The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  Onno had already asked him a few times where on earth he had been for the last few weeks—he seldom got any answer when he called the Vossiusstraat—to which Max replied that there were regular evening meetings on the program of the new telescope in Westerbork, which was due to be inaugurated that same year. Onno was quite prepared to believe him; he himself did little else but attend meetings anymore. After Berkeley, Amsterdam, and Berlin—where Rudi Dutschke had meanwhile been shot—the students had now revolted in Paris, too. That immediately had another, more serious dimension, in view of the fact that there it was taking place in a revolutionary tradition; the revolt promptly spread to the workers, who occupied their factories, and suddenly things began to get serious in Europe. L'Imagination au pouvoir! A new epoch was about to begin, and in the Netherlands too the new guard must be ready to take over power. In mid-May, in order to bring himself up-to-date, Onno went to Paris for a few days with some comrades-in-arms, where in the crowded cafes around the occupied Sorbonne he saw various activists he knew from Havana, orating with Cuban authority, the illuminated look of victory in their eyes. But, as he told Max after his return, he didn't make himself known to them in the presence of his Dutch friends: they did not need to know precisely what he had been up to in Cuba in order to be able to use it against him one day.

  "Nice profession you're in," said Max.

  "You're telling me. Politics are conducted by glorified gangsters, and I'm the meanest gangster of them all. Not a job for gentle-natured, unworldly spirits like you."

  But world events were passing Ada by. Max had not seen her again since the night of the accident; he felt a resistance to visiting her, and because he didn't have to feel guilty on her account, he didn't feel guilty anymore. Sophia never inquired whether he had been to the Wilhelmina Hospital yet; but when Onno called up one Sunday morning and asked if he would go with him, Max could not refuse. And an hour later they were walking through the streets of the extensive complex of somber buildings, which dated from the last century. Even outdoors in the windless spring morning there was the smell of Lysol, mixed with that of oranges.

  She lay in a remote wing with six other coma patients in a ward painted a dirty yellow. It was visiting time, and silent or whispering relatives were already sitting by every bed; most patients had bandages around their heads. A male nurse was sitting reading at a table, under a monthly calendar with a large photo of the pyramid of Cheops. Ada was lying on a sheepskin; her head, with a catheter in her nose, was turned slightly aside on the pillow. She was breathing peacefully, eyes closed, as though she were asleep—and at the same time one could tell in some way that it wasn't sleep. The expression on her face had changed, but it was difficult to say in what way: there was something eternal about it, as though it were slowly making way for an image of itself. Her arms lay next to her body, the hands motionless. What had unmistakably changed in any case, grown, risen, was the wave under the blanket. She was now in her seventh month, and what was growing there inside her was no image, but a creature of flesh and blood. It was as though she only continued to exist to give birth to that, like a helpless queen bee kept alive by drones.

  Max and Onno, standing on either side of the high, tightly tucked bed, looked at each other.

  "The statue gives birth to a human being," said Max softly, immediately sensing that he was going too far.

  Onno shivered. That expressed exactly what he had been feeling all those weeks. She had been reduced to an oven, which was different in kind to the bread that was rising in it. Would the moment ever come when she opened her eyes? Today again nothing had changed, and a short while ago he had virtually lost hope, but he did not want to admit it to himself; and the problems that probably lay in store for him, he only wanted to think about when it was certain. He had the vague feeling that by assuming this he was in some way bringing the irrevocable closer.

  "Everyone is convinced," he said, "that the people in those beds can't hear anything, and yet everyone is sitting whispering."

  "So that they won't hear," Max added. "So perhaps they can hear something."

  "Do you really think so?"

  Max shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know. We're whispering too, aren't we? Why are we here, for that matter? Perhaps deep down we're convinced that those patients here can take in everything but simply can't express it." Onno opened his mouth, but closed it again—whereupon Max said, "Yes, I know about that E.E.G. too, of course."

