The Discovery of Heaven (16 page)

They were sitting next to each other at a long table with well-ordered piles of papers. Onno surveyed the cupboards full of files, with code numbers, which went up to the plastered ceiling, and remarked that some people would be glad to put a match to them; but Max was silent. He realized that he was approaching the end of something. The papers would shortly be put on the table for the last time, but now that he was here, he did not want to know everything at all—precisely how it had happened, how it was reconstructed during the trial, what the witnesses said, and what other crimes his father might have committed; he no longer needed to read the verdict. What had happened had happened. The only thing he wanted to see was something concrete, something direct, which showed that his father had existed—perhaps just a photograph.

Oud came in with six thick files clasped to his chest, followed by a young man with an even higher pile of dusty archive files and boxes under his chin. After it had been laid out in front of them, Oud sat down behind it like a market trader, made a demonstrative gesture, and said: "How can I help you?"

There it was, like dirty scum in an empty bathtub.

Max read on a cover. He would have preferred to get up now and leave; he only stayed in his chair because Onno was there. The latter in turn had decided to outdo everyone and take matters in hand—but the amount of material paralyzed him; he was also a little frightened of the man sitting behind it, with his threatening, St. Christopher-like initials alpha and omega.

When he saw Max hesitating, Oud said: "I know my way around this file. I was involved in the preliminary investigation at the time. Do you want to see the documents where you yourself are mentioned?"

Max shivered. "So you knew him." He wanted to say "my father," but could not bring himself to.

"Knew ... I don't think anyone ever knew him. But I met him a few times, yes."

"What did he say about me?"

"Himself? He never said anything—not about you or anything else. He didn't open his mouth during the whole of his detention, or during the hearings. There was no question of interrogating him."

"But then how was he ..."

Max did not have to finish his question. Oud nodded, opened a file, undid the clip, and a little while later placed his flat hand on a typed letter: gray lines with narrow spacing, a signature that was half visible under his wrist.

"In this your father asks a certain General von Schumann of the Wehrmacht, who was later killed at Stalingrad, whether he can take steps to rid him once and for all of his young wife. The general was a personal friend of his, because he addresses him as
Du.
In fact, he expressly calls it a favor to a friend."

Max turned away. He must not even look at that. He hoped Oud would not ask him if he wanted to read the letter, so that he would have to hold it in both hands. Out of the corner of his eye he saw him leafing through.

"Here is the letter from Schumann to Rauter, the
Höhere SS-und Polizeiführer
in The Hague, also using
Du.
They were all good pals," said Oud, and went on looking. "He was also a witness at your father's trial— he himself was not executed until three years later. Yes, here we have his instructions for the
Sicherheitsdienst
in Amsterdam, complete with address and everything, and this is the list of the Amsterdam SD on that day, with a little
v
in front of your mother's name, indicating that it had been dealt with. With your grandparents, who were not protected by your existence, he took a much more direct route. Shall I look that up as well?"

Max swallowed and shook his head.

"But what's in all those other files?" asked Onno.

"Those concern other people," said Oud impassively, "and, apart from that, mainly robbery and plunder."

There was a silence. Max again saw the piano being taken out of the house, the pile of clothes in his mother's bedroom. In order to help him through the moment, Onno asked whether there was an explanation for Delius's consistent silence.

"Was it from a feeling of guilt? Because he had fatally incriminated himself in that letter? It appears that Ezra Pound has stopped speaking these days for a similar reason."

"According to the public prosecutor," said Oud, "it was only a last resort to escape the burden of proof. But one day something strange was found in his cell." He looked in one of the archive boxes and pulled out a thick yellow official envelope. "This," he said, taking out a cigarette packet and giving it to Max.

It was a Sweet Caporal packet, yellowed and empty. In astonishment Max took it and turned it over. On the back something was written in green ink.

" 'Only I exist,' " he read in German. " 'What does not exist cannot die.' "

"That's the same tune as Wittgenstein," said Onno. "Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent. Another frustrated Austrian."

Max did not hear. He had never seen his father's handwriting. It was un-Dutch—sharper, more angular. He had held this same packet in his hand, there in his cell in Scheveningen, and he had written this on it, perhaps on his knee, sitting on the edge of his bed.

But it wasn't Wittgenstein, said Oud, it was Delius: he had certainly never heard of Wittgenstein, his contemporary, who was only now becoming fashionable. In a psychiatric report, that note was used as evidence of diminished responsibility: he was under the illusion that only he himself actually existed and that everything else was illusion, projection; from that point of view he could not be guilty of murder, because nobody else was alive, only he himself could die. Even his judges and his interrogators did not exist. Even his executioner, paradoxically, did not exist.

Such a patient should therefore be exempted from prosecution and detained at the government's pleasure. However, the prosecutor argued in turn that it was only the cunning maneuver of an intelligent criminal in order to escape his just punishment. Giltay Veth, on the other hand, the defense counsel Wolfgang had been assigned, who had not been able to get a word out of him, had gone into it further. He argued that Delius's cell contained the infamous book of Max Stirner, a German philosopher from the first half of the previous century, the advocate of an extreme, amoral egoism, whose
Ego
was a precursor of Nietzsche's
Ubermensch.
After Hitler's downfall, Delius had obviously gone a step further and arrived at an authentic, metaphysical solipsism. Giltay Veth had subsequently sought the advice of two distinguished foreign philosophers: Russell from Cambridge and Heidegger from Freiburg im Breisgau.

"Heidegger?" said Onno in surprise. "Have you got it there?"

Oud had opened another file and put his finger on a postcard.

