The Discovery of Heaven (12 page)

She was not very talkative, either. She could sit for hours at the open window overlooking the Vondelpark, where children and dogs were being taken for walks, where hippies in Oriental dress danced past, singing and adorned with flowers, and where the same boy was always practicing juggling on the grass, learning nothing but how to bend down. On the other side, almost invisible from the park behind bushes and trees, there was a low building containing chapels of rest, to which hearses drove up several times a day and which tearful people went in and out of. For some reason she found this panorama ideally suited to Max: she felt a similar stark juxtaposition of life and death in him. In fact he was always in a good mood, but somehow that was so striking because it was set against a dark background, in the same way that a diamond is displayed on black velvet at the jeweler's.

Only when Max once asked her did she tell him anything about her parents, about their meeting during the bombing of Leiden and how they later set up a secondhand bookshop. She had never felt that she was the child of those two people who were so completely different from her, but rather that she was their foster child, a foundling, who in fact had nothing to do with them. Not that she had any romantic ideas in that direction, because she needed only to look in the mirror and she saw her mother.

"The reverse probably also happens," said Max, "where someone thinks that his parent are his parents, and they aren't."

After that first occasion he had never met her parents again. He, too, felt that he had nothing to do with them, and Ada did not ask him—although her parents had indicated a few times that they would like to meet her boyfriend. He knew that she was grateful to him for taking her out of the house for at least two days a week. And as far as his own parents were concerned, had she asked him about them, he would have told her his story: when she did not, he left things as they were.

Domestic happiness was in the air! He was in the habit of pacing through the rooms when he was thinking, but he never did so when he was not alone; Ada was the first person who did not inhibit him from doing this. The pacing was not simply walking back and forth, just as it is not with caged polar bears or lions, but was determined by a precise geometrical pattern, of which he was himself vaguely conscious and from which he did not deviate one inch. It was formed by the three invisible lines projecting from his furniture: the extensions of the diagonals and the center lines. His chairs, tables, and cupboards, combined with the angles of the corners of the room, were the focus of a complicated network, like an imaginary garden in Lenotre style, which allowed him to step on many points in it, but not all. While he was pacing with his hands behind his back, he sometimes found himself thinking about the future.

When the Westerbork facility was finished in a few years' time, he would probably have to go to Drenthe more frequently than now. He contemplated the bleak evenings there, with nothing to do for miles around. Yokels playing billiards, odd girls, whom he could hardly understand and with whom he dare not try anything, for fear of being murdered with pitchforks and rakes. Wouldn't it be nice if Ada came along now and then? They could rent a pied-a-terre somewhere, in the local solicitor's house, and furnish it to their taste. Ada would have her work too, of course, and in a car you could be in Amsterdam in an hour, or an hour and half...

Since Bruno had realized that Ada had a boyfriend, he was routinely unable to attend rehearsals; because of this she was learning a new piece by Xenakis for solo cello,
Nomos Alpha.
This did not disturb Max when he was working—on the contrary: the fact that she was occupied, too, relieved him of the responsibility of having to say something to break the silence. Now and then they even made music together. During the war his mother had occasionally given him piano lessons, and later his foster parents had sent him to a music school, but his playing was not of a very high standard; he had bought the grand piano on impulse, at an auction—perhaps just to see it being carried into his house, thereby putting something right. When he did occasionally play with Ada, completely different things happened. She had been to the conservatory in The Hague. She was a professional musician; she knew that making music was not about expressing emotions but about evoking them: and that could only succeed when it was done professionally—that is, dispassionately, like a surgeon operating, regardless of theatrical grimaces conductors and soloists often pulled when they knew they were being watched. At home or in rehearsal, they never pulled those faces, nor did orchestral musicians, because those were the faces of listeners.

