The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  How he would have liked to talk to his father about this. Would he have agreed with him? Perhaps he would have agreed and called depictions of the Annunciation "religious peep shows"; perhaps he would have exclaimed in alarm: "The shameful thought will crush that head of yours!" He burst out laughing. The latter struck him as most probable.

  Wandering among the sculptures in the Museo Bargello, on the second day of his stay, he was suddenly reminded of Theo Kern, who had of course been here too, to learn how his colleagues had removed the superfluous stone. Through the windows of the old palace he occasionally saw the Florentines in the street and in the smoky buses, and wondered how many of them had looked at these wonderful things here. Which of them knew that their city had invented the Renaissance? Perhaps the memory of most people in the world didn't extend much farther than their own lifetime; perhaps they didn't even realize that they were living a thousand years after a thousand years ago. Between their birth and their death, they were trapped in a windowless cell; for them everything was as it always had been. Of course that wasn't the case—but in a certain sense it was, because that's how it had been a thousand years ago for almost everybody, and two thousand years ago, and ten thousand. By simply living, working, having fun, eating, reproducing, they had in fact become much more eternal than the eternal masterpieces of all those unique individuals!

  He stopped at an arbitrary sculpture and thought: Take that thing there. What was it? A beautiful, naked boy, with his right hand on his crown, his left hand on that of a great eagle, which was sitting at his feet and looking at him devotedly, BENVENUTO CELLINI, 1500—1571. Ganymede. He didn't know the myth, but that didn't matter; he knew in any case that there was an old story behind it. There was a story behind everything. Only someone who knew all the stories knew the world. It was almost inevitable that behind the whole world, with all its stories, there was another story that was therefore older than the world. You should find out about that story!

  "Did you pose for that?"

  He started. A tall man, who seemed vaguely familiar, looked at him and smiled, but he didn't like the smile. He was about fifty, balding, with dull eyes, a pointed nose, and thin lips; out of his sleeves, which were rolled up, protruded two pale arms with a golden chain around each wrist. Suddenly Quinten remembered who he was: he slept in the same room, on the other side of the gangway.

  "No," he said gruffly.

  "I saw your guidebook on your chair, that's how I know you're Dutch too. My name's Menne."

  Quinten nodded, but he didn't intend to give his own name. What did this guy want? Had he followed him too, perhaps? Menne looked back and forth between him and the statue.

  "You two look very like each other, do you know that? I'm sure you have little pointed nipples just like that, and beautiful legs. Except that your eyes are much more beautiful. And that little dick—I bet you've got a much bigger one than that. Am I right or not? Tell me honestly . . ." Panting a little, he bent toward him. "Have you got hair on it yet? Do you play with it sometimes? I expect you do, don't you?"

  Quinten couldn't believe his ears. What a dirty bastard! Without a word, he turned on his heel and left the room.

  "Don't act so offended," the man called after him. "It was only a joke. Let's go and have a cappuccino."

  As soon as Quinten got to the top of the steps, he immediately went down three steps at a time, outside, and ran criss-cross through a couple of alleyways to shake him off. It turned out to be unnecessary: of course because Menne knew that he would find him again in the hostel at the end of the day. When he went to bed at eleven o'clock Menne fortunately still wasn't back. Who knows; perhaps he'd gone.

  But in the middle of the night he was awakened by a hand wandering around under the blanket between his legs. The guy was sitting on the edge of his bed, stinking of alcohol and with his fly unbuttoned, with a thick penis sticking out of it as blue-white as detergent, at which he was tugging with his other hand at a speed that reminded Quinten of the rod of Arendje's locomotive when he forced it along the rails at full speed. The thing was also a little bent—because of all that jerking of course.

  "Get lost, you dirty creep!" he said.

  "Oh darling, darling," whispered Menne. "Let me let me. It'll be over in a moment..."

  He tried to put his lips on Quinten's, and for the first time in his life Quinten clenched his fist, lashed out, and hit someone as hard as he could with his knuckles. His lover got up with a groan and fell forward onto his own bed, where he stayed with his back heaving. Of course he was crying.

  No one had noticed anything. For a few seconds Quinten listened in astonishment to the snores around him. He realized that for the second time he was being driven out of a city. He got angrily out of bed, dressed, packed his things in his backpack, and put the postcards with the Annunciations into his guidebook. He paid the porter, who was sitting on a brown imitation-leather bench reading the Osservatore Romano, and walked down the cool nocturnal streets to the station. In the hall, he sat down among scores of other young people on the ground and tried to get a little more sleep.

  53

  The Shadow

  Even when Onno went shopping in the mornings, Edgar was in the habit of sitting on his shoulder. People no longer paid any attention in the shops. In the street the bird sometimes spread its wings, took off, and after one flap on Onno's crown flew up to a gutter or disappeared behind the houses, but it always came back. Onno was more attached to it than he was prepared to admit—perhaps to protect himself against the possibility that one day it might not come back. Imagine some bastard or other shooting it! Humanity after all contained that kind of scum, who should be ashamed at what they did to animals, none of which had any knowledge of evil and for that reason had to be killed.

