The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  Of course that was from the Bible again, but he had no idea what it referred to. Since the evening after the inauguration of the new telescopes, he had looked up to his father even more. At dinner he had asked him what kind of disc it was that Max had talked about, and for the first time it had dawned on him that his father had originally not been a politician at all, but a linguistic genius, who had interpreted Etruscan. Something quite different from that strange father of Arend's, who only concerned himself with sterile abracadabra, as Onno told him afterward. He himself, he had said, could prove in a trice that Bacon had written Genesis, or the novels of Nabokov: all you had to do was look at the first five letters of his name and you could see that it was an anagram of "Bacon," and if you had to remember that the c in the Cyrillic alphabet was the kfi; and the ending ov, of course, stood for "of Verulam"—that was obvious.

  Max sometimes told him fascinating things, too—for example that it didn't matter which way you looked: the most distant object was always yourself; or about the mystery of why it was dark at night and not much brighter than during the day, with that indescribable number of stars, which altogether should really form one gigantic sun, one infinite light, that should constantly light the whole firmament . . . but when all was said and done Max was not his father. His foster father's connection with the war, with Hitler, who had murdered his mother, was in an alarming world, which Mr. Spier also inhabited, but in which he, fortunately, was not involved.

  His interest continued to focus on things that were not taught in school. As in elementary school, he made no friends; he had never yet met anyone of his own age with whom he could talk about the things that concerned him. But it was not something that caused him pain, nor did it surprise him, because he did not even have the feeling that he was different from his classmates—it was so self-evident. In the breaks he talked and laughed with them, but a little like an actor playing his role; after the performance, when he was himself again, the character disappeared completely from his thoughts. For the same reason he did not feel superior, because it did not occur to him to compare himself with them.

  In a heavy wrought-bronze box that he had found in the loft among the baron's things, he kept the sketches that he made of the Citadel of his dreams. Because the Citadel was infinite in all directions, he was obliged to limit himself to fragments, cross-sections, ground plans, which could not form a whole but did all relate to each other. The double-folded papers were in a thick beige envelope from the Westerbork Synthetic Radio Telescope, on which he had written in his first high school Latin and in his most beautiful Quadrata Quinten's dream: SOMNIUM QUINTI.

  In his search for "the" building, Mr. Themaat had meanwhile put him on the trail of the classicist revolutionary architecture that flourished around 1800—at least in designs, because very little of it had actually been built. Again neglecting his homework, Quinten studied the drawings of scores of architects from that school, but he kept returning to the megalomaniacal fantasies of Boullee. They really exceeded all bounds, said Themaat, and that boundless quality was precisely what fascinated Quinten. Gigantic public buildings: a palace of justice, a necropolis, a library, a museum, a cathedral—each of them of such Cyclopic dimensions that one needed a magnifying glass to be able to distinguish the people, who swarmed like ants over the staircases and between the towering columns. Also a gigantic temple, which according to Themaat you had to imagine as the Colosseum, crowned by a cupola like that of the Pantheon. It was built over an inaccessible, dark ravine, which led into the center of the earth; at the entrance to the cave stood a statue of Artemis Ephesia, the goddess with the many breasts. Quinten stared at them shyly. Did perhaps the world of the Citadel begin in that black abyss? He was reminded of his mother for a moment, but immediately put it out of his mind. He scarcely ever thought of his mother, because he had learned from his father that it meant he was thinking of nothing; he had never visited her again since that one time, because how were you to visit no one? Fortunately, Granny never asked him if he was going with her to Emmen.

  He was just as fascinated by Boullee's extreme designs for a Newton monument. He knew who Newton was from Max: the Einstein of the seventeenth century, with whom modern science had begun, and who—so Themaat told him—was worshiped in the seventeenth century as a kind of messiah, since he had been the first to understand and calculate the work of the world's architect.

