The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  Inside at the Spiers' everything was already packed in boxes and gray horse blankets. When the moving van turned onto the forecourt that early afternoon, he said goodbye to them on the terrace. Mrs. Spier had tears in her eyes and couldn't say anything; she just hugged him to her and kissed him five or six times.

  But Mr. Spier shook hands with him firmly and said: "We're sorry we won't be able to see you every day anymore, QuQu. You've become part of our life—in fact you were always something of our child. I hope that things will go well in your life, but I don't really have any doubt that they will. As long as you look after yourself. You promise me that you'll look after yourself?"

  "Yes, Mr. Spier."

  "Come and visit us in Pontrhydfendigaid when you're in England—or in Wales, I should say."

  Quinten went to the pond with his recorder, to the embrace of the rhododendrons. He left the instrument unplayed in his lap all afternoon; he sat in front of his hut until it began to grow dark. It was an overcast spring day; there was no wind, and the oily, gleaming water was only occasionally crossed by the reflection of a bird flying overhead.

  Now Mr. and Mrs. Spier had also disappeared from his life. The Judith. The Quadrata. Pontrhydfendigaid .. . Was his father there too perhaps? He felt sad. Why was there actually something, and not nothing? And if everything passed anyway, what point was there in its ever having been there? Had it really ever been there? If there were no more people one day, no one who could remember anything anymore, could you then say that anything had ever happened? That was, could you now say that then you could say that something had happened, when there would be no one else to say anything? No, then nothing would have happened—although it would have happened. He knew that he could talk to Max about this; but because he couldn't talk to his father about it, he didn't want to talk to Max about it either.

  He was reminded of the Remembrance Center that had been opened at the Westerbork camp the previous year, which he had gone to with Max and Granny. In the large photographs and also in a film you could see people getting into cattle trucks, supervised by people just like Nederkoorn, being transported to their deaths. He had seen that Max leaned forward to inspect all the faces closely—obviously in the hope that he would discover his mother by chance. There were also women, of whom one could see only the backs of their heads. All dead. Surely that could never have happened! Max had told him that there were admirers of Hitler nowadays, who maintained that all those films and photographs were fake, that none of it had ever happened—but why did they admire him? They were saying that actually Hitler was a failure who had not managed to do what he had proclaimed. Fine sort of admirers they were—Hitler would have put them up against a wall straight away. But still . . . those people could say that it hadn't happened, although it had happened—that would be proved by the historio-scope—but if one day there were no more people left so no one else could say that it had happened, how could it not not have not happened?

  That fish there, poking its nose out of the water, creating an expanding set of circles, like an ever-expanding halo—had it really done that forever? And he himself; he was sitting here now. Was it possible that he had never sat here? Was he actually sitting here now, properly speaking? Did anything really exist? Perhaps you should say that the world existed and did not exist. A bit like the Citadel. And he himself: he existed and he did not exist. That was completely wrong, then. What was he to do in such an idiotic world? What was the point of his being here?

  When he got back, Mr. and Mrs. Spier had gone. Korvinus was already walking through the empty rooms with a yardstick, and month later he was living there himself. From that moment on it was as though the castle were keeling over, like a torpedoed ship.

  No one dared to go and look, not even by accident, to see how Nederkoorn was living up in the loft. According to Max, he slept under a swastika flag, with a portrait of Himmler above his bed. On Max's own floor, which he shared with Kern, everything was unchanged at first sight; but below, Spier's Empire interior had been replaced by oak furniture, so massive— and probably reinforced with concrete on the inside—that, according to Kern, Korvinus could count himself lucky that everything did not crash through the floor and plunge down into the cellar.

  He, too, had a wife who was obviously devoted to him; but because he had obviously forbidden her to fraternize with fellow residents, it was impossible to discover whether she was attached to him because of or despite the stone ball in his head. They had two sons of the same age as Quinten and Arend Proctor. Quinten had nothing to do with them, but Arend made friends with the elder, Evert—probably against Korvinus's will. It was obvious that he wanted the whole castle to himself, and links of friendship with the enemy made his war of nerves more difficult.

