The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  "Do I really have to go on doing this for four years?" he asked Helga reproachfully as he sat on her sofa. "And perhaps for another four years after that? I'll be fifty-two by then! How long can you be a democrat with no power?"

  "Who knows," she said. "Perhaps there'll be another crisis soon, or something unexpected will happen that will change everything."

  "Oh Lord!" he exclaimed. "Make all things new!"

  There was no interim crisis, and for the four years that the despicable, scandalous right-wing cabinet was in power—as the counterpart of the Spanish-Catholic-Habsburg tyranny in the sixteenth century—he saw Quinten even less than before—no more than a couple of times a year: on his birthday, at Christmas, at Granny To's funeral—partly because he no longer had a chauffeur-driven car, and not even one without a chauffeur, because neither he nor Helga had a driver's license: driving, in his opinion, was for chauffeurs and not for passengers like him. Increasingly, Quinten became an incident from the past for him.

  But at Groot Rechteren life went on even without him. Since Quinten had appeared at the door of Sophia's bedroom that night, she had, as Max had expected, no longer appeared in his room. After seven years of clandestine faithfulness, which at the same time had been thrilling deceit, and after a few weeks of celibacy, he had started an affair with a secretary at the observatory in Dwingeloo—Tsjallingtsje Popma, a tall blond woman of about thirty, with a good figure but also with a severe rural Christian appearance.

  She looked like a sculpture by Arno Breker, Hitler's favorite sculptor. Whenever she saw him, in his elegant, worldly outfit, a look of deep revulsion and contempt had appeared in her eyes; that had left him indifferent, although he had interpreted it from the very beginning as a declaration of love, because of course one did not look like that at someone one scarcely knew. But with the help of his self-denial she began to excite him more and more each day. The very first evening after he had proposed going to see the new moon with her, in the thundering silence on the heath her virtuous revulsion turned into struggling lust and loud cries of "Oh God! Oh God!" which frightened the grouse and heath frogs, so that with his trousers around his knees, he stopped with a laugh and listened to hear whether any alarmed astronomers were approaching.

  But afterward: blood and tears. He had deflowered her.

  "I'm so ashamed, I don't even know you ..."

  "Well, we have that in common."

  She lived in a rented room in Steenwijk over a little stationer's, which also sold postcards and photo albums. One of the things that made him grow fond of her was the touching, girlish interior, with a little collection of old tin toys; because it had gotten too expensive for her in recent years, he occasionally bought her a colored wind-up bird when he was in Leiden.

  They did not talk much, least of all about him and his life: they listened to music, he unfolded his radio maps, she made a cable-knit sweater for him that he would have to wear, and after taking a shower he went home. Although she had once asked him, he never took her to Groot Rechteren—although it was not primarily out of consideration for Sophia. Since after all there had never been anything between Sophia and him during the day, after a few months he had told her casually in the kitchen:

  "Oh, by the way, I should tell you something, Sophia. I've got a girlfriend."

  "How nice for you," she said, without looking up. "I can smell that you occasionally use a different soap."

  "Respectable woman—a vicar's daughter from Enter," he added, but she didn't ask anything more; nor did she indicate that she would like to meet her.

  They never talked about it after that. But it was mainly Quinten who prevented him from introducing his sturdy, affectionate Tsjallingtsje. Groot Rechteren was first and foremost Quinten's domain, which Max must not disturb with his private frivolities; apart from that he was a little frightened of the look Quinten might focus on her. Nor did he discuss her with Onno.

  As he grew up, Quinten became increasingly incomprehensible to everyone. He had no friends. Usually, he sat reading in his room, or wandered through the surrounding countryside—occasionally with his recorder. As Max and Sophia sat on the balcony, they sometimes heard pastoral sounds coming from the woods, from his favorite spot by the pond with the rhododendrons. That sound, mingling with the song of the invisible birds, touched Max more than the most moving performance of the most beautiful symphony by the best orchestra, and he could see that Sophia too was thinking of Ada at those moments, but it was never mentioned.

