The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  Was it a view of the Citadel? Quinten's eyes began to shine. How splendid! They were photos of a fantastic street, indoors, consisting of a covered hallway: huge pieces of scenery consisting of gables, designed by different architects, all the gables differing totally from each other and yet belonging together, while each gable also consisted of elements that didn't belong together and yet formed a whole. While Themaat said that Vitruvius would have a heart attack if he saw that and that Palladio would kill himself laughing, Quinten looked at a paradoxical portico with four standing columns very close together: the first was a bare tree trunk, the second stood on a model of a house, the third was only half built—the upper half, which floated in the air and still pretended to support the architrave—the fourth was a hedge cut in a form of the column; the architrave was indicated by a curved strip of blue neon. Everything had a fairy-tale paradoxical quality, the disharmony as harmony. Mr. Themaat might meanwhile maintain that it was classical language, but with all the words wrongly spelled and the syntax turned into an Augean stable, such as toddlers wrote, it gave him an overwhelming feeling of happiness.

  "I thought you'd like it, QuQu," said Mr. Themaat, dabbing the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief. "For me it's an end, a kind of fireworks to conclude the great banquet, which once began in Greece. But then you had the balanced world view of Ptolemy, with the earth resting in the center of the universe; according to humanism you got that from Copernicus, with the sun resting in the middle; afterward you got the infinite universe of Giordiano Bruno, which no longer had any center at all. All those universes were eternal and unchanging, but recently we have been living in the explosive, violent universe of your foster father, which suddenly has a beginning. Then you get a postmodern sort of spectacle; then everything bursts into pieces and fragments. Everything's exploding at the moment, up to and including the world population, and that's all because of the crazy development of technology. Suddenly a whole new age has dawned, which fortunately I won't have to experience."

  Quinten looked out of the window thoughtfully. "But a beginning is also some kind of fixed point isn't it? What is more fixed than a beginning? You really ought to see that as progress after the previous universe, which had no center anymore."

  "Yes," said Themaat. "You could look at it like that."

  "Anyway, I suddenly remember what Max once said: that human beings are smaller than the universe in approximately the same proportion as the smallest particle is smaller than the human being."

  For a few seconds Mr. Themaat fixed his great staring eyes on him. "So is it true after all? So is man in the middle after all? They should have known that."

  "Who?"

  "Well, Plato, Protagoras, Vitruvius, Palladio—all those fellows."

  Groaning a little, he lay down again, and there was a moment's silence. "For the last few weeks I've found myself thinking of music all the time, QuQu. The Platonic harmony of the spheres has disappeared from the world since Newton, and harmony disappeared from music itself with Schonberg, in Einstein's time. But just like those wretched columns in that catalog, tonality is making a comeback at the moment—except that in the meantime music has become a bane instead of a boon. Here it's still relatively quiet—here it's just dogs barking—but in the city there's no escaping it anymore. There's music everywhere, even in the elevators and the bathrooms. Music comes out of cars, and on the scaffolding every building worker has his portable radio on as loud as it will go. Everywhere is like it only used to be at the fair. But all that harmonic music now together forms a cacophony, compared with which Schonberg's relativist twelve-tone system was nothing. And that ubiquitous cacophony is what the new-fangled cacophonous architecture expresses. That bomb that you once talked about, Quinten, has exploded. That's what I wanted to tell you, but perhaps you should forget it again at once. Anyway, I've gotten tired. I think I'm going to close my eyes for a minute."

  The talk had affected Quinten deeply: it had sounded a bit like a testament. Suddenly he'd heard so many new things that he couldn't take it all in. While he went up the stairs in the hall, he reflected that there was still more to know in the world than he knew. Of course you couldn't know everything, and that wasn't necessary either, but lots of people probably didn't know what there was to know. They lived and died without anyone ever telling them that there was this or that to know that they might have liked to know. Except, once you were dead, what difference did it make? You might just as well never have been born. Anyway, most people didn't want to know anything. They simply wanted to get very rich, or eat a lot, or watch soccer or that kind of thing. Or kiss each other.

  In his room, he stood indecisively and looked at the black case with his mother's cello in it, upright against the wall. He had never opened it; he had always had the feeling that it was inappropriate to do so out of mere curiosity. But if ever the moment had come, it was now. Perhaps it was the first time for sixteen years that the light would shine on it again. But no, of course his father had looked at it occasionally. He laid the case carefully on the ground, knelt down, clicked the two locks, and slowly opened the lid.

  Although he knew that the instrument was inside, the sight of it was still a shock to him. It lay dull and dusty on its back in the dark-red velvet, the edges of which had been gnawed by moths. It had the form of a human being, with broad hips, a waist, and a torso with shoulders; at the end of a long neck the peg box and the scroll formed a small head, like that of an ostrich. The symmetrical sound holes on either side of the bridge looked like footprints. Carefully, he took it out of the case—on the bottom the lining had been virtually completely eaten away—and he solemnly carried it over to his bed. He sat down next to it, as if next to a human being, and sat looking at it in silence. Perhaps it was more like his mother than his mother now was. He looked at the strings, over which her fingers had glided, at the side edges that she had held between her thighs—all of this retained more memories of herself than she did herself.

