The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  "Imagine being a mother and having your child suddenly take off into the blue!"

  "And what about your parents, then? Shouldn't you introduce me to your parents? I'm whisking you off too, aren't I?"

  "Good God, do you know what you're saying? They'll have a fit when they hear that I'm going to live with someone without getting married. I didn't introduce Helga to them, either. I always have to do everything behind their backs."

  For Ada it was all unnecessary. Onno had wanted to meet her parents before—he was curious about them, particularly about her mother: according to him, you must always look at the mother of a child if you wanted to know how the child was going to turn out. It was that remark particularly which had led to her avoiding a meeting: the thought of becoming just like her mother filled Ada with revulsion. She hated her mother and was ashamed of her father, who always said the wrong things. On the other hand, she appreciated the fact that Onno wanted to do this. All told, Max had asked about her parents once; to him they were superfluous, as she was herself in the last resort. With Onno she did not have that feeling of superfluousness; on the contrary, she had the feeling that he could no longer do without her, although he was not the kind of man to say so. The question whether she felt the same was one she did not allow herself to ask.

  She was able to avoid his going to Leiden and seeing her parents' petit bourgeois living quarters: the following Monday afternoon, when the bookshop was closed, they came to Amsterdam. In the Kerkstraat, Oswald and Sophia Brons shook hands with Onno with the awkwardness of people applying for a job. Brons struck him as a good sort, but he was immediately a little wary of her mother: she looked at him as though he were a thing, a chair in the wrong place. Next they surveyed the empty rooms, and Onno saw that she gave everything the same look: it was simply her look. In the basement, transformed from a wilderness into a reasonably well maintained garden, her father pointed to the tables, still hanging in their old place, and asked: "Don't you do astronomy anymore, Onno?"

  "You're mixing up everything again, Dad," said Ada in annoyance. "That was Max, my last boyfriend."

  "You haven't kept us very well informed, Ada," said her mother, glancing at Onno. "We had to drag every word out of you."

  "Oh, young people these days." Onno nodded. "They do just what they like."

  "How old are you yourself?" inquired Brons.

  "What a mean question. I estimate that I am the same number of years older than her as you are than me, Mr. Brons."

  "I'll work it out when I get home. But you're still being very formal with me."

  "But I can't be informal with my father-in-law! That would undermine the whole social system."

  Her mother looked at him from beneath Ada's sharply defined eyebrows. "Do you plan to get married?"

  "Mama, please ..."

  "Why can't I ask?"

  "Because I don't like it. As though marriage were the greatest thing on earth. When we decide to get married, you'll hear; for the time being we are not intending to, no."

  They arranged to come back when everything was finished, and at the suggestion of Sophia Brons they went for tea at the Bijenkorf department store, where she wanted to do some shopping.

  While Ada and her mother lost themselves in the perfumed, mirrored mazes of the store, Onno and Oswald Brons found a table in the cafeteria by the window. Feeling awkward and surrounded by women, they looked out over the crowded Dam. The wide steps of the national monument, an erect pylon of pre-Freudian innocence, were covered with hippies in multicolored garb sitting or lying about, guarded by strolling policemen in black uniforms and two mounted gendarmes. Brons said that all that lolling about down there was a desecration of those who had lost their lives, while Onno made a gesture that indicated there was something to be said for that view, but on the other hand. . .. On the other side of the square, beneath the facade of the royal palace—which Onno and his political allies believed should become the town hall again, as it had been at the time of the Dutch Republic— children were sitting in the street watching a performance of a puppet show.

  To Onno's alarm Brons put a hand on his arm. "Onno, look at me. Promise me that you'll look after Ada."

  "I promise," said Onno in an ironically solemn tone, as though taking an oath.

  He wanted to pull his arm away, but that was out of the question, of course. The hand remained there, so that a little later he felt its warmth. He looked uncomfortably into the faithful eyes of the bookseller. It was clear that he was trying to say something but that it was difficult for him to begin; perhaps he'd prepared it and was now trying to remember.

