Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"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.