The Discovery of Heaven (2 page)

—
But they knew each other now.

—The foundations had been laid. Back in cold, hungry Vienna, Delius found employment as a teacher of commercial accounting in a private school for young ladies, but he remained in correspondence with Weiss. The latter soon began to prosper in Amsterdam. At the beginning of the 1920s he brought his young friend over and gave him a temporary job as an accountant in his diamond firm. Not long after, with Weiss's support, Delius set up in business for himself, trading with Germany and Austria. Within a year the business grew into quite a substantial company, he was naturalized, and in 1926 Wolfgang Delius married Eva Weiss, his benefactor's daughter, who was sixteen years his junior. The girl was eighteen at the time, and the very next year she had a baby boy—but because of a typing error in my department the angelic child died in its crib after two weeks. It turned out to be a dreadful marriage, I'm sorry to say. It was brought home to me yet again how privileged we are in being neither male nor female—but it was necessary for the sake of their second son, who was born in 1933 and whom I needed as the father of our man on earth.

—
Why was the marriage dreadful?

—Had it not been for your instructions, it ought never to have happened. Everyone on earth always marries the wrong person, that's well known, but seldom were a couple less suited than these two. In some way the young woman and her much older husband must have hurt each other irreparably—not so much by doing or saying or failing to do anything specific, but just by being who they were. In the final analysis they married because we wanted them to, though they themselves had no idea of this, of course. The decisive factor for her may have been the interesting, obscure background suggested by the look in his bright blue eyes, which was eventually to turn against her; for him, precisely that sense of freedom in her that in the end he could not endure. Her spirit was ten times lighter and quicker than his. He was heavy and twisted like an anchor rope caught in a ship's propeller—like that of almost all Austrians since 1918, choking with hate and self-hatred in the
Sadosachermasochtorte
of their dismembered dual monarchy, which a few years later was to cease to exist as a result of the frenzy of another Austrian. In the evenings she wanted to go out, but he preferred to immerse himself in Max Stirner. While she enjoyed herself in town with Jewish friends of her own age and of both sexes, her Germanic husband, with his monocle in place, read about the ego as the Only True Being and the world as his property. According to Stirner, no one should allow themselves to be told what to do by anyone or anything: the unique ego was sovereign, even to the point of committing crime. When she came home in the evenings, she sometimes found him screaming in his sleep, fighting the Italians with his pillow. Perhaps she could have done something about it before the fatal moment, but she did not. Perhaps because she was too young; also perhaps because, in the final analysis, she was even more of a loner than he was. In 1939 Eva left her Wolfgang, taking her six-year-old son with her.

—Fine. And what about the mother-to-be?

—Fortunately I didn't have to work in such a roundabout way in this case. In fact it presented scarcely any problems, and certainly no international ones. I was dealing with the Dutch, and among those well-behaved trading folk everything is rather less intense. I won't deny that this is partly because they were able to keep out of the First World War. In fact, the Second World War was their first since the sixteenth-century one against Spain, which incidentally was ruled by a half-Austrian then, too. If the Second World War had passed them by as well, they would have become the same sort of frustrated virgins as the inhabitants of the Swiss valleys.

—
I'm not sure I'm too impressed by that view of things.

—If you like, I'll retract what I said and argue the opposite.

—
That won't be necessary.

—It needed only a slight adjustment to bring her to life. Once again starting from the end result that we required, in combination with the genetic material of Delius Junior, we discovered as a possible paternal grandfather a keeper at the Netherlands Museum of the History of Science in Leiden: a certain Oswald Brons, born for no particular reason in 1921. By pure coincidence, the necessary maternal grandmother, Sophia Haken, turned out to be living close by, in Delft, where she had been born in 1923, also for no particular reason. Because of his age, Brons was more or less in hiding in the museum at the end of the war; he often slept there, in the room containing the Surrealist contraption built by Kamerlingh Onnes for liquefying helium, which looks exactly like a monster on the right-hand-side panel of Hieronymus Bosch's
Garden of Earthly Delights,
the musical inferno, and also like the topmost figure in Marcel Duchamp's
Grand Verre.