  After a while he got up and went to the front room. Sophia was busy polishing the glass of the framed photographs on the mantelpiece, and he asked her if he could borrow her measuring tape; when she said that she had lost it some while ago, he went to Theo Kern and borrowed a yardstick. Then he carefully measured the length of the A string, from the nut to the bridge: twenty-four inches. Now he had to strum it, but the fact that he was going to make sound on that cello after all this time was an awareness that he first of all had to overcome. He pulled the string with the nail of his index finger and listened to the singing sound. He frowned. According to him, it was a semitone too low. He checked with his recorder: he was right; it was an A flat.

  Although it didn't matter, he tried to tune the string; but the peg would not budge. Then he determined the middle of the string with the yardstick, twelve inches, put his index finger on that point, and struck it again. When he heard the same A flat, which at the same time was not the same A flat, he sat up and looked around with an ecstatic smile. It was true! Pythagoras! Plato! He had picked up a sound from the center of the world!

  Suddenly, he left everything where it was and ran downstairs into the hall. Downstairs Korvinus tore open his door and snapped that there were other people living there and couldn't he be a bit quieter, but Quinten did not even look at him. He ran across the forecourt—where Neder-koorn was teaching Evert Korvinus to drive in his Jeep, with Arend on the backseat—over the two bridges and then into the rectangular, tree-enclosed field behind Klein Rechteren. There he flopped into the ditch and, panting and sweaty, looked at the red cow, which with grinding jaws returned his gaze and then resumed its meal in reassurance. The sky was still overcast, but now with strange, hectic, scudding clouds, dark purple in the middle, but light at the edges; it looked as though they were coming up vertically from the depths. Yet it was windless and oppressive where he was sitting.

  He looked with excitement at the dark trees that fringed the field, at the grazing cow between the two alders, and at the three
boulders that lay in their perfect positions, like in a Japanese garden. He suddenly knew for certain that he was predestined for something awesome—it was as though he had received a message, a mission to do something that only he was capable of! But what was it? How was he to find out? Did it have something to do with that completely different time which, according to Mr. Themaat, had dawned? At that moment a deer appeared on the other side between the trees. It stopped and looked out across the field. Immediately afterward—no one would believe it—suddenly a strong wind began to blow in Quinten's face, so that from one moment to the next the whole wood started rustling and roaring like the sea, and between the trunks high undulating leaves suddenly rolled onto the meadow, whereupon the deer bounded into the darkness and disappeared.

  48

  Velocities

  When at the beginning of December Ferdinand Verloren van Themaat was admitted to a psychotherapeutic clinic in Apeldoorn for an indefinite period, Elsbeth finally took the plunge and also moved to that town, whereupon Korvinus immediately incorporated their flat into his own. From then on Paco was no longer chained up in the front courtyard. The year 1985 approached.

  The demolition contractor now occupied the whole of the ground floor, with the result that the other occupants could no longer use the front door: he didn't want people traipsing to and fro through his part of the house. From then on they had to use the former tradesmen's entrance at the side, through the bicycle shed, the cellar, and the former staff staircase at the back of the villa. Like the cellar, that stairwell had for decades been crammed with rubbish, rusted buckets, broken chairs, rolls of carpet; if they didn't like it, then all they had to do was to clear it up, and anyone who didn't like it could clear off. On the way to the attic only Nederkoorn was allowed to go on using the old, now partitioned-off stairs to the first floor.

  Proctor was driven to distraction by this measure. Up to now it had seemed that the domestic upheavals had actually passed him by, of course because his mind was occupied with his great book on Vondel's Lucifer; but now he suddenly came charging down the stairs one afternoon with an ax and, with a roar, began hacking at the new partition door. It took Clara, Sophia, and Selma an hour to pacify the shuddering translator somewhat. He wasn't going to be forced to use the back door, he kept on repeating as he drank a glass of water; he'd been using the front door for twenty years, and a brute like that needn't imagine that he could direct him to the back door. He wasn't staying here one day longer!

  Everyone expected a dreadful response from Korvinus, but he reacted with astonishing restraint; the same day he had the door repaired and didn't say another word about it. According to Max, the explanation was that he saw himself getting closer to his goal step by step and had to do less and less in order to undermine their morale; it was enough to turn off the electricity or the water without warning from time to time. Quinten assumed that he was also inhibited somewhat by the friendship between Arend Proctor and his son Evert, who were inseparable.

  "The two of them also smashed up my hut," he said.

  "How do you know it was them?" asked Sophia.

  Quinten shrugged his shoulders. "I don't, but it was."

  Although Marius Proctor had announced that he wasn't staying a day longer, he did finally stay: those blows with the ax had obviously sapped his willpower. He left only after the police had rung his bell on the terrace on New Year's night. There had been a serious accident. After having drunk too much in a disco, the two boys had stolen a car, skidded on an icy country road, lost control going around a bend, and crashed into a tree. Evert Korvinus, who was at the wheel, had been very badly injured but might perhaps survive. Arend Proctor was dead.