Max, on the other hand, was so far from being a musician that it was almost impossible for him to make music—not because it did not affect him, but because it affected him too much. He had an extensive record collection, four yards of records from Machaut and Dufay to Boulez and Riley, but he almost never put anything on for himself. As soon as he struck a note on his grand piano, and then the octave, it already affected him too deeply: it opened a fathomless shaft in him, making him dizzy. When the piano tuner was there, he pretended to look through the newspaper; in reality he was racked by emotions, almost more than when a great soloist was at work, because now it was harmony itself resonating in a pure medium without the intervention of a composer—just like at home the dough always tasted better than the cake itself, but one was not allowed to eat it, although he said a thousand times that he did not want cake. Milk, eggs, butter, flour, and sugar—it was true that in the oven the divine mixture was transformed into a work of culinary art, but at the same time it was ruined. Scores of times he repeated the first four bars of Schubert's Fantasie in F for four hands on the piano with Ada: what happened? A bed was laid down, a few simple notes sounded—and immediately an absolute beauty was attained: what was most exalted, most complex, most incomprehensible in the form of what was simplest. Even after the hundredth time it had lost none of its radiance and yielded nothing of its secret.

"What is it?" cried Max in despair. "What is it in heaven's name? Suddenly it reminds me of something. Yes, I've got it: Mendelssohn's
Fingal's Cave."
He got up, took out the record, and put it on the turntable. "Here, listen, at about bar one fifteen." He raised his forefinger. "Can you hear? It's almost the same, on just the same sort of bed!"

Ada kissed him on the cheek. "You have a merciless ear," she said.

He put his arm around her shoulders. "At least I can talk about it to you, even though you haven't a clue yourself—but no one has. Do you know what Onno once said when I started talking about music? He shook his great head with those quivering cheeks and said, 'Music is for girls.' Well, the girl in question is here. That was good intuition."

"Why is music supposed to be only for girls?"

"You mustn't take him so literally. Once when I bought an ice cream, he said, 'Ice cream is for vicars.' Music doesn't exist for him. He regards it as meaningless sound. For him only words have meaning. What he has against it is probably the flight from reality that it represents for many people, a kind of escape clause to the effect that if all else fails, there's always music. Perhaps he actually finds music a kind of cowardly consolation.

"He once told me that in the Middle Ages the Greek
mousike techne
— the 'art of the muse'—was derived from the ancient Egyptian word
moys,
which means 'water.' This made Moses the discoverer of music, because according to the same erroneous etymology, his name was supposed to mean 'rescued from water.' You know—the rush basket in which he was found in the Nile as a baby: the same Moses who struck water from the rock and who had God create the world with a word in Genesis, after which his spirit moved over the waters. Everything always fits. So in fact you're practicing the Mosaic art."

"I'm sure I am. Show me your thumbs."

He put his hands in hers: they were well formed, like the rest of his body, not too broad and not too slim, but his thumbs were both short and spatula-shaped. "I invent it all by sucking on my thumbs," he said.

"Who do you take after?"

"No idea. Maybe my father. Maybe myself. That's why I can just span an octave but can't go any further. What's the name of that pianist who had an operation on his hands in order to be able to span larger chords and then couldn't play anymore?"

"No idea," said Ada, putting his hands in his lap. "And why is ice cream for vicars?"

"Because they have to spoil themselves, of course, seeing that no one else does."

Ada stared at him and nodded. "You love him, don't you?"

"Of course I love him."

Max's eyes suddenly moistened. Ada was amazed to see it happen. She did not know what to make of it, but suddenly she had the feeling that she was the mother of the pair of them.

"Do you two tell each other everything?"

"Everything." Fortunately she did not ask if he loved him more than her. "We even tell each other what we would never tell anyone. That's friendship."

9
The Demons

When the sun had reached its solstice and touched the Tropic of Cancer— that is, at the beginning of summer—a political and musical happening was staged, to round off the turbulent season and in happy expectation of even more turbulent times. Since the riots of the year before, Amsterdam, as Onno put it, had been occupied by invading Dutch troops: uniformed farmers' sons from Christian homes had temporary control of the city, and the main issue was now its liberation, followed by the irrevocable overthrow of the Netherlands by Amsterdam. One of the organizers of the festival had evidently once heard a performance by Ada and Bruno, because they were invited to perform. It was to be her first engagement in Amsterdam, and although it wasn't a real concert, it was still a great honor. Ada was apprehensive about playing her kind of music for the kind of audience that could be expected there; but of course they must give it a try, and she persuaded Bruno to pick up where they had left off.

