The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  —From a human point of view, that all seems obvious.

  —So obvious that in the twentieth century he is scarcely mentioned on earth any longer. That's the danger of being absolutely right: virtually no one realizes that things were ever any different. Just imagine, in his day even scientific experiments were virtually unknown. That is why it has always astonished us that this rational founder of modern science and technology of all people should be surrounded by mystery. He is supposed to be the founder of freemasonry, he has been called a clandestine Rosicrucian and an initiate in numerous other secret societies. There has long been a Baconian sect, which with a lot of numerological hocus-pocus tries to prove that he wrote the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare. All nonsense, of course, but why is it that all this has become attached precisely to that cool, realistic combater of delusions? Not only has he been called the true author of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, but all kinds of acrostics have been dragged in to prove that the work of Edmund Spenser were actually by him—and of course, inevitably, that of Marlowe too. Bacon as the author of the first Faust play! It is claimed that at his funeral an empty coffin was consigned to the earth, because he is claimed to have lived for a further twenty-one years in Germany under another name.

  —In Württemberg, of course!

  —In the capital no less, Stuttgart. The so-called discovery finally woke us up, and we can now reconstruct the course of events. Baconians sometimes claim that he was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Leicester, but in reality he was born in 1561 as the son of Elizabeth's Keeper of the Great Seal. Because he was the youngest son, he was left penniless on his father's death; as a twenty-three-year-old lawyer he obtained a seat in Parliament. He was determined to become as rich and powerful as his father, but his career did not progress well. His bosom friend the earl of Essex, the queen's lover, did what he could for him, but Elizabeth did not trust Bacon. When all his attempts to secure his friend a high office had failed, the loyal Essex gave him one of his own estates as a consolation. That was in 1595. However, four years later Essex himself fell out of favor, a charge of high treason was prepared against him, and now Elizabeth suddenly intervened. She asked Bacon if he would be so kind as to draw up the indictment. And now the hour of the devil had struck—because, what do you think? He did it, although he knew that it would lead to the execution of his benefactor. The serpent promised him that he would rise even higher than his father, but for that he must first put his signature to the indictment and then publish a number of books, which would be dictated to him.

  —Why did Lucifer choose Bacon, of all people? Had he already written anything?

  —In 1597 he had published a collection of intelligent Essayes, which are still read, but are not anything that would have attracted the attention even of the devil. But much earlier, at the age of twenty-one, in 1583, he had published a pamphlet entitled Temporis Partus Maximus, "The Great Birth of Time." The fact that not a single copy of it has survived aroused our suspicions; and we now assume that it struck a tone that had made the devil prick up his ears. For some reason he later suppressed all copies of it. Be that as it may, after the prophet of the new age had signed the diabolical pact with mankind by putting his signature to the effective death sentence against his best friend, the stagnation of his career was suddenly over. In 1600 Essex was beheaded in the Tower, in 1607 Bacon became Attorney General, in 1613 Procurator General, and in 1617 he equaled his father's achievement by being appointed Keeper of the Great Seal. Two years later he confirmed his subservience to the devil by having an innocent prisoner tortured, because King James required a confession and a sentence; shortly afterward he became Lord Chancellor, the highest position in the land, thus surpassing his father. He was raised to the nobility as Lord Verulam, and later further elevated to become Viscount Saint Albans. Meanwhile he wrote the books that the devil dictated to him, and which were not prophetic but clever self-fulfilling prophecies intended to destroy mankind.

  —That means that the opportunistic traitor not only did not write the works of Shakespeare or Marlowe, but not even his own.

  —That's right. But Lucifer would not be Lucifer if he had left it at that. Even those who submit themselves to him and serve him must finally be destroyed. Because after Sir Francis had finally achieved more than he had ever dreamed of, the devil appeared to him one day in the shape of an official, from whom he accepted a bribe, which led to a trial for corruption, imprisonment in the Tower, and his complete social downfall. Five years later, at the age of sixty-five, he finally went to hell.

