The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  He listened to her exposition in amazement. It was as though she were giving a summary of her M.A. thesis.

  "Do you perhaps mean that since then nothing can worm its way from the heavenly side through the vanishing point in perspective to this world?"

  "You won't hear me talking that kind of nonsense."

  "Pity."

  "There is no heavenly side of the vanishing point."

  "How do you know? Perhaps it can no longer be made visible with artistic decency, but perhaps it's still all there just the same." He said it to tease her, but she turned out to be impervious.

  "In my opinion that's all drivel. Only temporality and space are eternal."

  "And probably not even them." He turned over onto his stomach too. "I believe that in astronomy it is sometimes called into question. For that matter, when I think of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, which is hanging on the Rampa . . . that's from after the discovery of perspective, isn't it?"

  "And in that, God floats there of necessity, in natural space, on this side of the vanishing point, which has no other side. He isn't a credible God any longer, but the brilliant fantasy of a man who overcame the laws of nature."

  "Instead of having made them." Max nodded. "But wait a moment. . . nowadays—"

  "Yes, I know what you mean."

  "You do? What, then?"

  "That modern art has abandoned perspective again."

  "Exactly. Take Picasso. With him you don't see any nonsimultaneous happenings, like in medieval paintings, but you do see spacial impossibilities, like the front and side of a face at the same time, and in the theory of relativity you find all those temporal and spatial oddities in scientific form, so I've heard."

  "But God hasn't reappeared. If there is another side to the vanishing point, then he's suffocated there by now, and it's only his corpse that is lying stinking in heaven."

  "Do you think so? If you ask me, nothing has changed, because nothing can change in eternity. Eternity is exactly the same thing as the moment. The vanishing point is the gate of heaven, where St. Peter stands with his keys. We probably can't take them from him, but if you ask me you can easily find a way through that point with your submachine gun. I'll slip in right behind you."

  "Well, I think what you're saying is all well and good, but you aren't going to tell me that you are a believer?"

  "Of course not."

  "You aren't going to tell me, or you aren't one?"

  "Perhaps Einstein is God; he's a bit like him. Ein Stein der Weisen—the Philosophers' Stone." Max sighed deeply. He pushed his fingers into the hot sand to where it was a little cooler. "I can still remember very well when he died in 1955; I was twenty-two and I felt as though I had lost my father. Listen, Marilyn. I make the occasional joke. I know that's not right according to orthodox thinkers like you, but that's just how I am. What's more, I'm in Cuba too now. Just like you, I believe that it must be possible to found a just society on earth. It's true that I'm still that much of a believer—just like you. And if Fidel succeeds, if only a little, I'm quite prepared in a manner of speaking to grant him a reflection of something like the divine. Or perhaps it already applies to his intention, even if he doesn't succeed. There's definitely something apostolic about him. I've got a good nose for that."

  He wanted to say to Ada in Dutch that here was finally someone who took art history seriously, and reached for a gun, but because it would be impolite suddenly to speak a secret language, he put his head on his arms and closed his eyes. He was sorry that Onno wasn't there; he would definitely have had something more to say.

  Perhaps he would have praised her for not having brought in the psychology of religion, or Marx. Max listened to the surf while the sun baked his back. That sound at any rate was almost eternal. Perhaps only the sound of an erupting volcano was older. The oldest signal was of course the cosmic background radiation of 3°K, the afterglow of the Big Bang, in which Marilyn's "natural space and time" had originated; the exploding singularity, then, was Marilyn's perspective vanishing point, through which nothing could pass. The question what was behind it, or in front of it, was absurd. It was so neat: art not only as a guide for political action but also for the scientific understanding of the world!

  "You're burning," said Ada. "So am I, come to that. I'll go and see if there's any sun oil."

  When she went to the bungalow he leaned on one elbow, looked deep into Marilyn's eyes, and said, "If that's all true, why don't we get married?"

