Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

Naturally, each of them had a circle of friends, who now also got to know each other, but at the same time Max and Onno became estranged from them, drifted away, leaving them behind in a joint shaking of heads. They generally met at the reading table in Cafe Americain, beneath the art nouveau lamps and surrounded by murals depicting scenes from Wagner operas. Max had often already eaten in Leiden, or had made himself a quick snack at home, while Onno was still having his dinner — that is, there was always a plate with four or five meat rissoles on it next to his newspaper, which he washed down with four or five glasses of milk. He never ate vegetables. "Salad is for rabbits," he was wont to say. He seemed to be totally out of proportion with his body, and perhaps that was why he was so impressively present; his meals were as slovenly as his unbrushed teeth and his clothes. Once, when his face was dripping with sweat, Max said, "Onno, you've got a temperature," — at which Onno wiped his forehead, looked at his gleaming palm, and said, "Christ, you're right!" — only to forget all about it the following instant.

Max, on the other hand, sat regularly in the waiting room of his Communist GP, staring at a large photo of striking Belgian workers in berets, eye to eye with a heavily armed platoon of militia, while there was never anything wrong with him, apart from the occasional dose of clap; and however great his imagined fear of death, his tie never clashed with his socks.

Once, Max started talking about death, which immediately irritated Onno beyond measure.

"Talking about death is a waste of time. As long as you're alive you're not dead, and when you're no longer alive you're only dead for other people."

But that was not what Max meant. He said that on the one hand he was convinced that one day he would die of a heart attack in dreadful pain, but on the other hand he might be immortal. A person could determine his life expectancy by adding the ages at which his parents had died and dividing by two. But both his parents had died violent deaths; if that had not happened, they might have been immortal. And because, according to Cantor, infinity plus infinity divided by two was also infinity, the proposition was proved.

"An extremely embarrassing logical error for a natural scientist," said Onno. "In reality it follows that you have a fifty percent chance of being murdered and a fifty percent chance of being executed, which means that it's a hundred percent certain that you'll die a violent death."

When the rissoles were finished they walked into town, where the wintry cold had disappeared from the air. Sometimes they went to the movies first, to see a James Bond film, or the latest Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a computer called HAL took control of a spaceship. When they emerged into the street — in the washed-out state in which reality grates on one like a gray file — Onno asked why Max thought the computer was called HAL. Because of the association with "hell," suggested Max. Damn, Onno hadn't thought of that. But suppose Max counted one letter on from H,A, and L in the alphabet.

"I," said Max, "B,M. IBM!" he cried. "I take my hat off to you, sir!"

Onno assumed a modest expression. "It's a gift."

While they were drinking a cup of coffee somewhere, with Little Richard wailing from the jukebox, Onno maintained that his eye for that kind of thing was a result of his Calvinist upbringing: it came from reading the Bible, "containing all the Holy Scripture." For him, truth could only reside in what was written, and could not, for example, be seen through a telescope. That higher form of reading was something that the Calvinists shared with the Jews; Catholics never read the Bible, and usually didn't have one— Catholics were illiterates. Pictures and photographs; that was what they understood.

Moreover, the Calvinists were more concerned with the Old Testament than with the New Testament, like the Catholics — who in a supreme display of primitivism actually sang the text. When the Jews were persecuted, Calvinists therefore joined the resistance much more often than Catholics, who were anyway the inventors of anti-Semitism — as often as the Communists, who also derived truth from a book, namely that of Marx, another Jew.

It was as though Max could see his friend's trains of thought sweeping through the air like a lion tamer's long whip, and they inspired him in turn.

"Have you ever noticed," he said, "that the area of Protestantism coincides with the area covered by polar ice in the Ice Age? In the Netherlands the border runs right through the middle: where there was ice is the territory of the Protestants, as far as Hammerfest, and where grass grew is Catholic, as far as Palermo. And where did Calvin live?" he suddenly thought. "In Switzerland! The only Protestant country in the Catholic area when there are still glaciers!"

"I'm shivering," said Onno. "There are shivers running down my spine. Only someone who is not Dutch could make such a shameful discovery. Get thee behind me, Satan! You don't belong here at all."

"Where do I belong, then?"

Onno waved an arm. "In space. You view the Netherlands from space, like an astronaut; but I'm in the middle of it, frozen in the Calvinist ice, like a mammoth. Don't get me started. Holland belongs to me and not a lost Central European woodcutter like you."

It was true. Max could not imagine what it felt like to be part of a people, a nation, a race, a religion — in brief, when one was not alone. He was Dutch, Austrian, Jewish, and Aryan all at once, and hence none of them. He belonged only with those who, like him, belonged with no one.

"I feel as Dutch," he said, "as Spinoza must have felt."

"Why Spinoza, of all people?"

"For a number of reasons. Partly because he was a lens grinder."

But their unending stream of theories, jokes, observations, and anecdotes was not their real conversation: that took place beneath these, without words, and it was about themselves. Sometimes it became visible in a roundabout way, like when in the past North Sea fishermen located a school of herring from its silvery reflection against the clouds.

In a pub in the newspaper district, full of journalists from the morning dailies, as well as the evening papers, where he ordered his first rum-and-Coke, Onno once told Max about the Gilgamesh epic, the oldest story in the world, deciphered in the previous century by his colleague Rawlinson, written as long before Christ as they were now living after Christ. Cheops's pyramid had already been built, said Onno, because that had always been there, so to speak; but Moses, the Trojan War, all of that had yet to happen.

The first story was the story of a friendship. The Babylonian king Gilgamesh dreamed of a frightening ax, with which he fell in love and on which he "lay as on a woman." His mother, obviously well acquainted with the theories of Freud, interpreted that ax as a man on which he would lie as on a woman. And a little later the man appeared: Enkidu, a tamed savage, with whom he ventured forth and slayed the monster Chuwawa. However, that deed eventually led to Enkidu's death. In his despair Gilgamesh went in search of the elixir of immortality, but when even that was finally stolen from him, by a serpent, he resigned himself to the inevitable like a Candide avant la lettre and found his life's fulfillment as the architect of the battlements of Uruk.

"Magnificent," said Max. "Why don't I know all that? Why doesn't everyone read that?"

"Because not everyone knows me."

"What a dreadful fate that must be, not knowing you."

"The very thought strikes me as unbearable."

"I too lived for a long time in that hell."

With the calculated precision of someone who has had too much to drink, a man sank into a chair at their table.