  —Long live friendship!

  —Your story too is yet another demonstration of what is missing—and it saddens me that that's how it must be. That's what I have always missed most against my better judgment, here in the Light. No shortage of love, bliss, goodness, wisdom, truth, peace, beauty, all in our service, but no friendship.

  —You're not my friend?

  —Or even your girlfriend. In organizations there are no friendships, and certainly not in ours, and even more certainly not between superiors and subordinates. Friendship exists only in the abyss. Do you know those famous, magnificent, elevated passages on friendship that Bacon wrote shortly before his death: No receipt openeth the heart but a true friend? Indeed, and the jugular vein! The man who had his best friend beheaded! Can you hear it? The laughter of the heartless devil, with his own temperature at absolute zero, resounds through all the halls of all eternities.

  —Now I finally understand why I made such efforts for all those years.

  —Go on. I'm listening.

  20

  The Hooblei

  One of the first things they did, back in autumnal Holland—Che Guevara turned out to have been murdered in Bolivia on the very night of the excursion to Varadero—was to repay the expenses incurred in Cuba. Max was not very keen in retrospect; his alarm at Guerra's words had subsided with distance, and according to him everything had disappeared into the caverns of bureaucratic oblivion. But in Onno's view it was a question of morality, of Kantian practical reason, about which there could be no haggling. Max inquired about the cost per day with full board at the Amsterdam Hilton, which turned out to be a lot of money; they estimated the capitalist profiteering of Conrad Hilton and his henchmen on the Wall Street stock exchange at 50 percent, then divided the amount in revolutionary fashion by two and decided to regard the excursions and car trips as Cuban investments in their future propaganda on behalf of the island. They considered sending the money to the ICAP in the form of an anonymous dollar check; but Ada told them that the conservatory in Havana urgently needed a new stencil machine, which was unobtainable in Cuba, whereupon Max selected a splendid machine and had it shipped out with the message: Hasta la victoria siempre.—Dos amigos.

  When he later reported what he had written, Onno nodded in agreement, but Ada shot him a short glance, which hit him like a blow to the head. He looked down and thought the same as she did. Dos amigos? Did a friend go to bed, or rather into the sea, with his friend's girlfriend, even though she had once been his own girlfriend? In his own words friendship was that condition in which one told the other person even what one would never tell anyone. Would he ever tell Onno what he had gotten up to in the Gulf of Mexico? Whether he told him or not, wasn't it in either case the end of true amistad? If he told him, it need not be replaced by enmity, it could be replaced by all kinds of things, but whatever happened, something else would replace it. But since he was not going to tell him, it had created an even more false situation: for Onno everything went on as before, but Max and Ada now had something to hide—they had both deceived him. It didn't change the actual situation at all, but Onno was now like someone who had invested his fortune in a Rembrandt drawing; the thief had replaced it one night by a faultless reproduction, and for the rest of his life he would have no idea that there was a worthless fake on the wall.

  What Max and Ada on their side did not know was that Onno had had an adventure of his o
wn. But he had been seduced—he had betrayed only his girlfriend, not his friend. Max salved his conscience with the thought that it had not actually happened in October but in June, as the belated payment of a debt for something that one had once bought and no longer possessed but that nevertheless had to be paid for, and a week later it had merged harmoniously with his other incredible experiences on the island, which were summarized by the aphorism that he had seen at Havana airport: "When the impossible becomes the everyday, a revolution is under way." He felt refreshed by the intercontinental excursion, and in the observatory's lecture room he gave an enthusiastic talk on the revolution in Cuba; it even attracted people from other faculties who were interested in hearing the report of an eyewitness. Because there were a few foreigners among them he spoke in English; an American colleague from the Goldstone radio telescope, who was working on the sun, got excited about the policy of strangulation being followed by his government. He was ashamed to be American!