  She returned his glance for a moment, and then, convulsed with laughter, rolled off her towel into the sand, where she lay on her back, her arms and legs spread wide apart. He was about to laugh too, but when he suddenly saw her mons veneris rising, with the thin material of her swim-suit wrapped over the curve of her labia, like a great coffee bean, his mouth hung open a little. When she realized what was suddenly happening, her laugh froze too. She sat up, put her arms around her knees, and looked at him for a while, nodding.

  "What are you thinking about?" she asked.

  "Terrible things."

  "Put those out of your head. You've got the wrong person."

  "I'm afraid I have."

  "Christ, this really bugs me. Here we are having an interesting conversation, but your wife or your girlfriend has no sooner gone off than the fooling around begins."

  "She's not my girlfriend. She's my friend's girlfriend." He saw that the information threw her for a moment. "You see, now you're supposed to cry: 'Darling, that changes everything!' and throw your arms around me."

  It was obviously an effort for her to maintain an air of indignation—if she were to laugh now, she probably thought, things would soon get out of hand. Of course she was involved with some comandante, or, rather, with an earnest professor of aesthetics, or with a jovial surrealist in a messy studio—anything was possible: a man never knew who a woman was involved with. Perhaps the revolution was her only love. He decided to leave things as they were for now. The day wasn't over yet. He turned back onto his stomach, rested his chin on his hands, and looked at Ada, who was coming out of the bungalow with the oil.

  19

  In the Sea

  In the evening Jesús again preferred to eat in the kitchen. Languidly, with red faces, they sat at the table on the veranda during the intemperate sunset; the heat scarcely abated, and, after showering, they had all put on just a shirt; Guerra was still wearing his long trousers with the embroidered jacket. As darkness quickly fell and the forest no longer stood out because of its shadow, it was filled with the chirping of legions of crickets. Melancholy at the thought of her impending departure, helped by the full-bodied red wine that was served with the roast lamb, Ada looked at the deepening violet glow above the sea.

  "I'm inconsolable. This is the last time that I shall have seen the sunset here."

  "Stay, then," said Guerra. "Marilyn stayed."

  "If only it were as simple as that..."

  "Suppose," said Max, dipping a piece of bread in his wine, "she were to say that she was staying. What would be in store for her—perfect happiness or the question: what next?"

  "In other words," concluded Marilyn, "happiness is impossible."

  He looked at her, convinced that she also knew that the two of them were simultaneously engaged in a second, unspoken conversation. He took the bottle and said, "How severe you are. Why don't you have a glass of wine? According to our friend who is otherwise engaged, water is for brushing your teeth."

  "No thanks," she said. "I may have to shoot."

  Laughing, he topped up the three other glasses. "That's right. It's extremely dangerous on the road—the whole coast is swarming with infiltrators. Why don't we stay the night here? I'm sure that's possible."

  "Of course," said Guerra, "if you want. .."

  "Don't be silly, Max," said Ada with a girlish gesture of her elbow. "I wouldn't dream of it, my plane leaves tomorrow—and it doesn't seem a very nice way to behave toward Onno. Come to that, shouldn't we be making a move?"
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  Max nodded with his eyes closed, indicating that the impulse had already gone, and put down his knife and fork.

  "Shall I tell you something, Marilyn? Believe it or not, I'm happy now. Because I know that one day I shall look back at this evening in the knowledge that I was happy then. Maybe you can only be happy via that mirror. One day I'll lie on my deathbed in the knowledge that I'll never get up again—and then the thought of this evening may perhaps ease my death." He took a sip, but did not swallow. He swished his tongue about in the wine, the smell of which now penetrated his nose from inside, and it seemed to him as though those few cubic inches in the darkness of his mind in some way contained the whole world, just as a drop of dew on a stalk of grass mirrors the landscape. He swallowed and said, "I've suddenly had a vision."

  "Tell us," said Ada.