  The cenotaph would have consisted of a colossal globe more than six hundred feet across, held up to its equator in three staircaselike, windowless cylinders, planted with colonnades of cypresses, the trees of death par excellence. Within, in the deep twilight, the empty sarcophagus stood on a dais, illuminated only by the small holes-in the globe, causing the sunlight to be transformed into the night sky full of stars. When Quinten saw the tiny coffin in the enormous space, the thought of his mother occurred to him willy-nilly. A drawing of the building in the moonlight exuded an ominous threat, as though the globe were a dreadful bomb that could explode at any moment and devastate the whole world—and one day he imagined that a smoldering fuse was sticking out of the top of the ball. Even while he was telling that fantasy to Mr. Themaat, he immediately saw something else: the bomb with the fuse was at the same time an apple with a stalk.

  "If you ask me, that building is actually the apple that fell on Newton's head."

  "No one has ever seen it like that," said Themaat, laughing. "Up to now we always thought of the universe."

  "And now I know exactly what kind of apple it was that fell on Newton's head."

  "Is it a secret, or can you tell?"

  "The apple that Eve picked in Paradise."

  "From the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil!" added Themaat, and suddenly he went into one of his strange, exaggerated fits of laughter, in which even his long arms and legs participated, so that his rocking chair threatened to tip over. "Help! You did it again, QuQu! And in order to prove your assertion," he said, getting up, "I'll immediately show you something else."

  As he hunted among the piles of magazines that were lying on the bottom shelves of his bookcase, he said that Quinten would have of course noticed the similarity between Boullee's Newton cenotaph and the Pantheon: that windowless round globe, which in both cases depicted the universe. "But as the founder of modern science also sat beneath the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil," he said, "what do you think of this?" Slightly triumphantly, he put a photo of a nuclear reactor on the table. "Talking of your bomb. Do you see that this thing fits exactly into the stylistic tradition of the Pantheon and of Palladio and Boullee? The fantastic thing is that the factory wasn't at all designed in an aesthetic tradition, but purely functionally, by architectural engineers from a government institute. Goodness gracious, QuQu. I'm inclined to think that what you say is true. And if you know that the creation of atomic energy, therefore also of the atom bomb, is due to Einstein, the second Newton, then Boullee may have actually designed an Einstein monument."

  "That's why it wasn't built then." Quinten nodded.

  "Because it's only relevant now, do you mean? Yes, why not? Although . . ." he said, making a face, "there are still a few snags. Not technical, because we'd be perfectly capable of building it nowadays, but something that is actually connected with your apple of paradise."

  Then he gave Quinten a lecture about the gigantic. It was always connected with death. The Colosseum had been built with the intention that human beings and animals should die in it; the gigantic, circular Castel Sant'Angelo, also in Rome, had been built by Hadrian as a mausoleum for himself and his successors. That gigantic scale originated in Egypt, where the whole of life was oriented toward the kingdom of the dead. The pyramids, those denials of time, were nothing but graves with a sarcophagus in them; and what Boullee had achieved, at least in imagination, was a link between that necrophiliac monumentality and its opposite, Greek harmony and moderation.

  He showed Quinten a sheet with a design for a necropolis: a pyramid, in the base of which a
semicircular hollow had been cut, wedged in it, like a mouse in a trap, a Greek temple facade with columns and the decorated architrave. That portico in combination with that arch were again of course reminiscent of the Pantheon, but at the same time that joyful Greek element was overshadowed and crushed by the mass of Egyptian style above it. And that architectural representation of the fragility of life, suddenly obviously threatened by the power of a colossal death, returned 150 years after Boullee as the depiction of direct mass murder: in the designs that Albert Speer had made for Adolf Hitler.

  Quinten started when he heard that name: there was that villain again! Actually, that name should never be spoken again. Mr. Themaat showed him photographs of the models for "Germania," as Berlin was to have been called after the final victory, as the thousand-year world capital. Series of unbridled buildings, with as their Germanic climax the Great Hall, which surpassed everything that had ever been imagined.

