The Discovery of Heaven (3 page)

"Onno—"

"Ignore him. Simply ignore him, then he'll shut up by himself."

"Anyway, you're a Quist too."

"Me? Me a Quist? What an unforgivable insult. I'm a bastard," he said solemnly. "A cuckoo in the next—that's what I am."

"You're cuckoo, all right," said one of his aunts at the table with the flashlight, which was becoming weaker and weaker.

"And who is the father of the cuckoo?" asked his eldest sister.

"Mother and I will never reveal that. Never! Isn't that so, Mother? We have sworn not to."

"What have we sworn?"

"Oh, now you're playing dumb. Don't you remember that handsome prince from that distant country who came to Holland on a white horse?"

"What on earth is he talking about?"

"If you ask me, the fellow's no longer completely
compos mentis."

Onno put his hand on his heart.

"About the Seventh Commandment, woman."

"Did the prince have a black beard by any chance?" asked his other brother, a professor of criminal law in Groningen. "Was he dressed in a green uniform, with a pistol perhaps?"

Onno faltered, set his glass down, put both hands against the wall, and began shaking with laughter.

"He's enjoying it, the windbag."

"Mother!" shouted Onno with a choking voice. "They know! It's come out!"

"What has come out?"

"That you deceived Father with Fidel Castro."

"Me, deceive Father? Wherever did you get that idea? I don't even know the man."

"Joke, dear, joke."

"Funny kind of jokes they tell here. I've never deceived Father."

"You deceived me!" cried Onno, standing up and raising a trembling forefinger like a prophet. "With Father! By conceiving me!"

At that moment his youngest sister, two heads shorter than he, loomed in front of him and took his hand. He allowed himself to be led into the room like a clumsy circus bear.

"That's really enough, Onno," she said softly. "There are limits."

"Who told you that?"

"I don't mind at all, I can take a dig or two, but you're embarrassing Mother. She can't follow your strange sense of humor."

"Strange sense of humor?" he repeated. "I mean every word. Doesn't anyone understand that? Not even you? If even you don't understand me, who will? Oh, where is there someone who understands me!"

"Stop it. You're simply being provocative, and you're enjoying it."

"Of course, of course, but I also mean it. I also mean what I don't mean."

"Oh yes, tell me more."

"No, you don't want me to tell you more at all. When I'm dying I shall crawl to you on my knees, but even you don't understand a thing. No one understands me!" he cried pathetically and suddenly at full volume again.

"That's true," said his eldest sister's husband. "So hurry back to your crossword puzzles, then we here in Holland will make sure you can go on doing your puzzles in peace."

Onno cupped his hand behind his ear.

"Do I detect a shrill tone there? Is that because no one will believe that a certain seedy public prosecutor from the provinces is the brother-in-law of the great, unforgettable, world-famous Onno Quist?"

While he beat his chest with both fists, the door opened and admitted a flock of children, led by a little girl of about seven. She was wearing a white nightgown, which came down to her bare feet. She cried: "Who's that drunk man?"

Onno surveyed them with a look of horror. "Brood of vipers! Are they all going to become ministers and judges and ambassadors' wives in their turn? Oh God, take those children and smash them to pieces against the rocks! Otherwise there will never be an end to it."

"Uncle Onno! Uncle Onno!"

"I'm not anybody's uncle. How dare you? I'm only my own uncle. Misunderstood, sneered at by everyone, and kicked into a corner, I wander lonely and magnificent in the rarefied realms of the Utterly Different."

"That clown is beginning to make me feel ill," said the provincial governor. "Father, can't you put a stop to it?"

There was a silence. Onno, too, suddenly stopped talking. Far away, in the front room, near the plush curtains, sat Quist. Onno could not see him, and looked in his direction, eyes peering, as when one tries to focus on a faint star.

"Oh," said Quist, "the lad will turn out all right."

