The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  Quinten demonstrated and asked: "Could that be connected with the fact that people used to write from right to left? Because most people are right-handed?"

  Onno opened his eyes wide for a moment and sighed deeply. "Yes, Quinten," he said. "Yes, that's probably a lot to do with it. From a political point of view too."

  "I thought so."

  "And who told you that people used to write from right to left?"

  "Mr. Spier."

  Onno suddenly had the feeling that one day he might be able to learn something from his son. Then he fell silent when he thought of the fact that he was contributing scarcely anything to his upbringing—even less than someone like Mr. Spier and the other residents of the castle. Of course, he could again resolve to devote more time to him, but again nothing would come of it.

  When they were approaching Emmen, the driver looked in his mirror and said: "The police are after us."

  Onno turned around. It was a small patrol car with a large light.

  "Faster," he said.

  "But, Minister . . ."

  "Faster! That's an order."

  The driver accelerated to a hundred and twenty. Behind them a siren began wailing, and at the entrance to Joy Court, the police car cut across them, as though it had overtaken them. Two excited policemen leapt out and a moment later realized who they were dealing with.

  "Was that you, Mr. Quist?" said one of them flabbergasted.

  "I wasn't sure you were genuine," said Onno. "I thought it might be a kidnap attack, here, with all those Moluccans and those train hijackings. . ."

  "Oh, is that what it was," said the policeman, though with a rather suspicious look in his eyes. "Of course, excuse us, that changes matters."

  "Doesn't matter, officers," said Onno magnanimously. "I expect you enjoyed the burn-up?"

  "In one way, yes. But it was quite dangerous."

  When they went inside, Onno said to Quinten: "That could have become very unpleasant for me."

  Quinten was trembling a little with tension: that he would be taken to see his mother so suddenly was something that he hadn't expected. After that chase, the wheelchairs in the brick-lined hall seemed to be going even slower than before. The administrator of the hospital stood waiting for them, but Onno indicated that he preferred to be left alone; he knew the way.

  The large elevator took them upstairs, and with his hand on the door handle he said: "You needn't be afraid."

  Quinten saw his mother. There she was: exactly there in that place in the world, and nowhere else. Her black hair had been cut short. He stepped across the threshold and looked at the motionless sleeper—only the sheet moved slowly up and down. She was going a little gray around the ears.

  After a while he asked: "Can Mama really not wake up anymore?"

  "No, Quinten, Mama was already asleep when you were born. She can't hear anymore or see anymore or feel anymore—nothing anymore."

  "How can that be? She's not dead, like Granddad, is she? She's breathing."

  "She's breathing, yes."

  "Is she dreaming?"

  "No one knows. The doctors don't think so."

  "How do they know?"

  "They say they can measure it, with special instruments. According to them you can't even say that Mommy's sleeping."

  "What, then?"

  Onno hesitated, but then said anyway: "She doesn't exist anymore."

  "Although she's not dead?"

  "Although she's not dead. That is," said Onno, pulling a face, "Mama is dead although she's not dead ... I mean, what's not dead isn't Mama. It's not Mama who's breathing."

  "Who is it, then?"

  Onno made a helpless gesture: "No one."

  "That's not possible, is it?"

  "It's absolutely impossible, but that's the way it is."

  Quinten looked again at the face on the pillow. The eyes were closed; the black, semicircular eyelashes looked like certain paintbrushes, which in Theo Kern's place stood in a stone mug and which in turn looked like Egyptian palm columns, which he had seen in a book of Mr. Themaat's. Her nose was small and straight, at the side a little red and inflamed, the mouth closed, the lips dry. So could something be still more incomprehensible than his dead Granddad, last week in the coffin? In the bed lay a breathing, living woman—and they were going to see his mother, weren't they?

