The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  He saw her in front of him again on the terrace, turning her head. "A gingersnap. I haven't heard that word for a long time." Those unique eyes . . . 31415 ... How old was she? Late seventies? Almost eighty? Was the unthinkable really thinkable? Had he seen Max's mother? Eva Weiss? Could it be true that she was still alive? He tried to recall her wedding photo, which had been on Max's "shelf of honor" in Groot Rechteren, on the mantelpiece. Of course, that portrait from the 1920s was in black-and-white; all he remembered was that Max had his father's eyes and the nose and mouth of his mother. Number 31415 also had a pronounced nose, but that was nothing special around here, either in Jews or in Arabs; her mouth had perhaps retained a suggestion of sensuality. But if that was true, then he must confront the unimaginable consequence. In that case Quinten was not his son but Max's. In that case Ada had deceived him with Max. In that case Max had betrayed their friendship. He was disgusted with himself. What kind of figments of the imagination were these?

  Suppose Max's mother had survived Auschwitz. Then she would have returned to Holland at once to trace her son, and she would have found him in that foster family in no time. But they were Catholics. Was it conceivable that they'd been able to keep Max hidden in those chaotic days because he would otherwise be brought up as a Jew, which would mean that his soul was lost for all eternity? That had happened a few times; once even involving abduction to a monastery. No, he remembered Max had told him that he didn't even have to cross himself before meals. Another possibility was that the Germans had told her that her son had been transported to an extermination camp, like her parents. Back in Holland, she had inquired if any of them had come back. They had not. But if her son had not come back, it was simply because he'd never been deported. Perhaps she would have found that out at the National Institute for War Documentation—the records were kept carefully during the war by the Jewish Council; but because she had lived for years in the conviction that he had been taken to Poland as well, the idea did not occur to her. After that there would have been nothing left for her in Holland, where there were only dreadful memories, and she had emigrated to Palestine.

  But wait. Max's foster parents had obviously also inquired from their side whether his mother had returned, and obviously they'd been told not. How was that possible? Everything was always possible. Perhaps they'd inquired about Eva Delius, while Max's mother had had herself registered as Eva Weiss, because she could not bear to say Delius. If that was the case, it should be possible to find out at War Documentation. And everything could have happened completely differently; one couldn't reconstruct reality by thinking. He must simply find out whether that lady just now had been Eva Weiss. That must be possible—Israel was not that big. But if it really was, then she would probably have Hebraized her name and was now called Chawah Lawan. What's more, in 1945 she had not yet turned forty; such an attractive woman with such striking eyes would of course have remarried, and now she was a widow with a different name. So now he had to get up immediately and go to the Registry Office, and to that Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, where all the millions of dead were documented; perhaps they also had the German registration numbers from Auschwitz. But he did not get up. He lay there in his hot little room without air-conditioning. Had she had another child? Probably not. Her only son was now really dead—had she really sat next to her own grandson just now? Had Quinten sat next to his grandmother?

  He found himself only holding on to all those speculations to avoid the most important thing of all. With his eyes closed, he frowned for a moment. Had Max been capable of that? Of course, he was capable of anything; for women he would have betrayed even God. But Ada? He thought back to that night in Havana, almost eighteen years ago, when according to their calculation Quinten had been conceived. Her shadow in the doorway of his hotel room late that evening .. . Where had she come from? He opened his eyes. Dammit, that was it! She'd been to the beach with Max, without him, because he was deceiving her with Maria, the revolutionary widow—that is, he had let himself be seduced by her, just as Ada had seduced him that same night, in complete contrast to her passive nature! He sat up, and a fragment of the Saint Matthew Passion, in which Ada had played, came into his head: "Was dürfen wir weiter Zeugnis?" Had she been through a kind of repetition exercise with Max, a nostalgic episode that had turned out to be rather active, after which she'd come to cleanse herself with him—but in fact sullied herself with Maria? In that case Max had been the stronger: she couldn't become pregnant; she was on the pill. But his seed was as brazen as he was and had paid no attention. That would explain everything! He must have been afraid for months that the child would look like him, and his offer to bring it up had not been simply an act of friendship but a penance—and to that extent a deed of friendship in its turn. At the same time Max had saddled him with the feeling of guilt for not bringing up his own son, who perhaps wasn't his own son, and whom, moreover, he'd later completely abandoned! With his head turned to one side, Onno looked out the window at the blue sky, in which hung the invisible sound of church bells and cooing doves. What next? If that was all true, then the old lady was none other than Eva Weiss; but perhaps it wasn't true.