  When Paco was not cringing at Nederkoorn's whip and orders, he lay in the forecourt on a chain under a room of Themaat's, where he barked continually. Invoking her husband, who was ill and could not stand it, Elsbeth had complained about it a few times, but from Nederkoorn she could only count on the kind of glance one casts at an object. Once, at her wits' end, she had phoned the police, but they could do nothing.

  "The police can almost never do anything," Max had said afterward, "except pick up Jews—they were very good at that."

  The dog itself was unapproachable: if anyone came closer than three yards, it began leering and bared its teeth with trembling lips, without giving the impression of laughing. Only when it saw Quinten did it immediately stop barking; it laid its ears flat into its neck, wagged its tail, and allowed itself to be stroked. When Nederkoorn had first seen that, he had erupted into rage.

  "If you so much as lay a finger on that animal again, you'll have me to deal with!"

  Quinten had never stroked him after that—not because he was frightened of Nederkoorn, but because Paco would of course have to pay for it. But he did, when he had the chance, take his book and sit below Mr. Themaat's window, so that the dog would at least be quiet for a little while. He had learned so much from Themaat that he was prepared to do that for him. He did not go to the pond anymore anyway, since his hut had been destroyed. As far as his chain allowed, Paco crawled toward him and would lie down with his snout as close as possible to him and with his golden brown eyes focused on him. He looks just like me, thought Quinten, but he doesn't know that he's got eyes. Once Korvinus had appeared on the terrace and had ordered him to go away—the forecourt wasn't a slum where the rabble sat in the street; but immediately Sophia had opened the window above and said calmly:

  "It begins to strike me that you talk a lot about slums, Mr. Korvinus. Why is that?"

  That had helped—but how long was this to go on?

  One evening, lying on the sofa, Max tried to work a little, but he was constantly disturbed by thoughts of the situation at the castle. He got up in irritation and went to Sophia's room. She was sitting in her dressing gown on the edge of her bed and giving herself the daily insulin injection that she had needed for years.

  "I'm sorry to disturb you, Sophia," he said, and looked at the needle in her thigh, "but I'm angry. I can't concentrate anymore, and what does it really have to do with me? Since the days of feudalism are over and the bourgeoisie now rule the roost, I spend hours every day thinking about the fact that we are living here. But you live somewhere precisely so that you can do something else. When you're walking, you don't think the whole time about the fact that you're walking—except when you've just broken your leg. I've got other things to think about—at present I'm involved in the most interesting project in my whole career. Do you remember that I once explained to you that the mirrors in Westerbork are actually a single huge telescope? But nowadays, with those computers, we're able to link up all the mirrors on earth, so shortly we should have a supertelescope with a diameter of over six thousand miles, as large as our whole planet. So what's in it for me not to be outwitted by this rabble here at the castle?

  "What are we actually talking about? Do I really have to dig my heels i
n over this? If you ask me, there's a great risk of one's messing up one's whole life over this. Take those Moluccans who used to be in Westerbork. Schattenberg estate, do you remember? They were in the Dutch East Indies army, collaborators who had to leave after the independence of Indonesia. Here they were also thrown out of everywhere too, but they were certain that one day they'd be able to return to a new republic of their own, Maluku Selatan. That's why those suckers didn't want to leave those rotten huts—because that would mean they had resigned themselves to the situation. Their sons began hijacking trains in the name of the ideal, and now they're in prison. What's more, they believed the Dutch government still owed them back pay—two thousand guilders or something. They fought their whole life for that with petitions and demonstrations at the houses of Parliament, and finally they were given it, but by that time their lives were over. They couldn't even buy a color television with it. And now they are old men, who still raise the flag on a country that doesn't exist. Shouldn't we learn from their experience and get out of here as soon as possible?"

  Putting a piece of cotton wool on the small wound in her left thigh, Sophia looked up. "I don't like it when you just come wandering into my bedroom, Max."

