The Discovery of Heaven

Second Intermezzo

— Congratulations! That must have been a satisfying moment for you. So there he was, our envoy — after years of hard work.

— Only for a moment, though. After that, it was like it always is: once you've achieved what you wanted to achieve, it's no longer what you wanted to achieve, but simply what you've achieved. You've come to take it for granted. What you win you lose, all things considered. What's more, when you see the havoc you've had to wreak to achieve it, it takes away the satisfaction. But anyway, I'm a professional, an old hand. Only the end matters.

— I take it you're thinking of the friendship between those two. But that tree that blew over. . was that coincidence, or were you behind that, too?

— I was behind that, too. There were two trees, by the way.

— What was the point of that? It was a very risky course of action, wasn't it? Suppose she hadn't survived, or had had a miscarriage. I know you don't care for this kind of question, but perhaps you'd like to answer anyway.

— If I couldn't make trees blow over exactly as I want, I wouldn't make any trees blow over. We know the position and force of every molecule in the air and, moreover, the elasticity of every point in the tree and its roots— it would gratify Laplace if he could see our aerodynamics division handling that kind of thing.

— Laplace? I expect he's one of those French intellectuals with a dirty scarf around his neck and a shawl over his shoulders.

— I don't know if they did that in his day. At any rate, a great man, a colleague of Max Delius's. But also an incorrigible optimist. A demon who knew all the world's preconditions at a given moment, he claimed — would not only be able to reconstruct the past precisely, but also work out the future with certainty.

— Definitely someone from the eighteenth century. Even we can't do that.

— We do very well at the level of trees being blown over.

— Tell me, why did that poor child have to have such a dreadful accident?

— Because otherwise the mission couldn't have been accomplished. In everything I did, I had only one thing in mind: the return of the dictate.

— All right, I can understand your not wanting to answer. Obviously it's a matter of your professional honor, and I respect that. I expect it will be clear to me in retrospect.

— To you, yes. In the past things were easier for us.

— What do you mean?

— When we simply used to address people directly as the need arose.

— But we stopped doing that after the creatures got the idea that it was not our voice they were hearing but their own inner voice. Of course, we couldn't stand for that kind of pickpocketing. It's undeniable that technology is increasingly taking the place of theology on earth, but psychology shouldn't get any big ideas on that score.

— It's still a shame it happened like that. The fact is that heaven and earth are only linked by means of the word — the present operation has precisely made that clear yet again.

— Exactly. This operation was the period we put after that conversation.

— It would be nice if people were scared to death when they hear what has happened — namely, that the testimony has been returned — and the shock brought them to their senses.

— No one will ever know. And anyway: senses? Don't make me laugh. Did you really think, that brood would give up anything at all? Come now. What they once have, they want to keep. That wretch Lucifer knows exactly what he's doing. With each new invention, people have stolen a piece of our omnipotence and in so doing have demonized their own reality step by step. Under the terms of the contract he has turned them into vampires, who are sucking us dry under his patronage. With their rockets they are already traveling faster than the wind, sound even, and one day they will approach the speed of light; with their television they are in fact already virtually omnipresent — they can see in the dark, they can look, into the insides of a human being without opening him up; with their computers they have a complete operating and monitoring system, in which they're already vying with your department; they can observe elementary particles, and they already know what happened ten to the minus forty-third seconds after our explosion of light. Beyond that limit their theories have failed up to now; for the time being all their calculations result in infinity, and let's hope that they never realize the deeper meaning of that; but by now I'm not sure of anything anymore.

— I've something to tell you about that in a moment.

— If they want, they can even destroy the earth. Excuse my saying so, but that power really was our prerogative. Meanwhile they're busy destroying the planet without meaning to, and to be on the safe side, they're already walking on the moon as a jumping-off point for the rest of the universe. In the foreseeable future they will have mastered our absolute privilege: the creation of life, as a pendant to its wholesale extermination. A virus to begin with, then a microbe, then a worm, Caenorhabditis elegans probably, and one day they will produce people in their own image — and these days that's often as vacuous as a doll: instead of an expression, they have things, like cars. Of necessity they will become peoplelike things. Human knowledge doubles every twelve years — now, in their 1985, they know and can do twice as much as in their 1973, and as omnipotence draws closer, literally everything becomes possible down there. Knowledge itself is power — who do you think thought up that aphorism? That damn Francis Bacon again, of course. Knowledge is power sure enough, and not just over nature, but over people, and us too. The earth has changed once and for all into his doomed House of Solomon and people no longer need us — we've become fairy stories to them, curiosities, literature. . Do you remember that string of questions that the Chief once fired at Job — whether he could raise his voice to the clouds, and whether he could shut out the sea with doors, and heaven knows what else? No, he could not, only the Chief could do that, and now just look at everything our Job can do. There are some things that are brand-new even to our Chief. Lucifer has won, and there's no use in beating around the bush any longer. Through his devilish move with the treacherous viscount, he has proved the stronger — there's no getting away from it. Less than five years after Bacon's death, Galileo and Descartes wrote their fundamental works, the Dialogo and the Discours de la methode, the beginning of the modern age, which set us off along the fateful road to Auschwitz and Hiroshima and the decoding of DNA. Old Goethe had foreseen that course of events, although he gave it a worthily positive twist: he has his hundred-year-old Faust end up as a technocrat who subdues the sea with dikes and canals — that is, he turns nature into a human creation.

— A kind of Dutch polder engineer from the Ministry of Transport, in fact, who shuts out the sea with doors. Perhaps Goethe was thinking of Leeghwater; he was very famous as early as the seventeenth century with his Book of the Haarlemmer Meer.

— Maybe, but I can't concentrate on literary historical reflections at the moment. You're distracting me from my argument — what was I talking about?

— About the general downfall of everything.

— Yes, and especially our own. Because that was what Lucifer was after from the very first day: our complete humiliation and destruction. In the last analysis human beings leave him cold. And for that matter don't forget that the damn technology also has all kinds of pleasant aspects. Not only the construction of polders, but take medical technology for example. Think of local anesthetic, to mention one small thing. Did you think that anyone at all would want to go back to having a tooth pulled without anesthetic? And can you blame them? How dreadful to have teeth! No, take it from me — that it's hopeless. Via people's bodies, Lucifer has gotten a grip on their minds. Our greatest mistake is that we have always underestimated him. We thought things wouldn't be that bad, because who could challenge the Chief? Well, he could. Sometimes I think — it's a shame to have to say it — that he knows people much better than the Chief. The Chief is an idealist, a darling, who wants the best for people without knowing what he has taken on. But Lucifer knows that they would prefer to let heaven and earth go under rather than get rid of their car. He has ensured that their salvation now resides in things. He knows that they'd sooner get rid of their own legs. So heaven and earth will go under. And there will be nothing left to be lost in that Twilight of Humankind, because it has been devilishly betrayed, sold and melted down to make machines. A motorist is not a pedestrian in a car but a totally new creature, made of flesh, blood, steel, and gasoline. They are modern centaurs, griffons, and the actual mythical creatures are the only thing that will ultimately remain, because they have been created at the cost of nature, human beings, us and the Chief. With every new technological gadget, human life has automatically become more absurd. And our world will finally contain only that triumphant Negative in the ice-cold flames of its hell, with in heaven the eternal agony of the Chief as the flickering ember of a great Light. Looking back on it, it's all been for nothing. What was I actually going to say? I've totally lost the thread. Yes, I'm getting more and more confused. I can feel the decay and exhaustion in myself, too. Go on. I'm listening.

34. The Gift

"Healthy baby born to brain-dead mother," reported the morning paper the following day; Ada survived the operation without complications, and the weeks following — during which Quinten had to remain in the incubator— brought new changes.

The director of the observatory kept his word: he had made an appointment for Max with an old friend from his student days, a Baron Gevers, who lived a few miles south of the radio observatory at Westerbork and, as he had informed Max, had a place to rent. It was a sunny June day when Max drove there from Dwingeloo, with the caretaker's description of the route in his head. On his right, the sun flickered like a strobe light between the alder trees along the provincial road as they flashed by, which meant he had to resist something like a threatening hypnosis; as always he glanced at the space on the left of the road where there were two trees missing.

After driving along the main highway for a few miles, he took a turn-off into a winding woodland path by a collapsed barn. There were still fallen trees everywhere, their crowns forever in their bare wintry state, their roots, which had been torn out of the earth, already dried out and whitish. To his amazement he suddenly saw a group of Indonesian boys creeping through the bushes, in improvised battle dress, as though there were a war on — a moment later he had the feeling that he had dreamt it. And now and then the wood gave way to meadows with a farmhouse, fields, maize plantations, the path crossed an unmanned level crossing — and at the moment he saw the house looming up, he thought of what Goethe had once said, according to Onno: "Humanity begins with barons."

The low, white, quite small country house, from the look of it dating from the beginning of the last century, lay at the end of a lawn and radiated restrained distinction. At the same time it also looked like the center of a working farm. Next to it there were stalls, a haystack, sheds for agricultural machinery. It was called Klein Rechteren. The drive was flanked by large erratic stones and was strewn with gravel, which crunched feudally beneath his tires and forced even the Volkswagen to the slow sedateness of a Bentley. Because his intuition told him that he couldn't park his car right outside the door, he parked it opposite. When he got out, he saw a peacock sitting on the eaves.

The door was opened by a boy of about twenty with Down's syndrome. He looked up at Max with bewildered beady eyes.

"Mommy!" he shouted at once in a hoarse voice, without taking his eyes off Max.

A slender lady of about sixty appeared in the hallway. Max introduced himself and then also shook the warm, broad, motionless hand of her son, who turned out to be called Rutger. In the conservatory at the back of the house, where the doors to the terrace and the vegetable garden stood open, he was given a cup of China tea.

"I'm expecting my husband any moment. How is our Jan getting on? We haven't seen him for quite a while. He occasionally stays here when he has to come to Dwingeloo."

She was talking about the director. Although the director had of course explained exactly Max's own circumstances to them, she did not allude to them. That might have been discretion, but also something else; he felt a little uncomfortable with the cool politeness of her conversation, and he had the impression that this was the intention. Should he come to live here, he must be quite clear from the outset that this was no charter for familiarity.

Next to her stood a round table with framed family photos on it; also a photo of a white horse. Max looked at Rutger now and again with fascination. He sat in a wicker chair, the back of which spread to enormous dimensions like a throne, fiddling about, with his tongue hanging out. To his left a ball of violet wool lay on the ground; by means of a reel, with three small nails in it, he was weaving a woollen thread into a rope, which must by now be hundreds of feet long and lay in a colorful heap at his feet.

"Make very big curtain," he said when his eyes met Max's.

Max nodded at him in encouragement and looked at his mother.

"He's been working on it for about ten years, that very big curtain. I cut a bit off now and then, otherwise eventually we won't be able to get into the house anymore."

"And he doesn't notice?"

"Not if he doesn't see me doing it."

"Perhaps," said Max, "he has no sense of the length of that thread because he has no sense of time."

The baroness looked at him with an expressionless face. "Maybe."

Max had the feeling that he had gone too far: whoever talks about time is also talking about death.

A tractor approached down the path at the end of the vegetable garden, driven by a heavy figure in workman's clothes; only his sand-colored hat, the brim of which was turned up on one side and down on the other, indicated that this was not a simple farmer. He came into the conservatory in green boots and introduced himself with a hard, callused hand, without coming in. There was something severe, but not unfriendly, about his face; he sported a cultured, small white mustache.

"You're just in time, I've already had ten phone calls. Shall we get right off?"

For the second time Max realized that relationships must be clear, even though he had been recommended by a friend. As he went through the vegetable garden to the road next to his landlord-to-be, he became extraordinarily curious about what awaited him. Without entirely admitting it to himself, he hoped for an idyllic coach house among the trees, with a lawn in front; but to be on the safe side he prepared himself for a melancholy turf cutter's cottage on a canal, waiting motionless for drowning toddlers. It was clear that this would not happen when Gevers said that they could go on foot, because it was close by. Max told him about the Ambonese he had seen crawling through the woods.

"Those are those stupid Moluccans from Schattenberg," said the baron, "a few miles farther on. They're preparing for the liberation of their island on the other side of the world."

The Schattenberg estate: that was the present-day name of Westerbork camp.

"I really thought I was dreaming," said Max.

The baron nodded. "The world is made of dreams. Fortunately, there are only a few left and they'll be gone soon too, thanks to the observatory."

They met two girls on horseback, who called out, "Hello, Mr. Gevers!" cheerfully — and a few hundred yards farther on, where the road curved slightly, there was a turn-off toward a large wrought-iron gate, fixed to two carved, hard-stone plinths surmounted by shield-bearing lions. A bridge over a narrow canal led to a long drive flanked by a double row of trees; at the end of it there was a second bridge, across a moat, to the forecourt of a castle.

"Groot Rechteren," said Gevers with a motion of his hand, and pushed open the creaking gate.

A castle! As they walked over the loose planks of the bridge toward the drive, Gevers told him that he had been born here, like his father and grandfather before him, but it was all getting too expensive, staff particularly, and it was no longer heatable without going bankrupt. They had moved to Klein Rechteren. The castle had been temporarily divided up into flats, which were occupied by fairly respectable people — except for one, where there was a Communist, but that was now vacant.

Looking at the large, broad castle that he was approaching step by step, Max was speechless. At the sides and in the back it was surrounded by huge trees; it made an impression of neglect and it was not particularly beautiful — obviously it had been repeatedly converted and expanded over the course of the centuries — but it was unmistakably a castle: a building that was as different from a house as an eagle from a chicken. The facade, probably dating only from the nineteenth century, was flat and symmetrical; at the level of the attic, in the straight pointed gable above the entrance, was a clock without hands. On the ground floor there was a series of arch-shaped cellar windows; a double staircase led to the terrace with the main floor, flanked by high windows divided into small panes; the upper story ended on the right in a large balcony. Beneath it stood a container on the forecourt, into which someone was throwing planks and all kinds of rubbish. The back turned out to be older; the pointed roof of a square tower could be seen crowned by a weather cock. Could it be true that he was going to live in this fairytale place? Perhaps there by that balcony? What had he done to deserve it?

The castle was the center of a small hamlet. On the left there were newly planted saplings, which turned into coniferous woods, but on the right there were a number of small houses, a coach house, converted stables, and barns.

On the lawn in front of what had probably been the porter's lodge, a man with a scythe was cutting the grass around a colossal erratic stone, and looked up and said, "Hello, Baron," — which elicited a benevolent "Hello, Piet." Half visible between the buildings and hedges was an orangery, where there was also someone moving; under the trees a billy goat was trying to reach farther than the length of the rope around its neck would allow.

Everything looked occupied; there were windows open everywhere. Shaded by the colossal crown of a brown oak tree, on the bank of the moat, two black swans glided past with the majesty of a more exalted existence, while among the water-lily leaves, at the foot of head-high rhododendron bushes, a couple of ducks were making a vulgar din.

Max had the urge to walk on tiptoe. The castle lay in the water as if on the palm of an outstretched hand; the stone bridge over the moat had, according to Gevers, replaced the earlier drawbridge. A couple of cars were parked in the forecourt, the bricks of which had been laid in an artistic undulating pattern, like a horizontal wall. When they were on the steps to the terrace, a refrigerator crashed with a resounding thud into the container, after which a face leered down at them over the balustrade of the balcony. It emerged, from a blue and white plate next to the main door, that the castle was a listed monument. One half of the door was open, secured with a wooden reel on the ground. Before going in, Gevers stepped out of his boots and took his rakish hat off, which suddenly made him still more severe with his bald pate.

In the hall, paneled in dark oak, a small, carefully dressed lady appeared from a doorway; Max glanced into a large room with Empire furniture, a table with framed photographs, a marble mantelpiece with a gold-framed mirror above it. Gevers introduced her as Mrs. Spier.

"Mr. Delius may be the new upstairs tenant."

She gave him a searching look. Her whole appearance was carefully groomed; not one hair of her coiffure dared to step out of line.

"Welcome, Mr. Delius. If we can be of any help to you, do let us know."

"Her husband is a famous typographical designer," said Gevers as they climbed the wide oak stairs at the end of the hall. "For that matter, it's crawling with clever people here; you'll fit in very well. As a simple yokel I'd feel quite out of place in this cultured company."

The violence in that remark did not escape Max. From the way Gevers looked around, it was clear that he didn't like coming here; of course everything reminded him of the past and confronted him with the decline of the castle. The director had told him that Gevers had played a leading role in the resistance during the war; because Holland was a small country, he might also know Onno's father. At the same time, Max realized that this probably meant he knew who his own father had been.

Upstairs there was another hall, actually more of a spacious landing, which led onto various doors; the oak formality had disappeared here. Through a large window in a conservatory the woods behind the castle were visible; on one side of the space stood buckets covered with plastic and wrapped-clay models on slender, tall modeling stands.

"An artist lives there," announced Gevers with a short motion of his head. "Theo Kern; a rather odd type. Outside on the estate, he's got a studio for larger work." He suddenly stopped and looked straight at Max.

"Bloody fine thing you're doing, Mr. Delius, looking after your friend's child. Just wanted to say that. Bloody fine thing." Before Max knew how to reply, Gevers pointed to the apartment opposite, where all the doors were open and there was the chaos of a removal. "Action Group Egg. Headquarters of the revolution in Drenthe. Moving tomorrow or the day after to Assen, in order to bring the province to a state of proletarian readiness."

The baron did not give the impression of being sad about the departure of this tenant. The man who had just leered at them was sitting with a woman and a number of friends on the floor of the balcony room, where they were drinking tea from flowered mugs. He was about thirty, had long hair; stuck in his teeth was a thin cigar, which he didn't take out of his mouth when he spoke.

"Well, comrade," said Gevers. "Having a rest?"

The man gave a brief nod, with a brief smile, but did not get up. That Gevers was a baron was obviously not a neutral fact in this company; except that it didn't add to his stature, like everywhere else, but detracted from it. Rather scornful but not unfriendly, the social worker looked at Max's blazer and club tie.

"Are you moving in here?" And after Max had made a vague gesture toward Gevers: "Congratulations. You'll never find anything like this again. Have a look around if you like." When Max met the eyes of the woman, he saw hate in her eyes — but because this would now become his apartment, perhaps. Of course she didn't want to go to Assen at all.

In the balcony room, which faced south, the ceiling was painted light blue, with white clouds in it; that would all have to'be redecorated. A dividing door gave access to a large room next door, which was linked by a rundown pantry with a tower room at the back. That seemed to him to be the nursery; and because Sophia had to sleep near Quinten, but also near him, it looked as though he would be laying claim to the balcony room. On the other side, the latter room gave access to a spacious kitchen-dining room, which looked out over the forecourt; there was another large room adjoining it, which must be above the front door.

There were open shutters next to all the windows. He looked around excitedly. There was ample room for three people to live here. Everywhere was full of rubbish. Shelves had been fixed to the walls, loaded with folders, piles of newspapers and magazines, stencil machines on trestles — but his eyes overlooked all that and saw how it would be.

"Well?" asked Gevers as they stood on the balcony — which was itself as large as a room — looking out over the awesome trees on the other side of the moat. "Don't expect it's your cup of tea."

Max made a gesture of speechlessness. "A gift from heaven," he said.

35. The Move

After the apartment had been cleared two days later, Max proudly showed Sophia what a marvelous place he had secured, and she too could scarcely believe it. They spent as much as possible of the time that Quinten had to stay in the incubator on doing up the rooms, which the previous tenants had left in a sorry state. For the first few nights they slept in Dwingeloo, in different rooms in the guest suite; but in anticipation of the move, he then took some essential things of his and Sophia's to the castle in a rented van: mattresses, bedding, clothes, kitchen utensils, books. She did not get into bed with him in Dwingeloo, which was perhaps connected not only with the other guests, but also with her daughter, who had spent her last conscious night there, if one can put it like that.

Perhaps the silence was also an obstacle. The first few times that he himself had spent the night in Dwingeloo, as a city dweller he had scarcely been able to get to sleep: the silence was so deep and complete that it was as though he had gone deaf. The only thing that could be heard was his own heartbeat and the rushing of blood in his ears; outside the room the world had disappeared into nothingness. Only later had it sunk in that it was the silence of the war: then it had been as quiet at night in Amsterdam as on the heath. But the very first night in Groot Rechteren, where only the distant call of an owl occasionally broke the silence, the secret ritual was resumed. With heart pounding he had lain waiting for her in the balcony room, and when he heard her coming from the temporary mattress in the room next to his, followed by the creaking of the door handle and the squeaking of the door — it would all have to be greased — his relief was if anything greater than his excitement. Imagine if for her all this had belonged solely to Leiden and her late husband!

It was the first time that they had been in each other's company on a daily basis and formed a household, but that meant no change: he continued to call her Mrs. Brons, and unlike what happened between people who were having an affair, there were no marital tiffs between someone and his friend's mother-in-law. Awakened in the morning by the ducks, they breakfasted on the balcony, and he devoted all the time that he could spare to taking down the shelves in the front room, removing the plywood boards that were supposed to give the old handmade doors a modern look in the 1950s, and on painting, varnishing, and emulsifying.

Gradually, he was seized by a kind of frenzy, which made it almost impossible for him to stop in the evenings. Long after Sophia had sat down in front of the television with a glass of wine and was sewing curtains, he was still up a ladder moving his roller over the playful cloud formations on the ceiling. He had never done anything like this — his girlfriends had always looked after that for him — and the immediately visible result had a relaxing effect on him; what's more, he thought of his work now and then while he was doing it, but in a different way than at his desk: more indirectly, in a certain sense more fruitfully, just as he always had his best ideas when he was cleaning his teeth or his shoes, or under the shower. Actually, there was no shower — he had one put in. Because the castle was not connected to the gas network, a new heater had to be put in that used bottles of butane gas; the decrepit oil stoves also needed replacing.

When he needed fresh paint or brushes or planks, he drove in his dirty clothes to the shop in the village of Westerbork, six miles south of the new observatory and with only its name in common with the camp. He had still not been to the latter; until the mirrors were completed, there was nothing for him to do there, and he had resolved to put it off for as long as possible.

In their first few days there they had paid courtesy visits to the other occupants of the castle. Mr. Spier, the husband of Mrs. Spier, was on the point of leaving when they knocked. He was as small as she was, and as painfully correct with his carefully cut, thin dark-blond hair, in his three-piece dark-blue pin-striped suit, with a decoration in his buttonhole and a pearl pin in his tie: a little off-center, as was proper. He said politely that they were bound to meet each other frequently, after which Max immediately invited them for a glass of champagne in a few weeks' time. Mr. Verloren van Themaat, who taught the history of architecture at the Polytechnic in Delft and lived in the other wing on the ground floor, was in the habit of coming only on the weekends; at the moment he was spending the summer in Rome, in the Netherlands Art Historical Institute.

In the southern half of the loft — in a series of what were formerly servants' rooms on the northern side, where superfluous furniture of the baron's was stored — lived an English translator, that is, a translator from English: Marius Proctor, a man of nearly forty, with black hair and a rather somber expression. His wife, Clara, a provocative, cheerful person with hair dyed red and large earrings, looked like a fortune-teller; she made ghostly abstract objects from old umbrellas, which hung on the sloping walls of their rooms. Whenever she invited Max and Sophia for afternoon tea, sitting on their modern 1950s chairs, Proctor usually disappeared without a word through the thick padded door into what was obviously his study: the tower room above the one in which a crib and a commode were waiting for Quinten.

He earned his living by translating novels, but his real work at the moment was a translation of Milton's Paradise Lost; apart from that, Clara said that for years he had been writing a book on a discovery he had made, which would create a stir in the literary-historical world. In any case he had the sunken cheeks and temples of the fanatic who was gnawing at himself. They had an aggressive son of about four, called Arendje, who whenever he saw Max ran straight at him and began pushing against his thighs with both hands, as though he wanted to get him out of the room, out of the castle, with his head bent malevolently forward, like a billy goat; amused words and gentle force had no effect, and when Clara finally pulled him away, Arendje tried to give him a kick in the shins. Max was not inclined to go upstairs too often. Once he tried to start up a conversation on literature, but Proctor only answered with a few vague remarks and for the rest maintained his sphinxlike silence. Sophia disliked him, but Max said that he had obviously been crushed by some insight or other, or perhaps by Clara.

They got along best with Theo Kern and his wife, on their own floor. Going to their apartment meant leaving this world and entering another. The arrangement of the rooms was the mirror image of their own, but that was the only similarity. At first sight the confusion reminded Max of that at Onno's, but at a second glance it became clear to him that it was more the opposite, but in a different way to the calculated order in his own place.

It was orderly disorder, or disorderly order — it was a third possibility: an artistic, unplanned arrangement of countless things, which had obviously landed somewhere by chance, casually put down, forgotten, like at Onno's, but which here formed an incomprehensible, harmonious creation, just as a swarm of birds at a certain moment took on a perfect shape that had not been composed by anyone. For that matter there were birds, too. Spread through the rooms were three cages, each containing three creamy white doves; some of the cage doors were open, with the crested creatures cooing and bowing on the top.

Stands with clay models on them, tables with drawings and plants; on the mantelpieces, on the tables, and on the ground there were wire sculptures, prints, pinecones, branches in vases, stones, statuettes, tree trunks, shelves. There was no distinction between bedrooms, living room, and kitchen; one suddenly came upon the Kerns' white four-poster bed, the varnished wooden bed of their daughter, who was in a summer camp at the moment, somewhere a draining board, a fridge, an oven — everything absorbed into the whole — clear, blond, weightless, as translucent as paper.

And in the midst of all this stood the artist: small, thick-set, jovial, always barefoot, his head surrounded from crown to chin by a huge halo of graying hair, like a dandelion after its petals had fallen. Whenever Max saw him he was reminded of a gnome on a toadstool; but his heavily built wife, Selma, who in her full, long dresses that reached to the ground looked as though she were eternally pregnant, who seldom laughed and sometimes looked at her husband as though he were mad, made one suspect that there were something entirely different in the sculptor — because in Max's view the hidden side of a man was visible as his wife, just as the hidden side of a woman was visible as her husband. But it seemed more sensible to him not to mention that view to Sophia.

Mother Earth was his usual name for Selma. She had long, loose dark-blond hair and a withdrawn look; Sophia got on very well with her. Like the Proctors, they seemed to have a slight problem with the constellation of Max and Sophia and the child that was about to appear; but they got used to it. Kern occasionally came and looked at Max's efforts, helped now and then and lent him tools — his electric drill, his stapler. They ate with them a few times: large, tasty dishes with a South American feel, so that they were spared the greasy schnitzels in the country restaurant.

Onno had not yet appeared at the castle. Whenever Max had dropped Sophia off at the Wilhelmina Hospital — where she went to visit her daughter and grandson — they arranged to meet somewhere in town, once even in the canteen of the party headquarters, which was around the corner from Max; spiritually he himself was no longer living in his half-dismantled flat. But their conversations were only about practical things and never lasted longer than half an hour. With a few friends, Onno had been elected to the party executive on behalf of the club of rebels by a party conference; as a reaction, a right-wing schism was approaching, which according to Onno every Social Democratic party in Europe envied them for, because in left-wing circles only left-wing schisms were the tradition, which meant that those parties were becoming more and more right-wing.

Because of all this, he was busier than ever; sometimes, to his own alarm he realized in bed at night that he hadn't thought of Quinten and Ada for the whole day. Meanwhile his second cousin, the real estate agent, had sold Sophia's place for a reasonable price for conversion into a snack bar, the stock of "In Praise of Folly" had been taken off her hands by colleagues, superfluous effects had been collected by an auction house, Brons's wardrobe by the Salvation Army. Once the moving was complete and they had furnished the rooms at Groot Rechteren, Max and Sophia drove to Amsterdam one warm July morning, where Onno was waiting for them at the hospital.

The staff were very reluctant to part with Quinten. He had been laid in bed next to Ada — as he had been for the last few days, since he no longer needed to be in the incubator. They looked in shock at the angelic child, with his wide blue eyes, next to Ada's motionless, almost marble face with its closed eyelids. The tidal wave under the sheets had broken, and Max felt the sight sinking deep into himself, as something that would never disappear from his memory. The moment a nurse pulled the sheet aside and picked up Quinten, everyone here realized that something irrevocable was happening, like a second birth, a second farewell. Ada, too, was shortly to leave the hospital; they were looking for a nursing home near the castle.

"May I have him?" asked the nurse with Quinten in her arms. "I've never known such a marvelous child. Do you know that he hasn't cried once since his birth? How much do you want for him?"

In the car Sophia sat in the backseat, with Quinten next to her in a travel bassinet. Little was said. Like Max, Onno was thinking of their fateful journey in February, of which this journey was in some senses the pendant, but neither of them mentioned it.

When Onno got out on the forecourt of Groot Rechteren, he looked around him, puffed out his chest, and said: "Right! This is a suitable environment for my worthy son! It's true that nature of itself is cretinous, and feudalism is completely out of keeping with the character of a simple man of the people like me, who as a Socialist through and through thinks only of the welfare of the low-paid, but in this special case the party executive will overlook it."

When Sophia took the travel bassinet carefully out of the car and was about to take it inside, he said, "No, Mother, I'll do that. That is my privilege." He put the handles of the bassinet over his arm like a shopping bag, raised one hand, and as he mounted the terrace began reciting solemnly: "In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti!"

In the tower room Sophia laid Quinten on the chest of drawers to change his diaper, and Max showed Onno the apartment. In Sophia's living room-cum-bedroom he recognized the corduroy sofa and the low table, but here, with a view of the moat and the wood, everything had taken on a completely new look. The portrait of Multatuli had obviously been given to the house clearer. When he saw all this, he wondered what had really possessed Max, but the time to raise the subject had now passed.

Mixed with other things of Sophia's, Max's belongings were mostly in the larger room at the front: the green chesterfield armchair; the grand piano; his books. On his desk again was the row of small instruments, transformed into symbols through their combination and precise arrangement. Although he knew all those things, they too had changed character here. Onno asked whether the rent wasn't astronomical, but Max said that it was scarcely half what he had paid in Amsterdam.

Onno stood at the mantelpiece, on which were the books in the "shelf of honor." Kafka had disappeared from the row, and in its place he now saw a copy of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. There was also a photo of Ada and him, taken last year by Bruno in Havana. Next to it a second, framed old photograph. He had seen at once that they were Max's parents. Without saying anything he looked at Max.

Max nodded. "Risen from limbo," he said.

"Where has that suddenly appeared from?"

Max told him about the visit to his foster mother, without going into the circumstances.

Onno bent forward and studied the couple. "You've got the top. half of your face from your father and the bottom half from your mother."

"Do you remember that you said something like that about my face before — the day we met?"

"No," said Onno, "but I'm sure I hit the nail on the head."

"Of course."

"Are you coming?" called Sophia.

She was sitting under a sun shade on the balcony over which Max had spread two bags of fresh gravel, giving Quinten a bottle. Both Max and Onno were struck by the unity that she formed with the child, as though she were really the mother. Both fathers saw a completely happy woman, who seemed never to have had a daughter.

Kern and his Selma also appeared.

"Max has already told me about you," said Onno, after he had introduced himself with a click of his heels, perhaps as a commentary on Kern's bare feet.

Kern gave the impression that he had not heard. With one hand, covered in clay and stone dust, he gestured toward Quinten, who, as he lay on Sophia's lap drinking, fastened the deep-blue pools of his eyes on the orange stripes of the sun shade.

"Whoever saw such a creature? This is completely impossible!"

"You've either got the gift or you haven't," said Onno proudly. "There are artists who create beauty in a dogged struggle with spirit and matter, like you, but I do it in a lascivious moment with flesh." As he spoke these words he suddenly felt a chill go through him, as though Ada's presence on the balcony were suddenly penetrating his body.

Perhaps because he could not bear Quinten's gaze, Kern had left shortly afterward. In a cooler covered in condensation stood a bottle of champagne, and after Max, with ballistic satisfaction, had made the cork prescribe its parabola into the moat — where the ducks made a beeline for it, flapping and half running over the water, before ducking and waggling their tails and turning their attention to more serious things — the Proctor family appeared. Clara behaved like a woman behaves when she sees a baby for the first time; but when the gloomy translator saw Quinten, something in his face changed: it lightened as if a veil had been removed. The effect of the child on Arendje was even more strange. As Max poured the glasses, he kept a wary eye on the little rascal, who ran to Sophia — in order to be able to intervene at once in case he tried to plant his fist on Quinten's nose.

Instead of that, he hugged him, kissed him on the forehead, and said: "Doesn't he smell nice."

Little Arendje tamed! Proctor looked back and forth between Quinten and Onno — and then said something that made Max's heart leap:

"He looks like you. He's got your mouth."

He couldn't have given Max a greater present. And yes, perhaps that was the case: perhaps he did have the same thin, classically arched lips. It was as though the last remnants of his doubt were washed away by those words like the dirty scum by a jet of water after one had washed one's hands.

After sufficient chairs had been pulled up, the company split into two by sex, with Quinten in the middle of the women. While the latter group swapped experiences with infant care, Onno told Proctor that his wife had been a cellist. He assumed that Max had told him about the accident and said:

"I was first going to call my son Octave in honor of her: after the simplest, completely consonant interval, on which all music is based. Have you already plumbed the Pythagorean mysteries of that simple one-to-two relationship?"

Max had told Onno about Proctor's withdrawn nature, and he could see that Onno was trying to find a way to get through to him.

Proctor made a vague gesture. "I know nothing about music."

"Who does? Music transcends all knowledge. But when I hear the name Octave in my mind's eye, I see a type that I wouldn't want to see as my son. More an elegant, rather effete philosopher on stiltlike heron's legs with a flower in his buttonhole and not the robust man of action that my son must become, as I am myself so signally according to everyone. So I moved from the completely elemental to the cunning two-to-three of the dominant. The pure fifth!"

That was new for Max, too.

Meanwhile, Proctor's brain had also been working, because he said: "The octave consists of eight, and God is also eight."

It took a couple of seconds to get through to Onno. "God is eight? How did you work that out?"

"You know a bit about languages, don't you?"

A bitter laugh escaped Onno. "To tell you the truth I don't really know anyone who knows as much about languages as I do. That's the reason why I couldn't call my son Sixtus. Not because that's a pitiful interval of three-to-five, but because the name derives not from sextus, the Latin word for 'sixth,' as everyone thinks, but from the Greek word xystos, which means 'polished.' "

"So you also know what the tetragrammaton is?"

"Please continue, sir."

Next Proctor reminded them that God's name Yod He, Wau, He was Jehovah. Because Hebrew, as Mr. Quist of course already knew, had no separate figures, those four letters also had the numerical value 10, 5, 6, and 5. Adding them together gave 26. If, following the rules of Gematria, you added the 2 and the 6 together, you got 8.

"You stagger me!" exclaimed Onno. "You are a gifted cabbalist! But if God is eight, what is five?"

"Of course it can be an infinite number—" Proctor began, but the last word was lost in a rattling cough that suddenly took hold of him.

"Not infinite," Max corrected him. "Very great. Although.. perhaps an infinite number, yes."

"And what is significant in this connection," continued Proctor after taking a deep breath and wiping his mouth, "is the number of letters in the alphabet."

"Of course." Onno nodded with an irony, which only Max noticed. "Twenty-two."

"In Hebrew, yes. But our alphabet has twenty-six." He looked at Onno with an expression that said he had unveiled the final secret.

"Ah-ha!" said Onno with raised eyebrows, and lifted an index finger. "Ah-ha! The same number as the numerical value of God! Dutch as a divine language! By the way, Mr. Proctor, you mustn't say 'Jehovah,' but 'Jah-weh,' with the accent on the e. 'Jehovah' is a bastardized Christian word from the late Middle Ages. It's even more sensible not to speak the name at all, because otherwise you might come to a sticky end. It would be better to say 'Adonai,' with the letters alef, daleth, nun, jod. At least if that has an acceptable numerical value, but it's almost bound to have."

"One plus four plus fifty plus ten," said Proctor immediately, "makes sixty-five."

"Makes eleven, makes two." Onno nodded. "Seems fine to me."

While Arendje counted Quinten's toes when he heard all those numbers and cried "Ten!" Kern appeared on the balcony again, now accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Spier.

With a friendliness that did not reveal whether it was pretended or real, they fulfilled their social duties.

"What a darling," said Mrs. Spier.

Mr. Spier looked intently at Quinten, stroked the soft spot on his fontanel with the tip of his ring finger, and then said, as though one could see by looking at him: "His initials are Q. Q."

"Qualitate qua," nodded Onno.

"That is rare. The Q is the most mysterious of letters, that circle with that line," he said, while he formed a slightly obscene gesture a circle with the manicured thumb and index finger of one hand and the line with the index finger of the other, "the ovum being penetrated by a sperm. And twice at that. Very nice. My compliments."

Like Proctor, he was obviously aware that Onno had a relationship with written characters. Max felt a little shiver go down his spine at his words, but Onno made a clumsy and at the same time elegant bow. Spier too gave a slight bow and took out a silver watch from his waistcoat pocket. Unfortunately they had to leave immediately — the taxi was already waiting for them on the forecourt to take them to the station: they were going on holiday to Wales, to Pontrhydfendigaid, as they did every year.

Kern had meanwhile sat down astride an upright chair and against the back of the seat in front of him had placed a thick piece of cardboard to which a sheet of paper was fastened with a clip. Without taking his eyes off Sophia and the child on her lap, he made large sketching movements, gliding over the paper with just the side of his hand. In his fingers he had a stick of charcoal, but it was not yet given permission to leave a trace. He was obviously waiting for an order from the world of the good, beautiful, and true, telling him that the moment of irrevocability had come.

36. The Monument

A man who was free, Max reflected one afternoon in autumn as he looked at the yellowing trees from his balcony, could not imagine that he could ever be imprisoned, just as a prisoner could never really imagine freedom. The slowness of the masses found its pendant in the slowness of spirit: anything that was not the case at a particular moment had the character of a dream. The result was that history was to be found in books but scarcely anywhere outside them — and what were books? Little things, seldom larger than a brick, but lighter, and almost irretrievable amid the myriads of other things that covered the surface of the earth, and on their way to becoming more and more insignificant in the electronic world, which was rising faster and faster out of abstraction.

Everything was progressing, and everything that had happened could just as well not have happened. Dreams were remembered for a few minutes after waking up — and a little later they had been forgotten. Where was the battle of Verdun now, except in barely traceable and in any case unread books, and in the memory of a handful of old men, who in twenty years time would also be dead and buried, with nightmares and scars and all? Where was the battle of Stalingrad? The bombing of Dresden? Hiroshima? Auschwitz?

In the winter of 1968, six months after they moved into Groot Rechteren, Max went to Westerbork camp for the first time. All twelve mirrors were now ready, as were the computer programs; a start had been made with experimental observations. His arrival was not really necessary, but in Leiden — where he still had to go regularly — even the director had already asked him in surprise whether he hadn't been to take a look at his new workplace yet. It finally happened on the day that he showed Sophia the observatory at Dwingeloo. During the furnishing of Groot Rechteren she had spent the night there a few times, but she hadn't viewed the observatory on those occasions; technical things didn't interest her. One bright, cold morning he persuaded her to wrap Quinten up warmly and come with him. Why he wanted her to, he didn't know himself. While he showed her the buildings and the mirrors, he thought constantly of that day with Ada and Onno, now nine months ago; but he did not refer to it, and she didn't ask about it. Not much had changed since then — except that there were now unused electric typewriters all over the floor with the cables wound around them, while computer screens had appeared on the desks.

Quinten sat earnestly on Sophia's arm during the tour, and to everyone's delight he looked around with his blue eyes like a personage that was not displeased with the course of events. He was now seven months and had never yet cried, but had never yet laughed either — in fact had scarcely uttered a sound. Sophia was sometimes worried that he had suffered damage in the accident, but the doctor said that he was obviously an extraordinary child; there were no indications apart from that, that he was not normal.

During the coffee break, while all the staff gathered in the hall of the main building around the trolley with the shiny urn, Max talked to an electronics engineer who was responsible for the wiring of the synthetic radio telescope; soon he would have to go Westerbork on the shuttle bus, because there had been new teething troubles. He spoke with such a soft, modest voice that Max could scarcely hear him in the hubbub. On an impulse he offered to take him there in his own car, seeing that he had to go there himself. He had suddenly said it: this was the moment, with Quinten and Sophia. Over the months, during the long evenings at the castle, he had told Sophia more about his life than he had ever told her daughter — possibly because their formal relationship somehow made it easier for him than an intimate one.

Three quarters of an hour later they were driving along the provincial road. Sophia, who was in the backseat with the child, perhaps suspected that the accident had happened somewhere here; but when they passed the spot Max only glanced at it quickly out of the corner of his eye. The open space where the trees had been was now filled with two young alders, supported by wooden poles, to which they were attached by strips of black rubber, obviously cut from car tires, in the form of a figure eight. They did not speak. The engineer leafed through a folder of papers on his lap, Quinten had fallen asleep, and suddenly Max was reminded of his walk through the clammy Polish heat, from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II — as though that were a counterpart of the route from Dwingeloo to Westerbork. A feeling of nausea seized him, which not only issued from that memory but mainly from what lay behind it. He did not think of it for weeks or months, but it always suddenly reappeared in an unchanged state, without the decay to which even radioactive material was subject.

