The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  Max looked at him and nodded. "Now tell me," he said, "what you will really never tell anyone."

  However much Onno had had to drink, there was always a point where he was sober. He put down his glass.

  "Dreadful! As a student I was living in a rented room, where I was trying to get the philosophy of the concept of law into my head. Next to me there was an unmarried mother, a girl with a baby that cried nonstop. God knows what got into me. One winter evening I ran into her place, at the end of my tether. She was sitting at the table sewing baby clothes; the baby was screaming—for a father, of course! There was one of those old-fashioned coal stoves, boiling hot. I snatched the brat from its cradle, held it up by its ankle with my right hand, grabbed the poker with my left hand, raised the lid of the stove, and held the child above the glow with its head down. I said nothing, I just looked at her. She was frozen. She looked like a photo of herself. The baby, too, was silent for the first time. Terrible! I ought to have been arrested for that and thrown into prison."

  He fixed Max's gaze.

  "Well," he said. "Now you know. But you didn't just ask me this for no good reason, because you knew I was going to ask you in turn. You asked me because you want to tell me something yourself that you would never tell anyone. Get it off your chest."

  Max nodded. "When my foster father was on his deathbed last year," he said rather flatly, "I got a letter from my foster mother. I only saw them rarely by then, because it seems you never forgive someone when they've been good to you. She wrote that he wanted to see me one last time before he died."

  "That's enough," said Onno.

  The alcohol had worn off instantly. After a while Max stood up and replaced the Kafka book. He stood there aimlessly, and in a sudden impulse lit a candle that was on the dining table. He turned around, looked at his watch, and said, "It's seven o'clock. I'm hungry. Let's have breakfast in the American Hotel—and come to that, I'm feeling in need of a romantic escapade. Perhaps there'll be an early bird there—you never know."

  5

  Coming Out to Play

  Siamese twins derived their name from the brothers Eng and Chang, who in the previous century had lived to the age of sixty-three: in order to amuse Onno, Max had looked it up in his encyclopedia. Since they were joined at the chest, they were known in medical terminology as a thoracopagus; Onno's immediate reaction was to say that since they had grown together through their inner natures, they were a mentopagus.

  As a result, they started to change each other's lives.

  At the end of March, Onno was again spending a few days at his girlfriend's place; as always he had taken his dirty laundry with him. She lived above a bric-a-brac shop, which was usually shut, on a quiet side canal, in a narrow seventeenth-century house with a gable, the Unicorn. He had met her a few years before at the Art Historical Institute, where she was a librarian. He had fallen in love with her at once, because she looked just as he imagined a librarian should and as they seldom did: tall, slim, with hair up, and a severe Dutch face, like the lady governor of an orphanage in a painting by Frans Hals, only younger.

  Now and then she cleared up the basement where he lived like a hamster in its hutch. From time to time he earned a little by writing articles and giving lectures, but it was not really necessary; he spent little and could survive on an allowance from his future inheritance. During a family dinner a six-year-old nephew had once asked him: "Uncle Onno, what are you going to be when you grow up?" After the laughter had died down, everyone had looked at him expectantly, and he had said, "That question is too good to spoil with an answer." If he had wanted, he could long ago have become a lecturer at some university at home or abroad; he repeatedly received offers, but had no wish to give up his way of life. He saw himself as an eighteenth-century gentleman scholar; he regarded the didactic industry as vulgar. In his view, professors were rather like swimming coaches: and who had ever seen a swimming coach in the water? No one had ever seen such a thing, because swimming coaches couldn't swim at all, they simply talked a lot at the poolside; but he was someone who plowed his way through the water with a relentless butterfly stroke.

  It began one sunny Saturday afternoon, after spring had appeared from the wings and done the splits with great panache; the windows had been opened and balmy air filled the room. Onno had taken some papers to the Unicorn, but his work had not been going well for weeks. His great body lay on the sofa like a stranded ship.