  47

  The Music

  To protect himself against Paco's barking, Verloren van Themaat now usually sat in the side room during the day, below Sophia's bedroom. That was Elsbeth's domain, where they also ate. One stuffy, overcast Sunday afternoon in the autumn of 1984, Elsbeth had asked Quinten if he would visit Themaat again. He would really like that, she said.

  Mr. Themaat lay with his hands folded on a sofa in front of the window that overlooked the moat. The view was the same as upstairs, but from a different angle, so that at the same time it was not the same: the water lilies and the ducks were closer; the trees on the other side, taller. Because the sky was dark, a light was already on inside and there was the faint sound of music, some violin concerto or other, perhaps to drown out the distant barking. Mr. Themaat was in a bad way. Quinten could not imagine that this sick old man was the same person he had known. He sat down, and because he had not come with a question, he did not know what to say; he had never just talked to him. He looked at Mrs. Themaat's antique secretary. In the symmetrical grain of the mahogany he saw a devilish, batlike figure; its head with two great eyes on the top drawer, its outspread wings on the closed writing surface, its claws on the two doors below.

  It seemed as though Mr. Themaat also found the situation difficult. There was something strange about his eyes: he blinked not very quickly, like everyone else, but kept shutting his eyes for a moment and then opening them again, as though he were dead tired.

  "Well, QuQu ..." he said. "Times change. How old are you now?"

  "Sixteen."

  "Sixteen already . . ." He focused on the oak beams in the ceiling. "When I was sixteen, it was 1927. In that year Lindbergh was the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic—I can remember precisely. I was living in Haarlem then, close to the flea field, as we called it; I used to hang around there a lot with my friends. It was an extended grass field opposite a great white pavilion from the end of the eighteenth century, with columns and an architrave and everything that you're crazy about." Quinten could see that he was seeing it again, although he could only see the ceiling. "It was so grand, it didn't fit into the bourgeois surroundings of Haarlem at all." He looked at Quinten. "I myself was much more interested in the New Architecture, in the de Stijl, the Bauhaus, and so on. I always find your preference rather strange for such a young boy, but shall I tell you something? You're really modern with your Palladio and your Boullee and those people."

  "How do you mean?"

  Mr. Themaat raised his hand for a moment, perhaps to brush his face, but a moment later he dropped it, trembling.

  "I haven't kept up with the literature for quite some time, but after classicism and neoclassicism, all those classical forms are coming back for the third time. By the year 2000 the world will be full of them—you mark my words, you'll see. At the beginning I thought it was just a whim of fashion, but it goes much deeper. You'll be proved right, and I'm not sure if I'm pleased about that. In the visual arts and literature and music, it might be the end of modernism, and in politics as well. Gropius, Picasso, Joyce, Schönberg, Lenin—they determined my life. It looks as though soon it will all be in the past."

  "Freud and Einstein, too?" asked Quinten. At home he had always heard those names in that kind of list.

  "It wouldn't surprise me. The last few years I've felt like a champion of the Gothic must have felt at the rise of classicism. All those magnificent cathedrals had suddenly become old-fashioned. Are you still interested in that kind of thing?"

  Quinten had the feeling that Themaat was not quite sure who he was talking to. It was though he were regarding Quinten as a retired professor, like he himself was.

  "I've never been interested in that way."

  "In what way, then?"

  Quinten thought for a moment. Should he tell him about the Citadel of his dreams? But how could you really tell someone about a dream? When you told someone about a dream, it always sounded stupid, but while you were dreaming it, it wasn't stupid at all—so when you tell a dream precisely, you are still not telling the person what you dreamed. Telling someone about a dream was impossible.

  "Well, I was just interested," he said. "I don't know. I think you've told me everything that I wanted to know."

  Themaat looked at him for a while, then turned his legs laboriously off the sofa and sat up, with his back bent, two flat white hands next to his thighs.

  He closed his eyes and opened them again. "Shall I tell you one thing that you may not know yet?"

  "Yes, please."

