The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  "It's just the same in politics," said Onno. "All improvisation and making do. People believe in masterminds and devilish plots, but if they were to hear how policy is actually made, they'd get the shock of their lives. It's just the same as at home. I think it's the same everywhere when you look behind the scenes. It's a miracle the world still goes around."

  In the service hut, where a couple of observers were sitting at the panels, he inquired what was being observed, or eavesdropped on, at the moment.

  "I think they're calibrating," said Max. "What are we doing, Floris, 3C296?"

  A man of his own age, perhaps a little younger, said without taking his eyes off his meters: "Yes, but there's interference from somewhere. It's probably one of those bloody weather balloons from Cuxhavn, with its thirty-eighth harmonic. Why don't we call the air base at Leeuwarden and get them to shoot the damn things down?"

  "They cause just as much interference."

  That really was the problem, said Max; Onno was right about his moped. Once you had the information on punch cards, you had to first work out what you'd really measured and make sure you'd gotten the astronomy out of it.

  "Excuse me, but I think that I'll have to lend a hand. Why don't you two take a walk across the heath, and I'll see you at about dinnertime. I've reserved a table at what you might call a gourmet restaurant in the village. And remember, if a storm starts, you must lie flat on the ground and crawl back. That's the kind of thing you don't know when you are a city person."

  But the moment he said this, he was struck as though by lightning by the realization that this would be the solution to his problem: if Ada were to meet her end in that way—and he wanted that thought to be immediately burned out of his head.

  It hadn't been necessary to reserve a table; because of the bad weather they were the only ones in the restaurant. In the dark, primitive space, full of vague paintings and prints and iron pots on the walls, they chose a table as far away as possible from the windows, against which gusts of rain blew now and then. Max lit the candle and listened to Onno's argument about the difference between rotten weather in the city and rotten weather in the country. In Onno's view you got wetter from the rain in the country— weather didn't belong in the city at all; on the other hand people in the country became depressed because of it, while in the city it was simply inappropriate.

  "You don't give me the impression of being depressed at the moment, though."

  "No, not me of course, because I'm above all that. I dwell in the regions of pure reason, on which the weather conditions have no influence. But you—you seem depressed to me. Is there something wrong?"

  "Of course not," said Max. He looked uncertainly at Ada, whom he had just now wished dead. "What could be wrong with me?"

  "That's what I'm asking. Perhaps you come here too often. What's going to happen to you when that installation in Westerbork is finished?"

  "I'll see about that nearer the time."

  "How far have they gotten?"

  "The twelfth mirror will be finished this year."

  "That's sure to be a fantastic sight," said Ada. "One of them is already impressive enough."

  "I think so too."

  Onno looked at him searchingly. "Do you mean you've never been to see them yet?"

  "No. I mean, yes. I've not been to look yet."

  "Isn't it near here?" asked Ada.

  "Fifteen miles farther on."

  "Very close, then."

  Onno placed his hand on hers for a moment, and Max could see that this was not only a gesture of tenderness but also an instruction to be quiet. Obviously she didn't realize what Westerbork meant to him: he had never told her; but probably she had been told by Onno meanwhile and had simply forgotten the name. It wasn't exactly pleasant to find himself treated with such circumspection, like a patient.

  "But I know the site backward. I have all the plans in my head, and I can take you to the parade ground or the punishment barracks blindfolded."

  It looked increasingly as if he were going to become telescope astronomer in Westerbork—that is, the astronomer who worked regularly with the technicians on the spot—and he would see what happened then. Perhaps it was best to put it off until there was no alternative, just as one shouldn't first feel how cold the water was with one's toe but simply dive in. Perhaps it had been obscured for the last few months by the problem he had inflicted on himself.

  Not even the neat black suit could change the coarse face of the waiter, whose grandparents had probably been born in a turf hut. But he opened the champagne expertly, without making the cork pop. Max tasted it, waited until he had poured the glasses—with Ada putting her hand over her glass—and then proposed a toast.

