Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

Silence.

Onno sat with his stick between his legs on the priest's bench, his hands folded on the snake's head, and felt as if he were playing a part in an absurd play. This couldn't be real. Under the bench was the suitcase. He would not have felt more foolish if someone had sent him off to catch a basilisk with a butterfly net and an empty jam jar. This was where that sultry Cuban night eighteen years ago — when Ada had seduced him — had finally brought him: to a Roman confessional with his son, locked in next to the holiest spot on earth, since that, according to this same tyrant, was where Moses' stone tablets of the Law were preserved. They were no more in that altar than yesterday's paper — or perhaps they were: they would never know. The tension he felt derived exclusively from uncertainty about how their weird burglary would turn out.

Quinten himself wasn't sure, either; but he did not doubt for a moment that they could force their way into that chapel and find the tablets there. They were simply waiting for him. In his half of the narrow cupboard things were less comfortable; there was only a bench for kneeling on, on which he had sat down. Separated by a partition with a barred diamond-shaped opening, they listened to each other's breathing.

"Can you hear me, my son?" whispered Onno.

Quinten turned around cautiously and put his mouth to the grille. "Yes."

"Satisfied, now you've finally got your way?"

"Yes."

"What would. ." — "Ada" was on the tip of Onno's tongue—"Max say if he saw us sitting here like this?"

"I can't imagine."

"Do you know what I think? He'd have died laughing."

Onno thought of Max's fit of laughter in Havana when they had discovered what kind of conference they had wound up in. There on that island not only had Quinten been conceived, but the seeds of his own political downfall had been sown. Koos's face, on the boat to Enkhuizen: "Does your stupidity know no bounds, Onno?" Helga's death the same day. . Ada. . And Quinten also thought of Max, vanished so completely from the world as if he had never existed. His empty coffin in the earth. His mother. .

"Perhaps it's because it's so dark and silent here," whispered Onno, "but I keep thinking of your poor mother the whole time."

"Me too."

"Do you remember we went to visit her together?"

"Of course. We were chased by the police."

"Yes, I vaguely remember something of the sort."

Quinten hesitated, but a moment later said: "That evening I had a really fantastic dream for the first time."

"Can you remember that too? It's almost ten years ago."

"Didn't I say that I hardly ever forget anything?"

"What did you dream, then?"

"I'm not going to tell you," said Quinten, turning his head away a little. "Something about a building." The center of the world. He thought of the deathly fear with which he had woken up after hearing that calm, hoarse voice, how afterward he had groped around helplessly in just such a darkness and silence as he found himself in now — but although he was not dreaming now, and although the fact that he was here was completely bound up with that dream, he didn't feel a trace of fear. "But at the very last moment it suddenly turned into a nightmare. I had no idea where I was. I stared screaming, I think, and it was only when Granny came out of Max's bedroom and put the light on that I saw that I was on the threshold of her room."

Onno caught his breath. Did Sophia come out of Max's bedroom at night? What did that mean? He had the feeling he really shouldn't ask about it, but he couldn't help himself:

"Did Max and Granny sleep together, then?"

"Never noticed it. Perhaps they'd been talking, for all I know. Be quiet for a moment…"

Far away a soft, sing-song voice resounded: probably from the refectory, where a priest was reading an edifying text, while the others sat silently eating their frugal meal and did not listen.

Onno would have liked to ask what Sophia was wearing that night, but he knew enough. Bloody lecher. He stopped at nothing — not even that frigid Sophia Brons, who was a thousand years older than him. How could he ever have believed otherwise? But had he ever believed otherwise? He'd never wanted to think about it, because of course he suspected that there was something going on between those two in that lonely castle with its long nights, but he hadn't wanted to admit it to himself. Why not? What was wrong with it? Because Max's offer to bring up his son had to be an act of pure, self-sacrificing friendship? How pure were his own motives when it came down to it? He also realized with a jolt that this meant that his mother-in-law had recently — without anyone knowing — been widowed for the second time, at the age of sixty-two.

"If we ever get out of this alive," he whispered, "we must get in touch with your grandmother immediately."

"All the same to me," said Quinten indifferently.

Everything that followed lay before him as though on the other side of a mountain, of which he could see only the summit ridge at the moment: beyond that might be the sea, or a city, or a desert, or a mist-filled abyss. He felt as if up to now he had done everything by himself, and as if he still had to do the most important thing in the next few hours — afterward, he knew with absolute certainty, events would take their own course and he would see what happened to him. He slowly nodded off, though nothing escaped his ears, like a dozing dog…

"Quinten?"

"Yes?" He looked at the luminous child's watch that he had bought yesterday for a few thousand lire, with a Mickey Mouse wobbling to and fro as a second hand. It was almost nine o'clock.

"Were you asleep?"

"Just dozing."

"You're completely calm, aren't you? Nothing can happen to you."

"I don't think so."

"I wish I could say the same. I'm dying a thousand deaths, and I feel claustrophobic."

"Why did you wake me up?"

"I didn't know you were asleep."

"What did you want to say, then?"

"I keep thinking of Max," said Onno. "Have you ever had a bosom friend?"

"A bosom friend?"

"That means you haven't. A bosom friend is someone you even tell something that you'd never tell anyone."

"Do you mean a secret?"

"I don't know what you mean by a secret, but I mean something shameful, something that you are so shamed of that no one must know."

"I haven't got anything like that."

"Really?"

"What sort of thing would it be? Of course I've got a secret that I'll never tell anyone, but not because I'm ashamed of it."

"Not even your mother?" asked Onno after some hesitation.

"No one."

Quinten said no more. Hadn't his father himself said that his mother was really "no one"? So precisely by telling his secret to no one, he was actually telling it to his mother. Should he tell his father this now? He'd understand immediately, but then of course he would have betrayed something of the secret. Was his mother perhaps ultimately the secret?

Again the silence was disturbed by stumbling in the distance.

"There they are," whispered Quinten.

Everything went as expected. In the chapel of San Silvestro the priests were now gathering for complines, after which they would go to bed. A few minutes later the sound of old men's singing rang out.

With eyes closed, squeezed shut by the darkness, Onno and Quinten listened to the thin Gregorian chant, which hung in the air like a silver cobweb. For Onno it exuded a desperate loneliness, a metallic freezing cold, which seemed to flow in through a chink straight from the Middle Ages— but for Quinten its harmonic unanimity evoked the image of ten or fifteen men, sinking after a shipwreck but holding each other to the last. The psalms, intended to help them through the night, were interrupted only by a short chapter prayer.