"You have to turn right here," said the engineer when they were at the village of Hooghalen.

"Sorry, it's the first time I've been here."

"You can't be serious."

"But it's true."

"Are you really interested in astronomy?"

"Maybe not."

He saw a sign pointing to a neighboring village of Amen — as though the whole area had been prepared for centuries for what would one day happen there — and suddenly there was a sign to the Schattenberg estate. He drove down a woodland path, flanked on the right by rusty train rails. Now and then they passed Ambonese in traditional ankle-length Indonesian dress, supplemented for the Dutch winter with woollen scarves and woolly hats; sometimes whole families, whose members walked not alongside each other but one behind the other, with the father at the head, and the youngest child at the back. A moment later Max realized with a shock what the rails along the road were: laid by the Germans and ending at Birkenau.

He stopped at a barrier in the barbed-wire fence, got out, and looked at the camp with bated breath. From the plans and blueprints, which he had looked at repeatedly in Leiden and Dwingeloo, he knew that it was a trapezoid approximately a third of a mile long and a third of a mile wide.

What he saw was a large forest-framed space, the freezing air filled with minute icicles that gleamed in the sunlight; there were rows of dilapidated huts, set carefully at right angles like in Birkenau, as if they were still on the drawing-board — an inhuman pattern that seemed to have served as a model for postwar housing developments. Smoke still rose from some chimneys, but most of the huts were obviously no longer occupied; a few had burned down, and here and there huts had disappeared. Children were playing; somewhere someone was cycling along who undoubtedly would have a great deal to say about what went on in Indonesia during the Japanese occupation but knew nothing of what had taken place here.

Straight in front of him the rails continued to the other end of the camp — and parallel with them, farther to the right like. . yes, like what? — like a vision, a mirage, a dream over a distance of a mile, the procession of huge dish aerials, entering the camp on one side and leaving it on the other. His eyes grew moist. Here, in this asshole of the Netherlands, they entreated the blessing of heaven like sacrificial altars in the total silence. At the same moment he felt the pressure that had weighed on him for the past few years lifting: the pressure of having to work in this accursed spot. Suddenly he could think of no place on earth where he would rather work than here. Wasn't everything that he was gathered together here, as in the focal point of a lens?

Without looking at Sophia, he got back in the car and drove slowly to the new low-rise service building, suddenly unable to stop talking. Agitatedly, occasionally half turning around, he told them that the camp had been set up by the Dutch government in 1939 for German Jewish refugees — the first Jewish camp outside Germany — but that the cost had been recovered from the Jewish community in the Netherlands. So that when the Germans arrived, they had the refugees neatly collected in one place. Subsequently, over a hundred thousand Dutch Jews were transported to Poland from this place — proportionately more even than from Germany itself. After the war Dutch fascists, of which Drenthe was full, were imprisoned in it. For a while it was a military camp, then Dutch citizens expelled from Indonesia were accommodated in it, and finally the Moluccans, who were now, reluctantly and with regular police intervention, being forced into more or less normal housing developments. In order to prevent their return to the camp, everything was deliberately being allowed to fall into disrepair. By establishing the observatory here, the government hoped that the name Westerbork would lose its unpleasant connotations.

When he had once said this to Onno, Onno had said that his eldest brother, the provincial governor of Drenthe, was bound to be behind it.

"Imagine the Poles setting up a conservatory in Auschwitz so that the name Auschwitz would sound less unpleasant! It would be hilarious if it were not so sad. You sometimes wonder if people really know the sort of world they're living in. Did you know, for example," he asked the engineer, "that Westerbork council sold a lot of those huts to neighboring farmers and sports clubs? All over Drenthe young soccer players are getting changed in those huts that once inspired terror. Business is business! But the things are Jewish property, and I've not read anywhere that the proceeds were transferred to the Jewish community. They are still being ripped off!"

He banged his steering wheel excitedly, and the engineer turned and exchanged a short glance with Sophia.

In the control building, on the other side of the line of telescopes, it was warm and there was the smell of fresh coffee. Smiling with surprise, the director of the installation, a technical engineer who had once worked for an oil company, appeared.

"We thought we'd never see an astronomer here." His dark-brown eyes met those of Quinten. "Well, well, the daughter of the house has come too!"

It took a while for Max to explain that Quinten Quist wasn't a daughter but a son, and not his but his friend's, and that Sophia Brons was not his wife or the mother of the child but the grandmother.

The director made a gesture indicating that it made no difference to him, and led them into the computer area. Sophia took off Quinten's coat and cap and handed him a little doll, which he haughtily ignored. Max shook hands with the technicians, who were sitting around at the monitors and whom he knew from Dwingeloo. He was shown his office and went with the director to the reception area, humming and groaning with the ventilators, isolated in a Faraday cage. When they returned to the central terminal, he stood for a while at the large semicircular window with a view of the mirrors and the huts.

When he remembered Sophia's presence, he turned around, pointed to the telescopes, and asked: "Do you know how they work?"

"I won't understand anyway."

"It's dead simple."

The row of reflectors, he explained, was aligned precisely from west to east, a hundred and forty-five yards apart, exact to within a fraction of an inch. Beyond that, however, it was a true straight line: over the distance of a mile the curvature of the earth had also been compensated for. Just imagine! And that accuracy was necessary, because the twelve mirrors had to be seen as one gigantic circular telescope with a diameter of a mile, the largest in the world. The idea was that because of the rotation of the earth, seen from space, the row of mirrors after a quarter of a day would be at right angles to its original position and after half a day in the reverse position; so by observing a radio source for half a day, you could achieve the synthesis that you wanted.

"Surely a child can understand that."

"I can hear everything you say, but it doesn't mean anything to me," said Sophia, while she held Quinten's wobbling head and wiped his mouth.

Max took a radio map off a desk and asked the technician: "What's this?"

He looked at it absentmindedly. "M 51."

"Here," said Max, and held it in front of Sophia. "This is what it looks like. The whirlpool nebula in the constellation of Canes Venatici. Thirteen million years ago."

But it was Quinten who took the paper in both hands and subjected the pointed mountains of waving lines of intensity to a close inspection.

"I'm curious to know what he's going to tell us," said the director with raised eyebrows.

When Quinten had given back the sheet, without crumpling it up or rubbing it on the ground in an uncoordinated way, Sophia put her arms around him and cuddled him and said: "What a strange child you are. You're just like your father."

The way in which she had behaved with Quinten from the first showed a completely different side of her nature, which had amazed Onno during his sporadic visits, but which Max recognized from the way she behaved with him at night — but then without saying a word. Quinten didn't like the hug and freed himself from it with dignity.

Max watched and, lost in thought, said: "I'm going outside for a while."

He put on only a scarf, stuck his hands in his pockets, and wandered onto the site. The air was still full of magically floating, glowing splinters. He needed to be alone for a few minutes, so that he could allow the change that he had just undergone to penetrate through him. There was a vague smell of Indonesian food; in an arid garden behind a hut a boy was repairing a bike. He remembered from the plans that a line of hospital huts had been demolished to make way for the mirrors. The camp was already no longer what it had been during the war, but even if everything were to disappear, it would still be the spot for all eternity. The house by the barrier, where he had just gotten out, had been the house of the camp commandant. It was still occupied; there were curtains and plants on the windowsill. Across the road along the railway line, which was once called Boulevard des Miseres, he walked in an easterly direction. When he had told Sophia just now about the exact west-to-east alignment of the instruments, his father's Polish triangle of Bielsko-Katowice-Krakow, a triangle with the same angles occurred to him, which also pointed directly eastward, with Auschwitz at its center. None of it meant anything, but that was how it was. And now he suddenly saw the map of Drenthe in front of him: an isosceles triangle with Westerbork camp at its center.

Here, on this road, perhaps on the spot where he was now walking, his mother had gotten into a cattle truck under the watchful eye of the camp commandant, after which the door was slid shut and the bolt fastened. Here her last journey had begun. He tried to reconcile that awareness with what he could see; but although the event had taken place on this spot, the two things remained as different from each other as a thought and a stone. The road was deserted, but the rails were empty, it smelled not of Jewish cooking but of nasigoreng. It was time, he thought, that tore everything to shreds. He looked around: the silent, majestic entry of the mirrors into the camp. From somewhere came the hammering of a woodpecker. He was sure of it — he belonged here; here was where he must spend his life.

He walked on, to the other end of the camp, where the rails ended in a decayed bumper. He crouched down and put his hand on the rusty iron, stood up and looked again at the row of antennas, all pointing to the same point in the sky. And suddenly he thought of the yellow star that his mother had had to wear on her left breast during the war. A star! Stars! All those tens of thousands here had worn stars; they had been forced into the wagons with stars on their chests, on their way from the small trapezoid to the great square. He remembered from the papers discussions on the question of whether there should be a monument to the deported in Westerbork. The survivors had been against it; everything should now be forgotten. But it was there anyway! What was the synthetic radio telescope finally but a monument, a mile in diameter, to the dead!

37. Expeditions

While life continued in Groot Rechteren and Dwingeloo in rural and astronomical calm, in Amsterdam Onno had embarked upon a lightning political career. Sometimes he had the feeling that the way in which it was happening was not connected solely with his qualities but also with the fate that had befallen him: as though all his political friends felt that he deserved it after his wife's accident — or in any case that they could not decently obstruct him too forcefully. At the beginning of 1969 he had been elected to the city council, and shortly afterward he became alderman for education, arts, and sciences.

"During my period of office," he had whispered to the mayor after his appointment, at a dinner in the official residence, "education will be principally geared to producing spineless yes-men. With Plato in mind, I will put poets mercilessly to the sword, and I shall bring science completely into line and put it in the service of my personal ambitions. I shall make myself hated like no previous Amsterdam alderman. While your statue is decorated daily with fresh flowers, my name will be spoken even centuries afterward only with the deepest revulsion."

Whereupon the gray-haired mayor had taken his hand from his ear and said: "Yes, yes, Onno, take it easy."

Everyone was worried that he would harm the party with his big mouth, but things went surprisingly well: he had found his bearings in a few weeks, and in the council chamber he took a completely different tone — namely, the measured tone that he knew was the only effective one in Holland. A new life had begun for him. University administrators who refused to see him had to cool their heels in his waiting room; the chairman of the arts council was summoned; in The Hague he argued for Amsterdam interests at the ministry, he lobbied his party colleagues in the Lower House of Parliament, he made decisions, mediated, intervened, dismissed, appointed, joined battle with the students. Suddenly he had power, a secretary, civil servants who danced to his tune and a car with a driver, who took him from the town hall to the Kerkstraat in the evenings.

But there was no one there any longer. When he had closed the door behind him, he was greeted by a silence that seemed to emanate from two boxes: Ada's cello case in his study and the Chinese camphor chest in his bedroom, in which he had stored her clothes. But the thought of her and of Quinten was quickly buried under the dossiers that emerged from his outsize briefcase — partly because he knew that Quinten lacked for nothing and Ada was being well looked after in a nursing home in Emmen, although he had not been there more than twice. Measured by his interest in the cryptic signs on a certain plate in the museum of Herak-lion, his interest in the content of those dossiers was minimal — after all he could just as well be in charge of a different portfolio. But he had resigned himself to the fact that his life was evidently to be determined by brilliant beginnings, which were suddenly frustrated — in his family life just as in linguistics.

He knew people for whom being an alderman in Amsterdam would be the pinnacle of their life's achievement. He himself was happy with it because it at least gave him something to do. He had decided to make the best of things. He had abandoned the illusion that he could change Holland or even Amsterdam after just a few months — and if he were honest with himself, he didn't really think it was necessary. Where in the world were things better than in Holland? In Switzerland, perhaps — but that was more corrupt and, worse still, more boring. If he could grasp the light-hearted changes that had been brought about in the second half of the 1960s from below and stabilize them, he would be satisfied; but now, as the 1970s approached, he saw imagination being drowned in a morass of constant, embittered meetings, which seemed to be out to achieve something like a merciless, totalitarian democracy. No one did anything anymore; everyone simply talked about the way something ought to be done, if anyone did it. He had once talked in an interview about "the self-abusive reflection," which had caused softening of the brain and weakening of the bone marrow in students.

His front door was daubed with red paint and in the middle of the night he received a threatening phone call: "We'll get you one day, you bastard!"

But before he was able to say, "Is that you, Bork?" the caller hung up.

Since the accident he had lived in celibacy. Not that he forced himself, but because it did not occur to him to take up with a woman. There would be no trouble: he had soon discovered that power had an erotic effect; and if anyone wanted to get into his bad books forever, then they should ask him why he didn't get divorced, which would be a legal formality.

The fact that his rooms were tidied up every morning by a municipal housekeeper, who also made up his bed and did his laundry while he himself was at the town hall, was of course connected with this. That had been organized by Mrs. Siliakus, his secretary, without whom nothing would have gone right, either with his work or with his life: she supplemented exactly what was missing in him. "Together we make a human being," he was once to say. But Mrs. Siliakus was already in her fifties and for twenty years had shared a flat with a lady of her own age. "If you didn't have such an offensively unnatural nature," he confessed to her in an intimate moment, "but were as utterly normal as me, then I'd know what to do."

Until, one Sunday evening in July, Max had called him on his new, unlisted telephone number and had asked if he knew that that evening the first man was to set foot on the moon.

"Of course you'll be watching? It's all on television."

"What time, then?"

"At about four."

"To tell you the truth I wasn't intending to. The moon? You must be crazy. It plays absolutely no part in municipal politics. Tomorrow morning at half past nine I've got to address the chancellor of the University of Leningrad, in Russian. I'm working at it now."

"You absolutely must watch. The fantastic thing is not that it's happening, because Jules Verne predicted that, and Cyrano de Bergerac, and Kepler as well in fact—"

"And what would you say to Plutarch? And Lucian? And Cicero? Somnium Scipionis! Of course you've never heard of them. That takes us before Christ. Don't get any ideas."

"Let me finish for goodness' sake! What I'm trying to say is that one thing never occurred to anyone: that everyone in the world will be witnesses when a man steps onto the moon, without even getting out of their armchairs — even though the moon is not visible in the sky to them at that moment. That's the really inconceivable thing. If anyone had predicted that, he'd have been branded as a madman."

"Will you always be twelve years old? If I understand you correctly then I have to watch because it's something that can't really be seen: an idea. For you everything is always different. You yourself, indeed, are more or less looking at the Big Bang there on the heath. But okay, I'll listen to you again, although I have the feeling that it won't do me much good. Tell me, how is Quinten Quist getting on? Has he said anything yet?"

"No idea, I can't understand it anyway. You would probably have to know what language he's babbling in. It may be the same one that you were looking for before."

"Yes, just you go on opening old wounds, born sadist that you are. Perhaps I shall have to resign myself to being the father of an illiterate. It always happens: Goethe's son was thick as a brick, too. Great men always have imbeciles for sons — which of course implicitly proves that my father wasn't a great man. Anyway, perhaps we should be glad that his lordship is at least prepared to crawl."

"We sometimes have the impression that he understands things."

"Let's hope so. How is my esteemed mother-in-law faring?"

"Fine. Come and see us soon."

Onno replaced the receiver, but held on to it and sighed. Since Quinten's first birthday, two months ago, he hadn't been back in Drenthe; so many Quists with their retinue had appeared, and fellow tenants of the castle, and even the mother of his mother-in-law, that he had scarcely had an opportunity to spend any time with Quinten. He had had to spend that thirtieth of May mainly massaging his family, who had seen for the first time how a Quist was being brought up by his grandmother and his father's friend.

With his hands still on the receiver, he looked at his watch. It was eleven o'clock. The five hours still separating him from Max's lunar moment seemed insurmountably long to him. Hearing Max's voice had done him good; it had suddenly torn him away from the drudgery of his work. Of course he could just go to bed, Max would never know, or wasn't there someone who could keep him company? Couldn't he look someone up?

At the same moment he knew he who he was going to ring — but the brainwave gave him such a shock that it took him a couple of seconds to get over it. He still knew the number by heart.

"Helga?"

"Yes, who's that?"

"How awful. Don't you even recognize my voice anymore?"

"Onno! What a surprise! How are you?"

"Well, I expect you heard a bit about all of it. Uh, a lot has happened."

"Awful. I wanted to write to you, but I didn't know what kind of tone to take. Is there any change in her condition?"

"No."

"And your son? How old is he now?"

"Just over a year."

"Does he live with you? How do you manage? Aren't you an alderman at the moment?"

"I live alone. He's being brought up by my mother-in-law and by Max— you know, the chap you were so crazy about. They live in Drenthe."

"Isn't that a bit odd?"

"A little, yes, but it's the ideal solution. Of course he's got some new girlfriend there already, but we don't talk about that kind of thing anymore. And what about you? What are you getting up to?"

"At this moment? I'm sitting reading."

"What?"

"You'll laugh: the council report in the paper."

"You're sitting reading the newspaper? Haven't you read what's going to happen in a few hours?"

"What?"

"Tonight a man is going to set foot on the moon."

"So what? As long as he doesn't slip over. Is that why you're calling? Since when have you been interested in that kind of thing?"

"Since five minutes ago. Max called and said that I had to watch."

"And so you're going to."

"Helga, the shrill note in your voice is not escaping me. I don't give a damn about celestial bodies, including the earth; but I'm glad he did so, because that gives me a chance to ask you to receive me, so we can watch it together."

"I don't know if I want to, Onno."

"And, of course, I'm the one who determines what you want?"

"No, not for some time. How do you know that I haven't long since found another boyfriend, who is now lying languidly on the sofa?"

"Because I know that no grass can grow where I once stood."

"Onno, have you really not changed at all?"

"I'll be with you in a quarter of an hour — and if you don't open the door, I shall abolish the Art Historical Institute tomorrow. First thing in the morning."

"Of course all you want to do is bring your dirty laundry."

"Listen, dear Helga. Do you know how the Habsburgs were buried?"

"I beg your pardon? The what were buried?"

"The Habsburgs. The Austro-Hungarian monarchs."

"How they were buried?"

"Surely you know?"

"What in heaven's name are you getting at?"

"Listen. The cortege of the coffin arrived at the Kapuzinergruft in Vienna and then the major domo or someone knocked three times on the door with his staff. From inside you then heard the trembling voice of an old monk, asking, 'Who is there?' And then the major domo said, 'His Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesty, emperor of Austria, king of Hungary' and another five hundred and eighty-six such titles. Afterward there was a silence inside, after which he knocked three times on the door again and rattled off the same list. And after he had knocked for the third time on the door and the monk had again asked, 'Who is there,' the major domo answered, 'A poor sinner.' And only then did the doors slowly open."

"And what do you mean by that?"

"Do I have to make myself clearer? With my tail between my legs, I'm telling you that I've had enough of playing outside — if that still means anything to you."

After first appropriating the rooms of the apartment, Quinten had broadened his world to the whole castle with the result that he kept getting lost every day. From the wonderful baby who had teethed after three months, a toddler had emerged who delighted everyone with his beauty. Selma Kern said repeatedly to Sophia that her husband was addicted to QuQu's appearance. He was often called QuQu, since Mr. Spier consistently addressed him as Q — moreover to point him to the door just as consistently, since he did not wish to converse with someone who didn't say anything back. "You learn Dutch first, Q."

However, at the Kerns' on the other side of his own floor, he was always welcome; if the artist was not carving in his studio in one of the coach houses, he could not take his eyes off the child. Martha, his ten-year-old daughter, a skinny blond girl, was also crazy about him and had resigned herself to the fact that he could not speak. With her legs crossed, she sat with him on the ground and handed him a pinecone or a shell to study, or pointed the white doves out to him. Once when a dove alighted on his crown and stayed there cooing softly, Kern spread his arms out in pleasure, as though he wanted to fly himself, and remained in that attitude looking at Quinten, who did not move either and in turn didn't take his eyes off Selma, in her black dress.

"This is just out of this world!" he exclaimed.

A large folder already contained scores of drawings of Quinten, in which the eyes became bigger and bigger, made vivid blue with the tip of the middle finger with methylene powder; he also appeared subsequently with a scepter and an orb in his hands, seated on a voluptuous cushion, or as pope with a tiara on his head. According to Selma, Kern's daughter had never inspired him in this way. He had asked Max whether Onno would agree to him exhibiting the series one day; whereupon Max assured him that he could probably persuade Onno to open the exhibition, but then he would have to be prepared for the latter to claim all the honor for himself as father. Undoubtedly, he would dream up some kind of structure in which there was nothing left for the artist but the stupid duplication of reality— that is: the proof of his complete superfluousness.

"He would probably call that the 'parrot principle' or some such thing," said Max — again realizing how Onno had become part of his own being.

Upstairs, at the Proctors', among the gruesome black umbrellas, Quinten looked at the electric train — saw how when the train was approaching the curve, suddenly little Arendje pulled the handle of the transformer right over to the right with a jerk, so that the train derailed and fell on his back, and he convulsed with laughter, thrashing his legs in the air with demonic pleasure. Quinten looked at this with the same expression he had used when looking at the train.

Then he went exploring in the northern part of the attic. One room there was always locked, and invariably that was the first one whose handle he rattled. When that had no effect, he clambered around in the baron's musty, crammed storage room, over rolled-up carpets, books tied with string, among upturned chairs and tables, fallen chandeliers, cupboards, boxes, and piles of clothes, on which he sometimes fell asleep — and where he was finally found by a relieved Sophia or Max:

"I've got him!"

On his second birthday he still could not speak, or at least he had not yet said anything comprehensible; what he did do was display more and more strikingly that strange combination of curiosity and aloofness. He did not wish to be hugged, although he allowed himself to be occasionally, by Sophia; the toys Max bought for him did not interest him any more than a potato, a screw, or a branch. He could look for minutes at the flow of water from a tap, at that clear, cool plait that kept its form and glow although it was made up of constantly new water.

No one knew what to make of him. He was too beautiful to be true, seldom cried, never laughed, said nothing; but no one doubted that all kinds of things were going on beneath that black head of hair. Once he stood motionless on the balcony looking at the balustrade, at the gray stone banister on the wooden amphora-shaped pillars. Max squatted down beside him to see if there was perhaps an insect walking along them; but only when Quinten carefully put his forefinger on a certain spot did he see that there was a tiny, fossilized trilobite, from the Paleozoic period, about 300 million years old. At the same moment he realized that the creature that Quinten had discovered had lived at about the moment that the extragalactic cluster in the constellation of Coma Berenices — "Berenice's Hair" — had emitted the light that was now reaching earth.

Quinten looked at him.

"That's a trilobite," said Max, "a kind of silver fish. What would you like? Shall we free it?"

He took a file out of Sophia's manicure case, placed the point at an angle beside the little fossil, and gave it a slight tap with a pebble, so that it flew up and disappeared into the gravel. But Quinten bent down and already had it in his hands.

"When you're grown-up," said Max, "you must become a paleontologist."

When he was lost, he might also be in the cellar. On his way there he always first tried the handle of the door of Mr. Verloren van Themaat, downstairs in the paneled hall, opposite the Spiers' apartment. But the door only opened on the weekends, and during holidays. The art historian was about sixty, a tall, thin, rather stooped man with thin gray hair and fine features; behind a pair of metal-rimmed glasses, he usually looked withdrawn, as though he were sizing you up, but suddenly he burst into exuberant, almost manic laughter, in which all his limbs participated. His wife, Elsbeth, was probably scarcely forty — in any case about five years younger than Sophia; they had no children. Max was a little intimidated by the professor: an academic intellectual of the severe Dutch kind, who overlooked nothing.

Once, with Onno, Max had divided intellectuals up according to the Catholic monastic orders: he himself soon turned out to be an unscrupulous Jesuit, while Onno first maintained that he was a coarse Trappist, since he always just did his duty in silence; but finally he joined the cultivated, well-behaved Benedictines, who devoted their souls to God after a successful worldly life. In that spectrum Themaat was a strict Carthusian, who Max felt saw him as an intellectual libertine where astronomy was not concerned.

But when Quinten appeared in the doorway, on tiptoe, his hands still above his head on the door handle, something changed in the stiff professor, too. When he was sitting reading in his rocking chair — he was always reading — he put the book away, folded his pale hands on his lap, and looked at the approaching child. Unlike the Spiers' apartment, where everything was furnished with precious antiques, the room here had the character of outgrown student quarters, up to and including the worn Persian carpets, the old desk, the worn brown leather armchairs, and even a half-disintegrated hockey stick in an umbrella stand. Although it was a second house, the long wall opposite the windows was covered with bookcases up to the ceiling. Here and there were framed architectural drawings, most of them a little lopsided, but Quinten's first port of call was always a large, framed etching, which was on the floor against the bookshelf.

Once Themaat had knelt down beside him and told him that it was an obelisk:

"Say it after me: obelisk." And when Quinten said nothing: "You must regard it as a petrified sunbeam. It's in Rome, near the Lateran, that palace here on the right, the place where the popes resided in the Middle Ages. Can you see all those signs that have been carved in the shaft? That means that they are actually chiseled into light. Can you see all those birds? They're Egyptian hieroglyphics. I think your father can read those — at least he could before he started wasting his time with politics. You take after your father, Q. The emperor Augustus had wanted to take that monster to Rome, but an unfavorable augury prevented him from doing so. Three hundred years later the emperor Constantine didn't bother about that; he was the man who introduced Christianity. Look, there's almost no pavement. That print was made in the eighteenth century; today it's a very busy place, with hundreds of scooters and honking cars. In that building behind is the former private chapel of the pope, the Sancta Sanctorum, and also the Scala Santa, the holy staircase of Pontius Pilate's palace in Jerusalem, up which Jesus Christ walked. At least so it's said. There are still bloodstains on the steps. You're only allowed to climb it on your knees."

"What on earth are you saying to that little mite?" asked Elsbeth, looking up from her magazine. "You must be out of your mind."

"A person is never too young to learn."

Then Quinten was off again. Via a door next to the staircase, he went to the cellar, which extended on either side of a low passageway under the whole castle. There was suddenly an even deeper silence than above — perhaps because it was emphasized by the echoing sound of drips, which, somewhere far off, at long intervals, fell into a puddle.

The musty passageway was almost completely dark; scarcely any light penetrated into the compartments through the small, high windows, almost black with dirt. Some of them were still half full of coal, which was no longer used; others were packed with hundreds of empty bottles, discarded furniture and gardening equipment, broken carriages, bicycles without wheels. Washrooms, rinsing rooms, pantries, larders — everything full of the debris of decades. The great kitchen, where for centuries staff had bustled about, until they dragged themselves exhausted up the back stairs to the attic late at night, and lay desolately in the deep gloom.

Cracked draining boards, disconnected water pipes, and tiles that had been prised up. The kitchen dumbwaiter to the dining room, where Mr. Spier's living room now was, had plunged to the bottom of the shaft with its ropes broken.

Quinten crept into it, wrapped his hands around his knees, and stared into the darkness.

38. The Grave

A few weeks before Quinten's third birthday, which in 1971 fell at Whitsun, there came a proud moment for Onno. At the insistence of Helga he had found time to pay a visit to Drenthe — in an official car, although that was not entirely proper; he had picked up Helga from her home. There was no question of them living together; neither he nor she wanted that. He had resumed his visits to the Unicorn, although now without plastic bags full of laundry, and it sometimes seemed to him that his episode with Ada came from a novel he had once read, in which Quinten was also a character.

The high point of his friendship with Max also belonged to the vanished 1960s; it too was bathed in the melancholy light of memory. He had the beginnings of a middle-age spread and wore a dark-blue suit, but with dandruff on his collar and mostly with a tail of his shirt hanging out of his trousers, so that a segment of his white belly was visible. He always had an inappropriate tie and socks that were too short — all those disasters that Max called his "Social-Democrat lack of style."

They were approaching forty now, but they no longer celebrated their joint conception on the day of the Reichstag fire, because that was also the day of Ada's accident and her father's death. Helga sometimes accompanied Onno to official receptions or dinners, although she usually did not feel like it, so he had to pester her first. But that endeared her to him; it proved that she did not care about the dubious glamour of his position but about him.

Sophia's mother was also at Groot Rechteren. Onno had greeted Quinten by putting his hand on his crown, raising his eyes heavenward, and saying, "A wise son gladdens his father's heart." Precisely because he in fact no longer thought of Quinten when there was no reason, he did not really know what sort of tone to take with him. During lunch in the kitchen— fried eggs with ham, milk, fruit, everything local — Max sat like a paterfamilias opposite Sophia at the short end of the table; on his right sat old Mrs. Haken and Onno, on his left Helga with Quinten. The driver had also been invited, but he preferred to stay on the forecourt and eat the sandwiches he had brought.

"A Christian Democrat who knows his place," Onno had said. "The real mechanisms of oppression are not outside human beings but in them — and that's just as well. Recently far too many of them have disappeared, and we shall pay for it yet."

"Well, well," said Max. "Strong language for a progressive politician."

"External behavior without inner behavior is not possible. That cannot be replaced by the police — you'd need two policemen per individual for that: one for the day and one for the night. But who would guard the police, then?"

"What would you say to God?" asked Max, laughing. And then he said to Helga, "Is your companion really becoming such a reactionary?"

Before she could answer, Onno said: "It's all far more hopeless than you lot think. But please don't let's talk about it, because then I'd prefer to go."

Suddenly Max heard a tone in his voice that he didn't recognize.

"Are you leaving already?" asked Mrs. Haken. "You've only just come."

"No, Granny. I'm staying for a little while."

Helga inquired about Max's work. He knew that she did this out of politeness; he still had the same stiff relationship with her. Obviously she would never forgive him for the role that he had played in her life — first when without realizing it he had broken up her relationship with Onno, and then when he had restored it, again without realizing it. When he had first heard that they were back together again, thanks to the landing on the moon, he had a momentary feeling that nothing had changed; but he only had to look at Quinten and Sophia to see that this was not the case.

Westerbork, he said, was operating better than expected; all his colleagues throughout the world envied him the research he was able to do. In reply to a question from Onno, he said that after all kinds of violent evictions and conflicts with the police, the last Ambonese family had gone; there were scarcely any reminders left of the Schattenberg estate, and hence of the transit camp at Westerbork. In order to prevent their return — that is, the return of the Moluccans — all the huts had been demolished; the barrier had also gone. Against his will, by the way, but the survivors wanted it, so what else could he do? Even the rails had been removed; only a rotten buffer was still there. He had, however, thought of something for the last Day of Commemoration, on the eve of the fourth of May; a couple of hundred visitors always came then. He had devised a small computer program that caused all twelve mirrors to bend meekly toward the ground, which happened down to the thousandth of a second at eight o'clock; they stayed in that position for the two minutes' silence and then turned heavenward again.

"One does what one can," he said, and lowered his eyes for an instant. "Only the house of the former German camp commandant is still standing. Strange, isn't it? The widow of the military commandant from shortly after the war still lives there. Would you like to hear a nice story? A few weeks ago there was a sudden power cut, so we immediately switched over to the emergency generator; a little later we heard her trotting up to the terminal. She had a package in plastic wrap in her hands: she asked if she could leave it in our tridge for a while. It turned out to be her husband's evening meal— beefsteak, roast potatoes, and peas — that she had made for him twenty years before, that he had not been able to eat, because he had suddenly died of a heart attack."

"Right!" cried Onno to Helga, shaking his knife over his head. "That is love! Take a leaf out of her book."

Quinten knelt on his chair and looked at his father open-mouthed as if at a fireworks display.

When Onno saw the expression on his face, he said: "Yes, my son, it leaves you speechless. Even if love can no longer find its way to a man's heart through his stomach, it still transcends death! Why don't you say something, you scamp? When I was your age I was already reading Tacitus."

"Onno. ." said Sophia reproachfully. "He understands more than you think."

After lunch, while Helga stayed behind with Quinten, they went to see Ada — Onno, being the largest, sat next to the driver; Max was wedged between Sophia and her mother on the backseat, with arms folded. On the way Mrs. Haken asked when they were going to tell Quinten what had happened to his mother.

"Maybe never," said Onno at once, without turning his head. Whereupon he turned around after all and said to Sophia, "I'm sorry."

"There's nothing to be sorry about. Don't worry, one day he'll suddenly be able to talk, I'm sure of it." And to her mother: "Of course he mustn't be allowed to think for a moment that I'm his mother and Max his father. He must know how things stand immediately. Isn't that so?"

"Of course," said Max. He now saw clearly the gray hairs that had appeared here and there in her hair. He was sitting closer to her than he ever did during the day, and at night it was dark. "Just imagine."

"And when do you plan to let him see Ada for the first time?" asked Mrs. Haken.

"Onno must decide that."

"No, you must decide," said Onno. "You know him best. It all depends on what kind of boy he turns into, because it will be a dreadful shock of course. When he's six? Ten? What do you think, Max?"

"I think we'll know precisely when the moment comes."

"Probably true."

"By the way, do you know," asked Sophia, "who still visit her a couple of times a year? Marijke and Bruno. They got married."

No one said anything else. Everyone sensed the same thought in the others: would she survive for years? Would she have to go on living for years? And if she suddenly died — should Quinten never have seen her, even if she was doing nothing but breathing?

The nursing home — called Joy Court by sardonic civil servants from the health department — was in a new building in a new street on the outskirts of Emmen. It was built in the same modern nonstyle as the room in which Oswald Brons had descended into the flames, with brick interior walls that looked like exterior walls, so that although one was inside, one constantly had the impulse to go inside.

"Even architects leave people out in the cold these days," said Max.

Onno agreed with him: "It's hopeless. Architects are peace criminals. The end is nigh."

Ada lay in a small room on the second floor, with a view of a paved courtyard. They gathered silently around the bed; a chair was pulled up for Mrs. Haken, whose eyes filled with tears. Here they were, thought Max:

Quinten's great-grandmother, his grandmother, his mother, and his father, too, in any case. Ada had changed again, but it was difficult to say what had actually changed. It was like when you had bought a new book and put it in the bookcase unread: when you took it out for the first time after a few years, it wasn't new anymore, although nothing demonstrable had changed. It had not renewed itself; it had not moved with the times. There she lay, her head turned to one side on the pillow, and she did not even know that she had a son with unworldly blue eyes, let alone that the Russians had occupied Prague, that the Americans were now destroying Cambodia too, and that her husband was an alderman for Amsterdam.

Even a cat knew more than she did, thought Onno; maybe she still had the consciousness of a mouse. But with mice you were allowed to spread poison or set a trap… he was shocked by his own thoughts and glanced guiltily at Sophia, who had taken Ada's hand in hers and was looking at her daughter with an imponderable expression in her dark eyes.

Back at Groot Rechteren they drank tea in the front room, but no real conversation started up again. In the kitchen the driver was reading the newspaper. Mrs. Haken went for a nap on her daughter's bed, and Sophia showed Helga photos. While Onno made a few telephone calls at Max's desk, Max, with his arms folded, looked at a point in the bookcase and thought of the plans to install movable thirteenth and fourteenth mirrors in Westerbork, which would improve the resolving power of the instrument by a factor of two; but The Hague felt that the radio observatory had already cost enough.

The windows had been pushed up and from the direction of the coach houses came music that sounded like the Rolling Stones; now and then there was a dull thundering sound to be heard as a car drove over the loose planks of the bridge over the outer canal. Onno turned and said that politics consisted of telephoning; you wondered how Julius Caesar had done things. He sat down in the green armchair, where, lost in thought, he took an astrophysics magazine off the table.

In the distance was the faint rumble of a train, passing the unmanned level crossing. A little later Max saw Quinten lying on his tummy across Onno's feet, half over the still-unpolished shoes with the threadbare laces. That was very unusual; he had never done anything so intimate with him — Quinten was not very close to him. The sight reassured Max. His fear of fatherhood had receded over the years, like the bald patch on the back of his head; but unlike that spot, it had never disappeared entirely— just as someone who had recovered from cancer or a heart attack never felt a hundred percent sure and would never forget that he had once fallen prey to it, although he sometimes didn't think of it for months: for the rest of his life there was a monster lying in wait somewhere in a dark cave. He knew that now — for as long as Ada was alive, he might be able to determine paternity by means of a blood test: if Quinten had certain genetic factors that were lacking in both Ada and himself, then Onno was the father; if they were lacking in Onno, then he was. He could have his own blood analyzed very simply, and with a little thought he would be able to secure blood samples from Ada and Quinten, but how could he get hold of Onno's blood? Anyway, it could not be completely ruled out that there were no factors missing; either in his own blood or in Onno's. Indeed, that wouldn't surprise him. In the future it might be different, but for the time being tests couldn't give a conclusive answer in all cases.

Quinten tried in vain to turn the lid of a tin box, in which something was rattling. Onno didn't notice what was happening at his feet; with his eyebrows raised skeptically, he leafed through the specialist journal, as though it were a publication of the Theosophical Society. Only when he felt Quinten's warmth penetrating through the leather of his shoes did he put it down and bend forward.

"Can't you turn it? Leave it in there. It's much nicer when you don't know what it is. What would you say if the two of us went for a walk?"

"Are you sure?" asked Max. "It'll mean venturing out into nature."

"I shall give nature a dreadful shock."

"Look after your father, Quinten," said Helga as they walked hand in hand to the door.

In the forecourt, Onno was undecided about which way to go. Only now did he see the flowering rhododendrons beside the coach houses: huge violet explosions that hung heavily over the water and from beneath which some ducks swam, like the faithful emerging from a cathedral. The decision was made by Quinten. The warm hand pulled him along over the bridge and down the path by the moat; they were walking under the shade of the majestic brown oak and past the side of the castle. The flat, weathered stones of the lower part, which rose at a slight angle from the water, were obviously still from the middle ages.

Onno realized guiltily that it was the first time that he had been alone with Quinten. He was a degenerate father; he left everything to Max as if it were the most natural thing in the world — and on what basis? The little hand in his reminded him of his own in his father's large hand when he had walked with him along the pier at Scheveningen. They had bent over the railings together and looked at the large oblong nets that were winched squeaking and creaking out of the waves on which ten or twenty innocent fish were thrashing about. He was still wearing the curls and pink dresses that his mother liked to see him in. The memory shocked him: was Quinten perhaps the kind of creature that his mother had looked for in himself and that she had brought into being through him? He stopped and looked at Quinten. Yes — if you didn't know, he might just as well be a girl, even without a dress or curls.

"Take a lesson from your wise old father, Quinten," he said as they walked toward the pinewood through the young saplings. "The new is always the old. Everything that's old was once new, and everything that's new will one day be old. The oldest thing of all is the present, because there's never been anything else but the present. No one has ever lived in the past, and no one lives in the future, either. Here we are walking along, you and me, but I in turn once walked just like this with my father along the pier at Scheveningen, which was blown up by the Germans in the war. He told me about the miraculous catch of fish, and that the Lord of Lords had called the apostles "fishers of men." Thirty-five years is an unspeakably long time ago for me, but for your foster father thirty-five years ago is yesterday. For him everything is yesterday. And the war is not even yesterday, but this morning, a moment ago, just now. I don't get the feeling that you're very fond of him, though, or am I mistaken? Tell me honestly. If you ask me, you understand me perfectly well, although you can't understand a word. True or not? Or are you making fools of all of us? Do you understand everything, perhaps, and simply don't feel like talking? Do you get out of bed at night and secretly read the Divina Commedia ? Yes, that's it, I think. Of course you're annoyed at the corrupt translation that Max has in his bookcase, and you can't find anything by Virgil. Isn't that it? Admit it."

Quinten did not reply, but obviously he knew exactly where he was going. As they passed, the trunks of the precisely planted pinewood produced geometric patterns with turning and changing diagonals and verticals till they merged into an overgrown park, where there were bare, uprooted trees everywhere, in various directions, felled by various storms. Where the wood became somewhat lighter a wall of exuberantly flowering rhododendrons appeared. Quinten let go of his hand and went in as though there were no resistance to be overcome, while Onno had to force his way with his hands through the unyielding bushes, which were taller than himself.

"Where in heaven's name are you taking me?" he cried. "This is not meant for human beings, Quinten! People belong on pavements!"

But when he had gotten through, even he experienced the fairy-tale nature of the spot. They were at the edge of a large, capriciously shaped pond, enclosed by mountains of violet flowers; in complete silence two black swans glided between the water lilies. In the distance there was a glimpse of the tower of the castle between the trees — obviously the pool was linked with the moat. But it was too distinguished here for the ducks. The aggressive black coots, with the wicked white patch on their heads, obviously didn't feel at home here either.

Yet they had still not reached their objective. Quinten began walking along the water's edge under the branches. Holding on, complaining all the while, blowing petals out of his face, and once slipping and cursing and getting one shoe wet, Onno followed him to the other side. Once he had gone through another wall of flowers, he was standing at the edge of an open space, thickly overgrown with deep-green stinging nettles that reached to his waist.

"Not through there, surely?" he said.

But Quinten took him to a narrow, winding path that consisted of flattened, but in places already reemerging, stinging nettles. Because he himself was smaller than the devilish brood, he made Onno lead the way. With a sigh Onno tucked his trouser legs into his socks, picked up a branch, and with his squelching shoe went down the path, swiping furiously and with real hatred at every nettle that could threaten them.

"What are you doing to me?" he cried. "If only I'd never married!"

After thirty or forty yards they were suddenly confronted with a square gravestone at the foot of a small, pointed conical pillar.