When Onno heard this, he put his glass on the windowsill and made his way to the front room between the heavy pieces of furniture and the outstretched legs—a journey in the course of which the average age of the guests gradually increased. At the other end of the suite his father was sitting in the winged armchair like a dark red boulder: a last erratic stone that had come to rest, having been driven along by the terminal moraine of his times. Beside him was the oak lectern, on which lay the massive seventeenth-century Authorized Version, as large as a suitcase, with silver trimmings and two heavy locks. Onno could not make out his face. He dropped to his knees and pressed his lips to his father's high black shoes. The leather was warmed by the feet it was covering.

Onno sat up, and suddenly said in a lighthearted tone, "Farewell, all. I'm going home."

"What time is it?" asked his mother. "Surely there are no more trains running?"

"I'm going to hitch a lift."

"What nonsense, you can sleep here."

His brother-in-law laughed. "I wouldn't dream of giving a lift to such a sinister figure in the middle of the night."

"We've got a bed too," said his eldest sister. "You can come in the car with us. We're all going home; it's twelve-thirty."

"I'm going to Amsterdam. I've got a date."

"Stop being silly. You haven't got a date."

"Let him have his way," said the public prosecutor.

Had the insults already been forgotten? Obviously, his family regarded him as a natural phenomenon: after the storm, the branches that have been blown down are cleared up, and there's an end of it. He spread his arms wide in farewell and went into the hall whistling softly.

"You can't find a thing here in this Stygian darkness," said his youngest sister, with the almost completely extinguished pocket flashlight in her hand.

As he began rummaging among the piles of coats, the key squeaked in the lock. "Heavens, you're muddling everything up," said Coba, retrieving his coat as she passed.

"Shall I drive you to the main Wassenaar road?" asked his sister, while he unbuttoned his coat again and this time rebuttoned it symmetrically. "It's over half an hour's walk."

"I'd like a bit of a walk."

"You're restless."

He gave her a kiss on the forehead and went out. As he closed the garden gate, the lights came on again all over the house.

The Hague lay silent in the darkness. There were scarcely any cars about. The houses were lighter-colored than in Amsterdam, but almost all the windows were dark. The civil servants were asleep and dreaming of putting an end once and for all to the disturbances in the capital that had been going on for years, with tanks on the street corners and dive bombers firing rockets at the university institutes, after which they would be appointed governor of the pacified city.

In his heavy full-length winter coat, Onno walked in the direction of the main road to Leiden. Although it was freezing he was not wearing gloves, but he did not put his hands in his pockets: he held them on his back, where they gradually became purple with cold, without him noticing. Here, where he had spent his whole youth, he knew every stone, but that awakened no nostalgic feelings in him. Moreover, he did not look around him; nor did he reflect on the evening that had just passed. Stooping a little, with a slightly labored gait in his clumsy, and as always unpolished, shoes, he walked through the deserted streets, with a circular clay tablet constantly in his mind—sometimes one side, sometimes the other.

He suddenly seemed like a different person. He kept his tongue on the left side of his mouth between his teeth and chewed on it gently, as he always did when he was thinking. There was a sleepy look on his face, but that was not because of tiredness or alcohol; it was the sleepiness of thought. Thought is never action, forward, up and at it, as people think who do not know what thinking is; it is not like a forest explorer cutting back creeping vines, but more like someone letting himself relax into a hot bath.

The tablet, the so-called Phaistos disc, was the size of a dessert plate. Both sides had a pattern, which resembled nothing so much as a hopscotch diagram of the kind that children draw on the street with chalk: a spiral moving inward in a clockwise direction, ending in a central point. It looked like a maze, but it was definitely not one. It was impossible to get lost in it—there was only one way, and that led to the center. The diagram was divided into compartments filled with primitive signs, such as a helmeted head, a number of human and animal figures in profile, an ax, something like a portable cage, and many other illustrations. Onno looked at the rebus, whose 242 signs and forty-five syllables in the sixty-one compartments he knew better than his own body, and which in another sense was still a maze—while ever new connections formed in his mind, disappeared, emerged again in modified form, linked with other linguistic facts and signs, Philistine, Lycian, Semitic . . .

There was a great silence around him.

2
Their Meeting

As Onno Quist was leaving his parents' house, in another, considerably less distinguished, area of The Hague a man of the same age had reached orgasm in four or five waves, accompanied by loud cries.

