Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

Next Max also began to have doubts. He had let himself be carried along by the first flush of enthusiasm, but when things stagnated, he wondered what he actually wanted. In five years' time at the most, Quinten would be leaving home — was he to stay living here with Sophia? The task he had undertaken would then have been completed, after which nothing would tie him to her except memory.

One evening, when he was slightly tipsy, he suddenly plucked up courage to raise the subject: "Listen, Sophia, something else about the castle. In a few years' time, when Quinten—"

"Of course," she immediately interrupted him. "Then our ways will part."

Using the alibi that they could not simply abandon Theo, who after all had lived longer at Groot Rechteren than all of them, he was able to convince the others simply to let events take their course and to hope that the new owner would leave things as they were.

All this passed Quinten by. He also took Gevers's substantial bequest for granted: looking after Deep Thought Sunstar's grave and teaching Rutger how to weave a carpet were perfectly natural, after all!

Because he knew that he was going to be kept back a grade this year, he did even less schoolwork than usual. In the evenings, in the total silence, a little dazzled by the light on his open books, he stared at the tall black window in his room, in which he could only vaguely make out the transition from the dark sky to the even darker wood.

His father was somewhere out there in the night now — far away, perhaps in America, or even on the other side of the world, in Australia. But in any case not infinitely far away, like his mother. And anyway perhaps he was close by; perhaps he only implied that he was leaving Holland so that no one would look for him there: perhaps he was simply living with a farmer nearby. But if you didn't know where someone was, that really made no difference. What was he doing at this moment? He'd wanted "to think something through," he had written to Max. What was that? What did he mean by that? He took his father's letter from the bronze box, in which he also kept the secret maps of the SOMNIUM QUINTI. He did not need to read it again, because he knew it by heart: he carefully brushed with his fingertips the paper on which his father's hand had rested. The idea that he would really never see him again seemed just as impossible as the idea that the sun would not rise tomorrow.

He locked the box with the antique padlock that he had been given by Piet Keller; he hid the little key between the loose bricks behind the oil stove. After placing his hand on the case of Ada's cello for a moment, he went to the window to look at the spiders again.

They looked awful and he hated them, but they fascinated him. Because the light in his turret room attracted the insects from the wood, five or six large spiders had realized that they should spin their webs in front of the glass. He didn't understand them. On the one hand they were ingenious, subtle architects, who wove gossamer-fine webs patiently, and in a material that reminded him of the stuff that for the last few months he had even found in his pajama bottoms when he woke up in the mornings: that had always been preceded by a blissful dream, which he could never remember and which had nothing to do with the Citadel. But when their work was finished, they emerged as equally patient but gruesome murderers, who pounced mercilessly on their prey, bit it to death, spun the wings so that they were crushed together, and sucked it dry. How could those things be reconciled — that architectural sophistication and that savage aggression?

There were spiders that waited at the edge of their web until something wandered into their fatal silver trap, but there were also spiders that sat in the middle. And one evening he suddenly saw that the lucid structure of their webs in a certain sense was a geometrical representation of their repulsive bodies, with the eight hairy legs — a kind of transparent extension of it, just as algebra is the abstraction of mathematics. He had to know more about this, and he decided to put it to Mr. Themaat.

"Do you know what's wrong with you, QuQu?" said Mr. Themaat the following day, with the resignation of someone who had met his match. "You… anyway, leave it. I don't know what's wrong with you."

Then he told Quinten that for the umpteenth time he had hit the bull's-eye. He spoke more slowly than he used to; his exuberant fits of laughter no longer occurred, either. It was as though his head had grown into a motionless extension of his trunk; his wide-open eyes stared out at Quinten from a practically expressionless face. Quinten had heard from Sophia that it was because he had to take so many pills — they made you like that. He looked like a wax image of himself, like at Madame Tussaud's, but it was clear from what he said that his intellect had not been affected.

Via the spider's web, he said, Quinten had hit upon the "homo-mensura-thesis": Protagoras's argument that man was the measure of all things. In Roman antiquity, Vitruvius had said that temples should have the ideal proportion of the human body, as had been the case with the Greeks. In the Middle Ages that prescription had been linked to the Old Testament notion that God had created man in His own image, which gave human measurements a divine origin, with as a New Testament addition of course the central fact of Christ's body. In architecture that had led to churches and cathedrals in the form of a Latin cross, that is, the rough scheme of the human figure; but only in the Renaissance did those views evolve into a sophisticated philosophical architectural system.

"Lie down on the ground," order Mr. Themaat.

Quinten looked at him in astonishment. "Me?"

"Yes, you."

When Quinten did what he had been told, Themaat rose from his rocking chair slowly, as in a slow motion film, and asked Elsbeth if she had any string in the house.

"String?" she repeated suspiciously. "What on earth are you planning to do, Ferdinand? Are you going to tie him up?"

"Just give me it."

She took a ball of white wool out of a basket. "Will this do?"

"Even better."

Themaat said that Quinten should put his ankles together and spread his arms. Crawling on his knees, he then put the thread on the carpet in a pure square bordered by Quinten's crown, the tips of his middle fingers, and his heels. Then he had to move his feet slightly apart and his arms slightly upward, whereupon Themaat draped a second white thread in a circle along the soles of his feet and the tips of his fingers. Quinten got up carefully and looked at the double figure. The circle was resting on the lower side edge of the square; to the side and at the top, it circumscribed it. Themaat took a guilder coin out of his pocket and put it carefully in the middle of the circle which coincided with that of the square.

"And that spot marks your navel," he said, "which linked you to your mother."

A little alarmed, Quinten looked at the coin, which through Themaat's words was suddenly transformed into a shining mystery.

That linking of the "homo circularis" and the "homo quadratus," Themaat told him, had been described before Christ by Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture, but in the fifteenth century Leonardo da Vinci made a famous drawing of it. He took a book out of the case and showed it to Quinten: a proud, naked man in a square and a circle, with thick locks of hair down to his shoulders and four arms and four legs, surrounded by a commentary in mirror writing.

"I expect it's a self-portrait," he said. "And good God, he's like a spider in a web too — and he's got eight limbs as well! What does that mean?" He glanced sideways at Quinten, who had also seen it right away. "Aren't you frightened that you're gradually venturing into areas where no one can follow you anymore?"