  Why else had they driven here? So was it his mother or not? And if it was his mother and at the same time not his mother, who was he himself? His thoughts spun around—and suddenly it was as though, like with a dynamo, a soft glow lit up in his head when he suddenly saw the light of the Easter bonfire behind the trees: the towering bonfire of dried twigs collected by everyone in the area, which the baron lit every year on a field near Klein Rechteren and which hundreds of people came to look at.

  "Mama's locked up," he said, thinking of Piet Keller for a moment.

  Onno gave him a chair and sat down himself. He was suddenly bitterly aware that his family had been reunited for the first time: father, mother, and son, and no one else.

  Quinten looked at him across the bed. "How did it happen, Daddy?"

  Onno nodded and told him the whole story in broad outline. Almost the whole story—he left out the fact that Ada had first been Max's girlfriend. He told him about the friendship between himself and Max, how they had gone around together day and night, so that Quinten should understand why Max of all people had become his foster father. He told him about Ada's musical gifts, about her playing in one of the best orchestras in the world. When he came to their visit to Dwingeloo and the accident in the stormy night, the memory suddenly came back with full intensity, so he had to fight to control himself.

  "After that you were in Mama's tummy for three months. That was very strange—it was even in the papers afterward."

  Quinten looked at the white outlines of Ada's body under the sheet. "Was I in that tummy?"

  "Yes."

  Pensively, hands on knees, he rocked back and forth with his upper body. "But if I was in there, then I wasn't really in Mama's tummy anymore?"

  Onno made a helpless gesture and did not know what to say. The paradox made everything true, so that nothing was true anymore. "Don't try to understand, Quinten. It's impossible to understand."

  While everything looked so ordinary in the room, Quinten felt surrounded by mysteries, of which he himself was a part. It was as though in that body, inside, there was a boundless space.

  "Can I touch her?"

  "Of course."

  He laid both his hands on hers and—for the first time since his birth— felt her warmth. Could she really not feel it? He looked at her face but it remained as motionless as that of a statue in Kern's studio.

  "I'd so like to see her eyes, Daddy."

  Her eyes! Onno sat up in bewilderment. He hadn't seen her eyes for eight years, either: should he fetch a nurse, or could he lift up an eyelid himself? With a feeling that what he was doing was right, he leaned over the bed, put the tip of his middle finger on an eyelid, and carefully raised it. Together they looked at the deep brown, almost black, eye that saw nothing— as little as the eye that seems to form in the sky in a total eclipse of the sun.

  That evening Quinten could scarcely keep his eyes open at dinner, and immediately afterward he went to bed and found himself in the dream that was never to leave him .. .

  Suddenly there are buildings everywhere: the universe has been transformed into a single architectural complex, without beginning or end. Nowhere is there a living being to be seen. Completely alone, but without a feeling of loneliness, he wanders around through a limitless series of rooms, colonnades, staircases, galleries, alcoves, pillars, footbridges, doorways, vaults, which extend in all directions—past pompous facades covered with statues and ornaments that reveal themselves as interior walls, through cellars that at the same time are lofts, across roofs that at the same time are like foundations. Because the interior has no exterior, no daylight can penetrate anywhere; but even though there are n
o lamps lit, it is not dark. And although he does not meet anyone and it is not clear either where he has come from or where he is going, wandering through the dimly lit world edifice fills him with happiness: all that material built, joined together, piled on top of itself, spreads out and envelops and encloses him like a bath filled with warm honey. Everywhere there is a total silence; only now and then is there a momentary swishing sound, which reminds him of the wingbeats of a large bird. Suddenly he is standing in front of a closed double door made of ancient wood, decorated with diamond-shaped patterns made of iron. It is bolted with a heavy, rusty sliding padlock, as large as a loaf. The menacing look of that device overwhelms him with dismay. It is as though the door is looking at him, and at the same moment he hears a hoarse voice saying:— The center of the world. The words sound calm, like when someone says "Nice day today"—but at the same time they flood him with such a sulfurous fear of death; he knows there is only one way of saving his life: waking up . ..