  "Ada is a very difficult girl," he said. "For herself especially. As a child she was very withdrawn; she never really had any girlfriends. She wanted to, but for some reason she always provoked aggression, without consciously trying to. At school there were constant plots against her by other girls. They talked about her behind her back, ridiculous stories were spread about her."

  "Why was that?"

  "No idea. Until she was about sixteen or seventeen she was in a kind of sleepy cocoon. She looked at you in a way that made you wonder whether she could really see you. And she wasn't just bad at school—we had the feeling that she didn't understand what study really meant. She went from one school to another, but it made no difference."

  He took his hand away and waited for a moment until the tea had been put down in front of them. Where on earth did that asymmetry come from? Onno wondered. Why was the love of parents for their child axiomatic and the reverse not? Why should "Honor thy father and thy mother" be a commandment, and "Honor thy child" not?

  "But it's all turned out well," he said.

  "That's true," Brons went on, "but nature was just as aggressive toward her. Until she was eight or ten she had constant problems with her ears, and had to have them cleaned all the time. Fortunately that stopped, but then she developed eye trouble. At a certain moment it turned out she was shortsighted and far-sighted at the same time, if I've got it right. First she had one kind of glasses, then another. Fortunately that came right too, perhaps because short-sightedness and far-sightedness finally cancel each other out; but by that time she must have been to the eye specialist a hundred times. And besides that she was always accident-prone. Cycling crash, front teeth broken. Skating crash, someone skated over her hand—wham, tendons severed. Fortunately it was her right hand. I can't bear to think what would have happened to her if she hadn't been able to play the cello any longer, because that's what finally helped her through it all: music. I've never really understood it—I'm not musical at all, I can't even tell a requiem from a Viennese waltz."

  "Perhaps there isn't any difference."

  "Yes, there you are. You understand—otherwise you wouldn't be with Ada."

  "What makes you think that?" said Onno. "I don't understand it either. Words are day, music is night. Your daughter is a mystery to me, but maybe understanding just gets in the way of love. Do you understand your wife, if I may ask?"

  "What?" asked Brons, and looked at him, with a sudden severity in his eyes. "What do you mean?"

  "Nothing really. All I mean is that probably not only does no one understand anything about anyone else's marriage, but they don't even understand their own. For example, I've sometimes wondered what my father really saw in my mother, but to be honest I really wouldn't know, and probably he doesn't either. Perhaps that's precisely what love is."

  Suddenly Ada and her mother appeared at their table. Ada looked inquiringly from Onno to her father. What had they been discussing? Had it been set up like this by her mother?

  Onno got up and looked into the sphinxlike face of Sophia Brons. "We've been discussing developments in the stock market," he said. "I've decided to speculate on a fall."

  15

  The Invitation

  Even when the house on the Kerkstraat had been furnished and Onno finally had a "real home," Max wasn't invited. Because Ada preferred not to go to the Vossiusstraat, they mostly
saw each other somewhere in town. One evening they'd arranged to meet at the bar of the Lucky Star, a dance hall filled with the social bouillabaisse that had been bubbling away in Amsterdam for the last few years: intellectuals, poets, writers, composers, activists, politicians, ex-Provos, mixed with frivolous industrialists, straight-faced fashion designers, giggling society hairdressers, and accepted underworld figures, all of them with their female or male retinue simmering away in the soup of keen young dancers from the working-class districts.

  Max listened to "California Dreamin' " by the Mamas & the Papas on the jukebox and watched the girls walking toward the dance floor ahead of their boyfriends, with a strange kind of way of moving one arm: it did not move from front to back more or less fully extended, but was bent at right angles, with the upper arm remaining almost motionless, while the lower arm with the hand hanging down described a horizontal circular segment of approximately forty-five degrees. Above the dance floor was a revolving glitter ball, inlaid with hexagonal pieces of mirror glass; reflected beams from a couple of spotlights rotated in countless small misty dots over walls and people, and now he was dazzled by a brilliant flash. Perhaps there was something similar somewhere in space, he thought.

