Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

The following morning at the crack of dawn, he took the local train back along the north side of the triangle to Katowice. Flat fields, bleak and deserted under an overcast sky, impoverished villages, children waving at the train from the courtyards of wooden farmhouses, gloomy woods, gradually changing into a black industrial landscape of mines and factories and then an endless railway yard full of goods trains. He wandered aimlessly through the silent streets for a couple of hours, inhaling the heavy, damp smell of coal and sulfur, and looked at the woman street sweepers.

Would his own child ever walk through Amsterdam and Leiden like this? He found himself thinking immediately of Ada. Did this mean that he should go back to her? Since she had left, he had had no further contact with her, had in fact half forgotten her. Imagine her ringing him up to announce that she was pregnant with his child. What would he do? But that was impossible; the pill took care of that. He put these thoughts aside and went back to the station. The train took him along the base of the triangle to Bielsko-Biala, thirty miles farther south. But in that town, too, where his grandmother had screamed at his father's birth, he heard no echo. The feeling of familiarity, which had originally inspired him, had receded. Perhaps Lysenko had not been entirely right. An hour later he traveled back along the southern side of the triangle to Krakow, looked at the crows in the fields, at the horses and horsecarts on the country roads, and wondered whether he ought to have listened to Onno.

On the third day he again took the train to Katowice; he had to change in Trzebinia and with his heart pounding traveled into the triangle to Oswiecim, at the intersection of the bisecting angles. Here too, under a misty white sky, there were extensive railway yards with shunting trains, train drivers leaning out of their shuddering locomotives and looking back along the endless rows of closed cattle trucks. A taxi took him to the camp entrance in less than five minutes.

Rust-brown buildings, looming between the trees. The tall, square chimney of the crematorium, ARBEIT MACHT FREI. He looked grimly at the wrought-iron slogan above the gate; was this National Socialist cynicism, as he had always supposed, or had it already been there when this was an Austro-Hungarian cavalry barracks, situated on the former border of the Habsburg empire and that of the Hohenzollerns? Maybe his father had been in the garrison stationed here.

There was a clammy, windless heat. At a stall he ate a spicy sausage on a slice of black bread, bought some brochures from another stall, and went in. He felt as if in some way he was trying to catch up with himself — as if his body were already walking over the raked gravel but he himself were still not here, as if it would take decades for him to arrive. Watchtowers. Double lines of bent concrete posts with barbed wire strung between insulators. Skulls and crossbones. Halt! Stoj! It was smaller than he had expected, a silent village of thirty-three brick buildings, in three rows of eleven, where tens of thousands of people had been beaten to death, shot, given fatal injections, and tortured, where there had been experiments with gas on wounded Russian prisoners of war and patients from surrounding hospitals; but it was still not the actual place.

Stones, moldy cellars, dark caves, iron rings on walls, chains, rusty operating tables. A couple of blocks had been turned into a museum. He looked at an infernal terrarium, twenty yards long and three feet deep, filled with women's hair, which had gone a uniform dull-gray color. Was his mother's hair in there? Another terrarium contained discarded children's shoes, with spectacles, toothbrushes, artificial limbs. There it was. Was the truth perhaps, he wondered, that it ultimately made no difference? Was everything possible and could anything be done, since it would one day irrevocably be cast aside? Even in heaven eternal bliss would be possible only by the grace of a criminal loss of memory. Should the blessed not be punished with hell for this? Everything had been wrecked for all eternity — not only here, but by thousands of earlier and later occasions, which no one remembered. Heaven was impossible; only hell might perhaps exist. Anyone who believed in God, he thought, looking at the huge display case full of toys, should be executed — put up against the black tarred wall of execution that he had seen next to Block II.

He could feel that he was working himself into a state. At the stall outside the camp he drank a glass of lukewarm mineral water, leafed through the brochures, peered at the figures and diagrams, and set out toward a hamlet a few miles further on, where the extermination camp Auschwitz II was situated. He could have rung for a taxi, but because countless thousands had been driven to their deaths along this road, he felt that he had to walk, like a Christian taking the Via Dolorosa. The deserted narrow road stretched away through the fields of stubble with occasional birchwoods, behind which loomed the towers of mine shafts and factory chimneys. The day was muggy; sweating and stooping slightly, he looked at the cobblestones over which he was walking, while around him not only the landscape, but gradually everything that tied him down — Amsterdam, Onno, his girlfriends, his colleagues, and also his work, the observatory, the absurd depths of the universe — sank into oblivion. All that remained was himself, walking at that moment over the cobbles between Os'wiecim and Brzezinka, in the center of his diabolical triangle. Without thinking about anything in particular he became increasingly filled with the sense that he was there, that he existed, here and now, that he, here and now, was who he was. Why? Was he perhaps that question, that secret itself? Was the question the answer and the answer the question?

He saw his shoes advancing in turn, and suddenly he was aware of the rotation of the earth; he had to keep walking to remain in the same place, but after a while the rotation began gradually to increase, so that he had to walk faster to compensate for it, and a little later he had the feeling that he was about to fall forward.

He stopped dizzily and looked up. He was standing at a crossroads with a sandy country road full of cart ruts. A few hundred yards farther on there was a bridge over a railway line — and less than a mile beyond it, a low and large expanse in the misty sunshine, lay the entrance building of Auschwitz-Birkenau: anus mundi.

He stared at it numbly. There it was. With its small tower above the gate it was like a monstrous bird of prey, which had landed there with outspread wings. And above it the sky had glowed day and night with the burning men, women, and children; all around there must still be traces of their ash in the fields. There was no traffic; the silence was filled only with the twittering of birds and whistling locomotives in the distance. There was a smell of warm grass, mixed with an indefinable chemical smell. Motionless in its relentless symmetry, the building looked at him. As he began to walk toward it, he saw a small statue of the Virgin on the other side of the crossroads, mounted in a kind of bird box. The Madonna had a few withered branches in her hands and her eyes were turned upward with the look that he had seen so often — when he sat up in bed — on the pillow beneath him. At the same instant he was overwhelmed by rage. Without a second thought and without even looking around, he ran toward it, grabbed the wooden statue off its pedestal, took it by the head, and flung it as far as he could into the bushes.

No longer taking his eyes off the camp, he walked on over the railway bridge with heart pounding and saw the camp coming closer with every step: a black hole, from which nothing could escape. This was the altar, the real powerhouse of fascism. Was there a place on earth where as much good had been done as evil had been done here? If hell had this branch on earth, where was heaven's? There was no such place, because only hell existed, not heaven. This place was the exact opposite of paradise, even if there was no paradise. Only now did he realize that there were two entrances in the reddish brick building: one in the center, with the single-track railway running through it, and one on the left for other traffic. For hundreds of yards to left and right there were double rows of concrete posts with electrified barbed wire, twelve feet high, with watchtowers at short intervals. He was about to walk in through the center gate, shaped like the opening of a crematorium oven, but it was as if an invisible wall suddenly descended with a crash: he could no longer enter. The accursed ground, where millions had been murdered, had become sacred, and he could not set foot on it.