The Discovery of Heaven (19 page)

"Not at all. I'd like to see the kind of place you live in. I've heard so much about you ..."

"Max has never seen how I live, or, rather, do not live."

"I'm not Max."

They looked at each other. Everything was suddenly changing—like a tree blown over by the wind, pulled out of the earth roots and all, teeming with insects. No, she wasn't Max, and he wasn't Max either—and at the same time she was Max, and so was he.

While Max completed his rectangular path of mourning around the mega-scaffold in Poland, Ada was amazed about what she was suddenly doing, and Onno about what he was allowing to happen. He lugged her cello across the Museumplein and said that he now finally understood why Max had broken it off. They walked to the Kerkstraat through the Rijksmuseum arch. He went down the four steps to the basement, opened the door of the former tradesman's entrance, and let her in.

"This is quite impossible," he said as he led the way over the cracked marble slabs of the dark corridor. One of the walls was almost hidden by the pile of red and green paraffin cans.

"Why? Aren't you allowed female visitors by your landlady?"

"My landlady is an unbelievable trollop herself. I always have to lock the door at night."

"You're acting as if I'd asked you to go to bed with me."

"Haven't you?"

"Perhaps," said Ada, to her own surprise.

Onno stopped and turned his eyes heavenward.

"What further witness is needed? This is the final proof of the unfathomable immorality of womankind! Even the miracle of music is obviously powerless to help."

Ada heard herself talking, lightheartedly, like a woman of the world.

She scarcely recognized herself; it was suddenly as though she were seeing herself in the mirror in coronation robes. She sensed that she was master of the situation—she, a little provincial from Leiden, here in Amsterdam with an internationally famous scholar from a distinguished family. She was in charge. With Max she had never been in charge—such an idea had not even occurred to her; he had graciously tolerated her, as one tolerates a cat on one's lap, before gently pushing her away. But now the cat had a bird in its jaws.

She hesitated on the threshold to Onno's room. It was certainly just as well that Max had never seen this. The chaos was complete. Beneath the narrow window in the front room, through which passersby on the pavement could be seen only up to knee height, stood a desk piled high with papers, open books, magazines, jumbled newspapers, folders, stencils, bank statements, envelopes, bills, everything topsy-turvy and garnished with overflowing ashtrays, an empty milk bottle, an open bag of sugar, a portable radio, a piece of butter on aluminum paper that had turned orange—and this continued over the floor and along the walls with their crooked bookshelves, a sagging sofa and an oil stove, into the back room, where it was rounded off by a mattress with sheets the color of the ancient varnish on the murals in the Sistine Chapel.

"Yes," said Ada, going in, "if anything is quite impossible, then this is it."

"Are you suggesting it's untidy?"

"What can I say? It's a bit different from your friend's place."

"But then I don't live with the feeling that I may have to take flight at any moment," said Onno. "For him anything can happen at any moment, so he has to be able find what he wants to take with him immediately. I can never find anything."

Ada picked up an antique brown folio with a damaged leather spine from the floor and read the title, which was printed in a dozen different typefaces:
Vollständiges Hebräisch-chaldäisches Rabbiner-Wörterbuch zum alten Testament, der Thargumim, Midraschim und dem Talmud, mit Erlduterun-gen aus dem Bereiche der historischen Kritik, Archäologie, Mythologie, Naturkunde etc. und unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Dicta messiana, als Verbindung der Schriften des alten und neuen Bundes.

"Good story?" she asked, looking up.

"Better than you'd think. It's the kind of book that the fairies compile for me, at night when I'm asleep."

There was a modern brochure in it as a bookmark: "Socialism & Democracy." Putting it carefully on a pile, she was suddenly reminded of her father's shop, which gave her a homey feeling. She opened the window and her eye was caught by two shiny photos pinned to the windowframe: a kind of hopscotch field spiraling inward in a clockwise direction.

"Is that it?"

"That's it."