  "That wretched Pernier," he groaned. "I wish he had let the bloody thing smash to smithereens back in 1908. Yes, but then he would have glued the fragments together again. There's a whole people hidden in there somewhere, with helmets and axes, but it just stays put and won't budge."

  Helga took off her reading glasses and looked up from her book. "Why don't you let it rest for a while? Start something else."

  "Do you know what you are saying, woman? I know precisely which people are working on this, and they don't start anything else. What are you reading?"

  As though she didn't know, she looked at the cover. "Progress in Library Science."

  "That book, dear Helga, is printed, isn't it? And all the books it is talking about are also printed, aren't they? Everyone thinks that printing with separate stamps began in China a thousand years ago, but do you know who invented it?" He waved a photo of the Phaistos disc.

  "The people who made this. Four thousand years ago! This has been stamped! And if they were such preliterate geniuses, then there'll be something very interesting here, won't there? And I must be the first person to read it, mustn't I? The wretched thing is that we only have this specimen, and of course you don't make stamps for only one tablet. There must be lots more, but nothing else has been found in Crete. For that matter, there's nothing Minoan about them. Look—this daft sedan chair. What sort of thing is it? What does it mean? We must look elsewhere, but where? In what family?"

  "But don't you have anything to go on then?"

  "I'll explain to you the position I'm in." He grabbed a newspaper off the floor and made a scribble in the margin. "Write the following number: eighty-five billion, four hundred and ninety-one million, seven hundred and sixty-one thousand and thirty-two." When she had noted this down on the sheet of paper she was using for notes, he continued: "Now imagine an aboriginal cryptographer in the Australian bush, who doesn't even know that they're figures; all he sees is eleven incomprehensible signs: 85491761032, all different except for the two 1 signs. What can he deduce from that? Nothing at all. That's the point I'm at now. Imagine he has the brilliant idea that they are figures. How then is he supposed to discover that they are the alphabetically ordered numerals from 'one' to 'ten'? Beginning with the e of 'eight,' and ending with the t of 'two.' How is he supposed to discover that the numeral 'eight' is the name of the figure 8? He doesn't even know the decimal system, let alone English. How on earth is he supposed to discover that he is looking at Dr. Quist's unforgettable Narration from A to Z? What is the key? And yet he is determined to find out!" "What's that?" he suddenly shouted loudly at the photo. "Hello! Is anybody there? I can't hear you! The line is so bad!" He threw the photo away and put his hands over his face. "I'm completely blocked."

  Helga closed her book, putting her forefinger between the pages.

  "And why are you so blocked?" she asked in a sing-song tone.

  "I don't know," he said with a feigned tearfulness. "I don't know. Perhaps you can only make a real discovery once in your life."

  "Could it also be because of those sleepless nights with your new friend?"

  The posturing disappeared from Onno's face. He sat up and looked at her. "You can't be serious."

  "I'm perfectly serious. Do you realize how overwrought the whole thing is?"

  "Helga!" he said in dismay. "What do you mean?"

  "I don't know what you mean by that, all I know is that you've been completely blocked since you've known him. You've no idea how much you've changed recently."

  "In what way?"

 
She put the book down and folded her arms. "If you ask me, you're thinking more of him than of your work. You only get home as I'm leaving for the institute. How does he manage it, by the way? Isn't he an astronomer? Doesn't he have to look at the stars at night?"

  "I don't have to go to the museum in Heraklion to look at those symbols, do I? And I'm allowed to sleep in, aren't I?"

  He got off the sofa and went over to the window. Of course he was thinking less about his work, but was that so bad? It stopped thinking from becoming fretting, and that was much more harmful to thought than not thinking. His exchange with Max was in a certain sense the "something else" that he had started on. She was jealous, of course. "You're not jealous by any chance?"

  "I want the best for you."

  He sighed deeply and turned around. "Listen. What there is between Max and me can never exist between you and me; and what there is between you and me can never exist between me and Max. That's as clear as crystal, we don't have to waste words on it. To be honest, I think we've already wasted too many words on it."