"Here Russell writes: 'Solipsism, although not my cup of tea, is a perfectly legitimate philosophical position. Not taking it seriously would imply a defamation of philosophy as such. In my opinion, therefore, your client should be executed without hesitation.' As you can imagine, Giltay Veth never submitted this; it has obviously found its way among these papers by accident. He only produced Heidegger's German letter. Here it is. 'The expression solipsism derives from
solus ipse:
"I alone." The germ of this kind of thinking, which turns its back on being, is to be found not in Classical antiquity, but may be linked to Descartes. The latter's universal skepticism, which called everything into doubt, apart from the self, led to the formula familiar to every schoolboy:
cogito ergo sum.
Solipsism arises when
cogito ergo sum
is sharpened to
ergo solus ergo sum.
However, this is a logical extension of Cartesianism. Dismissing it implies a rejection of the whole of post-Cartesian philosophy. Hence a death sentence passed against your client would basically imply a condemnation of the whole of philosophy.' "

All very well, but according to the public prosecutor, said Oud, Heidegger was himself a philosophical delinquent, a Nazi of the first order, who was indirectly only trying to exonerate himself, because he also felt under threat. In their judgment, the judges finally took the view that someone who could hound his wife and parents-in-law to their deaths was by definition not normal, that no murderer was normal, but that this could not mean that murderers could appeal to their deed as a mitigating circumstance, because that would mean the end of jurisprudence, which would herald the return to barbarity of human civilization—in brief, the kind of society that had just been prevented at the cost of fifty-five million dead.

"Quite right." Onno nodded.

Here and there in the corners of the cigarette packet there were still some blackened remnants of tobacco. Max closed it and a little later watched it disappear into the envelope.

"Have you got a photo of my father, perhaps?"

Oud raised his eyebrows. "I ought to have," he said with doubt in his voice, and began looking. "In any case, in his passport. .."

"Do you know where your father's grave is?" asked Onno with feigned nonchalance.

"No," said Max, and looked at Oud.

The latter opened his eyes for a moment and made a brief apologetic gesture. Finally he found only a blurred newspaper photograph of the court, taken from a distance. Max saw an unrecognizable figure, flanked by a gendarme with a white lanyard. Perhaps the same one who had taken him out of school four years earlier.

Onno had an appointment with a couple of politicians, and Max went straight home. He felt tired and needed to talk to Ada. She knew nothing about any of this; she had been born in the year that his father had been shot. Of course, hearing the name Delius may have awakened a memory in her parents, since the name was rare in the Netherlands, but it was a long time ago, and there had been lots of trials in those days, most of which were more spectacular than his father's. She had to know now, partly because he had not behaved very elegantly that morning.

The moment he entered the room, he sensed that something was wrong. Her cello, which was always by the grand piano, had gone. On his desk lay her letter:

Dear Max,

When you get home, I shall have gone. Perhaps you won't understand immediately, but if you think a little, you'll be able to work it out. I've had a wonderful time with you, for which I'm grateful to you and which I will never forget. You meant a lot to me and perhaps I meant a little to you too. If we meet again, I hope that it will be as good friends.

Yours ever,

Ada

He slowly put the sheet of paper down. The unexpected tone of farewell, the finality of the sentences, sank deep into him, but at the same time he knew that he would not do anything to change it. So that was it; the episode was over. He sat down and pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk, in order to do what he had planned to do in her presence. All he had to do was take out what he needed, without looking: the order he created around himself gave him an extra year of life, which other people wasted in looking.

He placed an old-fashioned fountain pen and a glasses case in front of him. The fountain pen was thick, and made of flame-patterned, dark-blue ebonite, which had become matt and lifeless; the copper clip and the decorations were dull and rusty. He unscrewed it carefully and looked at the gold nib, which was blackened with ancient ink. He turned on the desk lamp and studied the pen carefully with his magnifying glass, and he saw what he had hoped for: among the traces of ink there was a faint deep-green glow, like algae in a stagnant pond. He put the top back on; the thread had gone, but still he felt a very slight resistance at the end.

The glasses case was made of cheap beige papier-mâché. He opened it and took out the glasses. The frames were made of light, transparent celluloid; the greasy, dirty lenses had been ground positively. He was going to try them on for a moment, but when he opened them, everything crumbled into pulverized fragments. The lenses fell out, and suddenly there was nothing but a little heap of rubbish on Ada's letter. He winced. Grabbing the wastepaper basket with his left hand, he swept everything into it with his right forearm.

12
The Triangle

Max could have asked Oud, because it was bound to be in the trial papers, but he did not want to set foot in that haunted house again. At the Ministry of Justice he discovered with some difficulty that his paternal grandparents had been married in Prague and that his father, with calendary discipline, had been born in 1892, in Bielitz, Austria-Hungary, on the same day that he died—June 21. Obviously, no one had remembered that it was his birthday when he was put against the wall. He had attended primary school in Katowitz, and later the high school in Krakau, before going to Vienna University at the age of nineteen.

Since his visit to the National Institute for War Documentation, Max had been pondering a suggestion of Onno's that this summer he should not spend his vacation at some stupid beach in France but in his father's native region—where he might finally be able to put it all into context. On the other hand, as far as the past was concerned, there would be as a massive silence surrounding such matters in those towns as there was in Brussels, where his mother had been born. However, when he consulted his atlas at home, he made a shocking discovery. The three place names from his father's youth, now situated in southern Poland, near the Czech border— Bielsko, Katowice, and Krakow—formed a pure isosceles triangle, which pointed due east like an arrowhead, while in the middle, precisely at the intersection, lay Oswiecim: Auschwitz.