  "To our simultaneous conception!"

  Ada looked at him in astonishment. Had he told Onno about this? "What on earth do you mean?"

  He realized immediately what she thought he meant—but before he could answer Onno said:

  "I told you about that, Ada, but you weren't listening. You thought: yes, yes, I'm sure that's true. That's what we're celebrating here; the silent, holy night of Van der Lubbe, the most influential Dutch politician who ever lived."

  While they studied the menu, he told her again—and he described the occasion on which Max had worked it out for him. "Mrs. Hartman, can Onno come out to play?" Max had already almost forgotten. It was a year ago, but it seemed something from the distant past.

  "How is Helga?" he asked. "Have you seen her again?"

  "Never. She's sitting dutifully at the Art Historical Institute keeping the catalog up to date."

  They ate wild boar, and Onno expanded on his domestic political adventures, while Max and Ada listened politely. A Great Leap Forward was being made, he said, in which what his father and his friends had prevented in 1945 was finally being achieved—that was, going hand in hand with a rabid wave of democratization, which was not devoid of plebian features: no one was allowed to achieve any more than anyone else—and if you simply promoted that and meanwhile you yourself aristocratically achieved what no one else achieved, then you were assured of power to the end of the century.

  "Machiavelli did not live in vain," said Max.

  "Oh, Machiavelli!" cried Onno. "A name that is mentioned too rarely!" After coffee Onno asked for the check, but the waiter said that everything had been settled.

  "You're my guests," said Max, getting up. "I'll have a meal on you sometime in Amsterdam."

  26

  Fancy

  It was still pouring rain, and now there was a strong wind. They rushed to the car. Driving down the dark, abandoned roads they reached the observatory in ten minutes. The lights were still on everywhere. Observations were still being made, and the Antipodean was still sitting at the dining table in the guest suite. It was ten-thirty and Max asked if they wanted to go to bed yet—if not, he still had some wine and rum-and-Coke in the kitchen. Ada said that she would have a glass of cola, even if it might not be a good idea for a pregnant woman; but Onno thought alcohol was deadly to harmful bacteria and therefore extremely good for growing embryos. It was as though Max could see the colorful pile of books on pregnancy and childbirth that was of course at Ada's bedside.

  Outside, the storm was getting worse and worse and they sat comfortably around the open hearth, in which there was no fire. Onno now made a distinction between "large weather" and "small weather": the weather could be so bad that it fell below zero and became good again. Thunder and lightning, breached dikes, floods—you couldn't say that they were "bad weather"; Max then told them that Dickens gave a dinner for his friends every Christmas Eve, in which a hired tramp had to stand outside in the snowstorm under the window and shout every few minutes, "Brr! How cold it is!"—so that the people inside enjoyed the warmth and the goose even more.

  "What a bastard," said Ada.

  "Not at all," said Onno. "That's perfectly all right dialectically. It shows that in his way of living, he was a great writer."

  "You two hav
e strange ideas of greatness."

  "So what is the mark of greatness according to you?"

  "Modesty."

  "Ada!" cried Onno, grabbing his head in despair. "Anything but that!"

  "I mean it. If you ask me, Bach felt very small compared with music."

  "But meanwhile he did write one masterpiece after the other. Very modest. Anyway, what is 'music'? Without Bach and the other composers music would not even exist. Or do you think that 'music' is something that is simply floating up in the sky somewhere?"

  "Perhaps, yes."

  "All women are Platonists," said Onno, shaking his head.

  "And what about Max, then, with that telescope here?" asked Ada, turning to him. "Don't you feel small when you look at that enormous universe?"

  "I think," said Max cautiously, "that you're confusing two different things. Einstein was also a modest man, you always read, but meanwhile he did tell us how the universe is made. Onno's right: how modest is that, actually? You may say that he didn't brag about it in his everyday life, but it wasn't necessary. But then you are seeing modesty only as a psychological category—"

  "And psychology is always uninteresting," interrupted Onno. "Anyway, how modest was Freud? Read the documents and tremble."