  She got up, took a few steps, stopped and said, "Onno, be careful."

  "What in heaven's name do I have to be careful of?" he asked in amazement.

  She made a helpless gesture. "I don't know."

  "Aha," he said, and went over to her. "Woman's intuition." He hugged her clumsily. "Sorry about that. Women have everything—brains, feeling, willpower—but only men have intuition. That's why there's no female creation of any importance, and that isn't because they've always been confined to the kitchen, because even the best cooks are men. One is forced reluctantly to accept the fact. But they can do one thing that men can't do, and that is give birth to men. That's more than enough." She freed herself from the hug.

  "Why do you start waffling on the moment I try to talk to you?"

  "You know what Napoleon said, don't you? All his wars were a bagatelle compared with the war that will break out one day between men and women. Therefore I now swear a sacred oath, that when it comes to that I will be the first traitor to my sex, although I know that I will pay dearly for it in the long run."

  "All right, Onno. That's enough. You're impossible." She pushed the loose strands of hair back under the hairpins with both hands. "Shall we go to the Vondelpark?"

  At that moment there was a shout from outside: "Yoohoo, Onno!"

  They glanced at each other and each leaned out of a different window. With his hands in his pockets and a magazine under his arm, Max was leaning against a telephone box by the side of the canal.

  "Mrs. Hartman," he called to Helga, putting on a whining boy's voice. "Can Onno come out to play?"

  Onno and Helga looked at each other again, now along the front of the house. Disaster. They both realized at the same moment that this was the end—that in his innocence Max had suddenly laid bare the heart of their relationship.

  A quarter of an hour later Onno finally came out.

  "Did you have to do your homework first?" asked Max.

  Onno did not look at him. He walked beside him in a rage. "The things you do to your friends.. .. It's over. All your fault. I left the front door key on the table."

  "My fault? What have I done?"

  "It's none of your business. I'm not talking to you anymore." He stopped and looked at him with disgust. "Do you know what's wrong with you?" When Max looked back at him with a puzzled expression, he repeated: "Don't you know?"

  "Not that I'm aware of."

  "Don't you know? Then I'll tell you: I don't like your intuition. I don't like your intuition one little bit."

  Max had no idea what he was getting at; he knew almost nothing about Onno's relationship with Helga. They never talked about women, or about cars, money, or sports; at most, about woman as such, as Onno was in the habit of putting it—and never about their own girlfriends. Max did not talk about his, because he did not allow himself time to get to know them— and because Onno would have found it disgusting to listen to. And Onno did not talk about Helga, because that was not done. The few times that Max had met her, they had said scarcely a word to each other—not because he did not like her, but he saw her as belonging to a different world. She would never have caught his eye, even if he had sat opposite her in a train for an hour; and through her he realized how completely different he was from Onno. He couldn't imagine a woman that they would both be interested in.

  He had never been in Helga's flat, and Onno never invited Max to his place on the Kerkstraat. He was in the habit of saying that mankind was divided into guests and hosts and that he simply belonged by nature to the first category; besides, it was cheaper. That was what he said, but that was not the reason. Taking Max to his parents' house and introducing him to his family, to his father, was just as inconceivable, although people in The Hague had long since heard, with raised eyebrows, about his strange friendship with Delius's son, and of course they would have liked an opportunity to size him up. No, the reason was that in himself too there was an area where he never admitted anyone—not only not Max, not only not Helga, but not even himself. There, in an inhospitable region, was a hermit's cave, a Carthusian monk's cell, where a leaden silence reigned—something that seemed to wait threateningly for him, that he would rather not think about and that he had never talked to Max about.

  He walked along the canal, shoulders drooping, whining like a broken man. "What am I to do now? You've wrecked my life. I don't have a home. You have a home. I have just a humble shelter against the rain and the wind. Who'll do my laundry now? You've ruined me once and for all, and of course that was your intention all along. I'll wind up in the gutter, with unkempt hair and a beard and a crazed look in my eyes, begging for alms. What did you actually come for, you bastard?"