  "Of course there are decent people too," he said to Edgar in the street, without paying any attention to the looks that passersby gave them. "I estimate them at about eight percent of mankind. But another eight percent always and everywhere consists of the worst rabble imaginable, who are capable of anything. If they get the chance, the first thing they will do is to exterminate the good eight percent. The rest are neither good nor bad; they cut their coat according to their cloth. The first and the thirteenth in every hundred are the ones to watch; the other eleven don't matter. That means the first must make sure he gets them on his side, to keep the thirteenth down, because they could just as well follow him. In the best possible case number thirteen finally hangs himself, like Judas, or is hanged, like in Nuremberg, or he is put in front of the firing squad, like in Scheveningen; but always only after they have done their work, when it doesn't really matter anymore. My head's spinning again, Edgar. The grip of the first is gradually loosening; everywhere the thirteenth is probing his limits, seeing how far he can go, slashing the seat on a train here and there, then vandalizing another telephone booth. That's what's happening now, Edgar, in a world without God and with a Golden Wall that is about to collapse. I contributed to it. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. And when he appears in court, then a psychiatrist will probably immediately appear as devil's advocate and explain his behavior from causes. Wretched childhood, abused a lot, parents divorced. But causal explanations can never be justifications for his behavior. Man is not a machine, or simply an animal, like you—and I'm not even so sure about you. That's why behavior must be judged not causally but finally.

  "Do you mind my taking a scientific tone for a moment? The moral judgment has disappeared from the causal description, and the residue is subsequently presented judicially as mitigating circumstances, resulting in a reduction in sentence. But that of course implies a denial of human freedom, and man is dehumanized by taking away his responsibility. I vaguely remember that there was something like that in the sentence on Max's father; the fellow had probably been betrayed in his childhood by his mother. Denial of punishment is inhuman punishment. Moreover, it's an unacceptable insult to people who have had an equally rotten childhood and who do not co
mmit crimes. According to the same principle, they should actually be rewarded by the government. That would cost the state dear, but if this system is not introduced, then justice demands that psychiatrists be driven out of court, like the moneychangers from the temple. No, what the judge needs is an iron hand, like Gotz von Berlichingen. Unless you have the sweetest flesh of the Messiah, you can only fight evil brutally with evil. In the service of good you must necessarily and tragically embrace evil, but that's the price you must pay. 'No one can rule innocently,' said Saint-Just before he went to the guillotine himself."

  The glances cast by the passersby at the eccentric, talking to himself with unintelligible guttural sounds, did not move him. He no longer belonged among people; all he did was think about them, like an ornithologist about birds. When he crossed a busy, square piazza, with full café terraces at the foot of orange-plastered houses, Edgar jumped to the ground and mingled with the pigeons, who gave way to his black figure in alarm.

  "Good idea, Edgar. Let's inspect thirteen people here in the sun at our leisure."

  He sat down on the steps of a fountain and put his plastic shopping bag next to him. From the basin rose a sculptured pedestal, with dolphins spouting water, on top of which was an obelisk, eighteen feet or so high, covered with hieroglyphics, crowned by a gold star, from which sprouted a bronze cross.

  "Thirteen men, that is—as a gentleman I'll leave women out of it. You know what Weininger said: 'Woman is man's fault.' Hitler was a man, but through three elections he only came to power thanks to the lovelorn women of Germany; so let's shroud that in the democratic and feminist mantle of love. Take him," and he nodded toward a carefully groomed, graying gentleman with a newspaper under his arm and his coat draped loosely over his shoulders. "Decent man, chief accountant at a medium-sized bank, manager of some department or other. Reliable, bit vain, in any case not the first and not the thirteenth. And neither is that one over there," he said, and his eyes followed a man in overalls walking past and studying some machine component or other that had to be repaired or replaced. "He's doing his job. He's too busy to murder or perform miracles. But those two talking over there—one of them I don't like at all. That smile is no good. And that face is just a bit too pale and too smooth."

  The man was in his late twenties and noticed immediately that he was being watched. Instantly, his smile vanished completely, as though a switch had been turned off, and a cold, threatening expression remained focused on Onno. Onno averted his gaze.

  "Dammit, Edgar, if you ask me there's the thirteenth. But don't look, because he's dangerous. He's dangerous because he can control his emotions, like someone else's car; what he uses to steer them with is itself not an emotion. Hopefully, he'll get run over by a car today. Who have we over there?" he said, looking at a boy who crossed the square diagonally, stopped open-mouthed, and took in the building opposite. At the same moment Onno caught his breath. He began trembling and slowly stood up.

  The Pantheon! There it was! Quinten felt as though what he was looking at was not real. The Roman temple of all the gods, twenty centuries old: gray and bare, scraped clean from top to bottom by barbarians, emperors, and popes, it stood there as something not only from a different time but from a different space—like sometimes during the daytime an alarming image loomed up from the dream of the preceding night.