  On Speer's own testimony this monster, too, issued from the inexhaustible womb of the Pantheon: a neoclassical facade of pillars with a round space behind it, topped by a cupola. But that cupola was now twice as high as the pyramid of Cheops; on top of it was a cylinder-shaped lantern, surrounded by pillars to admit light, which was itself already many feet taller and wider than the whole Pantheon, which in turn was larger than Michelangelo's cupola in St. Peter's. On top of that, like the fuse of Quinten's bomb, stood an eagle with the globe in its claws. The hall could accommodate 180,000 people, reduced to the status of fleas; the possibility of cloud formation and drizzle had to be allowed for. The project was based on a sketch that Hitler himself had once made—originally Hitler wanted to become an architect, Mr. Themaat told him, but on reflection he preferred to go into the demolition business, because after his suicide, scarcely one stone was left standing in Berlin. Even the models had finally been burned.

  "So now you've got everything together architecturally, QuQu. Hiroshima and Auschwitz. The gigantic triumph of science and technology in the twentieth century!"

  If he wanted to read without being disturbed or to play his flute, Quinten sometimes went to sit by the side of the pond when the weather was fine. There, surrounded as though in the tropics by the tall rhododendron bushes and usually in the company of the two black swans floating on their own reflections, he felt protected and at peace. He had built a hut of branches, which he was proud of and which protected him against rain that was not too heavy. But if something was worrying him or if he had to think about something, he usually sought out a different spot: a couple of hundred yards outside the estate, behind the baron's fields.

  Although scores of people came past every day, he was certain that he was the only one who had recognized the place, because he never saw anyone looking at it specially. In fact there was nothing much to see about it. It was the site of the annual Easter bonfire: a small, oblong field, enclosed on three sides by tall trees, on the fourth by a narrow country lane. In the summer a red cow grazed there; she looked up attentively when he sat down in the ditch and put his arms around his knees. Perhaps it was also connected with those two trees, which seemed to have escaped from the dark edge of the wood and were standing separately in the grass, each in a perfectly good place, where they gave the space structure, as did the three large erratic stones—but that did not explain the mystery that hung about the place. It was as though it were warmer and quieter than in other places where it was just as warm and quiet.

  He let his eyes wander over the enclosed domain and thought of the previous day. Because his father had again not found time to come to Groot Rechteren for a couple of months, Quinten had been to visit him in The Hague with Max, where to his satisfaction they had gotten lost in the Parliament building. In the party offices, a lady who worked there said that he was in the chamber of the house; and after having listened to a long set of directions, by the end of which they had forgotten the beginning, they set off through the maze of narrow corridors—upstairs, downstairs, to the left, to the right, past lines of portraits of deceased members of Parliament, libraries, committee rooms, girls using copiers, talking loudly, obviously slightly tipsy journalists, politicians conferring in window alcoves: everything repeatedly converted, improvised, with walls knocked through. But only after they had asked the way twice more did they open a door and suddenly find themselves in the public gallery.

  In the beautiful oblong room, full of red, brown, and ochre, which was smaller than Quinten had imagined, a minister slumped in his chair behind the government table was listening to the argument of someone at the lectern, or at least pretending to; on the countless benches there were no more than four or five equally bored members of Parliament. Onno was standing talking to the Speaker of the House, but he saw them immediately and gestured them to come to him.

  "Thank you for releasing me from the most dreary of lion's dens," he said, and took them to the coffee room. And there, while Quinten ate his open sandwich, he had asked him, "You're twelve now—do you know what you want to be yet?"

  When he didn't answer at once, Max said: "An architect, if you ask me."

  Quinten was annoyed that Max had said that; it was an intrusion. Apart from that, he didn't want to become an architect at all.