—
What in heaven's name are you talking about?

—Pay no attention. Because of all that genetic fiddling about, I've still got a loose bobbin inside me like a loom. At the end of 1944, in the last winter of the war, the German occupying forces were in the habit of parking trains carrying V-2 rockets immediately south of the Academic Hospital in the hope that this would deter the English from air attacks. They were fired at London from a launchpad nearby. Nevertheless, one December afternoon, just after midday, there was a heavy raid on the station; shortly afterward the false rumor circulated in Delft that the hospital was on fire. Although weakened by hunger and despite the cold, Sophia immediately cycled to Leiden to see whether anything had happened to her best friend, a fellow nurse. As she was passing the museum, a few hundred yards south of the station, the second attack came and she took cover in a doorway—but because the English, under my benevolent influence, were frightened of hitting the hospital, it suddenly started raining bombs around her. One devastated a wing of the museum containing brass telescopes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Amid the chaos of fire, noise, dust, screaming in Dutch and German, firemen, ambulances, and police, she bumped into Oswald Brons. Bewildered, with torn clothes and covered in grazes, he was wandering across the heaps of rubble carrying a huge lens in his arms like a baby, and she took pity on him.

—Minor intervention. Positive effect. How many people dead?

—Fifty-four.

—A slight adjustment, you said?

—Well, what do you want? I didn't invent all that manipulation business, I'm only carrying out your cherubic will. What's more, I prevented the hospital from being razed to the ground. It seems so easy to influence the normal course of events, but reality is just like water; it's liquid and mobile, but it can only be compressed a little by using a great deal of force. When someone falls onto it from a great height, it's as hard as the rock from which Moses struck water.

—
Oh, our Moses . . . you're touching a sensitive nerve there.

—I'm sorry.

—
When was their daughter born?

—In 1946, during the baby boom.

—
When did she meet the young Delius?

—In May 1967.

—
Tell me the whole story from that moment on, preferably without a commentary. Just tell it in full and with all the details, so that I can select when it's my turn to report.

—For a fuller understanding, it would be better if I started a little earlier.

—
When?

—On Monday, February 13, 1967, at twelve midnight.

—
Which in fact is February 14.

—Yes, human time is one great paradox.

—
What year is it down there now?

—1985.

—
Begin, then. I'm listening.

1
The Family Gathering

At the stroke of midnight I contrived a short-circuit. Anyone walking along the quiet avenue in The Hague with his collar turned up high against the freezing cold (though there was no one at that moment) would have seen all the lights in the detached mansion suddenly go off, as though a gigantic candle had been blown out inside. For those living in the neighborhood, the villa exuded a somewhat somber splendor: it was the home of a legendary prime minister, the strict Calvinist Hendrikus Quist. In the crowded downstairs rooms, where the party was going on, the sudden darkness and the fading of the music into a fathomless cave were greeted with laughter.

"Time for the young'uns!" cried a woman's voice, itself no longer very young.

"Is anyone here technically minded?"

"I'll see to it. Where are the fuses, Grandmother?"

"On top of the electric meter, in the cupboard next to the stairs down to the cellar."

"Someone must have been messing about with them. You don't get a short-circuit just like that."

"I'll go and have a look up in the attic, at the little ones."

"Ouch!"

"Someone must have been using that wretched toaster again. Coba?"

"Yes, ma'am?"

"Did you use that toaster?"

"No, ma'am."

"Look and see if there are any candles left in the sideboard."

"Yes, ma'am."

The only light in the rooms was that cast by the streetlamps. In the dark conservatory at the back of the house a large figure now rose from a wicker armchair. Glass in hand, he surveyed the scores of silhouettes.

"No, Mother!" he cried in a loud voice, emphasizing every syllable. "This has nothing to do with the toasters. It has begun!"

"What has begun?"

"It!" He shouted it with his head thrown back, ecstatically, like an enlightened mystic.

"He's off again," said a man's voice. "Sit down and stop drinking."

