The Discovery of Heaven Read Free

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.
    — What in heaven's name are you talking about?
    —Pay no attention. Because of all that genetic fiddling about, I've still got a loose bobbin inside me like a loom. At the end of 1944, in the last winter of the war, the German occupying forces were in the habit of parking trains carrying V-2 rockets immediately south of the Academic Hospital in the hope that this would deter the English from air attacks. They were fired at London from a launchpad nearby. Nevertheless, one December afternoon, just after midday, there was a heavy raid on the station; shortly afterward the false rumor circulated in Delft that the hospital was on fire. Although weakened by hunger and despite the cold, Sophia immediately cycled to Leiden to see whether anything had happened to her best friend, a fellow nurse. As she was passing the museum, a few hundred yards south of the station, the second attack came and she took cover in a doorway—but because the English, under my benevolent influence, were frightened of hitting the hospital, it suddenly started raining bombs around her. One devastated a wing of the museum containing brass telescopes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Amid the chaos of fire, noise, dust, screaming in Dutch and German, firemen, ambulances, and police, she bumped into Oswald Brons. Bewildered, with torn clothes and covered in grazes, he was wandering across the heaps of rubble carrying a huge lens in his arms like a baby, and she took pity on him.
    —Minor intervention. Positive effect. How many people dead?
    —Fifty-four.
    —A slight adjustment, you said?
    —Well, what do you want? I didn't invent all that manipulation business, I'm only carrying out your cherubic will. What's more, I prevented the hospital from being razed to the ground. It seems so easy to influence the normal course of events, but reality is just like water; it's liquid and mobile, but it can only be compressed a little by using a great deal of force. When someone falls onto it from a great height, it's as hard as the rock from which Moses struck water.
    — Oh, our Moses . . . you're touching a sensitive nerve there.
    —I'm sorry.
    — When was their daughter born?
    —In 1946, during the baby boom.
    — When did she meet the young Delius?
    —In May 1967.
    — Tell me the whole story from that moment on, preferably without a commentary. Just tell it in full and with all the details, so that I can select when it's my turn to report.
    —For a fuller understanding, it would be better if I started a little earlier.
    — When?
    —On Monday, February 13, 1967, at twelve midnight.
    — Which in fact is February 14.
    —Yes, human time is one great paradox.
    — What year is it down there now?
    —1985.
    — Begin, then. I'm listening.
     
     

1
The Family Gathering
    At the stroke of midnight I contrived a short-circuit. Anyone walking along the quiet avenue in The Hague with his collar turned up high against the freezing cold (though there was no one at that moment) would have seen all the lights in the detached mansion suddenly go off, as though a gigantic candle had been blown out inside. For those living in the neighborhood, the villa exuded a somewhat somber splendor: it was the home of a legendary prime minister, the strict Calvinist Hendrikus Quist. In the crowded downstairs rooms, where the party was going on, the sudden darkness and the fading of the music into a fathomless cave were greeted with laughter.
    "Time for the young'uns!" cried a woman's voice, itself no