The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch Read Free Book Online Page A

himself; he was not sure whether it was acceptable to be so nonchalant, because how thick was the layer of ice around this man? Was there in fact something entirely different beneath it?
    "If your mother was Jewish," he said "then you must be a Jew yourself." He immediately disliked hearing the word Jew from his own mouth. Maybe only Jews were allowed to use it after all that had happened; perhaps there was a taboo on it—but on the other hand, should he allow himself to be silenced by the fascists?
    "According to the rabbis, I am. According to the Nazis, thank heavens, I was only half-Jewish, otherwise I wouldn't have survived. You ask yourself, 'What half? The top half? The bottom half? Left? Right?' "
    "The Nazis were biologists. For them you were a kind of diluted Jew; the Jewish wine had been diluted with fifty percent Aryan water."
    "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