  Trembling, bathed in sweat, he opened his eyes, but the terror did not subside. He sat up and did not know where he was. The complete darkness surrounded him as if the universe suddenly contained nothing else but him. He put out his hand and felt a wall after all; he got out of bed. Breathing heavily and groping around, he found a door, but on the other side it was just as dark and silent; at his wit's end he took a couple of steps, brushed a wall with the palm of his hand, bumped into something, felt it without recognizing it, left it, and turned on his heel. Where was he? Again he took a couple of steps. He stubbed his toe on a threshold and stopped with his eyes wide open. Suddenly, without wanting to, he gave a loud scream.

  Immediately afterward, he heard Sophia's voice in the distance: "Quinten! What's wrong? Did you have a nightmare? Wait, I'm coming . . ."

  After she had closed the bedroom door behind her, a strip of light appeared under the threshold. Max folded his hands under his head and stared up into the darkness. This was the end. It was bound to happen one night: and here it was. She would no longer appear in his bed. In itself there was no reason, because why should a grandmother not have an affair with her son-in-law's friend? But Quinten must not know, because then he might mention it to both of them during the day, and that was of course unacceptable.

  He listened to the voices in Sophia's bedroom. Quinten was of course in bed with her now, and a great sense of calm came over Max. In fact he had expected it much earlier. He was now almost forty-two; she, fifty-two: it had lasted seven years—a long time. Their affair had had the character of a mystery, a completely new alternative alongside the classical family of father, mother, and child, without displacing the family.

  During the day he had been the only man in the world who was the head of a family without quarrels, consisting of his friend's child and mother-in-law, to whom he was bound by no sexual ties; but at night he was her lover. Depending on the position of the sun, everyone was someone else—except the child. He remained simply his friend's child—although he had even doubted that for a long time. "For you everything is always something else," Onno had once said to him. Nothing in his life was what it seemed. Even the fact that he "studied stars" actually meant something different to him since he had been working in Westerbork.

  What were they going to do now? The foundation of his relationship with Sophia had been removed, but the task he had undertaken of course remained unchanged: there was no question of his leaving as long as Quinten was in the house—and that could be another ten years. By that time he would be fifty-two.

  42

  The Citadel

  For Onno, too, a moment came when everything suddenly changed again. In March 1977 the coalition government fell and new elections were held, in which his party was the great winner: that probably meant there was a ministry in prospect for him. But at the eleventh hour, after the longest political birth pangs ever known in Holland, nine months, the Christian Democrats opted for the Conservatives rather than the Socialists as partners, and overnight he was out of a job.

  After handing over his powers at the ministry to his successor and receiving his decoration, he was offered the opportunity of being taken home one last time in the official car, but declined. "Decent people travel on the train," he said with insolent dignity—but when he stood in the street that cold winter afternoon it turned out not to be so simple, because since he had been in the government he was in the habit of not carrying money with him. The doorman was prepared to lend him twenty-five guilders, and sitting in the tram on the way to the station, he found himself whistling. He was free! Goodbye to The Hague! Farewell to ponds, avenues, chancelleries, cocktail parties, blue-striped shirts, poker faces!

  When he left the station in Amsterdam it was already dark. He walked whistling into the lighted, messy city and for the first time in years he suddenly saw everyday life again without ulterior motives and policy initiatives, like when a window is opened after the party and the fresh night air streams in. With Christmas approaching, the streets were crowded and the shops and pubs were full; men from the Salvation Army were standing singing on the pavement around a jar in which one was expected to put money; a girl was sitting on the curb playing a guitar; a man leaned out the window of his car and swore at a cyclist.