  The news shook Groot Rechteren to its psychic foundations. For the whole of New Year's Day, Sophia and Selma supported Marius and Clara, neither of whom could handle their despair. Max had been conscious from an early age of the inescapable fact that anything could happen at any moment, but even he was beside himself for the whole day: it suddenly brought back the memory of another car accident, seventeen years ago. There was no sign of Korvinus. His wife—who suddenly turned out to be called Elsa— tried to make contact with Arend's parents via Sophia; but Proctor shouted at Clara that he would kill her if she spoke to the woman. Arend was dead, but her own son was alive, and, what's more, she had a second son! Quinten heard him screaming, with his voice breaking, that life was a dung heap, that there was no point to it all, that existence was one senseless mess!

  As he stood listening in the hallway, Quinten wondered how one could say that. Perhaps you only said such things when someone died, or when you yourself died; but was it right or, on the contrary, quite wrong? Was there an ultimate truth in death or in life? If you found life absurd, shouldn't you find death precisely meaningful? It seemed as though Proctor were confusing everything. If he found Arend's death senseless, then surely he should find life meaningful! Anyway, what did it matter that Arend was dead? Why was he screaming like that? Perhaps it depended on the kind of person you were. His own father, from whom he had heard nothing for three years, had perhaps understood just as little of what it was all about. He himself was reminded of his mother's accident, and of the death of Aunt Helga, but apart from that, what had happened left him unmoved: they shouldn't have destroyed his hut.

  That night he couldn't sleep with all the wailing going on above his head. He got out of bed and went to the window. The frozen moat lay beneath the icy light of the stars. Suddenly the roaring and commotion in Proctor's study assumed absurd proportions; a little while later he saw papers fluttering past his window, followed by umbrellas and still more papers, sometimes whole packs of them, which disintegrated in the air.

  Once the Proctors had left, a week after Arend's funeral, Nederkoorn expanded into their flat. From then on Max's and Theo's flats were sandwiched between those of the rabble as if between the jaws of a serpent. But Max and Sophia agreed that out of solidarity with Theo and Selma, they could no longer go. Evert Korvinus, it transpired, had a lesion of the spinal cord and was paralyzed from the waist down and for the rest of his life would be confined to a wheelchair, Sophia heard from his mother. The demolition contractor would therefore be a little quieter for a while and would not try to sour the last year of their protected tenancy—if only because Elsa Korvinus had now, in addition, broken the rule of silence.

  Max, completely absorbed by his work on quasar MQ 3412, which turned out to be behaving in an increasingly mysterious way, looked forward to the prospect of a year of peace and quiet—but that was not granted him. For months Ada's condition had been gradually deteriorating. First she had problems with her digestion; then she developed a chronic pelvic infection, as a result of her bladder catheter. But on an arctic day in February, when the oil stoves in Groot Rechteren could not warm their rooms even at the highest setting, Sophia came back from Emmen with much more serious news. She had gone to the director to talk about the mold in Ada's mouth; she had been told that Ada would probably shortly have to be transferred to the hospital. Hemorrhages had begun occurring even between her monthly periods, and according to the doctor in charge, it looked as though she had cancer of the womb.

  While she was telling him this, her face again assumed that masklike expression that Max knew so well. The fact that Ada—that is, her poor body—had gone on having her periods every month all through those seventeen years shocked him more than the news of her illness. The latter, on the contrary, was something hopeful: the upbeat toward the end of her absurd existence.

  He looked at Sophia in silence. After a little while he asked: "Do you suppose this is the moment of truth?"

  Since Onno and he had embarked on their crazy campaign, at the time of Ada's cesarean operation, they had never talked about euthanasia again. He had never once spoken to Sophia about it, although it of course preoccupied her, too.

  She did not reply, but he could tell from her eyes that she felt the same way.

  Ten days later, in the car on the w
ay to Hoogeveen hospital, they did not discuss it, either. When he closed the door and looked about him in the crunching snow, it amazed him that everything here was just the same as that evening of the accident, that calamitous February 27 when Onno and he had celebrated their common conception in Dwingeloo. Suddenly he also remembered the taxi driver who had refused to take him to Leiden, where Sophia had become a widow. The fact that Ada had now been admitted here for the second time gave him the sense of things having come full circle—and full circles always signaled radical changes. He was happy that he had made a date with Tsjallingtsje for that evening.

  Kloosterboer, the doctor who had invited Sophia to come, confirmed the diagnosis. They sat next to each other facing his desk and looked at the young gynecologist, who with his short blond hair and bright-blue eyes looked more like a tennis coach.

  "How far has it gone?" asked Sophia.

  He nodded. "It's spread. There's no point in operating anymore."

  "Well, well," said Max.

  The doctor focused his eyes on him. "How do you mean?"

  "Of course you're not going to operate on a woman who has been lying in a coma for seventeen years and living like a vegetable. Even if there was any point, there would still be no point."