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 mor
e 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 you
r 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.
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