Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"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rather stooped man with thin gray hair and fine features; behind a pair of metal-rimmed glasses, he usually looked withdrawn, as though he were sizing you up, but suddenly he burst into exuberant, almost manic laughter, in which all his limbs participated.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.

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."