Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"Dr. Quist's unforgettable Narration from A to Z," said Helga, glancing at Onno as she left the room.

Onno sighed deeply.

"Do you know what that woman is? My scribe, like Eckermann was to Goethe. She never forgets anything you've ever said. God knows, perhaps the principle may be on that wretched Cretan thing, who knows? If one day I'm ousted from power because of an excessive intelligence that forms a danger to the state and am driven shamefully over the frontier by the royal military constabulary, I may give it one last try — but I fear that I shall need precisely that historioscope in order to decode the principle on which it's based. Probably by that time I would have been murdered by some secret service or other, or by agents of the pope, because imagine what it would unleash: photographs of everything that's ever happened or what precisely didn't happen. ."

"Or film," said Quinten.

"Or film, of course! First silent films, then talkies, and then in color as well! We focus on the Star of Bethlehem and we zoom in on the Mount of Olives. Is someone ascending into heaven there? No. Is someone receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Horeb? Alas. No, I would be quite rightly eliminated; the world would descend into chaos."

"A great spring cleaning," said Max, "that's what it would be. All nonsense and fraud would be brought to light; mankind would be liberated and would finally possess the whole truth!"

But as he spoke, to his dismay he suddenly saw another astronomical documentary before him: the bay at Varadero — himself bobbing up and down in the waves, cheek to cheek with Ada, her legs spread wide around his hips in the blood-red light of the rising moon… So hadn't it disappeared — not even in himself?

Onno was going to ask him what event he would photograph first, but he could tell from his look that it would probably be something dreadful, perhaps his father's execution — so he turned to Proctor:

"What about you? What would you focus this historical camera on?"

As befits someone who has just come to dinner, the translator had not taken part in the conversation, but now he leaned forward and said: "At a deathbed in a certain house in Stuttgart in the old center, which was devastated in the Second World War. In the year 1647."

"Of course. For that purpose of course we screw the X-ray lens on the camera, which can penetrate through all walls. And whom do you want to see dying there?"

"Francis Bacon," said Proctor, and looked significantly from one to the other.

"Francis Bacon?" repeated Max. "In Stuttgart? In 1647? Are you sure you're not wrong?"

Proctor gave a short laugh with a bitter undertone. Of course, official scholarship had thought for centuries that he had died in London in 1626, but new facts had taught them otherwise — that is, people with an open mind who were able to let go of old ideas. Of course, he knew all about the nonsense that the Baconians were wont to spout, for example that Shakespeare's work was actually by Bacon, but he did not take any notice of that nonsense — even though it had respectable adherents, like old Freud. But it had always intrigued him why such rubbish was attributed precisely to Bacon. And then years ago he himself had discovered something unprecedented. He looked back and forth between Max and Onno. Could they keep a secret?

"Our lips are sealed," said Onno, folding his arms.

Bacon had been present at the birth of Vondel's Lucifer. That tragedy had its first performance in Amsterdam on February 2, 1654. Vondel had worked on it for six years — that is, he had begun it in the year of Bacon's actual death. Proctor had collected hundreds of textual proofs for his thesis, that the idea of writing a play about the downfall of Lucifer derived from Bacon. The eighty-six-year-old Bacon had whispered it to the sixty-year-old Vondel on his deathbed.

"Do you also have proof," asked Onno, having exchanged a short glance with Max, "that our national prince of poets was in Stuttgart in 1647?"

"He must have been. That is implicitly proved by my other evidence."

"Of course."

"I keep finding new proofs."

"Name one."

The usual code from the seventeenth century, Proctor told them, numbered the letters of the alphabet from one to twenty-four, with the I and the J having the same number, 9, and the V and W the figure 21. The sum of BACON came to 33 and that of FRANCIS to 67, totaling 100. Now, if you took Lucifer's first speech in Vondel and looked for the thirty-third word, then you found: this. Meaning, "This is Bacon." Or, "This should really be attributed to Bacon." If you went on counting to the hundredth word, then you found extinguished. That is, "This man is extinguished. Francis Bacon dies."

There was a moment's silence, after which Max said to Onno: "If you ask me, there's no answer to this."

"We have absolutely no answer to this. But," inquired Onno cautiously, "if you want to focus that deathbed there in Stuttgart with Quinten's telescope, does that not mean that you're not a hundred percent certain of your case, which to me personally seems so completely plausible?"

"What makes you think that?" said Proctor, almost indignantly. "All I want to do is hear why Bacon wanted to see a play about the downfall of Lucifer written. I imagine he told Vondel. What had he, as an Anglican, to do with a figure like Lucifer? Perhaps that may be connected with all those absurd legends attaching to his person; but I shall get to the bottom of that."

"Of course." Onno nodded. "That's necessary. And why did Bacon choose Vondel, of all people?"

"That's obvious! As a Catholic, Vondel had a relationship with devils and angels — there was no point in Bacon tackling a Protestant like Gryphius about it. Vondel was at that moment the only great dramatist who came into consideration for his project — except for Corneille, perhaps, but one couldn't permit oneself such fantastic extravagances in the Paris theater as one could in Amsterdam."

"Why fantastic?" asked Quinten.

"Listen," said Proctor. "It had never been shown in literature before: a play set from beginning to end in heaven. If that isn't fantastic, then I don't know what is."

"What a beautiful ring you have on," said Quinten suddenly.

A little disconcerted, Proctor looked at it. "It's a sapphire. Also a symbol of heaven."

"I expect it's very expensive."

"I should say so. A five-carat stone costs a good five thousand guilders. This is one gram."

Max too leaned forward. "Can you see that stone is exactly the color of your eyes, Quinten?"

"Are you coming to eat?" asked Sophia. "We've got hot pot with rib of beef."

Even though he only understood half of them, Quinten never forgot conversations like that. But what he heard at his high school in Assen, where he had to go on the bus every day from the end of the summer onward, he could only retain with the greatest effort. Moreover, the fact that Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres he was prepared to believe; but the fact that in his book it was printed in lower case, and sometimes even in italics, he found idiotic: the Romans hadn't known those letters at all! They should be capitals, preferably the Quadrata. According to Mr. Spier, that typeface had originated in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — like the Greek minuscule: the ancient Greeks, too, had written only in capitals. When Onno once called up from Parliament to say that he was terribly sorry that he was tied up again, Quinten had complained to him too:

"Can they just change it just like that? It's the same as if you were to depict Caesar in a denim suit instead of a toga."

Whereupon Onno had exclaimed: "Well done, Quinten. You're a son after my own heart! Fortunately modern theater doesn't appeal to you at all. Until the Heaven and the Earth shall pass away, not a jot or tittle of the Law shall pass you by, until everything shall be accomplished!"