Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

He found himself only holding on to all those speculations to avoid the most important thing of all. With his eyes closed, he frowned for a moment. Had Max been capable of that? Of course, he was capable of anything; for women he would have betrayed even God. But Ada? He thought back to that night in Havana, almost eighteen years ago, when according to their calculation Quinten had been conceived. Her shadow in the doorway of his hotel room late that evening.. Where had she come from? He opened his eyes. Dammit, that was it! She'd been to the beach with Max, without him, because he was deceiving her with Maria, the revolutionary widow — that is, he had let himself be seduced by her, just as Ada had seduced him that same night, in complete contrast to her passive nature! He sat up, and a fragment of the Saint Matthew Passion, in which Ada had played, came into his head: "Was dürfen wir weiter Zeugnis?" Had she been through a kind of repetition exercise with Max, a nostalgic episode that had turned out to be rather active, after which she'd come to cleanse herself with him — but in fact sullied herself with Maria? In that case Max had been the stronger: she couldn't become pregnant; she was on the pill. But his seed was as brazen as he was and had paid no attention. That would explain everything! He must have been afraid for months that the child would look like him, and his offer to bring it up had not been simply an act of friendship but a penance — and to that extent a deed of friendship in its turn. At the same time Max had saddled him with the feeling of guilt for not bringing up his own son, who perhaps wasn't his own son, and whom, moreover, he'd later completely abandoned! With his head turned to one side, Onno looked out the window at the blue sky, in which hung the invisible sound of church bells and cooing doves. What next? If that was all true, then the old lady was none other than Eva Weiss; but perhaps it wasn't true.

Had Max known that Quinten was his son? Quinten didn't look like either of them, but maybe Max had nevertheless discovered something in common between himself and Quinten. So did Sophia perhaps know about it, too? Obviously there had been something going on between those two! Or maybe Sophia had discovered that Max and Quinten had something in common, something unobtrusive, some odd trivial thing, but had not told him. And since she had not told him, Onno, she wouldn't do so now. Anyway, what good would that knowledge do anyone? Quinten least of all. For years he'd been looking for his father, while his father may have been sitting opposite him at the table every evening, and had been acting as his father in practice all along. The only person who would derive any joy from it was Chawah Lawan.

The news that her son had not been gassed at the age of nine but had become a leading astronomer, and had only just died at age fifty-one, would of course plunge her into an impossible mixture of happiness and despair; perhaps she'd even read the fantastic report of his death in the newspaper here, referring to a "Dutch astronomer in Westerbork," without mentioning his name, because he was not that famous. But if she survived that news, she could then look into the eyes of her grandson as if into a mirror.

Only by establishing the identity of that Mrs. 31415 could he get at the truth — and perhaps nowadays it was also possible medically. He hadn't read newspapers for years, but it wouldn't surprise him if all that DNA research had by now led to reliable determination of kinship. But in that case Quinten would also have to give blood or saliva — which would also be bound to have a poisonous effect on him, even if Onno emerged from such a test as the father. And apart from that: did he really want to know? After Ada's accident, Helga's death, and his political and academic disasters, it might be better for him not to have a son anymore. So was it not better to banish the eyes of that lady from Jerusalem from his memory? What was truth? If he did nothing, no one else would ever hit upon such misbegotten ideas and everything would stay as it was: Quinten would keep the father whom he had sought and found, and he himself would have a son like Max had had all that time, both his and not his..

He swung his legs off the bed, took hold of his stick, and stood up. He went to see Quinten, who was obviously still worried. He would tell him that he may have had a touch of sunstroke on the Temple Mount but that everything was fine now.

After taking Onno to his room, Quinten had gone to his own. On his doorpost, too, there was a small white cylinder, a mezuzah, that his father had told him contained a small roll of parchment with the commandments from the Torah on it. He touched it briefly, closed the door behind him, and automatically put the small chain on.

It was hot. He undressed completely, threw his clothes on the bed, put his watch and compass on the washbasin, and freshened up. The window was open, but no one could see him; at the back of the hotel was a courtyard, surrounded on three sides by much lower houses. Without drying himself he tied the towel round his waist, knelt on the floor by the window, and crossed his arms on the windowsill.

He let his eyes wander languidly over the old city, from which rose the bronze pealing of church bells; the Temple Mount was on the other side. From the roof came the sound of cooing doves. A glance at the trembling needle of his compass told him that he was facing due northwest. He realized that on the other side of the gently sloping hills in the distance — beyond the sea, Turkey, the Balkans, Austria, and Germany — stood his mother's bed. Nothing had changed there, of course. He had been away from home for scarcely four weeks. Really? Wasn't it four years? Forty? How would Granny Sophia be getting on? Of course she was thinking that he was still in Italy wandering around churches and museums. Was Mr. Themaat, from whom he'd learned so much, still alive? If only he knew what Quinten had been up to in the meantime. What would he have said? "Well done, QuQu, you did it again!" And Piet Keller? Without him none of it would have been possible. Was Mr. Spier still living in Wales, in that place with all those strange letters in it? And Clara and Marius Proctor, and Verdonkschot with his Etienne, and Rutger with his huge carpet — where were they all? Was Groot Rechteren still there, or was the castle by now full of villains in black boots? Theo Kern was definitely still around, with his purple feet. He thought of Max for a moment too, but in a different way. Although he'd lived under one roof with him all his life, for some reason or other he couldn't recall him clearly. He had not forgotten anything — one of his oldest memories was of Max taking him on his knee at the grand piano and playing all kinds of chords to him — but it was as though everything were happening under water: visible and in close-up, but in a different element.

Perhaps that water was the war, which always surrounded Max. He knew in broad outline what had happened to Max: a different, unimaginable world, with which he had no link at all; he had little affinity with his father's family, either, but they were his own family after all. Jews and the murderers of Jews — that gruesome union was as alien to him as the history of the Aztecs, even if he was now keeping the Jewish Law downstairs in the safe. That had nothing to do with the fact that he was one-thirty-second-part Jewish, as he had discovered, because that was a very weak concentration, scarcely more than 3 percent, but with his dream about the Citadel. Max on the other hand was 50 percent Jewish. Had he ever been in Israel? Quinten wondered. Had he ever walked through the streets of Jerusalem? Once or twice a year he'd packed his bags for a conference abroad, sometimes as far away as America, Japan, or Australia, but Quinten couldn't remember ever having heard anything about Israel. Perhaps they didn't go in for astronomy here.