The Discovery of Heaven (81 page)

Onno looked up from his notes, perplexed.

"What do you want?" he asked. Not having said anything the whole morning, he cleared his throat.

The raven fixed him with one eye and croaked.

"Cras?"
repeated Onno. "Yes, of course you're speaking Latin. 'Tomorrow'? What about tomorrow?"

The bird jumped off the windowsill onto the table, stirred through the chaos of papers a few times with its tail feathers, left some droppings, and then went over to a plate on which there were a few remnants of bread. With a loud tapping of its beak, as blue-black as fountain-pen ink, it devoured them and again looked at Onno, as if wanting to know if that was all. After it had eaten its fill, it jumped onto the windowsill, spread its wings, and disappeared—but the following afternoon it was back, at the same time.

In this way something resembling a friendship had begun. Onno had never had anything to do with animals before; they did not feature in his thinking. He had been brought up to believe that they had no souls, but after just a few days he found himself becoming anxious when the bird was late. Although he had not worn a watch since leaving Holland, he always knew what time it was thanks to the church bells. When on one occasion the raven missed a day, he could no longer concentrate. He looked mournfully at the untouched plate of birdseed and leaned outside every ten minutes to scan the sky.

"You don't treat people like this, Edgar," he said the following day with a reproachfully wagging index finger. "Not even as a bird. You don't stand your host up with the food. I trust it won't happen again."

While his pitch-black visitor scratched about around the room, over the chairs, among the rubbish under the bed, it constantly croaked and squawked, and Onno had the impression that it stayed longer if he himself talked a lot, too. From then on he made a habit of speaking while it was there. At the beginning he found it difficult; except for a few words in a shop, a restaurant, or in his bank, he had said nothing for four years. But one can no more forget how to speak than how to ride a bike or swim, and he of all people would be more likely to forget how to ride a bike than how to speak; he could not swim.

"Of course you're wondering what I'm doing here, Edgar. I'll tell you. I'm working on a letter to my father. But it's a rather strange kind of letter, because even when I get it down on paper I won't be able to send it. Kafka wrote a letter to his father too—Max read it to me once, long ago, in far-off innocent days—but poor Royal and Imperial Franz-Josef never dared mail it. My own problem is more serious, because what's the address of a dead person? Perhaps you know, being a black bird; unfortunately you won't be able to tell me. But I want to do it precisely because it's absurd. Since everything is ultimately absurd, the whole of life and the whole world, conversely only the absurd makes any kind of sense. Can you understand that? If everything's absurd, then within that absurdity only the absurd is not absurd! True or not? Have you ever heard of Camus? He was the philosopher of the absurd, and he died in an absurd car accident. For many people that was a confirmation of his thesis that everything is absurd. But for the philosopher of the absurd, an absurd death is of course an extremely meaningful end! Think hard about that. Everything is far more absurd than even he thought. Now of course you're curious about what I'm trying to tell my dead father in my absurd way. It's about the nature of power. In the last few years I've thought of a few things, on which I want his impossible judgment. It's rather sinister, and in political terms you must translate the word
sinister
not by 'left,' but rather by 'right': then you get
dexter.
Another difference with Kafka is that I'm not able to get my ideas into order. They're not in an orderly succession; they're still chaotically juxtaposed. In the past when I wrote an article or a speech, academic or political, it was always as if my thoughts were numbered in some way and I immediately knew the sequence of the sentences. But I've lost that priceless ability. Now I feel as if I have to complete a jigsaw puzzle as big as the room, while all the pieces are plain white—or, rather, as black as you, Edgar. Look over there. Thousands of notes. Very personal, about Koos and Dorus and Bart Bork, but also very general ones, about the question of how power is possible and heaven knows what else. The mountain grows higher every day, but do you think that means I'm any closer to my goal? Each note takes me farther away from it! This stuff is like a tree, constantly branching, sprouting, growing, precisely when I'm trying to locate the trunk and the point where it comes out of the ground. Each time I start on my letter, I have to go through all those notes again, to build up momentum, but it never leads to a first sentence, just to new notes. In the meantime many of them have become illegible—because they've lain in the sun, or because I've spilled coffee or cola over them, or because they're stuck together with jam, or because you've relieved yourself on them with your leaching excreta, which are as white as you are black. I don't mind. Don't worry about it—that's nature."

A few weeks later the situation had reversed itself: Edgar no longer came to visit once a day, but occasionally left the house. Changed from a guest into a lodger, he generally slept in a corner of the room among the clothes lying on the floor. The first time the tame animal fluttered onto his shoulder and held onto his ear with its beak, Onno's reflex was to try to push it off, but he was glad that he hadn't, because there would have been no second opportunity. And now Edgar was given fragments to hear every day, sometimes these, sometimes those—and suddenly Onno had the feeling that reading them aloud was bringing him close to a structure, enabling him to make a start on sifting and organizing.