"It!"

"Yes, yes. It. It's all right."

"That's right! It's all right. It's also dark, and it's freezing outside. It was about time that it began, that thank heavens it's happened. So be it. Amen— so that the infidels may also understand."

"Onno, you're insufferable."

But the very opposition he provoked was an inspiration. He knew that he was making an exhibition of himself, but he was swept along by his own words.

"Does my ear hear the cacophonous voice of my eldest brother, the most bigoted of Calvinists? What is more terrible than being an eldest brother? I shall say it through clenched teeth: having an eldest brother! Father, make that wretched individual shut up!"

"I don't know if you remember," said a woman in the dark, "but we're celebrating Father's birthday. It's his seventy-fifth birthday, do you remember? It's meant to be a celebration."

"Isn't that my youngest sister? The fair Ophelia? Yes, I remember, I remember. I myself am thirty-three—does that perhaps ring a bell in this company of fanatics and zealots? I remember everything, because I never forget anything. Isn't this the second time in a week that we've celebrated Father's birthday? Father, where are you? I am looking for you, but I am looking through a glass darkly. There you were the day before yesterday at the head of the table, in De Wittenburg Castle: on your right the queen, on your left the crown princess; at the other end, a ten-minute walk away, our poor mother, wedged between the prince-consort and the prime minister; and between you the whole cabinet, eighty-six ex-ministers, a hundred and sixty-eight thousand generals, prelates, bankers, politicians, and industrialists as far as the eye could see; and all of you, too, all the pashas and grand viziers and moguls and satraps by marriage.
Hic sunt monstra.
If only my abominable eldest brother were not there, the governor of that backward province whose name still escapes me."

"Now I've had enough, I'm going to punch him in the nose!"

"Calm down, Diederic. You're a terrible nuisance, Onno. You yourself were sitting talking oh so timidly to the Honorable Miss Bob in your dinner jacket."

"Oh God, the Honorable Miss Bob, the sweetie. I told her the facts of life. It was all completely new to her."

Onno was enjoying himself hugely. It was mainly his own generation who were turning against him. The previous one did not say much; the next one, which was still in high school, was amused and admiring. That was the way to be. One must have the guts to be like that.

"I can't find any candles anywhere, ma'am."

A boy came in with a pocket flashlight, which gave less light than a candle. "There are no fuses left," he said.

He put the flashlight on the table, transforming the faces of some old ladies, who were nibbling gingersnaps and drinking their liqueurs, into those of Transylvanian witches. But people's eyes were adjusting to the dark, so it seemed to be getting gradually lighter. Onno still maintained the pose of a field marshal surveying the battlefield.

"Go next door, Coba," said his mother, "to Mrs. Van Pallandt's. Perhaps she can help us. But only if the lights are on."

"Yes, ma'am."

"It's less than two months since the birthday of the Lord Jesus," cried Onno, "and there's no longer a single candle to be found in this Calvinist bastion!"

"Can you please put a stop to that exasperating chatter?" asked his eldest sister's husband. "For goodness' sake clear off, man. Go to Amsterdam where you belong."

"Yes, heaven be praised that I live in Amsterdam and not in Holland."

"How many rum-and-Cokes have you had, Onno?"

"In Amsterdam," said Onno, raising his glass, "we don't call this liquid rum-and-Coke. In Amsterdam we call it a Cuba libre, but you'll eventually catch on in Holland. So I shall drink a toast to
el líder maximo. Patria o muerte
—
venceremos!
He downed his glass in one.

"Long live Che Guevara!" shouted a boy.

"Hey, Maarten, have you taken leave of your senses?"

"The young monkey's showing his true colors."

"Beware of that monkey! That monkey will make short work of you and your horrible Holland. Soon Coba will be in control here, and then it will be the ex-governor of the ex-queen who will have to fetch candles from the people next door, who won't be called Van Pallandt but, for all I know, Gortzak, or some other honest working-class name. The bunch of you are Holland. Without Quists there would be no Holland, and what a blessing that would be for mankind."