The Discovery of Heaven (6 page)

"Don't they call that 'adulterating'?" asked Max, laughing. "Do you know, by the way, why that is so—that according to the Orthodox you're only a Jew when you have a Jewish mother and not a Jew if you only have a Jewish father?"

"Tell me."

"It's also connected with biology. Because a man can never be one hundred percent sure that he is the real father of his child. A mother may perhaps not be sure who the father is, but one thing is one hundred percent certain: that she is the mother."

"That shows a deep insight into the basic mendacity of woman as such."

Max burst out laughing. "Are you married, by any chance? Do you have children?"

Onno was glad that the dark cloud had been dispelled. "Children! Me, children! Even I'm not that cruel. I live with a girlfriend on and off, if you must know. One of those good souls who puts out bread." He decided not to ask about Max's love life, because it was probably too dreadful for words. "By the way, didn't you say that you were nine in 1942? That makes us the same age. When's your birthday?"

"The twenty-seventh of November."

"Mine's the sixth of November. So from now on, I shall regard you as my younger friend. You can still learn a lot from me. No, wait a bit . . ." he said, and stopped. "I was born three weeks prematurely. That means that we were conceived on the same day!"

They looked at each other in surprise.

"At the same moment!" cried Max.

Both of them, the driver and the hitchhiker, had the feeling that they had discovered the reason for their shock of recognition, as though they had never not known each other. They shook hands solemnly.

"Only death can part us," said Max in the exalted tone that he associated with Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. At the same moment he also thought of the blood-brotherhood ceremony in the Red Indian books: each cut his finger, after which the wounds were pressed together. It was on the tip of his tongue to say: "Actually, we ought to . . ."—but he did not.

They were back at his house on the imposing Vossiusstraat and arranged to phone each other the following day. Max offered to drive him home in the car, but Onno refused. As he took out his keys, Max looked after him in case he turned around and waved, but he did not. As he looked for the door key in his bunch of keys, he saw the circles and crosses in the palm of his left hand.

4
Friendship

In the next few months, when their work did not take them abroad, not a day went by without their seeing each other. Max had never met anyone like Onno, Onno had never met anyone like Max—as a self-proclaimed pair of twins, they did not cease to delight in each other. Each felt inferior to the other; each was at once both servant and master, which created a kind of infinity, like two mirrors reflecting each other. Because of their inseparable appearance in the street, in cafes and pubs, people sometimes talked of them as "homo-intellectuals." They were surrounded by misunderstanding and suspicion, because it was threatening: two grown men, who were obviously not gay and seemed to have nothing in common, and who in some mysterious way, precisely because of that, merged almost symbiotically with each other.

If they had been gay, there would have been no problem—they would simply have been a loving couple. But as it was, they confronted everyone with a deficiency in themselves, sometimes provoking an unpleasant mixture of jealousy and aggression, which saw one as an eternal student, who simply could not give up playing student pranks, and the other as an arrogant prick. In order to neutralize this, they fully admitted it and even played it up for good measure. They would discuss the question of what was going on between them only when it was no longer there, when all the days had merged in their memories into one eternally unforgettable day. Even the Greeks, Onno knew, who had laid the foundation of Western culture, had no word for
culture.
The words only appeared when the thing itself had gone.

Naturally, each of them had a circle of friends, who now also got to know each other, but at the same time Max and Onno became estranged from them, drifted away, leaving them behind in a joint shaking of heads. They generally met at the reading table in Cafe Americain, beneath the art nouveau lamps and surrounded by murals depicting scenes from Wagner operas. Max had often already eaten in Leiden, or had made himself a quick snack at home, while Onno was still having his dinner—that is, there was always a plate with four or five meat rissoles on it next to his newspaper, which he washed down with four or five glasses of milk. He never ate vegetables. "Salad is for rabbits," he was wont to say. He seemed to be totally out of proportion with his body, and perhaps that was why he was so impressively present; his meals were as slovenly as his unbrushed teeth and his clothes. Once, when his face was dripping with sweat, Max said, "Onno, you've got a temperature,"—at which Onno wiped his forehead, looked at his gleaming palm, and said, "Christ, you're right!"—only to forget all about it the following instant.