"What on earth is this?" said Onno, perplexed. He squatted down so that his scratched head was at the same level as Quinten's. His forefinger passed over the carved letters in the stone: DEEP THOUGHT SUNSTAR. He looked at Quinten. "Shall I tell you something? There's a horse buried here. That's what they call racehorses." He got up. "Who on earth buries a horse? Horses go to the knacker's yard, don't they?"

And then something happened that after a moment's speechlessness moved him to hold Quinten in his arms and to run back with him through the stinging nettles in triumph, and through the flowers and past the geometrical dancing of tree trunks to the castle: Quinten extended his finger toward the pillar, leaned back a little, and said with a laugh: "Obelisk."

39. Further Expeditions

Just as in Noordwijk the light of the lighthouse swept in all directions, so the four seasons swept over Groot Rechteren each year in great waves. In fact Max only knew the changing of the seasons from Amsterdam: one day in February or on March first, the indescribable scent of spring when he came into the street in the morning, as indefinable as the decimals of π; the stuffy summer, when the city was filled with tourists, equally suddenly changed into the damp, bitter autumn; and then the pale winter in which the cobble-stoned streets and the walls suddenly seemed to express the inaccessible nature of the world — but really only in passing, noticed in short intervals between going from one interior to the next.

If in the city nature was soft background music, in the castle he was in the midst of a thundering concert hall with Quinten and Sophia. Spring and autumn came with a huge show; the summers were hotter and drier, the winters colder and whiter. The constant change, he had once said to Onno, was of course the source of all creativity; the monotony of nature between the tropics also led to cultural stagnation — the tropics were a constant steambath, always green, just as the polar regions were always white — but the temperate latitudes with their four seasons were hot and cold baths, which kept people awake. That was true in the city too, of course, but only in the country had it become clear to him. Onno had countered by saying that in the country it was perhaps a little too clear, since that annually repeating four-part pattern in turn retained a certain monotony, so that real creations always took place in town. He had seen that Onno refrained from inquiring whether his own creativity had increased in the countryside; but although he had no complaints about his work, he did not broach that topic of his own accord.

In Drenthe not only was the darkness deeper, the silence more silent, storms more violent, and the rainbow more vivid than in Amsterdam; even the rain was different. When there was a walk through the woods with Quinten on the program, it did not occur to Max to wait until it was dry, let alone take an umbrella with him. All three of them put on their green boots and their oilskins, pulled the hoods over their heads, and waded through the mud, while the shots of the baron and his friends rang out in the distance.

Once, when it was no longer raining, and it was still dripping from all the trees, Max said: "When it stops raining, the trees start raining."

"They're crying," said Quinten.

"So you're not a tree, then," said Sophia.

Quinten waved his arms, jumped with both feet into the middle of a puddle, and cried: "I'm the rain!"

When Onno was told of this pronouncement by Max one Saturday afternoon in Amsterdam, in the reptile house at the zoo — while Quinten was looking at a motionless snake, coiled like a rope on a quayside — he said that this might cause problems at school. Everything suggested that he undoubtedly had a more brilliant mind than the teachers, just as had been obvious in his own case.

Since Quinten had communicated his first word to Onno, together with his first laugh, it was really as though he had been able to speak much earlier but had not seen any point. Less than six months later there was no question of any backwardness; grammatically, he seemed to be advanced for his age. When he meant himself, he didn't talk about Quinten, or about Q, but said "I." He called Onno Daddy; Sophia, Granny, or Granny Sophia if he had to make a distinction with Granny To; and Max, Max.

He did, though, remain more silent than other children. General toddler's chatter, tyrannical orders, whining about what he wanted to have, chattering what he had just done or what he wanted to do: there was none of that kind of thing. Nor had he any need for playmates; it did not really give him any pleasure when Sophia took him to the playground or the swimming pool. Before he went to sleep he allowed himself to be read a fairy tale. Apart from that, he was satisfied with the castle and what was going on there; since he had deigned to speak, he was even welcome at Mr. Spier's.

He was never bored. He sat for hours in his tower room and looked at pictures — not pictures from children's books, let it be understood, but particularly the illustrations in. a book that Themaat had let him take upstairs, Giuseppe Bibiena's Architetture e prospettive. As though Quinten knew what the eighteenth century and the Viennese court were, Themaat had told him that the book had been made in the first half of the eighteenth century at the Viennese court. Particularly the etchings of imaginary theatrical sets fascinated him: grand baroque, superperspectivist spaces with colonnades, staircases, caryatids, everything laden with ornaments. He would like to walk through those places.

When he was four, Sophia wanted him to go to the nursery school in Westerbork: that would be good for the development of his personality; in her opinion he was becoming far too solitary like this. Onno and Max had never visited such an institution — it was not usual in the 1930s — and they were not very keen; but Sophia had her way. On his way to the observatory Max dropped him off at the nursery on the first day, and that very morning another toddler bashed Quinten's head with an earthenware mug. When this happened he had not cried and just looked at his attacker with such an astonished look in his deep blue eyes that the other child had burst out crying.

Afterward the teacher, who had not seen anything of what had happened in the dolls' corner, had told Quinten off because he had obviously done something to the little boy, since otherwise he would not be crying like that. Quinten had said nothing. When Max picked him up, bustled by mothers and their screaming offspring, the teacher had told him what had happened. Of course she did not want to say that Quinten was underhanded or spiteful, but perhaps he should be watched a little. Sitting in the backseat of the car, Quinten told him what had actually happened and Max believed him; at home Sophia also discovered a small wound under his black locks. After a telephone call to Onno, having been put through by Mrs. Siliakus, they decided to remove him from the institution immediately.

"You don't have to go there anymore," said Max. "Is that all right?"

Quinten nodded. He stood by Max's desk, twisting the small compass slowly and looking at the wobbling needle, which seemed not to be attached to the compass but to the room.

"Don't you worry," said Sophia.

But it was something else that was troubling him. He focused his eyes on her and said: "All the children were picked up by mommies."

Max and Sophia looked at each other. There it was. Suddenly the fundamental question had been asked. Max didn't immediately know what to say, but Sophia knelt down to him, put an arm round him and said:

"I'm your mommy's mommy, Quinten. Your mommy is much too tired to pick you up. She's lying in a very big house with very nice people, sleeping in a bed, and she can't wake up anymore, that's how tired she is. She can't hear anyone and she can't talk to anyone."

"Not even me?"

"Not even you."

"Not even for a little bit?"

"Not even for a little bit."

"Really not even for a little tiny bit?"

And when Sophia shook her head: "Not even to Daddy and Auntie Helga?"

"Not to anyone, darling."

Thoughtfully, he put the top on the compass. "Just like Sleeping Beauty."

"Yes. Just like Sleeping Beauty."

"What about the prince, then?" he asked, looking up.

Like Max, he saw that Sophia's eyes had grown moist. Max had never seen such emotion in her before. Quinten wiped away Sophia's tears with the palm of his hand and did not ask any more questions. Max went to the mantelpiece and gave him the photograph of Ada and Onno.

"This is Mommy when she was still awake."

Quinten took the photograph in two hands and looked at the face in the square of black hair. "Beautiful."

"That's why you're so beautiful too," said Sophia.

Max expected that he would want to have the photograph, but he gave it back and went to his room. When they were alone, Max wanted to hug Sophia, but that was of course unthinkable.

"That was to be expected," he said. "And what now?"

"We must discuss it with Onno. I don't think we should return to the subject ourselves. I think that what he doesn't ask about he can't cope with."

Max nodded. "One day he'll give another sign."

Sophia brushed real or imaginary crumbs off her lap. "A few weeks ago I read him that fairy story of Sleeping Beauty, and I was halfway through before I realized what it was really about, but by that time I couldn't go back."

"Surely you don't feel guilty about it now?"

"Guilty?" she repeated, and looked at him. "Why should I be guilty about anything?"

The attack in the nursery class had of course also been provoked by Quinten's beauty. He already had his new teeth by the age of four. Theo Kern had had to open a second folder for his Quinten studies; he hadn't managed an exhibition yet, probably because he really wanted to keep them to himself. But not everyone was as jealous. Despite the sign saying NO ENTRY, ART. 461, CRIMINAL CODE by the gate with the two lions on it, cars regularly appeared in the forecourt with newly married couples, who had themselves photographed against the background of the castle, the women in long white dresses, the men in rented suits, gray top hats in their hands, since otherwise they would come down over their ears. Their faces were mostly tanned, halfway across their foreheads a sharp line where there was clammy white, where their caps usually reached.

A couple of times Quinten had already caught the photographers' eyes, after which they had rung the bell and asked Sophia if they could take a series of photos of this astonishingly beautiful boy — for advertising purposes, which would of course pay well.

The fact that he had not cried when he was hit on the head did not surprise Max and Sophia. In fact he had only really cried once. During a heat wave, in July, Sophia had put an inflatable round white plastic bath on the forecourt; when she couldn't find the air pump, she blew it up herself and half filled it with the garden hose. She lifted Quinten into it, called to Max that he should keep an eye on things, and went off to get eggs at the farm.

Half an hour later Max heard him crying. There had been a plague of flies all summer, but now the hot stones of the forecourt were suddenly covered by a black, seething carpet, which gave off a gruesome singing sound, like hundreds of cellos. Surrounded on all sides by the devilish brood, as if on an island, Quinten was standing up in the water, naked, his hands over his eyes, whining and shivering with fear. At the same moment the sight unleashed in Max a rage of an intensity he had never experienced; he himself had only a pair of swimming trunks on, and before he knew il he was running through the swarming, buzzing mass, feeling how he was crushing hundreds of flies under his bare feet, dragging Quinten out of the water in one movement and taking him to safety on the other side of the moat, in the shade under the brown oak tree.

By about his fifth birthday, in 1973—the year in which Max and Onno turned forty and Sophia fifty — Quinten had extended his territory to the whole of the wooded area. Every day he visited the former coach house where Theo Kern carved his large pieces. In the tall space full of stones and dust and tools, plaster carts, tables full of sketches, discarded furniture, and the constantly bubbling coffee machine in the corner, where everything was focused on work, he felt even more at ease than in Kern's apartment in the castle, in Selma's presence. He would sit on a lump of stone for hours watching the sculptor extracting heavily built female figures and ornaments for government buildings from the blocks, walking around over the sharp splinters in his bare feet like a fakir.

Now and then something alarming happened to him. He would suddenly stop, half close his eyes, bare his teeth to the gums, and raise his hands high in the air, shuddering, as though he had to defend himself against the image with a supreme effort. Then the good-natured gnome was suddenly changed into a ravenous beast. A moment later his face relaxed completely again, as though nothing had happened. Quinten saw that he himself no longer remembered behaving so strangely.

According to Kern, sculpture wasn't an art — anyone could do it. All you had to do, he said one day, was to remove the superfluous stone. "At least that's what Michelangelo used to say."

"Who's Michelangelo?"

"Someone like me, but different. He made that over there," — he pointed to a photograph pinned to a wooden beam with a drawing pin: a statue of a man with a wild face, a long beard, and two horns on his head.

"Is that the devil?"

"What makes you think that?"

"Well, those horns of course."

"Yes, I don't understand those either. But in any case it's Moses. Someone from the Bible."

"What's the Bible?"

Kern's mallet came to rest. "Don't you know that? Hasn't your father ever told you? A whole book of stories, which lots of people think really happened."

Quinten remembered the huge book that stood on a lectern in his grand-dad's house in The Hague from which he sometimes read aloud. That was the Bible of course.

Kern looked at the photo with a sigh.

"I couldn't make anything like that, QuQu. I get commissions from Assen Council, but he got them from the pope. You have to know your place. I myself don't really like color very much, but he could paint beautifully too. For example, he painted the Sistine Chapel — not bad at all. That's in the Vatican: the pope's family chapel."

"Who's the pope?"

"The head of the Catholics. Those are people who believe in God. And now I expect you're going to ask who God is?"

"Yes," said Quinten. He was sitting on a block of dark-blue granite, hands between his thighs, and nodded three times.

"He doesn't exist, but according to those who believe in him he made the world."

"Max says the world started with a bang."

"Then I expect that's right. In the Sistine Chapel you can see God: he's floating in the air and he's got a beard, like Moses."

"And you."

"But his isn't nice and white like mine. When you're older you must go and have a look in Rome. There's plenty more to see there, for that matter."

"How on earth can you paint someone that doesn't exist?"

"You make something up. Or you use a trick. Michelangelo simply painted some old chap or other who came into his street every day selling pizzas; he made him float in the air and then everyone said it was God. If I had to make a sculpture of God for Assen Council, then I'd simply be able to carve my own head."

"And yet," said Quinten, "you could make a sculpture of God himself perfectly easily if he doesn't exist."

"You'll have to tell me how you're supposed to do that."

"Well, you take a block of marble and you carve it until there's nothing left."

He looked at Quinten perplexed, and then burst out into a thundering laugh. "Then I take it to Assen. 'Here it is,' I'd say. 'God! Do you see! Nothing!' Do you think they'd understand? And pay me? No way! They wouldn't even pay for the marble. They're as thick as two planks."

"Who's the devil, then?"

"Christ, Quinten! Who's the devil? Why don't you ask the lady vicar. The devil is the archenemy of God!"

"Doesn't he exist either, or does he?"

"No, of course not."

"Well then, I know how you can make a statue of the devil too."

Kern lowered his mallet and chisel and looked at Quinten. "How, then?"

"You've got to fill the whole world with marble."

Quinten could see that he was confused.

"Where on earth do you get things like that from, QuQu?"

"Just like that.. " Quinten didn't understand what he meant, but he had the feeling that he should go now. He glanced at Moses; under his arm he had some large thing or other, a kind of map, which was obviously slipping out of his hands and threatening to fall on the floor, which he was just able to prevent. In real life he would probably have been a gardener or something. "Bye," he said.

Whenever he came out of the studio, there was the house in front of him. Seen from the castle, the group of outbuildings on the other side of the moat looked rather small and insignificant; the house itself, looked at from there, made a powerful, inaccessible impression. He always stood and looked at it for a few moments. He didn't think of anything — or, rather, what he thought coincided with what he saw: the castle, self-absorbed like his own thoughts, the clock with no hands above the door. Sometimes it was as though it suddenly became invisible for a split second.

To the right of Kern's studio was a smaller stable that housed the workshop of Mr. Roskam, the caretaker of Groot and Klein Rechteren, who did repairs; the door was usually locked. At the side a covered staircase led to the second floor, where different people lived every few months: sometimes a blond woman, then a man with a black goatee. He had no contact with them, but he did with Piet Keller, who lived on the other side.

On either side of the gravel path, which led to his front door past the large erratic stone, one could see the top halves of cart wheels. At first sight it looked as though someone had buried them up to the axles — but Quinten knew better. It was the other way around: they weren't sticking in but out of the earth; they weren't the top halves but the bottom halves. In fact the cart was under the path, the coach, the golden coach, which he had once seen on television: but upside down, pulled by eight horses, the coachman with the reins up in the box, all upside down in the ground, and there wasn't a queen in it but a much more beautiful woman, the most beautiful woman in the world — and the coach was standing still because they'd all fallen asleep..

When Piet Keller had once asked him why he never simply walked down the path but always around the wheels, across the grass, he had said: "Just because."

Keller was in his fifties, a skinny man with a stoop and an unhealthy complexion, usually dressed in a short beige dust coat. His wife sometimes suddenly made strange jerky movements with her whole body, which made Quinten a little afraid of her; his daughter and two sons, all three of them a head taller than he was, had reached an age at which they probably scarcely noticed Quinten. In an adjacent barn he had his workshop, and Quinten was in the habit of watching him, too, for hour after hour. He repaired old locks, which had been sent to him from miles around, not only by individuals but also by antiques dealers and museums. All around were boxes containing thousands of keys in all shapes and sizes, tins full of levers, locks, bars, tumblers, bolts, stops, and other components whose names he had taught Quinten. Countless skeleton keys hung on large iron rings.

"I've got every key," he had once said with a wink, "except musical keys and St. Peter's."

On a trestle table illuminated by a wobbly light, fixed to the wall with wire, lay the locks that he was currently dealing with; next to it was a set of shelves with countless compartments full of screws, nuts, pins, and other small items. There was also a heavy bench with a lathe and drilling and grinding machines. When Quinten was there, Keller usually accompanied his work with a mumbled, monotone commentary: not didactic, simply reporting on what he was doing and what he was thinking. Occasionally, when he was working on a heavy medieval padlock, as large as a loaf, which was locked and of which the key was missing, lyrical notes crept into his reports.

"Look at that, isn't it an angel? We call this a sliding padlock. Can you see those H-shaped grooves? That's where you have to put the key. I'm going to make it in a while. Inside there's a barrier of very strong springs; the ends are now relaxed, making them lock the shackle in the body of the lock."

"How do you know? Have you looked inside?"

"No, and I'm not going to. At least not now. First I'm going to do something quite different." From one of the storage boxes he fished out a couple of long, steel pins, which fitted in the H. Back at his bench, he lubricated them with oil and began sliding them slowly inside, with his eyes looking up, as though that was where the inside of the lock could be seen. "Yes, now I can feel the first curve in the spring blades. . yes. That's right, yes… a little further… now they're compressing.. yes. . it's difficult, it's rusty in there.. perhaps a little careful help with the hammer.. and now a couple more taps and one more, that should be enough…" There was a stiff click from inside, and he pulled the stirrup out of the lock.

He looked at Quinten with a smile. "Yes, QuQu, I could earn my living in a much easier way. But 'Thou shalt not steal.' Just ask the lady vicar."

He pulled out the pins and pushed the shackle back in again, which made a second click.

"What are you doing? It's locked again now!"

He put the monster down in front of Quinten. "You can already pick ordinary locks a bit, but try this one. Perhaps you can take over from me one day — I can't talk my own sons into it."

The lady vicar, Ms. Trip, the head of the Calvinist congregation in Hooghalen, was unmarried and lived twenty yards farther on, with her black cat, in the former gardener's house, which had a large conservatory built on. She had little contact with the other residents of Groot Rechteren— only the Verloren van Themaats occasionally had tea with her; she was a friend of the baroness's. Although she was no older than Sophia, her hair was already snow-white. When she sat on her terrace reading — Karl Barth, or a nice novel — or tended the flowers in her garden, which sloped down to a tributary of the moat, Quinten sometimes stopped and looked at her from the gate. She would give him a friendly nod, but she never waved to him, and he did not think that was necessary. She must know an awful lot, perhaps almost as much as his father, because everyone always said, "You must ask the lady vicar about that" when they did not know the answer themselves. It was mostly about God, or Jesus Christ, but he had never asked her anything. Usually he ran straight on toward the bridge.

Sophia had forbidden him to go across it: it was a very romantic, dilapidated, wobbly construction, with planks missing and which for some reason always reminded Max of a Schubert song: "Leise flehen meine Lieder durch die Nacht zu dir …" On the other side, in the shade of tall beech trees, was the orangery: a low, long building with large windows, where Seerp Verdonkschot lived with his friend. He not only lived there with his friend but also had his antiquities room there. There was scarcely ever another visitor when Quinten went in. For Verdonkschot himself was not there usually either; he worked for the post office — a gruff man, according to Max, embittered because he wasn't taken seriously as a scholar, either by the university in Groningen or by the Provincial Museum in Assen. Perhaps that was because he also put his antiquities up for sale.

His friend, Etienne, a man of about forty who was on the corpulent side, always put his head around the door and said: "Hello, beautiful, are you back? Don't pinch anything, you hear?"

On the wall were colored maps showing the extent of the Beaker culture in Drenthe, and Verdonkschot's prehistoric finds were displayed in two rows of showcases: dozens of stone arrowheads, five thousand years old, hand axes, rusty hairpins, potsherds, half-decomposed pieces of leather. It was not the objects themselves that fascinated Quinten; they didn't really appeal to him. It was the atmosphere in the brightly painted room: the orderly silence, with those dirty old things in it, which belonged deep in the earth and were now lying in the light like the guts of a fish at the fishmonger's in the village.

It was mysterious because it was really forbidden. And the strangest thing of all was the idea that all those things were lying under the glass even when no one was looking at them — at night, too, when it was dark here and he himself was in his bed. That was impossible, of course, because then they'd scream with fear and he'd hear from his bed; but he never heard screaming coming from the orangery at night. Just the call of an owl sometimes. So they only existed when he saw them.

Outside, he always climbed straight onto the erratic stone, which had appeared there too. He sat down and waited until Verdonkschot's goat Gijs came toward him with lopsided leaps. If Gijs had been able, he would definitely have given him a butt with his horns, but the rope was just too short for that.

Then Quinten would talk to him: "Why are you always so rotten to me?" He put out his hand to stroke the goat's head; but that was always refused with an abrupt movement. "I haven't done anything to hurt you, have I? I like you. I think you're much nicer than Arendje, for example — he bangs into people with his head down like that sometimes too. I think you're just about as nice as Max, but not nearly as nice as Daddy. Daddy's the nicest person in the world. When we go for walks he always tells me lots of things. He can speak every language and read hieroglyphics. Do you know why I can't go and live with him? Because he's so busy playing boss. That's why he hardly ever comes. He's the boss of at least a million million people. Auntie Helga doesn't live with him either. I've never been to his house, but he lives in a castle in Amsterdam. When I'm grown-up I'm going to see him there. Then you can come too. Do you know who I think is nicest of all? Mommy. Mommy's really tired, Granny says. Mommy fell asleep. Do you know what made her so tired? I bet you don't. But I do. Shall I tell you? But you mustn't tell anyone, do you hear? Because it's a secret. Do you promise, Gijs? It's because she always had to wave to everybody in the gold coach."

40. The World of Words

Meanwhile, Onno had gotten busier and busier playing boss. Late one evening, during the closing stages of cabinet formation, after he had been to see Helga and had drunk a couple of rum-and-Cokes on his way home, the man charged with the task of forming the cabinet called and asked if he wanted to be minister of state for science policy.

"Since when has that been a matter for the person forming the cabinet?"

"I'm ringing on behalf of your minister."

"Can I think about it for a little?"

"No."

"Not even for five minutes?"

"No. The whole business has to be completely sewn up within twenty-four hours — the whole damn fuss has been going on for more than five months. There are rumblings in the land."

"To what do I owe the honor, Janus?"

"Indirectly to the suggestion of a friend of yours, a certain pub-crawler from your town: the new minister of housing."

"And my own minister? Does she know that I'm extraordinarily ill-disposed toward science?"

"Yes, yes, Onno. I'm sure it will get you into difficulties in the cabinet. Come on, I've got plenty else to do. Yes or no?"

"If it's a matter of the national interesi:, everything else must be put aside. Yes."

"Fine. I'll expect you sober at General Affairs in The Hague tomorrow morning at ten o'clock. We're going to do a good job. Goodnight."

That had suddenly changed everything. He was not unhappy being an alderman, which he had now been for four years; although government had less and less influence every year, in a number of respects his job had more direct power than being a minister of state, who was hidden behind a secretary of state. In local politics he had direct contact with people; in national politics that would no longer be the case. For precisely that power sometimes filled him with disgust, as though he had suffered a defeat; exerting power was necessary to make society function, but at the same time there was something unmistakably plebeian about it.

There was also the advantage that as an alderman he worked in Amsterdam and not in that stuffy lair of civil servants The Hague, from which he had once fled and to which he would now have to go every day — it was a blessing for Amsterdam that the seat of government was not in the capital. But with a feeling of shame, he also realized immediately why he had said yes: to please his father and to put his eldest brother's nose out of joint. They would know immediately that he was going to be a minister one day: the highest state of political happiness.

Still looking at the telephone, he was suddenly amazed that in response to the question "Yes or no?" uttering the short sound no wouldn't have changed a thing in his life, while enunciating the equally short sound yes had changed a lot — while the spectrograms of the two sounds could only have been identified by experienced phoneticians. And if he had said ken, nothing would have changed either, although that also meant "yes," but in Hebrew. It was all obvious, bread-and-butter stuff to him, as easy as ABC, but suddenly it disturbed him, while at the same time he was really disturbed about being disturbed.

After saying yes, he had even less time for visits to Groot Rechteren: from then on Quinten saw him more often on television than in real life. By now he was in the first grade at the elementary school in Westerbork; and on one of Onno's sporadic visits — in a large dark-blue official car with two antennas, after he opened an institute of technology in Leeuwarden — Quinten told Sophia proudly that he knew how to read.

"Show Daddy what you can do," she said, and gave him the book.

" 'Pirn is in the wood,' " read Quinten, without using his forefinger. But before Onno was able to praise him, he looked at the newspaper lying on the ground and read the headline: " 'Cambodian President Lon Nol extends special powers.' " In the astonished silence that ensued, he said, "I didn't learn it at school at all. I've been able to do it for ages."

Max was the first one to say anything. "Who did you learn it from, then?"

"From Mr. Spier."

He could not understand what was so special about it. In Mr. Spier's immaculately tidy study, with the sloping drawing board, which looked out onto the woods behind the castle, his new letter designs were pinned alphabetically on the wall: twenty-six large sheets of squared paper, each of them with a capital and small letter, which he called "upper case" and "lower case." Mr. Spier — who was always immaculately dressed when working, with a tie, coat, and pocket handkerchief — had not only told him everything about "body of type," "serif," "flag," "tail," but for a couple of days in succession had taken him by the hand and conducted him along the wall step by step, pointing to letter after letter and speaking it, and making Quinten repeat it after him. That way it was as easy as pie! At the letter 0 Mr. Spier had always raised his forefinger meaningfully. He had called his new typeface Judith, after his wife. He also designed postage stamps and banknotes, but he only did that at the printer's in Haarlem, under police guard, because that was of course top secret. Inside it always made him laugh a bit, he said; in the war, when he had had to hide because Hitler wanted to kill him, he himself had forged all kinds of things: German stamps; identity cards.

"Who's Hitler?"

"Isn't it wonderful that there are once again people who don't know. Hitler was the head of the Germans, who wanted to kill all the Jews."

"Why?"

"Because he was afraid of them."

"What are Jews?"

"Yes, well lots of people have been asking themselves that for a long time, QuQu — the Jews themselves as well. Perhaps that's why he was frightened of them. But he didn't succeed."

"So are you a Jew too?"

"You bet."

"But I'm not frightened of you." And when Mr. Spier smiled: "Am I a Jew?"

"Quite the opposite, as far as I know."

"Quite the opposite?"

"I'm just joking. Jews often do that when they talk about Jews."

"What's wrong, Quinten?" asked Sophia. "What are you thinking about?"

"Nothing."

Max could still not understand. "Why did you never tell us you could read?"

Quinten shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

"His lordship confronts us with new mysteries every day," said Sophia.

"He has a congenital defect of being highly gifted." Onno nodded. "Shall I test him again?" And then he said to Quinten, "Can you see anything funny in the name Lon Nol?"

"There's a mirror in between," said Quinten immediately.

"You can't believe your ears!" cried Max — with double joy: there could no longer be any doubt who had contributed the hereditary factors here!

"Just like. .?" Onno went on.

Quinten thought for a moment, but didn't know.

"Me," said Onno. He was going to say Ada too, but he didn't; anyway it wasn't quite right: the d in the middle was not itself symmetrical.

"Of course!" said Quinten, laughing and covered the two l's with his two forefingers. "You're in it!"

"I'm in Lon Nol. ." repeated Onno. "If my party leader should hear, it will harm my career."

"That rhymes," said Quinten, "so it's true."

Max burst out laughing. "At last someone who takes poetry seriously."

"A while ago," Onno told them, "I was also asked to read aloud. By the P.P.S."

"What's the P.P.S.?" asked Sophia.

"Who is the P.P.S.? The permanent parliamentary secretary, the top official in the department who outlasts all the politicians — the representative of eternity."

"What did he want you to read?" asked Max.

"Everything, the whole time. Of course I wouldn't have dreamed of reading something from a piece of paper in Parliament, like the honorable members almost all do — I've always spoken my shattering truths impromptu. But he said that created bad blood, and that by doing it I was confronting them with their own bungling and they would take revenge. In his view oratorical talent was undesirable in Dutch politics — and what do you think? Since then I have deigned to put some papers in front of me, sometimes blank sheets, so that the chamber at least has the impression that I am reading from notes. Doesn't it make you want to hang yourself?"

And when Max laughed, he went on:

"Yes, you're laughing, but I'm sinking farther and farther into the morass of decline. In politics everything hinges on words. It's a disgusting world of words."

"Well, to me," said Max, "a world of words seems just the place for you."

"But not in this way. When I used to decipher texts in the dim and distant past, that consisted of actions, which were separate from the text even though I was only substituting one word for another. Can you follow me?"

"Even when everyone else has long ceased to follow you, Onno, I shall still follow you."

"But in politics the words themselves are the deeds, and that's something quite different. When you're sitting there in Westerbork and listening to the rustlings from the depths of the universe, I listen to words from early in the morning to late at night: at the ministry, in Parliament, in the coffee lounge, at party headquarters, during committee meetings, on the telephone, in the car, at cocktail parties, at dinners and receptions, and on working visits, from people who whisper something in my ear, who thrust information at me in notes, even if it's only 'Be careful of that guy' or some such thing. And I myself keep on saying all kinds of things to everyone on such occasions, and at press conferences or interviews in the paper and on television. I try to persuade, influence people. That's politics, power: it's all verbal, a continuous blizzard of words. But it's not just speaking, it's making statements. It's action; it's doing something without doing anything. Of course it's wonderful if you can change and improve things — I won't say a word against that— but the realization that it all happens like that is beginning to gnaw at me."

"Why? What could be nicer than doing things with words? Does a writer do anything else? And what about God?"

"Yes," said Onno. "Let's take God. That can never do any harm. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.' "

"Is that from the Bible?" asked Quinten.

"It certainly is! So according to St. John, the creator coincided with the word of creation, and according to the psalmist that was at the same time creation itself: 'He speaks and it is there.' God, Word, World — they're all identical. Nothing more political than Christian theology is conceivable."

"You can also turn it around, and say that it means politics are a religious matter," said Max.

"Do you know whom you're talking to? 'Government is the servant of God armed with a sword': I imbibed that with my mother's milk. It's just that the Christian dogs have never looked at it from the point of view of the philosophy of language. Anyway, that applies not just to politics. When I once said 'I do' at the town hall on your birthday, that was more of an action than a statement, or when I called that strange creature there Quinten. But I wasn't cut out for God, like you perhaps. There's a bad smell about doing things verbally without doing anything. Something that I don't like about it is a certain — how shall I say.. immoral dimension."

"Immoral dimension…" repeated Max. "That doesn't sound too good." He had to force himself not to look at Sophia — suddenly he had the feeling that Onno was really speaking about his clandestine relationship with her, but of course that was nonsense.

"The emperor Napoleon beautified Paris," said Onno, and was suddenly silent. Max nodded and waited for what came next. "King Solomon built the first temple in Jerusalem."

"I expect that's from the Bible too," said Quinten.

"Everything is always from the Bible."

"And what about Napoleon and Solomon?" inquired Max.

"The thing is that in the whole of his life King Solomon never once put one brick on top of another. So he didn't build it. He commissioned his architect to build a temple, but he didn't build it, either. It was built by anonymous workers. What right has the person who has least to do with it to take the credit for it?"

"Because it would not have been built without him."

"And it would have been built without the architect? And without the workers? And yet Solomon is of course the sole builder of the temple — the grounds of his power and a deed consisting of three words: 'Build a temple!.' Or rather two: 'Tiwne migdásh!' Build obviously means saying 'Build.' Isn't that indecent?"

"Exactly," said Max, who suddenly felt criticized in some way. "And having a temple built is still something noble, but take the example of being given an order to do something criminal." He turned to Sophia. "Tell him what you heard yesterday — about that cap."

Sophia looked at the paper pattern that she was pinning to a piece of cloth. Max and Onno could see that she had to concentrate for a moment: these kinds of conversations tended to pass her by. Probably, she thought it was all boyish nonsense.

Yesterday Mr. Roskam, the caretaker, had been invited to coffee, and he had told her about his father, who had been gardener under the father of the present baron. When Mr. Roskam was the same age as Quinten, he had once gone with his father to the orangery, which was still in use as a winter garden. On the threshold the old Gevers had stood, also with his son, also about six at the time, and he had glanced at Mr. Roskam's father's cap. "Fetch a spade, my man." His father had fetched a spade. "Dig a hole." His father had dug a hole. "Throw your cap in. I want that filthy thing out of my sight." His father had buried his cap and stamped down the earth with his clogs, while the two boys looked on. Fifty years later Mr. Roskam still trembled as he talked about it. His father had thought that he would be given a new cap, but that hadn't happened.

"Mr. Roskam?" asked Quinten, who had listened open-mouthed.

"Right," said Onno. "When I hear something like that I remember why I'm left-wing."

"As you say," said Max in an agitated voice, "the immoral thing is that commands like that are possible. 'Build a temple!' 'Bury your cap!' Take Hitler. He once gave Himmler his very personal order: 'Kill all Jews!'—of course only verbally. But he himself never murdered a Jew, nor did Himmler or Heydrich or Eichmann; that was finally done by the lowliest foot-soldiers. And in Auschwitz it was even more idiotic; there the Zyklon-B had to be thrown into the gas chambers by Jewish prisoners. So there you had the spectacle of the actual murder not being committed by the murderers but by the victims. Whoever did it didn't do it, and whoever didn't do it did it." He met a look from Sophia and suddenly checked himself. So as not to burden Quinten with the past, he never talked about those things when he was there — and actually, not even when he wasn't there.

"That's what I mean," said Onno. "The Führer's orders have the force of law. With Hitler you always find everything in its purest form. If words become deeds, deeds evaporate and the hell of paradox opens up and engulfs everything. There's something completely wrong with the world, and at the same time it can't be any different than it is. Perhaps it's my midlife crisis, but on rainy afternoons, toward dusk, I gaze out of a window at the ministry sometimes and already look forward to the day when I leave politics. Everyone in The Hague precisely wallows in that immoral constellation, but I will be happy when I can talk just as I normally do — like now. If I want to do something, I want to do it by doing it — like all decent people. Just now I opened an institute in Leeuwarden: with words, which were a deed; and afterward I had to do something else, namely pull a curtain off a statue. So that was a deed that wasn't a deed but a symbolic act. That's an ignoble existence! And if the day is even gloomier, I sometimes think of the queen in her deathly quiet palace: Her Majesty has to perform such nonacts day in day out, all her life, never being able to speak her own words, only ours. One ought to abolish the monarchy out of pure politeness."

He got up and stood at the window. "Politics," he said after a while, "harms everyone's soul. In politics your potential archenemy is always in the first row of the auditorium. That's why I have to distrust everyone — my friends first and foremost; and that in turn means that I constantly have to despise myself."

No one said anything else. Max looked in alarm at his hands, Quinten at his father's powerful back, while the words that he had heard swirled through his head like a swarm of bees.

After a while Onno turned around and said to Max: "Of course you were intending to lobby for your toy again, weren't you? Those completely superfluous thirteenth and fourteenth telescopes. I realize I've now made that virtually impossible for you. But because I would be playing politics again by using that, I shall in my infinite goodness not do so."

With relief Max realized that Onno's remark about friends he could not trust was not addressed to him.

" 'Build two mirrors!' " he said in the same tone in which Onno had quoted Solomon. "I don't know how you say that in Hebrew."

"Tiwne shté mar'ot! I regard it as wasted public money, social relevance nil, but I can tell you that I've meanwhile found a gap for it, at the expense of a couple of institutes abroad, which won't thank me. King Onno — builder of two mirrors in Westerbork," he said in an august tone. "When I can't even grind a pair of lenses, like Spinoza. What a wonderfully good person I am." He looked around. "What's happened to Quinten?"

"You never know with him," said Sophia.

Quinten had gone outside. In the forecourt stood the car with the two aerials — which one moment was standing still and next could be traveling at eighty miles an hour. The chauffeur was smoking a cigarette on the balustrade of the moat and gave him a friendly nod. Quinten thought the car was nicer than Uncle Diederic's, the governor's. He walked pensively across the bridge and glanced at the two wheels by the path to Piet Keller's door. The queen was sitting in her deathly quiet palace and wasn't allowed to say anything. Now he as quite sure: the queen was his mother. Otherwise his father would surely not be in the government and not have such a beautiful car, with a chauffeur; and his uncle was her governor in Drenthe, in that fancy house in Assen, looking after him. But his father had kept it hidden from him too, because of course it was a secret.

Perhaps they knew about it at school, otherwise they wouldn't be so rotten to him. They were jealous, because they themselves all had ordinary mothers, with flowered dresses and curls, and they lived on farms or in funny little houses that were stuck together. He could understand the children in his class, but they spoke differently from him, and their faces were different. Their hair was sometimes almost white and their eyes were like fishes' eyes. The boys liked soccer, which went against the grain with him, being the queen's son. Such a lovely round ball — who would think of kicking it? You might just as well kick people. You didn't do things like that as the queen's son. But the Jews all had to be killed, said Hitler, in gas chambers — Max had been talking about that again.

Perhaps he was a Jew himself; he must ask him. Max got very excited when he started talking about Hitler. What a rotter: wanting to kill Mr. Spier. . When he thought of "Hitler," he saw a huge muscular figure in front of him, a cannibal with long blond hair waving in the wind, who slept in a giant's bed on the heath at night.

"Watch where you're going, QuQu!"

He looked up. Selma Kern cycled past in her enormous dress. The statue his father had unveiled today might have been carved by Kern. You only had to take away the superfluous stone, and then a cloth. Perhaps Mr. Kern sometimes pulled that frock off Mrs. Kern, so that she suddenly stood naked in the room. He started laughing. What a sight! And maybe Max did that with Granny — when she crept into his bed at night, because she was cold; but he didn't want to think any more about that.

He looked at Kern's studio: he wasn't there; the padlock was on the door.

The door of Mr. Roskam's workshop was open — he could see him shuffling around in the dark. His father had had to bury his cap. Just imagine, his father had to bury his cap on the orders of the baron. He'd never do that! Anyway, he didn't even have a cap. I wonder if Mr. Roskam ever talked about it to the baron — I'm sure he didn't. He was obviously very ashamed, or perhaps he'd forgotten about it.

He walked past the lady vicar's house to the orangery, where Etienne was just driving off in his car. He turned down the window and said: "You can't go in now, beautiful. I have to run to the village. Come back tomorrow."

Once he had heard the loose planks of the bridge bumping, he carefully considered the situation. Mr. Roskam and his father had come out of the gardener's house, where the lady vicar now lived, and the old baron had stood with his son there on the threshold. So the Roskams must have been standing more or less on the same spot where he was now. But the ground was hard here; you couldn't dig a hole here. He looked around to see where he would dig a hole if he had to. He took a couple of steps from the hardened section to the start of the soft forest ground, which was now covered with fallen leaves. He took a stone and put it on the spot where the cap must be. Then he ran back to Mr. Roskam.

He was already old. He was trying to twist a nut off a tap with a pair of pliers, but didn't really have the strength anymore. When Quinten looked into his sad eyes, he wanted to say right away that he'd found his father's cap, but he preferred to surprise him.

"Well, QuQu, on the warpath?"

"Can I borrow a spade from you?"

"Buried treasure?"

"Yes," said Quinten.

"They're over there. Take the small one. But bring it back, mind, and not too late — it's getting dark earlier again."

Back at the orangery he moved the small erratic stone aside, brushed away the leaves with one foot, and stuck the spade in the ground. How deep would the cap be? No more than a foot or two. In order to increase the chance of finding it, he decided to dig a trench about a yard long, then he was sure to find it. Carefully, so as not to damage the hat even more than it already was after fifty years, he began shoveling the earth away. A few inches down he struck a stone, which he threw aside. A little later another stone appeared. He started to get worried that the cap was farther back, or to the side, but of course he couldn't dig up the whole area. It was just as well he hadn't said anything to Mr. Roskam. It was already growing dark. Suddenly there were four arrowheads on his spade, just like those in the orangery in Verdonkschot's windows. Antiquities!

He made a much bigger find than a cap! Wouldn't Etienne and Mr. Verdonkschot be pleased! He looked again at the two stones that he had thrown aside. No doubt about it! Hand axes.

Excitedly, he stuffed the finds in his pockets, filled up the trench, stamped down the ground, and brushed the leaves back in place so that no one else would have the idea of coming to look for prehistoric remains here. He was also glad that Gijs was in his shed and couldn't have seen him working. He decided not to say anything to Mr. Roskam, because he might ask him why he had started digging there; and what was he supposed to say then?

The light in the workshop was on, but the nut still wasn't loosened.

"Well?" said Mr. Roskam without looking up, when Quinten put back the spade. "Did you find any?"

"Yes."

"Good."

Fortunately he didn't ask anything else. But the chauffeur had gone and sat in the car, from which soft music was issuing. The engine was running almost inaudibly; he had obviously gotten cold. Upstairs at the front there was no light on, but when he came in everyone was sitting in the same places in the dusk.

"You've been up to something," said Sophia.

"I've been looking for Mr. Roskam's father's cap."

There was a silence, which was only broken after a considerable time by Max: "Mr. Roskam's father's cap. . you've been looking for it. .?"

"Yes."

"Well?" asked Onno.

"I dug a trench and look what I found."

He emptied his pockets on the table and put the light on. All three of them stood up and bent over the artifacts.

"Fantastic!" cried Max. "Quinten! Unbelievable!" And to Onno he said, "This is unbelievably ironic. God knows all the places that man goes digging, and it's right outside his door."