Humming, with an air as if she were simply reading what was written, she ran her eyes over the signs. Onno looked at her frail figure against the light, eye to eye with the thing that had tormented him for so long. Why not? he thought. It was over with Max, and he hadn't been devastated; come to that, even in her time he had had all kinds of other girlfriends. Onno was not a lecher who simply chased everything in skirts; he had always let himself be seduced, and that was what happened with Helga. It wasn't frequently that someone took a fancy to him; but when it happened, he was not only defenseless, but experienced the other person's will as his own love for her—and that's what it was. He was in love with Ada—as she stood there with her black hair looking at the hieroglyphics—but he must give himself time. He had never seen her without Max, not only not in the flesh, but not even in his imagination: she was a part of him, and that must be gotten rid of first. He certainly wasn't going to leap into bed with her today, in Max's fashion—and anyway, it needed a change of sheets first.

She turned around and surveyed the room again. There was one more or less beautiful object to be seen—an overladen carved Chinese chest in dark wood, with handles and a copper lock; when she lifted the lid and looked at the discarded clothes and shoes, a strong camphor smell rose from it.

"What's the system here?" she asked in the tone of someone about to set to work. "So I know how I'm to clear things up."

"There is no system. The wild disorder of genius reigns."

But that was not completely true. She went into the back room, where between the bulging bookcase and the disgustingly filthy basin, opposite the bed, a large number of sheets of squared paper had been pinned to the wallpaper: carefully arranged in numbered horizontal columns, and vertical ones with headings like:
Masculine? Feminine? Nominative. Possible "accusatives." Orthographic variants. Consonant 2c before 24?
Spread over the columns were characters, from the look of them not only those from the Phaistos disc, some groups boxed with red or green ink, with captions— everything precise and clear. On his rumpled pillow lay Machiavelli's
Il
principe;
the view from the window was of a dark, tiled courtyard.

Ada picked up some clothes and asked: "Have you got a washing machine?"

"There's one upstairs that I have the use of, but I'm frightened of the bloody thing. The whole house shakes when it's on; sometimes it even goes walkabout through the kitchen."

"Is there a vacuum cleaner and that kind of stuff? Buckets and mops and suchlike? Perhaps some soap as well?"

"Bloody hell, Ada, are you actually thinking of cleaning up in here? Are you a real Hercules?"

"Just you go into town for a few hours."

"Okay, have your way then." He gave her a kiss on the forehead. "Provided you don't interfere with anything."

14
Repayment

People returning from a journey carry the distances they have traveled with them like outspread wings—until they put the key in their front door. Then the wings fold up, and they are home again, as though in the center of an impassable steel ring on the horizon. The moment they close the door behind them, they can no longer imagine they have ever been away. Everything is as it was: the entrance hall, the staircase, the banisters. Max gathered up the newspapers and the mail and went slowly upstairs. He opened the windows, unpacked his case, put his washing in the laundry basket, and took a shower. Then he looked through the mail, sorted the newspapers into a chronological pile, with that from the day of his departure on top, and started leafing impatiently through them.

Only in Vienna had he been able to glance at Western newspapers for a few days; apart from that, it had not even occurred to him that there must be some news. However, after going through the first week he had had enough: what had happened had happened, what had not happened had not happened. One thing he did know was that he would now imagine for years that people who had died during those weeks were still alive.

He put the telephone on his lap and started dialing Onno's number, but when he got to the fourth digit he hesitated. Suddenly he had forgotten it. He put the receiver down and stared into space: there was a choice between three or four numbers. He'd dialed it hundreds of times, but there was nothing for it but to look it up, feeling guilty as he did so. Obviously he was more tired than he thought.

"Quist speaking."

"Onno, it's Max."

"Max! How long have you been back?"

"I've just gotten in from Budapest."

The pause between his saying "Max" and Onno's crying "Max," was a fraction longer than he had expected. There was a minimal hesitation: something was wrong.

"What are you going to do? Do you want to go to bed?"

"What are you talking about? I took the plane. Come on over."

