The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  He went over to her, put his hands on her shoulders, and gave her a kiss on her forehead; a strange, sweet-and-sour smell penetrated his nostrils. Immediately afterward, she pressed her crown against his breastbone for a moment, which reminded him of Gijs, Verdonkschot's billy goat. When she raised her face, it was wet with tears. It was the first time that he had seen her cry.

  "Granny!"

  "Don't worry about that. When did you want to go?"

  "As soon as possible." Only when he said this did it become final for him.

  Again Sophia controlled herself. "But where on earth are you going, Quinten? In which direction? You can't simply just get on the first train that comes along."

  "Perhaps that's a method too. First I'm going to see Dad's lawyer tomorrow. He knows where he is, doesn't he?"

  "But he won't tell you. He's got his professional code of ethics."

  "I can at least try. Perhaps he'll let something slip out, or something will slip out that I can use. And mightn't Auntie Dol know more than we think, too? Anyway, perhaps it's best if I go to see her first."

  Sophia looked at him red-eyed. Suddenly she could no longer restrain her tears; her face contorted, she sat down, put her hands over her eyes, and said in an almost sing-song voice: "Quinten ... something dreadful's going to happen when you've gone . . ."

  He had never seen her like this before. Helplessly he sat down opposite her. "What makes you think that?"

  "I don't know ..." she whispered, with her shoulders heaving, "I feel it."

  "What nonsense! No one knows what's going to happen. Perhaps I'll be away for a few months, and then I'll keep you posted about everything. And after that I can always go back to school again. Otherwise I'll take the state examination."

  He himself did not really believe that, and he saw that Sophia didn't believe it either. Holding a napkin to her eyes, she got up and suddenly went inside, with her face averted.

  Quinten looked at the apple peel on her plate: one long uninterrupted spiral, like she always made. You could make it as long as you wanted, he thought—infinitely long if only you peeled thinly enough. He breathed in the mild air deeply. It was over; in fact, he was not there any longer. But at the same time it seemed as though through that awareness everything struck him more intensely than ever before, just like at Christmas the burnt-out, guttering candles on the tree flared up once more and then went out, with the floor covered in colored wrapping paper and unwrapped presents.

  Max had always told him to stay in his room on Heiligabend until the Christmas tree had been decorated and the candles lit. "Come on!" From the harsh electric light of his room into the warm candlelight—a dark world from the distant past. ... He got up and went over to the stone balustrade. Deep in the wood an owl croaked. On an artificial island on the other side, the pitiless coots had built a new nest, around which everyone else swam respectfully. Fancy his unemotional grandmother suddenly becoming so tearful! But was he to stay here because of that? Would he have to look after her, as she had looked after him for all those years? His decision was made. He was going. He was going to look for his father. Deep in himself he felt the unshakable certainty that nothing and no one could stop him.

  "Quinten?"

  Via Max's bedroom, where Max's made-up bed had already frozen into an untouchable museum exhibit, he went into Sophia's. She was kneeling on the floor, in front of the open bottom drawer of the chest of drawers. In her hands she had a tiny compass. Much smaller than the one on the edge of Max's desk, it was no more than three quarters of an inch across.

  "Take this with you," she said, and gave it to him, with the cool, distant look in her eyes again. "It belonged to your granddad. He always carried it when we went walking on the heath, in the years after the war. It was still big in those days."

  The needle was fixed, but after he moved a pin at the side, it wobbled into motion: it still worked. A black leather shoelace had been threaded through the ring. Without saying anything, he allowed Sophia to put the instrument around his neck. He realized with relief that she had resigned herself to his departure. He had never known Granddad Brons; for Quinten, he belonged more to history than to himself, like most things in the crammed drawer. Although it was not locked, he had never rummaged in it; nor did he want anyone to poke their nose in his own things. He bent down and took out a yellow card from the chaos of photos, letters, folders, dolls, girls' books, a woollen rabbit.

  "Certificate of Report," he read, "As required under Article 9, first clause, of Decree No. 6/1941 of the Reichskpmmissar for the occupied territory of the Netherlands, regarding compulsory reporting of persons of wholly or partly Jewish extraction." He turned it over. "Haken, Petronella. Number of Jewish ancestors in the sense of Art. 2 of the decree: one." He looked inquiringly at Sophia.

  "That's my mother's," she said. "Her grandmother on her mother's side was Jewish."

  "That means—" Quinten began.

  "Yes, that you've also got Jewish blood in you."

  "You never told me that!"

  "It wasn't worth mentioning. Work it out."

  "My great-grandmother was a quarter, you an eighth, Mommy a sixteenth, and me a thirty-second." He put the card back and said, "No, it's not much. Did Max know about this?"

  "To tell you the truth, I never thought about it."

  His aunt and uncle could only repeat that they did not know where Onno was, either. Dol was the only person in the family to have had a letter from him, and since then she had not heard anything either; nor had he tried to get hold of his stored things in any way. Only on one occasion—already eighteen months ago—had Hans Giltay Veth written to them; Onno wanted the certificate of his honorary doctorate returned to Uppsala. They had done that, although they did not know the reason, nor did the lawyer.

