Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"What are you thinking about, Ada?"

His studio, a large rectangular space in a formal school building, is filled with his collections: rows of old portable gramophones on shelving on the wall, dusty trumpets, violins, and other musical instruments, crowded bookshelves, heavy tables from the flea market with scores of old salon music, rows of 78 records in damaged paper sleeves, worn Persian carpets on the floor, and a pair of large brown leather armchairs for sitting in, picking up a book, and cutting off from the outside world.

"That the coda still isn't right. We simply can't perform like this."

She is younger than he is, only recently graduated from the conservatory, where he teaches piano; but it's obvious that she takes the lead in the duo they comprise. He is a good pianist, which interests him less than many other things, such as the archaeology of popular music.

He has set up a group for performing it, which people listen to with a hilarity quite out of keeping with the manner of the playing. For that matter he himself is incapable of laughter, or at least he never laughs; he has built his personality around the decision never to laugh. This is often laughed at, although people seldom cry about someone who never cries. He lacks the ambition to make his name as a pianist; the fact that he is performing with Ada has less to do with the music than with Ada, and she knows it, but she puts up with it. They have performed a few times, for student societies, but that has already produced a favorable review in the newspaper. She sees a great future for herself as a soloist, an international one, featuring cello concertos, famous conductors, concert platforms in Paris and Milan. Ros-tropovich! Pablo Casals!

"Shall we have a bite to eat in town later?"

She had been expecting some such question, and she is annoyed at him for embarrassing her yet again. Surely he must have realized by now that she's not interested in anything like that. Of course she can tell him she doesn't want to go to bed with him, but then he'll say that he didn't ask her, though of course that is what it comes down to. He'll think she's frigid, and maybe she is — despite being twenty-one she has never slept with a man— but it must be possible to work with someone without it immediately leading to this.

Or does she have to put an end to their partnership if things are like that? What she'd like as a next step is to form a trio, or a quartet; the repertory for cello and piano is too small to be able to continue for long. What she's looking for are musically motivated people, but until she has found them she needs him.

"Do you mind if I just go home, Bruno? I'd prefer to put in bit more practice."

"The two things aren't mutually exclusive, are they? You have to eat, after all."

She nods. "That's true. But you know how it is."

"How is it, then?"

She doesn't want to be having this conversation at all. Of course this is what it is like in ten-year-old marriages, when one can no longer see anything in the other person: insistence, hope, despair — with a threat of violence on the horizon.

"Just leave it." She's ready to go, one hand on the handle of the case, the other clenched in an unhappy fist, with the four fingers wrapped around her thumb so no one will see that she bites her nails, though of course that makes it all the more apparent. "See you tomorrow."

Carrying the cello case in her arms like a sarcophagus, she descends the stairs into the street. Bruno's studio is not far from her parents' house, where she still lives, and on the way she has a sudden flashback from a dream of the previous night: a lush bay, with a thin, high amber cloud above the sea in the form of an ancient, gnarled tree trunk, which slowly changes shape; she tries to hold on to it, to remember more — she catches a glimpse of a black figure, strangely elongated horizontally, with a pointed hat and a long lance — but the horn of a braking car and a finger pointing to a forehead puts an end to it…

She walks down the side alley to the back of the house and goes in through the kitchen door, where her mother is trussing the pale, decapitated carcass of a chicken with a white thread. She is tall and slim, slightly taller than her daughter, with a straight, disciplined back. Her own eyes meet Ada's from beneath a head of black hair, which is worn up, but with a colder look, more suspicious, without there being any special reason.

"How did it go?"

"Well."

"Cup of tea?"

"Yes, please."

She is about to go upstairs, but her mother says: "You can't go upstairs now. Daddy's painting your room."

Ada takes her foot off the bottom step in annoyance. "Why the hell is he doing that? Did I ask him to?"

"Don't be so horrid all the time. He's doing it for you. Sit and wait downstairs. He'll be finished in an hour or so."

"Why did he suddenly take it into his head to paint my room? Hasn't he got anything better to do?"

"You'll have to ask him. I don't know either. He went upstairs and said that your room was badly in need of a coat of paint."

"Crazy people are a pain," says Ada, and lugs her instrument into the back room, which doubles as a dining room and a living room.

She'll be glad when she's away from here and can live as she wants to. The good intentions are the worst thing, because they make you powerless. Her mother is a bitch, but her father is a well-meaning freethinker, with no malice in him. If only there were some malice in him, then he would at least be able to understand malice. His wife, for instance. Ada's dearest wish now is for a place of her own, where she can be completely alone. She wants to rehearse, travel, perform, have triumphs — but always to return to her apartment, with the doorbell and telephone disconnected, the radio and television switched off, or maybe completely absent; to be able to devote herself completely to music and reading poetry, or simply to doing nothing at all for hours on end and to thinking, without someone suddenly taking it into their head to paint her room. But for the time being she doesn't have the money; even her father can only just makes ends meet.

It makes her jump when her mother puts a cup of tea and a slice of cake next to her.

"What are you thinking about, Ada?"

"Nothing."

"How did it go with Bruno?"

"Fine." She notices with irritation that her mother is still looking at her. "What's wrong?"

"Why don't you go out with him? He's such a nice boy."

"Oh, Mama, please stay out of it. Do you ever go out with Dad?"

"Come on, don't get so worked up right away. It would do you a lot of good to relax occasionally."

"Just leave that to me."

Once her mother is out of the room, she opens the score and studies the music, pencil in hand. She holds the sheets upside down for a moment and even then she can see that it is marvelous. It is not just that she can "hear" what she sees, it is rather that she sees what the listener sees when he listens: a structural beauty, which exists in space as the sheet of a score but as heard music only in time. This is why she is not that keen on novels, which are read in silence, but does like poems, which have to be given a sound. Not that she thinks all this in so many words; but what is going on in her mind as she looks at the music, beating an imaginary time now and then with her left hand, is based on it — just as a child can speak its language without knowing the grammar.

She puts the score on the floor, lifts the cello from its case, and screws on the spike. While she is tightening the bow, she goes to the dividing door and pushes it open with her shoulder; the small space is oppressive. She takes the instrument between her legs, tunes it, and looking sideways at the music she begins playing, at the same time hearing what Bruno is not playing, and occasionally humming it.