Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

Max swallowed and shook his head.

"But what's in all those other files?" asked Onno.

"Those concern other people," said Oud impassively, "and, apart from that, mainly robbery and plunder."

There was a silence. Max again saw the piano being taken out of the house, the pile of clothes in his mother's bedroom. In order to help him through the moment, Onno asked whether there was an explanation for Delius's consistent silence.

"Was it from a feeling of guilt? Because he had fatally incriminated himself in that letter? It appears that Ezra Pound has stopped speaking these days for a similar reason."

"According to the public prosecutor," said Oud, "it was only a last resort to escape the burden of proof. But one day something strange was found in his cell." He looked in one of the archive boxes and pulled out a thick yellow official envelope. "This," he said, taking out a cigarette packet and giving it to Max.

It was a Sweet Caporal packet, yellowed and empty. In astonishment Max took it and turned it over. On the back something was written in green ink.

" 'Only I exist,' " he read in German. " 'What does not exist cannot die.' "

"That's the same tune as Wittgenstein," said Onno. "Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent. Another frustrated Austrian."

Max did not hear. He had never seen his father's handwriting. It was un-Dutch — sharper, more angular. He had held this same packet in his hand, there in his cell in Scheveningen, and he had written this on it, perhaps on his knee, sitting on the edge of his bed.

But it wasn't Wittgenstein, said Oud, it was Delius: he had certainly never heard of Wittgenstein, his contemporary, who was only now becoming fashionable. In a psychiatric report, that note was used as evidence of diminished responsibility: he was under the illusion that only he himself actually existed and that everything else was illusion, projection; from that point of view he could not be guilty of murder, because nobody else was alive, only he himself could die. Even his judges and his interrogators did not exist. Even his executioner, paradoxically, did not exist.

Such a patient should therefore be exempted from prosecution and detained at the government's pleasure. However, the prosecutor argued in turn that it was only the cunning maneuver of an intelligent criminal in order to escape his just punishment. Giltay Veth, on the other hand, the defense counsel Wolfgang had been assigned, who had not been able to get a word out of him, had gone into it further. He argued that Delius's cell contained the infamous book of Max Stirner, a German philosopher from the first half of the previous century, the advocate of an extreme, amoral egoism, whose Ego was a precursor of Nietzsche's Ubermensch. After Hitler's downfall, Delius had obviously gone a step further and arrived at an authentic, metaphysical solipsism. Giltay Veth had subsequently sought the advice of two distinguished foreign philosophers: Russell from Cambridge and Heidegger from Freiburg im Breisgau.

"Heidegger?" said Onno in surprise. "Have you got it there?"

Oud had opened another file and put his finger on a postcard.

"Here Russell writes: 'Solipsism, although not my cup of tea, is a perfectly legitimate philosophical position. Not taking it seriously would imply a defamation of philosophy as such. In my opinion, therefore, your client should be executed without hesitation.' As you can imagine, Giltay Veth never submitted this; it has obviously found its way among these papers by accident. He only produced Heidegger's German letter. Here it is. 'The expression solipsism derives from solus ipse: "I alone." The germ of this kind of thinking, which turns its back on being, is to be found not in Classical antiquity, but may be linked to Descartes. The latter's universal skepticism, which called everything into doubt, apart from the self, led to the formula familiar to every schoolboy: cogito ergo sum. Solipsism arises when cogito ergo sum is sharpened to ergo solus ergo sum. However, this is a logical extension of Cartesianism. Dismissing it implies a rejection of the whole of post-Cartesian philosophy. Hence a death sentence passed against your client would basically imply a condemnation of the whole of philosophy.' "

All very well, but according to the public prosecutor, said Oud, Heidegger was himself a philosophical delinquent, a Nazi of the first order, who was indirectly only trying to exonerate himself, because he also felt under threat. In their judgment, the judges finally took the view that someone who could hound his wife and parents-in-law to their deaths was by definition not normal, that no murderer was normal, but that this could not mean that murderers could appeal to their deed as a mitigating circumstance, because that would mean the end of jurisprudence, which would herald the return to barbarity of human civilization — in brief, the kind of society that had just been prevented at the cost of fifty-five million dead.

"Quite right." Onno nodded.

Here and there in the corners of the cigarette packet there were still some blackened remnants of tobacco. Max closed it and a little later watched it disappear into the envelope.

"Have you got a photo of my father, perhaps?"

Oud raised his eyebrows. "I ought to have," he said with doubt in his voice, and began looking. "In any case, in his passport.."

"Do you know where your father's grave is?" asked Onno with feigned nonchalance.

"No," said Max, and looked at Oud.

The latter opened his eyes for a moment and made a brief apologetic gesture. Finally he found only a blurred newspaper photograph of the court, taken from a distance. Max saw an unrecognizable figure, flanked by a gendarme with a white lanyard. Perhaps the same one who had taken him out of school four years earlier.

Onno had an appointment with a couple of politicians, and Max went straight home. He felt tired and needed to talk to Ada. She knew nothing about any of this; she had been born in the year that his father had been shot. Of course, hearing the name Delius may have awakened a memory in her parents, since the name was rare in the Netherlands, but it was a long time ago, and there had been lots of trials in those days, most of which were more spectacular than his father's. She had to know now, partly because he had not behaved very elegantly that morning.

The moment he entered the room, he sensed that something was wrong. Her cello, which was always by the grand piano, had gone. On his desk lay her letter:

Dear Max,

When you get home, I shall have gone. Perhaps you won't understand immediately, but if you think a little, you'll be able to work it out. I've had a wonderful time with you, for which I'm grateful to you and which I will never forget. You meant a lot to me and perhaps I meant a little to you too. If we meet again, I hope that it will be as good friends.

Yours ever,

Ada

He slowly put the sheet of paper down. The unexpected tone of farewell, the finality of the sentences, sank deep into him, but at the same time he knew that he would not do anything to change it. So that was it; the episode was over. He sat down and pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk, in order to do what he had planned to do in her presence. All he had to do was take out what he needed, without looking: the order he created around himself gave him an extra year of life, which other people wasted in looking.

He placed an old-fashioned fountain pen and a glasses case in front of him. The fountain pen was thick, and made of flame-patterned, dark-blue ebonite, which had become matt and lifeless; the copper clip and the decorations were dull and rusty. He unscrewed it carefully and looked at the gold nib, which was blackened with ancient ink. He turned on the desk lamp and studied the pen carefully with his magnifying glass, and he saw what he had hoped for: among the traces of ink there was a faint deep-green glow, like algae in a stagnant pond. He put the top back on; the thread had gone, but still he felt a very slight resistance at the end.