The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch Read Free Book Online

grandparents, the only other relations he still had in Holland, were in hiding somewhere; he did not know where—as little as he knew that his father had meanwhile also betrayed their address—nor that, like his mother, they had been transported to Auschwitz via the transit camp at Westerbork, from where none of them returned.
    The collaborator had turned into a war criminal. Everyone called Weiss—and God knows who else from their spectrum—had to be wiped off the face of the earth. Max told Onno that after a few weeks the priests placed him with a childless middle-aged Catholic couple, who did not even require him to cross himself before meals. Occasionally, he cycled past his former house: the front door and windows were bricked up. He only heard about his father again after the war when he was put on trial, and then only on one further occasion: a short newspaper report of his execution.
    "Good God!" cried Onno. "Are you a son of that Delius? You deserve a lot of forgiveness, I believe."
    They were back on the Kerkstraat. Small, narrow houses with wooden staircases up to the first floor, stone steps down to the door of the basement.
    "My grandfather was a collaborator in the First World War," said Max, "my father in the Second World War, and to keep up the family tradition, I shall have to be one in the Third World War." As he lit a cigarette, he turned his head for a moment to inspect the calves of a passing woman.
    "Am I correct in thinking," asked Onno, "that you're talking about your mother's death and first make a dubious joke and then look at a woman? What kind of a person are you?"
    "I must be the kind of person who looks at a woman while he's talking about his mother's death. Anyway, I was also talking about my father's death."
    Onno was about to say something, but did not. It was incomprehensible to him that someone could talk so coolly about such experiences. He thought of his own mother being gassed in an extermination camp and his father shot by a firing squad after the war, but the fantasy did not take any solid shape. In reality, his father had been imprisoned for eighteen months as a hostage in a sort of VIP section of Buchenwald concentration camp, where together with other prominent figures he made plans for the postwar Netherlands—beginning with the setting up of a "special judiciary" and the reintroduction of the death penalty for the worst of the scum. Both his brothers had also been in the resistance.
    He looked at Max and felt completely at his mercy. There was of course no question of extending his hand, saying goodbye, and going in. "I'll see you back home," he said.
    For minutes on end they walked side by side through the winter night without a word, surrounded by the old violence that Max had summoned up as unexpectedly as a blow with the fist. Max, too, felt completely at Onno's mercy. He had told his paradoxical story differently from the few times he had done so previously. When someone tells the same thing to different people he tells it in different ways, which are as different from each other as those people—but now it was as though he had told the story to himself for the first time. It had lightened his load to the same extent that it had burdened Onno. In order to say something, he pointed to the bread that had been scattered here and there at the foot of trees.
    "There are still some good souls in the world."
    Onno had been waiting for Max to break the silence, but he did not feel entitled to ask for details of his story.
    "Shall I tell you something? Your father was naturalized on my father's authority. It was during the period of his cabinet, in the 1920s."
    Max looked at Onno and laughed. "That creates a nice bond between us. Is he still alive?"
    "Of course, my father is still alive. My father will never not be alive."
    "Tell him that. The greatest blunder of his career."
    Onno was about to say that because of it his own father actually deserved a bullet, too, but restrained