"Yes," said Onno thoughtfully, holding an arrowhead close to the lamp.

"Such is life," said Sophia.

"Perhaps it's not that odd," speculated Max. "The fact that there's been a castle here for centuries might well indicate that this place was already inhabited in the Stone Age."

"So were all those things in a line?" Onno asked Quinten.

"Yes."

Onno blew on the arrowhead, moistened it with a little spit, and studied it closely again. Then he looked at Max and said: "I'm not an archaeologist, but from my previous life I have some experience of a certain kind of archaeologist. Shall I tell you what I think? That gentleman there in the orangery. . What's his name?"

"Verdonkschot."

"That Mr. Verdonkschot made these things himself and put them in the ground, where he lets them go prehistoric for a few years and then sells them for a bundle. I'd swear to it. That whole collection of his is fake, of course."

Max looked at him flabbergasted and then sank back on the sofa. "Of course!" he cried. "Of course!"

"Okay, you can laugh," said Onno, "because you always laugh. But we've still got a problem. One fine day those con men are going to realize that something's missing and that they've been found out."

"Shall I put them back?" asked Quinten.

"Can they see that you've been digging there?"

"I pushed the leaves back on top."

"Very good. It's October now, and by the time the ground is visible again it'll be February or March next year. And all the traces of your digging will be gone. The stuff will have just disappeared; that's their problem. Perhaps they only dig up their goods after three or four years, because if you ask me they don't look nearly old enough yet. No, there's probably no problem. Throw that rubbish straight in the dustbin."

"What villains!" said Quinten indignantly. "Shouldn't we report them to the police?"

"Absolutely," said Onno. "Legally that's our duty, in fact. But I suggest not doing it, because it's not pleasant work. Naturally it's shameful that I should say so as a minister, but the police can't blame us for not having the idea that we had immediately, of course."

Obviously, the police had other channels for discovering the truth, because a year later a blue police van suddenly appeared at the orangery, policemen in sweaters without hats on threw the contents of the display cabinets into plastic garbage bags, and, under the silent gaze of almost all the residents, Etienne and Mr. Verdonkschot were arrested. Quinten shivered when he saw them getting so helplessly into the van. He looked up at Sophia and whispered, "Daddy's always right" — at which she put a finger to her lips. Just imagine, he thought, that this had happened because his father had reported them. Etienne gave him a wave from behind the barred window.

The following day it was even in the national papers. This made the position of the two friends at Groot Rechteren untenable, and the baron immediately gave them notice to quit. Piet Keller's wife looked after the goat for another week, but after their move it disappeared too and the orangery remained uninhabited.

Quinten missed the animal most. Weeks later he sometimes sat down on the large stone and saw Gijs leaping toward him in his lopsided way — but he wasn't there. The sky was empty, and the emptiness and the absence so unfathomable and complete that he could scarcely bear it. It was as though the whole world were affected by it — the woods, the castle, everything was filled with Gijs's impossible absence in that spot, so everything that was there in some way wasn't there, actually couldn't be there, or wouldn't be there. Who was he going to talk to now? Once he had burst into sobs on the stone, and decided not to go there anymore.

He had a similar feeling when at the end of the summer there was a plague of wasps. There were screens over all the windows, but it was as though they penetrated the thick walls. There were scores of them buzzing in every room on the ceilings with their black and yellow bodies: that nasty color combination, with which they proclaimed that there was no mercy to be expected from them. Actually that was pretty stupid of them, thought Quinten; if you were a villain, you didn't flaunt it, and you really ought to clothe yourself in soft blue or pink. But of course it was to frighten off greedy birds. No one understood where they suddenly appeared from; apart from that, it looked as though there were more wasps inside than outside, so the screens were probably having the reverse effect.

One afternoon when he was wandering through the back attic he suddenly stopped and cocked his head to one side as he listened. He was aware that the whole time there was a scarcely audible trembling in the air, almost more a feeling than a sound. Here too there were wasps buzzing close to the beams, but the sound was coming from somewhere else: from the direction of Gevers's storage rooms. He stopped at a closed door. He knew that it led to a small room, really more a cupboard, where the washerwoman had perhaps once slept, but which now contained only a few rusty bed springs. Cautiously, he pushed down the handle and slowly opened the door. He froze. It was as though he were seeing something holy, that he was not allowed to see.

The wasp's nest hung from the ceiling like a huge drop from another world — slightly off-center but completely in accordance with the Golden Section, which Mr. Themaat had taught him. It seemed to be made of dusty gold. Hundreds of wasps were walking over it, slipping in and out of the opening and flying back and forth through the room, almost without buzzing, as if not to disturb the queen who was laying her eggs there in the dark interior. Suddenly they no longer seemed dangerous, just modest and charming. The window was closed. When he gently closed the door it was as though the vision of the secret had nestled deep inside him, as though he had swallowed it. In the front loft he met Arend — who was now in sixth grade and didn't want to be called Arendje anymore. When Quinten told him about his discovery he went there in disbelief, opened the door ajar, and cried, "Christ Almighty!" quickly closed the door, and fetched his father. "Very good, QuQu," said Proctor, and immediately took steps.

Half an hour later, to Quinten's dismay, the farmhand from a neighboring farm appeared in the stairwell with a spray of pesticide on his back. When he got upstairs he asked for a broom, opened the door, and immediately knocked the nest off the ceiling, took a couple of quick steps backward, and for ten or fifteen seconds sprayed a thick mist of poison gas inside, after which he aimed particularly at the fallen nest, made another sweeping movement through the whole room, and nodded to Proctor with a smile, indicating that he could close the door. After that everyone had looked in astonishment at Quinten, who had suddenly gone pale and had to be sick.

Because the farmer had said that it would be best if everyone kept out of the room for a week, Quinten was the only person who still thought about the nest. Because he had blurted out the secret with such fateful results, he felt he had something to make up to them. Meanwhile the wasps had disappeared from the castle, and from the stuffed bottom drawer of the kitchen cabinet he had taken a plastic bag. When he got upstairs, the stuffy room had lost its enchantment. Around the shattered nest the floor was strewn with dead, dried wasps. The whole state had been wiped out — he had heard from Piet Keller that the population of wasps was called a state. The nest was now pale, like old packing paper; it felt like it too. He took it in both hands. It was very light — it had almost the opposite of a weight, like a gas-filled balloon. He put it carefully in the plastic bag. Outside, he borrowed a spade from Mr. Roskam, buried it under the brown oak tree, and marked the mass grave with a stone, which he could see from the castle.

41. Absences

Quinten was seven when Max suddenly lit a candle twice in two weeks. First Quinten heard that his great-grandmother, old Mrs. Haken, had died; and then that his grandfather Hendrikus Jacobus Andreas Quist, prime minister, Grand Cross of the Order of Orange, Grand Cross of the Order of the Dutch Lion, Grand Cross of the Order of Orange-Nassau, etc., etc., had passed away peacefully at the age of ninety-four. In the three-column announcement of his death, followed by ten more in which he was mourned, among the long list of members of the family was the name Quinten Quist, Westerbork. Max showed it to him, at the same moment regretting that he had done so: it might lead to a difficult question. But it didn't come; it had obviously not occurred to him. When he'd gone to bed, Max spoke to Sophia about the fact that Ada Quist, née Brons, Emmen, had not been listed in the notice. She thought that this was right, because her daughter no longer existed. Onno had called her about it — she'd forgotten to say; she had agreed with him.

Quinten did not attend the cremation of Sophia's mother. Max agreed that he should not be burdened with sadness about someone of three generations ago, whom he had scarcely known; but there was no question of his staying away from the funeral of Onno's father. He had been to see his grandparents in The Hague a few times, and he saw the rest of his family too, incidentally, at birthdays and parties. Occasionally, a cousin of his came to stay at Groot Rechteren, but he did not have much affinity with them. The family too, for its part, seemed to regard him more as a kind of corresponding member: if Onno was already something of an odd man out among the Quists — although somewhat less so the last few years — Quinten, brought up by his grandmother and a total stranger, was from a different world in their eyes. Moreover, his beauty was "un-Quistian," as his aunt Antonia put it: Quists were not beautiful. In fact beauty was inappropriate for respectable people.

In order to spare sensibilities Helga did not attend the funeral, and Max's instinct also told him that he did not belong there. He took Quinten and Sophia to The Hague, to the ministry, where they were received by Mrs. Siliakus, whom Onno had kept as his secretary; Max himself drove on to Leiden, to the observatory.

Onno sat at his desk, above his head a portrait of the queen, and was talking to a civil servant.

"Alone in the world!" he cried with feigned despair when they came in — but it was less despair that he was enacting than the artificial nature of that despair.

After he had put his signature — which looked like a lion tamer's whip at the moment of the crack — to a few things, had had one last telephone conversation, and had put his head around the door here and there in the silent corridors, they drove to the Statenlaan in his car. Behind closed curtains, scores of family members and close friends were assembled and were conversing in muted voices. Coffee was poured for them by Coba, and they were taking gingersnaps from a large dish.

It was apparent in all kinds of ways that Onno was now in the position of highest authority in the clan: compared with the deceased, of course, a mere nothing — a lowly minister of state — but the deceased was dead. People moved aside, the governor shook his hand, the public prosecutor looked deep into his eyes. He kissed Dol and put an arm around his mother's shoulders as she sat in a wheelchair. She began crying when she saw him. Then, holding Quinten by the hand, he went into the front room, where candles were burning and there was the stifling smell of piles of flowers. The old Quist, after a life devoted to queen and fatherland, lay in state next to the lectern with the huge, open Authorized Version.

Quinten started. He was actually lying in a box—they had put Granddad in a box! His face, which lay on the satin cushion, had changed beyond recognition. He remembered the full, heavy, powerful face, which still had something good-natured about it. Now suddenly the marble statue of a bird of prey was lying there, a fanatical hawk, like he had seen a few times swooping as the flapping doom of a field mouse. There were strange blotches on the skin of his forehead and temples; something was gleaming between his lips, as though they'd been stuck together with glue.

"Is that really Granddad?" he whispered.

"No," said Onno. "Granddad doesn't exist anymore."

On the other side of the coffin, his sister Trees shot him a reproachful look. "Granddad has left this earthly life for eternity," she said to Quinten.

He looked agog at the motionless contents of the coffin, without understanding what he saw. Something impossible was lying there. Everything that he had seen up to now in his life had been possible, because it was there; but now there was something lying there that couldn't possibly be seen and that he still saw. It was Granddad and it wasn't Granddad!

Trees suddenly began reading quietly from the open Bible: " 'And he saith unto him: Verily, verily I say unto you: hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.' "

Quinten looked at her in astonishment, and at the same time saw the thin, winding line of ants climbing and descending up the doors of the sink when sugar had been spilled.

Onno had to control himself not to snap at her that she herself definitely preferred the social ladder to that of Jacob; that insufferable reading aloud was of course only apparently intended for Quinten.

A little later six men in black appeared, with a lid. Quinten saw Granny To, supported by Uncle Diederic, place a last kiss on Granddad's forehead, after which the lid was lifted over the coffin. He saw the shadow fall across Granddad's face and bent his knees a little to catch the very last glimpse; at the moment that it disappeared in the darkness and wood struck wood, he heard a deep sob escape from Onno's breast, like an animal that had been imprisoned and was now finally set free. He looked at him and took his hand — and when Onno felt the small hand in his, it was as if he were his son's son.

Quinten shivered for a moment when he suddenly saw the long line of large, black limousines all waiting outside. Across the street neighbors with their arms folded watched who came out of the mansion; the police had also appeared. Two motorcycle policemen at the head of the cortege, one boot on the road, looked coolly ahead with engines running as if they owned death.

The coffin was slid into the first car, the flowers and wreaths into the following two cars. On the instructions of a balding man with papers in his hands who was leaping back and forth, Quinten was allotted his place in the third following car, on a folding chair opposite Sophia, Diederic's son Hans, now ambassador in Liberia, and Hadewych; Onno had sat next to the chauffeur. They drove to Wassenaar at an otherworldly pace, with saluting policemen at every junction. At a church in the center of the village, where spectators were kept at a distance by crowd barriers, there were many large cars already parked; except for a television news team, photographers, chauffeurs, and large numbers of police, there were in fact few people to be seen. Organ music sounded from the open doors, but shortly afterward stopped.

When Quinten went inside, he was overwhelmed by the fullness and at the same time silence. Everyone in the packed church had stood up. The first two rows were empty; as he went to the pew the man with the papers directed them to, in the middle of the second row he saw the gray-haired queen standing in the middle of the third row. Not only had she turned her gaze on him, it was as though everyone were looking at him; but he had gradually gotten used to the fact that the whole world found him beautiful.

With the queen just behind him and Granny To just in front in her wheelchair, he heard the vicar and the psalms and songs, but he didn't listen. He hadn't thought about it for quite some time, but the queen was of course not his mother, because not only was she not sleeping, she was also far too old; apart from that, she had not given any sign of recognition. On one side of him sat Granny Sophia, on the other side Rudy from Rotterdam, the same age as himself. With one finger Rudy kept an elastic band pressed against his thigh which he kept stretching and letting go of with his other hand — until Paula, his mother, suddenly took it from him.

When it was finally over and he was walking behind the coffin between Onno and Sophia, along a narrow path between the graves, Quinten suddenly asked:

"Daddy?"

"Yes?"

"Why wasn't Mommy in that big advertisement in the paper?"

Onno looked at him and didn't know immediately what to answer. He had thought long and hard about it and talked to Helga and Dol about it. Both of them thought that Ada should be included, even if she was unreachable; but in his view she was not "unreachable," because that implied the possibility of her being reached, and that simply didn't exist. Could you say of a vegetable that it was "unreachable"? His sister had called that "playing with words," but he had retorted that he obviously had a different view of both words and play. Only his mother-in-law had agreed with him; no one had thought of Quinten. Flustered, Onno glanced at Sophia. It was the second time in his life that Quinten had said something about Ada.

"We mustn't disturb Mama at all." He heard it coming from his own mouth, realizing at once that it contradicted his real motive.

"Will she wake up otherwise?"

Onno looked at Sophia, appealing for help.

"No, darling," she said. "She can't do that ever again."

Quinten nodded without saying anything.

The old village cemetery was far too small to fit everybody. When they stood in a semicircle around the grave, the queen now hand in hand with Granny To, the stationary line still wound its way back along the paths into the church. Many people were carrying bouquets — still more flowers: why flowers, of all things? Wouldn't stones be far better? While the prime minister outlined the inestimable services the deceased had rendered to the country, Quinten looked at the coffin with his hand in Onno's. It was flanked by the six men in black; against the wall of the cemetery, four ancient gentlemen stood in line, each with a colored ribbon in his buttonhole. Between the pine branches he saw the darkness of the hole into which Granddad would soon disappear forever.

"Daddy?" he whispered, when the prime minister had finished. He looked up: only then did he see that Onno's cheeks were covered in tears. He did not dare ask anything else, but Onno said in a hoarse voice:

"Yes?"

"I'd really like to see Mama."

Onno closed his eyes and nodded in silence.

At the age of four he had first said something about his mother; now he was almost twice as old. He did not even know anything about the accident; he also appeared to have forgotten that Ada's photograph was on the mantelpiece — no one had ever seen him looking at it. Everyone agreed that he should only go to see his mother accompanied by his father. A week later Onno got Mrs. Siliakus to cancel an appointment with Philips Laboratories; then she called the nursing home and on behalf of the minister of state requested that the drip feed be removed from Ada's nose temporarily the following afternoon. Although he still had very little time, he picked up Quinten from the castle, after which they drove at a hundred miles an hour down the provincial highway to Emmen. He still had a discussion with the management of the gas union in Groingen on his schedule; that evening he had to attend a state banquet in The Hague in honor of an African president whose name he had forgotten — without Helga, because concubines were not welcome at court.

They sat together on the backseat, but they still said nothing about Ada. When Onno asked what he had been up to, Quinten said that he had recently been in Theo Kern's studio. The sculptor had been working on some memorial stone or other; the letters that were supposed to go on it, he carved not from left to right, as you would think, but from right to left; he said that it was easier: he held the chisel in his left hand and the hammer in his right, so it was easier to work from right to left.

Quinten demonstrated and asked: "Could that be connected with the fact that people used to write from right to left? Because most people are right-handed?"

Onno opened his eyes wide for a moment and sighed deeply. "Yes, Quinten," he said. "Yes, that's probably a lot to do with it. From a political point of view too."

"I thought so."

"And who told you that people used to write from right to left?"

"Mr. Spier."

Onno suddenly had the feeling that one day he might be able to learn something from his son. Then he fell silent when he thought of the fact that he was contributing scarcely anything to his upbringing — even less than someone like Mr. Spier and the other residents of the castle. Of course, he could again resolve to devote more time to him, but again nothing would come of it.

When they were approaching Emmen, the driver looked in his mirror and said: "The police are after us."

Onno turned around. It was a small patrol car with a large light.

"Faster," he said.

"But, Minister. ."

"Faster! That's an order."

The driver accelerated to a hundred and twenty. Behind them a siren began wailing, and at the entrance to Joy Court, the police car cut across them, as though it had overtaken them. Two excited policemen leapt out and a moment later realized who they were dealing with.

"Was that you, Mr. Quist?" said one of them flabbergasted.

"I wasn't sure you were genuine," said Onno. "I thought it might be a kidnap attack, here, with all those Moluccans and those train hijackings. ."

"Oh, is that what it was," said the policeman, though with a rather suspicious look in his eyes. "Of course, excuse us, that changes matters."

"Doesn't matter, officers," said Onno magnanimously. "I expect you enjoyed the burn-up?"

"In one way, yes. But it was quite dangerous."

When they went inside, Onno said to Quinten: "That could have become very unpleasant for me."

Quinten was trembling a little with tension: that he would be taken to see his mother so suddenly was something that he hadn't expected. After that chase, the wheelchairs in the brick-lined hall seemed to be going even slower than before. The administrator of the hospital stood waiting for them, but Onno indicated that he preferred to be left alone; he knew the way.

The large elevator took them upstairs, and with his hand on the door handle he said: "You needn't be afraid."

Quinten saw his mother. There she was: exactly there in that place in the world, and nowhere else. Her black hair had been cut short. He stepped across the threshold and looked at the motionless sleeper — only the sheet moved slowly up and down. She was going a little gray around the ears.

After a while he asked: "Can Mama really not wake up anymore?"

"No, Quinten, Mama was already asleep when you were born. She can't hear anymore or see anymore or feel anymore — nothing anymore."

"How can that be? She's not dead, like Granddad, is she? She's breathing."

"She's breathing, yes."

"Is she dreaming?"

"No one knows. The doctors don't think so."

"How do they know?"

"They say they can measure it, with special instruments. According to them you can't even say that Mommy's sleeping."

"What, then?"

Onno hesitated, but then said anyway: "She doesn't exist anymore."

"Although she's not dead?"

"Although she's not dead. That is," said Onno, pulling a face, "Mama is dead although she's not dead… I mean, what's not dead isn't Mama. It's not Mama who's breathing."

"Who is it, then?"

Onno made a helpless gesture: "No one."

"That's not possible, is it?"

"It's absolutely impossible, but that's the way it is."

Quinten looked again at the face on the pillow. The eyes were closed; the black, semicircular eyelashes looked like certain paintbrushes, which in Theo Kern's place stood in a stone mug and which in turn looked like Egyptian palm columns, which he had seen in a book of Mr. Themaat's. Her nose was small and straight, at the side a little red and inflamed, the mouth closed, the lips dry. So could something be still more incomprehensible than his dead Granddad, last week in the coffin? In the bed lay a breathing, living woman — and they were going to see his mother, weren't they?

Why else had they driven here? So was it his mother or not? And if it was his mother and at the same time not his mother, who was he himself? His thoughts spun around — and suddenly it was as though, like with a dynamo, a soft glow lit up in his head when he suddenly saw the light of the Easter bonfire behind the trees: the towering bonfire of dried twigs collected by everyone in the area, which the baron lit every year on a field near Klein Rechteren and which hundreds of people came to look at.

"Mama's locked up," he said, thinking of Piet Keller for a moment.

Onno gave him a chair and sat down himself. He was suddenly bitterly aware that his family had been reunited for the first time: father, mother, and son, and no one else.

Quinten looked at him across the bed. "How did it happen, Daddy?"

Onno nodded and told him the whole story in broad outline. Almost the whole story — he left out the fact that Ada had first been Max's girlfriend. He told him about the friendship between himself and Max, how they had gone around together day and night, so that Quinten should understand why Max of all people had become his foster father. He told him about Ada's musical gifts, about her playing in one of the best orchestras in the world. When he came to their visit to Dwingeloo and the accident in the stormy night, the memory suddenly came back with full intensity, so he had to fight to control himself.

"After that you were in Mama's tummy for three months. That was very strange — it was even in the papers afterward."

Quinten looked at the white outlines of Ada's body under the sheet. "Was I in that tummy?"

"Yes."

Pensively, hands on knees, he rocked back and forth with his upper body. "But if I was in there, then I wasn't really in Mama's tummy anymore?"

Onno made a helpless gesture and did not know what to say. The paradox made everything true, so that nothing was true anymore. "Don't try to understand, Quinten. It's impossible to understand."

While everything looked so ordinary in the room, Quinten felt surrounded by mysteries, of which he himself was a part. It was as though in that body, inside, there was a boundless space.

"Can I touch her?"

"Of course."

He laid both his hands on hers and — for the first time since his birth— felt her warmth. Could she really not feel it? He looked at her face but it remained as motionless as that of a statue in Kern's studio.

"I'd so like to see her eyes, Daddy."

Her eyes! Onno sat up in bewilderment. He hadn't seen her eyes for eight years, either: should he fetch a nurse, or could he lift up an eyelid himself? With a feeling that what he was doing was right, he leaned over the bed, put the tip of his middle finger on an eyelid, and carefully raised it. Together they looked at the deep brown, almost black, eye that saw nothing— as little as the eye that seems to form in the sky in a total eclipse of the sun.

That evening Quinten could scarcely keep his eyes open at dinner, and immediately afterward he went to bed and found himself in the dream that was never to leave him..

Suddenly there are buildings everywhere: the universe has been transformed into a single architectural complex, without beginning or end. Nowhere is there a living being to be seen. Completely alone, but without a feeling of loneliness, he wanders around through a limitless series of rooms, colonnades, staircases, galleries, alcoves, pillars, footbridges, doorways, vaults, which extend in all directions — past pompous facades covered with statues and ornaments that reveal themselves as interior walls, through cellars that at the same time are lofts, across roofs that at the same time are like foundations. Because the interior has no exterior, no daylight can penetrate anywhere; but even though there are no lamps lit, it is not dark. And although he does not meet anyone and it is not clear either where he has come from or where he is going, wandering through the dimly lit world edifice fills him with happiness: all that material built, joined together, piled on top of itself, spreads out and envelops and encloses him like a bath filled with warm honey. Everywhere there is a total silence; only now and then is there a momentary swishing sound, which reminds him of the wingbeats of a large bird. Suddenly he is standing in front of a closed double door made of ancient wood, decorated with diamond-shaped patterns made of iron. It is bolted with a heavy, rusty sliding padlock, as large as a loaf. The menacing look of that device overwhelms him with dismay. It is as though the door is looking at him, and at the same moment he hears a hoarse voice saying — The center of the world. The words sound calm, like when someone says "Nice day today" — but at the same time they flood him with such a sulfurous fear of death; he knows there is only one way of saving his life: waking up..

Trembling, bathed in sweat, he opened his eyes, but the terror did not subside. He sat up and did not know where he was. The complete darkness surrounded him as if the universe suddenly contained nothing else but him. He put out his hand and felt a wall after all; he got out of bed. Breathing heavily and groping around, he found a door, but on the other side it was just as dark and silent; at his wit's end he took a couple of steps, brushed a wall with the palm of his hand, bumped into something, felt it without recognizing it, left it, and turned on his heel. Where was he? Again he took a couple of steps. He stubbed his toe on a threshold and stopped with his eyes wide open. Suddenly, without wanting to, he gave a loud scream.

Immediately afterward, he heard Sophia's voice in the distance: "Quinten! What's wrong? Did you have a nightmare? Wait, I'm coming. ."

After she had closed the bedroom door behind her, a strip of light appeared under the threshold. Max folded his hands under his head and stared up into the darkness. This was the end. It was bound to happen one night: and here it was. She would no longer appear in his bed. In itself there was no reason, because why should a grandmother not have an affair with her son-in-law's friend? But Quinten must not know, because then he might mention it to both of them during the day, and that was of course unacceptable.

He listened to the voices in Sophia's bedroom. Quinten was of course in bed with her now, and a great sense of calm came over Max. In fact he had expected it much earlier. He was now almost forty-two; she, fifty-two: it had lasted seven years — a long time. Their affair had had the character of a mystery, a completely new alternative alongside the classical family of father, mother, and child, without displacing the family.

During the day he had been the only man in the world who was the head of a family without quarrels, consisting of his friend's child and mother-in-law, to whom he was bound by no sexual ties; but at night he was her lover. Depending on the position of the sun, everyone was someone else — except the child. He remained simply his friend's child — although he had even doubted that for a long time. "For you everything is always something else," Onno had once said to him. Nothing in his life was what it seemed. Even the fact that he "studied stars" actually meant something different to him since he had been working in Westerbork.

What were they going to do now? The foundation of his relationship with Sophia had been removed, but the task he had undertaken of course remained unchanged: there was no question of his leaving as long as Quinten was in the house — and that could be another ten years. By that time he would be fifty-two.

42. The Citadel

For Onno, too, a moment came when everything suddenly changed again. In March 1977 the coalition government fell and new elections were held, in which his party was the great winner: that probably meant there was a ministry in prospect for him. But at the eleventh hour, after the longest political birth pangs ever known in Holland, nine months, the Christian Democrats opted for the Conservatives rather than the Socialists as partners, and overnight he was out of a job.

After handing over his powers at the ministry to his successor and receiving his decoration, he was offered the opportunity of being taken home one last time in the official car, but declined. "Decent people travel on the train," he said with insolent dignity — but when he stood in the street that cold winter afternoon it turned out not to be so simple, because since he had been in the government he was in the habit of not carrying money with him. The doorman was prepared to lend him twenty-five guilders, and sitting in the tram on the way to the station, he found himself whistling. He was free! Goodbye to The Hague! Farewell to ponds, avenues, chancelleries, cocktail parties, blue-striped shirts, poker faces!

When he left the station in Amsterdam it was already dark. He walked whistling into the lighted, messy city and for the first time in years he suddenly saw everyday life again without ulterior motives and policy initiatives, like when a window is opened after the party and the fresh night air streams in. With Christmas approaching, the streets were crowded and the shops and pubs were full; men from the Salvation Army were standing singing on the pavement around a jar in which one was expected to put money; a girl was sitting on the curb playing a guitar; a man leaned out the window of his car and swore at a cyclist.

Everything was as it was — crowded, noisy, chaotic, and at the same time with something eternal about it, something that had been exactly the same in the Middle Ages, or in imperial Rome, or in present-day Cairo, or even farther away or longer ago. There had been periods in which it had been different — like during the German occupation — but since for unfathomable reasons good ultimately always triumphed in the world, this was the real face of the eternal city. Onno felt completely happy. Since he spent little, he could if necessary live on his inheritance from his father until he died; and the automatic transfers for Quinten's upbringing were in no danger. For that matter, there was still more to come from his mother's side, and she had been in the hospital for the last few weeks; in addition, he would receive a generous severance payment for a number of months. In fact a man, he thought, should spend his life doing nothing except wandering the streets, or if he could afford that, do something real. Perhaps the real man was the craftsman.

In a telephone booth, the floor of which was covered with the pages of a telephone directory that had been torn to pieces, he called Helga. They arranged to meet in a Greek restaurant.

By the light of a candle, intended to give even the toughest cut of lamb the look of a noble tournedos, he told her that his dismissed colleagues and the party bosses were now gathered together bitterly in the party's room in Parliament but that he had spared himself the wake. He was celebrating his regained freedom: it was only a month since he had turned forty-four — he had a whole life in front of him! And finally he'd have more time for Quinten.

"Who do you think you're kidding?" inquired Helga. "Me or yourself?"

Onno fell silent and sighed deeply. "What an insufferable woman you are. Of course I'm kidding myself. But couldn't you have allowed me a little more time to do so?"

"I know exactly when you'll pick up the telephone and call your embittered comrades."

"And that will be?"

"When you get home in a little while and see the yellowed papers of your disc hanging on the wall."

He looked at her severely for a few seconds. "Do you think it's decent to know someone so well? It's not at all what's needed between man and woman. Between man and woman there should be nothing but misunderstandings, so that they can be overcome by physical intercourse."

"Forgive me."

He took her hand and planted a kiss on it. "Where would I be without you?"

And a few weeks later he sat on a bench, which was in fact too small for his bulk, in the Lower House as a member of Parliament and groaned as he listened to the government's policy statement.

The Phaistos disc had driven him back to The Hague. Just like most of his colleagues from the previous cabinet, he could have applied for a job outside politics — he might have become director of the Foundation for Pure Scientific Research, or mayor of a municipality like Westerbork, before receiving the sarcastic congratulations of his eldest brother; but he did what according to him befitted a politician in his circumstances: he joined the opposition, which was now led by the ex-prime minister.

Apart from that, none of those social functions accorded with his character. He had never felt like a real politician; but real politicians had in common with him the fact that in the last instance they were bohemians, street urchins, not to say street fighters, marginal figures, adventurers. And he soon realized that in a certain sense he was more in his element as parliamentarian than as a member of the government: he was better at caustic interruptions than wise policy. He created a political squabble in the blink of an eye. In response to developments in left-wing Holland, the two most important Protestant parties had merged with the Catholic party into a general confessional party; but in fact the Catholics had simply annexed the Protestants — the iconoclasts had finally been subdued by the idolaters — which prompted him to go to the microphone during the annual debate on government policy and say to the new ultra-Catholic prime minister that the revolt against Spain, out of which the nation had been born, had obviously been fought in vain. In saying this he had cut Holland to the quick, obliquely involving even the royal family, and the observation created a commotion in the papers and on television for weeks.

But when he saw the face of the prime minister stiffen, he felt disgust. Not because he was doing something to him — because his opponent was precisely a master of that style — but because again it was the words that were doing things. Now that he was a monitoring member of Parliament with no power, his world in fact turned out to be even more rarefied and abstract than it had been when he could still make decisions. That had an immoral dimension, as he had put it to Max — it was acting without doing anything, but at least it led to results. Now his speaking was on the one hand no longer action, on the other hand still not normal speech, but a hybrid, bastardized activity — in the chamber of the house, in committee rooms, and all those other forums of verbal conjuring in Parliament light-years removed from reality. It all happened in a glass bowl, which only Max might one day see thanks to his thirteenth and fourteenth mirrors, which Onno had long since been able to secure for him and which were now under construction.

"Do I really have to go on doing this for four years?" he asked Helga reproachfully as he sat on her sofa. "And perhaps for another four years after that? I'll be fifty-two by then! How long can you be a democrat with no power?"

"Who knows," she said. "Perhaps there'll be another crisis soon, or something unexpected will happen that will change everything."

"Oh Lord!" he exclaimed. "Make all things new!"

There was no interim crisis, and for the four years that the despicable, scandalous right-wing cabinet was in power — as the counterpart of the Spanish-Catholic-Habsburg tyranny in the sixteenth century — he saw Quinten even less than before — no more than a couple of times a year: on his birthday, at Christmas, at Granny To's funeral — partly because he no longer had a chauffeur-driven car, and not even one without a chauffeur, because neither he nor Helga had a driver's license: driving, in his opinion, was for chauffeurs and not for passengers like him. Increasingly, Quinten became an incident from the past for him.

But at Groot Rechteren life went on even without him. Since Quinten had appeared at the door of Sophia's bedroom that night, she had, as Max had expected, no longer appeared in his room. After seven years of clandestine faithfulness, which at the same time had been thrilling deceit, and after a few weeks of celibacy, he had started an affair with a secretary at the observatory in Dwingeloo — Tsjallingtsje Popma, a tall blond woman of about thirty, with a good figure but also with a severe rural Christian appearance.

She looked like a sculpture by Arno Breker, Hitler's favorite sculptor. Whenever she saw him, in his elegant, worldly outfit, a look of deep revulsion and contempt had appeared in her eyes; that had left him indifferent, although he had interpreted it from the very beginning as a declaration of love, because of course one did not look like that at someone one scarcely knew. But with the help of his self-denial she began to excite him more and more each day. The very first evening after he had proposed going to see the new moon with her, in the thundering silence on the heath her virtuous revulsion turned into struggling lust and loud cries of "Oh God! Oh God!" which frightened the grouse and heath frogs, so that with his trousers around his knees, he stopped with a laugh and listened to hear whether any alarmed astronomers were approaching.

But afterward: blood and tears. He had deflowered her.

"I'm so ashamed, I don't even know you…"

"Well, we have that in common."

She lived in a rented room in Steenwijk over a little stationer's, which also sold postcards and photo albums. One of the things that made him grow fond of her was the touching, girlish interior, with a little collection of old tin toys; because it had gotten too expensive for her in recent years, he occasionally bought her a colored wind-up bird when he was in Leiden.

They did not talk much, least of all about him and his life: they listened to music, he unfolded his radio maps, she made a cable-knit sweater for him that he would have to wear, and after taking a shower he went home. Although she had once asked him, he never took her to Groot Rechteren — although it was not primarily out of consideration for Sophia. Since after all there had never been anything between Sophia and him during the day, after a few months he had told her casually in the kitchen:

"Oh, by the way, I should tell you something, Sophia. I've got a girlfriend."

"How nice for you," she said, without looking up. "I can smell that you occasionally use a different soap."

"Respectable woman — a vicar's daughter from Enter," he added, but she didn't ask anything more; nor did she indicate that she would like to meet her.

They never talked about it after that. But it was mainly Quinten who prevented him from introducing his sturdy, affectionate Tsjallingtsje. Groot Rechteren was first and foremost Quinten's domain, which Max must not disturb with his private frivolities; apart from that he was a little frightened of the look Quinten might focus on her. Nor did he discuss her with Onno.

As he grew up, Quinten became increasingly incomprehensible to everyone. He had no friends. Usually, he sat reading in his room, or wandered through the surrounding countryside — occasionally with his recorder. As Max and Sophia sat on the balcony, they sometimes heard pastoral sounds coming from the woods, from his favorite spot by the pond with the rhododendrons. That sound, mingling with the song of the invisible birds, touched Max more than the most moving performance of the most beautiful symphony by the best orchestra, and he could see that Sophia too was thinking of Ada at those moments, but it was never mentioned.

When he was ten, in 1978, Ms. Trip stopped Sophia on the outer bridge one afternoon.

"Has Quinten told you?"

"Told me? What do you mean?"

The previous day she had been walking in Klein Rechteren with the baroness in the rose garden. As he frequently was recently, Quinten was with Rutger. In general the baroness was not very keen on unannounced visits, but because Rutger obviously perked up when Quinten came, he was always welcome. Suddenly she heard heart-rending whines coming from the direction of the terrace. They rushed toward it and saw Rutger sitting on the ground crying, with his arms around Quinten's knees — around those of his torturer, as appeared a little later.

Quinten was busy cutting Rutger's cat's cradle into pieces — the most beautiful thing he possessed, his endless creation that he had been working on for years. His mother also regularly took the scissors to it, but of course never when he was there. They had been too flabbergasted to intervene; moreover, they had the feeling that something was happening that must not be interrupted. They were also paralyzed by the strange beauty of the scene: the wonderfully beautiful boy with that misshapen imbecile twenty years his senior at his feet, while in the vegetable garden the peacock looked at them with a fan of fifty eyes.

"Yes, calm down," said Quinten as he went on cutting the thread into yard long lengths. "Wait. We're going to make a great big curtain. You'd like to do that, wouldn't you, make a great big curtain?"

"Yes," sobbed Rutger. "Don't do that, don't cut.."

"But if you want to make a great big curtain, you've got to do that. Then you mustn't just go on making one thread the whole time. You've got to weave. Look, like this…"

Then he'd sat next to him on the ground, took a large needle out of his pocket, and picked up the stiff, coarse-meshed base a yard square that he had brought with him and which he had turned out to have bought with his pocket money from the fabric store in the village. While he threaded a length of yarn through it, explaining what he was doing the whole time, Rutger stopped crying and looked breathlessly, chest still heaving, at what was happening.

"Now your turn," said Quinten, giving him the needle. "And when this one is completely full, we'll buy a new cloth. And when that's full, then we'll sew it onto this one and then we'll buy another one— until," he said with a sweep of his arm, "the curtain is as big as the whole world!"

"Yes!" Rutger laughed, dribbling.

"And if you make another curtain after that, then we'll hang it on the sun and the moon!"

"Yes! Yes!" Rutger bent over to him and gave him a kiss on his cheek. No one had ever had the idea that it was possible to intervene in Rutger's senseless activity, let alone that anyone would have had the courage to carry it through.

"How did you get that brainwave?" Max asked him that evening in awe. "How did you dare?"

"Well, I just did. ." said Quinten.

Max looked at Sophia and said: "That boy has an absolutist streak in his character."

The nurturing architectural dream that had appeared after his visit to his mother turned out to recur every few months. But it never ended in a nightmare, although the fortified door with the padlock on it at "the center of the world" must still be there. Whenever he had wandered around the limitless construction, through the labyrinth of rooms, past the decorated interior facades, along the galleries, he lay still for a moment after waking up, cracking the top joints of his thumbs as he did every morning, and tried to retain the memory — but always the images took their leave after a few minutes, like in the movies when the end of the film became invisible if the lights went on too soon. He gradually began to wonder where that building was. It must actually be somewhere, because each time he saw it clearly. But since he never met anyone there, he was certainly the only person who knew of its existence — and that meant a lot, because it was secret and he mustn't speak to anyone about it: of course not to Max, but not to Granny either; not even to his father, the few times that he saw him. For that matter how could it simply be somewhere in the world when the whole world was not built up? Perhaps it was in another world. He had also given it a name: the Citadel.

Sometimes he did not think of the Citadel for weeks. If it presented itself again, he sometimes went to Mr. Themaat's to see if there were illustrations of anything like it in his thick books. The professor had retired and now lived permanently at Groot Rechteren, so his library had expanded still further. Quinten was always welcome. Occasionally it happened that Mr. Themaat was in his rocking chair without a book on his lap. His face suddenly changed unrecognizably, as if it had been turned to stone, and that stone looked at him with two eyes expressing such total despair that he went away at once. It was as though Mr. Themaat in that state no longer even knew who he was. For a few days he did not dare visit him; but when he came back there was suddenly no trace of the stone.

"What are you looking for, for goodness' sake, QuQu?"

"Just looking."

"I don't believe a word of it. You're not just looking at pictures."

Quinten looked at him. He must not betray the secret, of course, because then the dream might not come back. He asked: "What is the building, Mr. Themaat?"

Themaat gave a deep sigh. "If only my students had ever asked me such a good question. What is the building?" he repeated, folding his hands behind his head, leaning back in his rocking chair and looking at the stucco of the ceiling. "What is the building. ." While he was still thinking, his wife came in. He said, "QuQu has just asked me the question."

"And what is that?"

"What is the building?"

"Maybe this castle," said Elsbeth.

"Yes," said Themaat, laughing at Quinten. "Women usually look less far afield, and perhaps they're right. Wait a moment. Perhaps I know," he said. "The building of course doesn't exist, but I think the Pantheon comes a good second."

A little later they sat next to each other on the ground looking at photos and architectural drawings of the Pantheon in Rome: the only Roman temple — devoted to "all gods" — that had been completely preserved. Quinten had seen at once that it was not like the Citadel at all. It was not a maze, but precisely very simple and clear, with a portico like a Greek temple facade at the front, as Mr. Themaat called it, with pillars and two superimposed triangular pediments; behind them, a heavy round structure that from inside consisted of a single huge, empty, windowless rotunda, with a large round hole in the middle of the cupola, through which the light entered — a little like the fontanel in a baby's skull.

On a cross-section drawing Mr. Themaat demonstrated with a compass that if you continued the line of the cupola downward, you produced a pure sphere resting on the ground. According to him, you could see the temple as a depiction of the world.

That meant, Quinten reflected, this world — and that was obviously not what he was dreaming about. But nevertheless it was connected with the Citadel, perhaps through the opposition of the decorated front and the closed back. In any case it fascinated him — also the carved letters on the architrave, which announced through a number of abbreviations, that AGRIPPA was the architect. The emperor Hadrian had magnanimously had this inscribed after it had been completely rebuilt, Themaat told him — and at the mention of the name Hadrian he suddenly stopped and looked at Quinten — the deep blue of his eyes between the dark eyelashes, the lank black hair around his moon-pale skin.

Themaat made a gesture in his direction and said to Elsbeth: "Antinous."

She smiled, glanced at him, and nodded.

Quinten didn't understand what was meant, but he didn't care.

One day, when he started talking about those letters to Mr. Spier, in fact just for something to say, Spier immediately became enthusiastic:

"That's the Quadrata, QuQu, the most beautiful capital there has ever been! How did you find out about that?" Then he told him that it was also called "lapidary" from the Latin lapis, meaning "stone." "That letter forms the perfect balance between body and soul."

