Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"I haven't given it any thought yet," said Ada with a little laugh.

"What about Elisabeth?" she asked a little while later. "Then we can call her Liesje."

"Now, that's the most idiotic custom of all," said Onno, "giving your child a name that you've no intention of using. If you're going to call her Liesje, you should christen her Liesje. Of course Elisabeth is nicer — it's the name of the mother of John the Baptist. But I think that our child should have as symmetrical a name as we have, and we can achieve that by changing Onno, according to Quist's law of phonology, into Anna. That's a good religious solution too, because it's the name of the grandmother of our Lord and Savior. On his mother's side, that is; little is known about his paternal grandmother — at least I've never heard anything about the mother of God. The feminists will have to work that one out. Come to that, Freud's daughter was also called Anna. It's what great men call their daughters."

"And what if it's a boy, after all?"

"Then we shall change Ada, via the transposition of alpha and omega, into Odo."

"That sounds a bit like a knight in a boys' book."

"Good point. We won't do that, then. Anyway, we don't need to think about it, because it won't be a boy. It's going to be a girl — with wonderful long ringlets. If it's a boy, we'll think up an impossible name." He gave her a kiss. "Thanks very much. I'm very happy with your present."

Once science had duly confirmed intuition, Onno phoned Max in Leiden and asked him if he had any plans for that evening. It surprised Max a little, because Onno usually gave only ten minutes' warning before dropping in. At nine o'clock the sound of his stumbling footsteps resounded through the stairwell, and on the threshold, with clumsy elegance, he assumed the pose of a classical god, an Apollo Belvedere: arms outstretched and head slightly averted.

"Noble simplicity, silent grandeur," he said. "You see before you a personage beside whom you sink into total insignificance."

"You have a supernatural beauty," said Max. "It can only be that the spirit has been poured out into you."

"You have no idea of everything that's been poured out."

Onno sat down in his chair and said, "Brace yourself, Max." And when Max joined in the game and grabbed hold of the grand piano, he continued, "I'm going to be a father."

Max kept his hands on the smooth black varnish and looked at him. "It's not true."

"True, true, infinitely true!"

The full implications of those few words had not yet gotten through to Max, though he had had an immediate sensation like at the launch of a ship, when the bottle of champagne smashes fizzing against the bow and the ship slowly starts to move. It was as though his hands had stuck to the grand piano; his attitude belonged to a game that was suddenly no longer being played. He stood up.

"How long have you known?"

"We've known for certain since yesterday. A frog was crucified for my child. You'll see in eight months if you don't believe it. To your astronomical mind, which is totally focused on eternity, the infinitely tender creation of a new life means nothing, of course, but you're still the first person to hear about it — for reasons that are too disgusting to refer to."

Max felt sick. Had Ada told him what had happened in Varadero? That was surely impossible! And when the memory of that night in the sea came back to him, as he made a lightning calculation, a much more awful possibility suddenly dawned on him: whose child was it?

He went over to the cupboard where he kept the glasses and asked: "What do you mean?"

"Let's say that you introduced her to me. What did you think I meant? What's wrong with you? You look green around the gills, my friend."

Max realized that he was starting to panic. "It's a shock," he said, putting the glasses down. "I'm sorry. It may be because I occasionally thought of children when I was with Ada and that's now out of the question for good."

He went to the kitchen. That was another lie — Onno would tell Ada, and she would know that that was not the reason for his alarm, but she wouldn't tell Onno. Hands shaking, he took a steaming ice tray out of the freezer compartment, held it under the tap for a moment, and pushed the ice into a bowl. He had to get his thoughts in order, weigh everything carefully, see what he had to do, and at the same time he had to go in and have a conversation with Onno, which would not be about what it was about. He had destroyed the palace of their friendship, which Onno thought was still standing, without realizing that it had become a mirage.

"I had no idea," said Onno.

"Of what?"

"That you wanted a child with Ada."

"It's not exactly like that, but she was the only woman in my life with whom the thought of a child didn't immediately scare me to death. Forget it. Things are as they are."

"If things were other than they were, something very strange would be going on in the world."

Max put a rum-and-Coke down next to Onno, poured himself a glass of wine, and sat down opposite him. He forced himself to look at Onno. "Had she stopped the pill?"

"The pill! Don't talk to me about the pill. She could just as well have swallowed a peanut every day. Medical technology is still obviously in its infancy — just as my child will be shortly. But I have no regrets. I reacted very differently than I thought I would. I would certainly never have decided to have a child of my own accord, but now that it's been taken out of my hands by a quack manufacturer, I've discovered I'm a born father. That warm, profoundly paternal element in me must have often struck you too. Or didn't it?"

"Of course," said Max, having difficulty in adjusting to Onno's tone, which had not changed but for him already belonged to the past. He took a sip and said, "If my arithmetic is right, it happened in Cuba."

"In Havana, in the headquarters of the revolution, on that night of the eighth to the ninth of October, A.D. 1967, at about two in the morning. You two had gone to the beach that Sunday. I was unfortunately prevented from going by some religious-phenomenological field research."

They looked into each other's eyes. Max nodded; he knew that Onno knew that he was now remembering their telephone conversation, in which he had called himself a "moral wreck" and a "necrophiliac." But whatever had happened, one thing that was certain was that Ada — after what had happened between her and himself — had seduced Onno that evening: that was why she had wanted to sleep with him instead of in her own hotel. She had taken everything into account, and quite rightly, as it now appeared. Quite deliberately, she had contrived to make the paternity of an extremely improbable but not impossible child uncertain. Did her cunning know no bounds? He had never known her like this, nor had Onno. But one day the moment of truth would arrive, because who would the child begin to resemble? In alarm, he allowed the question to sink in. Now, if he had himself looked a little like Onno, then no one would hit on the idea that the child was not Onno's, if it was his — but what did Onno and he have in common?

As Onno sat there on the green chesterfield with his big, heavy body, alongside which his own elegant figure was almost ethereal — and particularly with his straight, classical nose and, beneath it, the curved lips of a small restrained mouth, which was indeed a little like a Greek statue's. From an art-historical point of view, his own face belonged more in the period of Mannerism, with his predatory nose and his rapacious mouth. In a certain sense his head would be better suited to Onno's body, and vice versa. Fortunately they were both dark blond with blue eyes. Just imagine if one of them had been Chinese, or black. .