The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

Both turned out to live in the center, not far from each other. As they drove into the city, Onno told Max that he could read hieroglyphics by the time he was eleven, and that he had taught himself with an old English textbook, which he had bought in the market for twenty-five cents, so that by using a dictionary he learned English at the same time. That had been in the last winter of the war—when hunger and cold had finally broken him, he said—immediately wondering why he was telling something like this to a total stranger. At home, when he was young, he didn't talk about his language studies. He thought that anyone who made the slightest effort could do it.

  It was always the same with talent: a writer could not imagine that there was anyone who could not write. Onno only realized that it was not so ordinary on one occasion after the war when they were on holiday in Finland. They were in their hotel in Hämeenlinna, somewhere among those depressing lakes and pine forests, and the evening before their departure the food was cold, or barely warm. His father called the manager, who then pretended to tell off the waiter but in fact said that he shouldn't worry about those stingy cheeseheads, because the next day they were already buggering off to their stupid tulips and windmills. Whereupon he, Onno, inquired whether he had taken leave of his senses, speaking about his guests like that, or whether perhaps he wanted his head smashed in with a Dutch clog. Everyone was speechless. He could speak Finnish! After three weeks! A Finno-Ugric language! And when he saw his father's perplexed face, he thought: I've got one over on you, Your Excellency.

  "Are you a son of that Quist?" asked Max in surprise.

  "Yes, that Quist."

  "Wasn't he prime minister or something before the war?"

  "Would you mind speaking a little less casually about my father, Delius, Max? The four years of the Quist cabinet are among the darkest in human civilization. The Dutch nation languished under the theocratic reign of terror of my honored father, against whom I will not hear a word of criticism, and certainly not from someone with such a ridiculous automobile."

  "At least it got us home," said Max, stopping the car. "You can't even drive, if you ask me."

  "Of course not! What do you take me for? A chauffeur? There are things one simply isn't allowed to know how to do. For example, something else that you are not allowed to be able to do is serve food with a fork and spoon in the fingers of one hand, because that means you're a waiter. Of course you can do it just as well, but a gentleman like me is not used to serving himself. A gentleman like me does that very clumsily, with two hands, and even then I drop half on the tablecloth, because that's the way to do it."

  In the light of the streetlamps in the narrow street they could now see each other better. Onno thought Max was actually far too well groomed to be taken seriously; he was wearing the sort of Anglo-Saxon bourgeois outfit, with a blazer and checked shirt, that Onno also disliked on his brothers and brothers-in-law. Max, in his turn, felt that Onno would not cut a bad figure as an organ-grinder; around his ears and under his chin there were also various places he had missed while shaving. Perhaps he was short-sighted, having gone cross-eyed from poring over ideograms.

  Onno proposed driving to Max's house; then he would walk back. They noted with satisfaction that there were still people in the street and that there were still lights on everywhere in the houses, whereas in The Hague all life had been totally extinguished. At the high gate into the park Max locked his car and put on his coat; Onno saw that he was also wearing brown suede shoes. He was about to say goodbye, but now it was Max who said: "Come on, I'll walk along with you for a little way."

  There was the sound of police sirens from the direction of the Leidseplein: something was going on, perhaps the last throes of a demonstration against the Americans in Vietnam.

  "Are you also an honorary doctor of the university of Uppsala?" inquired Onno, "like me?"

  "I haven't got that far yet."

  "You're not an honorary doctor of the university of Uppsala?" cried Onno in dismay, and stopped. "Can someone like me really speak to you?" Suddenly he changed tone, still looking at Max. "Do you know that your face is all wrong? You have steely, extremely unsympathetic blue eyes, but at the same time a ridiculously soft mouth, which I wouldn't like to be seen with."

  Max looked up at him. Onno was almost a head taller. "That's right," he said after a moment's hesitation.

  "No, that isn't right."

  "It's right that it's not right."

  "And that nose of yours would be better cloaked totally in the mantle of love."