  Onno did his duty with his political friends. He also omitted to mention that he had been a delegate at a conference of radical revolutionaries; no one would believe the true story. However, he did explain that the main problem of the Third World was communication—not only the flow of goods, but also information: it was all totally inadequate, that's why the craziest things were possible there, and he could give astonishing examples of this, but that would take him too far at this point. And then there was the ideology! In Cuba you could learn the meaning of the word radicalism. In the United States the left wing of the Democratic party was still farther right than a right-wing party in the Netherlands, and there was no party taken seriously here as right-wing as the Republican party, let alone its right wing; but in Cuba the government was considerably farther to the left than even the Communist party in the Netherlands. American rage at the existence of that Red bastion off its coast was therefore understandable. For them it was quite simply the Red devil; this was the home of the new redskins who had to be gunned down from the hip; and for Dutch Social Democrats it still meant that the prevailing situation there should be closely observed with the necessary attention, albeit with judicious reserve.

  "I'm going into town for a bit," said Ada.

  She had put her head around the door of Onno's study; she had her coat on. He had a colleague with a mustache visiting him, smoking a large bent pipe; with his back to her Onno gave a wave of his hand, without turning around.

  She was still struck by the amount of grayness in Amsterdam after all those dazzling tropical colors, but it was not really unpleasant. She was at home here. People looked surly and dissatisfied, it was chilly, the trees were becoming bare, and it was getting dark early again, but it was just this variation of the seasons that were unknown in the tropics: no autumn, no winter, no spring, in fact only summer. Were Chopin or Stravinsky conceivable in a climate like that? In any case they hadn't appeared there, and nor had anything else of importance been thought of or invented there, as far as she knew. Because she had the feeling that she would be better off to leave such considerations to Onno and Max, she put these thoughts out of her mind.

  She didn't feel like taking the busy streets with trams running along them, and wandered aimlessly down the Spiegelstraat toward the center of town. She felt restless; suddenly she had become too impatient to practice, like when she wanted to do something and was expecting visitors any moment. Now and then she stopped at the window of an antiques shop and looked at a serene, gleaming gold Buddha with hands outstretched as though warding something off, at a lonely, grubby green Japanese bowl on dun-colored velvet, which no one would pick up if they saw it lying in the gutter, at antique glass and silver and at glowing seventeenth-century paintings. There was no end to the beauty of the world, nor to its cruelty. She had a painful feeling in her breasts—naturally, because she had let her posture at the cello become lazy; that had been her fault from her first lessons onward, when she was six. Tomorrow evening she was playing in The Hague with the orchestra, and a tour of the United States was scheduled for March. The artistic director had impressed on her not to say a word about her performance in Havana, preferably not to the other musicians either, because that might endanger the whole tour. Anyone who had been to Cuba had the plague, "the Red Death," in Poe's words.

  She walked along the Keizersgracht toward the narrow cross streets with the barbaric names that she could never remember, Berenstraat, Wolvenstraat, where small shops sold things: colorful jewelry, semi-antique knickknacks, ivory cigarette holders, rusty thimbles, dolls with yellow lace collars. Her thoughts went back to her own favorite doll, Liesje: a little bald waif with a furtive look, which was precisely what gave her a character of her own.

  At the same moment she remembered the sand-colored coconut mat on which she played and the legs of the table and the country-style chairs with the frayed underside of their wicker seats. Liesje was a doll and at the same time not a doll. When she pulled its arm out, the white elastic band in its shoulder became visible; when she let go, it snapped back against the body with a click and remained in an unpredictable position: "Hello!" or "Look, over there!" She could also twist the arms and legs backward into agonizing positions, but as soon as everything had been brought back within the bounds of possibility, Liesje once again became more than a doll. Then she was also a girl, just like Ada herself, a girl who understood her, and for whom she was what her mother was to her, so that she herself was at the same time Liesje. And both Liesjes were threatened by that appalling monster, which sometimes hid in the shadows of the curtains but also wandered around somewhere near the ceiling without ever showing itself, the Hooblei.

