of his came to stay at Groot Rechteren, but he did not have much affinity with them. The family too, for its part, seemed to regard him more as a kind of corresponding member: if Onno was already something of an odd man out among the Quists—although somewhat less so the last few years—Quinten, brought up by his grandmother and a total stranger, was from a different world in their eyes. Moreover, his beauty was "un-Quistian
," as his aunt Antonia put it: Quists were not beautiful. In fact beauty was inappropriate for respectable people.

  In order to spare sensibilities Helga did not attend the funeral, and Max's instinct also told him that he did not belong there. He took Quinten and Sophia to The Hague, to the ministry, where they were received by Mrs. Siliakus, whom Onno had kept as his secretary; Max himself drove on to Leiden, to the observatory.

  Onno sat at his desk, above his head a portrait of the queen, and was talking to a civil servant.

  "Alone in the world!" he cried with feigned despair when they came in—but it was less despair that he was enacting than the artificial nature of that despair.

  After he had put his signature—which looked like a lion tamer's whip at the moment of the crack—to a few things, had had one last telephone conversation, and had put his head around the door here and there in the silent corridors, they drove to the Statenlaan in his car. Behind closed curtains, scores of family members and close friends were assembled and were conversing in muted voices. Coffee was poured for them by Coba, and they were taking gingersnaps from a large dish.

  It was apparent in all kinds of ways that Onno was now in the position of highest authority in the clan: compared with the deceased, of course, a mere nothing—a lowly minister of state—but the deceased was dead. People moved aside, the governor shook his hand, the public prosecutor looked deep into his eyes. He kissed Dol and put an arm around his mother's shoulders as she sat in a wheelchair. She began crying when she saw him. Then, holding Quinten by the hand, he went into the front room, where candles were burning and there was the stifling smell of piles of flowers. The old Quist, after a life devoted to queen and fatherland, lay in state next to the lectern with the huge, open Authorized Version.

  Quinten started. He was actually lying in a box—they had put Granddad in a box! His face, which lay on the satin cushion, had changed beyond recognition. He remembered the full, heavy, powerful face, which still had something good-natured about it. Now suddenly the marble statue of a bird of prey was lying there, a fanatical hawk, like he had seen a few times swooping as the flapping doom of a field mouse. There were strange blotches on the skin of his forehead and temples; something was gleaming between his lips, as though they'd been stuck together with glue.

  "Is that really Granddad?" he whispered.

  "No," said Onno. "Granddad doesn't exist anymore."

  On the other side of the coffin, his sister Trees shot him a reproachful look. "Granddad has left this earthly life for eternity," she said to Quinten.

  He looked agog at the motionless contents of the coffin, without understanding what he saw. Something impossible was lying there. Everything that he had seen up to now in his life had been possible, because it was there; but now there was something lying there that couldn't possibly be seen and that he still saw. It was Granddad and it wasn't Granddad!

  Trees suddenly began reading quietly from the open Bible: " 'And he saith unto him: Verily, verily I say unto you: hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.' "

  Quinten looked at her in astonishment, and at the same time saw the thin, winding line of ants climbing and descending up the doors of the sink when sugar had been spilled.

  Onno had to control himself not to snap at her that she herself definitely preferred the social ladder to that of Jacob; that insufferable reading aloud was of course only apparently intended for Quinten.

  A little later six men in black appeared, with a lid. Quinten saw Granny To, supported by Uncle Diederic, place a last kiss on Granddad's forehead, after which the lid was lifted over the coffin. He saw the shadow fall across Granddad's face and bent his knees a little to catch the very last glimpse; at the moment that it disappeared in the darkness and wood struck wood, he heard a deep sob escape from Onno's breast, like an animal that had been imprisoned and was now finally set free. He looked at him and took his hand—and when Onno felt the small hand in his, it was as if he were his son's son.

  Quinten shivered for a moment when he suddenly saw the long line of large, black limousines all waiting outside. Across the street neighbors with their arms folded watched who came out of the mansion; the police had also appeared. Two motorcycle policemen at the head of the cortege, one boot on the road, looked coolly ahead with engines running as if they owned death.