  When Onno emerged from the split in the dark-red curtain at the entrance and saw him sitting there, he took a letter out of his inside pocket and waved it above his head.

  "Push off," he said sternly to a deathly pale young man sitting on the stool next to Max, and to his own amazement his order was obeyed. "What do you think? Letter from Cuba."

  "So they did write!" said Max in surprise.

  The letter was addressed to compañera Ada Brons—which according to Onno did not mean "comrade," because that was camarada, but, "friend," or "companion."

  "That's precisely the difference," he said.

  The letter was written in poor English and came from the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos. In October a ten-day chamber-music festival was to be held in Havana, with a large number of ensembles from Eastern and Western Europe and Latin America taking part. The journey by Cuban Airlines and accommodation in the Hotel Nacional would be paid for by the ICAP; because of the precarious exchange situation, the result of the North American blockade, there was unfortunately no fee.

  "Fantastic! The only problem is, the duo doesn't exist anymore, does it?"

  "We'll bring it back to life," said Onno with determination.

  "So she's going to do it?"

  "Of course. At least, if she can get leave from the orchestra; if some anti-Communist fanatic has the last word on the board, it will be difficult. She was playing this evening, and after the concert she was going to try to get hold of someone. I'm seeing her shortly above the Bamboo. But there's one small problem," said Onno, and put his finger under the date. "The letter took two months to get to the Christian West. That's the ultimate problem of the Third World: communications."

  "Has she already called the embassy?"

  "If she's allowed to by those terrible grandees, we're going straight there tomorrow. I don't trust the telephone: they'll ring you back after the festival is over."

  "You can come with me in the car tomorrow morning, if you like; I can take you to The Hague."

  "Come on, let's go."

  The room above the Bamboo Bar, from which the sound of a Dixieland band was blaring, was the home of the new left-wing liberal society; but the Social Democrats from the rebel club could also be found there, because everyone knew everyone else, and for the time being belonging to the same generation had a stronger pull than different political allegiances. At the top of the steep stairs stood the melancholy Hungarian doorman, who had fled from Budapest eleven years ago, after the uprising. Ada had just come in, he said with an expression that indicated it ultimately did not matter.

  It was full; there was soft Dave Brubeck music. As he went past, Onno heard someone say, "When I've shaken hands with a Christian Democratic politician, I always count my fingers afterward." It was the owner of the bar, a prominent journalist and one of the founders of the left-wing liberals.

  "Wish I'd said it myself," said Onno over his shoulder, whereupon the other looked up with a shrewd smile and said,

  "You will, Onno, you will."

  Ada was standing at the back, greeting people on all sides.

  Onno went over to her. "Well?"

  "Did it," she said, exchanging kisses with Max without looking at him. "As long as I don't broadcast the fact that I belong to the Concertgebouw Orchestra."

  "And Bruno?"

  "You know what he's like. He was very cool about it and said he might be able to find the time, but of course he was over the moon."

  "Koen!" called Max to the man behind the bar. "La Veuve!"

  Onno looked at him with eyebrows raised. "Since when have you drunk alcohol?"

  "Since now. This must be celebrated. Cuba! Just think of it!"

  The ice bucket with the champagne in it was brought to them and they clinked glasses.

  "To the friendship of peoples!" said Onno, kissing Ada on the crown from his great height.

  "Suppose," said Max, only thinking it as he said it, "we were to go too?"

  But he realized at once that this was the obvious solution. Far away over there, in a subtropical region, the sun might pierce the Polish mists that had been shrouding him for weeks. Cattle trucks, selections, gassings—over there on that Red island the black pool might be . .. not filled in, because that was impossible with something infinite, but perhaps be illuminated by a glow which meant that mankind was not written off as a hopeless failure. Not that Cuba would be the branch of heaven he was looking for, but perhaps there might be an inkling of something like it.

