Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

As he grew up, Quinten became increasingly incomprehensible to everyone. He had no friends. Usually, he sat reading in his room, or wandered through the surrounding countryside — occasionally with his recorder. As Max and Sophia sat on the balcony, they sometimes heard pastoral sounds coming from the woods, from his favorite spot by the pond with the rhododendrons. That sound, mingling with the song of the invisible birds, touched Max more than the most moving performance of the most beautiful symphony by the best orchestra, and he could see that Sophia too was thinking of Ada at those moments, but it was never mentioned.

When he was ten, in 1978, Ms. Trip stopped Sophia on the outer bridge one afternoon.

"Has Quinten told you?"

"Told me? What do you mean?"

The previous day she had been walking in Klein Rechteren with the baroness in the rose garden. As he frequently was recently, Quinten was with Rutger. In general the baroness was not very keen on unannounced visits, but because Rutger obviously perked up when Quinten came, he was always welcome. Suddenly she heard heart-rending whines coming from the direction of the terrace. They rushed toward it and saw Rutger sitting on the ground crying, with his arms around Quinten's knees — around those of his torturer, as appeared a little later.

Quinten was busy cutting Rutger's cat's cradle into pieces — the most beautiful thing he possessed, his endless creation that he had been working on for years. His mother also regularly took the scissors to it, but of course never when he was there. They had been too flabbergasted to intervene; moreover, they had the feeling that something was happening that must not be interrupted. They were also paralyzed by the strange beauty of the scene: the wonderfully beautiful boy with that misshapen imbecile twenty years his senior at his feet, while in the vegetable garden the peacock looked at them with a fan of fifty eyes.

"Yes, calm down," said Quinten as he went on cutting the thread into yard long lengths. "Wait. We're going to make a great big curtain. You'd like to do that, wouldn't you, make a great big curtain?"

"Yes," sobbed Rutger. "Don't do that, don't cut.."

"But if you want to make a great big curtain, you've got to do that. Then you mustn't just go on making one thread the whole time. You've got to weave. Look, like this…"

Then he'd sat next to him on the ground, took a large needle out of his pocket, and picked up the stiff, coarse-meshed base a yard square that he had brought with him and which he had turned out to have bought with his pocket money from the fabric store in the village. While he threaded a length of yarn through it, explaining what he was doing the whole time, Rutger stopped crying and looked breathlessly, chest still heaving, at what was happening.

"Now your turn," said Quinten, giving him the needle. "And when this one is completely full, we'll buy a new cloth. And when that's full, then we'll sew it onto this one and then we'll buy another one— until," he said with a sweep of his arm, "the curtain is as big as the whole world!"

"Yes!" Rutger laughed, dribbling.

"And if you make another curtain after that, then we'll hang it on the sun and the moon!"

"Yes! Yes!" Rutger bent over to him and gave him a kiss on his cheek. No one had ever had the idea that it was possible to intervene in Rutger's senseless activity, let alone that anyone would have had the courage to carry it through.

"How did you get that brainwave?" Max asked him that evening in awe. "How did you dare?"

"Well, I just did. ." said Quinten.

Max looked at Sophia and said: "That boy has an absolutist streak in his character."

The nurturing architectural dream that had appeared after his visit to his mother turned out to recur every few months. But it never ended in a nightmare, although the fortified door with the padlock on it at "the center of the world" must still be there. Whenever he had wandered around the limitless construction, through the labyrinth of rooms, past the decorated interior facades, along the galleries, he lay still for a moment after waking up, cracking the top joints of his thumbs as he did every morning, and tried to retain the memory — but always the images took their leave after a few minutes, like in the movies when the end of the film became invisible if the lights went on too soon. He gradually began to wonder where that building was. It must actually be somewhere, because each time he saw it clearly. But since he never met anyone there, he was certainly the only person who knew of its existence — and that meant a lot, because it was secret and he mustn't speak to anyone about it: of course not to Max, but not to Granny either; not even to his father, the few times that he saw him. For that matter how could it simply be somewhere in the world when the whole world was not built up? Perhaps it was in another world. He had also given it a name: the Citadel.

Sometimes he did not think of the Citadel for weeks. If it presented itself again, he sometimes went to Mr. Themaat's to see if there were illustrations of anything like it in his thick books. The professor had retired and now lived permanently at Groot Rechteren, so his library had expanded still further. Quinten was always welcome. Occasionally it happened that Mr. Themaat was in his rocking chair without a book on his lap. His face suddenly changed unrecognizably, as if it had been turned to stone, and that stone looked at him with two eyes expressing such total despair that he went away at once. It was as though Mr. Themaat in that state no longer even knew who he was. For a few days he did not dare visit him; but when he came back there was suddenly no trace of the stone.

"What are you looking for, for goodness' sake, QuQu?"

"Just looking."

"I don't believe a word of it. You're not just looking at pictures."

Quinten looked at him. He must not betray the secret, of course, because then the dream might not come back. He asked: "What is the building, Mr. Themaat?"

Themaat gave a deep sigh. "If only my students had ever asked me such a good question. What is the building?" he repeated, folding his hands behind his head, leaning back in his rocking chair and looking at the stucco of the ceiling. "What is the building. ." While he was still thinking, his wife came in. He said, "QuQu has just asked me the question."

"And what is that?"

"What is the building?"

"Maybe this castle," said Elsbeth.

"Yes," said Themaat, laughing at Quinten. "Women usually look less far afield, and perhaps they're right. Wait a moment. Perhaps I know," he said. "The building of course doesn't exist, but I think the Pantheon comes a good second."

A little later they sat next to each other on the ground looking at photos and architectural drawings of the Pantheon in Rome: the only Roman temple — devoted to "all gods" — that had been completely preserved. Quinten had seen at once that it was not like the Citadel at all. It was not a maze, but precisely very simple and clear, with a portico like a Greek temple facade at the front, as Mr. Themaat called it, with pillars and two superimposed triangular pediments; behind them, a heavy round structure that from inside consisted of a single huge, empty, windowless rotunda, with a large round hole in the middle of the cupola, through which the light entered — a little like the fontanel in a baby's skull.

On a cross-section drawing Mr. Themaat demonstrated with a compass that if you continued the line of the cupola downward, you produced a pure sphere resting on the ground. According to him, you could see the temple as a depiction of the world.

That meant, Quinten reflected, this world — and that was obviously not what he was dreaming about. But nevertheless it was connected with the Citadel, perhaps through the opposition of the decorated front and the closed back. In any case it fascinated him — also the carved letters on the architrave, which announced through a number of abbreviations, that AGRIPPA was the architect. The emperor Hadrian had magnanimously had this inscribed after it had been completely rebuilt, Themaat told him — and at the mention of the name Hadrian he suddenly stopped and looked at Quinten — the deep blue of his eyes between the dark eyelashes, the lank black hair around his moon-pale skin.