  "I see a German soldier on the Russian steppe, twenty-five years ago. You should know that there was a war going on between us in Europe at that time, but that would take me too long to go into now. He's about twenty years old, it's forty degrees below zero and among burnt-out tanks and frozen horse carcasses he lies back in the howling snowstorm while a glowing red grenade fragment lies hissing in his guts—and in his final moments he suddenly has a vision. He sees a table on the veranda by a fairy-tale bay, it's evening, the table is covered with food and wine, and it's so warm that two beautiful women are wearing nothing but flimsy shirts..."

  It was still for a moment. Ada gave Marilyn a look that showed a problem had now arisen.

  "And why," asked Guerra, bending aside to allow the black housekeeper to take his plate away, "are we the vision of a fascist soldier and not a Soviet one?"

  Max groaned. "You're right, but I can't force my visions, can I? It's his vision after all, isn't it?"

  Guerra smiled. "You wouldn't cut a bad figure as a dialectician at the cadre school."

  "If you assure me that visions are not forced there, either, I hereby apply for the post."

  "We don't force anything. The new Cuba is itself a vision."

  "You see," said Max to Ada, "now I'm staying here."

  All three of them looked at him—and suddenly he felt uncomfortable. Was he talking too much? It was as though there were a sudden distance between himself and the others; suddenly he felt abandoned. Because his headache started to return, he cupped his hands and asked Ada to pour some ice water from the carafe into them, after which he parted his knees and dipped his face into it.

  "Don't you feel well?"

  "A little relapse," he said, his face dripping. "It'll soon pass." He got up and only knew what he was trying to say when he said it. "Shall I give Onno a call? To say we'll be home in a couple of hours?"

  "Shall I do it?"

  "Let me."

  Without drying himself he went inside, where the black housekeeper pointed out the telephone in the hall. Marilyn's submachine gun was hanging over the arm of a chair. Her real identity was hanging there. He had been wrong about her. He must stop—otherwise he might bite off more than he could chew. But meanwhile his internal secretions had prepared themselves for it: he felt it like a hardening in his insides, something like the spongy stem sometimes put in a vase for sticking flowers into, erect from his abdomen to his heart.

  As Onno was probably still at dinner, he had him paged on the terrace of the restaurant, but he was not there; there was no answer from his room either. Just as he was about to hang up, he heard Onno's soft, hoarse voice:

  "Si?"

  "What's all this? It's Max. Were you asleep?"

  "Yes. You woke me up. What's wrong? I don't want to talk to anyone. Not even you."

  "What's happened?"

  "None of your business."

  "Onno! What's wrong?"

  There was a moment's silence. He was certain that Onno had half raised himself and was leaning on one elbow to see what time it was.

  "I can't look myself in the face any longer. I'm not fit for a high-minded person like you to talk to. I won't say any more, but even that must remain a secret. Can Ada hear you?"

  "No, she's sitting on the terrace. We're in a wonderful dacha by the sea, with Guerra and Jesús, with crowds of servants around us—well, as you know, only in a Communist country can people like you and me live like capitalists. What's more, the revolution has assigned me, as future leader of the Dutch People's Republic, a breathtakingly beautiful woman with a submachine gun."

  "Yes, I can hear, your deepest masochistic instincts are once again being satisfied. I should never have listened to you. We should never have come here, because they're serious here, and that seriousness has made a necrophiliac of me. I'm a moral wreck. Only sleep can bring me oblivion."

  "Did all that happen in church? Did you spit in the holy-water font?"

  "Yes! I spat in the holy-water font!"

  "Onno, you're not going to tell me that you've been to bed with another woman?"

  "I'm not going to tell you anything at all, you shit. When an exceptionally refined spirit reproaches itself, all you can think of is that. My real problem is of a completely different spiritual kind. I've allowed myself to be devoured—as a victim of my own goodness. My noble spirit will be my downfall one day. And now I'm going to hang my ... I mean, now I'm going to hang up, because I'm exhausted. Tell Ada that I'll come straight to her tomorrow to throw myself at her feet. No, don't say that last bit. You're coming back this evening, aren't you?"

  "We'll be home at about twelve."

  "See you tomorrow."