  When he was ten, in 1978, Ms. Trip stopped Sophia on the outer bridge one afternoon.

  "Has Quinten told you?"

  "Told me? What do you mean?"

  The previous day she had been walking in Klein Rechteren with the baroness in the rose garden. As he frequently was recently, Quinten was with Rutger. In general the baroness was not very keen on unannounced visits, but because Rutger obviously perked up when Quinten came, he was always welcome. Suddenly she heard heart-rending whines coming from the direction of the terrace. They rushed toward it and saw Rutger sitting on the ground crying, with his arms around Quinten's knees—around those of his torturer, as appeared a little later.

  Quinten was busy cutting Rutger's cat's cradle into pieces—the most beautiful thing he possessed, his endless creation that he had been working on for years. His mother also regularly took the scissors to it, but of course never when he was there. They had been too flabbergasted to intervene; moreover, they had the feeling that something was happening that must not be interrupted. They were also paralyzed by the strange beauty of the scene: the wonderfully beautiful boy with that misshapen imbecile twenty years his senior at his feet, while in the vegetable garden the peacock looked at them with a fan of fifty eyes.

  "Yes, calm down," said Quinten as he went on cutting the thread into yard long lengths. "Wait. We're going to make a great big curtain. You'd like to do that, wouldn't you, make a great big curtain?"

  "Yes," sobbed Rutger. "Don't do that, don't cut. .."

  "But if you want to make a great big curtain, you've got to do that. Then you mustn't just go on making one thread the whole time. You've got to weave. Look, like this ..."

  Then he'd sat next to him on the ground, took a large needle out of his pocket, and picked up the stiff, coarse-meshed base a yard square that he had brought with him and which he had turned out to have bought with his pocket money from the fabric store in the village. While he threaded a length of yarn through it, explaining what he was doing the whole time, Rutger stopped crying and looked breathlessly, chest still heaving, at what was happening.

  "Now your turn," said Quinten, giving him the needle. "And when this one is completely full, we'll buy a new cloth. And when that's full, then we'll sew it onto this one and then we'll buy another one— until," he said with a sweep of his arm, "the curtain is as big as the whole world!"

  "Yes!" Rutger laughed, dribbling.

  "And if you make another curtain after that, then we'll hang it on the sun and the moon!"

  "Yes! Yes!" Rutger bent over to him and gave him a kiss on his cheek. No one had ever had the idea that it was possible to intervene in Rutger's senseless activity, let alone that anyone would have had the courage to carry it through.

  "How did you get that brainwave?" Max asked him that evening in awe. "How did you dare?"

  "Well, I just did . . ." said Quinten.

  Max looked at Sophia and said: "That boy has an absolutist streak in his character."

  The nurturing architectural dream that had appeared after his visit to his mother turned out to recur every few months. But it never ended in a nightmare, although the fortified door with the padlock on it at "the center of the world" must still be there. Whenever he had wandered around the limitless construction, through the labyrinth of rooms, past the decorated interior facades, along the galleries, he lay still for a moment after waking up, cracking the top joints of his thumbs as he did every morning, and tried to retain the memory—but always the images took the
ir leave after a few minutes, like in the movies when the end of the film became invisible if the lights went on too soon. He gradually began to wonder where that building was. It must actually be somewhere, because each time he saw it clearly. But since he never met anyone there, he was certainly the only person who knew of its existence—and that meant a lot, because it was secret and he mustn't speak to anyone about it: of course not to Max, but not to Granny either; not even to his father, the few times that he saw him. For that matter how could it simply be somewhere in the world when the whole world was not built up? Perhaps it was in another world. He had also given it a name: the Citadel.