Everyone would be there, Max assured her. Politics was the new popular entertainment, in a way that it had not been since the war and as it would not be for a long time to come; he estimated the interval at twenty-two years: 1945; 1967; 1989.. .. Before the concert Ada went for a meal with the other musicians; she arranged to meet Max afterward in the greenroom and stay over at his place.

Onno went too. Since he had reached an impasse with the Phaistos disc, he had gradually gotten more interested in politics; after all, even Chomsky was more preoccupied with politics than with linguistics these days, so he was in good company. His instinctive sympathies lay with the anarchistic provocateurs and revolutionaries, as did those of Max, but deep down he knew that their rabid views did not stand a chance.

Holland hated radicalism; in the swampy delta of the Rhine estuary this kind of theorizing had been isolated and disarmed in theology, while practical people struck bargains—Max, with his dangerously foreign disposition, need have no illusions at all on that score: Erasmus called the tune here. In Holland there was only one path, and that was the middle path. And in politics it was power that mattered, nothing else. What else was left? The Social Democrats had become as ossified as the Christian parties. What about a splinter group like the Communists or the Pacifist Socialists? But, with respect, they were a completely different breed. It was true that a new left-wing Liberal party had been set up, which a few months ago, at the interim elections, had been very successful and already had seven members in the Lower House; but although it was led by the same kind of people as himself, even from the same generation, Onno found this group too lacking in a sense of history; moreover, he suspected it of trying to implement purely formal constitutional reforms in order to prevent socioeconomic ones.

"You're not really going into politics, are you, Onno?" asked Max as they were on their way to the meeting.

Onno looked at him uncertainly. "Do you think it's my destiny?"

"Destiny? Surely you decide that for yourself?"

"Do you think so? In any case, you're completely unsuited to politics, because for that you need come from a large family. You learn the craft in the life-and-death struggle with your brothers and sisters. If you haven't been through this school of intrigue and deceit and intimidation, you'll never make it. That means that I have excellent qualifications, but you're an only child—you've never had to fight for your parents' favor."

"It was a very close thing. I had an older brother, but he died in his crib."

"Just the sort of thing that would happen to you. You can't tolerate anyone around you. But as things stand at the moment, all you're fit for is to be king. Who knows?; if things go on like this, that position may yet become vacant."

"Then I'd immediately appoint you to form my first and only cabinet, because after that I would abolish democracy and proclaim an absolute monarchy."

Onno bent his back and folded his hands in entreaty.
"Euere kaiserliche und königliche, apostolische Majestat,
don't you think—"

"That is my last word. The audience is at an end—there is the door. Or, rather, there is the window."

"Sire, do I really have to .. ."

"Jump!"

"Damn," said Onno, and sat up. "I don't know if you know, but it is the Bohemian practice of defenestration that is welling up in your sick mind. In the Hradcany in Prague, disgraced politicians were always thrown out of the window." He suddenly looked disapprovingly at Max's elegant summer suit with its pocket handkerchief. "I must say you're very badly dressed for a subversive assembly."

"Robespierre also followed the fashion of the ancien regime."

"Yes, till his head was lopped off at his lace collar."

"And you've got your sweater on inside out. You look ridiculous with that label at the back of your neck."

"You'd do something like that deliberately."

In the side streets dark-blue police buses full of armed provincials waited like patient cats next to the mousehole; there was a great melee around the revolving doors. The auditorium, a temporarily converted auction room, was decorated with red flags and posters of Marx, Lenin, Bakunin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and, of course El Che, the hero of heroes, who had given up his Cuban ministerial post and was now in the jungle, probably in Bolivia, participating in the guerrilla struggle whose object was the liberation of the South American continent.