  "To be honest," said Max, "as a boy I never understood how anyone could feel small compared with the universe. After all, man knows how overwhelmingly large it is, and a few other things besides—and that means he is not small! The fact that man has discovered all this precisely proves his greatness. The amazing thing is rather that this insignificant being can contain the whole universe in the tiny space under his skull—and, what's more, can reflect on it, as we are doing now. That makes him in a certain sense even greater than the universe."

  "Yes," said Onno to Ada with a smile. "You should listen to that closely."

  The flue of the open hearth was humming like an out-of-tune organ pipe in the storm.

  "Of course you can imagine," said Max, pouring another glass, "someone saying that man must feel small compared with his own greatness, since he has it from God."

  "But that makes him a masochist," interrupted Onno. "And he's overlooking the fact that God is a product of mankind."

  Max studied the deep red color of his wine and was silent. The Ego and His Own. He was occupied with extragalactic research—the signals of cosmic events that had occurred billions of years ago in the young universe; but those paled into insignificance alongside the event that perhaps awaited him, on a small planet in an insignificant solar system, on the periphery of one of the scores of billions of galaxies. But that awareness did not lead him in any sense to something like "a sense of relativity." On the contrary, the birth of a human being was not an insignificant event in the measured immeasurability of the universe but rather an event of metacosmic proportions—even without God. Especially without God.

  Floris came in dripping wet, and with disheveled hair.

  "We shall have to secure the telescope, Max, otherwise we'll have to hunt for it on the heath tomorrow. It's gale-force ten, and according to the meteorologists in De Bilt, it's going to get worse—they're expecting gusts of wind of nearly a hundred miles an hour. It appears to be the last remnant of a hurricane from the Caribbean that's been roaming the ocean for a couple of months. Can you come and lend a hand? We've already positioned it with its back to the wind."

  Onno and the Australian put their coats on too. Ada said that she was going to bed; she had her score of Das Lied von der Erde with her and was going to work on it for a bit.

  "Right!" cried Onno when they got outside.

  In the howling storm trees were waving and swishing, as if wanting finally to shake themselves loose of their chains.

  The rain pelted in their faces, and they bent forward as they walked down the path toward the telescope, where the beams of flashlights were moving about and ten or twenty people were at work. The mirror was slowly turning into the horizontal position. Blocks were being lugged up and clamped to the wheels; someone shouted that the azimuth motor must be turned off; someone else screamed that Floris must now go up top to turn off the elevation motors. The whole procedure went by the book, which provided for such contingencies—and half an hour later people looked with satisfaction at the reflector, pointing immovably at the zenith, like a majestic sacrificial bowl.

  Everyone assembled in the laboratory, drenched to the skin, to talk things over and to listen to the director's speech of thanks.

  "Look at my brand-new chestnut-brown suedes," said Max, and pointed to his muddy black footwear.

  "Serves you right," said Onno.

  The caretaker's wife had made hot chocolate, which she poured out of a huge gray enamel kettle into thick white mugs, which gave everyone the hilarious feeling of being back home with Mom and Dad after a well-spent day.

  "I'm going to become an astronomer, too," said Onno with pleasure. "There's real human warmth here."

  At that moment a girl called: "Is there a Mr. Quist here?"

  "Yes?" said Onno in amazement.

  "Telephone for you."

  "This can't be true," said Onno, getting up.

  Max didn't believe it, either. It was nearly midnight—who would want to reach him here at this hour? Perhaps there was something wrong with his father or his mother.

  A little later Onno came back. From his face Max could see that there had indeed been bad news.

  "Ada's father has had a heart attack. That was her mother. It seems to be fairly serious, and she asked if we can go straight to Leiden. He's been admitted to the Academic Hospital as an emergency case."