  "Hunting dogs always have long snouts—they're better for sniffing with. You mustn't take it personally, but a Pekingese can't smell a thing. And anyway, I'm not a doctor cum grano salts like you, but a real one, with a thesis and all."

  "I can hear it already. You're one of those fools who think that achievement is more praiseworthy than talent. What was your thesis on?"

  "Hydrogen line spectra."

  "What in heaven's name is that?"

  "You won't understand. You have to be very clever for that."

  Max mentioned that he was an astronomer at Leiden Observatory. He had recently had an offer of a fellowship at the Mount Palomar Observatory in California, where a Leiden colleague of his was presently in charge, the man who had discovered quasars; but he was more interested in radio astronomy, with which you could see what was invisible, even during the day. Optical astronomers were pale nightwatchmen, and if a cloud appeared they could just as well get on their bikes and cycle home into the wind; apart from that, he had better things to do at night. He went regularly to Dwingeloo, in Drenthe, to the radio telescope there. A huge synthetic radio telescope was being built near Westerbork, consisting of twelve mirrors, of which one was completed. It was going to be the biggest telescope in the world, and he had high hopes for it.

  "By the way, you just said that it all began in the war with you— perhaps it was the same for me. In the middle of town the night sky had a clarity that today you find only at sea, or on Mount Palomar. At a certain moment I was in a kind of boarding school, run by priests. When they sang vespers in the chapel at night, I sometimes woke up and leaned out the window. I think that those quiet nights and those stars and that Gregorian chant and the war laid the foundation for my choice of career, for want of a better word. Maybe because those stars had nothing to do with the war." At the word stars he glanced upward, but the glow of the city was now reflected by a gray blanket of clouds.

  "So you were brought up as a Catholic. Or are you still one?"

  "I was brought up as nothing."

  "How did you wind up in that institution, then?"

  Max said nothing. He turned up the collar of his camel-colored coat and crossed the lapels, keeping hold of them with his gloved hand. The fathers below in the chapel sang:

  "Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison,

  Christe eleison, Christe eleison."

  In the sky the Great Bear, Cassiopeia, the pole star—around which the axis of the heavens turned. Where was his mother?

  He looked at Onno. "Shall I tell you?"

  Onno saw that he had touched a nerve. "If it's not intended for my ears, I don't want to hear."

  Max, too, was now surprised at himself. Not that he had anything to hide, but it wasn't something to make polite conversation about. He never talked to his colleagues and friends about it, to say nothing of his girlfriends, and he himself rarely thought about it. It was rather like the talent that Onno had talked about: all human beings were of course unique, and they only discovered that when someone else fell in love with them or when no one ever fell in love with them—but even extraordinary circumstances could seem perfectly natural, simply because they were as they were; and in that case the awareness of their extraordinariness only dawned when others found them extraordinary. A king's son, too, only realized later that flags were not put out for everyone in the country when it was their birthday.

  The canals were frozen over. In the murky depths people were still skating; silent figures glided
past with their hands on their backs, braking with blades scraping the ice when they came to the bridges, below which the ice was unreliable. As they walked through their city, past the Rijksmuseum, across the bridges with their strange sandstone and wrought-iron decorations of sea monsters that had crawled over the dunes, Max told Onno how his parents—as a result of the First World War—had found themselves in Amsterdam, how they met, how they separated, after which he went to live with his mother in South Amsterdam, behind the Concertgebouw. His father did not want to see them anymore, and when the Second World War came along he must have been overcome by some fateful urge. He reestablished contact with his former Austrian friends from the First World War, who in the meantime, since the country's annexation by Germany, had become pan-German generals and SS-Obersturmbannführer. In fact he, Max, knew all this only by hearsay; he'd never gone into it in depth. Perhaps his father needed to prove his pro-German attitude. He was still married to a Jewish woman; he had committed "a racial crime," even fathering a child with her, and perhaps that had to be put right first.

