Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

He sat down at his desk, took a sheet of squared paper, sharpened a pencil over the wastepaper basket, and began writing without much conviction:

Dear Onno,

I'd give many years of my life not to have to write this letter. Our friendship, which has now lasted for nine months, was the most precious thing I possessed. I'm not even sure whether "friendship" is the right word. Lots of men are friends, without my having the impression that it has much to do with our relationship; I too had plenty of "friends," of course, but that was always a completely different kind of thing. "Spiritual affinity," then? I don't thinly that word touches the core either, because what two souls are more different than ours? Perhaps, I've sometimes thought, we should think more of the affinity of lightning and earth, sometimes with me as the lightning, and sometimes you. I can't speak for you, but when I met you I often felt like a thundercloud that couldn't discharge. Or rather: after I'd met you, I realized that I'd felt like that. I'm aware that so far this sounds like a love letter, and in a certain sense it is. But of course it won't escape you of all people that I'm using the past tense. In a way that I will never forgive myself for, I have forfeited the right to say we are still friends. It's almost impossible for me to admit what has happened; most of all I would like to go on writing to the end of my days, simply to postpone it. Onno! The child that Ada is expecting may be mine.

The moment he had written this, he realized that he could obviously never send the letter. He had no right to reveal this on his own initiative, without consulting Ada. In that case he would, again for his own convenience, in a certain sense be doing the same to her as he had done to Onno. He was dependent on her; without her he couldn't do anything. So the first thing he must do was talk to her. But again that must be done behind Onno's back— whatever he did would drag him further and further into the mire. And apart from that he must manage to persuade her to abort her fetus. It was all equally disgusting, but doing nothing was also impossible. If he couldn't get her to come around, she might say that he must marry her in two weeks' time and act as the father — with a 50 percent chance that it would be Onno's child. That would also mean the end of the friendship, but if that was what happened, he wouldn't hesitate. He simply had to accept it as his fate. For that matter, if he hadn't seduced Ada that evening, she would not in turn have seduced Onno — so that even if it was Onno's child, it would not exist without him. Moreover, deep inside he felt a kind of acceptance of the fact that in that case he would have a child of Onno's.

But what would Onno do in that case? He was looking forward to his child and was preparing for his wedding. Perhaps he had already talked to his family about it. Suddenly everything would be taken away from him. That was also inconceivable. On the other hand it wasn't inconceivable that Onno would react in a similar way and be prepared to accept a child of his, though at the same time terminating their friendship. No, that was improbable — unless he really had slept with a woman that afternoon in Havana, when he himself had gone to Varadero with Ada. "I can't face myself anymore. I'm a moral wreck. I've spat in the holy-water font." In that case he would be caught up in a similar situation, and perhaps reason that without that escapade none of it would have happened, and that he would now have to pay for it with his friend's child. But no, for Onno there was perhaps something even more powerful at issue: for him his child might have to be first and foremost a Quist, a continuation of the dynasty — but for that of course it had to be really a Quist and not in fact a Delius. He himself did not have that feeling, and it required little effort for him to understand why not.

A young female colleague, who worked on polarization but looked more like a champion swimmer, poked her head around the door of his room and said that there were still problems with 3 C 296.

"I'm studying it too," said Max, tapping the letter with the eraser end of his pencil. "What would you say if it were to consist of two double radio sources? In that case the smaller one might coincide with the optical mist. Think of Centaurus A."

She stared at him for a moment, then raised a forefinger and disappeared.

This was the second time he had blurted this out for something to say, but it now dawned on him that it was probably true: at first sight it explained everything. Perhaps he had made an important discovery, on which he should start work immediately before it was taken out of his hands — but he wasn't in the mood for discoveries. First he must get to talk to Ada. He took the letter and tore it in two five times over; then he tore each half once more, after which he carefully mixed the clippings with the other rubbish in his wastepaper basket.

She was playing not for the audience but for her child — the sounds from the instrument between her legs, she thought, must penetrate deep into her abdomen and surround the little creature inside with beauty. After the last heroic bar, while the Czech guest conductor stood hunched up, as though he had had a sudden attack of colic, there was a moment's silence in the auditorium — and then the applause erupted, with hurrahs and, here and there, enthusiastic whistles. Slowly the maestro freed himself from his cramp; with a broad smile, shaking one hand with the other, he thanked the orchestra, his gaze meeting Ada's for a moment. With a flourish he took his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and mopped his brow ceremoniously, and only then did he turn his back on them, look at the balcony for a few moments with a triumphant snort, after which his head slumped forward as if he had been shot in the neck.

The audience rose to their feet and acclaimed him as though he were Franz Liszt himself — although a troublemaker like Mazeppa would be immediately arrested by the police in Amsterdam in the present circumstances, with a great degree of approval from the same audience. Tapping the side of her cello softly with her bow, Ada waited for him to turn around and, with an imposing gesture, baton in one hand, handkerchief in the other, make them rise like puppets. When she was on her feet, she realized that she wasn't looking into the audience but was staring over their heads, straight through the back wall to a point in the infinite distance.

In the orchestra's room under the stage she put her instrument to bed in its case; because there was a rehearsal the following morning she didn't take it home with her. Her friend, the clarinetist Marijke, asked if she was going along to the pub. In fact she would have preferred to go straight home, as she was feeling tired, but it was the kind of suggestion that only the strongest characters could refuse.

"Just for a bit then," she said when Marijke persisted.

Max was sitting on a collapsed red sofa next to the gas stove and reading the paper. He stood up in surprise.

"What a coincidence!"

Ada was not so sure it was a coincidence — on the contrary. Of course, he had looked in the listings to see when the orchestra's next performance was. He was still tanned from Cuba. They kissed each other on the cheek. She took off her wet coat and sat down next to him, while Marijke was swallowed up by the rapidly swelling crowd.

Now came what could no longer be put off. When Max heard that they had performed Mazeppa after the intermission as a kind of encore, he said that Prokofiev had obviously also listened closely to that highly romantic symphonic poem, because it always reminded him of the passage from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet that had been playing in the street in Havana, with Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. The two compositions merged in Ada's memory, and she heard what he meant. These days Onno could also explain everything to her about the Pythagorean comma, or about il diavolo in musica, or why the Mixolydian and Aeolian scales were each other's mirror image, but he would never be capable of an observation like Max's.