The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  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 Quint
en'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."