The Discovery of Heaven (28 page)

There was a moment's silence. He was certain that Onno had half raised himself and was leaning on one elbow to see what time it was.

"I can't look myself in the face any longer. I'm not fit for a high-minded person like you to talk to. I won't say any more, but even that must remain a secret. Can Ada hear you?"

"No, she's sitting on the terrace. We're in a wonderful
dacha
by the sea, with Guerra and Jesús, with crowds of servants around us—well, as you know, only in a Communist country can people like you and me live like capitalists. What's more, the revolution has assigned me, as future leader of the Dutch People's Republic, a breathtakingly beautiful woman with a submachine gun."

"Yes, I can hear, your deepest masochistic instincts are once again being satisfied. I should never have listened to you. We should never have come here, because they're serious here, and that seriousness has made a necrophiliac of me. I'm a moral wreck. Only sleep can bring me oblivion."

"Did all that happen in church? Did you spit in the holy-water font?"

"Yes! I spat in the holy-water font!"

"Onno, you're not going to tell me that you've been to bed with another woman?"

"I'm not going to tell you anything at all, you shit. When an exceptionally refined spirit reproaches itself, all you can think of is
that.
My real problem is of a completely different spiritual kind. I've allowed myself to be devoured—as a victim of my own goodness. My noble spirit will be my downfall one day. And now I'm going to hang my ... I mean, now I'm going to hang up, because I'm exhausted. Tell Ada that I'll come straight to her tomorrow to throw myself at her feet. No, don't say that last bit. You're coming back this evening, aren't you?"

"We'll be home at about twelve."

"See you tomorrow."

" 'Good night, sweet prince.' "

Max hung up and stood there lost in thought. What did it mean? Had Onno really been unfaithful to Ada, in broad daylight? Surely that was inconceivable, but even if he had, then what he said was incomprehensible, even making allowances for all the exaggeration. What did he mean by "necrophiliac"? Had he been seduced into taking the host, perhaps?
Hoc est enim corpus meum?
Had he slunk toward the altar, with head bowed and hands folded, and stuck his tongue out? Perhaps to please someone? The priest? Perhaps because he was the only person in the church? In any case Max knew that Onno always exaggerated in the direction of truth, never in the opposite direction, and that something was really tormenting him, and that he would do better not to return to the subject if Onno did not raise it himself.

He went to the veranda, where the housekeeper, the cook, and Jesús had now joined them and sat talking softly in the dark. Ada had disappeared. Marilyn said that she had gone into the sea for a last time "to say goodbye."

"What's stopping you?" said Guerra, gesturing toward the crashing of the surf in the darkness.

Yes, why not? He had never swum in the Gulf of Mexico at night, and in a few days' time he would be shaking his English umbrella with its bamboo handle in and out in the doorway, as though fighting a gigantic bat. In the bungalow he put on his clammy swimming trunks again and went down the steps to the beach.

'When he emerged from under the trees, his bare feet sinking into the sand, still warm from the sun, the moonless starry sky spread out with a gesture that he thought he could almost
hear:
like a marvelous chord played by the whole orchestra. Compared to this, the sight of the heavens from his hotel room on the twenty-fifth floor, pale because of the city lights and the exhaust fumes, was a record on an old portable gramophone. He stood still. Feeling as though his head were the dome of an observatory, he let his eyes wander.

Mars shone red and unwavering among the twinkling stars, and in the Cross of Orion, Messier 42 glimmered like a dried sperm stain on the fly of a pair of evening trousers. For him the stars to the south below Betelgeuse and Rigel, sometimes invisible even in summer at higher latitudes, did not merge into the geometrical mythical "pictures" of ancient astronomy; but even with those of the Northern Hemisphere he got no further than the few configurations that he had learned as a boy, in the war—just as doctors no longer knew the Hippocratic theory of temperaments. The capricious, faintly glowing band of the Milky Way wound across the heavens like a torn bridal veil, and for the first time in years he again realized why he had devoted his life to that magnificent dome.