"How is that possible? A letter isn't a human being, is it?"

"Of course it is!"

"Well how can letters have a soul?"

"They speak to you, don't they?"

"That's true." Quinten nodded earnestly.

"Like everyone, a letter has a soul and a body. Its soul is what it says and its body is what it's made of: ink, or stone."

Quinten thought of his mother. Was she just a couple of ink spots, then? Or a stone with no letters on it?

"A letter doesn't have to be made of anything," he said.

"Oh no? I sometimes dream of pure letters, floating through the air, but that's impossible, just like a soul without a body."

"And what about those letters in the Pantheon? They're not made of stone, precisely not stone. The stone has been carved away: I've seen Theo Kern doing that sometimes. They're made of nothing. So you sometimes do have a body without a soul in it, don't you?"

He was now in the sixth grade, and according to the teacher he should gradually start spending more time on his homework. His marks were not bad, but not good either; what naturally interested him, he mastered immediately, even if it was difficult; all the rest, even when it was actually easy, required lots of effort. But instead of learning his geography, or doing arithmetic, he preferred to find his way toward the Citadel with Mr. Themaat.

Sometimes the professor showed him examples of modern architecture from the first half of the twentieth century, by Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, of which he was quite fond himself. Sometimes Quinten thought it was nice, but that was all; because the cool objectivity of those matchboxes in no way reminded him of the Citadel, he lost interest.

Classical buildings came closest, centrally the Roman Pantheon, which, with its circular, windowless central section, added something somber and threatening to the pure light of the Greek temples. The Athenian Parthenon, which Mr. Themaat showed him, might be perfect, even as a ruin, but to his taste it was too rarefied and transparent. According to Themaat, the Romans had in fact never invented anything themselves from an artistic point of view; they had taken that sense of circularity and somberness from Etruscan tombs, tumuli, as could still be seen in Rome in the mausoleum of Augustus, or the tomb of Hadrian, the Castel Sant'Angelo. He should go and see all those things one day, later.

Under the direction of Themaat, who once talked of him to Max as "my best student," Quinten had soon found his way to the Italian Renaissance. There he was most fascinated by the churches of Palladio, who again showed that combination of brilliant classical facades and introverted brick walls. Themaat praised him for his good, albeit not very progressive, taste but that compliment was lost on him; none of it had anything to do with taste.

In the baroque, he had a vague feeling of recognition in the exuberant ornamentation, and neoclassical buildings from the nineteenth century fascinated him because they reminded him of those of Palladio in the sixteenth century. In any case they were all exteriors: magnificent exteriors, but he was precisely not interested in exteriors, only interiors.

Running the risk that he was revealing something of his secret, he decided one afternoon to ask a crucial question:

"Is there a building that has an interior but no exterior?"

Themaat stared at him for a couple of seconds before he was able to answer. "What made you think of something like that?"

"I just thought of it."

"Of course that's impossible, just like a building with an exterior but no interior."

"That's perfectly possible."

"How?"

"If it's not hollow inside, but of solid stone. Like a sculpture."

"There's something in that," said Themaat with a laugh. "And perhaps an interior without an exterior is possible too."

While he looked in his bookcase, he said that he himself had been brought up with the idea that the Renaissance was old-fashioned, and to tell the truth he still thought so; but when he heard Quinten so preoccupied with it, he had the feeling that there was something like a "re-Renaissance" coming. Then he showed him photographs of Palladio's Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, his architectural swan song.

From the outside it was an ugly brick box, but inside it showed indescribable magnificence. The back and the side walls were made of inlaid marble facades, exuberantly decorated with Corinthian columns, statues in luxurious window frames, with triangular and segment-shaped pediments; there were other sculptures — on pedestals, ornaments, scrolls, reliefs, inscriptions, behind the sloping benches of the semicircular room more pillars and sculptures — all made of wood and plaster, but you had to know that. That was also an exterior without an interior, said Themaat, because it was a piece of decor, and at the same time it was an interior without an exterior. Quinten understood that, but it was only partially a depiction of the Citadel.

"For that matter, do you remember that book by Bibiena that you used to like looking at so much?"

No, Quinten had forgotten, but when he saw it again a vague memory awakened in him. Themaat explained to him that those decor drawings showed the inside of buildings that had no outside. Obviously pleased with his explanation, the professor looked at the perspective drawings a little longer. Then he suddenly said: "Wait! Perhaps I have something even nicer for you."

From the case where everything was in perfect alphabetical order, he looked a little farther on from Palladio, Pantheon, and Parthenon — a large book of reproductions of Piranesi's Carceri.

When he opened it, it gave Quinten a jolt. Almost! It was almost there, his dream! — the same rooms continuing endlessly in all directions, full of staircases, bridges, arches, galleries; the deep shadows without sources of light; everything filled with the same still air. But in these etched prison visions it seemed chilly and dank, while in the Citadel it was warm and sweet. Except for him, the Citadel was empty, but here there were figures to be seen everywhere; the pillars and the massive, decorated facade were also missing. Only in combination with the decors of Palladio and Bibiena would it have really resembled the scenario of his dream.

"Now I'm gradually getting a vague idea of what you're looking for," said Themaat. "But in that case we'll have to look at a completely different kind of book than we have up to now. You don't want existing buildings but architectural fantasies. By the way, do you know that Piranesi is also the man who made your favorite print over there?"

"My favorite print?"

Themaat pointed to the framed etching that stood on the floor against the bookcase.

Quinten looked at it in astonishment. For years the print had merged with the other things in the room, he had never noticed it: the obelisk next to the building with the Scala Santa, the Sacred Staircase.

43. Finds

In the early summer of 1980, the two new movable mirrors were inaugurated in Westerbork — not by Onno's successor, but by the minister himself. Onno and Helga drove with Max from The Hague and were welcomed by Diederic the governor, who was shortly to retire. Apart from that, everyone from Leiden was there — at the center the old director, now eighty, but still upright, as if he were the axis around which the globe of heaven turned. The whole of Dwingeloo had also naturally appeared, even Tsjallingtsje, but that was because she wanted to see Sophia and Quinten at last. Quinten had initially not wanted to go, but when he heard that his father would be there, Sophia and he had naturally come, too. When Max saw them all together in the control building, with a glass of champagne in their hands, he was reminded of a certain kind of thriller, in which all the suspects were finally gathered in the lounge of the hotel, where after an acute reconstruction the detective singled out the culprit, whom one would never have thought capable of doing it.

After the speeches and the ministerial finger on the button, a large part of the company, including Tsjallingtsje, walked to the thirteenth and fourteenth mirrors, which were a mile and a half away; some of them were still holding their glasses of champagne. Floris, who knew how far they had to walk, had put a bottle in his pocket. Sophia stayed behind with Helga in a circle of astronomers' wives, who had seen enough, while Max, Onno, and Quinten walked into the grounds. Onno, who was in Westerbork for the first time, had put a hand on Quinten's shoulder and was listening to Max. Only the villa belonging to the camp commandant was still standing; the huts had given way to a broad, innocent-looking expanse of grass with an occasional tree, surrounded on all four sides by woods. As they walked along the former Boulevard des Miseres, Max tried to give Onno a picture of the scenes that had taken place almost forty years before; looking at the boy he controlled himself, but Quinten suddenly asked:

"Are you a Jew?"

Max and Onno glanced at each other.

"My mother got on the train here and never came back," said Max.

"And what about your father?"

"Not him."

"Is he still alive, then?"

"Not for a long time."

Quinten was silent. Since he had talked to Mr. Spier about it, he hadn't thought any more about the Jews — it shocked him that Max, too, was connected with those things: his mother had even been murdered by Hitler! It did not concern him, but it gave him a vague feeling of guilt that he had never known about it. What did he really know about Max? Last year he had heard him say that he had to go to Bloemendaal, to his foster mother's funeral; he had not asked any more about it, but now he understood why Max — like he himself, in fact — had had foster parents.

At the buffers the rails and sleepers had been left, neatly framed by a kind of curb. Max showed them that the buffer was new; the old one was close behind it, almost completely forgotten. The end of the rails had been bent upward by an artist, as though in that spot the last train had gone to heaven.

"It's all gone for good," said Max, letting his eyes wander over the site.

In the distance the cheerful group of worthies and astronomers walked past the majestic row of parabolas, pointing at the blue sky like the rails; their laughter resounded faintly across the plain. While neither Max nor Onno knew what to say next, Quinten looked back and forth between the mirrors and the rails, which reminded him of the antennae of a grasshopper.

"If you ask me," he said, "one day you'll be able to see here very clearly what happened during the war."

Max and Onno looked at him in alarm.

"May one ask what you mean, Quinten?" asked Onno.

"Well, it's quite logical. Max once told me that we see the stars as they used to be. So on the stars they see the earth as it used to be. If the people on a star that is forty light-years away from here look at us with a very powerful telescope, then they must be seeing what happened here forty years ago, mustn't they?"

"Is that right?" Onno asked Max.

Max shivered. "Of course."

It amazed him that he had never had that idea: the image of Westerbork as a transit camp was now rushing at the speed of light through space between Arcturus and Capell A, like that of Auschwitz with its fire-belching chimneys. "In theory it ought to be always visible somewhere in the universe. Except that doesn't mean we can see it."

"But it will be reflected back, won't it?" said Quinten.

"Reflected back?"

"With those telescopes over there you can look at a star that is twenty light-years away from here, can't you? — so you can see your mother getting into the train forty years ago, can't you?"

And getting off somewhere else, thought Max.

"You're right again. Perhaps you should think more of distant planets or moons, at least if such things exist outside our solar system, but then we first have to discover a completely new principle."

"But when that's been discovered in a hundred years' time, it will be possible to see it from a planet or a moon, which is fifty plus twenty light-years away from us."

"I can't argue with you."

"I don't feel well," said Onno. "Quinten! What's gotten into you? What kind of person are you?"

Quinten shrugged his shoulders. If you asked him, it was all pretty obvious.

While Sophia and Helga were busy in the kitchen, as in Onno's view befitted women, the gentlemen went on talking about the subject of "historical astronomy" founded by Quinten. Proctor was also there. He had dropped by to borrow some eggs. Clara and Arend were spending the night with his mother-in-law. Sophia had invited him to join them for a meal.

That everything that had ever happened on earth was still to be seen somewhere in the universe was obviously a very seductive idea of Quinten's; but according to Onno, it could never be realized. It was true that satellite photos of the earth could be enlarged down to the smallest details, at least if it was cloudless when the photo was taken — at the Defense Ministry they knew all about it — but what would be left of such an image after a journey of scores, hundreds or thousands, of years through the universe? Moreover, how was it to be reflected back? After all, planets and moons were not made of mirror glass. They were strewn with stones and dust and, besides that, convex instead of concave: the last remnants of the image would be immediately dispersed.

"And that's as it should be," he concluded. "The past is sealed for eternity, and whoever tries to break those seals — would that he had never been born. Only the Lord of Hosts sees everything."

"Of course," said Max, "your optical knowledge is astonishing, but that's what people have always said. Just imagine a boy of twelve saying to his father a hundred years ago that within a hundred years not only would man set foot on the moon, but that everyone on earth would have been able to witness it at the same moment—"

"Yes, yes, we know all about that," Onno interrupted him. "I vaguely remember your saying that eleven years ago." He gestured toward Helga, who was setting the table. "Thanks again."

Helga glanced around, and Max made a polite bow to both of them, and then continued:

"If you go on thinking of an optical image, of course it would never be possible — that's obvious. But in radio astronomy we don't work with optical images, do we? Do you have any idea how weak the signals are that we receive in Westerbork? What makes things so misleading there is that when you've got large instruments and machines, you automatically think of large forces: a large dam produces enormous quantities of energy; a huge cannon has an enormous range. But with the synthesizing radio telescope it's precisely the other way around: there, the large is intended for the small. Shall I tell you something? A bicycle lamp uses more energy in one second than all those fourteen dishes receive in a hundred years."

"Really?" asked Quinten.

"Really. And as far as that's concerned, we're getting quite a long way. In other words, in a practical sense it may not be totally impossible, but some Einstein or other would first have to find an entirely new principle, just as was necessary for television."

"If he says it," said Onno, "it's probably right. Okay, so there's a nice branch of science for you — as long as you know that Quinten has a right to share the Nobel Prize."

Quinten did not like Max contradicting his father; on the other hand he was flattered by his support, and he thought it was nice of his father to allow himself to be convinced. He also thought that it was nice that they talked for a long time about the idea that had occurred to him.

"If there's a possibility," said Max, "I think it will be even more difficult than the key to your disc. After all, you also assumed that messages from the distant past could be read on it, didn't you?"

"Dr. Quist's unforgettable Narration from A to Z," said Helga, glancing at Onno as she left the room.

Onno sighed deeply.

"Do you know what that woman is? My scribe, like Eckermann was to Goethe. She never forgets anything you've ever said. God knows, perhaps the principle may be on that wretched Cretan thing, who knows? If one day I'm ousted from power because of an excessive intelligence that forms a danger to the state and am driven shamefully over the frontier by the royal military constabulary, I may give it one last try — but I fear that I shall need precisely that historioscope in order to decode the principle on which it's based. Probably by that time I would have been murdered by some secret service or other, or by agents of the pope, because imagine what it would unleash: photographs of everything that's ever happened or what precisely didn't happen. ."

"Or film," said Quinten.

"Or film, of course! First silent films, then talkies, and then in color as well! We focus on the Star of Bethlehem and we zoom in on the Mount of Olives. Is someone ascending into heaven there? No. Is someone receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Horeb? Alas. No, I would be quite rightly eliminated; the world would descend into chaos."

"A great spring cleaning," said Max, "that's what it would be. All nonsense and fraud would be brought to light; mankind would be liberated and would finally possess the whole truth!"

But as he spoke, to his dismay he suddenly saw another astronomical documentary before him: the bay at Varadero — himself bobbing up and down in the waves, cheek to cheek with Ada, her legs spread wide around his hips in the blood-red light of the rising moon… So hadn't it disappeared — not even in himself?

Onno was going to ask him what event he would photograph first, but he could tell from his look that it would probably be something dreadful, perhaps his father's execution — so he turned to Proctor:

"What about you? What would you focus this historical camera on?"

As befits someone who has just come to dinner, the translator had not taken part in the conversation, but now he leaned forward and said: "At a deathbed in a certain house in Stuttgart in the old center, which was devastated in the Second World War. In the year 1647."

"Of course. For that purpose of course we screw the X-ray lens on the camera, which can penetrate through all walls. And whom do you want to see dying there?"

"Francis Bacon," said Proctor, and looked significantly from one to the other.

"Francis Bacon?" repeated Max. "In Stuttgart? In 1647? Are you sure you're not wrong?"

Proctor gave a short laugh with a bitter undertone. Of course, official scholarship had thought for centuries that he had died in London in 1626, but new facts had taught them otherwise — that is, people with an open mind who were able to let go of old ideas. Of course, he knew all about the nonsense that the Baconians were wont to spout, for example that Shakespeare's work was actually by Bacon, but he did not take any notice of that nonsense — even though it had respectable adherents, like old Freud. But it had always intrigued him why such rubbish was attributed precisely to Bacon. And then years ago he himself had discovered something unprecedented. He looked back and forth between Max and Onno. Could they keep a secret?

"Our lips are sealed," said Onno, folding his arms.

Bacon had been present at the birth of Vondel's Lucifer. That tragedy had its first performance in Amsterdam on February 2, 1654. Vondel had worked on it for six years — that is, he had begun it in the year of Bacon's actual death. Proctor had collected hundreds of textual proofs for his thesis, that the idea of writing a play about the downfall of Lucifer derived from Bacon. The eighty-six-year-old Bacon had whispered it to the sixty-year-old Vondel on his deathbed.

"Do you also have proof," asked Onno, having exchanged a short glance with Max, "that our national prince of poets was in Stuttgart in 1647?"

"He must have been. That is implicitly proved by my other evidence."

"Of course."

"I keep finding new proofs."

"Name one."

The usual code from the seventeenth century, Proctor told them, numbered the letters of the alphabet from one to twenty-four, with the I and the J having the same number, 9, and the V and W the figure 21. The sum of BACON came to 33 and that of FRANCIS to 67, totaling 100. Now, if you took Lucifer's first speech in Vondel and looked for the thirty-third word, then you found: this. Meaning, "This is Bacon." Or, "This should really be attributed to Bacon." If you went on counting to the hundredth word, then you found extinguished. That is, "This man is extinguished. Francis Bacon dies."

There was a moment's silence, after which Max said to Onno: "If you ask me, there's no answer to this."

"We have absolutely no answer to this. But," inquired Onno cautiously, "if you want to focus that deathbed there in Stuttgart with Quinten's telescope, does that not mean that you're not a hundred percent certain of your case, which to me personally seems so completely plausible?"

"What makes you think that?" said Proctor, almost indignantly. "All I want to do is hear why Bacon wanted to see a play about the downfall of Lucifer written. I imagine he told Vondel. What had he, as an Anglican, to do with a figure like Lucifer? Perhaps that may be connected with all those absurd legends attaching to his person; but I shall get to the bottom of that."

"Of course." Onno nodded. "That's necessary. And why did Bacon choose Vondel, of all people?"

"That's obvious! As a Catholic, Vondel had a relationship with devils and angels — there was no point in Bacon tackling a Protestant like Gryphius about it. Vondel was at that moment the only great dramatist who came into consideration for his project — except for Corneille, perhaps, but one couldn't permit oneself such fantastic extravagances in the Paris theater as one could in Amsterdam."

"Why fantastic?" asked Quinten.

"Listen," said Proctor. "It had never been shown in literature before: a play set from beginning to end in heaven. If that isn't fantastic, then I don't know what is."

"What a beautiful ring you have on," said Quinten suddenly.

A little disconcerted, Proctor looked at it. "It's a sapphire. Also a symbol of heaven."

"I expect it's very expensive."

"I should say so. A five-carat stone costs a good five thousand guilders. This is one gram."

Max too leaned forward. "Can you see that stone is exactly the color of your eyes, Quinten?"

"Are you coming to eat?" asked Sophia. "We've got hot pot with rib of beef."

Even though he only understood half of them, Quinten never forgot conversations like that. But what he heard at his high school in Assen, where he had to go on the bus every day from the end of the summer onward, he could only retain with the greatest effort. Moreover, the fact that Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres he was prepared to believe; but the fact that in his book it was printed in lower case, and sometimes even in italics, he found idiotic: the Romans hadn't known those letters at all! They should be capitals, preferably the Quadrata. According to Mr. Spier, that typeface had originated in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — like the Greek minuscule: the ancient Greeks, too, had written only in capitals. When Onno once called up from Parliament to say that he was terribly sorry that he was tied up again, Quinten had complained to him too:

"Can they just change it just like that? It's the same as if you were to depict Caesar in a denim suit instead of a toga."

Whereupon Onno had exclaimed: "Well done, Quinten. You're a son after my own heart! Fortunately modern theater doesn't appeal to you at all. Until the Heaven and the Earth shall pass away, not a jot or tittle of the Law shall pass you by, until everything shall be accomplished!"

Of course that was from the Bible again, but he had no idea what it referred to. Since the evening after the inauguration of the new telescopes, he had looked up to his father even more. At dinner he had asked him what kind of disc it was that Max had talked about, and for the first time it had dawned on him that his father had originally not been a politician at all, but a linguistic genius, who had interpreted Etruscan. Something quite different from that strange father of Arend's, who only concerned himself with sterile abracadabra, as Onno told him afterward. He himself, he had said, could prove in a trice that Bacon had written Genesis, or the novels of Nabokov: all you had to do was look at the first five letters of his name and you could see that it was an anagram of "Bacon," and if you had to remember that the c in the Cyrillic alphabet was the kfi; and the ending ov, of course, stood for "of Verulam" — that was obvious.

Max sometimes told him fascinating things, too — for example that it didn't matter which way you looked: the most distant object was always yourself; or about the mystery of why it was dark at night and not much brighter than during the day, with that indescribable number of stars, which altogether should really form one gigantic sun, one infinite light, that should constantly light the whole firmament. . but when all was said and done Max was not his father. His foster father's connection with the war, with Hitler, who had murdered his mother, was in an alarming world, which Mr. Spier also inhabited, but in which he, fortunately, was not involved.

His interest continued to focus on things that were not taught in school. As in elementary school, he made no friends; he had never yet met anyone of his own age with whom he could talk about the things that concerned him. But it was not something that caused him pain, nor did it surprise him, because he did not even have the feeling that he was different from his classmates — it was so self-evident. In the breaks he talked and laughed with them, but a little like an actor playing his role; after the performance, when he was himself again, the character disappeared completely from his thoughts. For the same reason he did not feel superior, because it did not occur to him to compare himself with them.

In a heavy wrought-bronze box that he had found in the loft among the baron's things, he kept the sketches that he made of the Citadel of his dreams. Because the Citadel was infinite in all directions, he was obliged to limit himself to fragments, cross-sections, ground plans, which could not form a whole but did all relate to each other. The double-folded papers were in a thick beige envelope from the Westerbork Synthetic Radio Telescope, on which he had written in his first high school Latin and in his most beautiful Quadrata Quinten's dream: SOMNIUM QUINTI.

In his search for "the" building, Mr. Themaat had meanwhile put him on the trail of the classicist revolutionary architecture that flourished around 1800—at least in designs, because very little of it had actually been built. Again neglecting his homework, Quinten studied the drawings of scores of architects from that school, but he kept returning to the megalomaniacal fantasies of Boullee. They really exceeded all bounds, said Themaat, and that boundless quality was precisely what fascinated Quinten. Gigantic public buildings: a palace of justice, a necropolis, a library, a museum, a cathedral — each of them of such Cyclopic dimensions that one needed a magnifying glass to be able to distinguish the people, who swarmed like ants over the staircases and between the towering columns. Also a gigantic temple, which according to Themaat you had to imagine as the Colosseum, crowned by a cupola like that of the Pantheon. It was built over an inaccessible, dark ravine, which led into the center of the earth; at the entrance to the cave stood a statue of Artemis Ephesia, the goddess with the many breasts. Quinten stared at them shyly. Did perhaps the world of the Citadel begin in that black abyss? He was reminded of his mother for a moment, but immediately put it out of his mind. He scarcely ever thought of his mother, because he had learned from his father that it meant he was thinking of nothing; he had never visited her again since that one time, because how were you to visit no one? Fortunately, Granny never asked him if he was going with her to Emmen.

He was just as fascinated by Boullee's extreme designs for a Newton monument. He knew who Newton was from Max: the Einstein of the seventeenth century, with whom modern science had begun, and who — so Themaat told him — was worshiped in the seventeenth century as a kind of messiah, since he had been the first to understand and calculate the work of the world's architect.

The cenotaph would have consisted of a colossal globe more than six hundred feet across, held up to its equator in three staircaselike, windowless cylinders, planted with colonnades of cypresses, the trees of death par excellence. Within, in the deep twilight, the empty sarcophagus stood on a dais, illuminated only by the small holes-in the globe, causing the sunlight to be transformed into the night sky full of stars. When Quinten saw the tiny coffin in the enormous space, the thought of his mother occurred to him willy-nilly. A drawing of the building in the moonlight exuded an ominous threat, as though the globe were a dreadful bomb that could explode at any moment and devastate the whole world — and one day he imagined that a smoldering fuse was sticking out of the top of the ball. Even while he was telling that fantasy to Mr. Themaat, he immediately saw something else: the bomb with the fuse was at the same time an apple with a stalk.

"If you ask me, that building is actually the apple that fell on Newton's head."

"No one has ever seen it like that," said Themaat, laughing. "Up to now we always thought of the universe."

"And now I know exactly what kind of apple it was that fell on Newton's head."

"Is it a secret, or can you tell?"

"The apple that Eve picked in Paradise."

"From the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil!" added Themaat, and suddenly he went into one of his strange, exaggerated fits of laughter, in which even his long arms and legs participated, so that his rocking chair threatened to tip over. "Help! You did it again, QuQu! And in order to prove your assertion," he said, getting up, "I'll immediately show you something else."

As he hunted among the piles of magazines that were lying on the bottom shelves of his bookcase, he said that Quinten would have of course noticed the similarity between Boullee's Newton cenotaph and the Pantheon: that windowless round globe, which in both cases depicted the universe. "But as the founder of modern science also sat beneath the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil," he said, "what do you think of this?" Slightly triumphantly, he put a photo of a nuclear reactor on the table. "Talking of your bomb. Do you see that this thing fits exactly into the stylistic tradition of the Pantheon and of Palladio and Boullee? The fantastic thing is that the factory wasn't at all designed in an aesthetic tradition, but purely functionally, by architectural engineers from a government institute. Goodness gracious, QuQu. I'm inclined to think that what you say is true. And if you know that the creation of atomic energy, therefore also of the atom bomb, is due to Einstein, the second Newton, then Boullee may have actually designed an Einstein monument."

"That's why it wasn't built then." Quinten nodded.

"Because it's only relevant now, do you mean? Yes, why not? Although. ." he said, making a face, "there are still a few snags. Not technical, because we'd be perfectly capable of building it nowadays, but something that is actually connected with your apple of paradise."

Then he gave Quinten a lecture about the gigantic. It was always connected with death. The Colosseum had been built with the intention that human beings and animals should die in it; the gigantic, circular Castel Sant'Angelo, also in Rome, had been built by Hadrian as a mausoleum for himself and his successors. That gigantic scale originated in Egypt, where the whole of life was oriented toward the kingdom of the dead. The pyramids, those denials of time, were nothing but graves with a sarcophagus in them; and what Boullee had achieved, at least in imagination, was a link between that necrophiliac monumentality and its opposite, Greek harmony and moderation.

He showed Quinten a sheet with a design for a necropolis: a pyramid, in the base of which a semicircular hollow had been cut, wedged in it, like a mouse in a trap, a Greek temple facade with columns and the decorated architrave. That portico in combination with that arch were again of course reminiscent of the Pantheon, but at the same time that joyful Greek element was overshadowed and crushed by the mass of Egyptian style above it. And that architectural representation of the fragility of life, suddenly obviously threatened by the power of a colossal death, returned 150 years after Boullee as the depiction of direct mass murder: in the designs that Albert Speer had made for Adolf Hitler.

Quinten started when he heard that name: there was that villain again! Actually, that name should never be spoken again. Mr. Themaat showed him photographs of the models for "Germania," as Berlin was to have been called after the final victory, as the thousand-year world capital. Series of unbridled buildings, with as their Germanic climax the Great Hall, which surpassed everything that had ever been imagined.

On Speer's own testimony this monster, too, issued from the inexhaustible womb of the Pantheon: a neoclassical facade of pillars with a round space behind it, topped by a cupola. But that cupola was now twice as high as the pyramid of Cheops; on top of it was a cylinder-shaped lantern, surrounded by pillars to admit light, which was itself already many feet taller and wider than the whole Pantheon, which in turn was larger than Michelangelo's cupola in St. Peter's. On top of that, like the fuse of Quinten's bomb, stood an eagle with the globe in its claws. The hall could accommodate 180,000 people, reduced to the status of fleas; the possibility of cloud formation and drizzle had to be allowed for. The project was based on a sketch that Hitler himself had once made — originally Hitler wanted to become an architect, Mr. Themaat told him, but on reflection he preferred to go into the demolition business, because after his suicide, scarcely one stone was left standing in Berlin. Even the models had finally been burned.

"So now you've got everything together architecturally, QuQu. Hiroshima and Auschwitz. The gigantic triumph of science and technology in the twentieth century!"

If he wanted to read without being disturbed or to play his flute, Quinten sometimes went to sit by the side of the pond when the weather was fine. There, surrounded as though in the tropics by the tall rhododendron bushes and usually in the company of the two black swans floating on their own reflections, he felt protected and at peace. He had built a hut of branches, which he was proud of and which protected him against rain that was not too heavy. But if something was worrying him or if he had to think about something, he usually sought out a different spot: a couple of hundred yards outside the estate, behind the baron's fields.

Although scores of people came past every day, he was certain that he was the only one who had recognized the place, because he never saw anyone looking at it specially. In fact there was nothing much to see about it. It was the site of the annual Easter bonfire: a small, oblong field, enclosed on three sides by tall trees, on the fourth by a narrow country lane. In the summer a red cow grazed there; she looked up attentively when he sat down in the ditch and put his arms around his knees. Perhaps it was also connected with those two trees, which seemed to have escaped from the dark edge of the wood and were standing separately in the grass, each in a perfectly good place, where they gave the space structure, as did the three large erratic stones — but that did not explain the mystery that hung about the place. It was as though it were warmer and quieter than in other places where it was just as warm and quiet.

He let his eyes wander over the enclosed domain and thought of the previous day. Because his father had again not found time to come to Groot Rechteren for a couple of months, Quinten had been to visit him in The Hague with Max, where to his satisfaction they had gotten lost in the Parliament building. In the party offices, a lady who worked there said that he was in the chamber of the house; and after having listened to a long set of directions, by the end of which they had forgotten the beginning, they set off through the maze of narrow corridors — upstairs, downstairs, to the left, to the right, past lines of portraits of deceased members of Parliament, libraries, committee rooms, girls using copiers, talking loudly, obviously slightly tipsy journalists, politicians conferring in window alcoves: everything repeatedly converted, improvised, with walls knocked through. But only after they had asked the way twice more did they open a door and suddenly find themselves in the public gallery.

In the beautiful oblong room, full of red, brown, and ochre, which was smaller than Quinten had imagined, a minister slumped in his chair behind the government table was listening to the argument of someone at the lectern, or at least pretending to; on the countless benches there were no more than four or five equally bored members of Parliament. Onno was standing talking to the Speaker of the House, but he saw them immediately and gestured them to come to him.

"Thank you for releasing me from the most dreary of lion's dens," he said, and took them to the coffee room. And there, while Quinten ate his open sandwich, he had asked him, "You're twelve now — do you know what you want to be yet?"

When he didn't answer at once, Max said: "An architect, if you ask me."

Quinten was annoyed that Max had said that; it was an intrusion. Apart from that, he didn't want to become an architect at all.

Preceded by four young dogs, a young woman now ran across the country road, dressed in a long white dress, with rings on all her fingers and hung with chains and bracelets; she came from the farmhouse a little farther on, where a commune of Amsterdam artists lived — dropouts, who had had enough of life in town. She raised an arm cheerfully and he returned her greeting absent-mindedly.

He looked dreamily at something that could not be seen but that was still coming toward him from the quieter than quiet field with the cow, the three boulders, and the two alder trees in it. The question of what he wanted to be had never occurred to him. He was what he was, surely — so what was he supposed to be? But of course his father meant some profession or other, like one boy in his class, who was always announcing that he wanted to be a doctor. It was just that he could not imagine ever practicing some profession or other, not even architecture. That interest was only connected with the dream of the Citadel, but Max could not know that. Perhaps everything would always remain the same.

44. The Not

Onno might have been just as unsure what he wanted to be, but the following year, in 1981, after the new elections, he was put forward by his party leader as minister of defense. The center-right coalition of the previous four years gave way to a center-left coalition, in which the Christian Democrat prime minister was obviously not subject to change; only the conservative vice-premier left office with his cohort, to be replaced by the new Liberals and the Social Democrats of the last cabinet but one, who had been dumped four years previously and now wanted to be in government again at any price — bearing in mind the adage that politics did not wear out those in power but those not in power.

Toward the end of the cabinet formation, one Sunday in August, twenty or thirty of the principal players gathered for a boat trip on the IJsselmeer. That had been organized months before by an enlightened, stubborn banker, who not only promoted the arts but did not let even his opinions be determined by his interest, because his wealth did not prevent him from being more or less left-wing; and because, besides being more or less left-wing, he was also a rich banker, and moreover the scion of an old patrician family, no one ever had a reason to refuse an invitation from him.

However, the trip now became an appropriate opportunity for the new political friends to conclude their squabbling over the portfolios undisturbed; the leaders of the Conservatives, who had previously also been invited, had understood that unfortunately it would be better if they were otherwise engaged. Their place was taken by a number of ministers-designate, like Onno. Usually he stayed over Saturday night at Helga's, but now he had gone home so as not to wake her the following morning; she had herself had a ticket for a late showing of the old film Les enfants du paradis.

Before they went aboard, the groaning politicians, still half asleep, drank coffee in Muiden castle, but by eleven o'clock the first empty whiskey bottles were already landing in the crates. It was an oppressive day; the bank's seagoing motor launch, manned by a graying captain-cum-navigator and two ladies in white aprons who attended to those on board, made its way through the water, which was as gray as the sky. In the afternoon they were to drop anchor in Enkhuizen, where an organ program by the Social Democrat party chairman was planned; then there would be a crossing to Fries-land, to Stavoren, where a hotel had been booked. For those not wishing to spend the night there, official cars would in the meantime have arrived.

In a circle on the rear deck, with a rum-and-Coke in his hand, Onno was explaining to the banker why he was considered by everyone so excellently suited to become minister of defense.

"I owe it to my big mouth. Even in my own party they're frightened that a Social Democrat won't be able to stand up to the generals. But they know that I will line up that bunch in my room on the very first day and say, 'Gentlemen, if any of you should ever feel the necessity to threaten resignation, then he can regard himself as automatically dismissed.' And after I have had them swear allegiance unto death to my person, I will wipe the Soviet Union off the map with a fearsome first strike."

The banker had an infectious asthmatic laugh, which resonated in the sounding box of his overweight body. He was sweating and with a newspaper was constantly brushing away the myriad tiny gnats that were accompanying the boat. For that matter they were not the only accompaniment: about a couple of hundred yards away, somewhat behind them, was a patrol boat of the national police. A company had also formed on the foredeck, but the important business was being conducted in the cabin, which no one entered without being summoned. Through the open door at the bottom of the steep stairs Onno could see them at the drawing room table — the prime minister and the two other party leaders with their intimates. Someone regularly went to the bridge to make a phone call.

Obviously something was wrong, because they'd been together for an hour. Everyone called everyone else by their Christian names, but the staff were addressed as "sir" and "madam." Why was that? Onno wondered. Why was it that this handful of people called the tune in Holland? How was it possible that it was possible? Obviously, there were indeed two different kinds of people in the world. He emptied his glass, looked around the circle, and was going to ask whether there shouldn't actually be a god on board as well, but controlled himself.

The first signs of drunkenness were becoming noticeable. In the forecastle an interim minister had been shouting for sometime "Steady as she goes!" at the helmsman, who each time nodded with a smile. A veteran politician in an over-thick sailor's jersey said threateningly to a serving lady, "Tonight I shall count your hairs." The radar aerial revolved slowly and superfluously. They passed Marken, and when they had left Volendam and Edam behind them, the coast slowly sank below the horizon. Although the boat was in the middle of nothing but water, it was becoming more and more oppressive. Everyone had become convinced that things were not going according to plan in the cabin: something was wrong. While Onno discussed with the minister of internal affairs the delicate matter of the crown prince, who in all probability would become liable for military service under his regime, his party leader came out of the cabin. His tie was loose and his shirt was hanging out of his trousers at the back; with clumsy, uncoordinated gestures he took Onno aside behind the sloop. It became quieter on deck, and immediately Onno knew that something was seriously wrong.

The leader with his bald pate, prime minister of the cabinet in which Onno had been a minister of state, vice-premier of the coming cabinet, two heads shorter than himself, waved a sheet of paper and looked up at him.

"Things have gone to pot, Onno. Were you in Cuba in 'sixty-seven?"

That was it.

"Yes."

"When you were there did you take part in…" He put on a pair of reading glasses with heavy frames and looked at the paper, but Onno immediately completed his question:

"La primera Conferencia de La Habana? Yes, but actually not."

Lost for words, the leader took off his glasses and stared at him. "And at the conference you were actually on the first committee — that of the armed struggle? I can scarcely get the words out."

"Yes, Koos."

Koos revolved on his own axis in astonishment and looked out across the water; on his neck, his slightly too long white hairs came together in a series of points, like shark's teeth. "What in God's name is the meaning of this? Do you really think that you can take over Defense with something like this in your CV? Why did you keep it from me?"

"I didn't keep anything from you. I simply didn't think about it anymore. It was fourteen years ago. For me it was a silly incident that meant nothing."

"Does your stupidity know no bounds, Onno?"

"Apparently not."

"Do you realize what you're doing to the party? The whole cabinet formation may now be in jeopardy. Tell me, who are you? Did you have guerrilla training there as well, perhaps?"

Onno ignored that remark and asked: "Is that an anonymous letter?"

"Yes."

"Then I know who wrote it."

"Who?"

"Bart Bork."

"Bart Bork? Bart Bork? That ex-Communist student leader? Were you at that conference with him?"

"On the contrary — he couldn't get in. But he had a score to settle with me, and it seems as though he's got what he wants."

"Would you now please tell me at once what actually happened?"

"I would appreciate doing that with the prime minister present."

"That's fine by me."

"Was that addressed to you?" asked Onno as they went toward the cabin, followed by the silent glances of the others.

"No. Dorus suddenly put it on the table just now. Goddamnit, Onno, I won't let him have the pleasure."

Onno knew that the prime minister was the bane of Koos's life. When Dorus had been minister of justice in his own cabinet, he had become thoroughly irritated by the bigoted zealot, who could not ignore a single abortion — to say nothing of euthanasia — but who ordered the security forces to open fire without pity when the Moluccans hijacked trains in Drenthe; in the last cabinet formation Koos had been eliminated remorselessly by him— as leader of the opposition he had not gotten a hold on him — and now he had to serve under him again. Politics was the continuation of war by other means, in which you could win or lose; the problem was that you got used to winning but never to losing. That meant that when you lost, more went through you than when you won; that when you lost, you lived more intensely, which in turn resulted in some people ultimately preferring to lose than to win, because winning bored them. Onno would have liked to say to Koos that this destructive tendency was a much greater enemy of his than Dorus, but he had never dared.

Meanwhile Dorus had also appeared on deck, where he was applauded by everyone when he did a handstand to relax. Onno saw that Koos, who was fifteen or twenty years older than Dorus and who could scarcely stand up properly, was extremely irritated by this. Like Onno, he came from a Calvinist family.

A little later in the warm cabin the atmosphere was icy. Apart from them, only Piet, the new Liberal chief, was at the table.

"We're listening," said Dorus. He was in shirtsleeves, his hair combed with excruciating care. His appearance had something fragile and boyish about it, but his shaded eyes, which were focused on Onno, and his fleshy, slightly pursed lips in his expressionless face with its pointed nose, talked a different, a more remorseless, language.

Onno was surprised at his own calm. Without feeling that it really mattered, he explained what had happened fourteen years before: his meeting with Bork after the political and musical demonstration in Amsterdam, where Bork had announced that Onno would become a beachcomber on Ameland after the revolution — and that it was precisely that ominous remark that had finally made him decide to go into politics. Then the Cuban invitation to his wife, the misunderstanding at the airport, and the explosive conference in which he had found himself. He said nothing about the role of Max, who had persuaded him to go. Finally, he told of his meeting with Bork in the park in Havana, where he was exchanging money on the black market, where he had gotten even with him.

"And now it's his turn again," he concluded. "But it was an interesting conference, from which I learned a lot. It's just that looking back on it, it might have been more sensible if I had enrolled as a press representative."

Dorus tapped the tips of his outstretched fingers against each other and looked around the circle. "We believe you."

"At least I do," said Piet, with the astonished, innocent look in his blue eyes that won him so many votes.

"Moreover," continued Dorus, "I appreciate your honesty. There are also photocopies of the conference administration enclosed, in the name of a certain Onno Quits, and you could have said that was someone else or that they're forgeries. As long as there's no photograph on which you can be seen in the company of the formidable Dr. Castro Ruiz, you could have risen very high."

"I'm not lying, Dorus, because I have nothing to hide."

"But as things are at present, what's the good of us believing you? Will the chiefs of staff believe you — or want to believe you? It's like that naughty bishop who's found in the brothel and who proclaims, 'In order to be able to fight evil, one must know evil.' What's happened to your authority? Because I assure you that the generals will also be in possession of these documents within twenty-four hours. This epistle," said Dorus, putting his narrow, well-manicured hand on it, "was not addressed to me but to the American ambassador, who had the politeness to send it to me by courier last night. Well, that means that the CIA now knows about it, that our own armed forces will soon know about it, and that they will know about it in Brussels, at NATO headquarters, under the archpatriarchal leadership of our inestimable countryman. Mr. Bork has done his work thoroughly. And you can rest assured that our American friends will not wish to run any risks, however small, that a pro-Fidel lout will ever have authority within the treaty organization over the forces on the north German plain, nor that this individual should be informed of vital military secrets, so that the Cold War might have been fought in vain."

With this the open account of the Eighty Years' war that had been fought in vain was settled. Politics, thought Onno, was a profession in which everything was settled down to the last cent. "It's hopeless, Onno," sighed Koos, without taking his thin cigarillo out of his mouth. "You're finished. For that matter, I don't mind you knowing that even in my time some generals had strange ideas: I was already going too far for them. What's more, certain monarchist groups from the former resistance have been hoarding caches of weapons since the beginning of the 1970s, just in case the New Left came to power. They know that we know who they are and where they've buried their stuff, and as minister of defense you'd also be informed of that."

"That is," observed Dorus, "we know what we know, but we don't know what we don't know."