  "Perhaps you'll think it's nonsense, just the chatter of a sick old man, but I want to tell you anyway. Look, how is it that that ideal Greco-Roman architecture and that of the Renaissance could turn into the inhuman gigantism of someone like Boullee? And how could it later, with Speer, even degenerate into the expression of genocide?"

  "You once said that it had something to do with Egypt. With the pyramids. With death."

  "That's right, but how could it have had anything to do with that?"

  "Do you know, then?"

  "I think I know, QuQu. And you must know too. It comes from the loss of music."

  Quinten looked at him in astonishment. Music? What did music suddenly have to do with architecture? It seemed to him as though a vague smile crossed the mask of Mr. Themaat's face.

  The humanist architects, like Palladio, he said, were guided in their designs not only by Vitruvius's discovery of the squared circle, which determined the proportions of the divine human body, but also by a discovery of Pythagoras in the sixth century before Christ: that the relationship between the harmonic intervals was the same as that between prime numbers. If you plucked a string and then wanted to hear the octave of that note, then you simply had to halve its length—the harmony of a note and its octave was therefore determined by the simplest ratio, 1:2. With fifths, it was 2:3 and with fourths, 3:4. The fact that the fantastic notion 1:2:3:4, which was as simple as it was inexpressible, was the basis of musical harmony, and that the whole of musical theory could be derived from it, gave Plato such a shock 150 years later that in his Dialogue "Timaeus" he had a demiurge create the globe-shaped world according to musical laws, including the human soul.

  Fifteen hundred years later, that still found an echo in the Renaissance. And in those days the architects realized that the musical harmonies had spatial expressions—namely, the relationships of the length of strings, and spatial relationships were precisely their only concern. Because both the world and the body and soul were composed according to musical harmonies by the demiurge architect, both the macrocosm and the microcosm, they must therefore be guided in their own architectural designs by the laws of music. In Palladio that developed into an extremely sophisticated system. And subsequently that Greek divine world h
armony also became connected with the Old Testament Jahweh, who had ordered Moses to build the tabernacle according to carefully prescribed measurements—but he could no longer remember the details. He'd forgotten.

  "The tabernacle?" asked Quinten.

  "That was a tent in which the Jews displayed their relics on their journey through the desert."

  "Did it have to be square or round?"

  "Yes, you've put your finger on it. That was precisely the obstacle to reconciling Plato and the Bible. There were also squares involved, if I remember correctly, but nothing round. The whole tent must be oblong."

  "Oblong? Greek and Egyptian temples were oblong too, weren't they— like beds?" Quinten's eyes widened for a moment, but he wasn't given the opportunity to pursue his thoughts, because Themaat came to a conclusion.

  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he said, at the birth of the new age, when modern science originated, it had all been lost. The view that musical theory should be the metaphysical foundation of the world, of body and soul and architecture, was rejected as obscurantist nonsense—and that led directly to Boullee and Speer. The harmonic relationships of course did not automatically change when the elements were enlarged a hundredfold; but the dimensions of the human body, as the measure of all things, remained unchanged—that is: it became proportionately a hundred times smaller, thus ultimately disturbing all harmony and eliminating the human soul in an Egyptian way.

  Slowly, as though he were lifting something heavy, Mr. Themaat raised an index finger. "And what you see at the moment, QuQu, is the unexpected return of all those classical motifs, all those stylobates and shafts and capitals and friezes and architraves—fortunately on a human scale again, but also in a totally crazy way. It's just as though somewhere high in space the classical ideal exploded and the fragments and splinters are now falling back to earth, all confused, distorted, broken and out of their equilibrium. Here," he said, and took hold of a large, thick book, which he had obviously laid out ready. "Catalog of the Biennale in Venice. Four years ago there was an architecture exhibition there, which made me first see what was brewing. 'The Presence of the Past' was the theme. Look," he said, and opened the book where he had laid a bookmark. "The Acropolis in a distorting mirror." With half-closed lids, he handed the book to Quinten.