Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

Then he gave Quinten a lecture about the gigantic. It was always connected with death. The Colosseum had been built with the intention that human beings and animals should die in it; the gigantic, circular Castel Sant'Angelo, also in Rome, had been built by Hadrian as a mausoleum for himself and his successors. That gigantic scale originated in Egypt, where the whole of life was oriented toward the kingdom of the dead. The pyramids, those denials of time, were nothing but graves with a sarcophagus in them; and what Boullee had achieved, at least in imagination, was a link between that necrophiliac monumentality and its opposite, Greek harmony and moderation.

He showed Quinten a sheet with a design for a necropolis: a pyramid, in the base of which a semicircular hollow had been cut, wedged in it, like a mouse in a trap, a Greek temple facade with columns and the decorated architrave. That portico in combination with that arch were again of course reminiscent of the Pantheon, but at the same time that joyful Greek element was overshadowed and crushed by the mass of Egyptian style above it. And that architectural representation of the fragility of life, suddenly obviously threatened by the power of a colossal death, returned 150 years after Boullee as the depiction of direct mass murder: in the designs that Albert Speer had made for Adolf Hitler.

Quinten started when he heard that name: there was that villain again! Actually, that name should never be spoken again. Mr. Themaat showed him photographs of the models for "Germania," as Berlin was to have been called after the final victory, as the thousand-year world capital. Series of unbridled buildings, with as their Germanic climax the Great Hall, which surpassed everything that had ever been imagined.

On Speer's own testimony this monster, too, issued from the inexhaustible womb of the Pantheon: a neoclassical facade of pillars with a round space behind it, topped by a cupola. But that cupola was now twice as high as the pyramid of Cheops; on top of it was a cylinder-shaped lantern, surrounded by pillars to admit light, which was itself already many feet taller and wider than the whole Pantheon, which in turn was larger than Michelangelo's cupola in St. Peter's. On top of that, like the fuse of Quinten's bomb, stood an eagle with the globe in its claws. The hall could accommodate 180,000 people, reduced to the status of fleas; the possibility of cloud formation and drizzle had to be allowed for. The project was based on a sketch that Hitler himself had once made — originally Hitler wanted to become an architect, Mr. Themaat told him, but on reflection he preferred to go into the demolition business, because after his suicide, scarcely one stone was left standing in Berlin. Even the models had finally been burned.

"So now you've got everything together architecturally, QuQu. Hiroshima and Auschwitz. The gigantic triumph of science and technology in the twentieth century!"

If he wanted to read without being disturbed or to play his flute, Quinten sometimes went to sit by the side of the pond when the weather was fine. There, surrounded as though in the tropics by the tall rhododendron bushes and usually in the company of the two black swans floating on their own reflections, he felt protected and at peace. He had built a hut of branches, which he was proud of and which protected him against rain that was not too heavy. But if something was worrying him or if he had to think about something, he usually sought out a different spot: a couple of hundred yards outside the estate, behind the baron's fields.

Although scores of people came past every day, he was certain that he was the only one who had recognized the place, because he never saw anyone looking at it specially. In fact there was nothing much to see about it. It was the site of the annual Easter bonfire: a small, oblong field, enclosed on three sides by tall trees, on the fourth by a narrow country lane. In the summer a red cow grazed there; she looked up attentively when he sat down in the ditch and put his arms around his knees. Perhaps it was also connected with those two trees, which seemed to have escaped from the dark edge of the wood and were standing separately in the grass, each in a perfectly good place, where they gave the space structure, as did the three large erratic stones — but that did not explain the mystery that hung about the place. It was as though it were warmer and quieter than in other places where it was just as warm and quiet.

He let his eyes wander over the enclosed domain and thought of the previous day. Because his father had again not found time to come to Groot Rechteren for a couple of months, Quinten had been to visit him in The Hague with Max, where to his satisfaction they had gotten lost in the Parliament building. In the party offices, a lady who worked there said that he was in the chamber of the house; and after having listened to a long set of directions, by the end of which they had forgotten the beginning, they set off through the maze of narrow corridors — upstairs, downstairs, to the left, to the right, past lines of portraits of deceased members of Parliament, libraries, committee rooms, girls using copiers, talking loudly, obviously slightly tipsy journalists, politicians conferring in window alcoves: everything repeatedly converted, improvised, with walls knocked through. But only after they had asked the way twice more did they open a door and suddenly find themselves in the public gallery.

In the beautiful oblong room, full of red, brown, and ochre, which was smaller than Quinten had imagined, a minister slumped in his chair behind the government table was listening to the argument of someone at the lectern, or at least pretending to; on the countless benches there were no more than four or five equally bored members of Parliament. Onno was standing talking to the Speaker of the House, but he saw them immediately and gestured them to come to him.

"Thank you for releasing me from the most dreary of lion's dens," he said, and took them to the coffee room. And there, while Quinten ate his open sandwich, he had asked him, "You're twelve now — do you know what you want to be yet?"

When he didn't answer at once, Max said: "An architect, if you ask me."

Quinten was annoyed that Max had said that; it was an intrusion. Apart from that, he didn't want to become an architect at all.

Preceded by four young dogs, a young woman now ran across the country road, dressed in a long white dress, with rings on all her fingers and hung with chains and bracelets; she came from the farmhouse a little farther on, where a commune of Amsterdam artists lived — dropouts, who had had enough of life in town. She raised an arm cheerfully and he returned her greeting absent-mindedly.

He looked dreamily at something that could not be seen but that was still coming toward him from the quieter than quiet field with the cow, the three boulders, and the two alder trees in it. The question of what he wanted to be had never occurred to him. He was what he was, surely — so what was he supposed to be? But of course his father meant some profession or other, like one boy in his class, who was always announcing that he wanted to be a doctor. It was just that he could not imagine ever practicing some profession or other, not even architecture. That interest was only connected with the dream of the Citadel, but Max could not know that. Perhaps everything would always remain the same.

Onno might have been just as unsure what he wanted to be, but the following year, in 1981, after the new elections, he was put forward by his party leader as minister of defense. The center-right coalition of the previous four years gave way to a center-left coalition, in which the Christian Democrat prime minister was obviously not subject to change; only the conservative vice-premier left office with his cohort, to be replaced by the new Liberals and the Social Democrats of the last cabinet but one, who had been dumped four years previously and now wanted to be in government again at any price — bearing in mind the adage that politics did not wear out those in power but those not in power.