Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"I'm inconsolable. This is the last time that I shall have seen the sunset here."

"Stay, then," said Guerra. "Marilyn stayed."

"If only it were as simple as that…"

"Suppose," said Max, dipping a piece of bread in his wine, "she were to say that she was staying. What would be in store for her — perfect happiness or the question: what next?"

"In other words," concluded Marilyn, "happiness is impossible."

He looked at her, convinced that she also knew that the two of them were simultaneously engaged in a second, unspoken conversation. He took the bottle and said, "How severe you are. Why don't you have a glass of wine? According to our friend who is otherwise engaged, water is for brushing your teeth."

"No thanks," she said. "I may have to shoot."

Laughing, he topped up the three other glasses. "That's right. It's extremely dangerous on the road — the whole coast is swarming with infiltrators. Why don't we stay the night here? I'm sure that's possible."

"Of course," said Guerra, "if you want.."

"Don't be silly, Max," said Ada with a girlish gesture of her elbow. "I wouldn't dream of it, my plane leaves tomorrow — and it doesn't seem a very nice way to behave toward Onno. Come to that, shouldn't we be making a move?"

Max nodded with his eyes closed, indicating that the impulse had already gone, and put down his knife and fork.

"Shall I tell you something, Marilyn? Believe it or not, I'm happy now. Because I know that one day I shall look back at this evening in the knowledge that I was happy then. Maybe you can only be happy via that mirror. One day I'll lie on my deathbed in the knowledge that I'll never get up again — and then the thought of this evening may perhaps ease my death." He took a sip, but did not swallow. He swished his tongue about in the wine, the smell of which now penetrated his nose from inside, and it seemed to him as though those few cubic inches in the darkness of his mind in some way contained the whole world, just as a drop of dew on a stalk of grass mirrors the landscape. He swallowed and said, "I've suddenly had a vision."

"Tell us," said Ada.

"I see a German soldier on the Russian steppe, twenty-five years ago. You should know that there was a war going on between us in Europe at that time, but that would take me too long to go into now. He's about twenty years old, it's forty degrees below zero and among burnt-out tanks and frozen horse carcasses he lies back in the howling snowstorm while a glowing red grenade fragment lies hissing in his guts — and in his final moments he suddenly has a vision. He sees a table on the veranda by a fairy-tale bay, it's evening, the table is covered with food and wine, and it's so warm that two beautiful women are wearing nothing but flimsy shirts…"

It was still for a moment. Ada gave Marilyn a look that showed a problem had now arisen.

"And why," asked Guerra, bending aside to allow the black housekeeper to take his plate away, "are we the vision of a fascist soldier and not a Soviet one?"

Max groaned. "You're right, but I can't force my visions, can I? It's his vision after all, isn't it?"

Guerra smiled. "You wouldn't cut a bad figure as a dialectician at the cadre school."

"If you assure me that visions are not forced there, either, I hereby apply for the post."

"We don't force anything. The new Cuba is itself a vision."

"You see," said Max to Ada, "now I'm staying here."

All three of them looked at him — and suddenly he felt uncomfortable. Was he talking too much? It was as though there were a sudden distance between himself and the others; suddenly he felt abandoned. Because his headache started to return, he cupped his hands and asked Ada to pour some ice water from the carafe into them, after which he parted his knees and dipped his face into it.

"Don't you feel well?"

"A little relapse," he said, his face dripping. "It'll soon pass." He got up and only knew what he was trying to say when he said it. "Shall I give Onno a call? To say we'll be home in a couple of hours?"

"Shall I do it?"

"Let me."

Without drying himself he went inside, where the black housekeeper pointed out the telephone in the hall. Marilyn's submachine gun was hanging over the arm of a chair. Her real identity was hanging there. He had been wrong about her. He must stop — otherwise he might bite off more than he could chew. But meanwhile his internal secretions had prepared themselves for it: he felt it like a hardening in his insides, something like the spongy stem sometimes put in a vase for sticking flowers into, erect from his abdomen to his heart.

As Onno was probably still at dinner, he had him paged on the terrace of the restaurant, but he was not there; there was no answer from his room either. Just as he was about to hang up, he heard Onno's soft, hoarse voice:

"Si?"

"What's all this? It's Max. Were you asleep?"

"Yes. You woke me up. What's wrong? I don't want to talk to anyone. Not even you."

"What's happened?"

"None of your business."

"Onno! What's wrong?"

There was a moment's silence. He was certain that Onno had half raised himself and was leaning on one elbow to see what time it was.

"I can't look myself in the face any longer. I'm not fit for a high-minded person like you to talk to. I won't say any more, but even that must remain a secret. Can Ada hear you?"

"No, she's sitting on the terrace. We're in a wonderful dacha by the sea, with Guerra and Jesús, with crowds of servants around us — well, as you know, only in a Communist country can people like you and me live like capitalists. What's more, the revolution has assigned me, as future leader of the Dutch People's Republic, a breathtakingly beautiful woman with a submachine gun."

"Yes, I can hear, your deepest masochistic instincts are once again being satisfied. I should never have listened to you. We should never have come here, because they're serious here, and that seriousness has made a necrophiliac of me. I'm a moral wreck. Only sleep can bring me oblivion."

"Did all that happen in church? Did you spit in the holy-water font?"

"Yes! I spat in the holy-water font!"

"Onno, you're not going to tell me that you've been to bed with another woman?"

"I'm not going to tell you anything at all, you shit. When an exceptionally refined spirit reproaches itself, all you can think of is that. My real problem is of a completely different spiritual kind. I've allowed myself to be devoured — as a victim of my own goodness. My noble spirit will be my downfall one day. And now I'm going to hang my… I mean, now I'm going to hang up, because I'm exhausted. Tell Ada that I'll come straight to her tomorrow to throw myself at her feet. No, don't say that last bit. You're coming back this evening, aren't you?"

"We'll be home at about twelve."

"See you tomorrow."

" 'Good night, sweet prince.' "

Max hung up and stood there lost in thought. What did it mean? Had Onno really been unfaithful to Ada, in broad daylight? Surely that was inconceivable, but even if he had, then what he said was incomprehensible, even making allowances for all the exaggeration. What did he mean by "necrophiliac"? Had he been seduced into taking the host, perhaps? Hoc est enim corpus meum? Had he slunk toward the altar, with head bowed and hands folded, and stuck his tongue out? Perhaps to please someone? The priest? Perhaps because he was the only person in the church? In any case Max knew that Onno always exaggerated in the direction of truth, never in the opposite direction, and that something was really tormenting him, and that he would do better not to return to the subject if Onno did not raise it himself.

He went to the veranda, where the housekeeper, the cook, and Jesús had now joined them and sat talking softly in the dark. Ada had disappeared. Marilyn said that she had gone into the sea for a last time "to say goodbye."