  She remembered this with a start as she was walking across the stamp market, with the shabby philatelists at their stalls, the albums covered with plastic against the drizzle. She hadn't thought of it for ten or fifteen years. The dark threat of the Hooblei had hung over her childhood like a storm that refused to break. The Hooblei wanted to stuff her in a box. There was no one she could talk to about it, only Liesje, who willingly allowed herself to be stuffed into cardboard boxes in the bookshop in order to find out what it was like. And one day the Hooblei struck and Liesje was indeed gone for good, put out for the dustman by her father, with box and all, on the edge of the sidewalk. She still managed to run after it with her father, but was only in time to see how two streets farther on, the loading compartment of the dustcart moved into a vertical position with a screech while Liesje was ground up with all the dirt and rubbish of the world ...

  Wading through pigeons she crossed the Dam and, caught up in the current of warm air behind the revolving doors, she entered the Bijenkorf department store. She strolled aimlessly for a while between women smelling the backs of their hands or having thick red stripes put on them; she stepped onto the elevator and allowed space to sink slowly downward. It made her feel a bit sick; perhaps she should eat something. At a high table in the cafeteria she ate a mackerel roll standing up, and then walked to the toy department, where she subjected herself to the gaze of dozens of dolls, each one with a more stupid expression than the last. None of them was even remotely like Liesje.

  On a shelf there was a contingent of Russian mamushkas in all sizes; brightly painted peasant women that could be opened by twisting the top, whereupon the next one appeared. Her eye lighted on a box full of little peasant women in the same style, also hand-painted, no more than two inches high, with only a pencil sharpener hidden under their skirts. A smile crossed her face. She decided to give one to Max for his birthday in November: a woman with such alarming genitalia—that would teach him. 1 guilder, 5 cents said the small label. She stood with it in her hands undecidedly. For some reason she had the feeling that it was already hers and that she would devalue that possession by paying for it, just as a man using prostitutes knows that the woman does not belong to him. She looked around, closed her hand over the doll, walked on, and a little later slipped it into the pocket of her raincoat.

  Her deed filled her with am
used satisfaction. She was reminded of Onno's argument that winning the 100,000-guilder prize in the lottery gave one deeper satisfaction than earning the same amount, and that was exactly why gambling should be prohibited. Even as a child she had never stolen anything from a shop, and she was surprised how easy it was. Touching the doll now and then, she went to the grocery department, where she immediately did the shopping for that evening. Since she had lived with Onno, she had understood her mother better; having to think every day of what to have to eat was worse than playing scales—and then she was lucky to have Onno, because at least he ate the same thing every evening. She paid for the macaroni and the ham and went to the exit. Dusk was already falling outside.

  But when she had gone through the revolving door, a man suddenly barred her way.

  "Would you mind showing me what you've got in your coat pocket?"

  She looked in alarm at the identity card he held up in front of her, which showed his face, but differently from what she now saw: kinder, looking up in a relaxed way at something pleasant. Now she met a stony look. She handed him the pencil sharpener in embarrassment.

  "Didn't they wrap it up for you? Could I see the receipt?"

  "I haven't got one."

  "Come with me."

  People turned to look at her, trams and cars passed by, on the other side she read the sign DE ROODE LEEUW, and suddenly the matter-of-fact world of freedom disappeared over the horizon, because now she had to go back into the building.

  "I'll pay for it," she said.

  "You can't sort it out with me. After you."

  Passing through an unobtrusive door behind the glittering cosmetics counters, they arrived in a concrete, neon-lit corridor, where in an instant the sweetness of existence had ended. Through a steel door she was admitted to a small, windowless room, which contained only a long table and a couple of chairs. She expected the man to follow her, but the door closed behind her and a key was turned in the lock.