  Sometimes he did not think of the Citadel for weeks. If it presented itself again, he sometimes went to Mr. Themaat's to see if there were illustrations of anything like it in his thick books. The professor had retired and now lived permanently at Groot Rechteren, so his library had expanded still further. Quinten was always welcome. Occasionally it happened that Mr. Themaat was in his rocking chair without a book on his lap. His face suddenly changed unrecognizably, as if it had been turned to stone, and that stone looked at him with two eyes expressing such total despair that he went away at once. It was as though Mr. Themaat in that state no longer even knew who he was. For a few days he did not dare visit him; but when he came back there was suddenly no trace of the stone.

  "What are you looking for, for goodness' sake, QuQu?"

  "Just looking."

  "I don't believe a word of it. You're not just looking at pictures."

  Quinten looked at him. He must not betray the secret, of course, because then the dream might not come back. He asked: "What is the building, Mr. Themaat?"

  Themaat gave a deep sigh. "If only my students had ever asked me such a good question. What is the building?" he repeated, folding his hands behind his head, leaning back in his rocking chair and looking at the stucco of the ceiling. "What is the building . . ." While he was still thinking, his wife came in. He said, "QuQu has just asked me the question."

  "And what is that?"

  "What is the building?"

  "Maybe this castle," said Elsbeth.

  "Yes," said Themaat, laughing at Quinten. "Women usually look less far afield, and perhaps they're right. Wait a moment. Perhaps I know," he said. "The building of course doesn't exist, but I think the Pantheon comes a good second."

  A little later they sat next to each other on the ground looking at photos and architectural drawings of the Pantheon in Rome: the only Roman temple—devoted to "all gods"—that had been completely preserved. Quinten had seen at once that it was not like the Citadel at all. It was not a maze, but precisely very simple and clear, with a portico like a Greek temple facade at the front, as Mr. Themaat called it, with pillars and two superimposed triangular pediments; behind them, a heavy round structure that from inside consisted of a single huge, empty, windowless rotunda, with a large round hole in the middle of the cupola, through which the light entered—a little like the fontanel in a baby's skull.

  On a cross-section drawing Mr. Themaat demonstrated with a compass that if you continued the line of the cupola downward, you produced a pure sphere resting on the ground. According to him, you could see the temple as a depiction of the world.

  That meant, Quinten reflected, this world—and that was obviously not what he was dreaming about. But nevertheless it was connected with the Citadel, perhaps through the opposition of the decorated front and the closed back. In any case it fascinated him—also the carved letters on the architrave, which announced through a number of abbreviations, that AGRIPPA was the architect. The emperor Hadrian had magnanimously had this inscribed after it had been completely rebuilt, Themaat told him—and at the mention of the name Hadrian he suddenly stopped and looked at Quinten—the deep blue of his eyes between the dark eyelashes, the lank black hair around his moon-pale skin.

  Themaat made a gesture in his direction and said to Elsbeth: "Antinous."

  She smiled, glanced at him, and nodded.

  Quinten didn't understand what was meant, but he didn't care.

  One day, when he started talking about those letters to Mr. Spier, in fact just for something to say, Spier immediately became enthusiastic:

  "That's the Quadrata, QuQu, the most beautiful capital there has ever been! How did you find out about that?" Then he told him that it was also called "lapidary" from the Latin lapis, meaning "stone." "That letter forms the perfect balance between body and soul."

  "How is that possible? A letter isn't a human being, is it?"

  "Of course it is!"

  "Well how can letters have a soul?"

  "They speak to you, don't they?"

  "That's true." Quinten nodded earnestly.

  "Like everyone, a letter has a soul and a body. Its soul is what it says and its body is what it's made of: ink, or stone."

  Quinten thought of his mother. Was she just a couple of ink spots, then? Or a stone with no letters on it?

  "A letter doesn't have to be made of anything," he said.

  "Oh no? I sometimes dream of pure letters, floating through the air, but that's impossible, just like a soul without a body."