"Listen," he said, sitting at his desk with his reading glasses on his nose. "Take this. This is very important. Perhaps my patriarchal treatise should begin with this.
The Golden Wall
is the title.
In front of the Golden Wall it's an improvised mess; people teem around in the noisy chaos of everyday life, and the reason things don't go haywire is due to the world behind the Golden Wall. The world of power lies there like the eye of the cyclone, in mysterious silence, controlled, reliable, as ordered as a chessboard, a sort of purified world of Platonic Ideas. At least that's the image that the powerless in front of the Golden Wall have of it. It is confirmed by the dark suits, the silent limousines, the guards, the protocol, the perfect organization, the velvety calm in the palaces and ministries. But anyone who's actually been behind the Golden Wall, like you and me, knows that it's all sham and that in there, where decisions are made, it's just as improvised a chaos as in front, in people's homes, at universities, in hospitals, or in companies. I've never had that impression more strongly than in the archaeological museum in Cairo. Once when I was a minister of state I was given a guided tour by my Egyptian colleague. We looked at the treasures from the grave of Tutankhamen—all those wonderful things that were reverently displayed there. But there were also a couple of large photographs of the state in which the tomb had been found. All the things were piled on each other, like old rubbish in a loft, and the mess had not only been caused by robbers. The wooden shrines that housed the sarcophagus had also been crudely and wrongly assembled; the granite lid of the sarcophagus did not fit and had been broken in two when it had been lowered. The same spectacle was presented by the pitiful human remains that had emerged from beneath that indescribably splendid golden mask of the pharaoh's. All politicians, some civil servants, and some journalists know that it's just as pitiful a junk shop behind the Golden Wall as in front of it, but almost none of the powerless citizens know. Should anyone discover how a policy is made—which is virtually impossible—he will spend the rest of his life with a fundamental feeling of insecurity. So it's a miracle that things don't go haywire behind the Golden Wall too: it points to a much higher power. For you that's no problem; for you that's God. But for me unfortunately not even the functioning of society is a proof of God's existence. How can it possibly have functioned up to now? You won't believe it, but I know. It's because of the existence of that very Golden Wall. The Wall itself is the highest power.
Wait a moment. Of course—this is where that quote from Shakespeare belongs, from the opening of one of his sonnets. Where is it? Here:
From what power hast thou this powerful might?
It's about love, but the Golden Wall is connected with love, too. Look what we've got here:
What is the nature of the Golden Wall? The powerless think that it consists of the congealed majesty of the mighty, who in some cases are even worshiped: the Liberator, the King, the Leader. But in reality it is not a product of the mighty but of the powerless themselves: it's the crystallization of their own reverence, awe, and fear. But if the powerless are hence in fact worshiping nothing but their own worship, are in awe only of their own awe, and are afraid only of their own fear, which at the same time excludes them from power, what is left for the powerful? What are they? Once someone has penetrated the Golden Wall, what does he see? Nothing special. Just ordinary people going about their business, no more interesting and no different in kind than the powerless. They exercise power not in some 'powerful,' inevitable, so to speak mathematically, certain way, as the powerless believe, but in just as messy and improvised a way as every powerless person manages his affairs. Dorus and Frans formed a cabinet over lunch; Churchill and Stalin carved up the Balkans over a drink. And yet. . . they must have something extra, which the powerless experience, because not everyone can penetrate the Wall by acquiring power.
That means, Edgar, that the 'powerful might' of Shakespeare's Dark Lady was also in a certain sense not her quality, because she didn't possess it for all men. So her answer to his question, where she got it from, must therefore be 'From you yourself, Billy.' He gave her that power over him—although . . . yes, I'm saying it again: although ... and yet . .. what does that something extra consist of? Not of intelligence, because there have always been some unspeakable idiots in power. . . ; there are also always superintelligent people who never rise to power, although they would like to despite their intelligence. That something extra isn't the 'will to power,' because there are countless people who want it and will never succeed in achieving it, just as there are people who come to power who never wanted it but who, to their own amazement, are impelled toward it. So political instinct, you may say: there are lots of people with political instinct who never rise above the level of alderman in a country municipality. 'Charisma,' then? That's simply a Greek word that means gift, 'grace': that doesn't answer the question but asks one. No, something's involved that no one knows about, except me. Now I must write this down, before I forget:
Of course the whole of society is as saturated with all forms of power as a sponge, between man and woman, in education, in business, over animals, nowhere is there no power—but what is political power? Political power is the fact that someone can achieve things that he knows nothing about; that he is in a position where he can decide the fate of people that he doesn't know—sometimes on matters of life and death, and frequently beyond his own death. The powerless see the powerful one, but he does not see them. That applies not only to Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin but also to our own good old Dutch rulers, to Koos and Dorus, and to you of course, and to myself a little too
