Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

Max looked proudly at Ada as she bowed and returned for another curtain call with Bruno.

"Take very good care of that girl," said Onno. "You don't deserve her at all."

There was some truth in that, thought Max. The whole evening his eyes had been wandering toward the back of a head in the third row, with unruly curly red hair; the woman to whom it belonged seemed to feel this, because now and then she looked to one side, not directly at him, but nevertheless in such a way that he must be at the edge of her field of vision, because he saw that she was not looking at what she was seeing but that she saw what she was not looking at, namely him. There was nothing for it. It was bound to happen, whether he wanted it to or not.

The grand piano and the music stand had disappeared, and the forum discussion was taking place at a long table. The forum consisted of the left-wing elite of the Cuba Committee — the writer, the chess player, and the composer — joined by a distinguished-looking old lady, who had been a nurse with the Reds in the Spanish Civil War and had still not regained her Dutch nationality. The chairman was a generally respected journalist and publicist, himself no longer very young, a former anarchist and now an anarchist once again. Each member made a short statement, after which a discussion arose on the points that the rabid German had in fact already discussed exhaustively.

The old lady drew attention to the fact that the obvious primary interest of the pharmaceutical industry in a capitalist economy was that patients should not get better, and it was clear what consequences that had for the quality of medicines and hence of public health, whereupon the serial composer raised his hands above his head and praised Chinese medicine, which under the inspirational leadership of Chairman Mao could dispense with anesthetics even in serious operations.

At that moment Onno could suddenly no longer contain himself and shouted: "You hysterical fool! In ten years' time you'll be as right-wing as an American general!"

"I must disagree," said the composer, laughing.

Whereupon Onno stood up and declared with great dignity: "I don't want to be disagreed with, I want to be knocked down."

Things began to go with a swing. The writer, too, had to put up with an interruption. When he expressed his concern, without too much conviction, that the workers were leaving the intellectuals in the lurch, someone shouted:

"Why don't you piss off, mate! Go and cut sugarcane in Cuba."

"I have cut sugarcane in Cuba."

"Yeah, for a fraction of a second — for the cameras."

The writer leaned back with a superior smile and said no more.

"What a creep," said Max.

Onno nodded. "You're a bit like him."

At that moment someone in the auditorium stood up and said in a thunderous voice: "I'm a worker!"

All heads turned in his direction. It was true. There he stood. No doubt about it: a worker. Heavy industry, probably. Blast furnaces. A beret with a stalk on his head, his heavily lined face ravaged by exploitation, his hands held slightly open at hip height, ready to cope with any chore. There was applause here and there; the old lady bent over her microphone and invited him to have a seat at the table. The chairman tried to prevent this, but the worker was already on his way, chin aloft, exuding deep contempt for everyone who was not a worker.

"He's a nutcase," said Onno. "Anyone can see that. He hasn't done a day's work in his life."

Anyone with any experience could tell that the evening was now about to go off the rails. The worker did not deign to look at any of the members of the forum panel; he pulled the old lady's microphone toward himself and, with a fixed expression, began explaining that the Jesuits had constructed an underground network of tunnels under the streets and squares of Amsterdam, from where they planned one day to launch a merciless attack. He had written countless letters on the subject to the city council, the government, the queen, and the United Nations, but never—

"I thank you for your lucid statement," the chairman interrupted. "And now for a completely different subject: the recent attack by Israel on—"

"Be quiet when I'm speaking," said the worker, without so much as turning his head. While the members of the panel looked at each other in astonishment and the mood in the audience became more and more high-spirited, he went on unperturbed: "It is no accident that the general of the Jesuits is a Dutchman. He has his headquarters in Spain, which since the Revolt of the Netherlands and the Inquisition—"

Now again someone stood up in the auditorium and shouted: "For God's sake stop that nonsense, mate!" He was proof that a large amount of flesh could also contribute to intellectual superiority, because even the worker now fell silent. The excessively fat, bald man, a well-known restaurateur, turned with outstretched arms to the audience, which egged him on with acclamations. "What good is all this rubbish to us? Doesn't everybody know that Amsterdam is the New Jerusalem, blessed with the refined hyper-biogeometric ethics of Dante, Goethe, and Queen Esther with her thirty-six Essenes and thirty-six Saddikim and with the new, all-renewing, Messianic Pythagorean world mathematics, the primeval mathematics of the wisdom of the prehistoric world, as an interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, namely the new Jewish laws of harmony of prime numbers and the prime pairs of Moses, David, and Solomon — the new bio-algebra, bio-geometry, and bio-mechanics of William of Orange, Spinoza, Erasmus, Simon Stevin, Christian Huygens, Descartes, and Rembrandt, and the new plastic mathematics of Teilhard de Chardin, Mondrian, Steiner, Thomas Aquinas, Mersenne, Fermat, Aristotle, Nicolaus Cusanus, Wittgenstein, Weinreb—"

But he was not allowed to complete his list: at the back of the auditorium a door suddenly flew open, through which the earlier attacker again charged in.

"Where's that stinking German bastard?" he screamed, looking around in bewilderment. "Give him to me and I'll kick the shit out of him!"

With this he suddenly crossed a critical borderline: the auditorium capsized and submerged in thunderous laughter. The chairman crossed his arms, leaned back, and looked calmly at the pandemonium.

"It is no accident," — the worker now resumed his revelations completely unperturbed—"that Princess Irene married a Catholic three years ago, a French creep who wants to be king of Spain."

"Augustine!" shouted the restaurateur. "Einstein! Euclid!"

"Give the bastard to me! I'll cut his head off!"

"Princess Beatrix for queen of Israel!"

"Good idea! Republic! Republic!"

And shortly afterward, those organizing the proceedings showed that they had had a brilliant brainwave because, blowing on saxophones, trumpets, clarinets, bassoons, and tubas, the musicians entered from both wings — playing a loud but slow, strangely Oriental melody, while at the same time from the back of the auditorium, along the central aisle, a man with a sheep was seen to be making his way toward the platform.

"A sheep! A sheep!"

It was not clear what was meant — maybe something to do with a symbolic sacrifice — but the shock was great. And maybe Max was the only person who suddenly found his eyes full of tears at the sight of the animal kicking in fright, the fathomless seriousness of it all, and the closeness of the bond linking it to the farmer leading it, who perhaps already knew that it would soon die of shock.

In the crowd afterward, Max was able to make a quick date with the redhead in the third row, after which he went backstage to the greenroom. Other public figures had also managed to gain admittance. At the bar stood a tall, platinum-blond young man in a raincoat with an umbrella — the "rain maker" of the former Provo movement — who arranged for precipitation by magic whenever it could hamper the police. He was listening with a smile to a pale lad with a bandaged forehead: he had made a hole in his skull with a dentist's drill, and because of this new fontanel, as he explained in interviews, was constantly as high as a baby.