Max, on the other hand, sat regularly in the waiting room of his Communist GP, staring at a large photo of striking Belgian workers in berets, eye to eye with a heavily armed platoon of militia, while there was never anything wrong with him, apart from the occasional dose of clap; and however great his imagined fear of death, his tie never clashed with his socks.

Once, Max started talking about death, which immediately irritated Onno beyond measure.

"Talking about death is a waste of time. As long as you're alive you're not dead, and when you're no longer alive you're only dead for other people."

But that was not what Max meant. He said that on the one hand he was convinced that one day he would die of a heart attack in dreadful pain, but on the other hand he might be immortal. A person could determine his life expectancy by adding the ages at which his parents had died and dividing by two. But both his parents had died violent deaths; if that had not happened, they might have been immortal. And because, according to Cantor, infinity plus infinity divided by two was also infinity, the proposition was proved.

"An extremely embarrassing logical error for a natural scientist," said Onno. "In reality it follows that you have a fifty percent chance of being murdered and a fifty percent chance of being executed, which means that it's a hundred percent certain that you'll die a violent death."

When the rissoles were finished they walked into town, where the wintry cold had disappeared from the air. Sometimes they went to the movies first, to see a James Bond film, or the latest Stanley Kubrick,
2001: A Space Odyssey,
in which a computer called HAL took control of a spaceship. When they emerged into the street—in the washed-out state in which reality grates on one like a gray file—Onno asked why Max thought the computer was called HAL. Because of the association with "hell," suggested Max. Damn, Onno hadn't thought of that. But suppose Max counted one letter on from
H,A,
and
L
in the alphabet.

"I,"
said Max,
"B,M.
IBM!" he cried. "I take my hat off to you, sir!"

Onno assumed a modest expression. "It's a gift."

While they were drinking a cup of coffee somewhere, with Little Richard wailing from the jukebox, Onno maintained that his eye for that kind of thing was a result of his Calvinist upbringing: it came from reading the Bible, "containing all the Holy Scripture." For him, truth could only reside in what was written, and could not, for example, be seen through a telescope. That higher form of reading was something that the Calvinists shared with the Jews; Catholics never read the Bible, and usually didn't have one— Catholics were illiterates. Pictures and photographs; that was what they understood.

Moreover, the Calvinists were more concerned with the Old Testament than with the New Testament, like the Catholics—who in a supreme display of primitivism actually sang the text. When the Jews were persecuted, Calvinists therefore joined the resistance much more often than Catholics, who were anyway the inventors of anti-Semitism—as often as the Communists, who also derived truth from a book, namely that of Marx, another Jew.

It was as though Max could see his friend's trains of thought sweeping through the air like a lion tamer's long whip, and they inspired him in turn.

"Have you ever noticed," he said, "that the area of Protestantism coincides with the area covered by polar ice in the Ice Age? In the Netherlands the border runs right through the middle: where there was ice is the territory of the Protestants, as far as Hammerfest, and where grass grew is Catholic, as far as Palermo. And where did Calvin live?" he suddenly thought. "In Switzerland! The only Protestant country in the Catholic area when there are still glaciers!"

"I'm shivering," said Onno. "There are shivers running down my spine. Only someone who is not Dutch could make such a shameful discovery. Get thee behind me, Satan! You don't belong here at all."

"Where do I belong, then?"

Onno waved an arm. "In space. You view the Netherlands from space, like an astronaut; but I'm in the middle of it, frozen in the Calvinist ice, like a mammoth. Don't get me started. Holland belongs to me and not a lost Central European woodcutter like you."

It was true. Max could not imagine what it felt like to be part of a people, a nation, a race, a religion—in brief, when one was not alone. He was Dutch, Austrian, Jewish, and Aryan all at once, and hence none of them. He belonged only with those who, like him, belonged with no one.