  Had Max known that Quinten was his son? Quinten didn't look like either of them, but maybe Max had nevertheless discovered something in common between himself and Quinten. So did Sophia perhaps know about it, too? Obviously there had been something going on between those two! Or maybe Sophia had discovered that Max and Quinten had something in common, something unobtrusive, some odd trivial thing, but had not told him. And since she had not told him, Onno, she wouldn't do so now. Anyway, what good would that knowledge do anyone? Quinten least of all. For years he'd been looking for his father, while his father may have been sitting opposite him at the table every evening, and had been acting as his father in practice all along. The only person who would derive any joy from it was Chawah Lawan.

  The news that her son had not been gassed at the age of nine but had become a leading astronomer, and had only just died at age fifty-one, would of course plunge her into an impossible mixture of happiness and despair; perhaps she'd even read the fantastic report of his death in the newspaper here, referring to a "Dutch astronomer in Westerbork," without mentioning his name, because he was not that famous. But if she survived that news, she could then look into the eyes of her grandson as if into a mirror.

  Only by establishing the identity of that Mrs. 31415 could he get at the truth—and perhaps nowadays it was also possible medically. He hadn't read newspapers for years, but it wouldn't surprise him if all that DNA research had by now led to reliable determination of kinship. But in that case Quinten would also have to give blood or saliva—which would also be bound to have a poisonous effect on him, even if Onno emerged from such a test as the father. And apart from that: did he really want to know? After Ada's accident, Helga's death, and his political and academic disasters, it might be better for him not to have a son anymore. So was it not better to banish the eyes of that lady from Jerusalem from his memory? What was truth? If he did nothing, no one else would ever hit upon such misbegotten ideas and everything would stay as it was: Quinten would keep the father whom he had sought and found, and he himself would have a son like Max had had all that time, both his and not his .. .

  He swung his legs off the bed, took hold of his stick, and stood up. He went to see Quinten, who was obviously still worried. He would tell him that he may have had a touch of sunstroke on the Temple Mount but that everything was fine now.

  65

  The Law Taker

  After taking Onno to his room, Quinten had gone to his own. On his doorpost, too, there was a small white cylinder, a mezuzah, that his father had told him contained a small roll of parchment with the commandments from the Torah on it. He touched it briefly, closed the door behind him, and automatically put the small chain on.

  It was hot. He undressed completely, threw his clothes on the bed, put his watch and compass on the washbasin, and freshened up. The window
was open, but no one could see him; at the back of the hotel was a courtyard, surrounded on three sides by much lower houses. Without drying himself he tied the towel round his waist, knelt on the floor by the window, and crossed his arms on the windowsill.

  He let his eyes wander languidly over the old city, from which rose the bronze pealing of church bells; the Temple Mount was on the other side. From the roof came the sound of cooing doves. A glance at the trembling needle of his compass told him that he was facing due northwest. He realized that on the other side of the gently sloping hills in the distance—beyond the sea, Turkey, the Balkans, Austria, and Germany—stood his mother's bed. Nothing had changed there, of course. He had been away from home for scarcely four weeks. Really? Wasn't it four years? Forty? How would Granny Sophia be getting on? Of course she was thinking that he was still in Italy wandering around churches and museums. Was Mr. Themaat, from whom he'd learned so much, still alive? If only he knew what Quinten had been up to in the meantime. What would he have said? "Well done, QuQu, you did it again!" And Piet Keller? Without him none of it would have been possible. Was Mr. Spier still living in Wales, in that place with all those strange letters in it? And Clara and Marius Proctor, and Verdonkschot with his Etienne, and Rutger with his huge carpet—where were they all? Was Groot Rechteren still there, or was the castle by now full of villains in black boots? Theo Kern was definitely still around, with his purple feet. He thought of Max for a moment too, but in a different way. Although he'd lived under one roof with him all his life, for some reason or other he couldn't recall him clearly. He had not forgotten anything—one of his oldest memories was of Max taking him on his knee at the grand piano and playing all kinds of chords to him—but it was as though everything were happening under water: visible and in close-up, but in a different element.