  Marijke had also said something like that, Onno remembered, but of course that was utter nonsense. He was going to counter by saying that in that case the dead also obviously heard everything, because people whispered in rooms where someone had died too; but Ada's presence prevented him—so that perhaps it was not such an absurd notion after all. Moreover, he knew that Max would immediately push his theory to the limit, just as he always pushed everything to the limit, and would also be ready on this occasion to widen the border area between life and death into an expanse of no-man's-land. From what Onno knew of him, with his rather homosexual tendency to symmetry, he would take a postmortem period of nine months—thus immediately explaining the deeper reason for the period of mourning.

  Max, for his part, didn't really believe his theory either—but he too was quite sure that he would not dare to whisper in Ada's ear, "Your father is dead, and I am having an affair with your mother." He read the card on the flowers that stood next to the bed:

  "From Bruno." He looked at Onno. "An absurd gesture. Waste of money."

  "He did it for himself."

  "Worse still."

  When Onno realized that Max's answer implied that he was sure that Ada would never wake up, he said: "Or perhaps he hoped that she would come to and immediately see his flowers."

  There was a silence in the ward. The motionless patients, with the visitors looking at them: the living dead.

  "It's like a museum in here," whispered Max.

  At the same moment as Onno, he took Ada's hand in his: Onno the one with which she had controlled the strings, Max the one with which she had held the bow. They both felt that the hand, although warm, had become a thing. Here and there rust erupted through the white paint of the bed.

  "Let's go," said Onno after a few moments.

  They laid the hands back in place, Onno pressed a kiss on Ada's forehead, and they went to the door. As Max put his hand out toward the handle, it moved downward and a doctor in a white, open jacket appeared, letting Sophia through. They stared at each other in surprise.

  "Good heavens," said Onno. "Hello, Mother."

  "Hello, Onno. Hello, Max."

  "Hello, Mrs. Brons." Max shook hands with her, knowing for sure that no one could tell anything by looking at either of them.

  The doctor, a small, balding man, was wearing a pair of glasses with double lenses, the front pair of which was turned up, so that he seemed to be looking at right angles into the sky. After Onno had introduced him as Ada's neurologist, Dr. Stevens, they returned to the bed.

  Max had a strange feeling. Suddenly all four of them, or in fact all five of them, were together. But who were they? Onno simply thought he was in the company of his friend, his mother-in-law, and the mother of his child. But at the same time he was in the company of the mistress of his friend, who himself was perhaps the father of the child that his wife was expecting and who could therefore no longer be rightfully called his friend, and nor could his wife be called his wife. Sophia knew a little more than Onno, but not everything, as Max himself did.

  Sophia ran her hand through Ada's hair and then loosened the sheet a little at the foot end.

  "She'll get club feet like that," she said, without looking at Stevens. And then with an impassive face, "The news is not good, Onno."

  Onno looked at the neurologist in alarm.

  "Well..." said the latter, glancing at Max.

  "Go ahead, I have no secrets from my friend."

  "We've just been talking about it. The E.E.G. has deteriorated seriously in the l
ast few days, and there are other indications that you must be prepared for the fact that your wife is in all probability in an irreversible coma."

  Onno stared at him, then glanced at Ada and left the ward. Max hesitated, but then followed him into the corridor, where Onno was staring out of the window across the bleached roadways of the hospital site.

  "I knew it," he said. "I knew all along. We all knew. What in heaven's name are we going to do now?"

  In his eyes Max saw complete, unbearable despair—which at the same instant seem to leap across to him, like a summons, a demand!

  When Onno phoned his youngest sister that same afternoon to give her the bad news, she told him that members of the family had been telephoning and talking things over for days, discussing what was to happen if Ada were to remain in a vegetative state. That immediately irritated him beyond measure: he would decide for himself. But on the other hand the solution must come from that direction; he understood that too. "Family is forever," he was in the habit of saying—and when Dol suggested organizing a family council, he agreed. In the evening she called back with the message that their father wanted to invite the vicar along too, to which Onno replied that in that case he wanted it called off.