  It was their last day in the suburb near Rotterdam. They were just able to receive him in the midst of their moving. Uncle Karel, the surgeon, had finally laid down his scalpels, and they were going to move permanently to their second home on Menorca, where Quinten had stayed a couple of times during summer vacation.

  In the dismantled front room, as they sat with plastic cups of mineral water on nailed-down boxes, the conversation that he had had with Sophia repeated itself: about interrupting his studies, and if he was so sure that what he was doing was sensible, and about where was he going to look. He had the feeling that Onno had almost disappeared from their lives. His things had already been collected a few weeks ago by a storage company; they were now in a warehouse in the docks. Sophia had been informed about it, but she had obviously not wanted to burden him with that message. While he waited for the train to Amsterdam on the platform, the expression that his uncle had used for his father constantly echoed through his head: dropout.

  In the lobby of the lawyers' office building behind the Rijksmuseum the name J.C.G.F. Giltay Veth, M.L. stood among a long list of other names. The bearer of it came to see him himself: a fat, kindly man in his early fifties, with a small pair of reading glasses on the tip of his nose. In the elevator up to the top floor he told Quinten that he had known his father since they were students together. Although Onno could say terrible things, Giltay Veth had seldom laughed so much as he had with him. His room looked out over the entire center of town. He pointed out the palace on the Dam in the distance to Quinten, with Atlas carrying the globe of the world on his neck— like someone, thought Quinten, who was himself outside the world.

  When a black girl in a white coat put down some tea, they sat down opposite each other at a long table, half of which was taken up by piles of folders and dossiers.

  "I must extend my sympathies on the death of your foster father," said Giltay Veth. "I read about it in the paper. It's scarcely credible, something like that." Lost for words, he shook his head for a moment. "Of course I had nothing to do with it, but are his affairs properly sorted out, as far as you know?"

  "You should ask my grandmother about that. I believe there are problems, because he had no famil
y at all."

  "Please tell your grandmother that she can always contact me if she needs help. It won't cost her a penny. I know that I will be acting in the spirit of your father."

  Quinten looked straight at him. "Didn't you tell my father, then?"

  Giltay Veth held a lump of sugar in his tea and waited until it had absorbed all the tea. "No." He let go of the lump. "I can only contact him in extreme cases."

  "So he doesn't know at all that Max is dead?"

  "I couldn't tell you. Perhaps he's read about it in the paper somewhere, too."

  "So he's not in Holland?"

  The ghost of a smile crossed Giltay Veth's face, but it immediately disappeared; he stirred his cup seriously for a few seconds.

  "I know what you're getting at, Quinten. To tell you the truth, I expected your visit much earlier. I knew that you'd be sitting here opposite me one day; I said as much to your father at the time. But if you want to know from me where he is, I can't tell you."

  "I swear I'll never tell anyone that I heard it from you. Surely I can bump into him by accident somewhere, as it were, can't I? Coincidences like that do happen, don't they? My foster father was hit by a meteorite; surely that's a much greater coincidence?"

  "Absolutely." Giltay Veth nodded. "Except that it's not a question of my knowing and not being able to tell you; I really don't know. I haven't the faintest idea."

  "How can that be? In his farewell letter to Max my father wrote that he could always be reached by you in emergencies."

  "That's true, but only in a roundabout way. There are two other addresses in between. The first is that of a colleague of mine—abroad, yes, you got hold of the right end of the stick there. But he knows only of a post-office box in another country. That might be Holland, but just as easily Paraguay. Suppose you managed to get me to tell you where that colleague is—which won't happen. Even then that gentleman won't help you out, because he knows nothing about you. Quite apart from the fact that the only thing he knows is that post-office box number, in another country." He put one hand on top of the other and looked at Quinten. "Forget it, lad. Your father has covered his tracks thoroughly. Something dreadful has happened to him; you must assume that he's not alive anymore. I know all about your situation. I know of the dreadful fate that befell your mother, I know what happened to your father and recently to your foster father, but you must resign yourself to it. There are boys whose fathers have been murdered, or have been killed in a plane crash. It's all equally horrible, but that's obviously how life is. Try and put it out of your mind. Don't let your life be scarred by it."

  Quinten made an awkward gesture and said: "If I knew that my father was really dead, there would be nothing wrong. But he isn't dead. He's somewhere in the world and is doing something or other at this moment. Perhaps he's sitting reading the newspaper, or drinking a cup of tea." He faltered. "That means . . . are you actually sure that he's still alive?"

  Giltay Veth nodded. "If it were otherwise, I would know and so would you."

  "Then I'm going to look for him."

  The telephone rang, and without waiting to see who was on the line, the lawyer said: "I don't want to be disturbed." He put the receiver down, folded his arms, and leaned back."No one can stop you. But have you asked yourself whether you're acting in accordance with your father's wishes?"

  He had been talking the whole time about his father's spirit. Quinten took Onno's letter out of his pocket and read the last sentence aloud. When he had explained his interpretation—that it wasn't a ban on looking for him but just a statement of the pointlessness of doing so—a smile crossed Giltay Veth's face.