  "I never come for any special reason," said Max, "but I have great news. I've just been to the dentist's and in the waiting room there was an old issue of Time. There's an important article about us in it."

  "About us," Onno repeated. "In Time."

  Max opened the magazine and pointed to a commemorative piece on the Reichstag fire, which had taken place on February 27 thirty-four years before.

  "What about it?"

  "Good God! Wasn't I born on November 27, 1933, and weren't you supposed to have been born on November 27 too? Didn't we come to the conclusion that we're nonidentical twins! Don't you understand? Nine months!

  We were conceived during the Reichstag fire! While Van der Lubbe was setting fire to the curtains in Berlin, our parents were climbing on top of each other in The Hague and Amsterdam!"

  Onno stopped, stretched his whole body, and spread his arms in triumph, while a broad smile passed across his face. "Death, where is thy sting?" he cried. "I can face life again!"

  6

  Another Meeting

  Two months later—their delight in their friendship showed no signs of waning—Onno had a meeting with a colleague from Jerusalem in the Natural History Museum in Leiden. He had gotten no further with the deciphering, and the Israeli was as curious about his progress as he was about the Israeli's. When he emerged from the colossal building later that afternoon, Max was waiting for him outside in the sun, sitting in a strange little public garden next to the adjacent Science Museum, with his eyes closed and his head thrown back. They had agreed that Max would show him the observatory.

  Onno expressed his contempt for blockheads who sunbathed—his own white Calvinist flesh had never seen the sun—but Max said it was part of his job: after all the sun was a star. They went into town for a cup of coffee first. Onno told him with relief that Landau, his most important rival, had obviously not made any progress either; so that threat had been removed for the moment. They reacted differently to the atmosphere of the little town with its low houses than to Amsterdam; they felt something like tenderness, such as someone from London or New York must feel in Amsterdam.

  "We're walking this way now," said Max, "and while I was waiting for you, I was reminded of two other men who also walked this way."


  "Everyone has walked this way. Even Einstein."

  "With Lorentz, yes, and with De Sitter, but I don't mean him."

  He meant Freud and Mahler. As far as he remembered from biographies, it had been in the summer of 1908. Freud was staying in a boarding-house in Noordwijk, from where he was about to travel on to Italy, when a telegram arrived from Vienna: Mahler had problems. He was suffering from impotence and could no longer make love to his wife, Alma—who was later also to turn the heads of Franz Werfel, Walter Gropius, and Oskar Kokoschka. He needed immediate help. Mahler took the train to Leiden, where he met Freud in a hotel. They walked around the town for four hours, and Mahler was subjected to a sort of emergency analysis, which indeed seems to have had some effect.

  A little girl ties a rope to a lamppost, starts turning the rope; a second girl moves her upper body forward and backward a couple of times in the same rhythm, jumps into the imaginary egg, and begins skipping. And as they walked along, Onno responded with the same suppleness to the anecdote.

  "Well, well, Herr Obermusikdirekor, you are suffering from overpotency. In my psychoanalysis I have coined the term astronomical satyriasis for this. It is a disease that inspires the greatest possible disgust, even in specialists, despite their being familiar with the dark side of human nature."

  "But what if I like it," whined Max. "Cure me, Herr Professor. I want to stop liking it. I want to be monogamous, like you, or impotent—whatever you are. I'll double your fee."

  "The fact that you immediately bring up money points to an anal-erotic fixation, which conjures up scenes before my inner eye from which even Dante would shrink. Did I hear you say you like it? Surely it can't be true?"

  "It is!"

  "Occasionally, even experienced mountaineers are faced with precipices that force them to say, 'This is too much.' When I tell my friend Ferenczi about this, he'll say, 'You can convince me of lots of things, Sigi, but this is impossible.' "