Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

Max nodded. Now he remembered: the large man in tails, pretending to be astonished as he received the diploma from a lady in an academic cap, as though it were a complete surprise to him.

Onno looked sideways. "And what about you?" he asked. "What do you do for a living? I can't recall ever having seen your photo in the paper."

"What a shit you are," said Max, laughing. "I do astronomy." Motioned right with his head. "Over there. In Leiden."

Onno looked at the town on the edge of the bare fields. "Don't you need to turn off here, then?"

"I live in Amsterdam, thank God. That's why I have a car." Onno put out his hand and said, "Onno Quist." Max shook the hand. "Delius, Max."

Onno never answered curious questions about his discovery. "You can read all about it in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies," he was wont to say. "I don't work overtime." Now, however, in response to Max's question how he had deciphered the script, he explained patiently that it was not a matter of deciphering, seeing that it had been legible for donkey's years. It consisted largely of the Greek alphabet, but it was not Greek; it was incomprehensible. It was as if someone who knew no Greek were to learn the Greek alphabet and then try to read the Iliad. The Etruscans were an Italic people, he lectured, living in what was now Tuscany. The Roman conquerors called them "Tusci." Latin was full of Etruscan loanwords, such as persona for "mask," but apart from that there were only a few words whose meaning was known, such as those for "god," "woman," and "son."

The problem was that there was no long bilingue as there had been with Champollion's Rosetta stone, with the same text in Etruscan and a known language. So they were connected with the Greeks in some way, and at the same time their language was totally unconnected with Greek. They wrote their language phonetically with Greek characters, like first-year high school pupils did with their names, and like Dutch people did with Roman letters. So that in about the ninth century B.C. this people came from somewhere where there were also Greeks. However — and that was the decisive flash of inspiration — it was of course also possible that the Greeks had once borrowed their alphabet from the Etruscans in order to write their own language, Greek. Of course it was a totally crazy idea; but following that line of reasoning, supported by all kinds of archaeological considerations, he arrived at the Cretan languages, Linear B, deciphered fifteen years previously by his late colleague Michael Ventris, and Linear A from the eighteenth century — which in turn had Semitic origins. .

"In short, my dear Watson," he said as they were passing Schiphol airport, "through combination and deduction and a lot of luck and wisdom, I found the answer. It's true that Professor Pellegrini still regards me as a fantasist and a charlatan, but that is largely an indication of his autistic nature."

"What did you study?"

"Law." Law?

"It's a family disease."

"But all those languages.."

"A hobby. I'm an amateur, like the great Ventris, who was an architect by profession. If I have to, I can learn a language in a month. I could read by the time I was three."

"How many languages do you know then?"

"I'm bad at counting. That strikes me as more in your line. How many stars are there?"

"We haven't counted them all yet, and anyway, the number isn't constant. In one galaxy alone there are about a hundred billion. As many as a human being has brain cells."

"Speak for yourself."

"In addition there are about a hundred million known galactic systems, as many as I have brain cells, so you can work it out. A one and twenty-two naughts. How many languages are there?"

"A mere nothing. About two thousand five hundred."

"Can you read hieroglyphics too?"

"What kind of hieroglyphics?"

"Egyptian."

"Nothing to it. I can speak them too. Paut neteroe her resch sep sen ini Asar sa Heme nen ab maä kheroe sa Ast auau Asar. Which, being interpreted, is: 'The paut of the gods rejoice at the coming of Osiris's son Horus, upright in heart, whose word is absolute, son of Isis, heir of Osiris.' "

"Goodness me! What does 'paut' mean?"

"Well, that's a bit of a problem. How annoying of you to ask. Most experts believe that it refers to the primeval substance the gods are made of; but in fact it's even more complicated, because in the Book of the Dead the god creator says: 'I created myself from the primeval substance, which I made.' But I won't weary you with such archaic paradoxes."

"They seem quite modern to me," says Max. "Where do you live? I'll drop you off at your door."

Both turned out to live in the center, not far from each other. As they drove into the city, Onno told Max that he could read hieroglyphics by the time he was eleven, and that he had taught himself with an old English textbook, which he had bought in the market for twenty-five cents, so that by using a dictionary he learned English at the same time. That had been in the last winter of the war — when hunger and cold had finally broken him, he said — immediately wondering why he was telling something like this to a total stranger. At home, when he was young, he didn't talk about his language studies. He thought that anyone who made the slightest effort could do it.

It was always the same with talent: a writer could not imagine that there was anyone who could not write. Onno only realized that it was not so ordinary on one occasion after the war when they were on holiday in Finland. They were in their hotel in Hämeenlinna, somewhere among those depressing lakes and pine forests, and the evening before their departure the food was cold, or barely warm. His father called the manager, who then pretended to tell off the waiter but in fact said that he shouldn't worry about those stingy cheeseheads, because the next day they were already buggering off to their stupid tulips and windmills. Whereupon he, Onno, inquired whether he had taken leave of his senses, speaking about his guests like that, or whether perhaps he wanted his head smashed in with a Dutch clog. Everyone was speechless. He could speak Finnish! After three weeks! A Finno-Ugric language! And when he saw his father's perplexed face, he thought: I've got one over on you, Your Excellency.

"Are you a son of that Quist?" asked Max in surprise.

"Yes, that Quist."

"Wasn't he prime minister or something before the war?"

"Would you mind speaking a little less casually about my father, Delius, Max? The four years of the Quist cabinet are among the darkest in human civilization. The Dutch nation languished under the theocratic reign of terror of my honored father, against whom I will not hear a word of criticism, and certainly not from someone with such a ridiculous automobile."

"At least it got us home," said Max, stopping the car. "You can't even drive, if you ask me."

"Of course not! What do you take me for? A chauffeur? There are things one simply isn't allowed to know how to do. For example, something else that you are not allowed to be able to do is serve food with a fork and spoon in the fingers of one hand, because that means you're a waiter. Of course you can do it just as well, but a gentleman like me is not used to serving himself. A gentleman like me does that very clumsily, with two hands, and even then I drop half on the tablecloth, because that's the way to do it."

In the light of the streetlamps in the narrow street they could now see each other better. Onno thought Max was actually far too well groomed to be taken seriously; he was wearing the sort of Anglo-Saxon bourgeois outfit, with a blazer and checked shirt, that Onno also disliked on his brothers and brothers-in-law. Max, in his turn, felt that Onno would not cut a bad figure as an organ-grinder; around his ears and under his chin there were also various places he had missed while shaving. Perhaps he was short-sighted, having gone cross-eyed from poring over ideograms.