Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

While life continued in Groot Rechteren and Dwingeloo in rural and astronomical calm, in Amsterdam Onno had embarked upon a lightning political career. Sometimes he had the feeling that the way in which it was happening was not connected solely with his qualities but also with the fate that had befallen him: as though all his political friends felt that he deserved it after his wife's accident — or in any case that they could not decently obstruct him too forcefully. At the beginning of 1969 he had been elected to the city council, and shortly afterward he became alderman for education, arts, and sciences.

"During my period of office," he had whispered to the mayor after his appointment, at a dinner in the official residence, "education will be principally geared to producing spineless yes-men. With Plato in mind, I will put poets mercilessly to the sword, and I shall bring science completely into line and put it in the service of my personal ambitions. I shall make myself hated like no previous Amsterdam alderman. While your statue is decorated daily with fresh flowers, my name will be spoken even centuries afterward only with the deepest revulsion."

Whereupon the gray-haired mayor had taken his hand from his ear and said: "Yes, yes, Onno, take it easy."

Everyone was worried that he would harm the party with his big mouth, but things went surprisingly well: he had found his bearings in a few weeks, and in the council chamber he took a completely different tone — namely, the measured tone that he knew was the only effective one in Holland. A new life had begun for him. University administrators who refused to see him had to cool their heels in his waiting room; the chairman of the arts council was summoned; in The Hague he argued for Amsterdam interests at the ministry, he lobbied his party colleagues in the Lower House of Parliament, he made decisions, mediated, intervened, dismissed, appointed, joined battle with the students. Suddenly he had power, a secretary, civil servants who danced to his tune and a car with a driver, who took him from the town hall to the Kerkstraat in the evenings.

But there was no one there any longer. When he had closed the door behind him, he was greeted by a silence that seemed to emanate from two boxes: Ada's cello case in his study and the Chinese camphor chest in his bedroom, in which he had stored her clothes. But the thought of her and of Quinten was quickly buried under the dossiers that emerged from his outsize briefcase — partly because he knew that Quinten lacked for nothing and Ada was being well looked after in a nursing home in Emmen, although he had not been there more than twice. Measured by his interest in the cryptic signs on a certain plate in the museum of Herak-lion, his interest in the content of those dossiers was minimal — after all he could just as well be in charge of a different portfolio. But he had resigned himself to the fact that his life was evidently to be determined by brilliant beginnings, which were suddenly frustrated — in his family life just as in linguistics.

He knew people for whom being an alderman in Amsterdam would be the pinnacle of their life's achievement. He himself was happy with it because it at least gave him something to do. He had decided to make the best of things. He had abandoned the illusion that he could change Holland or even Amsterdam after just a few months — and if he were honest with himself, he didn't really think it was necessary. Where in the world were things better than in Holland? In Switzerland, perhaps — but that was more corrupt and, worse still, more boring. If he could grasp the light-hearted changes that had been brought about in the second half of the 1960s from below and stabilize them, he would be satisfied; but now, as the 1970s approached, he saw imagination being drowned in a morass of constant, embittered meetings, which seemed to be out to achieve something like a merciless, totalitarian democracy. No one did anything anymore; everyone simply talked about the way something ought to be done, if anyone did it. He had once talked in an interview about "the self-abusive reflection," which had caused softening of the brain and weakening of the bone marrow in students.

His front door was daubed with red paint and in the middle of the night he received a threatening phone call: "We'll get you one day, you bastard!"

But before he was able to say, "Is that you, Bork?" the caller hung up.

Since the accident he had lived in celibacy. Not that he forced himself, but because it did not occur to him to take up with a woman. There would be no trouble: he had soon discovered that power had an erotic effect; and if anyone wanted to get into his bad books forever, then they should ask him why he didn't get divorced, which would be a legal formality.

The fact that his rooms were tidied up every morning by a municipal housekeeper, who also made up his bed and did his laundry while he himself was at the town hall, was of course connected with this. That had been organized by Mrs. Siliakus, his secretary, without whom nothing would have gone right, either with his work or with his life: she supplemented exactly what was missing in him. "Together we make a human being," he was once to say. But Mrs. Siliakus was already in her fifties and for twenty years had shared a flat with a lady of her own age. "If you didn't have such an offensively unnatural nature," he confessed to her in an intimate moment, "but were as utterly normal as me, then I'd know what to do."

Until, one Sunday evening in July, Max had called him on his new, unlisted telephone number and had asked if he knew that that evening the first man was to set foot on the moon.

"Of course you'll be watching? It's all on television."

"What time, then?"

"At about four."

"To tell you the truth I wasn't intending to. The moon? You must be crazy. It plays absolutely no part in municipal politics. Tomorrow morning at half past nine I've got to address the chancellor of the University of Leningrad, in Russian. I'm working at it now."

"You absolutely must watch. The fantastic thing is not that it's happening, because Jules Verne predicted that, and Cyrano de Bergerac, and Kepler as well in fact—"

"And what would you say to Plutarch? And Lucian? And Cicero? Somnium Scipionis! Of course you've never heard of them. That takes us before Christ. Don't get any ideas."

"Let me finish for goodness' sake! What I'm trying to say is that one thing never occurred to anyone: that everyone in the world will be witnesses when a man steps onto the moon, without even getting out of their armchairs — even though the moon is not visible in the sky to them at that moment. That's the really inconceivable thing. If anyone had predicted that, he'd have been branded as a madman."

"Will you always be twelve years old? If I understand you correctly then I have to watch because it's something that can't really be seen: an idea. For you everything is always different. You yourself, indeed, are more or less looking at the Big Bang there on the heath. But okay, I'll listen to you again, although I have the feeling that it won't do me much good. Tell me, how is Quinten Quist getting on? Has he said anything yet?"

"No idea, I can't understand it anyway. You would probably have to know what language he's babbling in. It may be the same one that you were looking for before."

"Yes, just you go on opening old wounds, born sadist that you are. Perhaps I shall have to resign myself to being the father of an illiterate. It always happens: Goethe's son was thick as a brick, too. Great men always have imbeciles for sons — which of course implicitly proves that my father wasn't a great man. Anyway, perhaps we should be glad that his lordship is at least prepared to crawl."