  Perhaps that water was the war, which always surrounded Max. He knew in broad outline what had happened to Max: a different, unimaginable world, with which he had no link at all; he had little affinity with his father's family, either, but they were his own family after all. Jews and the murderers of Jews—that gruesome union was as alien to him as the history of the Aztecs, even if he was now keeping the Jewish Law downstairs in the safe. That had nothing to do with the fact that he was one-thirty-second-part Jewish, as he had discovered, because that was a very weak concentration, scarcely more than 3 percent, but with his dream about the Citadel. Max on the other hand was 50 percent Jewish. Had he ever been in Israel? Quinten wondered. Had he ever walked through the streets of Jerusalem? Once or twice a year he'd packed his bags for a conference abroad, sometimes as far away as America, Japan, or Australia, but Quinten couldn't remember ever having heard anything about Israel. Perhaps they didn't go in for astronomy here.

  Max, Sophia, his mother, his father ... it was though he were taking leave of all that. Drowsily, he let his chin sink onto his arms and looked at the dry, sun-drenched slopes that extended motionless to the horizon beyond the new city, which was at a lower level. It was as though the undulating lines, with which the blood-soaked earth stood out against the blue sky, had not been created by geological events but had been drawn by an inspired hand. He was dry. The sweltering heat that hung over the city and the countryside enveloped him again . . . and suddenly he lifts his head in amazement. There's no more sound. The church bells are silent, perhaps because some sacred hour or other has passed, or come; but no voices come from the windows around the courtyard, either. Even the cooing of doves has disappeared. It is as though the world has fallen into a deep sleep—the houses, the landscape, the sky .. . what has suddenly happened to everything? Is his father asleep next door, too? Nothing is moving anymore, and the shimmering heat over the roofs has gone. He feels as if he is not looking at reality but at an old-fashioned painted panorama, like the Panorama Mesdag in The Hague, where he once went with his Aunt Dol; in that dune landscape there was just the sort of breathless silence as there is here now. Everything that he can see exists, but at the same time does not exist; only in himself has nothing changed. He hears his heartbeat and the roaring of blood in his ears.

  But then something does happen. Suddenly a small black dot appears in the blue dome of the sky, like a hole—not far above the horizon, in the direction of Tel Aviv. It moves up and down a little and slowly becomes larger. But suddenly it seems to be much closer, as though it is something that is approaching: gradually it takes shape, stretches out lengthwise into a black strip, the ends of which move solemnly up and down. Is it a bird? If it is, it's a big one. He gets up in a rapid movement and his eyes open wide. Edgar! It's Edgar!

  He is already above the steep valley and is making straight for the hotel. Is it really conceivable that he has followed Onno's trail here all the way from Italy? That's impossible! But no one understands birds; no one knows how they sometimes find their way half across the world. Once he's above the city wall, Edgar stops beating his wings and begins an elegant dive with wings outspread. A little later he lands on the windowsill with his claws stretched out in front of him, shakes his feathers, folds his wings, turns around once, lifts his tail, leaves some droppings, and looks at Quinten with one eye.

  "You need the room next door," says Quinten, who has taken a step backward. He points to the side. "Next window."

  Immediately, he's amazed at his own voice. Normally he always hears the sound from two directions: through his ears and from inside; now the words remain smothered deep in his chest, as though his ears are blocked. Edgar's arrival also took place in complete silence. Even if the bird had heard his words, he couldn't have understood them; in any case he pays no attention. With a fluttering leap, he lands on the floor and hops to the door with an unmistakably arrogant air.

