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

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