  Meanwhile, he played a leading role in commercial relations with the occupying powers. His office grew into a semigovernmental institution, in fact specializing in plunder, particularly of Jewish goods, and through a lawyer he informed Eva Delius, nee Weiss that he wanted a divorce. But she refused: her marriage to an Aryan provided added protection against deportation, perhaps even more than the child she had had by him. In fact, that insistence on a divorce was already a disguised attempt to murder his wife. As emerged after the war, he finally enlisted the help of his former comrades.

  One morning in 1942, Max told Onno—the year he was nine—the housekeeper picked him up from school; in the headmaster's room there was a gendarme with a tall cap, boots, and a white lanyard over his shoulder. He was told that his mother had suddenly left for an unknown destination and that he had to go with the gendarme and sort out his things. When he got home, a moving van was already outside the door, with the name PULS on it in huge letters; he remembered that distinctly. A couple of moving men were carrying the piano out.

  Inside, men were walking around with lists, noting down everything, except of course the things that they were putting in their pockets. There were no Germans anywhere, just two policemen from the local force. Everything had been turned upside down, in his mother's bedroom, all the drawers and cupboards were open; her clothes lay in a heap on the floor. He was given five minutes to collect his belongings, and then he was taken to some Roman Catholic college. In his innocence, he said he wanted to go and see his father: he did not yet know that he was anathema to his father. His grandparents, the only other relations he still had in Holland, were in hiding somewhere; he did not know where—as little as he knew that his father had meanwhile also betrayed their address—nor that, like his mother, they had been transported to Auschwitz via the transit camp at Westerbork, from where none of them returned.

  The collaborator had turned into a war criminal. Everyone called Weiss—and God knows who else from their spectrum—had to be wiped off the face of the earth. Max told Onno that after a few weeks the priests placed him with a childless middle-aged Catholic couple, who did not even require him to cross himself before meals. Occasionally, he cycled past his former house: the front door and windows were bricked up. He only heard about his father again after the war when he was put on trial, and then only on one further occasion: a short newspaper report of his execution.

  "Good God!" cried Onno. "Are you a son of that Delius? You deserve a lot of forgiveness, I believe."

  They were back on the Kerkstraat. Small, narrow houses with wooden staircases up to the first floor, stone steps down to the door of the basement.

  "My grandfather was a collaborator in the First World War," said Max, "my father in the Second World War, and to keep up the family tradition, I shall have to be one in the Third World War." As he lit a cigarette, he turned his head for a moment to inspect the calves of a passing woman.

  "Am I correct in thinking," asked Onno, "that you're talking about your mother's death and first make a dubious joke and then look at a woman? What kind of a person are you?"

  "I must be the kind of person who looks at a woman while he's talking about his mother's death. Anyway, I was also talking about my father's death."

  Onno was about to say something, but did not. It was incomprehensible to him that someone could talk so coolly about such experiences. He thought of his own mother being gassed in an extermination camp and his father shot by a firing squad after the war, but the fantasy did not take any solid shape. In reality, his father had been imprisoned for eighteen months as a hostage in a sort of VIP section of Buchenwald concentration camp, where together with other prominent figures he made plans for the postwar Netherlands—beginning with the setting up of a "special judiciary" and the reintroduction of the death penalty for the worst of the scum. Both his brothers had also been in the resistance.

  He looked at Max and felt completely at his mercy. There was of course no question of extending his hand, saying goodbye, and going in. "I'll see you back home," he said.

  For minutes on end they walked side by side through the winter night without a word, surrounded by the old violence that Max had summoned up as unexpectedly as a blow with the fist. Max, too, felt completely at Onno's mercy. He had told his paradoxical story differently from the few times he had done so previously. When someone tells the same thing to different people he tells it in different ways, which are as different from each other as those people—but now it was as though he had told the story to himself for the first time. It had lightened his load to the same extent that it had burdened Onno. In order to say something, he pointed to the bread that had been scattered here and there at the foot of trees.

