Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

To Onno's alarm Brons put a hand on his arm. "Onno, look at me. Promise me that you'll look after Ada."

"I promise," said Onno in an ironically solemn tone, as though taking an oath.

He wanted to pull his arm away, but that was out of the question, of course. The hand remained there, so that a little later he felt its warmth. He looked uncomfortably into the faithful eyes of the bookseller. It was clear that he was trying to say something but that it was difficult for him to begin; perhaps he'd prepared it and was now trying to remember.

"Ada is a very difficult girl," he said. "For herself especially. As a child she was very withdrawn; she never really had any girlfriends. She wanted to, but for some reason she always provoked aggression, without consciously trying to. At school there were constant plots against her by other girls. They talked about her behind her back, ridiculous stories were spread about her."

"Why was that?"

"No idea. Until she was about sixteen or seventeen she was in a kind of sleepy cocoon. She looked at you in a way that made you wonder whether she could really see you. And she wasn't just bad at school — we had the feeling that she didn't understand what study really meant. She went from one school to another, but it made no difference."

He took his hand away and waited for a moment until the tea had been put down in front of them. Where on earth did that asymmetry come from? Onno wondered. Why was the love of parents for their child axiomatic and the reverse not? Why should "Honor thy father and thy mother" be a commandment, and "Honor thy child" not?

"But it's all turned out well," he said.

"That's true," Brons went on, "but nature was just as aggressive toward her. Until she was eight or ten she had constant problems with her ears, and had to have them cleaned all the time. Fortunately that stopped, but then she developed eye trouble. At a certain moment it turned out she was shortsighted and far-sighted at the same time, if I've got it right. First she had one kind of glasses, then another. Fortunately that came right too, perhaps because short-sightedness and far-sightedness finally cancel each other out; but by that time she must have been to the eye specialist a hundred times. And besides that she was always accident-prone. Cycling crash, front teeth broken. Skating crash, someone skated over her hand — wham, tendons severed. Fortunately it was her right hand. I can't bear to think what would have happened to her if she hadn't been able to play the cello any longer, because that's what finally helped her through it all: music. I've never really understood it — I'm not musical at all, I can't even tell a requiem from a Viennese waltz."

"Perhaps there isn't any difference."

"Yes, there you are. You understand — otherwise you wouldn't be with Ada."

"What makes you think that?" said Onno. "I don't understand it either. Words are day, music is night. Your daughter is a mystery to me, but maybe understanding just gets in the way of love. Do you understand your wife, if I may ask?"

"What?" asked Brons, and looked at him, with a sudden severity in his eyes. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing really. All I mean is that probably not only does no one understand anything about anyone else's marriage, but they don't even understand their own. For example, I've sometimes wondered what my father really saw in my mother, but to be honest I really wouldn't know, and probably he doesn't either. Perhaps that's precisely what love is."

Suddenly Ada and her mother appeared at their table. Ada looked inquiringly from Onno to her father. What had they been discussing? Had it been set up like this by her mother?

Onno got up and looked into the sphinxlike face of Sophia Brons. "We've been discussing developments in the stock market," he said. "I've decided to speculate on a fall."

Even when the house on the Kerkstraat had been furnished and Onno finally had a "real home," Max wasn't invited. Because Ada preferred not to go to the Vossiusstraat, they mostly saw each other somewhere in town. One evening they'd arranged to meet at the bar of the Lucky Star, a dance hall filled with the social bouillabaisse that had been bubbling away in Amsterdam for the last few years: intellectuals, poets, writers, composers, activists, politicians, ex-Provos, mixed with frivolous industrialists, straight-faced fashion designers, giggling society hairdressers, and accepted underworld figures, all of them with their female or male retinue simmering away in the soup of keen young dancers from the working-class districts.

Max listened to "California Dreamin' " by the Mamas & the Papas on the jukebox and watched the girls walking toward the dance floor ahead of their boyfriends, with a strange kind of way of moving one arm: it did not move from front to back more or less fully extended, but was bent at right angles, with the upper arm remaining almost motionless, while the lower arm with the hand hanging down described a horizontal circular segment of approximately forty-five degrees. Above the dance floor was a revolving glitter ball, inlaid with hexagonal pieces of mirror glass; reflected beams from a couple of spotlights rotated in countless small misty dots over walls and people, and now he was dazzled by a brilliant flash. Perhaps there was something similar somewhere in space, he thought.

When Onno emerged from the split in the dark-red curtain at the entrance and saw him sitting there, he took a letter out of his inside pocket and waved it above his head.

"Push off," he said sternly to a deathly pale young man sitting on the stool next to Max, and to his own amazement his order was obeyed. "What do you think? Letter from Cuba."

"So they did write!" said Max in surprise.

The letter was addressed to compañera Ada Brons — which according to Onno did not mean "comrade," because that was camarada, but, "friend," or "companion."

"That's precisely the difference," he said.

The letter was written in poor English and came from the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos. In October a ten-day chamber-music festival was to be held in Havana, with a large number of ensembles from Eastern and Western Europe and Latin America taking part. The journey by Cuban Airlines and accommodation in the Hotel Nacional would be paid for by the ICAP; because of the precarious exchange situation, the result of the North American blockade, there was unfortunately no fee.

"Fantastic! The only problem is, the duo doesn't exist anymore, does it?"

"We'll bring it back to life," said Onno with determination.

"So she's going to do it?"

"Of course. At least, if she can get leave from the orchestra; if some anti-Communist fanatic has the last word on the board, it will be difficult. She was playing this evening, and after the concert she was going to try to get hold of someone. I'm seeing her shortly above the Bamboo. But there's one small problem," said Onno, and put his finger under the date. "The letter took two months to get to the Christian West. That's the ultimate problem of the Third World: communications."

"Has she already called the embassy?"

"If she's allowed to by those terrible grandees, we're going straight there tomorrow. I don't trust the telephone: they'll ring you back after the festival is over."

"You can come with me in the car tomorrow morning, if you like; I can take you to The Hague."

"Come on, let's go."

The room above the Bamboo Bar, from which the sound of a Dixieland band was blaring, was the home of the new left-wing liberal society; but the Social Democrats from the rebel club could also be found there, because everyone knew everyone else, and for the time being belonging to the same generation had a stronger pull than different political allegiances. At the top of the steep stairs stood the melancholy Hungarian doorman, who had fled from Budapest eleven years ago, after the uprising. Ada had just come in, he said with an expression that indicated it ultimately did not matter.