"I feel as Dutch," he said, "as Spinoza must have felt."

"Why Spinoza, of all people?"

"For a number of reasons. Partly because he was a lens grinder."

But their unending stream of theories, jokes, observations, and anecdotes was not their real conversation: that took place beneath these, without words, and it was about themselves. Sometimes it became visible in a roundabout way, like when in the past North Sea fishermen located a school of herring from its silvery reflection against the clouds.

In a pub in the newspaper district, full of journalists from the morning dailies, as well as the evening papers, where he ordered his first rum-and-Coke, Onno once told Max about the Gilgamesh epic, the oldest story in the world, deciphered in the previous century by his colleague Rawlinson, written as long before Christ as they were now living after Christ. Cheops's pyramid had already been built, said Onno, because that had always been there, so to speak; but Moses, the Trojan War, all of that had yet to happen.

The first story was the story of a friendship. The Babylonian king Gilgamesh dreamed of a frightening ax, with which he fell in love and on which he "lay as on a woman." His mother, obviously well acquainted with the theories of Freud, interpreted that ax as a man on which he would lie as on a woman. And a little later the man appeared: Enkidu, a tamed savage, with whom he ventured forth and slayed the monster Chuwawa. However, that deed eventually led to Enkidu's death. In his despair Gilgamesh went in search of the elixir of immortality, but when even that was finally stolen from him, by a serpent, he resigned himself to the inevitable like a Candide
avant la lettre
and found his life's fulfillment as the architect of the battlements of Uruk.

"Magnificent," said Max. "Why don't I know all that? Why doesn't everyone read that?"

"Because not everyone knows me."

"What a dreadful fate that must be, not knowing you."

"The very thought strikes me as unbearable."

"I too lived for a long time in that hell."

With the calculated precision of someone who has had too much to drink, a man sank into a chair at their table.

"Can I inquire what
les boys
are talking about?"

Onno looked into the journalist's cynical face with distaste.

"Of course you can't. That would confront you fatally with the abyss of your own worthlessness, day laborer that you are. Your sense of history extends no further than yesterday's evening paper, but we—we survey eons! Landlord!" he called to the bodybuilder who served as a waiter. "A big order! Another Cuba libre and a freshly squeezed orange juice!"

Max leaned confidentially toward the man opposite him. "Personally I like you well enough," he said softly, "but why does everyone else hate your guts?"

The man continued staring at him for a moment, digesting the insult. Then he leaped forward and grabbed Max by his lapel; perhaps he was going to pull him across the table, but while Max was helpless in his grasp, Onno jumped up and did the same to the journalist himself, causing Max to tumble from his chair. While he kept the man pressed down against the table with his left hand, he raised his right hand high in the air, as if to give him a deadly karate blow to the neck, looked around the pub, which had fallen silent, and said, "He attacked my friend—he must die!"

Max knew nothing about Gilgamesh and Enkidu, although astronomy had first originated at that time and in that place, but he did know something about different kinds of men, like Leopold and Loeb. While they had been debating in a pub with Red activists that day—or some other day—and were walking back through the city after midnight, across the square with the ruined synagogues, he told Onno the story of those two American law students, bosom friends, age eighteen and nineteen, sons of wealthy Chicago families. They read Nietzsche's
Thus Spake Zarathustra
and
Beyond Good and Evil,
and came to the conclusion that they were
Übermenschen,
above all human laws. In 1924, in order to put this to the test, they decided to commit a perfect crime, motiveless, apart from their own private motive. They murdered a fourteen-year-old boy, made his face unrecognizable with sulfuric acid, hid his body in a sewer, and went to dinner in a chic restaurant. However, Leopold, an expert ornithologist, had left his glasses behind, and everything came out. They were given life sentences plus ninety-nine years. Loeb, the charmer of the two, was later killed in a fight in prison; Leopold, the brains, had been released about ten years ago, and would now be sixty-two if he was still alive.