  "Of course," says Quinten, "as you prefer. You can go by the corridor too. What a surprise it will be for Dad."

  But as he crosses the threshold he pauses. There is no hallway anymore. The wall opposite has given way to a balustrade with amphora-shaped uprights, beyond which stretches an immense space full of staircases and galleries. He turns around. Not only has the door of his father's room disappeared, but so has his own. The whole wall is gone: and on that side too in the distance, above and down below, there are endless flights of colonnades, alcoves, gateways, vaults... is this a dream? He is standing on a narrow footbridge, which leads to a carved windowframe with an architrave; farther on, borne by caryatids, it disappears in the shadow of a tall portico.

  He looks around with a deep sigh. In all its sweet bliss, warm as his own body, the Citadel finally envelops him again. Time after time he has thought of it—in Venice, in Florence, in Rome, in Jerusalem—but now that it is there, it doesn't remind him of anything else: it is what it is, just as the sun needs nothing else to be seen. But sunlight does not surround him there, or simply moonlight, more something like the "ash-gray light," which can be seen just before or after a new moon on the lunar surface next to the thin crescent, and which is sometimes not ash-gray but more marble-gray— caused, as Max once explained to him on a winter evening on the balcony of his bedroom, by reflected sunlight from the earth, and it is brighter the cloudier that side of the earth is.

  Edgar shuffles restlessly to and fro on the balustrade, looking down with his head on one side, or upward, or both at once; he spreads his wings and dives down, climbs up, soars over a row of massive buttresses, disappears in the distance behind the pillars of a brick bridge, and far below swerves around a colossal column with an extravagant capital; on the milk-white shaft are the letters XDX, one below the other. It is as though the trail of his soaring reconnaissance flight hangs in the space like a black ribbon. When he has seen enough, he lands on the end of the footbridge, turns his head back 180 degrees, and rummages among his feathers with his beak, extending one wing with outspread feathers. Quinten has the impression that he is only doing this to kill time—that the bird is waiting for him. When he reaches him, Edgar begins hopping and fluttering ahead of him like a guide. The colonnade ends in a wide marble
staircase, flanked with statues leading down to a complicated series of blind arcades and narrow, sometimes covered, alleys, leading to a series of pontifical chambers.

  When they in turn give way to an indoor street with immense facades to the left and right, divided from each other by pilasters, dripping with ornamentation, Quinten has lost all sense of time and direction. But he has no need of time or direction. He would prefer to follow Edgar forever, here in this deathly silent, blissful, constructed world, made only for him. At a spiral staircase around the blocks of a pillar many feet thick Edgar suddenly discovers a trick: with his claws and beak around the round rail, he lets himself slide down in an exuberant spiral, keeping his balance with his wings. Laughing, leaping down the stairs two at a time, Quinten tries to keep up with him. Having reached the bottom of the staircase after five turns, he stops with his head spinning and looks around inquiringly. What has happened to Edgar? Has he gotten playful? Has he hidden?

  With a start Quinten sees where he is, but feels no fear. No, this is not a dream. All the rest is a dream—Israel, Italy, Holland. The Citadel is the only thing that really exists. Opposite him, about twenty yards away, the double door to the center of the world covered with a diamond-shaped pattern of iron bars stands wide open; the heavy rusty sliding padlock is lying on the ground. Black as the back of a mirror, Edgar sits on the threshold, like a sentry, and looks straight at him in a way that has nothing playful about it. As he slowly approaches, he sees behind him the green safe from the hotel.

  Edgar turns around, flies onto the safe with a couple of short flaps of his wings, and begins sharpening his beak against the edge—but even without that Quinten understands what he has to do. He crosses the threshold with a slight shiver. The room is cube-shaped, about thirty feet long, wide, and high; although there are no openings in the walls, the same dusky light is everywhere. He kneels down by the knob of the combination lock and holds it between his fingers. He doesn't have to think about the combination— there is only one that comes into consideration: J,H,W,H. He pulls open the immense door and takes the suitcase from the bottom shelf. When he has opened the locks, the first thing he sees is the beige envelope with SOMNIUM QUINTI on it.