"Well, well!" he gasped when it had subsided, both surprised and appreciative. "Thank you."

He was lying on the floor, and with his eyes closed he stroked the woman who had collapsed on top of him like a half-empty balloon; and somehow, something was wrong. He felt a leg where in fact there could be no leg; her head was at a point where he expected a foot. He stroked a rounding that was probably the beginning of a breast but might also have been that of a buttock, raised his eyebrows in resignation, sighed deeply, and dozed off. . .

He had met her in Rotterdam a few hours earlier. Some students from the Economics University had organized a "revolutionary carnival" there, and he had read the announcement on a noticeboard in Leiden, where he worked. He lived in Amsterdam, but because he had nothing to do, he had driven to the party later that evening after work. Deafening music in decorated rooms, people dancing everywhere; even the stairs were full. At an improvised Cuban restaurant, Moncada, he ate a hunk of meat, and in a Flemish tavern, the Racing Shorts, he ordered an orange juice. In a side room an "occult market" had been set up: at trestle tables all kinds of individuals were offering their services, free, with Tarot cards, horoscopes, pendulums, crystal balls, and I Ching paraphernalia. He searched the throng for girls he might be able to chat up, but everyone was accompanied, had dressed up—there were scores of boys in Che Guevara berets—and were enjoying themselves; he soon began to tire of the relaxed, unerotic atmosphere. Human beings were not on earth for their pleasure, he believed—fucking was an imperative—and after an hour he decided he might as well go back to his car. He was tired, but he mustn't give in to that, either; there was still time to fix up something in Amsterdam.

On his way to the exit he again passed through the room with the wizards and witches, but in the meantime it had virtually emptied. As the atmosphere became more intense, interest in higher things had disappeared; most people were already busy packing up their supernatural equipment. Only by the stall of a woman in a purple sweater was there still a girl sitting with her hand, palm upward, in that of the lady, like a saint showing her stigmata.

She was an attractive girl. She was no more than nineteen or so, with her blond hair in a ponytail. With feigned interest he stopped and listened to what the palmist had to say. With a slim pen she drew lines, crosses, and circles alongside significant twists in the lines of the hand, which reminded him of markings on astronomical photographs. In general the patterns seem to present a favorable picture, but certain side branches of the lifeline did give cause for alarm: they pointed to a serious illness at the age of about forty; it was also better not to have a grille on the Mount of the Sun. The girl looked at her hand and nodded in understanding.

"I think what you're doing is quite scandalous," he said suddenly—first and foremost, of course, to make himself known to the girl, but he also meant what he said. "I hope she thinks it's all nonsense, because that's what it is; but meanwhile it's been planted in her head—your threat about that illness. For twenty years." The two women looked up at him, the girl with an amused look, the astrologer with a morose glance over her semicircular reading glasses. She was his own age, perhaps a little older; dark-brown hair lay in strange twists across her head, as though an enormous lizard had nestled there, an iguana. Something in her face immediately grabbed him. He saw her small breasts in her sweater, between them a pendant with a flat metal hand on it—and at that moment he knew that he wanted to go to bed not with her client, but with her.

"Scandalous," he said, still looking at her.

Perhaps the girl had seen the change; she got up, said goodbye politely, and left.

"I think we have a bone to pick with each other," he said severely.

When she got up to pack, she turned out to be very slightly built: her beastly crown did not even come up to his shoulders. Without a word she put on her coat and went outside. Wondering how he was to break through that silence, he followed her to the car park. When she had put the key into the door of a small car, she suddenly turned to him and gestured invitingly.

He burst out laughing. "I've got one too. I'll follow you."

A little later, in his dark-green sports car with the white cloth hood, which was raring to go faster, he dawdled behind her along the road to The Hague, with a constant semi-erection because of the situation.

"A fortune-teller!" he cried as they passed Delft, and banged his wooden steering wheel. "That's all I needed!" He felt in his element and began singing a Mahler song:
"Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht, fröhliche Hochzeit macht
..." Tears welled up in his eyes. Melancholy, lust, music—suddenly everything overwhelmed him as he watched the red taillights.