  Of course everything had been prearranged by the clan. It would only seem to be a consultation; it was clear to him at once how it would turn out. In the immediate family there were only two couples with small children: that of Diederic's oldest son, Hans, and that of Trees's oldest daughter, Paula. He had never been very interested in those secondary branches; he occasionally saw their offspring at parties, but they had always grown and changed so much that he couldn't remember who was who, and he didn't really care.

  His nephew Hans, at present first secretary in the Copenhagen embassy, with whom he had never exchanged more than a few words, was on the threshold of a promising career in the diplomatic service; partly by virtue of being a Quist, he was predestined for ambassadorial posts in the most awful countries, possibly eventually achieving the highest state of diplomatic bliss: London. He was married to a banker's daughter from Breda, whose father had the notion of calling her Hadewych. His niece Paula, whom he didn't really know either, had chosen a freight-shipping magnate from Rotterdam, Jan-Kees, who had brought three children from a previous marriage: a clumsy, jovial man approaching forty, who had a loud voice and smoked cigars.

  Two days later a heavyweight delegation had assembled at his parents' house in The Hague. With the light behind him, next to the lectern with the Authorized Version of the Bible on it, old Quist sat in his winged armchair and surveyed his children and grandchildren. Women were in the majority. Diederic and his Antonia were not there—they were paying an official visit to Indonesia—but their Copenhagen Hans and his Hadewych were; since Hans had to visit the Foreign Office anyway, he had taken the opportunity. As Onno had expected, Paula and Jan-Kees had also turned up. Like Hadewych, Paula was Ada's age, perhaps a little older, and expecting her second child. Only Sophia did not belong to the immediate family circle. After Coba had served tea and gingersnaps and had left the room, Onno assumed that his father would open the meeting, like the chairman of the cabinet—but it was his mother who said:

  "The poor child. I didn't sleep a wink last night. Is there really no hope, Onno?"

  He shrugged. "Nothing seems to be a hundred percent certain in medicine, but according to the doctors we must assume that things will stay as they are. You can ask Karel."

  "I phoned the Wilhelmina Hospital yesterday," said his brother-in-law the brain surgeon. "I'm afraid that's how it is. And perhaps," he said, with a quick glance at Onno, "this may be the lesser evil. A protracted coma like this would be bound to have dreadful consequences, such as complete loss of memory or complete change of character."

  Complete loss of memory. Complete change of character. The words sank into Onno like bullets. No one had said that to him before—not Karel and not the doctors in the hospital; obviously everyone had been hoping recently that she would not wake up.

  "It's dreadful for you, too," said Mrs. Quist to Sophia. "First the death of your husband and now this dreadful fate befalling your only child."

  Onno looked at his mother-in-law. Since he had once turned up at the ward and had seen her filing Ada's nails, which were no longer bitten, he had softened his harsh judgment of her. It was obvious that she felt ill at ease in this company, but she sat up straight and held her ground.

  "I've always known that life is a bit like the weather. It can change completely at any moment."

  After these words, which did not testify immediately to Christian sentiments, there was a moment's silence. From the distance, where there was roadwork going on, came the sound of jackhammers. Onno hoped there wouldn't be some soothing quotation from the Heidelberg catechism; fortunately, everyone turned out to have enough of an instinct to avoid this. Anyway, he reflected, it applied mainly to weather conditions in the Netherlands and not those in the Sahara; but he kept that to himself.

  "Things are as they are," he said—with the feeling that this tautology contained the ultimate wisdom. "Perhaps we shouldn't talk about our emotions this afternoon but about the question of what we are to do next. If everything goes well, our child will be born in two months, in July. And according to the people who should know, there's no reason to suppose that it won't go well, as far as that's concerned. But after that?"

  "Of course," said Trees, his eldest sister, adjusting her silk scarf, "no one expects you to start washing diapers."

