Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

Quinten looked out of the window thoughtfully. "But a beginning is also some kind of fixed point isn't it? What is more fixed than a beginning? You really ought to see that as progress after the previous universe, which had no center anymore."

"Yes," said Themaat. "You could look at it like that."

"Anyway, I suddenly remember what Max once said: that human beings are smaller than the universe in approximately the same proportion as the smallest particle is smaller than the human being."

For a few seconds Mr. Themaat fixed his great staring eyes on him. "So is it true after all? So is man in the middle after all? They should have known that."

"Who?"

"Well, Plato, Protagoras, Vitruvius, Palladio — all those fellows."

Groaning a little, he lay down again, and there was a moment's silence. "For the last few weeks I've found myself thinking of music all the time, QuQu. The Platonic harmony of the spheres has disappeared from the world since Newton, and harmony disappeared from music itself with Schonberg, in Einstein's time. But just like those wretched columns in that catalog, tonality is making a comeback at the moment — except that in the meantime music has become a bane instead of a boon. Here it's still relatively quiet — here it's just dogs barking — but in the city there's no escaping it anymore. There's music everywhere, even in the elevators and the bathrooms. Music comes out of cars, and on the scaffolding every building worker has his portable radio on as loud as it will go. Everywhere is like it only used to be at the fair. But all that harmonic music now together forms a cacophony, compared with which Schonberg's relativist twelve-tone system was nothing. And that ubiquitous cacophony is what the new-fangled cacophonous architecture expresses. That bomb that you once talked about, Quinten, has exploded. That's what I wanted to tell you, but perhaps you should forget it again at once. Anyway, I've gotten tired. I think I'm going to close my eyes for a minute."

The talk had affected Quinten deeply: it had sounded a bit like a testament. Suddenly he'd heard so many new things that he couldn't take it all in. While he went up the stairs in the hall, he reflected that there was still more to know in the world than he knew. Of course you couldn't know everything, and that wasn't necessary either, but lots of people probably didn't know what there was to know. They lived and died without anyone ever telling them that there was this or that to know that they might have liked to know. Except, once you were dead, what difference did it make? You might just as well never have been born. Anyway, most people didn't want to know anything. They simply wanted to get very rich, or eat a lot, or watch soccer or that kind of thing. Or kiss each other.

In his room, he stood indecisively and looked at the black case with his mother's cello in it, upright against the wall. He had never opened it; he had always had the feeling that it was inappropriate to do so out of mere curiosity. But if ever the moment had come, it was now. Perhaps it was the first time for sixteen years that the light would shine on it again. But no, of course his father had looked at it occasionally. He laid the case carefully on the ground, knelt down, clicked the two locks, and slowly opened the lid.

Although he knew that the instrument was inside, the sight of it was still a shock to him. It lay dull and dusty on its back in the dark-red velvet, the edges of which had been gnawed by moths. It had the form of a human being, with broad hips, a waist, and a torso with shoulders; at the end of a long neck the peg box and the scroll formed a small head, like that of an ostrich. The symmetrical sound holes on either side of the bridge looked like footprints. Carefully, he took it out of the case — on the bottom the lining had been virtually completely eaten away — and he solemnly carried it over to his bed. He sat down next to it, as if next to a human being, and sat looking at it in silence. Perhaps it was more like his mother than his mother now was. He looked at the strings, over which her fingers had glided, at the side edges that she had held between her thighs — all of this retained more memories of herself than she did herself.

After a while he got up and went to the front room. Sophia was busy polishing the glass of the framed photographs on the mantelpiece, and he asked her if he could borrow her measuring tape; when she said that she had lost it some while ago, he went to Theo Kern and borrowed a yardstick. Then he carefully measured the length of the A string, from the nut to the bridge: twenty-four inches. Now he had to strum it, but the fact that he was going to make sound on that cello after all this time was an awareness that he first of all had to overcome. He pulled the string with the nail of his index finger and listened to the singing sound. He frowned. According to him, it was a semitone too low. He checked with his recorder: he was right; it was an A flat.

Although it didn't matter, he tried to tune the string; but the peg would not budge. Then he determined the middle of the string with the yardstick, twelve inches, put his index finger on that point, and struck it again. When he heard the same A flat, which at the same time was not the same A flat, he sat up and looked around with an ecstatic smile. It was true! Pythagoras! Plato! He had picked up a sound from the center of the world!

Suddenly, he left everything where it was and ran downstairs into the hall. Downstairs Korvinus tore open his door and snapped that there were other people living there and couldn't he be a bit quieter, but Quinten did not even look at him. He ran across the forecourt — where Neder-koorn was teaching Evert Korvinus to drive in his Jeep, with Arend on the backseat — over the two bridges and then into the rectangular, tree-enclosed field behind Klein Rechteren. There he flopped into the ditch and, panting and sweaty, looked at the red cow, which with grinding jaws returned his gaze and then resumed its meal in reassurance. The sky was still overcast, but now with strange, hectic, scudding clouds, dark purple in the middle, but light at the edges; it looked as though they were coming up vertically from the depths. Yet it was windless and oppressive where he was sitting.

He looked with excitement at the dark trees that fringed the field, at the grazing cow between the two alders, and at the three boulders that lay in their perfect positions, like in a Japanese garden. He suddenly knew for certain that he was predestined for something awesome — it was as though he had received a message, a mission to do something that only he was capable of! But what was it? How was he to find out? Did it have something to do with that completely different time which, according to Mr. Themaat, had dawned? At that moment a deer appeared on the other side between the trees. It stopped and looked out across the field. Immediately afterward — no one would believe it — suddenly a strong wind began to blow in Quinten's face, so that from one moment to the next the whole wood started rustling and roaring like the sea, and between the trunks high undulating leaves suddenly rolled onto the meadow, whereupon the deer bounded into the darkness and disappeared.

When at the beginning of December Ferdinand Verloren van Themaat was admitted to a psychotherapeutic clinic in Apeldoorn for an indefinite period, Elsbeth finally took the plunge and also moved to that town, whereupon Korvinus immediately incorporated their flat into his own. From then on Paco was no longer chained up in the front courtyard. The year 1985 approached.

The demolition contractor now occupied the whole of the ground floor, with the result that the other occupants could no longer use the front door: he didn't want people traipsing to and fro through his part of the house. From then on they had to use the former tradesmen's entrance at the side, through the bicycle shed, the cellar, and the former staff staircase at the back of the villa. Like the cellar, that stairwell had for decades been crammed with rubbish, rusted buckets, broken chairs, rolls of carpet; if they didn't like it, then all they had to do was to clear it up, and anyone who didn't like it could clear off. On the way to the attic only Nederkoorn was allowed to go on using the old, now partitioned-off stairs to the first floor.