The sea, which seemed even warmer than in the afternoon, received him like someone coming home. The tide was in. As he swayed and let the waves break against his chest, he tried to find Ada, but it was impossible in all that dark movement. He cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted:

"Ada!"

She hesitated. She saw his silhouette outlined against the lighter beach. Each wave lifted her up a little and set her back on her toes. But she was absorbed by the fairy-tale fact that she was here now because she could play the cello: music had carried her
auf Flügeln des Gesanges
to this spot in the sea—if only her mother could see her!

"Max!" She waved. "Over here!"

He waved back and dived.

She would have preferred to remain alone, but then of course he would have worried that she had been engulfed by the sea. Only when she was alone did she have the sense that she really existed; other people might be frightened precisely because of that sense, but she was frightened of other people because they stole it from her.

Max surfaced near her.

"What do we owe this to?" she cried.

"Our lucky stars!"

He put his hands around her waist and together they bobbed up and down in the almost black water. It had been a long time since she had seen him so close; his dripping face was lit only by the stars. She put her hands on his shoulders and laughed.

"It's as though we're dancing."

He put his right arm around her waist, took her right hand in his left, and pulled her to him.
"La valse
..."

She saw a mischievous twinkle in his eyes and could feel him getting an erection, but because it was under water, invisible down in the depths, it was as though she had nothing to do with it: there were so many secrets in the sea that had not yet been unveiled. He put his cheek against hers, and while he hummed the macabre theme of Ravel's orchestral piece through the roar of the surf, she saw a bright light shooting across the sky.

"Look, a falling star! We can make a wish."

He turned his head, but he did not entirely trust the grainy, slowly fading dust trail: it must be a block of one or two kilos, and meteorites were rarely that big.

"And if it doesn't come true," he said, "it was a fragment of a satellite; the sky's full of them at this latitude. What did you wish?"

"You must never say that." She looked at him in confusion.

A child
is what she had instantly thought, without hesitation, as though the wish had plunged into her mind like that thing into the atmosphere—
I
want a child.
She felt as disconcerted as a good husband and father who, on seeing a meteor, suddenly desires a beautiful nymph of seventeen. As far as she was aware, she did not want a child at all, nor did Onno. So was she suppressing her deepest wish every time she swallowed that little white pill?

Suddenly there was a syncopation in the rhythm of the waves: a faster, higher one arrived, which lifted them up and tumbled them over. Coughing, spewing saltwater, they surfaced again and grabbed each other again. Max gave her a kiss on the cheek and immediately afterward sought her mouth. Had he seen what she was thinking? She let herself be kissed and felt his hand disappearing down the back of her bikini bottom.

"What are you doing?"

"We need to finish something ..." he panted.

Bring yourself off.
His excitement of course also derived from the state he had gotten himself into with Marilyn; he had been given the cold shoulder and now Ada was the erotic substitute—but at the same time he harked back to that morning over three months ago, and that rendered her helpless. He had not forgotten, either; he too knew that it was wrong. At the moment that a wave lifted them up, he pulled down her bikini bottom and already had it around his arm. Almost weightlessly, she wrapped her legs around his hips and said, "Max ... this is impossible ... if Onno . .."

But he could no longer hear. I made sure that a completely different force flowed through him, which cared nothing about him. She felt him penetrate her—and over his shoulder she saw that a blood-red, monstrous crescent moon had risen; in its first quarter, it lay back almost horizontally on the horizon . . .