  M•AGRIPPA L•F•COS•TERTIVM•FECIT

  The Quadrata! There they were, those wonderful, inspired letters on the architrave above the eight pillars, under the two triangular pediments, which Palladio had studied so closely: Marcus Agrippa, the son of Lucius, who had allegedly made this during his third consulate; but in reality it was the emperor Hadrian, as Mr. Themaat had taught him. He wondered how Mr. Spier was getting on there in his Pontrhydfendigaid.

  To the left and right of the doorway and the round building behind with the cupola, grooves many feet deep had been cut down to Roman street level, which made the temple appear to be rising from the earth, like the erratic stones in Drenthe. At the front, he knew, the entrance steps were still buried below the asphalt. Slowly he walked along past the row of waiting horse carriages, toward the shadow of the high, rectangular portico, supported by another eight pillars—together making as many columns as he had years. A group of visitors was already waiting. A little later one of the bronze doors, over twenty feet high, was opened a fraction by two men, which required all their strength.

  As he crossed the threshold, the colossal empty space took his breath away. As in the impenetrable interior of a crystal, the shadowless light hung on the blond marble floor, against the columns and alcoves and chapels, where the proud Roman gods had been replaced by humble Christian saints. The highest point of the cupola was occupied not by a keystone but by the blue sky, a round hole measuring almost thirty feet across, through which a diagonal beam of sunlight shone like an obelisk, producing a dazzling egg on a damaged fresco. The cupola with the hole in it reminded him of an iris with a pupil: the temple was an eye, which he was now inside. From outside, the hole must be black. The building was an observatory.

  What had Mr. Themaat said again? That the Pantheon, though it might not be the building, because that didn't exist, was a "good second" and you could see it as a depiction of the world. Perhaps he had meant by that not simply nature, the earth, the moon, the sun the stars, but all the other worlds, such as for example those of numbers, geometrical figures, and music. For that matter the building was also a clock—a sundial, which indicated the time not with a shadow but with light itself. He went and stood in the middle of the space, directly beneath the opening, and took out his little compass. The entrance was due north.

  He looked in the direction the needle indicated, where his attention was caught by a seedy figure by the bronze doors, who was staring at him. He was large and heavily built and was wearing a pair of dark glasses; on his shoulder sat a black crow, no, it was more like a raven. An unkempt gray beard hid the rest of his face too. His long hair had been gathered into a ponytail at the back; his grubby shirt was half open and hanging out of his trousers, exposing his navel; worn sneakers covered his bare feet. Quinten started. Not again, surely? In Venice the woman from Vienna, in Florence that sleazy type, and now a tramp—things were going from bad to worse. He felt himself turning away in irritation, but at that moment the ebony-colored bird flew off the man's shoulder, described a circle through the temple with wings flapping, sat for a moment on the ledge where the cupola rested on the rotunda, then flew up and disappeared croaking through the blue opening.

  Everyone in the Pantheon watched it go. The Japanese quickly took photos, and Onno knew immediately that it would not come back. He had not intended to speak to Quinten; he just wanted to see him for a moment. He was about to call the bird back, but was frightened that Quinten would recognize his voice. Now he had not even said goodbye to Edgar—and suddenly he felt so utterly abandoned that he could not bear it.

  When Quinten saw the shabby figure coming toward him, trembling and supporting himself on a stick, he would have preferred to run around him in a wide arc and dash outside; but he decided to tell him plainly that he wanted nothing to do with him—at least if he spoke French, German, or English—and then to make a dignified exit from the temple. When the man arrived opposite him, he took off his sunglasses.

  Quinten felt himself changing into an image of himself. His breathing his heart, his brain, and his intestines—all came to a stop; for a moment he turned to marble as he looked into Onno's eyes, which he knew so well and through which at the same time someone completely different from his father seemed to be looking at him. Then they fell into each other's arms and for a couple of seconds stood hugging each other without moving.

  "Dad ..." sobbed Quinten.

  Onno looked around, searching for something. "I have to sit down for a moment."

  Hand in hand, they walked toward a wooden bench, a few yards away from the sarcophagus containing the bones of Raphael, where they stood and surveyed eac
h other in silent astonishment. On the one hand Quinten had the feeling that it couldn't be true that his father was suddenly sitting there; on the other hand it was quite obvious that he had found him without really trying. How disheveled he was! It couldn't be from lack of money, and yet he looked completely down and out. Uncle Karel had been right: Auntie Helga's death had turned him into a dropout. Was what was happening really the right thing?

  Onno, too, was completely confused. He realized that he had again undermined his whole life with his sudden impulse. By speaking to Quinten, he had done something irrevocable: it was of course impossible for him to say goodbye forever in a moment, and equally unthinkable that he should resume his earlier existence. At the same time he felt something like relief that everything was suddenly completely different from the past four years. When he had left Holland, Quinten had been a boy of twelve, and now there was almost a man sitting there. For the first time he was ashamed. He lowered his eyes and did not know what to say.