  The coffin was slid into the first car, the flowers and wreaths into the following two cars. On the instructions of a balding man with papers in his hands who was leaping back and forth, Quinten was allotted his place in the third following car, on a folding chair opposite Sophia, Diederic's son Hans, now ambassador in Liberia, and Hadewych; Onno had sat next to the chauffeur. They drove to Wassenaar at an otherworldly pace, with saluting policemen at every junction. At a church in the center of the village, where spectators were kept at a distance by crowd barriers, there were many large cars already parked; except for a television news team, photographers, chauffeurs, and large numbers of police, there were in fact few people to be seen. Organ music sounded from the open doors, but shortly afterward stopped.

  When Quinten went inside, he was overwhelmed by the fullness and at the same time silence. Everyone in the packed church had stood up. The first two rows were empty; as he went to the pew the man with the papers directed them to, in the middle of the second row he saw the gray-haired queen standing in the middle of the third row. Not only had she turned her gaze on him, it was as though everyone were looking at him; but he had gradually gotten used to the fact that the whole world found him beautiful.

  With the queen just behind him and Granny To just in front in her wheelchair, he heard the vicar and the psalms and songs, but he didn't listen. He hadn't thought about it for quite some time, but the queen was of course not his mother, because not only was she not sleeping, she was also far too old; apart from that, she had not given any sign of recognition. On one side of him sat Granny Sophia, on the other side Rudy from Rotterdam, the same age as himself. With one finger Rudy kept an elastic band pressed against his thigh which he kept stretching and letting go of with his other hand—until Paula, his mother, suddenly took it from him.

  When it was finally over and he was walking behind the coffin between Onno and Sophia, along a narrow path between the graves, Quinten suddenly asked:

  "Daddy?"

  "Yes?"

  "Why wasn't Mommy in that big advertisement in the paper?"

  Onno looked at him and didn't know immediately what to answer. He had thought long and hard about it and talked to Helga and Dol about it. Both of them thought that Ada should be included, even if she was unreachable; but in his view she was not "unreachable," because that implied the possibility of her being reached, and that simply didn't exist. Could you say of a vegetable that it was "unreachable"? His sister had called that "playing with words," but he had retorted that he obviously had a different view of both words and play. Only his mother-in-law had agreed with him; no one had thought of Quinten. Flustered, Onno glanced at Sophia. It was the second time in his life that Quinten had said something about Ada.

  "We mustn't disturb Mama at all." He heard it coming from his own mouth, realizing at once that it contradicted his real motive.

  "Will she wake up otherwise?"

  Onno looked at Sophia, appealing for help.

  "No, darling," she said. "She can't do that ever again."

  Quinten nodded without saying anything.

  The old village cemetery was far too small to fit everybody. When they stood in a semicircle around the grave, the queen now hand in hand with Granny To, the stationary line still wound its way back along the paths into the church. Many people were carrying bouquets—still more flowers: why flowers, of all things? Wouldn't stones be far better? While the prime minister outlined the inestimable services the deceased had rendered to the country, Quinten looked at the coffin with his hand in Onno's. It was flanked by the six men in black; against the wall of the cemetery, four a
ncient gentlemen stood in line, each with a colored ribbon in his buttonhole. Between the pine branches he saw the darkness of the hole into which Granddad would soon disappear forever.

  "Daddy?" he whispered, when the prime minister had finished. He looked up: only then did he see that Onno's cheeks were covered in tears. He did not dare ask anything else, but Onno said in a hoarse voice:

  "Yes?"

  "I'd really like to see Mama."

  Onno closed his eyes and nodded in silence.

  At the age of four he had first said something about his mother; now he was almost twice as old. He did not even know anything about the accident; he also appeared to have forgotten that Ada's photograph was on the mantelpiece—no one had ever seen him looking at it. Everyone agreed that he should only go to see his mother accompanied by his father. A week later Onno got Mrs. Siliakus to cancel an appointment with Philips Laboratories; then she called the nursing home and on behalf of the minister of state requested that the drip feed be removed from Ada's nose temporarily the following afternoon. Although he still had very little time, he picked up Quinten from the castle, after which they drove at a hundred miles an hour down the provincial highway to Emmen. He still had a discussion with the management of the gas union in Groingen on his schedule; that evening he had to attend a state banquet in The Hague in honor of an African president whose name he had forgotten—without Helga, because concubines were not welcome at court.

  They sat together on the backseat, but they still said nothing about Ada. When Onno asked what he had been up to, Quinten said that he had recently been in Theo Kern's studio. The sculptor had been working on some memorial stone or other; the letters that were supposed to go on it, he carved not from left to right, as you would think, but from right to left; he said that it was easier: he held the chisel in his left hand and the hammer in his right, so it was easier to work from right to left.