  Everything was as it was—crowded, noisy, chaotic, and at the same time with something eternal about it, something that had been exactly the same in the Middle Ages, or in imperial Rome, or in present-day Cairo, or even farther away or longer ago. There had been periods in which it had been different—like during the German occupation—but since for unfathomable reasons good ultimately always triumphed in the world, this was the real face of the eternal city. Onno felt completely happy. Since he spent little, he could if necessary live on his inheritance from his father until he died; and the automatic transfers for Quinten's upbringing were in no danger. For that matter, there was still more to come from his mother's side, and she had been in the hospital for the last few weeks; in addition, he would receive a generous severance payment for a number of months. In fact a man, he thought, should spend his life doing nothing except wandering the streets, or if he could afford that, do something real. Perhaps the real man was the craftsman.

  In a telephone booth, the floor of which was covered with the pages of a telephone directory that had been torn to pieces, he called Helga. They arranged to meet in a Greek restaurant.

  By the light of a candle, intended to give even the toughest cut of lamb the look of a noble tournedos, he told her that his dismissed colleagues and the party bosses were now gathered together bitterly in the party's room in Parliament but that he had spared himself the wake. He was celebrating his regained freedom: it was only a month since he had turned forty-four—he had a whole life in front of him! And finally he'd have more time for Quinten.

  "Who do you think you're kidding?" inquired Helga. "Me or yourself?"

  Onno fell silent and sighed deeply. "What an insufferable woman you are. Of course I'm kidding myself. But couldn't you have allowed me a little more time to do so?"

  "I know exactly when you'll pick up the telephone and call your embittered comrades."

  "And that will be?"

  "When you get home in a little while and see the yellowed papers of your disc hanging on the wall."

  He looked at her severely for a few seconds. "Do you think it's decent to know someone so well? It's not at all what's needed between man and woman. Between man and woman there should be nothing but misunderstandings, so that they can be overcome by physical intercourse."

  "Forgive me."

  He took her hand and planted a kiss on it. "Where would I be without you?"

  And a few weeks later he sat on a bench, which was in fact too small for his bulk, in the Lower House as a member of Parliament and groaned as he listened to the government's policy statement.

  The Phaistos disc had driven him back to The Hague. Just like most of his colleagues from the previous cabinet, he could have applied for a job outside politics—he mig
ht have become director of the Foundation for Pure Scientific Research, or mayor of a municipality like Westerbork, before receiving the sarcastic congratulations of his eldest brother; but he did what according to him befitted a politician in his circumstances: he joined the opposition, which was now led by the ex-prime minister.

  Apart from that, none of those social functions accorded with his character. He had never felt like a real politician; but real politicians had in common with him the fact that in the last instance they were bohemians, street urchins, not to say street fighters, marginal figures, adventurers. And he soon realized that in a certain sense he was more in his element as parliamentarian than as a member of the government: he was better at caustic interruptions than wise policy. He created a political squabble in the blink of an eye. In response to developments in left-wing Holland, the two most important Protestant parties had merged with the Catholic party into a general confessional party; but in fact the Catholics had simply annexed the Protestants—the iconoclasts had finally been subdued by the idolaters—which prompted him to go to the microphone during the annual debate on government policy and say to the new ultra-Catholic prime minister that the revolt against Spain, out of which the nation had been born, had obviously been fought in vain. In saying this he had cut Holland to the quick, obliquely involving even the royal family, and the observation created a commotion in the papers and on television for weeks.

  But when he saw the face of the prime minister stiffen, he felt disgust. Not because he was doing something to him—because his opponent was precisely a master of that style—but because again it was the words that were doing things. Now that he was a monitoring member of Parliament with no power, his world in fact turned out to be even more rarefied and abstract than it had been when he could still make decisions. That had an immoral dimension, as he had put it to Max—it was acting without doing anything, but at least it led to results. Now his speaking was on the one hand no longer action, on the other hand still not normal speech, but a hybrid, bastardized activity—in the chamber of the house, in committee rooms, and all those other forums of verbal conjuring in Parliament light-years removed from reality. It all happened in a glass bowl, which only Max might one day see thanks to his thirteenth and fourteenth mirrors, which Onno had long since been able to secure for him and which were now under construction.