"It won't be as bad as that," said Koos. "Most of them are okay people, although there are a few generals among them. It's just to give you an impression of the atmosphere."

With a mixture of numbness and relief, Onno said: "It goes without saying that I am withdrawing."

"And if our feathered friends of the press inquire for what reason?" asked Dorus. "Your name has been circulating in the newspapers for some weeks."

"Because you in your unfathomable wisdom decided on a different distribution of portfolios, which unfortunately left me high and dry. Or think of some illness for me. Say I've had a slight brain hemorrhage."

"Nonsense," said Piet. "Why should you have to lie because you don't want to lie? Apart from that, Bork may still make the matter public. If anyone asks anything, you simply tell it like it is and in a year's time you'll become mayor of Leiden."

"The job of beachcomber of Ameland," said Dorus, with a deadpan expression, "appears to have been already allocated."

"Dorus!" cried Piet reproachfully, but also smiled.

"Just tell us what you want," mumbled Koos.

"And who will get Defense now?" asked Piet.

"Without the shadow of a doubt you have a sweet prince on board for that exceptionally responsible post who is dear to all of us."

"Just a minute!" said Koos indignantly, sticking up an index finger, the top joint of which was deformed. "That means that we—"

"Undoubtedly," Dorus interrupted. "With his crystal-clear intelligence, old Koos has immediately hit on the essence of my spontaneous brainwave."

Onno had gotten up and said that he felt superfluous here. They agreed that for the time being he would say nothing to the others; God willing, they might have solved the problem before they arrived in Stavoren. Onno promised that he would not jump ship in Enkhuizen.

When he sat down again in his chair on the afterdeck, everyone in the circle looked at him in silence, but no one asked anything. Only Dolf, the badly shaven Catholic minister of economic affairs, put a hand on his shoulder as he passed. What he would have preferred, Onno reflected, would be to be fired by cannon from the ship onto the shore, because he no longer had any business here. While the conversations were resumed, he realized calmly that once again he did not know what he wanted to be.

From one minute to the next, everything had changed. He did not feel at all like simply remaining in Parliament; and a job as a mayor did not come into consideration, or becoming director of the Foundation for Pure Scientific Research, or anything in "Europe"; it was now a fact that he was definitely leaving politics. It had begun with Bork and it was ending with Bork. That his life should be forever linked with Bork's filled him with disgust. He saw Bork's leering eyes and felt as if a disgusting insect had crawled over him; he rubbed his face with both hands to shoo it away. Then he thought of Max, who ultimately had all the turning points in his life on his conscience, but did not bear him any malice. The only person whom he begrudged his fall was his retired elder brother — fortunately his father did not have to experience it. And as far as Helga was concerned: she'd probably be just happy that it had gone as it had.

The few citizens of Enkhuizen who saw them walking through the quiet old streets from the marina to the church stopped and were sure that they were dreaming: it wasn't just the prime minister walking there but everyone. That was of course impossible, because all those faces belonged on television and not in their little town: if it was really true that all those in power were now in Enkhuizen, then great danger probably threatened them.

The mayor and the local police were also in the dark; only the vicar and the sexton welcomed them. Giggling like a class of schoolchildren, the visitors distributed themselves across the wooden pews in the nave. In order to stretch their legs, Koos, Dorus, and Piet had joined them, but they immediately withdrew into a side chapel, where they continued their deliberations under a painting of St. Sebastian. The church still smelled of incense from the morning mass. The minister who had just now kept shouting "Steady as she goes!" suddenly mounted the stairs to the pulpit, undoubtedly to preach a Calvinist fire-and-brimstone sermon, but was prevented from doing so by his minister of state. Meanwhile, the Social Democratic party chairman, who had begun as a Protestant theologian, had vanished — and shortly afterward Bach's equally invisible variations on the choral "Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich hier" came thundering out of the motionless pipes.

Onno glanced around: the front of the organ reminded him of the opened jaws of a whale, attacking him from behind. He felt completely out of place, both in this Catholic church and in this company. He thought back with embarrassment to his inflated words of just now, that he would line up the generals and threaten them — he would be jokingly reminded of this one day, when people happened to bump into him.

Feeling a certain stiffening in his body, he looked at the crucifix on the altar and listened to the music. Bork's observation at that time may have been decisive in his decision to go into politics, but there was a deeper motive behind it: his failure with the Phaistos disc. Now the wheel had obviously come full circle, shouldn't he try and go back to the disc?

Four years ago he had still been able to take the escape route of becoming a member of Parliament; now everything was much more final. Perhaps it was because of Bach, but suddenly the prospect attracted him. Of course he would have to get back into it again — he hadn't kept up with the specialist literature in the intervening fourteen years. The only thing he knew for certain was that it had still not been deciphered, not even by Landau, his Israeli rival, because Landau would certainly not have deprived himself of the pleasure of informing him personally. He sighed deeply. Who knows, perhaps all those years had been necessary to allow the solution to mature deep inside him: perhaps he might very shortly have the liberating insight!

The sexton came out of the sacristy and asked something of someone in the front row, who turned around, scanned the church, and pointed at him. Onno looked up inquiringly, whereupon the sexton made a turning movement next to his ear.

Onno got up in astonishment, while two things went through his head at once: how could anyone know that he was here — and how was it possible that the gesture for "telephone" was still determined by the mechanics of a piece of equipment that had not existed for fifty years and could only be seen in Laurel and Hardy films?

The sexton took him to the sacristy. The telephone stood on a table with a dark red cloth on it; in a wall cupboard with its sliding doors open hung long mass garments, like the wardrobe of a Roman emperor.

Onno picked up the receiver. "Quist speaking."

"Are you Mr. Onno Quist?" asked a woman's voice.

"Yes, who am I speaking to?"

"Mr. Quist, this is the central police station in Amsterdam. We managed to find out where you were via the prime minister's office. We're sorry, but you must prepare yourself for some shocking news."

Onno felt himself stiffening and immediately thought of Quinten. "Tell me what's happened."

"We know that you are a friend of Ms. Helga Hartman's."

It was as though those two words, Helga Hartman, penetrated his body like bullets.

"Yes, and what about it?"

"Something very serious happened to her last night."

Onno suddenly could not speak anymore; his breath was stuck in his throat like a ball.

"Mr. Quist? Are you still there?"

"Is she dead?" he asked hoarsely.

"Yes, Mr. Quist…"

Was this possible? Helga dead. Helga dead? His eyes widened in dismay; he felt as though he were emptying, in the direction of Amsterdam, where her dead body must be.

"Really completely dead?" he asked, immediately hearing how idiotic the question was.

"Yes, Mr. Quist."

"Christ Almighty!" he suddenly screamed. "How in God's name did it happen?"

"Are you sure you want to talk about it on the telephone—"

"For God's sake tell me! Now!"

She must have been attacked in the early hours of the morning, when she was opening the front door of her house. She was dragged inside and in the hall attacked mercilessly with a knife, probably by an addict; after her house had been ransacked, she was left to her fate. There was no trace of the culprit. Because her vocal chords had been cut, she could not call for help; but bleeding heavily, she managed to open the door and crawl to the telephone booth on the other side of the canal, with some change in her hand that had been left in her emptied bag.

Obviously, she wanted to call the emergency number, and if she had been given immediate help, she would probably have survived, but the telephone had been vandalized. Probably only an hour later, toward morning, she was found by a passerby; by that time she had already died from loss of blood. She was in the morgue at Wilhelmina Hospital.

Onno did not rejoin the others, but went out into the street through a side door. A small crowd had meanwhile gathered by the closed church door, but nothing from his surroundings got through to him anymore; without looking where he was going, he wandered into the town along a narrow canal.

Helga was dead. A desert had been created in him. He would have liked to cry, but he felt dried up inside. They had slaughtered her senselessly. She no longer existed. In an Amsterdam cellar her mutilated body was lying under a sheet, and at this moment her murderer was in a state of heroin bliss. Perhaps he would see him one day in town, rummaging in a dustbin — how could he ever go out into the street again?

He had to get away, away from Holland for good. First Ada, now Helga. Everything had been razed to the ground. Had he loved her? He'd never really understood what other people meant when they said that they loved someone, but at any rate Helga was a part of himself that was now dead. Why weren't addicts cleaned off the streets, on the basis of the Mental Health Act? Perhaps he might yet be caught — but what about the vandals who had wrecked the telephone booth, as a result of which she had bled to death? Without them, she would still have been alive. They would never be caught, or even hunted for. If they happened to be caught in the act, they'd be back on the street half an hour later, with a reprimand. Robbery and murder could be combated by the police, but vandalism could only be prevented by despotic authority, or by God in heaven, in whom no one here believed any longer. He did not exist, but as long as people believed in him and his commandments were valid, no public telephones were vandalized for fun.

Helga was dead. So was a lie necessary, since the alternative was despotic authority? Neither in Moscow nor in Mecca were the telephone booths vandalized. Was the choice perhaps between being misled and despotism? He no longer wished to be involved in a world where things were like that. Did he have to choose between theocracy and worldly tyranny? Could society only function properly on a basis of fear? Did human beings have to be given a built-in policeman from above? Were they intrinsically evil, and did they only become good when circumstances were bad? So should their circumstances be made worse out of humane considerations? Was Rousseau the greatest idiot of all time? In Holland people had never been so humane as in the winter of 1944-45, when thousands of people were dying of hunger and the shots of the execution squads were exploding around them. It was hopeless. Helga was dead. His colleagues in the church, his former colleagues, would simply have to see how they got on with their tolerance — because they refused to choose, all that was left for them was anarchy. Fidel had his own optimistic design, with the ideal of the New Man in the role of God, and Che in that of his murdered son — Fidel had his blessing, but for him it was over. He was opting out.

Helga was dead. No more politics; no more girlfriends. Perhaps all that was left was the Phaistos disc. He did not want to be anything anymore. He was devastated. What day was it? He looked around, at the well-behaved Sunday gables. Probably, he had never been in Enkhuizen, nor Helga. But she wasn't not there in the same way that she had been not there before; her death had planted a completely different, permanent NOT in the world and in himself. It was over. His decision was made: he was going to disappear. In other civilized countries it was not a bit better than here, but there at least no one knew him, because he himself didn't want to know anyone from now on — not even Quinten. He'd become a stranger to everyone, in the first place to himself. He wasn't going to stay a day longer in Holland than was necessary.

45. Changes

The last time that Max, Sophia and Quinten saw him was at Helga's funeral, which many politicians and journalists had also attended. The press had treated him with compassion; the impression had been created that he was declining the ministerial post because of the death of his companion. Everyone considered that it was best to leave it at that. Of course he had made a dull, depressed impression, but nothing indicated that he intended to give up everything, not even when he said goodbye. A week later each of them received a handwritten letter, mailed from Amsterdam, which they read at the same time at the breakfast table on the balcony.

Dear Max,

We probably won't see each other again. I'm going away and not coming back. I've been pushed over the edge. Hopefully you'll understand that without my having to explain, because I can't explain. All I know is that I have to make myself invisible, a bit like a dying elephant. The person I was no longer exists, and everything that may yet happen in my life is actually already posthumous. I don't have to tell you that there are people who have endured unspeakably worse things and still don't react like me, but they are different people from me. There are also people who hang themselves over much less. I don't know if what I want is possible, namely that I don't want anything anymore, but I must at least have a try. All I want to do is think a few things through. The fact that I'm cutting loose from those I love best, like you, and of course Quinten and my youngest sister, instead of coming closer to you, is a mystery to me too; but what attitude can a person take in order to solve the riddle that he is? Perhaps the fact is that I've always wanted to escape from everything.

Between Ada's accident and Helga's murder there is my political career, which has now also come to an end. My life isn't conceivable without yours. Up to last week you determined its course to a greater extent than you yourself know. I realize that this may sound mysterious, but let it remain so. However many things we discussed, particularly in those first few months, what was essential always remained unspoken. What was it between us, Max? Gilgamesh and Enkidu? Do you remember? The "mentopagus"? I have forgotten nothing and I will forget nothing; the memory of our friendship will remain with me to my dying day. The fact that you've been prepared to take pity on Quinten — denying your previous joie de vivre in a way that, to tell the truth, still astonishes me — is something that not only fills me with deep gratitude, but also and perhaps with an even greater feeling of guilt. In fact from the very start he was much more your son than mine. Look after him well for the few years that he will still be with you. All the practical and financial matters have been settled with my bank; that will of course simply continue as usual. Sometimes I have the impression that he knows everything already, but should he want to go to university, there will be an allowance for him.

I have given my notice in the Kerkstraat and my things are in Dol's loft for the moment; should any of you want anything from them, then they can collect it. Except for my lawyer, Hans Giltay Veth (the son of your father's defense lawyer after the war, by the way), no one knows how I can be reached, not even my family. If there's something really important, you can turn to him. May it go well with you, Max, in your scientific work too. Unveil the Big Bang! I shall always think of you as someone who knew the answer to a question before it was posed.

Yours, Onno

Dear Mrs. Brons,

Any other opening would sound just as idiotic, so let's leave it like that. Max will let you read my letter, telling him that I'm going to disappear. That may look as though I've made a difficult decision, which I have thought over for a long time, but that's not how it is. As soon as I heard what had happened to Helga, I was certain that nothing else could be done. As I am now, I've become unsuitable for any social tie. In the background, of course, Ada's fate is intimately connected with all this.

It's difficult for me to write these lines. Although we've never had any disagreement, neither have we had any real contact with each other. You didn't choose me and I didn't choose you; but because Ada and I chose each other, we had to deal with each other, while in fact we've remained as alien to each other as creatures from different worlds. Obviously nature only deals in short-range psychology, and we shall have to resign ourselves to that. But that doesn't detract from the fact that your daughter is my wife. . or was — that twilight world of conjugation expresses exactly the depth of the disaster. Our five lives are interwoven for good: yours, mine, Ada's, Max's and Quinten's.

Ada will never know how splendidly you have taken over her task for the last thirteen years, but I know and I wish I had the ability to express my feelings. Sadly, I can't; but I console myself with the thought that someone who can probably doesn't have those feelings. Let me put it like this: in a number of respects I'm more grateful to you than to my own mother. Ada is flesh of your flesh; should decisions need to be made about her, then of course you must have the last word.

Please forgive the formal tone of this letter. Farewell. May things go well with you.

Your son-in-law

My Dearest Quinten!

You will have probably realized for yourself that in life things are constantly changing — usually that happens gradually and almost imperceptibly, but sometimes suddenly and very drastically. When you cycle somewhere not much is happening, but if you fall and break a leg, then suddenly a whole lot is wrong. War is something like that, but not just war. Mama and I lived very quietly together, but when she told me one day that you were going to be born — that is, at that moment of course we didn't know that it was going to be you, or even if it was going to be a boy or a girl — from that moment nothing was really the same again. Of course that was a nice change, but when Mama had that accident, everything was completely different in a terrible way. In the meantime you've also stood at Granddad's and Granny To's graves. They were very old, and when you're very old you simply die; but a few days ago we also buried Auntie Helga. Can you understand that suddenly I can't take it anymore? Perhaps you hadn't expected that of me, and perhaps you think I'm a wimp; I can't help it. It's like a match: you can break twice and the halves are still attached, but the third time it breaks in two. In some countries you have little wax matches — you can bend them backward and forward as much as you like and they never break; but I'm not one of them. Anyway, they're rotten matches that you always burn your fingers on.

My writing this letter means a change like that for you. By the time you read this, I shall have gone. I've gone underground, as we called it during the war. Then, people went underground to avoid the Germans. I've gone underground to escape life itself. Perhaps you may find that odd for a talker like me; perhaps one day you'll despise me because of it and perhaps you already do — but that's how it is. I have gone for you, just as I've gone for myself, you'll scarcely miss me, because not much will change. I've never been a real father to you, always a kind of distant uncle. Max is your father, just as Granny is your mother. There are fathers and sons in the world, and I've always been more of a son than a father. Perhaps you're more of a father than I am. Try and forget me. All I want to do is to think a bit. Just see me as a hermit who's going into the wilderness for the rest of his life.

Forgive me and don't look for me, because you won't find me.

Your Prodigal Father

Quinten looked up and met the eyes of Max and Sophia, who had also read each other's letters. In the morning sunlight, the first wasps had already alighted on the remains of the honey.

"What's a hermit?"

"A recluse."

"Has Daddy gone in the same way as Mama?"

Max had a constant line running through his head: I have lost the world— it was as though Onno's message were hidden beneath it, so that it couldn't really get through to him. He was also alarmed by the sentence in which Onno said that his life had to a large extent been more determined by Max than he himself knew — but from what followed it was apparent that this could not refer to Quinten. In confusion he looked at Quinten and looked for an answer to his question.

But Sophia said: "Of course not. He's simply somewhere, but he doesn't want to talk to anybody anymore. He's mourning Auntie Helga very deeply and that's why he's saying all that. I think that.." Suddenly her words were lost in the ear-splitting roar of a formation of jets flying low overhead; she waited for a moment until the noise changed over the woods into the boom of a distant storm. "Time heals all wounds. It wouldn't surprise me if he's back in a few months."

"I'm not so sure about that," said Max. It didn't strike him as completely impossible, either, but he didn't feel any false hopes should be awakened in Quinten. "In that case he would simply have hidden away somewhere for a while; but when someone writes letters like this, something else is going on with them. Can we read your letter too, Quinten?"

"Not now. I have to go to school."

"I'll call and say you'll be a bit late."

Reluctantly, Quinten handed the letter over, after which he read those of Sophia and Max. He did not understand everything, but he again formed an idea of the bond of friendship there had been between his father and Max. In that letter to Max, it also said that Max was actually his father, but that was of course in fact precisely not the case: the man who had written those farewell letters was not not his father, but his father. Max was only his father in a manner of speaking, just as Granny was only his mother in a manner of speaking.

He looked up. "Can I have Mama's cello in my room now?"

"Of course," said Max. "When I have to go down to that part of the world next, I'll collect it from Auntie Dol."

Quinten sighed deeply and stared across the moat toward the trees and the coach houses. He felt the absence of his father around him much more intensely than he had ever felt his presence; it seemed as though he was now far more present than when he had been there.

What did it all mean, Max asked himself a few months later, late in the evening after returning from Tsjallingtsje's, while he intended to drink a glass or two of wine in the silent castle but had emptied the whole bottle, when times suddenly changed? In the 1960s the students in Berkeley revolted; shortly afterward the Provos appeared in Amsterdam; and then the universities were occupied in Berlin and Paris too. There might still be a causal link between those things, but how come it also happened in Warsaw, on the other side of the Iron Curtain? And why was it that at the same time the Cultural Revolution took place in China, also something that involved young people? There was no connection, and yet it happened simultaneously. Imperial Japan had nothing to do with Hitler's Germany, and yet at the same moment it became just as aggressive.

Did Hegel's World Spirit perhaps really exist, and was humanity as a whole subject to the ebb and flow of mysterious undercurrents that paid no attention to political differences? That was the kind of question to which there was no answer, but on a small scale something comparable was now happening in his personal circumstances. "When troubles come they come not single spies said the insufferable cliche; but since he was approaching fifty, he began to realize that cliches were simply truths. Although it was entirely unconnected, it seemed in retrospect as though Onno's departure had also heralded the end of their stay in Groot Rechteren.

When after a long illness the baron had nevertheless died unexpectedly, as the death announcement said, it had in the first instance a gratifying consequence. As Quinten's guardian, Max received an invitation from a lawyer in Zwolle, where he was informed that the deceased had included Quinten in his will. In an imposing paneled room, which a silent lady entered now and again, to adjust something among high piles of documents folded lengthwise, the slightly emaciated official read him Gevers's testament. It had not escaped the deceased that Quinten regularly cleared the grave of Deep Thought Sunstar of stinging nettles: as a reward, therefore, he was leaving him ten thousand guilders. He was to receive thirty thousand guilders for the fact that he had made the life's work of his son, Rutger, possible: Rutger's "very big curtain" — by now measuring thirty feet by thirty. Forty thousand guilders — that was a lot of money, said the lawyer, and the family was probably not happy about it, but all in all it amounted to the restitution of rent since 1968. They had had free accommodation for all those years.

"By the way, if it interests you.." he said as he was accompanying Max to the front door, "I can tell you that the heirs plan to dispose of Groot Rechteren shortly. You can buy it if you like. You can have it for five hundred thousand, minus the park and Ms. Trip's house, but including the coach house and the other outbuildings. Ridiculously cheap."

"Where would I get half a million from?" laughed Max. "I have to get by on a scientist's starvation wage."

"Have a chat with your bank. And if it's too much for you alone, you could consider setting up a cooperative association with your fellow tenants, which can act as buyer. You never know what might happen otherwise.

Once ownership passes to a third party, you can be given notice after three years, and you'll never get anything like that again. I'm always available for advice. But don't take too long deciding — there are already sharks about."

This heralded a period of confusion and uncertainty, but the first result was an increase in solidarity. They had never gathered together so often in the castle: at Max and Sophia's, among Theo Kern's cooing doves, on the immaculate Empire furniture of Mr. and Mrs. Spier, occasionally also upstairs, at Proctor and Clara's, among the umbrellas; but usually in the library of Themaat, who had not been doing well recently.

Because no one was wealthy, they got the lawyer to draw up the draft statutes of a tenants' association; with an eye to restoration grants, he very shrewdly reserved a seat on the committee for an outsider, such as the Foundation for Drenthe Castles, or the National Forestry Commission. But when finance came up — the mortgage loan, people's own resources, rates, property tax, the mutual division of all those expenses — the first problems appeared.

Those with the nicest accommodation would of course pay most, that could be assessed; but Kern, who in any case had nicer accommodation than Proctor and moreover had the use of the coach house, began to have cold feet. Everyone had a fixed income and a pension, except for him; he was an artist. He was already well into his sixties, and if he fell ill tomorrow, not another cent would come in, and Selma would have to go and scrub floors at the baroness's; and anyway, how long would he still be physically able to sculpt, so that he could meet his obligations? His share of the lawyer's bill was already costing him an arm and a leg. But anyone who didn't become a member of the cooperative, the same lawyer had stipulated, had to agree to the loss of his residential rights.

Next Max also began to have doubts. He had let himself be carried along by the first flush of enthusiasm, but when things stagnated, he wondered what he actually wanted. In five years' time at the most, Quinten would be leaving home — was he to stay living here with Sophia? The task he had undertaken would then have been completed, after which nothing would tie him to her except memory.

One evening, when he was slightly tipsy, he suddenly plucked up courage to raise the subject: "Listen, Sophia, something else about the castle. In a few years' time, when Quinten—"

"Of course," she immediately interrupted him. "Then our ways will part."

Using the alibi that they could not simply abandon Theo, who after all had lived longer at Groot Rechteren than all of them, he was able to convince the others simply to let events take their course and to hope that the new owner would leave things as they were.

All this passed Quinten by. He also took Gevers's substantial bequest for granted: looking after Deep Thought Sunstar's grave and teaching Rutger how to weave a carpet were perfectly natural, after all!

Because he knew that he was going to be kept back a grade this year, he did even less schoolwork than usual. In the evenings, in the total silence, a little dazzled by the light on his open books, he stared at the tall black window in his room, in which he could only vaguely make out the transition from the dark sky to the even darker wood.

His father was somewhere out there in the night now — far away, perhaps in America, or even on the other side of the world, in Australia. But in any case not infinitely far away, like his mother. And anyway perhaps he was close by; perhaps he only implied that he was leaving Holland so that no one would look for him there: perhaps he was simply living with a farmer nearby. But if you didn't know where someone was, that really made no difference. What was he doing at this moment? He'd wanted "to think something through," he had written to Max. What was that? What did he mean by that? He took his father's letter from the bronze box, in which he also kept the secret maps of the SOMNIUM QUINTI. He did not need to read it again, because he knew it by heart: he carefully brushed with his fingertips the paper on which his father's hand had rested. The idea that he would really never see him again seemed just as impossible as the idea that the sun would not rise tomorrow.

He locked the box with the antique padlock that he had been given by Piet Keller; he hid the little key between the loose bricks behind the oil stove. After placing his hand on the case of Ada's cello for a moment, he went to the window to look at the spiders again.

They looked awful and he hated them, but they fascinated him. Because the light in his turret room attracted the insects from the wood, five or six large spiders had realized that they should spin their webs in front of the glass. He didn't understand them. On the one hand they were ingenious, subtle architects, who wove gossamer-fine webs patiently, and in a material that reminded him of the stuff that for the last few months he had even found in his pajama bottoms when he woke up in the mornings: that had always been preceded by a blissful dream, which he could never remember and which had nothing to do with the Citadel. But when their work was finished, they emerged as equally patient but gruesome murderers, who pounced mercilessly on their prey, bit it to death, spun the wings so that they were crushed together, and sucked it dry. How could those things be reconciled — that architectural sophistication and that savage aggression?

There were spiders that waited at the edge of their web until something wandered into their fatal silver trap, but there were also spiders that sat in the middle. And one evening he suddenly saw that the lucid structure of their webs in a certain sense was a geometrical representation of their repulsive bodies, with the eight hairy legs — a kind of transparent extension of it, just as algebra is the abstraction of mathematics. He had to know more about this, and he decided to put it to Mr. Themaat.

"Do you know what's wrong with you, QuQu?" said Mr. Themaat the following day, with the resignation of someone who had met his match. "You… anyway, leave it. I don't know what's wrong with you."

Then he told Quinten that for the umpteenth time he had hit the bull's-eye. He spoke more slowly than he used to; his exuberant fits of laughter no longer occurred, either. It was as though his head had grown into a motionless extension of his trunk; his wide-open eyes stared out at Quinten from a practically expressionless face. Quinten had heard from Sophia that it was because he had to take so many pills — they made you like that. He looked like a wax image of himself, like at Madame Tussaud's, but it was clear from what he said that his intellect had not been affected.

Via the spider's web, he said, Quinten had hit upon the "homo-mensura-thesis": Protagoras's argument that man was the measure of all things. In Roman antiquity, Vitruvius had said that temples should have the ideal proportion of the human body, as had been the case with the Greeks. In the Middle Ages that prescription had been linked to the Old Testament notion that God had created man in His own image, which gave human measurements a divine origin, with as a New Testament addition of course the central fact of Christ's body. In architecture that had led to churches and cathedrals in the form of a Latin cross, that is, the rough scheme of the human figure; but only in the Renaissance did those views evolve into a sophisticated philosophical architectural system.

"Lie down on the ground," order Mr. Themaat.

Quinten looked at him in astonishment. "Me?"

"Yes, you."

When Quinten did what he had been told, Themaat rose from his rocking chair slowly, as in a slow motion film, and asked Elsbeth if she had any string in the house.

"String?" she repeated suspiciously. "What on earth are you planning to do, Ferdinand? Are you going to tie him up?"

"Just give me it."

She took a ball of white wool out of a basket. "Will this do?"

"Even better."

Themaat said that Quinten should put his ankles together and spread his arms. Crawling on his knees, he then put the thread on the carpet in a pure square bordered by Quinten's crown, the tips of his middle fingers, and his heels. Then he had to move his feet slightly apart and his arms slightly upward, whereupon Themaat draped a second white thread in a circle along the soles of his feet and the tips of his fingers. Quinten got up carefully and looked at the double figure. The circle was resting on the lower side edge of the square; to the side and at the top, it circumscribed it. Themaat took a guilder coin out of his pocket and put it carefully in the middle of the circle which coincided with that of the square.

"And that spot marks your navel," he said, "which linked you to your mother."

A little alarmed, Quinten looked at the coin, which through Themaat's words was suddenly transformed into a shining mystery.

That linking of the "homo circularis" and the "homo quadratus," Themaat told him, had been described before Christ by Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture, but in the fifteenth century Leonardo da Vinci made a famous drawing of it. He took a book out of the case and showed it to Quinten: a proud, naked man in a square and a circle, with thick locks of hair down to his shoulders and four arms and four legs, surrounded by a commentary in mirror writing.

"I expect it's a self-portrait," he said. "And good God, he's like a spider in a web too — and he's got eight limbs as well! What does that mean?" He glanced sideways at Quinten, who had also seen it right away. "Aren't you frightened that you're gradually venturing into areas where no one can follow you anymore?"

"How do you mean?"

"I don't know."

Quinten looked at the figures on the carpet again and said. "It also looks a bit like the ground plan of the Pantheon."

Themaat exchanged a glance with Elsbeth and said with a solemn note in his voice: "The awareness that the divine body is determined by two perfect, elementary mathematical figures placed man in the center of cosmic harmony. You can understand that this was a colossal discovery for those humanist architects, like your great friend Palladio."

Quinten did not take his eyes off the white square and the white circle, the guilder in the middle. Might that configuration also be the essence of his Citadel? Was this the last word? He was reminded of what Max had once said to him: that in the limitless universe the circumference was nowhere and the center everywhere — but also of the hoarse, blood-curdling voice in his dream, which had said that behind the bolted door was "the center of the world."

He looked at the guilder and suddenly saw his mother in front of him in her white bed: but that was oblong. Did the oblong go a step farther than the square? But the circle would then of course automatically become an ellipse, with two centers: the orbit of the earth around the sun!

At that moment he felt fingers in the hair at the back of his head, slightly to the right of the center. It was Mrs. Themaat.

"Quinten! Did you know that you were getting a white hair here? Just here, in this spot!"

46. The Free Market Economy

Within a few months it had become clear that people fought over castles just as they had done in the Middle Ages. It was a fight that took place in the black of night, between virtually invisible parties, which the residents had no part in but which would probably end in their expulsion by the victor. The longer the war lasted, the better it was for them. The first purchaser was a rich poultry farmer from Barneveld, the lord of life and death of millions of chickens. When he appeared one day at Groot Rechteren in order to survey his new property, which he had acquired unseen, he looked exactly as one imagined such a person: a large, heavy man with a harsh voice, a cigar, and an excellent disposition, who never appeared again. He left it to his estate manager, a graying gentleman of noble extraction who had also adapted his appearance to his title — but, Max felt, with something just a little too measured and aristocratic about his knickerbockers, green socks, and highly polished brogues, since he was, after all, the servant of a vulgar poultry farmer.

The new owner had not made any statement about the use to which he wanted to put Groot Rechteren, but according to the manager he was definitely not going to live there; he had a splendid villa in Lunteren. In the village, rumors began circulating that the castle was going to become the main building for an anthroposophical center for the mentally defective, with three units in the park taking sixty pupils each — which was supposed to have been sold to a pension fund. That was supposed to have been a precondition of the baroness's for the sale, although the lady vicar said she knew nothing about this.

Because it had been he who had frustrated the tenants' association, Max felt obliged to do something to resolve the uncertainty. He was completely absorbed in the preparation for an exciting international research program on a new wave band on quasar MQ 3412, from which the condition of the early universe could be studied — but nevertheless he regularly sat wasting his time in the town hall in order to get some clear idea of the plans. But the alderman and the officials, who of course were fully in the picture, and who were undoubtedly pleased to see the name Westerbork linked to a medical facility, proved even more impenetrable than the horizon of the universe to which he had now come so close.

Six months later, the anthroposophical lunatic asylum suddenly vanished from the scene. The rent had to be transferred immediately to a different bank account, in the name of someone who did not even deign to view his acquisition. He lived in a large country house in Overijssel, in the middle of the woods, where Max visited him. He looked like the postage-stamp clerk at the post office counter; his skinny wife was slightly hunchbacked; and on the lawn a hollow-eyed gardener with a scythe gave him a bloodthirsty look. It was all as menacing as in a Gothic novel, and Max could not even find out what the new landlord did for a living, let alone what his plans were. According to Mr. Rosinga, who lugged the oil drums upstairs in the winter, people were now telling each other in the village that Groot Rechteren was going to be converted into a luxury hotel-restaurant, but Piet Keller had heard that it was going to house a police training school.

None of this went ahead, either, and the owners continued to succeed each other. Now there was mention of an auction house that wanted to set up shop in the castle; now a recreation center for overworked managers. Meanwhile, nothing more was done about maintenance. Mr. Roskam had cleared his workshop, and no one knew whether or not he had followed the baron underground, into the domain of his father's cap.

Cracks in the external walls became visible; there were leaks; plaster fell from the lath ceilings; and in the corners of the rooms mildewed wallpaper began to come loose from the latching, exposing rough, centuries-old masonry. Autumn leaves blocked the gutters, so the rainwater streamed down the walls and flooded the cellars, which led to a plague of gnats in summer. It was as though the castle had cancer. It deteriorated month by month, and a stubborn spirit of resistance seized everyone: they weren't going to be driven out by the capitalists!

Eighteen months after Gevers's death, in 1983—Max had meanwhile turned fifty, Sophia sixty — the first breach appeared in their community: Keller agreed to let himself be bought out. At that time the owner was a good-natured-looking man in his forties, according to the vicar a Jehovah's Witness, whose wife ran a sex club in Amersfoort. He called himself an "antiques dealer," which meant that he drove to Spain with a "partner" in an empty van every month and came back with a load of peasant chairs, tables, and cupboards, which he stored in the dilapidated orangery. Keller's house was intended for the partner, who gave more of the impression of a lackey who would go through fire for his master.

According to him, no one need have any worries about taking advantage of their protected period of three years; after that the castle would be thoroughly restored, with a link-up to the natural gas network and central heating. The present residents would of course receive the right of first refusal, though they would have to take into account the fact that the rents would then be many times what they were at present. According to Mr. Spier, it would amount to a gigantic brothel under the patronage of the Supreme Being.

But suddenly it turned out that he had in turn also sold the castle. He had kept only the buildings beyond the moat — and when Max and Sophia saw the new lord of the manor, they knew immediately that things were going to be very different.

There was no doubt about it. There was the victor — the exalted market mechanism had finally achieved its worthy goal: a small, self-satisfied man with a bald head and a short beard called Korvinus, the owner of a demolition company. He had obviously decided to shorten the three-year notice period dramatically by means of harassment, because he immediately began poking his finger in everywhere. When Quinten, counter to the new regulations, had put his bicycle on the forecourt again, instead of in the bicycle shed, Max received a registered letter the following day asking him in emphatic terms to prevent this happening. Kern was informed that the communal upstairs landing was not part of his property and could not be used for the storage of goods. Clara was informed that she must no longer put her laundry out to dry on the roof, as was usual in slums. The stone demolition ball, which his workers hurled at house walls with cranes, was in some way or other in his head too.

Every week he was there for one occasion, by common consent solely in order to think up new tricks — but obviously that wasn't enough for him. He needed a jailer. The former storage rooms of the baron's, in the loft, were converted into an apartment, and one day its occupant appeared: Nederkoorn.

Max started when he saw him for the first time, and every time after that. A huge fellow of his own age, with a hard face, always in black riding boots, which he struck with a plaited whip, invariably accompanied by an Alsatian. Max would have most liked to empty a submachine gun into him immediately, but perhaps that would have been precisely more in the spirit of his new fellow resident. He had not introduced himself, never said hello, and spent hours training his dog, Paco, on the lawn opposite Piet Keller's former house. He shared his life with a plump young woman, much younger than he was and three heads shorter, who to Max's astonishment was obviously in love with him and put an arm around his shoulders when they drove off in their jeep.

But Sem Spier did not limit himself to murderous fantasies.

"I'm going," he announced a few days afterward with a tense face. "I can't live under one roof with that fellow. I'm sorry, that person makes me physically ill. It reminds me too much of something."

Everyone saw that he was serious, everyone begrudged Korvinus his victory, but everyone respected his decision and understood that the last phase had now begun.

The departure of Piet Keller had been something like that of Verdonkschot and his friend for Quinten: more an astonished observation of the fact, which his father had written to him about: that not everything remained the same. Keller's children had long since left home, just like Kern's daughter Martha for that matter, and he had helped him load up the keys and locks and the other things from his workshop, which he had played with so often. When he had asked if the two cart wheels along the gravel path shouldn't come too, Keller had hesitated for a moment and said that he had no room for them in the terraced house where he was going to live. When the hired van had disappeared bumpily over the loose planks of the outer bridge, he had the feeling that Keller — from whom he had learned so much — had never existed.

But he couldn't bear to watch the departure of Mr. Spier. He remembered that when he was a little boy, Granny had always come to tuck him in and turn off the light; after she had given him a kiss and gone to the door, he pulled the blanket over his head and squeezed his eyes tight shut — if he opened them afterward then it must remain just as dark as when they were still shut. There mustn't be any difference any more between open and shut. If the light on the other hand was still burning, because she was clearing something up in his room, that was a disaster; then in some way or other the night was ruined.

Inside at the Spiers' everything was already packed in boxes and gray horse blankets. When the moving van turned onto the forecourt that early afternoon, he said goodbye to them on the terrace. Mrs. Spier had tears in her eyes and couldn't say anything; she just hugged him to her and kissed him five or six times.

But Mr. Spier shook hands with him firmly and said: "We're sorry we won't be able to see you every day anymore, QuQu. You've become part of our life — in fact you were always something of our child. I hope that things will go well in your life, but I don't really have any doubt that they will. As long as you look after yourself. You promise me that you'll look after yourself?"

"Yes, Mr. Spier."

"Come and visit us in Pontrhydfendigaid when you're in England — or in Wales, I should say."

Quinten went to the pond with his recorder, to the embrace of the rhododendrons. He left the instrument unplayed in his lap all afternoon; he sat in front of his hut until it began to grow dark. It was an overcast spring day; there was no wind, and the oily, gleaming water was only occasionally crossed by the reflection of a bird flying overhead.

Now Mr. and Mrs. Spier had also disappeared from his life. The Judith. The Quadrata. Pontrhydfendigaid.. Was his father there too perhaps? He felt sad. Why was there actually something, and not nothing? And if everything passed anyway, what point was there in its ever having been there? Had it really ever been there? If there were no more people one day, no one who could remember anything anymore, could you then say that anything had ever happened? That was, could you now say that then you could say that something had happened, when there would be no one else to say anything? No, then nothing would have happened — although it would have happened. He knew that he could talk to Max about this; but because he couldn't talk to his father about it, he didn't want to talk to Max about it either.

He was reminded of the Remembrance Center that had been opened at the Westerbork camp the previous year, which he had gone to with Max and Granny. In the large photographs and also in a film you could see people getting into cattle trucks, supervised by people just like Nederkoorn, being transported to their deaths. He had seen that Max leaned forward to inspect all the faces closely — obviously in the hope that he would discover his mother by chance. There were also women, of whom one could see only the backs of their heads. All dead. Surely that could never have happened! Max had told him that there were admirers of Hitler nowadays, who maintained that all those films and photographs were fake, that none of it had ever happened — but why did they admire him? They were saying that actually Hitler was a failure who had not managed to do what he had proclaimed. Fine sort of admirers they were — Hitler would have put them up against a wall straight away. But still. . those people could say that it hadn't happened, although it had happened — that would be proved by the historio-scope — but if one day there were no more people left so no one else could say that it had happened, how could it not not have not happened?

That fish there, poking its nose out of the water, creating an expanding set of circles, like an ever-expanding halo — had it really done that forever? And he himself; he was sitting here now. Was it possible that he had never sat here? Was he actually sitting here now, properly speaking? Did anything really exist? Perhaps you should say that the world existed and did not exist. A bit like the Citadel. And he himself: he existed and he did not exist. That was completely wrong, then. What was he to do in such an idiotic world? What was the point of his being here?

When he got back, Mr. and Mrs. Spier had gone. Korvinus was already walking through the empty rooms with a yardstick, and month later he was living there himself. From that moment on it was as though the castle were keeling over, like a torpedoed ship.

No one dared to go and look, not even by accident, to see how Nederkoorn was living up in the loft. According to Max, he slept under a swastika flag, with a portrait of Himmler above his bed. On Max's own floor, which he shared with Kern, everything was unchanged at first sight; but below, Spier's Empire interior had been replaced by oak furniture, so massive— and probably reinforced with concrete on the inside — that, according to Kern, Korvinus could count himself lucky that everything did not crash through the floor and plunge down into the cellar.

He, too, had a wife who was obviously devoted to him; but because he had obviously forbidden her to fraternize with fellow residents, it was impossible to discover whether she was attached to him because of or despite the stone ball in his head. They had two sons of the same age as Quinten and Arend Proctor. Quinten had nothing to do with them, but Arend made friends with the elder, Evert — probably against Korvinus's will. It was obvious that he wanted the whole castle to himself, and links of friendship with the enemy made his war of nerves more difficult.

When Paco was not cringing at Nederkoorn's whip and orders, he lay in the forecourt on a chain under a room of Themaat's, where he barked continually. Invoking her husband, who was ill and could not stand it, Elsbeth had complained about it a few times, but from Nederkoorn she could only count on the kind of glance one casts at an object. Once, at her wits' end, she had phoned the police, but they could do nothing.

"The police can almost never do anything," Max had said afterward, "except pick up Jews — they were very good at that."

The dog itself was unapproachable: if anyone came closer than three yards, it began leering and bared its teeth with trembling lips, without giving the impression of laughing. Only when it saw Quinten did it immediately stop barking; it laid its ears flat into its neck, wagged its tail, and allowed itself to be stroked. When Nederkoorn had first seen that, he had erupted into rage.

"If you so much as lay a finger on that animal again, you'll have me to deal with!"