  " 'Good night, sweet prince.' "

  Max hung up and stood there lost in thought. What did it mean? Had Onno really been unfaithful to Ada, in broad daylight? Surely that was inconceivable, but even if he had, then what he said was incomprehensible, even making allowances for all the exaggeration. What did he mean by "necrophiliac"? Had he been seduced into taking the host, perhaps? Hoc est enim corpus meum? Had he slunk toward the altar, with head bowed and hands folded, and stuck his tongue out? Perhaps to please someone? The priest? Perhaps because he was the only person in the church? In any case Max knew that Onno always exaggerated in the direction of truth, never in the opposite direction, and that something was really tormenting him, and that he would do better not to return to the subject if Onno did not raise it himself.

  He went to the veranda, where the housekeeper, the cook, and Jesús had now joined them and sat talking softly in the dark. Ada had disappeared. Marilyn said that she had gone into the sea for a last time "to say goodbye."

  "What's stopping you?" said Guerra, gesturing toward the crashing of the surf in the darkness.

  Yes, why not? He had never swum in the Gulf of Mexico at night, and in a few days' time he would be shaking his English umbrella with its bamboo handle in and out in the doorway, as though fighting a gigantic bat. In the bungalow he put on his clammy swimming trunks again and went down the steps to the beach.

  'When he emerged from under the trees, his bare feet sinking into the sand, still warm from the sun, the moonless starry sky spread out with a gesture that he thought he could almost hear: like a marvelous chord played by the whole orchestra. Compared to this, the sight of the heavens from his hotel room on the twenty-fifth floor, pale because of the city lights and the exhaust fumes, was a record on an old portable gramophone. He stood still. Feeling as though his head were the dome of an observatory, he let his eyes wander.

  Mars shone red and unwavering among the twinkling stars, and in the Cross of Orion, Messier 42 glimmered like a dried sperm stain on the fly of a pair of evening trousers. For him the stars to the south below Betelgeuse and Rigel, sometimes invisible even in summer at higher latitudes, did not merge into the geometrical mythical "pictures" of ancient astronomy; but even with those of the Northern Hemisphere he got no further than the few configurations that he had learned as a boy, in the war—just as doctors no longer knew the Hippocratic theory of temperaments. The capricious, faintly glowing band of the Milky Way wound across the heavens like a torn bridal veil, and f
or the first time in years he again realized why he had devoted his life to that magnificent dome.

  The sea, which seemed even warmer than in the afternoon, received him like someone coming home. The tide was in. As he swayed and let the waves break against his chest, he tried to find Ada, but it was impossible in all that dark movement. He cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted:

  "Ada!"

  She hesitated. She saw his silhouette outlined against the lighter beach. Each wave lifted her up a little and set her back on her toes. But she was absorbed by the fairy-tale fact that she was here now because she could play the cello: music had carried her auf Flügeln des Gesanges to this spot in the sea—if only her mother could see her!

  "Max!" She waved. "Over here!"

  He waved back and dived.

  She would have preferred to remain alone, but then of course he would have worried that she had been engulfed by the sea. Only when she was alone did she have the sense that she really existed; other people might be frightened precisely because of that sense, but she was frightened of other people because they stole it from her.

  Max surfaced near her.

  "What do we owe this to?" she cried.

  "Our lucky stars!"

  He put his hands around her waist and together they bobbed up and down in the almost black water. It had been a long time since she had seen him so close; his dripping face was lit only by the stars. She put her hands on his shoulders and laughed.

  "It's as though we're dancing."

  He put his right arm around her waist, took her right hand in his left, and pulled her to him. "La valse..."

  She saw a mischievous twinkle in his eyes and could feel him getting an erection, but because it was under water, invisible down in the depths, it was as though she had nothing to do with it: there were so many secrets in the sea that had not yet been unveiled. He put his cheek against hers, and while he hummed the macabre theme of Ravel's orchestral piece through the roar of the surf, she saw a bright light shooting across the sky.