  Onno and Ada looked at each other.

  "Yes, why not?" said Ada. "What's stopping you?"

  Onno shook his head. "How do you think we are going to do that? It's in three weeks' time. We need visas and heaven knows what else. We could be terrorists out to murder Fidel Castro. We'll never make it at such short notice with those Bolshevik bureaucrats, and from the Third World at that. Even a letter takes two months."

  "I haven't got a visa either."

  "But you've got an invitation."

  "Listen," said Max. "We can try at least. How about the three of us going to the embassy tomorrow. We'll put our passports on the table and say, 'Just give us a stamp, because we're friends of the Cuban revolution.' "

  "Why is it," Onno wondered, "that I, after all one of the most sensible people I know—and that's being modest—have such a stupid friend? That's not how the world works, old boy!"

  Suddenly Max felt completely sure of himself. He took a gulp of champagne, leaned forward, and said, "I don't know how the world works, Onno, but perhaps that's my strength. If you ask me, it doesn't work at all, any more than the contents of a dustbin work. If you ask me, the world, at least on earth, is one gigantic, improvised mess, which for inexplicable reasons still more or less functions. Mankind doesn't really belong in the universe at all, but now that it's there, everything is possible in all kinds of ways. After all, history has proved it, I would have thought, and you as a politician should know that. If you begin by saying, 'That's how the world works, and this is possible and that is impossible'—then you'd better go back to the Phaistos disc. It's all just fallible people, floundering about, that is, and that's perhaps why you should always simply do what your heart tells you and not limit your own room for maneuver in advance with considerations that other people may or may not raise."

  Was it the champagne? In any case his words had struck home. Onno looked at Ada in astonishment, and said: "He seems to be giving me a good scolding. But he's right. Let's give it a try. What can happen? Perhaps it's a political discovery that's been staring us in the face all along. And anyway," he said, pulling the bottle out of the tinkling ice, "when Columbus set out to discover America, Cuba was where he first landed, and he thought it was the El Dorado that Marco Polo had written about."

/>   As they drove into The Hague the following morning, with Ada sitting sideways at the back, Max pointed out the spot where he'd stopped in February to give Onno a lift.

  "Silent night," Onno began singing, "unholy night..."

  "Oh, thanks," said Ada. "If he hadn't stopped, you would never have met me."

  "True," said Onno. "Idiotically true, but I played a crucial part in it too, because if I hadn't had an appointment in Leiden that day, Max would not have met you."

  "And," said Max to Ada, "we owe that to your father."

  "To my father?"

  "If he hadn't put Mein Leben by Alma Mahler in the window, we would never have gone into In Praise of Folly."

  "Alma mater." Onno nodded. "But ultimately my father is behind it all, of course. If he hadn't seen fit to have his birthday on that first day, nothing at all would have happened."

  "Or if I hadn't gone to celebrate carnival in Rotterdam," said Max. "Life is one string of coincidences. Although ... what is one to make of Schönberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone system? He had an irrational fear of the number 13. In his compositions he often numbered the bars 12, 12-a, 14. And what do you know? He died on Friday the thirteenth."

  "So he was a hysteric." Onno laughed. "All composers are hysterics."

  "Not at all," said Ada. "He had a presentiment of what would happen. I believe everything is predetermined. It's all in the lines in your hand."

  Still looking at the road, Max's eyes widened for a moment, but he thought it better to say nothing about what it reminded him of.

  "Oh," sighed Onno passionately, "how marvelous that would be."

  "On the contrary," said Max. "It would take all the fun out of it. Predetermination is impossible in this universe anyway, because of Planck's constant. That makes everything uncertain."

  "God in his infinite wisdom also created Planck's constant," cried Onno with his finger raised. "Planck's constant is God's revelation in nature. That's why we have free will and are able to sin. Why are we on earth? We are on earth to sin and in so doing to glorify God."