Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

When Paco was not cringing at Nederkoorn's whip and orders, he lay in the forecourt on a chain under a room of Themaat's, where he barked continually. Invoking her husband, who was ill and could not stand it, Elsbeth had complained about it a few times, but from Nederkoorn she could only count on the kind of glance one casts at an object. Once, at her wits' end, she had phoned the police, but they could do nothing.

"The police can almost never do anything," Max had said afterward, "except pick up Jews — they were very good at that."

The dog itself was unapproachable: if anyone came closer than three yards, it began leering and bared its teeth with trembling lips, without giving the impression of laughing. Only when it saw Quinten did it immediately stop barking; it laid its ears flat into its neck, wagged its tail, and allowed itself to be stroked. When Nederkoorn had first seen that, he had erupted into rage.

"If you so much as lay a finger on that animal again, you'll have me to deal with!"

Quinten had never stroked him after that — not because he was frightened of Nederkoorn, but because Paco would of course have to pay for it. But he did, when he had the chance, take his book and sit below Mr. Themaat's window, so that the dog would at least be quiet for a little while. He had learned so much from Themaat that he was prepared to do that for him. He did not go to the pond anymore anyway, since his hut had been destroyed. As far as his chain allowed, Paco crawled toward him and would lie down with his snout as close as possible to him and with his golden brown eyes focused on him. He looks just like me, thought Quinten, but he doesn't know that he's got eyes. Once Korvinus had appeared on the terrace and had ordered him to go away — the forecourt wasn't a slum where the rabble sat in the street; but immediately Sophia had opened the window above and said calmly:

"It begins to strike me that you talk a lot about slums, Mr. Korvinus. Why is that?"

That had helped — but how long was this to go on?

One evening, lying on the sofa, Max tried to work a little, but he was constantly disturbed by thoughts of the situation at the castle. He got up in irritation and went to Sophia's room. She was sitting in her dressing gown on the edge of her bed and giving herself the daily insulin injection that she had needed for years.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, Sophia," he said, and looked at the needle in her thigh, "but I'm angry. I can't concentrate anymore, and what does it really have to do with me? Since the days of feudalism are over and the bourgeoisie now rule the roost, I spend hours every day thinking about the fact that we are living here. But you live somewhere precisely so that you can do something else. When you're walking, you don't think the whole time about the fact that you're walking — except when you've just broken your leg. I've got other things to think about — at present I'm involved in the most interesting project in my whole career. Do you remember that I once explained to you that the mirrors in Westerbork are actually a single huge telescope? But nowadays, with those computers, we're able to link up all the mirrors on earth, so shortly we should have a supertelescope with a diameter of over six thousand miles, as large as our whole planet. So what's in it for me not to be outwitted by this rabble here at the castle?

"What are we actually talking about? Do I really have to dig my heels in over this? If you ask me, there's a great risk of one's messing up one's whole life over this. Take those Moluccans who used to be in Westerbork. Schattenberg estate, do you remember? They were in the Dutch East Indies army, collaborators who had to leave after the independence of Indonesia. Here they were also thrown out of everywhere too, but they were certain that one day they'd be able to return to a new republic of their own, Maluku Selatan. That's why those suckers didn't want to leave those rotten huts — because that would mean they had resigned themselves to the situation. Their sons began hijacking trains in the name of the ideal, and now they're in prison. What's more, they believed the Dutch government still owed them back pay — two thousand guilders or something. They fought their whole life for that with petitions and demonstrations at the houses of Parliament, and finally they were given it, but by that time their lives were over. They couldn't even buy a color television with it. And now they are old men, who still raise the flag on a country that doesn't exist. Shouldn't we learn from their experience and get out of here as soon as possible?"

Putting a piece of cotton wool on the small wound in her left thigh, Sophia looked up. "I don't like it when you just come wandering into my bedroom, Max."

To protect himself against Paco's barking, Verloren van Themaat now usually sat in the side room during the day, below Sophia's bedroom. That was Elsbeth's domain, where they also ate. One stuffy, overcast Sunday afternoon in the autumn of 1984, Elsbeth had asked Quinten if he would visit Themaat again. He would really like that, she said.

Mr. Themaat lay with his hands folded on a sofa in front of the window that overlooked the moat. The view was the same as upstairs, but from a different angle, so that at the same time it was not the same: the water lilies and the ducks were closer; the trees on the other side, taller. Because the sky was dark, a light was already on inside and there was the faint sound of music, some violin concerto or other, perhaps to drown out the distant barking. Mr. Themaat was in a bad way. Quinten could not imagine that this sick old man was the same person he had known. He sat down, and because he had not come with a question, he did not know what to say; he had never just talked to him. He looked at Mrs. Themaat's antique secretary. In the symmetrical grain of the mahogany he saw a devilish, batlike figure; its head with two great eyes on the top drawer, its outspread wings on the closed writing surface, its claws on the two doors below.

It seemed as though Mr. Themaat also found the situation difficult. There was something strange about his eyes: he blinked not very quickly, like everyone else, but kept shutting his eyes for a moment and then opening them again, as though he were dead tired.

"Well, QuQu…" he said. "Times change. How old are you now?"

"Sixteen."

"Sixteen already. ." He focused on the oak beams in the ceiling. "When I was sixteen, it was 1927. In that year Lindbergh was the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic — I can remember precisely. I was living in Haarlem then, close to the flea field, as we called it; I used to hang around there a lot with my friends. It was an extended grass field opposite a great white pavilion from the end of the eighteenth century, with columns and an architrave and everything that you're crazy about." Quinten could see that he was seeing it again, although he could only see the ceiling. "It was so grand, it didn't fit into the bourgeois surroundings of Haarlem at all." He looked at Quinten. "I myself was much more interested in the New Architecture, in the de Stijl, the Bauhaus, and so on. I always find your preference rather strange for such a young boy, but shall I tell you something? You're really modern with your Palladio and your Boullee and those people."

"How do you mean?"

Mr. Themaat raised his hand for a moment, perhaps to brush his face, but a moment later he dropped it, trembling.

"I haven't kept up with the literature for quite some time, but after classicism and neoclassicism, all those classical forms are coming back for the third time. By the year 2000 the world will be full of them — you mark my words, you'll see. At the beginning I thought it was just a whim of fashion, but it goes much deeper. You'll be proved right, and I'm not sure if I'm pleased about that. In the visual arts and literature and music, it might be the end of modernism, and in politics as well. Gropius, Picasso, Joyce, Schönberg, Lenin — they determined my life. It looks as though soon it will all be in the past."