  "And what about those letters in the Pantheon? They're not made of stone, precisely not stone. The stone has been carved away: I've seen Theo Kern doing that sometimes. They're made of nothing. So you sometimes do have a body without a soul in it, don't you?"

  He was now in the sixth grade, and according to the teacher he should gradually start spending more time on his homework. His marks were not bad, but not good either; what naturally interested him, he mastered immediately, even if it was difficult; all the rest, even when it was actually easy, required lots of effort. But instead of learning his geography, or doing arithmetic, he preferred to find his way toward the Citadel with Mr. Themaat.

  Sometimes the professor showed him examples of modern architecture from the first half of the twentieth century, by Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, of which he was quite fond himself. Sometimes Quinten thought it was nice, but that was all; because the cool objectivity of those matchboxes in no way reminded him of the Citadel, he lost interest.

  Classical buildings came closest, centrally the Roman Pantheon, which, with its circular, windowless central section, added something somber and threatening to the pure light of the Greek temples. The Athenian Parthenon, which Mr. Themaat showed him, might be perfect, even as a ruin, but to his taste it was too rarefied and transparent. According to Themaat, the Romans had in fact never invented anything themselves from an artistic point of view; they had taken that sense of circularity and somberness from Etruscan tombs, tumuli, as could still be seen in Rome in the mausoleum of Augustus, or the tomb of Hadrian, the Castel Sant'Angelo. He should go and see all those things one day, later.

  Under the direction of Themaat, who once talked of him to Max as "my best student," Quinten had soon found his way to the Italian Renaissance. There he was most fascinated by the churches of Palladio, who again showed that combination of brilliant classical facades and introverted brick walls. Themaat praised him for his good, albeit not very progressive, taste but that compliment was lost on him; none of it had anything to do with taste.

  In the baroque, he had a vague feeling of recognition in the exuberant ornamentation, and neoclassical buildings from the nineteenth century fascinated him because they reminded him of those of Palladio in the sixteenth century. In any case they were all exteriors: magnificent exteriors, but he was precisely not interested in exteriors, only interiors.

  Running the risk that he was revealing something of his secret, he decided one afternoon to ask a crucial question:

  "Is there a building that has an interior but no exterior?"

  Themaat stared at him for a couple of seconds before he was able to answer. "What made you think of something like that?"

  "I just thought of it."

  "Of course that's impossible, just like a building with an exterior but no interior."


  "That's perfectly possible."

  "How?"

  "If it's not hollow inside, but of solid stone. Like a sculpture."

  "There's something in that," said Themaat with a laugh. "And perhaps an interior without an exterior is possible too."

  While he looked in his bookcase, he said that he himself had been brought up with the idea that the Renaissance was old-fashioned, and to tell the truth he still thought so; but when he heard Quinten so preoccupied with it, he had the feeling that there was something like a "re-Renaissance" coming. Then he showed him photographs of Palladio's Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, his architectural swan song.

  From the outside it was an ugly brick box, but inside it showed indescribable magnificence. The back and the side walls were made of inlaid marble facades, exuberantly decorated with Corinthian columns, statues in luxurious window frames, with triangular and segment-shaped pediments; there were other sculptures—on pedestals, ornaments, scrolls, reliefs, inscriptions, behind the sloping benches of the semicircular room more pillars and sculptures—all made of wood and plaster, but you had to know that. That was also an exterior without an interior, said Themaat, because it was a piece of decor, and at the same time it was an interior without an exterior. Quinten understood that, but it was only partially a depiction of the Citadel.

  "For that matter, do you remember that book by Bibiena that you used to like looking at so much?"

  No, Quinten had forgotten, but when he saw it again a vague memory awakened in him. Themaat explained to him that those decor drawings showed the inside of buildings that had no outside. Obviously pleased with his explanation, the professor looked at the perspective drawings a little longer. Then he suddenly said: "Wait! Perhaps I have something even nicer for you."