Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"I never come for any special reason," said Max, "but I have great news. I've just been to the dentist's and in the waiting room there was an old issue of Time. There's an important article about us in it."

"About us," Onno repeated. "In Time."

Max opened the magazine and pointed to a commemorative piece on the Reichstag fire, which had taken place on February 27 thirty-four years before.

"What about it?"

"Good God! Wasn't I born on November 27, 1933, and weren't you supposed to have been born on November 27 too? Didn't we come to the conclusion that we're nonidentical twins! Don't you understand? Nine months!

We were conceived during the Reichstag fire! While Van der Lubbe was setting fire to the curtains in Berlin, our parents were climbing on top of each other in The Hague and Amsterdam!"

Onno stopped, stretched his whole body, and spread his arms in triumph, while a broad smile passed across his face. "Death, where is thy sting?" he cried. "I can face life again!"

Two months later — their delight in their friendship showed no signs of waning — Onno had a meeting with a colleague from Jerusalem in the Natural History Museum in Leiden. He had gotten no further with the deciphering, and the Israeli was as curious about his progress as he was about the Israeli's. When he emerged from the colossal building later that afternoon, Max was waiting for him outside in the sun, sitting in a strange little public garden next to the adjacent Science Museum, with his eyes closed and his head thrown back. They had agreed that Max would show him the observatory.

Onno expressed his contempt for blockheads who sunbathed — his own white Calvinist flesh had never seen the sun — but Max said it was part of his job: after all the sun was a star. They went into town for a cup of coffee first. Onno told him with relief that Landau, his most important rival, had obviously not made any progress either; so that threat had been removed for the moment. They reacted differently to the atmosphere of the little town with its low houses than to Amsterdam; they felt something like tenderness, such as someone from London or New York must feel in Amsterdam.

"We're walking this way now," said Max, "and while I was waiting for you, I was reminded of two other men who also walked this way."

"Everyone has walked this way. Even Einstein."

"With Lorentz, yes, and with De Sitter, but I don't mean him."

He meant Freud and Mahler. As far as he remembered from biographies, it had been in the summer of 1908. Freud was staying in a boarding-house in Noordwijk, from where he was about to travel on to Italy, when a telegram arrived from Vienna: Mahler had problems. He was suffering from impotence and could no longer make love to his wife, Alma — who was later also to turn the heads of Franz Werfel, Walter Gropius, and Oskar Kokoschka. He needed immediate help. Mahler took the train to Leiden, where he met Freud in a hotel. They walked around the town for four hours, and Mahler was subjected to a sort of emergency analysis, which indeed seems to have had some effect.

A little girl ties a rope to a lamppost, starts turning the rope; a second girl moves her upper body forward and backward a couple of times in the same rhythm, jumps into the imaginary egg, and begins skipping. And as they walked along, Onno responded with the same suppleness to the anecdote.

"Well, well, Herr Obermusikdirekor, you are suffering from overpotency. In my psychoanalysis I have coined the term astronomical satyriasis for this. It is a disease that inspires the greatest possible disgust, even in specialists, despite their being familiar with the dark side of human nature."

"But what if I like it," whined Max. "Cure me, Herr Professor. I want to stop liking it. I want to be monogamous, like you, or impotent — whatever you are. I'll double your fee."

"The fact that you immediately bring up money points to an anal-erotic fixation, which conjures up scenes before my inner eye from which even Dante would shrink. Did I hear you say you like it? Surely it can't be true?"

"It is!"

"Occasionally, even experienced mountaineers are faced with precipices that force them to say, 'This is too much.' When I tell my friend Ferenczi about this, he'll say, 'You can convince me of lots of things, Sigi, but this is impossible.' "

"But I'm possible!"

"The fact that you are possible is certainly the ultimate mysterium tremendum ac fascinans. I have experienced a lot in the course of my practice — Little Hans, the Wolfman, all complete lunatics — but a phenomenon like you robs me of my last vestige of faith in mankind. I conclude from your revolting way of life that in your Sexualhysterie you would actually like to mount every woman that ever was but that your lewd priapic frenzy finds itself limited to the living. Those from the past have escaped your extraordinary appetite and those from the future will escape it. What you would prefer would be to possess every woman in space and time in one fell swoop, in the shape of the supreme woman: the primeval woman. Am I right in assuming, mein Lieber, that your mother's first name is Eva?"

"Donnerwetter!" laughed Max. "That hit home! Now I understand why my Nervenarzt recommended that I consult you." He had once told Onno his mother's name, but the slant Onno had put on it gave him a slight jolt.

"I can see right through you, Herr Generalkapellmeister."

"But if Eve is my mother, verehrter Herr Doctor, am I Cain or Abel?"

Now Onno seemed to be thrown, but not for long. He stopped and shouted: "The Lord will not see your sacrifice, seven times accursed one! Only mine shall be seen!"

As he said this, with the aplomb of which only he had the secret, Max's eye lighted on a cover in the window of a secondhand bookshop. They were in a narrow street behind the Pieterskerk, which rose like the Jungfrau above the low houses of the old town center.

"Look at that. Talk of the devil." He pointed to a copy of Alma Mahler's Mein Leben.

"Come on," he said, putting his hand on the door handle. "I'll buy it for you, as a fee for your analysis."

In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what — apart from the eternal innocence of animals — offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer, or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pieta: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap. No, the image of hope is someone passing with a musical instrument in a case. It is not contributing to oppression, or to liberation either, but to something that continues below the surface: the boy on his bike, with a guitar in a faded mock-leather cover on his back; a girl with a dented violin case waiting for the tram. The hallowed halls beneath concert platforms where orchestral musicians open their cases everywhere on tables and chairs and on the floor and take out their shining and glittering instruments, after which imprints of those instruments remain: negative clarinets, flutes, bassoons with their mouthpieces and connections, hollowed out of soft reinforced velvet; and while the space gradually fills with the muted cacophony of all the instruments thronging around the A like sparrows and seagulls and starlings and thrushes around a hunk of bread, the lids of the cases of double basses, as tall as a man, are opened like the doors to another world..

Or the young woman, who after rehearsal lays her cello back in its case and closes the lid?

She takes the score that has fallen apart off the music stand and arranges the sheets until the title sheet is nicely on top: Pohádka (Fairy Tale). Spiky, almost Japanese, black hair in a ponytail frames her pale face in a pure square; swaying like silk, it follows every movement of her head, always coming to rest in mathematical order. Her face is severe, the lips a little pinched, like those of someone who knows what she wants. Her pianist, a thick-set man with lank ginger hair and an expressionless face, is sitting hunched forward with his arms folded on the grand piano, his chin resting on them, and looks at her deep-brown eyes below the dark, sharply outlined eyebrows.