Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"What is it?" cried Max in despair. "What is it in heaven's name? Suddenly it reminds me of something. Yes, I've got it: Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave." He got up, took out the record, and put it on the turntable. "Here, listen, at about bar one fifteen." He raised his forefinger. "Can you hear? It's almost the same, on just the same sort of bed!"

Ada kissed him on the cheek. "You have a merciless ear," she said.

He put his arm around her shoulders. "At least I can talk about it to you, even though you haven't a clue yourself — but no one has. Do you know what Onno once said when I started talking about music? He shook his great head with those quivering cheeks and said, 'Music is for girls.' Well, the girl in question is here. That was good intuition."

"Why is music supposed to be only for girls?"

"You mustn't take him so literally. Once when I bought an ice cream, he said, 'Ice cream is for vicars.' Music doesn't exist for him. He regards it as meaningless sound. For him only words have meaning. What he has against it is probably the flight from reality that it represents for many people, a kind of escape clause to the effect that if all else fails, there's always music. Perhaps he actually finds music a kind of cowardly consolation.

"He once told me that in the Middle Ages the Greek mousike techne — the 'art of the muse'—was derived from the ancient Egyptian word moys, which means 'water.' This made Moses the discoverer of music, because according to the same erroneous etymology, his name was supposed to mean 'rescued from water.' You know — the rush basket in which he was found in the Nile as a baby: the same Moses who struck water from the rock and who had God create the world with a word in Genesis, after which his spirit moved over the waters. Everything always fits. So in fact you're practicing the Mosaic art."

"I'm sure I am. Show me your thumbs."

He put his hands in hers: they were well formed, like the rest of his body, not too broad and not too slim, but his thumbs were both short and spatula-shaped. "I invent it all by sucking on my thumbs," he said.

"Who do you take after?"

"No idea. Maybe my father. Maybe myself. That's why I can just span an octave but can't go any further. What's the name of that pianist who had an operation on his hands in order to be able to span larger chords and then couldn't play anymore?"

"No idea," said Ada, putting his hands in his lap. "And why is ice cream for vicars?"

"Because they have to spoil themselves, of course, seeing that no one else does."

Ada stared at him and nodded. "You love him, don't you?"

"Of course I love him."

Max's eyes suddenly moistened. Ada was amazed to see it happen. She did not know what to make of it, but suddenly she had the feeling that she was the mother of the pair of them.

"Do you two tell each other everything?"

"Everything." Fortunately she did not ask if he loved him more than her. "We even tell each other what we would never tell anyone. That's friendship."

When the sun had reached its solstice and touched the Tropic of Cancer— that is, at the beginning of summer — a political and musical happening was staged, to round off the turbulent season and in happy expectation of even more turbulent times. Since the riots of the year before, Amsterdam, as Onno put it, had been occupied by invading Dutch troops: uniformed farmers' sons from Christian homes had temporary control of the city, and the main issue was now its liberation, followed by the irrevocable overthrow of the Netherlands by Amsterdam. One of the organizers of the festival had evidently once heard a performance by Ada and Bruno, because they were invited to perform. It was to be her first engagement in Amsterdam, and although it wasn't a real concert, it was still a great honor. Ada was apprehensive about playing her kind of music for the kind of audience that could be expected there; but of course they must give it a try, and she persuaded Bruno to pick up where they had left off.

Everyone would be there, Max assured her. Politics was the new popular entertainment, in a way that it had not been since the war and as it would not be for a long time to come; he estimated the interval at twenty-two years: 1945; 1967; 1989… Before the concert Ada went for a meal with the other musicians; she arranged to meet Max afterward in the greenroom and stay over at his place.

Onno went too. Since he had reached an impasse with the Phaistos disc, he had gradually gotten more interested in politics; after all, even Chomsky was more preoccupied with politics than with linguistics these days, so he was in good company. His instinctive sympathies lay with the anarchistic provocateurs and revolutionaries, as did those of Max, but deep down he knew that their rabid views did not stand a chance.

Holland hated radicalism; in the swampy delta of the Rhine estuary this kind of theorizing had been isolated and disarmed in theology, while practical people struck bargains — Max, with his dangerously foreign disposition, need have no illusions at all on that score: Erasmus called the tune here. In Holland there was only one path, and that was the middle path. And in politics it was power that mattered, nothing else. What else was left? The Social Democrats had become as ossified as the Christian parties. What about a splinter group like the Communists or the Pacifist Socialists? But, with respect, they were a completely different breed. It was true that a new left-wing Liberal party had been set up, which a few months ago, at the interim elections, had been very successful and already had seven members in the Lower House; but although it was led by the same kind of people as himself, even from the same generation, Onno found this group too lacking in a sense of history; moreover, he suspected it of trying to implement purely formal constitutional reforms in order to prevent socioeconomic ones.

"You're not really going into politics, are you, Onno?" asked Max as they were on their way to the meeting.

Onno looked at him uncertainly. "Do you think it's my destiny?"

"Destiny? Surely you decide that for yourself?"

"Do you think so? In any case, you're completely unsuited to politics, because for that you need come from a large family. You learn the craft in the life-and-death struggle with your brothers and sisters. If you haven't been through this school of intrigue and deceit and intimidation, you'll never make it. That means that I have excellent qualifications, but you're an only child — you've never had to fight for your parents' favor."

"It was a very close thing. I had an older brother, but he died in his crib."

"Just the sort of thing that would happen to you. You can't tolerate anyone around you. But as things stand at the moment, all you're fit for is to be king. Who knows?; if things go on like this, that position may yet become vacant."

"Then I'd immediately appoint you to form my first and only cabinet, because after that I would abolish democracy and proclaim an absolute monarchy."

Onno bent his back and folded his hands in entreaty. "Euere kaiserliche und königliche, apostolische Majestat, don't you think—"

"That is my last word. The audience is at an end — there is the door. Or, rather, there is the window."

"Sire, do I really have to.. "

"Jump!"

"Damn," said Onno, and sat up. "I don't know if you know, but it is the Bohemian practice of defenestration that is welling up in your sick mind. In the Hradcany in Prague, disgraced politicians were always thrown out of the window." He suddenly looked disapprovingly at Max's elegant summer suit with its pocket handkerchief. "I must say you're very badly dressed for a subversive assembly."

"Robespierre also followed the fashion of the ancien regime."