  "There are no more trains," said Max, and also got up. "Let's go. I'll drive."

  They went through the building to the guest suite. Ada was already asleep, with her face on one side, her forefinger in the closed score. While Onno woke her, Max went to his own room to pack his things. He thought of Ada's father, whom he could scarcely remember, felled by a blow to his chest on a stepladder in front of his bookcases. Obviously anything could happen at any moment; everyone lived from day to day in a sort of blind faith that everything would remain as it was, and then suddenly it all changed. He quickly fetched the punch cards for the Computer Institute and went to the lounge with the two bags, where a little while later Ada and Onno also appeared.

  "Christ, Ada," Max said, kissing her on the forehead. "What a mess. Has he had heart trouble before?"

  "I think he has, but he didn't want to admit it. Men are always so tough, aren't they? Let's get going."

  None of them had an overcoat. Outside, Max ran through the storm to his car, which he drove close to the door of the guest suite. Because the top was up, Onno now had to fold himself behind the two seats to a quarter of his size; Ada offered to change places with him, but he wouldn't hear of it. The rain pelted on the cloth top, and with his headlights on high beam, Max turned onto the sandy road.

  The wood moved as though made not of plants but of animals; everywhere there were branches that had blown down in the mud, which he had to avoid. Hunched over his steering wheel, occasionally wiping the mist off the windshield with his forearm, Max peered at the road. The path gave way to an asphalt road, on which the cloudburst produced myriads of dancing mice: thick bubbles with feet, a largely absurd polka, since he could register only a fraction of the bubbles. The lights were off in virtually all the houses in the village; on the pavements there were large puddles that the drains could not cope with and which he caused to shoot into front gardens with a sound of sharpening knives. When they passed the restaurant he suddenly had a quick vision of the interior: the waiter and the cook had gone home, the lights were out, but in a fathomless dark abandonment the tables and the chairs and the pots on the wall were still there.

  On the provincial road, where no lights were on at this hour, he had to grip the steering wheel tighter to keep control of the car. The asphalt gleamed from the water, but fortunately the car was weighed down by the weight of Onno on the rear axle,
and by Ada, who counted for two. It was raining so hard that the wiper had virtually no effect on the curtain of water hitting the front windshield. Immediately correcting for each gust of wind, Max tried to keep the white line in the middle of the road in view, which his headlights changed into cones full of dazzling pearls.

  "I'm sorry," he said, glancing at Ada. "I have to drive slowly."

  "Look out!" she cried.

  Right across the road lay an uprooted tree, which had fallen across the road from the left. He braked but immediately felt that the tires were losing contact with the asphalt. He declutched and swung the wheel; while Ada grabbed his shoulder, he came to a halt with his front wheels in the right-hand shoulder, a few feet from the towering scene of havoc.

  "Good God" he said. "That was a close shave. We'll have to go back."

  He shifted into reverse and tried to get off the shoulder, but the front wheels had sunk too far.

  "We'll have to push, Onno."

  He turned the engine off and opened the door, which was immediately almost wrenched out of his hands. He tipped the back of his seat forward to let Onno out.

  "Should I help?" asked Ada.

  "For God's sake, stay where you are," said Onno.

  "And we have to hurry," said Max, shutting the door, "before another car comes along."

  In the howling pandemonium they went to the shoulder and in the light of the headlights grabbed the bumper. Now sinking up to his ankles into the mud in his new shoes, Max counted to three—but at the same moment a second thing happened. Out of the din of the storm and the pouring rain a new noise emerged: a dark wheezing, which turned into deep cracking and rustling. Max looked around, up, and then suddenly saw a dark crown coming toward him from the other side of the road, like a giant hand. He grabbed hold of Onno and pulled him to the ground with his own weight. With a thundering crash, the tree hit the road and the car, which absorbed the impact for them.

  Although the tumult did not subside, it was as though a total silence had suddenly fallen. The headlights had gone out; branches hung over him. Max groped for Onno.