THE  MISSION

At that moment I said:

—Spark! Yes, you! Drift toward me in slowly turning parallellepipeda through this whiter than white Light, which shines and resonates from all sides, by which we are surrounded and permeated, are ourselves a part of, light in Light, harmony in Harmony. Who would want to leave this pneumatic field, where each element coincides with the whole, where the whole is in every part, and where first here and then there figures take shape and disappear, triangles, circles, ellipses, hyperbolas, spheres, cones, cubes, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, where tumbling spheroids glow and merge in the endless harmony of the Endless Light, in which you are a single point, no, a harmoniously resonating string of Light. Can you leave? Look, there, near that convex polygon sector, there's one, whoosh, gone, something quivers for a moment, a faint echo, a tiny silence, then Light closes over itself and it is as though nothing has happened. But something has happened. Look around you—you can see it happening everywhere, continuously. Where are they going? Look hard—you can see Sparks coming back into the Light too: there, and there, and there. So is there nothing else but this eternal domain? Look into yourself into that unbroken light that you are, without a flaw—is there perhaps a flaw in it after all? Isn't that flaw a certain vague longing, which is always with you and which you are hence not aware of, just as you are not aware of the glowing harmony that you are by being a part of it? A kind of homesickness, although you have never been anywhere else but here? Isn't it as though even perfection is not perfect? The Light is not completely luminous and Harmony is not completely harmonious? Yes, you must know now: this world is not the only one. There is another world. I cannot prove it, you have to believe it, you have to take the step and only then will you really experience it. There is an earth. The earth exists—as the innermost dungeon of the Kingdom of the Archontes. There is no point in telling you much about it, or even a little, because you would not understand. You would not even understand what you do not understand, because you do not yet know what "not" is. So, for example, it is not always light on earth—but that is already beyond your understanding. I might as well say nothing, but I am going to say it all the same: perhaps from envy, because I will never be able to live there. In a way that is as explicable as it is mysterious, it is sometimes light, sometimes dark: but even the earthly light of the sun is Darkness compared with our Light. It is as if it were the shadow of ours, and the shadow of that shadow is the poison of earthly darkness. I realize that I am not making it attractive for you to depart for that impure, confused world, but I do not wish to hold out false hopes to anyone, even though they do not understand me—and precisely because you do not understand me, I will now reveal the deepest secret. Just as the germ of Darkness is hidden within our Light, so Darkness tends toward our Light and loves it. By going there, you will bring Light, and the only way of bringing Light is by going there. This cosmic mismatch ultimately contains the meaning of our world. That is, only by setting out for that region of black light, lies, deceit, violence, murder, sickness, and death do you make yourself meaningful. By far the greater number of the infinite number of Sparks—if I can put it like that—will never have that opportunity, because they are reserved for contingencies that will never arise. For them eternity will never give way to transience and the finite. But you are one of the small, select band who are given the chance. Much has already been invested in making your departure possible— more than you will ever know, for your peace of mind. And that investment has been made because you are being given a mission, which only you will be able to remember. But you will not remember it as a memory; you will think that it's your own idea, a fantastic brainwave. Because just as here you know nothing of the earth, on earth you will know nothing of this world. You will forget all about it. When we are mentioned, you will shrug the shoulders you will then have. Because while you are sinking through the three hundred and sixty-five eons, worlds, and generations on your way to the earth at a point in time, you will grow heavier and heavier; more and more litter from the cosmic spheres will attach itself to you, shrouds, clothes, excrescences, snails, dead weight, covering your awareness of the original Light, until you at last fall into the dark dungeon of spirit and flesh and are finally born as a human being. That is, as a being that remembers nothing, not even what it is, namely Light—like someone sleeping. That applies to you too.

But at the same time you are different from the others. All the others are sleepers, who have yet to awake, through faith and knowledge. Only then is there a way back for them. But the heavy accretions have mostly reconciled them with life on earth; they have forgotten that they are aliens there and that they are what they think they are: that is the greatest threat to their return. Things will be easier for you. For technical reasons, we have decided on the VIP procedure. And now your moment has come; everything is ready for your reception. Farewell! Go! Now! Retrieve the testimony for us! Adieu!

PART TWO
THE END OF THE BEGINNING

First Intermezzo