Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

— That means that the opportunistic traitor not only did not write the works of Shakespeare or Marlowe, but not even his own.

— That's right. But Lucifer would not be Lucifer if he had left it at that. Even those who submit themselves to him and serve him must finally be destroyed. Because after Sir Francis had finally achieved more than he had ever dreamed of, the devil appeared to him one day in the shape of an official, from whom he accepted a bribe, which led to a trial for corruption, imprisonment in the Tower, and his complete social downfall. Five years later, at the age of sixty-five, he finally went to hell.

— Long live friendship!

— Your story too is yet another demonstration of what is missing — and it saddens me that that's how it must be. That's what I have always missed most against my better judgment, here in the Light. No shortage of love, bliss, goodness, wisdom, truth, peace, beauty, all in our service, but no friendship.

— You're not my friend?

— Or even your girlfriend. In organizations there are no friendships, and certainly not in ours, and even more certainly not between superiors and subordinates. Friendship exists only in the abyss. Do you know those famous, magnificent, elevated passages on friendship that Bacon wrote shortly before his death: No receipt openeth the heart but a true friend? Indeed, and the jugular vein! The man who had his best friend beheaded! Can you hear it? The laughter of the heartless devil, with his own temperature at absolute zero, resounds through all the halls of all eternities.

— Now I finally understand why I made such efforts for all those years.

— Go on. I'm listening.

One of the first things they did, back in autumnal Holland — Che Guevara turned out to have been murdered in Bolivia on the very night of the excursion to Varadero — was to repay the expenses incurred in Cuba. Max was not very keen in retrospect; his alarm at Guerra's words had subsided with distance, and according to him everything had disappeared into the caverns of bureaucratic oblivion. But in Onno's view it was a question of morality, of Kantian practical reason, about which there could be no haggling. Max inquired about the cost per day with full board at the Amsterdam Hilton, which turned out to be a lot of money; they estimated the capitalist profiteering of Conrad Hilton and his henchmen on the Wall Street stock exchange at 50 percent, then divided the amount in revolutionary fashion by two and decided to regard the excursions and car trips as Cuban investments in their future propaganda on behalf of the island. They considered sending the money to the ICAP in the form of an anonymous dollar check; but Ada told them that the conservatory in Havana urgently needed a new stencil machine, which was unobtainable in Cuba, whereupon Max selected a splendid machine and had it shipped out with the message: Hasta la victoria siempre. — Dos amigos.

When he later reported what he had written, Onno nodded in agreement, but Ada shot him a short glance, which hit him like a blow to the head. He looked down and thought the same as she did. Dos amigos? Did a friend go to bed, or rather into the sea, with his friend's girlfriend, even though she had once been his own girlfriend? In his own words friendship was that condition in which one told the other person even what one would never tell anyone. Would he ever tell Onno what he had gotten up to in the Gulf of Mexico? Whether he told him or not, wasn't it in either case the end of true amistad? If he told him, it need not be replaced by enmity, it could be replaced by all kinds of things, but whatever happened, something else would replace it. But since he was not going to tell him, it had created an even more false situation: for Onno everything went on as before, but Max and Ada now had something to hide — they had both deceived him. It didn't change the actual situation at all, but Onno was now like someone who had invested his fortune in a Rembrandt drawing; the thief had replaced it one night by a faultless reproduction, and for the rest of his life he would have no idea that there was a worthless fake on the wall.

What Max and Ada on their side did not know was that Onno had had an adventure of his own. But he had been seduced — he had betrayed only his girlfriend, not his friend. Max salved his conscience with the thought that it had not actually happened in October but in June, as the belated payment of a debt for something that one had once bought and no longer possessed but that nevertheless had to be paid for, and a week later it had merged harmoniously with his other incredible experiences on the island, which were summarized by the aphorism that he had seen at Havana airport: "When the impossible becomes the everyday, a revolution is under way." He felt refreshed by the intercontinental excursion, and in the observatory's lecture room he gave an enthusiastic talk on the revolution in Cuba; it even attracted people from other faculties who were interested in hearing the report of an eyewitness. Because there were a few foreigners among them he spoke in English; an American colleague from the Goldstone radio telescope, who was working on the sun, got excited about the policy of strangulation being followed by his government. He was ashamed to be American!

Onno did his duty with his political friends. He also omitted to mention that he had been a delegate at a conference of radical revolutionaries; no one would believe the true story. However, he did explain that the main problem of the Third World was communication — not only the flow of goods, but also information: it was all totally inadequate, that's why the craziest things were possible there, and he could give astonishing examples of this, but that would take him too far at this point. And then there was the ideology! In Cuba you could learn the meaning of the word radicalism. In the United States the left wing of the Democratic party was still farther right than a right-wing party in the Netherlands, and there was no party taken seriously here as right-wing as the Republican party, let alone its right wing; but in Cuba the government was considerably farther to the left than even the Communist party in the Netherlands. American rage at the existence of that Red bastion off its coast was therefore understandable. For them it was quite simply the Red devil; this was the home of the new redskins who had to be gunned down from the hip; and for Dutch Social Democrats it still meant that the prevailing situation there should be closely observed with the necessary attention, albeit with judicious reserve.

"I'm going into town for a bit," said Ada.

She had put her head around the door of Onno's study; she had her coat on. He had a colleague with a mustache visiting him, smoking a large bent pipe; with his back to her Onno gave a wave of his hand, without turning around.

She was still struck by the amount of grayness in Amsterdam after all those dazzling tropical colors, but it was not really unpleasant. She was at home here. People looked surly and dissatisfied, it was chilly, the trees were becoming bare, and it was getting dark early again, but it was just this variation of the seasons that were unknown in the tropics: no autumn, no winter, no spring, in fact only summer. Were Chopin or Stravinsky conceivable in a climate like that? In any case they hadn't appeared there, and nor had anything else of importance been thought of or invented there, as far as she knew. Because she had the feeling that she would be better off to leave such considerations to Onno and Max, she put these thoughts out of her mind.

She didn't feel like taking the busy streets with trams running along them, and wandered aimlessly down the Spiegelstraat toward the center of town. She felt restless; suddenly she had become too impatient to practice, like when she wanted to do something and was expecting visitors any moment. Now and then she stopped at the window of an antiques shop and looked at a serene, gleaming gold Buddha with hands outstretched as though warding something off, at a lonely, grubby green Japanese bowl on dun-colored velvet, which no one would pick up if they saw it lying in the gutter, at antique glass and silver and at glowing seventeenth-century paintings. There was no end to the beauty of the world, nor to its cruelty. She had a painful feeling in her breasts — naturally, because she had let her posture at the cello become lazy; that had been her fault from her first lessons onward, when she was six. Tomorrow evening she was playing in The Hague with the orchestra, and a tour of the United States was scheduled for March. The artistic director had impressed on her not to say a word about her performance in Havana, preferably not to the other musicians either, because that might endanger the whole tour. Anyone who had been to Cuba had the plague, "the Red Death," in Poe's words.