When Onno sat down in the green chesterfield armchair half an hour later, there was again something hesitant in his manner; but Max did not think he should bring it up, like some anxious mother whom nothing escaped. As he reported on his journey, he felt as though he were talking about a dream. That same morning he had walked from his hotel on Lenin Kórüt to the imposing Parliament building, to take a last look at the Danube, with the old fortified castle hill on the other side with its palaces and churches and citadels—all that awesome
Europa,
which he had also seen in Vienna and particularly in Prague, and which was just as strange and at the same time familiar as the Austrian accent he had heard in all those countries. While he told Onno about his days in Berlin and in the Polish towns, he could scarcely imagine that he had really been there. Birkenau appeared before him, motionless in the mist. He was about to tell Onno about his walk around the camp, which had taken hours, but he fell silent.

"You're in a gloomy mood, Max."

Max nodded and looked at his nails. "Anyway, you were right that I had to go. It's just that it hasn't strengthened my links with Holland."

"Could you live over there?"

"Nonsense. I was born here, Dutch is my language, I grew up here and my friends are here—and we mustn't forget my girlfriends. Anyway, that wouldn't be the main problem, certainly not in Vienna or Budapest. As far as that's concerned, there's no shortage."

"Okay, okay," said Onno. "Spare me that."

"By the way, in Vienna I found another Delius in the phonebook."

"And you didn't telephone."

"That's right."

Onno nodded. He felt uncomfortable, and after a short silence he asked about Max's impressions of the situation behind the Iron Curtain.

"What do you mean?"

"What do you mean 'What do you mean?' "

"What do you mean what do you mean what do you mean? What do you want me to say? Big Soviet stars on the buildings, statues of Lenin, portraits of all kinds of local patriarchs, banners with slogans that a polyglot like you can read, but I can't. Everything shabby and grubby, a ghastly arrogant bureaucratic fuss everywhere, like here at the town hall or the post office or the job center."

"Dictatorship is the natural element of bureaucracy," said Onno in agreement. "In a dictatorship everyone's a bureaucrat."

"In Prague no one had heard of Kafka—but at the same time everyone is much friendlier than here. A lot of good things are being suppressed, I think, but probably a lot of bad things too."

"So things should stay as they are?"

"You mustn't ask me that kind thing. In any case fascism doesn't stand a chance there, if you ask me, and that's the main thing. The rest is a luxury."

"Stalinism too?"

"What are you getting at, Onno? The great villains were Hitler and Mussolini, and they were gotten rid of by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. That's the way I see it."

"That's what I'm frightened of."

"Okay," said Max. "I'm quite aware of what you're driving at, but let me test you out. Suppose God calls you before his throne and says, 'My son, I have decided that the world is going to be ruled for all eternity in the spirit of either Hitler or Stalin. You must decide which of the two it is to be—with the proviso that if you are unwilling to choose between those two villains, or if you refuse to take part in such immoral games, it will be Hitler.' What will you say then?"

"Then I suppose you'll say Stalin," said Onno.

"Without a moment's hesitation."

"And why won't you hesitate?"

"Because Stalin represents the inhumanity of rationalism, and Hitler that of irrationalism—and because by my very nature I'm on the side of rationalism. Hitler was an irresponsible madman, but Stalin calculated everything, so that he himself was responsible."

"Do you really think that? What a child you are. No wonder all the women go for you. What's the difference for their victims, by the way? Is it nicer dying in the service of reason?"

"No, it makes no difference for the individual. Everyone dies their own unique death."

Onno stared at him for a moment. "Shall I tell you something? You've not been in the Eastern bloc at all. You've been only in Hitler's pan-German Reich, and maybe also in Franz Joseph's dual monarchy."

Max smiled. "Let's say that I represent the continuity of history, and let's suppose that you have given no answer to God's question. Stalinism will disappear and the world will be governed forever in the spirit of Hitler. The end of civilization looms. A gulf opens between us."

"Perhaps there's a third possibility."

"God didn't say anything about that."

Onno nodded. "Perhaps it would be more sensible to stop this conversation."

There was something in his tone that made Max also think it would be better. "Okay, but I hope you'll still have a Cuba libre." He got up to pour him a drink. "Tell me, what have you been up to?"