Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"Well, comrade," said Gevers. "Having a rest?"

The man gave a brief nod, with a brief smile, but did not get up. That Gevers was a baron was obviously not a neutral fact in this company; except that it didn't add to his stature, like everywhere else, but detracted from it. Rather scornful but not unfriendly, the social worker looked at Max's blazer and club tie.

"Are you moving in here?" And after Max had made a vague gesture toward Gevers: "Congratulations. You'll never find anything like this again. Have a look around if you like." When Max met the eyes of the woman, he saw hate in her eyes — but because this would now become his apartment, perhaps. Of course she didn't want to go to Assen at all.

In the balcony room, which faced south, the ceiling was painted light blue, with white clouds in it; that would all have to'be redecorated. A dividing door gave access to a large room next door, which was linked by a rundown pantry with a tower room at the back. That seemed to him to be the nursery; and because Sophia had to sleep near Quinten, but also near him, it looked as though he would be laying claim to the balcony room. On the other side, the latter room gave access to a spacious kitchen-dining room, which looked out over the forecourt; there was another large room adjoining it, which must be above the front door.

There were open shutters next to all the windows. He looked around excitedly. There was ample room for three people to live here. Everywhere was full of rubbish. Shelves had been fixed to the walls, loaded with folders, piles of newspapers and magazines, stencil machines on trestles — but his eyes overlooked all that and saw how it would be.

"Well?" asked Gevers as they stood on the balcony — which was itself as large as a room — looking out over the awesome trees on the other side of the moat. "Don't expect it's your cup of tea."

Max made a gesture of speechlessness. "A gift from heaven," he said.

After the apartment had been cleared two days later, Max proudly showed Sophia what a marvelous place he had secured, and she too could scarcely believe it. They spent as much as possible of the time that Quinten had to stay in the incubator on doing up the rooms, which the previous tenants had left in a sorry state. For the first few nights they slept in Dwingeloo, in different rooms in the guest suite; but in anticipation of the move, he then took some essential things of his and Sophia's to the castle in a rented van: mattresses, bedding, clothes, kitchen utensils, books. She did not get into bed with him in Dwingeloo, which was perhaps connected not only with the other guests, but also with her daughter, who had spent her last conscious night there, if one can put it like that.

Perhaps the silence was also an obstacle. The first few times that he himself had spent the night in Dwingeloo, as a city dweller he had scarcely been able to get to sleep: the silence was so deep and complete that it was as though he had gone deaf. The only thing that could be heard was his own heartbeat and the rushing of blood in his ears; outside the room the world had disappeared into nothingness. Only later had it sunk in that it was the silence of the war: then it had been as quiet at night in Amsterdam as on the heath. But the very first night in Groot Rechteren, where only the distant call of an owl occasionally broke the silence, the secret ritual was resumed. With heart pounding he had lain waiting for her in the balcony room, and when he heard her coming from the temporary mattress in the room next to his, followed by the creaking of the door handle and the squeaking of the door — it would all have to be greased — his relief was if anything greater than his excitement. Imagine if for her all this had belonged solely to Leiden and her late husband!

It was the first time that they had been in each other's company on a daily basis and formed a household, but that meant no change: he continued to call her Mrs. Brons, and unlike what happened between people who were having an affair, there were no marital tiffs between someone and his friend's mother-in-law. Awakened in the morning by the ducks, they breakfasted on the balcony, and he devoted all the time that he could spare to taking down the shelves in the front room, removing the plywood boards that were supposed to give the old handmade doors a modern look in the 1950s, and on painting, varnishing, and emulsifying.

Gradually, he was seized by a kind of frenzy, which made it almost impossible for him to stop in the evenings. Long after Sophia had sat down in front of the television with a glass of wine and was sewing curtains, he was still up a ladder moving his roller over the playful cloud formations on the ceiling. He had never done anything like this — his girlfriends had always looked after that for him — and the immediately visible result had a relaxing effect on him; what's more, he thought of his work now and then while he was doing it, but in a different way than at his desk: more indirectly, in a certain sense more fruitfully, just as he always had his best ideas when he was cleaning his teeth or his shoes, or under the shower. Actually, there was no shower — he had one put in. Because the castle was not connected to the gas network, a new heater had to be put in that used bottles of butane gas; the decrepit oil stoves also needed replacing.

When he needed fresh paint or brushes or planks, he drove in his dirty clothes to the shop in the village of Westerbork, six miles south of the new observatory and with only its name in common with the camp. He had still not been to the latter; until the mirrors were completed, there was nothing for him to do there, and he had resolved to put it off for as long as possible.

In their first few days there they had paid courtesy visits to the other occupants of the castle. Mr. Spier, the husband of Mrs. Spier, was on the point of leaving when they knocked. He was as small as she was, and as painfully correct with his carefully cut, thin dark-blond hair, in his three-piece dark-blue pin-striped suit, with a decoration in his buttonhole and a pearl pin in his tie: a little off-center, as was proper. He said politely that they were bound to meet each other frequently, after which Max immediately invited them for a glass of champagne in a few weeks' time. Mr. Verloren van Themaat, who taught the history of architecture at the Polytechnic in Delft and lived in the other wing on the ground floor, was in the habit of coming only on the weekends; at the moment he was spending the summer in Rome, in the Netherlands Art Historical Institute.

In the southern half of the loft — in a series of what were formerly servants' rooms on the northern side, where superfluous furniture of the baron's was stored — lived an English translator, that is, a translator from English: Marius Proctor, a man of nearly forty, with black hair and a rather somber expression. His wife, Clara, a provocative, cheerful person with hair dyed red and large earrings, looked like a fortune-teller; she made ghostly abstract objects from old umbrellas, which hung on the sloping walls of their rooms. Whenever she invited Max and Sophia for afternoon tea, sitting on their modern 1950s chairs, Proctor usually disappeared without a word through the thick padded door into what was obviously his study: the tower room above the one in which a crib and a commode were waiting for Quinten.

He earned his living by translating novels, but his real work at the moment was a translation of Milton's Paradise Lost; apart from that, Clara said that for years he had been writing a book on a discovery he had made, which would create a stir in the literary-historical world. In any case he had the sunken cheeks and temples of the fanatic who was gnawing at himself. They had an aggressive son of about four, called Arendje, who whenever he saw Max ran straight at him and began pushing against his thighs with both hands, as though he wanted to get him out of the room, out of the castle, with his head bent malevolently forward, like a billy goat; amused words and gentle force had no effect, and when Clara finally pulled him away, Arendje tried to give him a kick in the shins. Max was not inclined to go upstairs too often. Once he tried to start up a conversation on literature, but Proctor only answered with a few vague remarks and for the rest maintained his sphinxlike silence. Sophia disliked him, but Max said that he had obviously been crushed by some insight or other, or perhaps by Clara.