Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"I still can't believe that we're suddenly sitting here, Quinten."

"Perhaps we aren't."

A smile crossed Onno's face. "Perhaps we're dreaming. Both having the same dream." He looked at him shyly. He had to inquire about Ada. "How's Mama?"

"The same, as far as I know. I haven't seen her." He didn't want to talk about his mother; he also suddenly felt irritated that his father had to ask about her. She might have been dead. Or had she died in the meantime perhaps? His granny still did not know where she could reach him. He'd want to know in a moment how Max was doing, and then he would have to tell him what had happened. To give the conversation a different turn, he asked, "Why are you using a walking stick?"

Onno put the stick on his lap and looked at it. It was a crudely trimmed, gnarled branch, with its unprotected tip transformed into a weathered brush; the curved handle had been artistically shaped into a serpent's head.

"Nice, isn't it? Found it in a secondhand shop." Slowly he turned to face Quinten and said, "I had a slight stroke, a brain hemorrhage eighteen months ago." And then he saw that Quinten was alarmed. "Don't worry, it's over now. But it happened very deep, in a dangerous place, in the thalamus, as it's called. Less than an inch farther forward, and I would have been in a wheelchair — the neurologist said I should consider myself lucky. Do you know that feeling? When you fall under a tram and lose your leg, you should be happy that you didn't lose both legs. Whenever something serious happens, you're supposed to count yourself lucky and be happy."

"Did it hurt a lot?"

"Not at all. In real life things are always different than you've imagined them. Shall I tell you about it?"

Quinten gave a slight shrug of the shoulders. He didn't really want to know, but he wanted to put off the question about Max for as long as possible.

One cold winter's day, said Onno, he was walking down the street not far from here. Suddenly he felt something hanging over his head. It was as if he were not completely there. His left hand began tingling, and a moment later his left foot. He felt as if he had a couple of stones in his shoe, but a minute later his whole left shoe was full of stones and all those stones together formed his left foot. After another minute he realized that something was seriously wrong. His whole left leg, his left side, and the left-hand half of his face had gone numb. Because it had all been on the left, he thought of his heart, but he had no pain in his chest, though he did have a little in his head, though not even enough to require an aspirin. Now and then he had to stop.

When he felt his pulse, his heart was racing so fast that he couldn't count. He tried to take off his left glove, but he never wore gloves; he realized that he was busy pulling his fingers. He tried to tell from the faces of the people who came toward him whether there was anything strange to be seen about him; but he didn't see anything special. And yet he knew they were now in a different world from him. He sat down on the edge of the pavement and a woman asked if she should call for an ambulance. He said it wasn't necessary, but she did anyway; a little later he was driven to the hospital with wailing sirens. There they pushed him into a kind of gigantic, turning oven, for taking brain scans. Three days later he was back home.

"All that happened was that I wasn't allowed to smoke or drink anymore. Well, three glasses of wine a day, but that makes you more or less a teetotaler. The left-hand side of my body is still a little numb, and I'm almost always giddy when I walk. Perhaps it will pass eventually; but as you get older, things usually don't pass. That's why I use a walking stick now. I can do without it, but I feel safer with one."

"Why did you suddenly have that hemorrhage?"

"I've a hunch about that. Do you remember I used to work on deciphering archaic script? I once published a theory about Etruscan, for which I received an honorary doctorate."

"Yes, Auntie Dol said the other day that you told her to send it back."

"Dol.." repeated Onno, and was silent for a moment. "How's Dol?"

"They live on Menorca now."

Onno looked in a melancholy way through the space, which was filling with tourists.

"You probably also know that after that Etruscan thing I turned my attention to the Phaistos disc, but I couldn't crack it. I went into politics to have a private excuse for not being able to work on it anymore. But things didn't work out in politics either, and when Auntie Helga died I didn't know what to do anymore. I wrote to you all about that. I wanted to go away for good — but where? Then I thought: I'm back where I started. Perhaps I won't want to do anything anymore, but you never know for sure. Nothing is final in life, apart from death — as you can see yet again now. So I thought: if ever I want to do anything else, then I must continue where I left off, with that disc. The script had still not been deciphered. Actually, my old notes were the only thing I took with me from Amsterdam, although I could scarcely understand them any longer. And since I had to go somewhere, that settled my destination. Rome. You won't find as much material anywhere else. Maybe in London, but it rains most of the time there."

"Of course!" cried Quinten. "I could have thought of that myself! I only thought of Crete."

Onno looked at Quinten. "Did you want to find me?"

"Yes, of course. Do you think that's crazy?"

Onno looked down. Somehow he must have been groggy from the blow all these years, like a boxer hanging on the ropes and being constantly pounded by his opponent, even though the referee with his bow tie occasionally stepped between them. He hadn't really admitted the thought of Quinten to himself. Since Quinten's birth he had told himself that though the boy might be physically the son of himself and Ada, he'd actually been Max and Sophia's son from day one. What a mistake! What a dreadful lie! It was as though from minute to minute more and more crusts were falling off him, as they did off a croute emerging from the oven.

"No, I don't think it's crazy." He looked at him again. "Did you visit Hans Giltay Veth?"

"Of course. But I wasn't any the wiser for that."

Onno was silent for a moment — but then he forced himself to say: "Do you forgive me, Quinten?"

Quinten looked straight at him with his azure eyes. "There's nothing to forgive."

It was as though Onno were sitting opposite his father — as though his son were his superior, and he could raise no objections.

"I was telling you what may have been the reason for my hemorrhage," he continued. "Those linguistic things were lying around in my room and I never looked at them again. But one morning, about eighteen months ago, I went to the market in the square around the corner from my place to get something to eat. I bought a piece of San Pietro, sunfish, I remember exactly; I can remember the fishwife wrapping it in a newspaper with her swollen red hands. I hadn't read a newspaper since I'd left Holland, but as I was unwrapping the fish at home, I suddenly saw my own name — spelled as Qiuts. When you're famous later and in the paper, you'll also notice that: it's as though the letters of your name jump off the page at you. The report was about my former rival Pellegrini, who was a professor here in Rome and had never been convinced by my Etruscan theory. In the past he had even written letters to Uppsala to block my honorary doctorate, as I heard from the vice-chancellor there. And I now read that in his old age he had been visiting his son's new country house in Tuscany, somewhere near Arezzo, and was walking through the garden when he suddenly fell into a hole in the ground. And what do you think? He'd landed in an Etruscan burial chamber. He had broken his hip, but the first thing he saw inscribed on a stela was a new bilingue —the same text in two languages, in this case Etruscan and Phoenician. From this it emerged that il professore islandese Qiuts had gotten it all wrong in any case. That meant there was virtually nothing of my life left."