THE DISCOVERY OF HEAVEN
A novel
Harry Mulisch
First published in Dutch as De ontdekking van de hemel 1992
This translation first published in the USA by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1996
First published in Great Britain in Penguin Books 1998
1 3579108642
Copyright © Harry Mulisch, 1992
Translation copyright © Paul Vincent, 1996
All rights reserved
PART ONE THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING
PROLOGUE
1 The Family Gathering
2 Their Meeting
3 I'll See You Home
4 Friendship
5 Coming Out to Play
6 Another Meeting
7 The Observatory
8 An Idyll
9 The Demons
10 The Gypsies
11 The Trial
12 The Triangle
13 Clearing Up
14 Repayment
15 The Invitation
16 The Conference
17 Hot Days
18 The Vanishing Point
19 In the Sea
THE MISSION
PART TWO THE END OF THE BEGINNING
First Intermezzo
20 The Hooblei
21 The News
22 What Next?
23 Heads or Tails
24 The Wedding
25 The Mirror
26 Fancy
27 Consolation
28 The Funeral
29 Irreversibility
30 The Scaffold
31 The Proposal
32 The Dilettante
33 Cesarean Section
De Profundis
PART THREE THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Second Intermezzo
34 The Gift
35 The Move
36 The Monument
37 Expeditions
38 The Grave
39 Further Expeditions
40 The World of Words
41 Absences
42 The Citadel
43 Finds
44 The Not
45 Changes
46 The Free Market Economy
47 The Music
48 Velocities
49 The Westerbork
50 The Decision
De Profundis
PART FOUR THE END OF THE END
Third Intermezzo
51 The Golden Wall
52 Italian Journey
53 The Shadow
54 The Stones of Rome
55 The Spot
56 Biblical Scholarship
57 Discoveries
58 Preparations
59 Waiting
60 The Commandos
61 The Flight
62 Thither
63 The Center of the Center
64 Chawah Lawan?
65 The Law Taker
Epilogue
PART ONE
THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING
PROLOGUE
—Can I have a moment?
—What is it?
—Mission accomplished. The matter's settled.
—What matter?
—Oh, forgive me. The most important matter of all. The major problem.
—The major problem? What are you talking about?
—The testimony.
—But of course! Good heavens, how terrible! One devotes oneself full-time to the essential questions, one focuses all one's energies on them, and at a certain moment one simply forgets them, or deals with them in a trice.
—Perhaps you should start delegating a little more.
—Perhaps you should be more aware of your place when someone confides in you. Delegate more! You still don't seem to understand what's hanging over us. Why do you think this project was set up? Tell me, how long have you been wording on this file?
—Over seventy years in human time.
—Tell me about it.
—Where shall I begin?
—You're the best judge of that. First tell me briefly about the prelude.
—I've seldom had to deal with such a complicated program. Thank God we generally let things run their own course, and in earlier assignments I had far more time to play with. However, because for some reason the matter had to be dealt with by the end of the millennium, I had four generations at most to come up with someone who could carry out the mission. The usual procedures were no good at all on such short notice. Normally, of course, we could have given the mission to any Spark we liked, but that would have been pointless. The problem was that if he was to be our envoy, he would have to remember the mission once he was in a body of flesh and blood—that is, he would have to be capable of hitting on the outrageous idea and, furthermore, have the strength of will and courage to execute it. I say "he" because it didn't seem a job for a "she." Of course, among the infinite human potential at our disposal there was a Spark who met those requirements, but how were we to get him to earth? So first we had to establish the unique DNA sequence in which he could manifest himself. I don't have to tell you that the coiled double DNA helix containing the information on a human individual, that Hermetic caduceus within the nucleus of each of the individual's hundred thousand billion cells, weighs no more than one hundred thousandth of a gram but, when extended, is approximately the same length as the individual himself, so that the number of possible sequences at the molecular level is vast. If written in the three-letter words of the four-letter alphabet, a human being is determined by a genetic narrative long enough to fill the equivalent of five hundred Bibles. In the meantime human beings have discovered this for themselves.
—That's right. They have uncovered our profoundest concept—namely, that life is ultimately reading. They themselves are the Book of Books. In their year 1869 the wretched creatures discovered the DNA in the cell nucleus, and at the time we kidded ourselves that it was of no great significance, because they would never have the bright idea that the acid contained a code—and in any case would never be able to break it—but a hundred human years later they had deciphered the genetic code down to its subtlest details. We made them much too clever, using the very same code.
—However, a hundred human years later I also achieved what I was after. First we managed to write down the secret name of our man, but that was nothing compared with what we had to do next: we had to find the great-grandparents, the grandparents, and the parents who could produce the desired combination within approximately fifty years. In his unfathomable wisdom, which may sometimes surprise even himself, the Chief arranged things so that in our Eternal Light we have a Spark for every possible combination of a sperm cell and an ovum. At each ejaculation a man emits three hundred million sperm: combined with a single female ovum, that is the same number of possible human beings, for which there are an equivalent number of Sparks—but a Spark is required for every combination of every sperm from every man in the present, past, and future with each ovum of each woman in the present, past, and future. That was necessary because even here no one could know when human beings would invent something that would extend their lives by hundreds or thousands of years. So there is a Spark for a particular sperm from a particular ejaculation of Julius Caesar's, which might have merged with a particular ovum of Marilyn Monroe's. And every sperm in the countless ejaculations of the possible son of that mismatch might subsequently have been able to join with every ovum of the countless possible daughters of John F. Kennedy and Cleopatra, or those of a random sculptor from the reign of the pharaoh Cheops with those of a toilet attendant living in ten thousand years' time— and all those possible permutations and their possible descendants might in turn have joined with all
other possible permutations and their possible descendants in space and time, and so on and so on ad infinitum. For example, besides the Sparks for the combinations of all sperm—thousands of quarts of which are emitted century after century in a never-ending stream—with all ova from all ages, there are also those for the alternative generations of what might have been, diverging and branching into hyperinfinity: This is the Logos Spermatikos—the Absolute Infinite Light!
