Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

It touched her that he should mention her name. Had Max ever used her name when he talked to her? Using someone's name during a conversation was like a casual caress, like stroking their hair — had she herself ever called Max by his name?

Onno told her that until he could get a handle on the Phaistos disc, he had decided to pass the time by changing the Netherlands. The time was ripe, and there wouldn't be another opportunity for a long time. That was why he had recently joined the Social Democratic party — not a bunch of heaven-and-earth-movers, admittedly, a rather embarrassing party actually, but ultimately the only one with a chance of real power with which one could just about associate oneself as a civilized human being. First of all, the party itself would have to be changed; he was part of the New Left, a small but select group of mutineers, journalists, and suchlike dubious figures, who were going to break the hegemony of the ossified Social Democratic elite, all those slavish followers of America with their hatred of Communists and their perverse love of Roman Catholics. At the same time, certain sinister student leaders must be prevented from seizing power; the old guard were no longer capable of doing that. In short, at present he spent most of his time in meetings.

"If you ask me, you're doing it to get at your brothers. What does your father make of it?"

"There you are again," laughed Onno. "Never tell a woman anything, because she'll misuse it in order to understand you. Deep down I'm sure that he thinks it's marvelous that there should be a Quist involved with the Reds, but he'd rather bite his tongue off than admit it. And the Socialists like having a Quist in their midst, too. I bear it all with the serene dignity that is so characteristic of me. In politics you must use the weapons you have, just as in love. All within the bounds of decency, of course."

"So you see less of Max than you used to."

"Yes," he said. "I see a bit less of Max than I used to." He lit up a cigarette and said, "I don't think I can explain it to you, because I don't really understand it myself, but to my dying day I shall be grateful to him for the fact that he exists."

"The same goes for him, as far as you're concerned. I know that." She looked at him for a moment. "But why are you suddenly making such a solemn declaration?"

"From saturnine melancholy."

"Has something unpleasant happened between you?"

"No, not at all. It's just something to do with time. We've known each other for six months now, and in the last few weeks I find myself being constantly reminded of a saying of Hegel's when I think of those first months: 'What a splendid sunrise it was.' Hegel wrote that as an old reactionary about the French Revolution, which had inspired him as a young man — at a time when everyone talked of nothing but the horrors of the Jacobin terror. But two months ago that saying never occurred to me, and that it should happen now, with that ominous past tense, is obviously a sign that something is changing. I see less of him because of my political activities, but it may also be partly the other way around, if you understand what I mean. Anyway, it's the same old story, nothing special, action is followed by reflection, a love affair by marriage. We shall always stay good friends — even though the bastard stole my girlfriend."

"Stole your girlfriend?" repeated Ada, more shocked than surprised. "And you said nothing unpleasant had happened. When was that, then?"

Onno laughed and said that it was always better not to take him too literally. He told her with amusement about his relationship with Helga, which Max had put an end to by pretending to be a playmate. In fact it had been high drama, of course. It was like the play in Hamlet, he said, the "play within the play," in which the king is confronted with his crime, the difference being that in Shakespeare it is deliberately staged by a cunning stepson, whereas Max had done it in his playful innocence.

"And who clears your room up now?"

"No one," said Onno with a comically strangled voice and screwing up his face, as though about to burst into sobs. "No one. I'm alone in the world."

"Poor boy," said Ada with a little laugh. "Shall I give your room a cleaning, then?"

"Yes, miss," said Onno, nodding in a way that used to be described in children's books as "eagerly." "Yes please, miss."

"Shall we go, then?"

He gave her a searching look. "Are you still joking?"

"Not at all. I'd like to see the kind of place you live in. I've heard so much about you…"

"Max has never seen how I live, or, rather, do not live."

"I'm not Max."

They looked at each other. Everything was suddenly changing — like a tree blown over by the wind, pulled out of the earth roots and all, teeming with insects. No, she wasn't Max, and he wasn't Max either — and at the same time she was Max, and so was he.

While Max completed his rectangular path of mourning around the mega-scaffold in Poland, Ada was amazed about what she was suddenly doing, and Onno about what he was allowing to happen. He lugged her cello across the Museumplein and said that he now finally understood why Max had broken it off. They walked to the Kerkstraat through the Rijksmuseum arch. He went down the four steps to the basement, opened the door of the former tradesman's entrance, and let her in.

"This is quite impossible," he said as he led the way over the cracked marble slabs of the dark corridor. One of the walls was almost hidden by the pile of red and green paraffin cans.

"Why? Aren't you allowed female visitors by your landlady?"

"My landlady is an unbelievable trollop herself. I always have to lock the door at night."

"You're acting as if I'd asked you to go to bed with me."

"Haven't you?"

"Perhaps," said Ada, to her own surprise.

Onno stopped and turned his eyes heavenward.

"What further witness is needed? This is the final proof of the unfathomable immorality of womankind! Even the miracle of music is obviously powerless to help."

Ada heard herself talking, lightheartedly, like a woman of the world.

She scarcely recognized herself; it was suddenly as though she were seeing herself in the mirror in coronation robes. She sensed that she was master of the situation — she, a little provincial from Leiden, here in Amsterdam with an internationally famous scholar from a distinguished family. She was in charge. With Max she had never been in charge — such an idea had not even occurred to her; he had graciously tolerated her, as one tolerates a cat on one's lap, before gently pushing her away. But now the cat had a bird in its jaws.

She hesitated on the threshold to Onno's room. It was certainly just as well that Max had never seen this. The chaos was complete. Beneath the narrow window in the front room, through which passersby on the pavement could be seen only up to knee height, stood a desk piled high with papers, open books, magazines, jumbled newspapers, folders, stencils, bank statements, envelopes, bills, everything topsy-turvy and garnished with overflowing ashtrays, an empty milk bottle, an open bag of sugar, a portable radio, a piece of butter on aluminum paper that had turned orange — and this continued over the floor and along the walls with their crooked bookshelves, a sagging sofa and an oil stove, into the back room, where it was rounded off by a mattress with sheets the color of the ancient varnish on the murals in the Sistine Chapel.

"Yes," said Ada, going in, "if anything is quite impossible, then this is it."

"Are you suggesting it's untidy?"

"What can I say? It's a bit different from your friend's place."

"But then I don't live with the feeling that I may have to take flight at any moment," said Onno. "For him anything can happen at any moment, so he has to be able find what he wants to take with him immediately. I can never find anything."