  Preceded by four young dogs, a young woman now ran across the country road, dressed in a long white dress, with rings on all her fingers and hung with chains and bracelets; she came from the farmhouse a little farther on, where a commune of Amsterdam artists lived—dropouts, who had had enough of life in town. She raised an arm cheerfully and he returned her greeting absent-mindedly.

  He looked dreamily at something that could not be seen but that was still coming toward him from the quieter than quiet field with the cow, the three boulders, and the two alder trees in it. The question of what he wanted to be had never occurred to him. He was what he was, surely—so what was he supposed to be? But of course his father meant some profession or other, like one boy in his class, who was always announcing that he wanted to be a doctor. It was just that he could not imagine ever practicing some profession or other, not even architecture. That interest was only connected with the dream of the Citadel, but Max could not know that. Perhaps everything would always remain the same.

  44

  The Not

  Onno might have been just as unsure what he wanted to be, but the following year, in 1981, after the new elections, he was put forward by his party leader as minister of defense. The center-right coalition of the previous four years gave way to a center-left coalition, in which the Christian Democrat prime minister was obviously not subject to change; only the conservative vice-premier left office with his cohort, to be replaced by the new Liberals and the Social Democrats of the last cabinet but one, who had been dumped four years previously and now wanted to be in government again at any price—bearing in mind the adage that politics did not wear out those in power but those not in power.

  Toward the end of the cabinet formation, one Sunday in August, twenty or thirty of the principal players gathered for a boat trip on the IJsselmeer. That had been organized months before by an enlightened, stubborn banker, who not only promoted the arts but did not let even his opinions be determined by his interest, because his wealth did not prevent him from being more or less left-wing; and because, besides being more or less left-wing, he was also a rich banker, and moreover the scion of an old patrician family, no one ever had a reason to refuse an invitation from him.

  However, the trip now became an appropriate opportunity for the new political friends to conclude their squabbling over the portfolios undisturbed; the leaders of the Conservatives, who had previously also been invited, had understood that unfortunately it would be better if they were otherwise engaged. Their place was taken by a number of ministers-designate, like Onno. Usually he stayed over Saturday night at Helga's, but now he had gone home so as not to wake her the following morning; she had herself had a ticket for a late showing of the old film Les enfants du paradis.

  Before t
hey went aboard, the groaning politicians, still half asleep, drank coffee in Muiden castle, but by eleven o'clock the first empty whiskey bottles were already landing in the crates. It was an oppressive day; the bank's seagoing motor launch, manned by a graying captain-cum-navigator and two ladies in white aprons who attended to those on board, made its way through the water, which was as gray as the sky. In the afternoon they were to drop anchor in Enkhuizen, where an organ program by the Social Democrat party chairman was planned; then there would be a crossing to Fries-land, to Stavoren, where a hotel had been booked. For those not wishing to spend the night there, official cars would in the meantime have arrived.

  In a circle on the rear deck, with a rum-and-Coke in his hand, Onno was explaining to the banker why he was considered by everyone so excellently suited to become minister of defense.

  "I owe it to my big mouth. Even in my own party they're frightened that a Social Democrat won't be able to stand up to the generals. But they know that I will line up that bunch in my room on the very first day and say, 'Gentlemen, if any of you should ever feel the necessity to threaten resignation, then he can regard himself as automatically dismissed.' And after I have had them swear allegiance unto death to my person, I will wipe the Soviet Union off the map with a fearsome first strike."

  The banker had an infectious asthmatic laugh, which resonated in the sounding box of his overweight body. He was sweating and with a newspaper was constantly brushing away the myriad tiny gnats that were accompanying the boat. For that matter they were not the only accompaniment: about a couple of hundred yards away, somewhat behind them, was a patrol boat of the national police. A company had also formed on the foredeck, but the important business was being conducted in the cabin, which no one entered without being summoned. Through the open door at the bottom of the steep stairs Onno could see them at the drawing room table—the prime minister and the two other party leaders with their intimates. Someone regularly went to the bridge to make a phone call.