—Can I ask if you are telling me all this to teach me something?
—Holy, holy, thrice holy! I am speaking because I am still dumbstruck at the thought of our Light.
—That does you honor. You are probably trying to say that there's a great deal of it.
—Yes, you could put it like that.
—But you succeeded.
—Just don't ask me how. Decoding the genome, the full, secret name of a human being, is simply a matter of money for human beings themselves now, one dollar per nucleotide to be exact, making three billion dollars, and they're working on the project all over the world. Within the foreseeable future their biotechnology will enable them to produce the genetic essence of a particular ovum and a particular nucleus with a tail more quickly and simply than we can select them with our romantic, extremely old-fashioned breeding system—but it simply had to be done before the year 2000.
—Precisely. And might there have been a connection, perhaps? Have you seen the light yet? It was only seventy-five human years ago that we discovered to our horror how rapidly technical skills were expanding down below and what human beings were going to do with them—not only in biotechnology, but in all other fields too. Before long our organization will be reduced to a skeleton staff, after which heaven will be wound up like a scroll. So tell me, how did you manage it?
—Seventy human years ago, despite all the problems, I suddenly saw a way of getting the required Spark into flesh and blood not in four generations but in three.
—Well, well. Your creative gifts are even greater than I thought.
—The only snag was that there was no way of doing it painlessly. I was forced to use a terrible expedient.
—Which was?
—The First World War.
—Yes, that's an aspect of the same problem. Our alarm at the technological turn that human history was increasingly taking was finally confirmed by that senseless slaughter.
—So I was able to give it some meaning at least, in the following way: working back from the necessary sequence of amino acids to a possible paternal grandfather, my 301655722 staff, following my instructions, arrived at an Austrian, a certain Wolfgang Delius, born for no particular reason in 1892. The only possible paternal grandmother turned out to be a certain Eva Weiss, also born for no particular reason, but not until in 1908, in Brussels.
—"Weiss" doesn't sound very Flemish. Shouldn't it be De Witte?
—Her parents were German-speaking Jews from Frankfurt and Vienna. A family of diamond merchants.
—Practicing?
—Completely agnostic. They laughed at us.
—Hmm.
—Faith is not so simple for human beings; we can scarcely imagine that. For us there is no such thing as faith, only knowledge.
—Yes, I can see that you operate at the farthest edge of the Light. Perhaps you should be a little wary of too much understanding. Go on with the story.
—I received your instructions in April 1914, and that same June in Sarajevo a student, a certain Gabriel Princip, leaped forward and shot the archduke of Austria. That Christian name and surname are bound to make you chuckle to yourself. He was a follower of Nietzsche, the most gruesome figure of the whole lot of them.
—The name Nietzsche seems to me to have connotations of its own. Nichevo. He was that nihilist who spread the rumor that the Chief was dead. Well, he wasn't far from the truth—but the fact that the Chief can't die is precisely the most dreadful limitation of his omnipotence. He exists by virtue of the paradox, but by the same token he must exist eternally and die eternally.
—Within a few months the slaughter was in full swing. I was able to use the spectacle not only to bring Wolfgang Delius and Eva Weiss into contact, but also for the following generation, which was to involve Dutch people.
—Dutch? Isn't this taking us a long way from home?
—It was the only solution. The German and Austrian high commands dusted off the old Schlieffen plan, which proposed violating Dutch and Belgian neutrality in order to invade France with a flanking movement. However, Dutch neutrality was as essential to my project as the infringement of Belgian neutrality, and through gentle promptings in Moltke's brain I was able to ensure that the plan was only implemented for Belgium.
—My memory for human affairs is like a sieve these days. Moltke?
—General Field Marshal von Moltke, the German supreme commander. Wolfgang Delius—or, as he was wont to say in the manner of his region, Delius, Wolfgang—who had just graduated from a Vienna business college, became a professional soldier and fought on the Italian, Russian, and French fronts. In Brussels he was billeted with the Weiss family, where his future wife was still sitting on the floor playing with a doll, already using it for practice, so to speak. Delius was a good-looking young officer in the mounted artillery, highly decorated and with silver spurs on his boots, but with an extraordinarily somber look in his eyes, which everyone put down to his wartime experiences—and which was partly due to them, but not entirely. There was a deeper, underlying somberness in him. In his knapsack he carried Stirner's The Ego and His Own. Weiss, very glad to be among compatriots and fellow German-speakers again, was by now driving along the Boulevard Anspach with the military governor in an open car, which did not escape the people of Brussels. The war had served its purpose, and when Germany and Austria capitulated, Weiss, in accordance with my plan, got into serious difficulties. The day after the armistice, all his possessions were confiscated, and in order to avoid arrest he had to flee overnight with his family—to Holland, that is, where I wanted them, because there was no other alternative. Meanwhile, Delius left for Germany on horseback at the head of his company.
—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.