  "There are still some good souls in the world."

  Onno had been waiting for Max to break the silence, but he did not feel entitled to ask for details of his story.

  "Shall I tell you something? Your father was naturalized on my father's authority. It was during the period of his cabinet, in the 1920s."

  Max looked at Onno and laughed. "That creates a nice bond between us. Is he still alive?"

  "Of course, my father is still alive. My father will never not be alive."

  "Tell him that. The greatest blunder of his career."

  Onno was about to say that because of it his own father actually deserved a bullet, too, but restrained himself; he was not sure whether it was acceptable to be so nonchalant, because how thick was the layer of ice around this man? Was there in fact something entirely different beneath it?

  "If your mother was Jewish," he said "then you must be a Jew yourself." He immediately disliked hearing the word Jew from his own mouth. Maybe only Jews were allowed to use it after all that had happened; perhaps there was a taboo on it—but on the other hand, should he allow himself to be silenced by the fascists?

  "According to the rabbis, I am. According to the Nazis, thank heavens, I was only half-Jewish, otherwise I wouldn't have survived. You ask yourself, 'What half? The top half? The bottom half? Left? Right?' "

  "The Nazis were biologists. For them you were a kind of diluted Jew; the Jewish wine had been diluted with fifty percent Aryan water."

  "Don't they call that 'adulterating'?" asked Max, laughing. "Do you know, by the way, why that is so—that according to the Orthodox you're only a Jew when you have a Jewish mother and not a Jew if you only have a Jewish father?"

  "Tell me."

  "It's also connected with biology. Because a man can never be one hundred percent sure that he is the real father of his child. A mother may perhaps not be sure who the father is, but one thing is one hundred percent certain: that she is the mother."

  "That shows a deep insight into the basic mendacity of woman as such."

  Max burst out laughing. "Are you married, by any chance? Do you have children?"

  Onno was glad that the dark cloud had been dispelled. "Children! Me, children! Even I'm
not that cruel. I live with a girlfriend on and off, if you must know. One of those good souls who puts out bread." He decided not to ask about Max's love life, because it was probably too dreadful for words. "By the way, didn't you say that you were nine in 1942? That makes us the same age. When's your birthday?"

  "The twenty-seventh of November."

  "Mine's the sixth of November. So from now on, I shall regard you as my younger friend. You can still learn a lot from me. No, wait a bit . . ." he said, and stopped. "I was born three weeks prematurely. That means that we were conceived on the same day!"

  They looked at each other in surprise.

  "At the same moment!" cried Max.

  Both of them, the driver and the hitchhiker, had the feeling that they had discovered the reason for their shock of recognition, as though they had never not known each other. They shook hands solemnly.

  "Only death can part us," said Max in the exalted tone that he associated with Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. At the same moment he also thought of the blood-brotherhood ceremony in the Red Indian books: each cut his finger, after which the wounds were pressed together. It was on the tip of his tongue to say: "Actually, we ought to . . ."—but he did not.

  They were back at his house on the imposing Vossiusstraat and arranged to phone each other the following day. Max offered to drive him home in the car, but Onno refused. As he took out his keys, Max looked after him in case he turned around and waved, but he did not. As he looked for the door key in his bunch of keys, he saw the circles and crosses in the palm of his left hand.

  4

  Friendship

  In the next few months, when their work did not take them abroad, not a day went by without their seeing each other. Max had never met anyone like Onno, Onno had never met anyone like Max—as a self-proclaimed pair of twins, they did not cease to delight in each other. Each felt inferior to the other; each was at once both servant and master, which created a kind of infinity, like two mirrors reflecting each other. Because of their inseparable appearance in the street, in cafes and pubs, people sometimes talked of them as "homo-intellectuals." They were surrounded by misunderstanding and suspicion, because it was threatening: two grown men, who were obviously not gay and seemed to have nothing in common, and who in some mysterious way, precisely because of that, merged almost symbiotically with each other.