Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

Max, Sophia, his mother, his father… it was though he were taking leave of all that. Drowsily, he let his chin sink onto his arms and looked at the dry, sun-drenched slopes that extended motionless to the horizon beyond the new city, which was at a lower level. It was as though the undulating lines, with which the blood-soaked earth stood out against the blue sky, had not been created by geological events but had been drawn by an inspired hand. He was dry. The sweltering heat that hung over the city and the countryside enveloped him again. . and suddenly he lifts his head in amazement. There's no more sound. The church bells are silent, perhaps because some sacred hour or other has passed, or come; but no voices come from the windows around the courtyard, either. Even the cooing of doves has disappeared. It is as though the world has fallen into a deep sleep — the houses, the landscape, the sky.. what has suddenly happened to everything? Is his father asleep next door, too? Nothing is moving anymore, and the shimmering heat over the roofs has gone. He feels as if he is not looking at reality but at an old-fashioned painted panorama, like the Panorama Mesdag in The Hague, where he once went with his Aunt Dol; in that dune landscape there was just the sort of breathless silence as there is here now. Everything that he can see exists, but at the same time does not exist; only in himself has nothing changed. He hears his heartbeat and the roaring of blood in his ears.

But then something does happen. Suddenly a small black dot appears in the blue dome of the sky, like a hole — not far above the horizon, in the direction of Tel Aviv. It moves up and down a little and slowly becomes larger. But suddenly it seems to be much closer, as though it is something that is approaching: gradually it takes shape, stretches out lengthwise into a black strip, the ends of which move solemnly up and down. Is it a bird? If it is, it's a big one. He gets up in a rapid movement and his eyes open wide. Edgar! It's Edgar!

He is already above the steep valley and is making straight for the hotel. Is it really conceivable that he has followed Onno's trail here all the way from Italy? That's impossible! But no one understands birds; no one knows how they sometimes find their way half across the world. Once he's above the city wall, Edgar stops beating his wings and begins an elegant dive with wings outspread. A little later he lands on the windowsill with his claws stretched out in front of him, shakes his feathers, folds his wings, turns around once, lifts his tail, leaves some droppings, and looks at Quinten with one eye.

"You need the room next door," says Quinten, who has taken a step backward. He points to the side. "Next window."

Immediately, he's amazed at his own voice. Normally he always hears the sound from two directions: through his ears and from inside; now the words remain smothered deep in his chest, as though his ears are blocked. Edgar's arrival also took place in complete silence. Even if the bird had heard his words, he couldn't have understood them; in any case he pays no attention. With a fluttering leap, he lands on the floor and hops to the door with an unmistakably arrogant air.

"Of course," says Quinten, "as you prefer. You can go by the corridor too. What a surprise it will be for Dad."

But as he crosses the threshold he pauses. There is no hallway anymore. The wall opposite has given way to a balustrade with amphora-shaped uprights, beyond which stretches an immense space full of staircases and galleries. He turns around. Not only has the door of his father's room disappeared, but so has his own. The whole wall is gone: and on that side too in the distance, above and down below, there are endless flights of colonnades, alcoves, gateways, vaults… is this a dream? He is standing on a narrow footbridge, which leads to a carved windowframe with an architrave; farther on, borne by caryatids, it disappears in the shadow of a tall portico.

He looks around with a deep sigh. In all its sweet bliss, warm as his own body, the Citadel finally envelops him again. Time after time he has thought of it — in Venice, in Florence, in Rome, in Jerusalem — but now that it is there, it doesn't remind him of anything else: it is what it is, just as the sun needs nothing else to be seen. But sunlight does not surround him there, or simply moonlight, more something like the "ash-gray light," which can be seen just before or after a new moon on the lunar surface next to the thin crescent, and which is sometimes not ash-gray but more marble-gray— caused, as Max once explained to him on a winter evening on the balcony of his bedroom, by reflected sunlight from the earth, and it is brighter the cloudier that side of the earth is.

Edgar shuffles restlessly to and fro on the balustrade, looking down with his head on one side, or upward, or both at once; he spreads his wings and dives down, climbs up, soars over a row of massive buttresses, disappears in the distance behind the pillars of a brick bridge, and far below swerves around a colossal column with an extravagant capital; on the milk-white shaft are the letters XDX, one below the other. It is as though the trail of his soaring reconnaissance flight hangs in the space like a black ribbon. When he has seen enough, he lands on the end of the footbridge, turns his head back 180 degrees, and rummages among his feathers with his beak, extending one wing with outspread feathers. Quinten has the impression that he is only doing this to kill time — that the bird is waiting for him. When he reaches him, Edgar begins hopping and fluttering ahead of him like a guide. The colonnade ends in a wide marble staircase, flanked with statues leading down to a complicated series of blind arcades and narrow, sometimes covered, alleys, leading to a series of pontifical chambers.

When they in turn give way to an indoor street with immense facades to the left and right, divided from each other by pilasters, dripping with ornamentation, Quinten has lost all sense of time and direction. But he has no need of time or direction. He would prefer to follow Edgar forever, here in this deathly silent, blissful, constructed world, made only for him. At a spiral staircase around the blocks of a pillar many feet thick Edgar suddenly discovers a trick: with his claws and beak around the round rail, he lets himself slide down in an exuberant spiral, keeping his balance with his wings. Laughing, leaping down the stairs two at a time, Quinten tries to keep up with him. Having reached the bottom of the staircase after five turns, he stops with his head spinning and looks around inquiringly. What has happened to Edgar? Has he gotten playful? Has he hidden?

With a start Quinten sees where he is, but feels no fear. No, this is not a dream. All the rest is a dream — Israel, Italy, Holland. The Citadel is the only thing that really exists. Opposite him, about twenty yards away, the double door to the center of the world covered with a diamond-shaped pattern of iron bars stands wide open; the heavy rusty sliding padlock is lying on the ground. Black as the back of a mirror, Edgar sits on the threshold, like a sentry, and looks straight at him in a way that has nothing playful about it. As he slowly approaches, he sees behind him the green safe from the hotel.

Edgar turns around, flies onto the safe with a couple of short flaps of his wings, and begins sharpening his beak against the edge — but even without that Quinten understands what he has to do. He crosses the threshold with a slight shiver. The room is cube-shaped, about thirty feet long, wide, and high; although there are no openings in the walls, the same dusky light is everywhere. He kneels down by the knob of the combination lock and holds it between his fingers. He doesn't have to think about the combination— there is only one that comes into consideration: J,H,W,H. He pulls open the immense door and takes the suitcase from the bottom shelf. When he has opened the locks, the first thing he sees is the beige envelope with SOMNIUM QUINTI on it.