  "You'd make a good lawyer, Quinten."

  "It says what it says."

  "There's no arguing with that. But it also says that you won't find him. How were you planning to go about it?"

  "I don't know yet. I'd hoped that you would put me on the track, but I'll find something else."

  Giltay Veth raised his eyebrows. "Is that why you came here?"

  "Yes, why else?"

  "I thought you might need money for your search."

  "I've got plenty of money."

  "Have you?"

  "I inherited forty thousand guilders."

  "Forty thousand guilders?" repeated Giltay Veth, taking off his reading glasses. "Who from?"

  After Quinten had told him what he had done to deserve it, Giltay Veth looked at him reflectively for a while.

  "A lot's been taken from you, but a lot's been given to you. God knows, perhaps you really will be able to find your father, although it's a mystery to me how you're supposed to do that."

  "Perhaps the age of miracles hasn't yet entirely passed," said Quinten.

  The drizzle was so fine that the drops seemed to be stationary in the air and made his face even wetter than a real shower. The two alder trees, the three boulders—everything in the field behind Klein Rechteren was dripping with water, which did not seem to be coming from anywhere. The red cow was not there. Was that a good or a bad omen? A good omen, of course, because otherwise she'd be there. Now he had to decide what direction to look for his father. Slowly, with his eyes wide open, he turned clockwise around his own axis and tried to register whether he felt something special at a particular moment.

  He felt nothing, although in a particular situation he must have been pointing exactly in the direction of his father with a hundred percent certainty. That seemed incomprehensible to him. He tried again, even more slowly and with his eyes closed, but again with no result. What next? He unbuttoned his shirt and took out the small compass. Again he made a slow rotation of 360 degrees, keeping his eyes constantly fixed on the needle. It wobbled across the dial from north to west and through south to north, without suddenly behaving unusually.

  He gave up in amazement. It was mysterious, but it wouldn't work like that. He put the compass away and looked out across the meadow, feeling his inner certainty suddenly wavering. Was it impossible, then? Perhaps he should try it the other way around. Where would his father definitely not have gone? Probably not to Africa, certainly not to the Eastern bloc or to China or anywhere in Asia. That already made a difference, but in any case that still left the whole of Europe and North and South America. He spoke all languages, so that was no problem for him. Perhaps he was in a monastery, from where he would never emerge—he had written that he was a hermit, hadn't he? Or in a hand-built hut on a desert island, covered in palm leaves, or somewhere in a cave in the mountains. On Crete, perhaps, where the Phaistos disc came from? So should he go to Crete, then? But even if he knew that he was in New York, even then he wouldn't be able to find him. He didn't know where to begin. But what was he to do, then?

  Tomorrow was the end of Easter vacation—so should he simply go back to school? That was also inconceivable—too much had happened to him in the meantime for that: you couldn't expect a stone that you'd let go of to return into your hand halfway, like a yo-yo.

  As wet as if he had worked up a sweat, he looked at the edge of the wood, and suddenly he began to shiver. Perhaps there was a method whereby, conversely, he could lure his father to Holland: by pretending in some way that he'd been abducted—by going underground and sending letters with stuck-on characters. Then perhaps his father would appear with the ransom, somewhere by a concrete pillar under a viaduct...

  It was as though the dream of being able to find his father had suddenly been swept away by this diabolical brainwave. He turned around and began to walk slowly back toward the castle. Of course it was impossible that he would play a trick like that—but he was going to leave here anyway, on a journey. That was all he could do now. Why didn't he go to Italy? He'd never been there. To the Veneto. Finally see the architecture of Palladio with his own eyes. Plenty of money. Of course he must take his sketches and plans of the Citadel, the SOMNIUM QUINTI, with him. Who knows what he might be able to add to them!

  De Profundis

  PART FOUR

  THE END OF THE END

&nbs
p; Third Intermezzo

  —I thought we were never going to get there.

  —I told you at the outset that the mission had been accomplished, didn't I?

  —It's probably because of your compelling narrative. That's inevitable with a good story: you don't experience it as a report in retrospect; it happens in the telling, as it were.

  —In my case there isn't that much difference.

  —Yes, you are those people's destiny, and to tell you the truth, I've been really astounded on occasion. What a disaster! Take the end of Max Delius—wasn't that a very draconian step?

  —What do you expect? He was on the point of discovering us!

  —He was on the threshold; I won't deny it. He was peering through the keyhole, as it were—but he was drunk- The next morning, he would have dismissed the whole thing as colossal nonsense. He was a specialist, after all, not an inventor of science fiction!

  —That's just the reason. I felt we couldn't take any risks. Suppose he had taken himself seriously and possessed the same persistence as his son. He didn't have a huge reputation to lose in astronomy; he might have been ready to go for broke at that turning point in his life. And after all, the last straw we cling to is people's belief; the moment our existence becomes a matter of knowledge, they'll abandon us completely. They'll shrug their shoulders and say "So what?" Besides, they always get dangerous when they discover different kinds of beings, or what they imagine to be. When they discovered the Indians, they were very enthusiastic about it for a while, but after that they lost interest and exterminated them. Or think of what they're doing with animals to this day.