Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

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.

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.