Quinten had never stroked him after that — not because he was frightened of Nederkoorn, but because Paco would of course have to pay for it. But he did, when he had the chance, take his book and sit below Mr. Themaat's window, so that the dog would at least be quiet for a little while. He had learned so much from Themaat that he was prepared to do that for him. He did not go to the pond anymore anyway, since his hut had been destroyed. As far as his chain allowed, Paco crawled toward him and would lie down with his snout as close as possible to him and with his golden brown eyes focused on him. He looks just like me, thought Quinten, but he doesn't know that he's got eyes. Once Korvinus had appeared on the terrace and had ordered him to go away — the forecourt wasn't a slum where the rabble sat in the street; but immediately Sophia had opened the window above and said calmly:

"It begins to strike me that you talk a lot about slums, Mr. Korvinus. Why is that?"

That had helped — but how long was this to go on?

One evening, lying on the sofa, Max tried to work a little, but he was constantly disturbed by thoughts of the situation at the castle. He got up in irritation and went to Sophia's room. She was sitting in her dressing gown on the edge of her bed and giving herself the daily insulin injection that she had needed for years.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, Sophia," he said, and looked at the needle in her thigh, "but I'm angry. I can't concentrate anymore, and what does it really have to do with me? Since the days of feudalism are over and the bourgeoisie now rule the roost, I spend hours every day thinking about the fact that we are living here. But you live somewhere precisely so that you can do something else. When you're walking, you don't think the whole time about the fact that you're walking — except when you've just broken your leg. I've got other things to think about — at present I'm involved in the most interesting project in my whole career. Do you remember that I once explained to you that the mirrors in Westerbork are actually a single huge telescope? But nowadays, with those computers, we're able to link up all the mirrors on earth, so shortly we should have a supertelescope with a diameter of over six thousand miles, as large as our whole planet. So what's in it for me not to be outwitted by this rabble here at the castle?

"What are we actually talking about? Do I really have to dig my heels in over this? If you ask me, there's a great risk of one's messing up one's whole life over this. Take those Moluccans who used to be in Westerbork. Schattenberg estate, do you remember? They were in the Dutch East Indies army, collaborators who had to leave after the independence of Indonesia. Here they were also thrown out of everywhere too, but they were certain that one day they'd be able to return to a new republic of their own, Maluku Selatan. That's why those suckers didn't want to leave those rotten huts — because that would mean they had resigned themselves to the situation. Their sons began hijacking trains in the name of the ideal, and now they're in prison. What's more, they believed the Dutch government still owed them back pay — two thousand guilders or something. They fought their whole life for that with petitions and demonstrations at the houses of Parliament, and finally they were given it, but by that time their lives were over. They couldn't even buy a color television with it. And now they are old men, who still raise the flag on a country that doesn't exist. Shouldn't we learn from their experience and get out of here as soon as possible?"

Putting a piece of cotton wool on the small wound in her left thigh, Sophia looked up. "I don't like it when you just come wandering into my bedroom, Max."

47. The Music

To protect himself against Paco's barking, Verloren van Themaat now usually sat in the side room during the day, below Sophia's bedroom. That was Elsbeth's domain, where they also ate. One stuffy, overcast Sunday afternoon in the autumn of 1984, Elsbeth had asked Quinten if he would visit Themaat again. He would really like that, she said.

Mr. Themaat lay with his hands folded on a sofa in front of the window that overlooked the moat. The view was the same as upstairs, but from a different angle, so that at the same time it was not the same: the water lilies and the ducks were closer; the trees on the other side, taller. Because the sky was dark, a light was already on inside and there was the faint sound of music, some violin concerto or other, perhaps to drown out the distant barking. Mr. Themaat was in a bad way. Quinten could not imagine that this sick old man was the same person he had known. He sat down, and because he had not come with a question, he did not know what to say; he had never just talked to him. He looked at Mrs. Themaat's antique secretary. In the symmetrical grain of the mahogany he saw a devilish, batlike figure; its head with two great eyes on the top drawer, its outspread wings on the closed writing surface, its claws on the two doors below.

It seemed as though Mr. Themaat also found the situation difficult. There was something strange about his eyes: he blinked not very quickly, like everyone else, but kept shutting his eyes for a moment and then opening them again, as though he were dead tired.

"Well, QuQu…" he said. "Times change. How old are you now?"

"Sixteen."

"Sixteen already. ." He focused on the oak beams in the ceiling. "When I was sixteen, it was 1927. In that year Lindbergh was the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic — I can remember precisely. I was living in Haarlem then, close to the flea field, as we called it; I used to hang around there a lot with my friends. It was an extended grass field opposite a great white pavilion from the end of the eighteenth century, with columns and an architrave and everything that you're crazy about." Quinten could see that he was seeing it again, although he could only see the ceiling. "It was so grand, it didn't fit into the bourgeois surroundings of Haarlem at all." He looked at Quinten. "I myself was much more interested in the New Architecture, in the de Stijl, the Bauhaus, and so on. I always find your preference rather strange for such a young boy, but shall I tell you something? You're really modern with your Palladio and your Boullee and those people."

"How do you mean?"

Mr. Themaat raised his hand for a moment, perhaps to brush his face, but a moment later he dropped it, trembling.

"I haven't kept up with the literature for quite some time, but after classicism and neoclassicism, all those classical forms are coming back for the third time. By the year 2000 the world will be full of them — you mark my words, you'll see. At the beginning I thought it was just a whim of fashion, but it goes much deeper. You'll be proved right, and I'm not sure if I'm pleased about that. In the visual arts and literature and music, it might be the end of modernism, and in politics as well. Gropius, Picasso, Joyce, Schönberg, Lenin — they determined my life. It looks as though soon it will all be in the past."

"Freud and Einstein, too?" asked Quinten. At home he had always heard those names in that kind of list.

"It wouldn't surprise me. The last few years I've felt like a champion of the Gothic must have felt at the rise of classicism. All those magnificent cathedrals had suddenly become old-fashioned. Are you still interested in that kind of thing?"

Quinten had the feeling that Themaat was not quite sure who he was talking to. It was though he were regarding Quinten as a retired professor, like he himself was.

"I've never been interested in that way."

"In what way, then?"

Quinten thought for a moment. Should he tell him about the Citadel of his dreams? But how could you really tell someone about a dream? When you told someone about a dream, it always sounded stupid, but while you were dreaming it, it wasn't stupid at all — so when you tell a dream precisely, you are still not telling the person what you dreamed. Telling someone about a dream was impossible.

"Well, I was just interested," he said. "I don't know. I think you've told me everything that I wanted to know."

Themaat looked at him for a while, then turned his legs laboriously off the sofa and sat up, with his back bent, two flat white hands next to his thighs.

He closed his eyes and opened them again. "Shall I tell you one thing that you may not know yet?"

"Yes, please."

"Perhaps you'll think it's nonsense, just the chatter of a sick old man, but I want to tell you anyway. Look, how is it that that ideal Greco-Roman architecture and that of the Renaissance could turn into the inhuman gigantism of someone like Boullee? And how could it later, with Speer, even degenerate into the expression of genocide?"

"You once said that it had something to do with Egypt. With the pyramids. With death."

"That's right, but how could it have had anything to do with that?"

"Do you know, then?"

"I think I know, QuQu. And you must know too. It comes from the loss of music."

Quinten looked at him in astonishment. Music? What did music suddenly have to do with architecture? It seemed to him as though a vague smile crossed the mask of Mr. Themaat's face.

The humanist architects, like Palladio, he said, were guided in their designs not only by Vitruvius's discovery of the squared circle, which determined the proportions of the divine human body, but also by a discovery of Pythagoras in the sixth century before Christ: that the relationship between the harmonic intervals was the same as that between prime numbers. If you plucked a string and then wanted to hear the octave of that note, then you simply had to halve its length — the harmony of a note and its octave was therefore determined by the simplest ratio, 1:2. With fifths, it was 2:3 and with fourths, 3:4. The fact that the fantastic notion 1:2:3:4, which was as simple as it was inexpressible, was the basis of musical harmony, and that the whole of musical theory could be derived from it, gave Plato such a shock 150 years later that in his Dialogue "Timaeus" he had a demiurge create the globe-shaped world according to musical laws, including the human soul.

Fifteen hundred years later, that still found an echo in the Renaissance. And in those days the architects realized that the musical harmonies had spatial expressions — namely, the relationships of the length of strings, and spatial relationships were precisely their only concern. Because both the world and the body and soul were composed according to musical harmonies by the demiurge architect, both the macrocosm and the microcosm, they must therefore be guided in their own architectural designs by the laws of music. In Palladio that developed into an extremely sophisticated system. And subsequently that Greek divine world harmony also became connected with the Old Testament Jahweh, who had ordered Moses to build the tabernacle according to carefully prescribed measurements — but he could no longer remember the details. He'd forgotten.

"The tabernacle?" asked Quinten.

"That was a tent in which the Jews displayed their relics on their journey through the desert."

"Did it have to be square or round?"

"Yes, you've put your finger on it. That was precisely the obstacle to reconciling Plato and the Bible. There were also squares involved, if I remember correctly, but nothing round. The whole tent must be oblong."

"Oblong? Greek and Egyptian temples were oblong too, weren't they— like beds?" Quinten's eyes widened for a moment, but he wasn't given the opportunity to pursue his thoughts, because Themaat came to a conclusion.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he said, at the birth of the new age, when modern science originated, it had all been lost. The view that musical theory should be the metaphysical foundation of the world, of body and soul and architecture, was rejected as obscurantist nonsense — and that led directly to Boullee and Speer. The harmonic relationships of course did not automatically change when the elements were enlarged a hundredfold; but the dimensions of the human body, as the measure of all things, remained unchanged — that is: it became proportionately a hundred times smaller, thus ultimately disturbing all harmony and eliminating the human soul in an Egyptian way.

Slowly, as though he were lifting something heavy, Mr. Themaat raised an index finger. "And what you see at the moment, QuQu, is the unexpected return of all those classical motifs, all those stylobates and shafts and capitals and friezes and architraves — fortunately on a human scale again, but also in a totally crazy way. It's just as though somewhere high in space the classical ideal exploded and the fragments and splinters are now falling back to earth, all confused, distorted, broken and out of their equilibrium. Here," he said, and took hold of a large, thick book, which he had obviously laid out ready. "Catalog of the Biennale in Venice. Four years ago there was an architecture exhibition there, which made me first see what was brewing. 'The Presence of the Past' was the theme. Look," he said, and opened the book where he had laid a bookmark. "The Acropolis in a distorting mirror." With half-closed lids, he handed the book to Quinten.

Was it a view of the Citadel? Quinten's eyes began to shine. How splendid! They were photos of a fantastic street, indoors, consisting of a covered hallway: huge pieces of scenery consisting of gables, designed by different architects, all the gables differing totally from each other and yet belonging together, while each gable also consisted of elements that didn't belong together and yet formed a whole. While Themaat said that Vitruvius would have a heart attack if he saw that and that Palladio would kill himself laughing, Quinten looked at a paradoxical portico with four standing columns very close together: the first was a bare tree trunk, the second stood on a model of a house, the third was only half built — the upper half, which floated in the air and still pretended to support the architrave — the fourth was a hedge cut in a form of the column; the architrave was indicated by a curved strip of blue neon. Everything had a fairy-tale paradoxical quality, the disharmony as harmony. Mr. Themaat might meanwhile maintain that it was classical language, but with all the words wrongly spelled and the syntax turned into an Augean stable, such as toddlers wrote, it gave him an overwhelming feeling of happiness.

"I thought you'd like it, QuQu," said Mr. Themaat, dabbing the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief. "For me it's an end, a kind of fireworks to conclude the great banquet, which once began in Greece. But then you had the balanced world view of Ptolemy, with the earth resting in the center of the universe; according to humanism you got that from Copernicus, with the sun resting in the middle; afterward you got the infinite universe of Giordiano Bruno, which no longer had any center at all. All those universes were eternal and unchanging, but recently we have been living in the explosive, violent universe of your foster father, which suddenly has a beginning. Then you get a postmodern sort of spectacle; then everything bursts into pieces and fragments. Everything's exploding at the moment, up to and including the world population, and that's all because of the crazy development of technology. Suddenly a whole new age has dawned, which fortunately I won't have to experience."

Quinten looked out of the window thoughtfully. "But a beginning is also some kind of fixed point isn't it? What is more fixed than a beginning? You really ought to see that as progress after the previous universe, which had no center anymore."

"Yes," said Themaat. "You could look at it like that."

"Anyway, I suddenly remember what Max once said: that human beings are smaller than the universe in approximately the same proportion as the smallest particle is smaller than the human being."

For a few seconds Mr. Themaat fixed his great staring eyes on him. "So is it true after all? So is man in the middle after all? They should have known that."

"Who?"

"Well, Plato, Protagoras, Vitruvius, Palladio — all those fellows."

Groaning a little, he lay down again, and there was a moment's silence. "For the last few weeks I've found myself thinking of music all the time, QuQu. The Platonic harmony of the spheres has disappeared from the world since Newton, and harmony disappeared from music itself with Schonberg, in Einstein's time. But just like those wretched columns in that catalog, tonality is making a comeback at the moment — except that in the meantime music has become a bane instead of a boon. Here it's still relatively quiet — here it's just dogs barking — but in the city there's no escaping it anymore. There's music everywhere, even in the elevators and the bathrooms. Music comes out of cars, and on the scaffolding every building worker has his portable radio on as loud as it will go. Everywhere is like it only used to be at the fair. But all that harmonic music now together forms a cacophony, compared with which Schonberg's relativist twelve-tone system was nothing. And that ubiquitous cacophony is what the new-fangled cacophonous architecture expresses. That bomb that you once talked about, Quinten, has exploded. That's what I wanted to tell you, but perhaps you should forget it again at once. Anyway, I've gotten tired. I think I'm going to close my eyes for a minute."

The talk had affected Quinten deeply: it had sounded a bit like a testament. Suddenly he'd heard so many new things that he couldn't take it all in. While he went up the stairs in the hall, he reflected that there was still more to know in the world than he knew. Of course you couldn't know everything, and that wasn't necessary either, but lots of people probably didn't know what there was to know. They lived and died without anyone ever telling them that there was this or that to know that they might have liked to know. Except, once you were dead, what difference did it make? You might just as well never have been born. Anyway, most people didn't want to know anything. They simply wanted to get very rich, or eat a lot, or watch soccer or that kind of thing. Or kiss each other.

In his room, he stood indecisively and looked at the black case with his mother's cello in it, upright against the wall. He had never opened it; he had always had the feeling that it was inappropriate to do so out of mere curiosity. But if ever the moment had come, it was now. Perhaps it was the first time for sixteen years that the light would shine on it again. But no, of course his father had looked at it occasionally. He laid the case carefully on the ground, knelt down, clicked the two locks, and slowly opened the lid.

Although he knew that the instrument was inside, the sight of it was still a shock to him. It lay dull and dusty on its back in the dark-red velvet, the edges of which had been gnawed by moths. It had the form of a human being, with broad hips, a waist, and a torso with shoulders; at the end of a long neck the peg box and the scroll formed a small head, like that of an ostrich. The symmetrical sound holes on either side of the bridge looked like footprints. Carefully, he took it out of the case — on the bottom the lining had been virtually completely eaten away — and he solemnly carried it over to his bed. He sat down next to it, as if next to a human being, and sat looking at it in silence. Perhaps it was more like his mother than his mother now was. He looked at the strings, over which her fingers had glided, at the side edges that she had held between her thighs — all of this retained more memories of herself than she did herself.

After a while he got up and went to the front room. Sophia was busy polishing the glass of the framed photographs on the mantelpiece, and he asked her if he could borrow her measuring tape; when she said that she had lost it some while ago, he went to Theo Kern and borrowed a yardstick. Then he carefully measured the length of the A string, from the nut to the bridge: twenty-four inches. Now he had to strum it, but the fact that he was going to make sound on that cello after all this time was an awareness that he first of all had to overcome. He pulled the string with the nail of his index finger and listened to the singing sound. He frowned. According to him, it was a semitone too low. He checked with his recorder: he was right; it was an A flat.

Although it didn't matter, he tried to tune the string; but the peg would not budge. Then he determined the middle of the string with the yardstick, twelve inches, put his index finger on that point, and struck it again. When he heard the same A flat, which at the same time was not the same A flat, he sat up and looked around with an ecstatic smile. It was true! Pythagoras! Plato! He had picked up a sound from the center of the world!

Suddenly, he left everything where it was and ran downstairs into the hall. Downstairs Korvinus tore open his door and snapped that there were other people living there and couldn't he be a bit quieter, but Quinten did not even look at him. He ran across the forecourt — where Neder-koorn was teaching Evert Korvinus to drive in his Jeep, with Arend on the backseat — over the two bridges and then into the rectangular, tree-enclosed field behind Klein Rechteren. There he flopped into the ditch and, panting and sweaty, looked at the red cow, which with grinding jaws returned his gaze and then resumed its meal in reassurance. The sky was still overcast, but now with strange, hectic, scudding clouds, dark purple in the middle, but light at the edges; it looked as though they were coming up vertically from the depths. Yet it was windless and oppressive where he was sitting.

He looked with excitement at the dark trees that fringed the field, at the grazing cow between the two alders, and at the three boulders that lay in their perfect positions, like in a Japanese garden. He suddenly knew for certain that he was predestined for something awesome — it was as though he had received a message, a mission to do something that only he was capable of! But what was it? How was he to find out? Did it have something to do with that completely different time which, according to Mr. Themaat, had dawned? At that moment a deer appeared on the other side between the trees. It stopped and looked out across the field. Immediately afterward — no one would believe it — suddenly a strong wind began to blow in Quinten's face, so that from one moment to the next the whole wood started rustling and roaring like the sea, and between the trunks high undulating leaves suddenly rolled onto the meadow, whereupon the deer bounded into the darkness and disappeared.

48. Velocities

When at the beginning of December Ferdinand Verloren van Themaat was admitted to a psychotherapeutic clinic in Apeldoorn for an indefinite period, Elsbeth finally took the plunge and also moved to that town, whereupon Korvinus immediately incorporated their flat into his own. From then on Paco was no longer chained up in the front courtyard. The year 1985 approached.

The demolition contractor now occupied the whole of the ground floor, with the result that the other occupants could no longer use the front door: he didn't want people traipsing to and fro through his part of the house. From then on they had to use the former tradesmen's entrance at the side, through the bicycle shed, the cellar, and the former staff staircase at the back of the villa. Like the cellar, that stairwell had for decades been crammed with rubbish, rusted buckets, broken chairs, rolls of carpet; if they didn't like it, then all they had to do was to clear it up, and anyone who didn't like it could clear off. On the way to the attic only Nederkoorn was allowed to go on using the old, now partitioned-off stairs to the first floor.

Proctor was driven to distraction by this measure. Up to now it had seemed that the domestic upheavals had actually passed him by, of course because his mind was occupied with his great book on Vondel's Lucifer; but now he suddenly came charging down the stairs one afternoon with an ax and, with a roar, began hacking at the new partition door. It took Clara, Sophia, and Selma an hour to pacify the shuddering translator somewhat. He wasn't going to be forced to use the back door, he kept on repeating as he drank a glass of water; he'd been using the front door for twenty years, and a brute like that needn't imagine that he could direct him to the back door. He wasn't staying here one day longer!

Everyone expected a dreadful response from Korvinus, but he reacted with astonishing restraint; the same day he had the door repaired and didn't say another word about it. According to Max, the explanation was that he saw himself getting closer to his goal step by step and had to do less and less in order to undermine their morale; it was enough to turn off the electricity or the water without warning from time to time. Quinten assumed that he was also inhibited somewhat by the friendship between Arend Proctor and his son Evert, who were inseparable.

"The two of them also smashed up my hut," he said.

"How do you know it was them?" asked Sophia.

Quinten shrugged his shoulders. "I don't, but it was."

Although Marius Proctor had announced that he wasn't staying a day longer, he did finally stay: those blows with the ax had obviously sapped his willpower. He left only after the police had rung his bell on the terrace on New Year's night. There had been a serious accident. After having drunk too much in a disco, the two boys had stolen a car, skidded on an icy country road, lost control going around a bend, and crashed into a tree. Evert Korvinus, who was at the wheel, had been very badly injured but might perhaps survive. Arend Proctor was dead.

The news shook Groot Rechteren to its psychic foundations. For the whole of New Year's Day, Sophia and Selma supported Marius and Clara, neither of whom could handle their despair. Max had been conscious from an early age of the inescapable fact that anything could happen at any moment, but even he was beside himself for the whole day: it suddenly brought back the memory of another car accident, seventeen years ago. There was no sign of Korvinus. His wife — who suddenly turned out to be called Elsa— tried to make contact with Arend's parents via Sophia; but Proctor shouted at Clara that he would kill her if she spoke to the woman. Arend was dead, but her own son was alive, and, what's more, she had a second son! Quinten heard him screaming, with his voice breaking, that life was a dung heap, that there was no point to it all, that existence was one senseless mess!

As he stood listening in the hallway, Quinten wondered how one could say that. Perhaps you only said such things when someone died, or when you yourself died; but was it right or, on the contrary, quite wrong? Was there an ultimate truth in death or in life? If you found life absurd, shouldn't you find death precisely meaningful? It seemed as though Proctor were confusing everything. If he found Arend's death senseless, then surely he should find life meaningful! Anyway, what did it matter that Arend was dead? Why was he screaming like that? Perhaps it depended on the kind of person you were. His own father, from whom he had heard nothing for three years, had perhaps understood just as little of what it was all about. He himself was reminded of his mother's accident, and of the death of Aunt Helga, but apart from that, what had happened left him unmoved: they shouldn't have destroyed his hut.

That night he couldn't sleep with all the wailing going on above his head. He got out of bed and went to the window. The frozen moat lay beneath the icy light of the stars. Suddenly the roaring and commotion in Proctor's study assumed absurd proportions; a little while later he saw papers fluttering past his window, followed by umbrellas and still more papers, sometimes whole packs of them, which disintegrated in the air.

Once the Proctors had left, a week after Arend's funeral, Nederkoorn expanded into their flat. From then on Max's and Theo's flats were sandwiched between those of the rabble as if between the jaws of a serpent. But Max and Sophia agreed that out of solidarity with Theo and Selma, they could no longer go. Evert Korvinus, it transpired, had a lesion of the spinal cord and was paralyzed from the waist down and for the rest of his life would be confined to a wheelchair, Sophia heard from his mother. The demolition contractor would therefore be a little quieter for a while and would not try to sour the last year of their protected tenancy — if only because Elsa Korvinus had now, in addition, broken the rule of silence.

Max, completely absorbed by his work on quasar MQ 3412, which turned out to be behaving in an increasingly mysterious way, looked forward to the prospect of a year of peace and quiet — but that was not granted him. For months Ada's condition had been gradually deteriorating. First she had problems with her digestion; then she developed a chronic pelvic infection, as a result of her bladder catheter. But on an arctic day in February, when the oil stoves in Groot Rechteren could not warm their rooms even at the highest setting, Sophia came back from Emmen with much more serious news. She had gone to the director to talk about the mold in Ada's mouth; she had been told that Ada would probably shortly have to be transferred to the hospital. Hemorrhages had begun occurring even between her monthly periods, and according to the doctor in charge, it looked as though she had cancer of the womb.

While she was telling him this, her face again assumed that masklike expression that Max knew so well. The fact that Ada — that is, her poor body — had gone on having her periods every month all through those seventeen years shocked him more than the news of her illness. The latter, on the contrary, was something hopeful: the upbeat toward the end of her absurd existence.

He looked at Sophia in silence. After a little while he asked: "Do you suppose this is the moment of truth?"

Since Onno and he had embarked on their crazy campaign, at the time of Ada's cesarean operation, they had never talked about euthanasia again. He had never once spoken to Sophia about it, although it of course preoccupied her, too.

She did not reply, but he could tell from her eyes that she felt the same way.

Ten days later, in the car on the way to Hoogeveen hospital, they did not discuss it, either. When he closed the door and looked about him in the crunching snow, it amazed him that everything here was just the same as that evening of the accident, that calamitous February 27 when Onno and he had celebrated their common conception in Dwingeloo. Suddenly he also remembered the taxi driver who had refused to take him to Leiden, where Sophia had become a widow. The fact that Ada had now been admitted here for the second time gave him the sense of things having come full circle — and full circles always signaled radical changes. He was happy that he had made a date with Tsjallingtsje for that evening.

Kloosterboer, the doctor who had invited Sophia to come, confirmed the diagnosis. They sat next to each other facing his desk and looked at the young gynecologist, who with his short blond hair and bright-blue eyes looked more like a tennis coach.

"How far has it gone?" asked Sophia.

He nodded. "It's spread. There's no point in operating anymore."

"Well, well," said Max.

The doctor focused his eyes on him. "How do you mean?"

"Of course you're not going to operate on a woman who has been lying in a coma for seventeen years and living like a vegetable. Even if there was any point, there would still be no point."

Kloosterboer folded his arms. "Let's understand each other from the start, Mr. Delius. If there were any point, we would go ahead."

Max and Sophia looked at each other for a moment.

"And now?" asked Sophia. "Chemotherapy, radiotherapy?"

"Not that, either."

"And pain-killers?" asked Max. "I'd be interested to know if you are also giving her pain-killers?" He saw that Kloosterboer did not know what to make of that question, because there was not an immediate answer. "I mean, if you aren't giving her any pain-killers, what actually is your position? How can you reconcile the two things?"

The doctor's face stiffened. "I can quite understand your views, and your situation, but I cannot discuss the matter with you at all. You must understand my position, too."

"We do," said Sophia, and stood up.

Kloosterboer rolled his chair back. "I'll take you to your daughter's room."

"Don't bother. We'll find the way."

As they walked along the corridors, Max said that Kloosterboer was obviously a Christian fundamentalist, however much a man of the world he looked.

"Perhaps he's just young," suggested Sophia, "and frightened for his career."

Yes, of course. She knew the medical world better than he did. Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at the upright, graying abbess at his side, of whom he still understood nothing. She was starting to look more and more like her mother. So they would now finally have to talk about it.

He slowed down. "Tell me, Sophia, what do you think should happen now?"

"Ada's husband must decide."

He shook his head. "Ada's mother must decide. Anyway, I remember that Onno wrote as much to you."

"What did he write, then?"

"That Ada is your flesh and blood, and that you have the last word if decisions have to be made about her. He can't have meant anything but a situation of the kind that we have now."

She stopped and looked him straight in the eye. "They intend to let her die slowly, but I think a stop should be put to it. Very positively — with a morphine injection. But we shouldn't bank on that. At most there will be a staff meeting about this, or they will withdraw—"

"Withdraw?"

"Stop feeding her. But they won't do that, because what happens then is terrible for the staff to see. She will slowly dehydrate, until she's just skin and bone."

Max shuddered. "In other words," he said, "she must be taken away from here, to a more enlightened hospital, where they are not so frightened that it will get into the papers. In Amsterdam."

"If they let her go at least, if they don't make it a matter of honor. Don't talk to me about hospitals. Anyway, she doesn't even have to go to a hospital. Any reasonable GP will do it — anyone knows that, the public prosecutors too, but no one talks about it."

He looked at her. "Do you mean that we should simply take her to the castle?"

"Of course not," she said immediately. "With Quinten. ."

"And what shall we do with him? Should he know what's going on?"

Sophia looked at him uncertainly. "What's the point of burdening him with that?"

In the lounge, patients and nurses were watching a broadcast of a chess game; someone showed them the ward where Ada was. Max no longer remembered when he had last visited her, perhaps four or five years ago, perhaps even longer — but what he now saw, by the window, hidden behind a screen, he saw for the first time. He stiffened.

In the whiter-than-white, snowy light her head reminded him of a cut-open coconut that, years ago, when he was still in Amsterdam, he had once forgotten to throw away and which was still in the dish on his return from holiday. Her stubbly hair had gone gray, deathly gray, framing her gaunt, blotchy face, her nostrils were red and inflamed by the feeding tube. One could scarcely see any longer that there was a body under the sheets. Her desiccated white hands were like a bird's claws; the tips of all her fingers were swaddled in bandages.

"You never told me about this," he said in dismay.

"You never asked."

He found himself thinking that a stop should be put to this at once — in the next five minutes. He looked at the tarnished remains in the iron bed, while yellowing images rushed through his memory like autumn leaves blowing past: in her parents' house in the upstairs room, the cello between her legs, her fingertips on the strings, naked and cross-legged opposite him on his bed, her legs around his hips in the warm, nocturnal sea. . With ribs heaving, he turned away and looked out of the window at the blinding snow, with the sun shining on it.

He had never been so absorbed by his work as in the past eighteen months. In the mornings, when he was not yet fully awake but was no longer asleep, precisely on the borderline, MQ 3412 immediately appeared in his brain — but in the shape of a chaotic tangle of data, diagrams, spectrums, radio maps, satellite X-ray photographs, absurd interpretations, whimsical fantasies, all hopelessly confused and entangled, like a ball of wool that the cat had been playing with and, moreover, surrounded by a halo of doom: it was all wrong, he was on completely the wrong track, it was pointless nonsense.

However, he'd gradually come to understand that waking depression in himself. It had begun when he had got into the habit of drinking a bottle of wine every evening — recently sometimes even two — and when he went to sleep he was on the contrary convinced that he was on the threshold of a earth-shattering discovery. Over the years he had learned not to take any notice of all this. By the time he had cracked the joints of his thumbs and thrown off the blankets, the worst of the gloom had already receded.

The same thing happened on Monday, March 11, 1985. That morning the first data from the VLBI, Very Long Baseline Interferometry, the telescope as large as the whole world, were due in. A number of young astronomers from Leiden had spent the night watching in Westerbork with the technicians; but he himself did not even call. At breakfast he first leafed through the morning paper, in a bad mood. Chernenko was dead; within four hours the Central Committee in the Kremlin had chosen a successor, a certain Gorbachev, but of course he wouldn't change anything, either. Nothing would ever change; the Cold War was forever. The remnants of a dream were still haunting him — an image of Ada: her organs were floating in the air outside her body, like in certain kinds of cross-sectional diagrams of the inside of engines, so that at the same time it looked like a still photograph of an explosion.

"I'm going to have dinner at Tsjallingtsje's tonight," he said, getting up with a slight groan.

"Will you be coming home?" asked Sophia.

"Maybe, maybe not," he said. "I'll see." He ran one hand over Quinten's shoulders and said: "Do your best."

As he drove through the hazy spring morning to Westerbork, he listened to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, conducted by Bohm. It was still indestructibly beautiful, but he did know every note of it, as by now he did of almost all music.

Once he was in the busy terminal his depression lifted and he looked with the same curiosity at the computer printout that Floris gave him as he would have when he was half his age — except that there were not yet any computer printouts then. As far as his enthusiasm was concerned, it was as though time had stood still. On the other hand, one thing that was governed by the passing of time was the quasar — and he saw at first glance that something was completely wrong.

"Good luck," said Floris sarcastically. "You might just as well throw it in the wastepaper basket."

Because Quinten had discovered the historioscope at the age of twelve, Max had once sketched the portrait of a quasar for him: a mysterious, superheavy object at the limits of the observable universe that emitted as much energy as a thousand galaxies of 100 billion stars each, while the quasi-star was much smaller than even one galaxy. Probably there was a black hole in it, the most monstrous of all celestial phenomena. The most distant known quasar, OQ 172, was over 15 billion light years away; so that you could see from it what the universe was like 5 billion years after Big Bang, when it was only a quarter of the size it was now. A contemporary of his from Leiden— who now worked at Mount Palomar in California — had discovered that distance in four-dimensional space-time through the red shift in the hydrogen lines in the optical spectrum. When a jet plane approached, Max had explained to Quinten, the sound of its engines became higher, and after it passed over you, it became lower: first it retracted its sound waves a little, making them shorter, and afterward it stretched them, making them longer. The fact that the strongest spectrum line of OQ 172 had moved a long way from ultraviolet in the direction of the longer wavelengths of red, into the middle of the visible spectrum, meant that the thing was moving away in the expanding universe at over 90 percent of the speed of light.

Quinten had shown only moderate interest — in the last analysis, Max reflected, he was still a real arts man, just like his father. Moreover, MQ 3412 refused to conform to the pattern of the almost two thousand quasars now known. And the VLBI now turned out to have a serious teething problem, probably a defect in the incredibly sensitive communications between the hundreds of mirrors in scores of countries on different continents; or perhaps there was something wrong with an atomic clock somewhere, so that the things had not been put into the computer with absolute synchronicity. Max looked at the calculations as though at an unbelievable juggling trick for which one would actually prefer not to know the explanation. This time MQ 3412 had decided to move at infinite speed, as appeared from the desolate radio spectrum.

"In other words," said Max "our tachyonic friend is at all points on a line simultaneously with an energy of zero."

"A. Einstein would have raised his eyebrows at that," said Floris.

Max spent the rest of the day in meetings, telephoning as far as Australia, reading and sending faxes and discussing things with the engineers. One of them suggested that the mistake might be theirs. Gas was being extracted from the earth beneath Westerbork, which may have caused minute subsidences, so that the mirrors were no longer absolutely perpendicular; a few months ago a small earthquake had been recorded near Assen, with a force of 2.8 on the Richter scale. It was decided to recalibrate everything and to contact the gas board in Groningen. It struck Max as remarkable that an event deep in the earth, in the perm, might have disturbed one's vision of the edge of the universe.

Toward evening he withdrew into his little office in order to look at the data at his leisure, but he couldn't make head or tail of them. It was though a monkey at a typewriter had tried to write a sonnet. But he was also reminded of a revolutionary experiment that had been conducted three years before in Paris. It related to a fundamental conversation in the 1930s between Einstein and Bohr — that is, between the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, which had never gotten along very well.

Einstein's putative experiment was tested in 1982, and it turned out that Bohr was right. Even then there seemed to be instantaneous, infinitely fast signals — that is, faster than light; since no one doubted that this was impossible, it indicated something in reality that no one had foreseen. Could it be connected with this? But how? Maybe the solution would only come with the VLBI in space, dish aerials on satellites, enabling a telescope to be built with a cross-section of 62,000 miles — but that would take ten years, and by that time he would probably have retired.

Around him there were tables, cases, and shelves overloaded with piles of papers; as usual with his things, though, the order among them was immediately visible. One wall was taken up by a green blackboard, on which formulas and diagrams were written in different-colored chalks — not scribbled down higgledy-piggledy in brilliant frenzy, with carelessly erased sections, but in a harmonious composition, as in a work of art.

He put the papers into a folder, rested his chin on his hands, and looked out the open window. On every side his view was blocked by the giant black skeleton of a mirror. They were calibrating. In the complete silence he heard at short intervals the soft hum of the mechanism with which the rotation of the earth on its axis was being compensated, in order to keep the observed object in focus. What kind of sinister irony was it that under the former Westerbork concentration camp it turned out that they were extracting gas?

Dusk was already falling, but in the distance visitors were still walking around the site — not looking at the telescopes, but at something that was no longer there. If those directly involved had wanted nothing more to do with the camp, in the new Jewish generation voices had recently been raised in favor of restoring it to its original state. The barrier was back in its old place and a watchtower had been restored by the buffers. There had even been a case made for ousting the observatory. If they really persisted in this, he would write a letter to the editor of the New Israel Weekly, extol the synthesis radio telescope as a "Jewish observatory," and argue that it could only be destroyed if after the complete restoration of Westerbork camp the ninety-three trains also appeared at the Boulevard des Miseres, to bring the people back from the gas chambers.

49. The Westerbork

Over the years Max's relationship with Tsjallingtsje had assumed the calm character of a marriage. While she still cried out "Oh God!" when she came, the stationer's above which she had lived had been taken over by a large publishing firm, which needed her rooms for storing cut-price English art books. He had arranged for her to move into a rustic Hansel-and-Gretel-type house on the edge of the village of Westerbork, where a shy electronics engineer from Dwingeloo had entertained young farmhands until he retired.

At the same time, Max had had the end of Groot Rechteren in mind and the moment when Quinten would leave home, after which Sophia and he would go their separate ways. At the bottom of the overgrown garden a wooden shed took up the whole width, was in fact much too large for this spot, but it could be turned into a studio for him; even now he sometimes sat there when he wanted to work undisturbed. He had never talked to Tsjallingtsje about it, nor had he suggested anything in that direction; but because she knew that he had promised to bring up the child of his friend, who, moreover, had disappeared four years ago, she of course knew that a new situation would arise afterward.

In Dwingeloo she had heard about the fiasco with the VLBI, and obviously to console him, she set the table for a special meal; there was even champagne in a cooler. She was wearing a bright red ankle-length robe, making her look even bigger, and although she was the same size as he was, she embraced him like a larger person embracing a smaller one: she with her arms around his neck, he with his hands on her high hips, which immediately resulted in a change in his chemical balance.

"At least you know what becomes a disillusioned researcher," he said, taking off his coat. He sank onto the sofa and with a glass of pink champagne in his hand he told her about the worldwide astronomical debacle, which had cost hundreds of thousands of guilders, perhaps millions. "In fact isn't it wonderful that it's possible? Thousands of toddlers' playrooms could have been built, and if the experiment had succeeded, it would still have been no good to anyone. The fact that that's still possible, reconciles me a little with mankind. It means that Homo sapiens still hasn't grown out of his curious childhood. Only when shortsightedness finally takes over and the importance of things is seen as a function of their proximity will things be really going the wrong way. Listen to me: I'm speaking as though I'm writing."

"You mean that people should look farther than their nose is long."

"In my case, that's actually scarcely possible."

Perhaps it was the way she burst out laughing that attracted him to her. He couldn't remember ever seeing Sophia laugh so genuinely, or Ada; but Tsjallingstje's stern face was always ready to change into something completely different from one moment to the next, as though a light were switched on in a dark room. Perhaps a talent for laughter was true wit, more so than the ability for intellectual tours de force.

While she was busy in the kitchen, he looked down at the evening paper, which was lying next to him. He read the headlines about the changes in Moscow. There, too, it was obviously a question of something like a red shift — or rather the reverse, a violent political shift: something was approaching humanity at great speed, since the expansion of the political universe had suddenly changed into contraction. He felt tired. He put his legs on the sofa, and when he closed his eyes for a moment he again saw the absurd measurement results. Perhaps it was because of the champagne, but for some reason he suddenly had the feeling there was nevertheless a meaning hidden in them.

At the table, too, it struck him that Tsjallingtsje had spent over her budget. There were oysters, with which they finished the champagne; when she then came out of the kitchen with venison steak and gave him a bottle of Volnay to uncork, he was certain that something else was going on.

"Out with it, Tsjal," he said, clinking glasses with her. "What is it? Have I forgotten a date?"

She looked at him over her glass. She gulped; he could see that it was an effort for her to say what she wanted to say.

"I hope you won't get angry with me, Max, but I'd really like there to be a date that we wouldn't forget."

"You're talking in riddles."

"I want a child by you."

He looked back at her without moving. The words ricocheted through his head like a burning arrow that had flown in through an open window. He had suspected previously that this was on her mind, but he hadn't expected that she would come out with it so directly and with such determination. Even before he knew what his reaction was to the statement, he got up and knelt down beside her, his arms around her waist and his face hidden in her lap. Tsjallingtsje began to cry. She took his left hand and pressed her lips to the palm, while she ran her other hand through his thick, graying hair. Max's head was spinning. Of course! That's what must happen! It was as though in the tumult a voice was constantly saying "Everything will be put right. Everything will be put right." He wanted to think, create some kind of clarity in himself. What he would most like to do would be to go into the garden through the open doors; but he couldn't simply abandon the festive meal.

He looked up. "Tell me honestly. Are you pregnant?"

"Of course not, what do you take me for? Do you think I'm blackmailing you? But I want a child of yours, even if you don't want one. I'm thirty-six, and every year it gets more and more critical, as you may know. If I wait a couple more years, all I'll be capable of having are Down's syndrome children."

"Oh, I know a very nice mongol, though." Because the hard coconut mat was beginning to hurt his knees, he sat on his haunches. "So it's a child with me or without me there, but in any case a child."

"Yes."

"And if I hadn't wanted to, what then? Would you have found someone else?"

She looked down. "I don't know. You mustn't ask me a thing like that."

"And you realize of course that I'll be seventy when your child is eighteen?"

"No more ideal father than a grandfather — everybody knows that."

"Well, that's settled then." He got up, put his arms around her large body, and kissed her. "Have your coil taken out tomorrow. Then I expect, of course, you'll want to get married."

"I couldn't care less. I don't have to."

"And your father, the vicar?"

"If you ask me, he hasn't believed in God for a long time."

"What kind of world are we living in?" cried Max, with a feeling that he was quoting Onno's tone.

He emptied his glass in one gulp, the same way that one drinks water, then poured another one for himself. While they ate they discussed the consequences of their decision. If everything went well, Quinten would take his university entrance exam next year and perhaps go somewhere to study, although he hadn't given any indication of such an intention; at the same time their stay at the castle would come to an end. Sophia hadn't said either what she intended to do afterward, but from what he knew of her, she'd known for a long time what she was going to do.

"Don't drink so much," said Tsjallingtsje, putting a fresh bottle on the table.

"Of course I drink a lot. In fact I intend to drink far too much this evening. Do you realize that I will be a father for the first time if we succeed?" He rubbed his face with both hands. Suddenly the world had changed. All those seventeen years he had spent with Sophia and Quinten suddenly seemed to have blown away like a sigh of wind. Everything began anew, but now in an honest, unambiguous way. He got up and tottered slightly.