. I don't know what it's like among ravens, but in any case that's what it's like among people. Political power is an abstract, which only becomes concrete outside the field of vision of the powerful person. But what is that something extra that enables them to be in power? What does Dorus have in common with Hitler; what has Koos in common with Stalin? I'll tell you a secret that will make you sit up. In my own days in power I once had dinner at the Elysee; seated opposite me was a French professor of sociology. After Giscard d'Estaing's speech he told me that during the election battles, a couple of his students had hung up the posters with the portraits of Giscard and Mitterand on them in some backward country village in Thailand. The population had never heard of them and no one could read what was on the posters. On the day of the presidential elections they got them to vote, and what do you think? The results corresponded exactly with those in France. That made us laugh at the time—the professor regarded it as a good joke, and I don't believe that he was ever able to draw the dreadful conclusion from it; but I was suddenly reminded of it when I realized what power means. Listen to this:
As a boy I identified power with property. My books were mine, but then in a higher degree yours, and in a still higher degree the mayor's; after that everything was yours a second time, as prime minister, but ultimately everything in Holland was the queen's. As an alderman, I thought that political power was simply the power of the word. Whoever had the best ideas and could express them best had the greatest power. Now I know that it's only in the third place a matter of ideas and words, and only in the second place a matter of who expresses them, the person. Most people find even that extremely undemocratic, but it's much worse. Power is the power of the flesh. Power is purely physical. No one has dared face up to that. No one attains power by what he says; his political program is incidental, and so is who he is: someone else may come along with the same program and nothing will happen. Someone gains power solely because he has the physical constitution of someone who gains power. If he were to say something different
—
the opposite, for example
—
in another party or movement, he would still gain power. He would always obtain power, Father, even with the Catholics, or the Communists. The powerful person is someone who gains power because he has a physical secret that makes other people say, 'Yes, that's our man'
—
or woman, of course. The something extra is solely that one thing: the body.
I mean, politics isn't a branch of economics, as Marx thought, or theology, as my father thought, or sociology, as other people think, but of biology. That was proved scientifically by those yokels in Thailand. I virtually never read a newspaper, Edgar. I have no idea what's going on in the world anymore—I don't have television, radio, or even a telephone—but when I see a photo of Margaret Thatcher, who appears to be in charge in England at the moment, at a newsstand, then I know immediately: shrewd eroticism. A bourgeoise Cleopatra. Of course, she's intelligent and energetic and what have you, but so are other English-women, who never get any further than head buyer at Harrods. Why is that? Take Hitler. Freud demonstrated that illness must not be understood in terms of health, but health in terms of illness. Similarly, you mustn't try to understand Hitler's absolute power in terms of more or less normal power structures, because you'll never be able to; you must do it the other way around. You can explain Margaret and Dorus through Hitler, but not Hitler through Margaret or Dorus. Suppose Hitler had never existed but someone else had said and done the same things as him from his birth in Braunau— and there were such people. Do you think things would have gone as they did to the bitter end? Of course not! How long could that other person have kept it up? At a certain moment at the beginning of the 1920s Rohm or Strasser would have rounded on him with: 'Why don't you shut your trap!' But he wasn't anyone else—he was the dark man with that dogged face and the 'basilisk's stare,' as Thomas Mann once called it, with a pale forehead, those fanatical cheekbones, those smooth cheeks and pinched lips. That appearance accounted for
33
percent of his effect, and all the neo-Nazis are still in love with it. And Salvador Dali once said, 'I love his back.' You can dismiss that as a surrealist observation by a Spanish lunatic, but it also indicates a sense of all-determining physicality. And what do you think of a remark that Heidegger once made to Jaspers, who wondered how such an uncivilized creature as Hitler could rule Germany. Heidegger's answer was, 'Civilization has nothing to do with it... just look at his wonderful hands.' Apart from that, he had a voice that went right through you, which made everything he said different than if someone else had said it. A second 33 percent of the oratorical impact of his words on the masses can be attributed to that sound. I once saw an X-ray picture of his skull in a book somewhere, and it was observed that he had exceptionally large sinuses, with extraordinary resonance. And the third
33
percent of his power was due to his incomparable body language. On the one hand his terrifying outbursts of rage at the lectern, on the other hand his perhaps even more terrifying silence: his masklike face, the precision of his pose, the tension in even the smallest movement. The way he saluted at a parade, with that slight curve of the wrist, the position of his thumb, the way he brought his hand back to his belt: all of it had bewitching power. All rehearsed in front of the mirror, of course; there are photos of that. Some conductors have the same thing, that absolute control, like a hummingbird hovering stationary in the air and keeping its proboscis fixed motionless in the pistil of a flower.
A fleur du mal
in this case. Look, you don't feel left out by my mentioning a little bird?