  Onno heard the unmistakable silent addition ". . . while you're still in diapers yourself—but he let that pass, not only because this was not the moment to get prickly, but also because he didn't entirely disagree. He would put the safety pins not just through the diaper but also through the baby, be lost in thought and let it fall off the chest of drawers, pick up the telephone and meanwhile let it drown in the bathtub.

  "Of course not," said her husband. "That's women's work. These days you hear different opinions, but the fact is that women have children and men don't. They only have it on hearsay. So let's keep it simple. Onno's child is due shortly, he can't look after it himself, so who is going to look after it?"

  In saying this, Coen had reduced things to their essentials—probably he had lots more to do this afternoon. With raised eyebrows, the public prosecutor looked around the circle, so the first one to raise a finger would be assigned the child by right, and the matter would be settled; they would go on discussing the weather, be given another cup of tea by Coba, and then they would simply head off home.

  "We haven't got any children," said Dol, "and I'd like nothing better than to take on yours, Onno. I'm almost forty, so it would still be possible. We've had a long talk about it, but we finally think that it's better for the baby to have younger foster parents. Isn't that right, Karel?"

  The surgeon sat with the tips of his outspread fingers touching; he took them apart for a moment and allowed them to return to the original position. That gesture made him look more than ever like Count Frankenstein.

  "Of course it would be best to be brought up in a family with other young children."

  Onno nodded and looked at Sophia. "It seems right to me."

  "It must go where it has most chance of developing its full potential," said Sophia.

  That sounded fairly obvious, but Onno also heard a distant echo of Solomon's judgment "Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other." He looked at the two couples, Hans and Hadewych and Paula and Jan-Kees—but first Margo spoke, the wife of his brother Menno, the professor, who had been prevented from coming himself because he had to account for his actions at a student meeting. As always her eyelids were swollen and red-rimmed, as though she had been crying, but actually she was good-humored.

  "Ours are already in high school, and to tell you the truth, I can't bear the thought of having to wash diapers again. And from what I know of Onno, he wouldn't want his child to grow up in Groningen a
nyway. Isn't that so? To you that would be the depths of the provinces, and it would also be too far away for you."

  "No one has to apologize for anything at all here," said Onno. "I'm not asking anyone for anything."

  "Right," said Jan-Kees. "Then we'll offer it to you." He put his cigar in the ashtray, stretched his legs, crossed his legs, and put his hands at the back of his neck. "I've already got a house full of children, so yours won't make any difference. We live in a place in the country near Rotterdam, with quite a nice garden because I've got a transshipment company that makes a bundle. I may be right-wing, but I look after my workers, and anyone who doesn't play ball gets the boot. We will bring up your child completely in your spirit, you can leave that to me, because before I belonged to high society, I was a Socialist myself. And it won't cost you a penny. Well? Have we got a deal or haven't we? Your turn."

  This was business Rotterdam-style. There was a slightly embarrassed silence, but Onno liked what he heard. Of course Jan-Kees was being provocative, maybe out of embarrassment; he was pretending to be what he ultimately was; but the fact that he was pretending to be like that meant that at the same time he was not.

  "You're being terribly tactful again," said Paula, smiling apologetically at Onno.

  "Yes, don't you think?" said Jan-Kees.

  "Very," said Coen, his father-in-law.

  "But we mean it, Uncle Onno. We'd like to do it," said Paula.

  The fact that his child would grow up in a reactionary environment was no problem for Onno—the same thing had happened to him; many of his progressive friends also came from more or less well-to-do circles. But Jan-Kees was of course a vulgar money-earner, devoid of any cultural interest; he also had something unmistakably animal about him, with his pointed teeth and his heavy, dark beard, which came bursting out of his face. On the other hand his Paula made a sweet, defenseless impression, sitting there with her fat tummy in her ankle-length black, gold-embroidered Afghan tent dress. Physically, she wasn't anything like her formidable mother Trees, but she was probably the boss at home. There had to be something of a lion-tamer in her.