"Don't you want some coffee?"

"Excuse me, but I have to be alone for a moment. I'm going to the shed."

"To the shed now? You're drunk, Max. Why don't you go and sit upstairs?"

"Now, leave me alone."

He gave her a kiss on the forehead, opened the conservatory doors, and went into the garden with the bottle and his glass. Night had fallen; above the trees the moon was in its third quarter. Halfway down the winding path between the bushes, he rested the bottom of the bottle for a moment on the gigantic erratic stone, which had worked its way out of the earth there and which came up to his waist; when he had controlled himself again, he turned on the unshaded light in the shed and sank into the worn wickerwork chair with a sigh. He left the door open. Once, the large space had been used for storage of some kind or as a workplace; perhaps a carpenter had once lived in Tsjallingtsje's house. At head height there were a couple of small windows.

He poured himself another glass and was amazed at the mysterious-ness of existence. It was as if Tsjallingtsje's six words that she wanted a child of his had given his existence a new impetus, like a crack of the whip gave to a spinning top when he was a child. Since he had lived with Quinten and Sophia at Groot Rechteren in Onno's service, his personal life had been in past perspective; it was now as though she had turned him around 180 degrees, so that he was suddenly facing the future— where although he couldn't make out anything concrete, since it didn't yet exist, there was nevertheless something like a dark space-time full of teeming possibilities.

At a stroke she had put an end to the tangled situation in which he had lived for seventeen years. Like a baby in a playpen. Quinten's playpen must still be somewhere in the storage room, folded up, like a dismantled bed. It was as though the prospect of a child, which would undoubtedly be his, now finally made Quinten Onno's son. In the paper he had read that a short while ago it had become possible to determine paternity unambiguously by means of DNA testing, but his former fears had long since receded. In appearance Quinten didn't look like either of them, only like Ada, as she had once been; and the arts-oriented nature of his interests pointed much more in Onno's direction than in his. The fact that music meant little to him simply confirmed that; he didn't even have a hi-fi in his room. Perhaps the incomprehensible boy didn't resemble anybody who had ever lived.

When the motionless, gradually disintegrating horror in the hospital bed appeared before him, he rubbed both hands over his face, as though the image were sticking to his skin. He took a swig and had the feeling that he would be capable of putting an end to the existence of that living dead person with his own hands. But how? With a knife? And why not with a knife? Why, he wondered would a cry of horror go up in the world if it turned out that in some hospital other terminal patients were taken to the cellar, where they were beheaded by guillotine? Or where they were given a shot to the back of the head in a courtyard? Simply because of the association with executions? Or because of that it wouldn't become clear that killing was killing and not anything else, such as "falling asleep"?

Perhaps it was ultimately all a question of words. Endlosung was what the Germans had called the mass murder of Jews. What was more beautiful than the "final solution" of something, the definitive result, the decisive result of the division of zero? It was almost something like the physicists' Theory of Everything. With half-closed eyes he looked at the rusty red in his glass and thought of Onno. He'd like to talk to him about that — language as a way of disguising reality. Probably Onno would dismiss it as a hackneyed topic, over which only adolescents racked their brains, but then go on to say a few unexpected things about it. Where was Onno? What was he doing at this moment? Was he perhaps also thinking of Max? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Perhaps he'd banished him completely from his consciousness. Not just him but Quinten, Ada, and Sophia as well. Perhaps he wasn't even alive anymore. Perhaps he'd crawled into a cave somewhere on Crete, where his bones would be found in fifty years' time, and would be initially taken for those of the writer of the Phaistos disc, until it was discovered by using the C14 method that this could only be a Dutch politician, probably of Calvinist origin.

Max could see through the open door that Tsjallingtsje had turned on the TV without switching on the light; the image flickered through the room as though there was a constant succession of small explosions. He had the feeling that he shouldn't really leave her alone now, but he wanted to think for a bit — or at least float on his thoughts, like on an air bed in the sea. At home Sophia was now also sitting alone in the room, just like Quinten was undoubtedly doing in his. Everyone was sitting alone in a room.

Recently he had been getting a little worried about Sophia: sometimes she sat motionless on a chair for hours, staring ahead of her with her hands in her lap; when he said anything about it, she started and looked at him as though she weren't aware of it herself. From his earlier vacations he remembered French and Italian families, in the evenings at long tables under pathetically twisted olive trees, themselves trees, with ancient great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers and all their branches of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nephews, nieces, and innumerable in-laws, down to infants at the breast, the tables covered with food and wine: he knew none of that. Only Onno's family tended a little in that direction. But those vacations were long ago, from the time of his fatal sports car. Since he had lived with Quinten and Sophia in the castle, they'd seldom gone abroad. Every other year, occasionally to the south of France or to Spain on a sudden impulse, when the weather gave them cause; anyway they could never have it better than at Groot Rechteren. He himself had no need for travel. Every year he had to go to a conference somewhere in the world for his work, and he was always glad when he was back.

Maybe that was also connected with the fact that he'd never been able to penetrate to the real peak of international astronomy. True, he knew everyone and everyone knew him and respected him for his work, but at the official closing dinner he never sat at the top table with the mayor or the minister, like his colleague Maarten Schmidt from CalTech.

As he refilled his glass — with one eye closed, in order not to fill a glass that wasn't there — he thought of the first time he had been to the south, a couple of years after the war, the overwhelming impression the light there had made on him, the color of the Mediterranean, which he had later seen again in the blue of Quinten's eyes.

In his student room in Leiden he sometimes saw those colors in his mind's eye, just after waking up but before he opened his eyes — when he opened them, then it was displaced by the gray Dutch morning. When he had been to the Riviera for the second time, he had thought of something to make up for that shock. When he woke up there, with his eyes still closed, he imagined that he was back in rainy Leiden and that the memory of the Mediterranean scene would be dispelled when he opened them. But then he opened them and it was really there! The sea the color of lapis lazuli, a blissful miracle! Instant displacement, faster than light! The sea… At night the sea was black — but he didn't want to think about that anymore. What was her name again? Marilyn. Her submachine gun. God and the invention of central perspective; the vanishing point, which since the fifteenth century nothing had been able to wriggle through, neither from one side nor from the other. She must be about forty by now, and of course she'd gone back to the United States long ago, to some provincial niche, where she had become a teacher of art history and the mother of three children, married to a well-behaved lawyer, who would have a fit if he heard about her revolutionary past.

Suddenly, in an even more distant past, he saw his mother's bedroom: the open drawers and cupboards, her clothes in a pile on the ground. That would never stop. As Onno was wont to say: "family is forever." Tsjal-lingtsje knew nothing about any of those things; perhaps he should tell her something about the grandmother and grandfather of the child that she wanted to have by him. What was it to be called? Octave? Octavia? After Onno's one-to-two ratio of the simplest perfect consonant interval? It seemed that nowadays you could determine sex during pregnancy by using an ultrasonic echo — in fact as new a principle as Quinten needed for his "historioscope." He looked at the house through the open door. The television was off; there was a light on upstairs in the bedroom. She was reading in bed, The Brothers Kammazov, which he had prescribed for her, and was waiting for him to come up.

Gradually, his head sank back and his eyes closed for a moment. He came to himself with a start and sighed deeply a couple of times. The smell of tarred wood. He poured himself another glass and sank back again; with his head against the chair he stared through the shed. It was though he could feel his life like a large object that he could put his arms around, like a dog that was much too large on his lap. Everything kept increasing, becoming more and more complicated, just as an acorn gave birth to an ethereal, symmetrical plant, which grew into a gnarled, twisted oak that retained nothing of its almost mathematical origin. And yet it had once had that form. How could one have been transformed into the other? And if that couldn't be explained, how could that transition have taken place? The problems, he considered, consisted not in what happened, because that was simply what happened, but in how what happened was conceivable. The universe had emerged from a homogenous origin — then how, in that case, could it look as it looked now, with a division of the solar systems as it was and no other way? Why hadn't anything remained homogenous? Why was the earth different from the sun? And the sun different from a quasar? How was it possible for a chair to be here and a rake there? How could he himself exist and be different from Onno? How could he now be thinking something different than he had just been thinking, and shortly something different from now? What had happened meanwhile? Or had the origin perhaps not been homogenous? Of course he knew the theories, on initial quantum fluctuations, but did they really explain the difference between him and Onno?

He looked at the planks of the shed. They resembled each other, but that's how they'd been made. Moreover, they weren't exactly the same; one of them was a little wider than the others, a little darker, a little lighter, and something appeared to be carved in one plank. He screwed up his eyes, but he couldn't see what it was. Because he felt he should know, he got out of his chair with a groan and went across to it. There were letters and figures, thin and almost illegible; he leaned against the plank with one hand and put the other over one eye.

Gideon Levi. 8.3.1943.

He put the other hand against the plank and dropped his head, exhausted. The shed came from Westerbork. Forty-two years ago a boy had carved that there with his pocketknife. After he had succumbed to the gas, someone had bought the hut and put it here in his garden. Through the small window, which he now also understood, he looked at the house. He wanted to tell Tsjallingtsje what had happened and that the shed must be demolished the very next day; but the light in the bedroom had gone out. Pale moonlight illuminated the front of the house. He looked around. The space was too small to have served as a barracks; perhaps it had been a school, or the sewing room. Perhaps his mother had been put to work here. Supporting himself on the planks, he found his way back to the chair, which he sank into with a flourish, and upturned the bottle over his glass.

After that he must have dropped off to sleep for a moment. He woke because it had become cold and damp in the shed; but he still did not stand up to shut the door. It was past twelve. He knew he was drunk and that he ought to go to bed, but he had the feeling that either beneath or beyond his drunkenness his brain was still working — perhaps less inhibitedly than when he was sober. With his eyes closed, rocking back and forth a little in his chair, he thought back to the computer printouts of that afternoon. Was the result really so absurd? He saw the sheets very clearly in front of him, as though he were really looking at them. And suddenly it was as though a great light were turned on in him: he understood everything!

In a split second everything had come together — but what was it? He knew the answer, but it seemed as difficult to unravel as the question. The so-called infinite velocity of MQ 3412 was not an error, as his colleagues all over the world thought, but revealed a constellation that had not occurred to anyone! It was like the discovery of penicillin by Fleming: his assistant had put away a petri dish with a staphylococcus culture in it to throw it in the wastebin, because it had gotten mold on it; but Fleming himself had another look and saw that it wasn't the bacteria that had attacked the penicillin, but the penicillin that had attacked the bacteria — which subsequently saved the lives of millions of people and won him the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize! There was no Nobel Prize for astronomy, but there was for physics. His thoughts wandered to Stockholm, where he would be standing on the platform in a tailcoat, on that circle with the inscribed N, in his hands the gold medal, received from the hands of the king — or at least he could expect an honorary doctorate too, in Uppsala…

He put aside these fantasies and forced himself as far as he could to think through his discovery. The supposed infinite velocity pointed to a distortion of perspective! It was like with the vanishing point: at the horizon the rails met, so that no train could get through, because it would be destroyed at that point — and on the other side of it there was nothing else. And yet trains passed through it, both from one side and from the other. Quasar MQ 3412 wasn't a quasar at all! Or perhaps it was a quasar but everyone regarded it as something that it wasn't, since another object in a geodetically straight line was behind it, still farther away, which was covered by it. Perhaps that was not a black hole but the primeval singularity itself: the point in the firmament where the Big Bang could still be seen!

Perhaps last night the VLBI had received signals from the other side right through that vanishing point, which had tunneled right through from that vanishing point — or rather: through the vanishing point! Black holes too, from which theoretically no information could emerge, turned out on closer inspection to leak like sieves. In a negative space-time suddenly all those infinities had become visible, those which theoreticians invariably encountered in their mathematical descriptions. Shorter than 10-13th second from the zero moment, Planck time, the hypermicroscopic universe was a theoretical madhouse; for the zero-moment calculations arrived at a paradoxical universe with a circumference of zero, hence a mathematical point, and at the same time with infinite density, infinite curvature of space-time, and infinitely high temperature. There, both the general theory of relativity and the quantum theory collapsed.

Everyone agreed that a new, overarching theory was necessary to be able to continue the discussion; the occurrence of infinities was always regarded as a sign that something was fundamentally wrong with the theory — but they really existed then; they'd been observed twenty-four hours ago! It was just that no one thought of interpreting it like that: the whole of cosmology was the victim of an optical illusion! And wouldn't it in fact be idiotic if the beginning of the universe were not linked with infinities. If something emerged from nothing, then that was of course an infinitely different matter than when something emerged from something else — the incomprehensibility was precisely the esssence of the fact that the world was there and not not there! He sat up. Now he must go to sleep and tomorrow immediately work this out and publish it as soon as possible, before someone else hit on the idea.

Instead of getting up, he held the bottle over his glass once more. When nothing more came out of it and he was about to put it down, it fell from his grasp. He put out an arm to pick it up but got no farther. As he let his arm hang down, his chin dropped onto his chest. Suddenly it occurred to him that in the last few months a similar new theory was causing excitement in physics, since it could perhaps finally reconcile quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity: the great unification— the long-sought-after Theory of Everything! This summer a large conference was going to be devoted to it in Bari — shouldn't he go? Up to now elementary particles, like electrons, had always been regarded as pointlike, zero-dimensional, which of course also meant that their energy in that point was infinitely great, and hence also their mass; strangely enough no one had ever worried about those infinities, but by now he was no longer surprised about that bungling and selective indignation: it was no different in science than in politics. The new theory suggested that elementary particles were not zero-dimensional but uni-dimensional: super-small strings in a ten-dimensional world. Not only all particles, also the four fundamental forces of nature and the seventeen natural constants, could be explained by the vibration of otherwise completely identical strings. Strings! The monochord! Pythagoras! Had science arrived back where it had begun? Was music the essence of the world?

The image of Ada appeared before his eyes, the cello between her parted legs. "All things are numbers," Pythagoras had said. For him ten was the sacred number, which you could count on your fingers, like the Ten Commandments and the ten dimensions in the superstring theory. Ten was the "mother of the universe," and from long-forgotten boyhood reading he suddenly remembered Pythagoras's mystical tetractys, the four-foldness, the symbolic depiction of the formula "one, two, three, four," with which his pupils swore the oath:

As a true Greek, thought Max, Pythagoras of course rejected complete infinities, although in his famous thesis he had encountered irrational numbers — but Max himself needed them in order to interpret the observations of the VLBI, that is, the origin of the world: the Big Bang as infinite music! Suddenly he lifted up his head and opened his eyes. Because the light dazzled him, he got up unsteadily, turned off the lamp, and sank back into the chair.

Was it possible that the mathematics already existed for this? When Einstein needed a non-Euclidian, four-dimensional geometry for his curved space-time, it turned out to have been created decades before by Gauss and Riemann. If the world was first and last a realized infinity, then he himself might be able to turn to Cantor, the founder of set theory. Cantor! The singer! As a student he had occupied himself for a while with Cantor's shocking theory of transfinite cardinal numbers, the infinite number of complete infinite numbers, but that had been a long time ago. He remembered the vertigo that had overcome him on his visit to the Orphic Schola Cantorum: its alephs,

his Absolutely Infinite

.

He must immediately immerse himself in it again, but at the same time watch his step, because it had also driven Cantor mad. Because he was interested in the man who had ventured into such regions, he had read a biography of him, which he remembered better than the mathematics. Cantor was regularly admitted to the asylum; originally he had wanted to become a musician, a violinist, but on his own testimony, God Himself had called him and revealed his theory.

As for Pythagoras, mathematics for him was also metaphysics: all numbers were things. He was paranoid and suffered from severe depressions, was interested in theosophy, freemasonry, the teachings of the Rosicrucians, and wrote a pamphlet in which he demonstrated that Christ was the natural son of Joseph of Arimathea, while he also gave lectures about Bacon and demonstrated irrefutably that Bacon had written the plays of Shakespeare. .

In the dark shed Max now had his eyes wide open. Again and again he brought the empty glass mechanically to his lips and put it back again; it was as though in the darkness the mists of alcohol cleared, but at the same time he knew that this was not the case. He suddenly saw an enervating drawing from a still more distant past, while he remembered immediately where it came from; from the translation of a popular book by Gamov, One, Two, Three.. Infinity, which he had read when he was seventeen and which had played a part in his decision to become an astronomer. Gamov, he had later learned, had first made the Big Bang theory scientifically acceptable and in 1948 had predicted its echo, the cosmic background radiation observed in 1964, which finally established the theory. His hand-drawing in the book showed a topological distortion of a man walking on earth and admiring the starry sky: everything was turned inside out. If in reality the organs were all enclosed in the body, which was surrounded by the universe — with the only access to that outside world via the mouth, the alimentary canal, and the anus — now the internal had become the external: his intestine stretched out limitlessly like extestines, while the universe, full of planets and stars and spiral nubulae, had become the interior of the man, where he was still walking inside out on the earth and which his eyes were still looking at. Who was the wretched man? Himself, looking through the vanishing point into the negative space-time to the far side of the Big Bang? God? Or was it perhaps a woman? Was it Ada, in her womb the tumor that had taken the place of Quinten? Or was it his own mother, with him in hers? The mother of the universe. . Ada and Eva.. Women. . only women. .

Again he had fallen asleep. When he woke up he felt tired and happy. He was now in his fifties and he was still preoccupied with the same things as when he was seventeen. Had anything really happened in his life since then? There was no break, as there was with Onno; the boy he had been had no need to be ashamed of him. He got up and again thought of the child that Tsjallingtsje wanted by him. Of course: Octavia! He couldn't make the child tonight — he was too drunk for that; what's more, the coil was still in place. He opened the door and with the handle in his hand he stopped.

Where was Onno? Who had Onno become? How was it possible that he could deny his child so completely? And poor Quinten himself — who was farther away for him now, his mother or his father?

The house was dark, the garden lay silently in the moonlight. Janácek, he thought. Fairy Tale. Forcing himself not to stagger, he walked down the path to the erratic stone, on which he sat down to have a break. The March night was cool and damp. Was it all nonsense that he had thought up? Had the VBLI really seen the primeval singularity, perhaps seen right through it, into another, timeless world, which was therefore larger than the universe? Wasn't he forgetting something? How drunk was he, actually? How was it possible to demonstrate that none of this was the case?

If something like that were possible, then at least an enormous red shift must have taken place — so great that it did not occur to anyone. The maximum that had been measured up to now, in OQ 172, had a value of 3.53; the lyman-line had found its way into visible light. For MQ 3412 they were now looking somewhere between 4 and 5, but perhaps you should look around 20, or 50. Or 100! No one in his right mind would look there, not even Maarten. What would such a shift be good for? He tried to calculate, but he was no long capable. Somewhere on the shortwave band, probably. Perhaps some radio ham had once received a singular voice: "I am the Lord thy God!" — after which he had turned the dial in boredom because he thought he was dealing with a weirdo on the air! Obviously not a second Moses!

Max raised his arms, threw back his head and began laughing loudly.

The thunderous impact with which a white fireball, like a rocket from the sky, hit the stone on which he was sitting scorched all the trees and plants in the garden. It shattered the windows of Tsjallingtsje's house, the curtains caught fire, and the explosion woke up the whole village. Everywhere dogs began barking, cocks crowing. For miles around, lights went on in panic and out of the windows people began shouting to each other that it must be a gas explosion. The following day even the erratic stone seemed to have partly evaporated.

That was how Max finally made the world press — not because of his cosmological hunch, which remained unknown, but because of the unbelievable coincidence of his being in the place where he was. As far as was known, the only person who shared his fate was a seventeenth-century Franciscan monk in Milan. The direct hit had left nothing more of the unfortunate Dutch astronomer than is left of an ant when two flints strike.

Experts assumed that the meteorite had been the size of a fist. Only tiny fragments had been recovered, from which it could be deduced that this was a stone meteorite, an achondrite, over 4 billion years old, probably originating from the area between Mars and Jupiter.

In accordance with international custom the celestial body was named after the nearest post office: the Westerbork.

50. The Decision

Four days later, at the funeral in the churchyard of Westerbork — to the strains of Janácek's Fairy Tale—Quinten did not dare ask himself what was in the coffin that was descending into the earth. Surrounded by astronomers and technicians, he glanced at Sophia, who stood arm in arm with Tsjallingtsje. Was there anything in it? But what had happened only got through to him with a jolt a month later.

Sophia and he had been invited by Theo and Selma Kern to dinner for Easter. Sophia had provided the wine, and around a great dish of pot-au-feu with horseradish they were talking about the gigantic Easter bonfire that the baron used to light every year on the grounds near Klein Rechteren — a tradition that had not been continued after his death. According to Kern, the reason was that there were no other country noblemen living in the area; they were more to the south, in Overijssel and Gelderland. Gevers had been the northernmost nobleman. Since the old baroness, together with Rutger and his hundred-square-yard curtain, had recently moved in with her daughter in The Hague, who ran a flourishing beauty salon for a select clientele, the rabble would shortly appear in Klein Rechteren too and destroy it.

"I'm a simple man of the people," he said. "My grandmother was a water-and-hot-coal seller in Utrecht, with sand on the floor, but if I have to choose between the nobility and the rich rabble, then I don't have to think for very long. Of course the aristocracy is also rabble, everyone is rabble, but they at least have style."

"You're getting old, Theo," said Selma.

"You're telling me. And just as well."

Quinten looked at him. The sculptor sat on his chair like a gnarled, snow-covered pinecone; his bare right foot was lying on a white linen pouf, the ankle swollen and the skin purplish, as though he had stepped in a jar of blackberries. Did the aristocracy have style? Quinten was reminded of Roskam's father, who had had to bury his cap on the orders of Rutger's grandfather. Yes, perhaps that was style — but a particular kind. On the other hand, the baron had left him lots of money because he had looked after the grave of Deep Thought Sunstar and had taught Rutger to weave. Perhaps the thing was that the aristocracy really thought there were two kinds of people: on the one hand themselves, with the queen at the head, and on the other side ordinary bourgeois people — in the same way that there were men and women. He would like to talk to his father about that, but he had disappeared.

"Do you remember the Easter eggs that you and Arendje always hunted for under the rhododendrons?" asked Selma.

How could he forget something like that? Again he could feel the branches on his back as he crawled over the ground, over the damp, withered leaves, between which a suddenly a bright color glowed, completely formed, like when he had a liberating brainwave while he was thinking about something. The troubling thought that Arendje would find more eggs than he did..

"I always kept the most beautiful ones," said Sophia. "Shall I get them?"

When she had left the room, Theo said to Selma: "Do you know what Max once said to me? 'A chicken is the means whereby an egg produces another egg.' I don't know in what connection, but I've never forgotten."

"Poor Max. ." sighed Selma.

A little later Sophia put a large, old-fashioned candy jar with a wide neck and a screw top on the table. While she told them that the jar came from her mother's bequest, Kern stared at the colored contents and it was as though he could scarcely control his emotions.

"All of those were painted here in this room, QuQu," he said, "while you were tucked up in bed. By all of us here at the castle."

After Selma had cleared the plates away, Sophia carefully laid the eggs on the table one by one. Quinten did not know that she had kept them all, but he recognized his finds almost without exception. She arranged them neatly in four rows of eight. Kern took his foot off the pouf, put on a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses, and bent forward.

"Can you see who painted what?"

Carefully putting one sort with another, Quinten began to change the places of the eggs. Suddenly he had the feeling that they should actually be in eight vertical rows of four rather than in the four horizontal rows of eight. There were Kern, Max, Proctor, Themaat, and Spier and their five wives— that made ten people; but Elsbeth Themaat and Judith Spier would probably not have joined in — they never came upstairs. It would be nice if there were four eggs from each of them, but there was only one from Mr. Spier: on the otherwise unpainted white shell there was an elegantly red painted A? on one side, and a blue Q? on the other. The capital italics obviously referred to Arendje, but now he was suddenly reminded of Ada. He assigned three eggs to Themaat, with pale geometrical patterns: diamonds, circles, triangles. The somber, dark-brown ones, sometimes black with zigzagging lightning bolts, were of course by Proctor, while it was probably Max who had limited himself to plain, bright colors, which now in some way contained his death. There was no mistaking Kern's work: expertly painted clown's faces, flowers, and animal heads. Clara had also made it simple for him by depicting umbrellas in all states of openness. He had more difficulty with Selma and Sophia. The remaining eggs were all abstract in design, with dots, stripes, and bands. He decided that the beautiful ones were by Selma and those with the clashing colors by Sophia.

The others looked in silence at what he was doing. After he had finally arranged the eggs by person, Kern said:

"You don't have to say any more." He glanced at it for a moment, then looked up and said to the two women, staring at the constellation on the table, "That's what's left of our community."

At the same moment Quinten realized that this was the truth. After the death of Max, only these three old people were left, of whom his grandmother, at sixty-two, was the youngest. Upstairs was Nederkoorn, below Korvinus, and soon it would be completely over. What was there to keep him here any longer? Everything around him had been destroyed, everyone was dead, had left, was inaccessible; even Kern's dovecotes had been empty for six months. Suddenly he got up and went to his room without saying anything.

He put his bronze box on the table. Because the key of the padlock had disappeared one day from between the loose bricks behind the oil stove, he had straightened a sturdy paper clip and, according to Piet Keller's lessons, had made a skeleton key with it. He carefully unfolded his father's letters and looked at the last sentence, although it was just the same as he remembered: Forgive me and don't look for me, because you won't find me. So it was something of a last wish that Quinten should not look for him! In fact it didn't say at all that he didn't want him to — just that he should save himself the trouble, because it would be to no avail. He looked at the case with his mother's cello in it. Now he was certain. He was going away. He was going to find his father.

"But where are you going to look for him, then?" asked Sophia the following morning at breakfast. "He could be anywhere. Do you know how large the world is?"

"In any case he's on earth. That excludes lots of other places."

"That's true," said Sophia. A smile appeared on her face, and she looked at him with a shake of her head. "You've virtually already found him, haven't you?"

"Yes." Quinten nodded and looked back at her, but without a smile.

They were sitting on the balcony. For the first time this year it was a mild spring morning. In the moat below, the ducks were noisily celebrating the change of season.

"But what if you find him and he doesn't want to have anything to do with you? Are you aware of what's happened to him? He's become a different person. I thought that it would turn out okay too and that he'd turn up again, but he's been gone for four years. He knows where he can reach you, doesn't he, and he hasn't done so, has he?"

"If he sees me and he still doesn't want to have anything to do with me, then I shall know. Then he'll really have become a different person, as you say, and a different person doesn't interest me. A different person isn't my father. Then I'll be finished with it."

"And your school," asked Sophia, without looking up from the apple she was peeling. "What'll happen to that?"

"I know enough. And anyway, the most important things that I know, I didn't learn at school."

"But, Quinten, you're almost there. Another year, and you'll have your high school diploma. Aren't you afraid that you'll be terribly sorry if you don't finish high school? That'll change the course of your whole life. You do want to study, I assume?"

Quinten looked at the bare trees on the other side of the moat. He could still look right through the wood; soon it would again become an impenetrable wall. In the distance a car was driving along the road to Westerbork. His father had once asked him too what he wanted to "be." "An architect," Max had said — but the idea of doing this or that for the rest of his life, and nothing else, still seemed idiotic to him. He wasn't born to gain certainty; he could leave that to others. Something completely different was waiting for him — that was the certainty that had come to him six months previously in the field near Klein Rechteren.

"I don't think so," he said.

Sophia tried again. "You won't be seventeen until next month. Keep at it for another year, then you'll be eighteen; and afterward you can do what you like for a year. Or two years. Then you can still always decide if you want to study or not. But if you stop now, you'll have decided once and for all."

"I'm going to look for Dad," said Quinten.

He was sorry for his grandmother. In order to keep up appearances she got up, brushed the crumbs and remains of bread into her other hand, and threw them over the balustrade, which immediately unleashed a flurry of quacking down below. She too was alone. Her daughter had been struck down by a terrible accident, her companion killed by a meteorite, and now she was being abandoned by her grandson, too. What else was there to do? Moreover, in a few months' time she'd be out in the street — with all her things, those of her daughter, and those of Max.

He went over to her, put his hands on her shoulders, and gave her a kiss on her forehead; a strange, sweet-and-sour smell penetrated his nostrils. Immediately afterward, she pressed her crown against his breastbone for a moment, which reminded him of Gijs, Verdonkschot's billy goat. When she raised her face, it was wet with tears. It was the first time that he had seen her cry.

"Granny!"

"Don't worry about that. When did you want to go?"

"As soon as possible." Only when he said this did it become final for him.

Again Sophia controlled herself. "But where on earth are you going, Quinten? In which direction? You can't simply just get on the first train that comes along."

"Perhaps that's a method too. First I'm going to see Dad's lawyer tomorrow. He knows where he is, doesn't he?"

"But he won't tell you. He's got his professional code of ethics."

"I can at least try. Perhaps he'll let something slip out, or something will slip out that I can use. And mightn't Auntie Dol know more than we think, too? Anyway, perhaps it's best if I go to see her first."

Sophia looked at him red-eyed. Suddenly she could no longer restrain her tears; her face contorted, she sat down, put her hands over her eyes, and said in an almost sing-song voice: "Quinten… something dreadful's going to happen when you've gone. ."

He had never seen her like this before. Helplessly he sat down opposite her. "What makes you think that?"

"I don't know…" she whispered, with her shoulders heaving, "I feel it."

"What nonsense! No one knows what's going to happen. Perhaps I'll be away for a few months, and then I'll keep you posted about everything. And after that I can always go back to school again. Otherwise I'll take the state examination."

He himself did not really believe that, and he saw that Sophia didn't believe it either. Holding a napkin to her eyes, she got up and suddenly went inside, with her face averted.

Quinten looked at the apple peel on her plate: one long uninterrupted spiral, like she always made. You could make it as long as you wanted, he thought — infinitely long if only you peeled thinly enough. He breathed in the mild air deeply. It was over; in fact, he was not there any longer. But at the same time it seemed as though through that awareness everything struck him more intensely than ever before, just like at Christmas the burnt-out, guttering candles on the tree flared up once more and then went out, with the floor covered in colored wrapping paper and unwrapped presents.

Max had always told him to stay in his room on Heiligabend until the Christmas tree had been decorated and the candles lit. "Come on!" From the harsh electric light of his room into the warm candlelight — a dark world from the distant past… He got up and went over to the stone balustrade. Deep in the wood an owl croaked. On an artificial island on the other side, the pitiless coots had built a new nest, around which everyone else swam respectfully. Fancy his unemotional grandmother suddenly becoming so tearful! But was he to stay here because of that? Would he have to look after her, as she had looked after him for all those years? His decision was made. He was going. He was going to look for his father. Deep in himself he felt the unshakable certainty that nothing and no one could stop him.

"Quinten?"

Via Max's bedroom, where Max's made-up bed had already frozen into an untouchable museum exhibit, he went into Sophia's. She was kneeling on the floor, in front of the open bottom drawer of the chest of drawers. In her hands she had a tiny compass. Much smaller than the one on the edge of Max's desk, it was no more than three quarters of an inch across.

"Take this with you," she said, and gave it to him, with the cool, distant look in her eyes again. "It belonged to your granddad. He always carried it when we went walking on the heath, in the years after the war. It was still big in those days."

The needle was fixed, but after he moved a pin at the side, it wobbled into motion: it still worked. A black leather shoelace had been threaded through the ring. Without saying anything, he allowed Sophia to put the instrument around his neck. He realized with relief that she had resigned herself to his departure. He had never known Granddad Brons; for Quinten, he belonged more to history than to himself, like most things in the crammed drawer. Although it was not locked, he had never rummaged in it; nor did he want anyone to poke their nose in his own things. He bent down and took out a yellow card from the chaos of photos, letters, folders, dolls, girls' books, a woollen rabbit.

"Certificate of Report," he read, "As required under Article 9, first clause, of Decree No. 6/1941 of the Reichskpmmissar for the occupied territory of the Netherlands, regarding compulsory reporting of persons of wholly or partly Jewish extraction." He turned it over. "Haken, Petronella. Number of Jewish ancestors in the sense of Art. 2 of the decree: one." He looked inquiringly at Sophia.

"That's my mother's," she said. "Her grandmother on her mother's side was Jewish."

"That means—" Quinten began.

"Yes, that you've also got Jewish blood in you."

"You never told me that!"

"It wasn't worth mentioning. Work it out."

"My great-grandmother was a quarter, you an eighth, Mommy a sixteenth, and me a thirty-second." He put the card back and said, "No, it's not much. Did Max know about this?"

"To tell you the truth, I never thought about it."

His aunt and uncle could only repeat that they did not know where Onno was, either. Dol was the only person in the family to have had a letter from him, and since then she had not heard anything either; nor had he tried to get hold of his stored things in any way. Only on one occasion — already eighteen months ago — had Hans Giltay Veth written to them; Onno wanted the certificate of his honorary doctorate returned to Uppsala. They had done that, although they did not know the reason, nor did the lawyer.

It was their last day in the suburb near Rotterdam. They were just able to receive him in the midst of their moving. Uncle Karel, the surgeon, had finally laid down his scalpels, and they were going to move permanently to their second home on Menorca, where Quinten had stayed a couple of times during summer vacation.

In the dismantled front room, as they sat with plastic cups of mineral water on nailed-down boxes, the conversation that he had had with Sophia repeated itself: about interrupting his studies, and if he was so sure that what he was doing was sensible, and about where was he going to look. He had the feeling that Onno had almost disappeared from their lives. His things had already been collected a few weeks ago by a storage company; they were now in a warehouse in the docks. Sophia had been informed about it, but she had obviously not wanted to burden him with that message. While he waited for the train to Amsterdam on the platform, the expression that his uncle had used for his father constantly echoed through his head: dropout.

In the lobby of the lawyers' office building behind the Rijksmuseum the name J.C.G.F. Giltay Veth, M.L. stood among a long list of other names. The bearer of it came to see him himself: a fat, kindly man in his early fifties, with a small pair of reading glasses on the tip of his nose. In the elevator up to the top floor he told Quinten that he had known his father since they were students together. Although Onno could say terrible things, Giltay Veth had seldom laughed so much as he had with him. His room looked out over the entire center of town. He pointed out the palace on the Dam in the distance to Quinten, with Atlas carrying the globe of the world on his neck— like someone, thought Quinten, who was himself outside the world.

When a black girl in a white coat put down some tea, they sat down opposite each other at a long table, half of which was taken up by piles of folders and dossiers.

"I must extend my sympathies on the death of your foster father," said Giltay Veth. "I read about it in the paper. It's scarcely credible, something like that." Lost for words, he shook his head for a moment. "Of course I had nothing to do with it, but are his affairs properly sorted out, as far as you know?"

"You should ask my grandmother about that. I believe there are problems, because he had no family at all."

"Please tell your grandmother that she can always contact me if she needs help. It won't cost her a penny. I know that I will be acting in the spirit of your father."

Quinten looked straight at him. "Didn't you tell my father, then?"

Giltay Veth held a lump of sugar in his tea and waited until it had absorbed all the tea. "No." He let go of the lump. "I can only contact him in extreme cases."

"So he doesn't know at all that Max is dead?"

"I couldn't tell you. Perhaps he's read about it in the paper somewhere, too."

"So he's not in Holland?"

The ghost of a smile crossed Giltay Veth's face, but it immediately disappeared; he stirred his cup seriously for a few seconds.

"I know what you're getting at, Quinten. To tell you the truth, I expected your visit much earlier. I knew that you'd be sitting here opposite me one day; I said as much to your father at the time. But if you want to know from me where he is, I can't tell you."

"I swear I'll never tell anyone that I heard it from you. Surely I can bump into him by accident somewhere, as it were, can't I? Coincidences like that do happen, don't they? My foster father was hit by a meteorite; surely that's a much greater coincidence?"

"Absolutely." Giltay Veth nodded. "Except that it's not a question of my knowing and not being able to tell you; I really don't know. I haven't the faintest idea."

"How can that be? In his farewell letter to Max my father wrote that he could always be reached by you in emergencies."

"That's true, but only in a roundabout way. There are two other addresses in between. The first is that of a colleague of mine — abroad, yes, you got hold of the right end of the stick there. But he knows only of a post-office box in another country. That might be Holland, but just as easily Paraguay. Suppose you managed to get me to tell you where that colleague is — which won't happen. Even then that gentleman won't help you out, because he knows nothing about you. Quite apart from the fact that the only thing he knows is that post-office box number, in another country." He put one hand on top of the other and looked at Quinten. "Forget it, lad. Your father has covered his tracks thoroughly. Something dreadful has happened to him; you must assume that he's not alive anymore. I know all about your situation. I know of the dreadful fate that befell your mother, I know what happened to your father and recently to your foster father, but you must resign yourself to it. There are boys whose fathers have been murdered, or have been killed in a plane crash. It's all equally horrible, but that's obviously how life is. Try and put it out of your mind. Don't let your life be scarred by it."

Quinten made an awkward gesture and said: "If I knew that my father was really dead, there would be nothing wrong. But he isn't dead. He's somewhere in the world and is doing something or other at this moment. Perhaps he's sitting reading the newspaper, or drinking a cup of tea." He faltered. "That means. . are you actually sure that he's still alive?"

Giltay Veth nodded. "If it were otherwise, I would know and so would you."

"Then I'm going to look for him."

The telephone rang, and without waiting to see who was on the line, the lawyer said: "I don't want to be disturbed." He put the receiver down, folded his arms, and leaned back."No one can stop you. But have you asked yourself whether you're acting in accordance with your father's wishes?"

He had been talking the whole time about his father's spirit. Quinten took Onno's letter out of his pocket and read the last sentence aloud. When he had explained his interpretation — that it wasn't a ban on looking for him but just a statement of the pointlessness of doing so — a smile crossed Giltay Veth's face.

"You'd make a good lawyer, Quinten."

"It says what it says."

"There's no arguing with that. But it also says that you won't find him. How were you planning to go about it?"

"I don't know yet. I'd hoped that you would put me on the track, but I'll find something else."

Giltay Veth raised his eyebrows. "Is that why you came here?"

"Yes, why else?"

"I thought you might need money for your search."

"I've got plenty of money."

"Have you?"

"I inherited forty thousand guilders."

"Forty thousand guilders?" repeated Giltay Veth, taking off his reading glasses. "Who from?"

After Quinten had told him what he had done to deserve it, Giltay Veth looked at him reflectively for a while.

"A lot's been taken from you, but a lot's been given to you. God knows, perhaps you really will be able to find your father, although it's a mystery to me how you're supposed to do that."

"Perhaps the age of miracles hasn't yet entirely passed," said Quinten.

The drizzle was so fine that the drops seemed to be stationary in the air and made his face even wetter than a real shower. The two alder trees, the three boulders — everything in the field behind Klein Rechteren was dripping with water, which did not seem to be coming from anywhere. The red cow was not there. Was that a good or a bad omen? A good omen, of course, because otherwise she'd be there. Now he had to decide what direction to look for his father. Slowly, with his eyes wide open, he turned clockwise around his own axis and tried to register whether he felt something special at a particular moment.

He felt nothing, although in a particular situation he must have been pointing exactly in the direction of his father with a hundred percent certainty. That seemed incomprehensible to him. He tried again, even more slowly and with his eyes closed, but again with no result. What next? He unbuttoned his shirt and took out the small compass. Again he made a slow rotation of 360 degrees, keeping his eyes constantly fixed on the needle. It wobbled across the dial from north to west and through south to north, without suddenly behaving unusually.

He gave up in amazement. It was mysterious, but it wouldn't work like that. He put the compass away and looked out across the meadow, feeling his inner certainty suddenly wavering. Was it impossible, then? Perhaps he should try it the other way around. Where would his father definitely not have gone? Probably not to Africa, certainly not to the Eastern bloc or to China or anywhere in Asia. That already made a difference, but in any case that still left the whole of Europe and North and South America. He spoke all languages, so that was no problem for him. Perhaps he was in a monastery, from where he would never emerge — he had written that he was a hermit, hadn't he? Or in a hand-built hut on a desert island, covered in palm leaves, or somewhere in a cave in the mountains. On Crete, perhaps, where the Phaistos disc came from? So should he go to Crete, then? But even if he knew that he was in New York, even then he wouldn't be able to find him. He didn't know where to begin. But what was he to do, then?

Tomorrow was the end of Easter vacation — so should he simply go back to school? That was also inconceivable — too much had happened to him in the meantime for that: you couldn't expect a stone that you'd let go of to return into your hand halfway, like a yo-yo.

As wet as if he had worked up a sweat, he looked at the edge of the wood, and suddenly he began to shiver. Perhaps there was a method whereby, conversely, he could lure his father to Holland: by pretending in some way that he'd been abducted — by going underground and sending letters with stuck-on characters. Then perhaps his father would appear with the ransom, somewhere by a concrete pillar under a viaduct…

It was as though the dream of being able to find his father had suddenly been swept away by this diabolical brainwave. He turned around and began to walk slowly back toward the castle. Of course it was impossible that he would play a trick like that — but he was going to leave here anyway, on a journey. That was all he could do now. Why didn't he go to Italy? He'd never been there. To the Veneto. Finally see the architecture of Palladio with his own eyes. Plenty of money. Of course he must take his sketches and plans of the Citadel, the SOMNIUM QUINTI, with him. Who knows what he might be able to add to them!

De Profundis

De Profundis