Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"Do you remember the Easter eggs that you and Arendje always hunted for under the rhododendrons?" asked Selma.

How could he forget something like that? Again he could feel the branches on his back as he crawled over the ground, over the damp, withered leaves, between which a suddenly a bright color glowed, completely formed, like when he had a liberating brainwave while he was thinking about something. The troubling thought that Arendje would find more eggs than he did..

"I always kept the most beautiful ones," said Sophia. "Shall I get them?"

When she had left the room, Theo said to Selma: "Do you know what Max once said to me? 'A chicken is the means whereby an egg produces another egg.' I don't know in what connection, but I've never forgotten."

"Poor Max. ." sighed Selma.

A little later Sophia put a large, old-fashioned candy jar with a wide neck and a screw top on the table. While she told them that the jar came from her mother's bequest, Kern stared at the colored contents and it was as though he could scarcely control his emotions.

"All of those were painted here in this room, QuQu," he said, "while you were tucked up in bed. By all of us here at the castle."

After Selma had cleared the plates away, Sophia carefully laid the eggs on the table one by one. Quinten did not know that she had kept them all, but he recognized his finds almost without exception. She arranged them neatly in four rows of eight. Kern took his foot off the pouf, put on a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses, and bent forward.

"Can you see who painted what?"

Carefully putting one sort with another, Quinten began to change the places of the eggs. Suddenly he had the feeling that they should actually be in eight vertical rows of four rather than in the four horizontal rows of eight. There were Kern, Max, Proctor, Themaat, and Spier and their five wives— that made ten people; but Elsbeth Themaat and Judith Spier would probably not have joined in — they never came upstairs. It would be nice if there were four eggs from each of them, but there was only one from Mr. Spier: on the otherwise unpainted white shell there was an elegantly red painted A? on one side, and a blue Q? on the other. The capital italics obviously referred to Arendje, but now he was suddenly reminded of Ada. He assigned three eggs to Themaat, with pale geometrical patterns: diamonds, circles, triangles. The somber, dark-brown ones, sometimes black with zigzagging lightning bolts, were of course by Proctor, while it was probably Max who had limited himself to plain, bright colors, which now in some way contained his death. There was no mistaking Kern's work: expertly painted clown's faces, flowers, and animal heads. Clara had also made it simple for him by depicting umbrellas in all states of openness. He had more difficulty with Selma and Sophia. The remaining eggs were all abstract in design, with dots, stripes, and bands. He decided that the beautiful ones were by Selma and those with the clashing colors by Sophia.

The others looked in silence at what he was doing. After he had finally arranged the eggs by person, Kern said:

"You don't have to say any more." He glanced at it for a moment, then looked up and said to the two women, staring at the constellation on the table, "That's what's left of our community."

At the same moment Quinten realized that this was the truth. After the death of Max, only these three old people were left, of whom his grandmother, at sixty-two, was the youngest. Upstairs was Nederkoorn, below Korvinus, and soon it would be completely over. What was there to keep him here any longer? Everything around him had been destroyed, everyone was dead, had left, was inaccessible; even Kern's dovecotes had been empty for six months. Suddenly he got up and went to his room without saying anything.

He put his bronze box on the table. Because the key of the padlock had disappeared one day from between the loose bricks behind the oil stove, he had straightened a sturdy paper clip and, according to Piet Keller's lessons, had made a skeleton key with it. He carefully unfolded his father's letters and looked at the last sentence, although it was just the same as he remembered: Forgive me and don't look for me, because you won't find me. So it was something of a last wish that Quinten should not look for him! In fact it didn't say at all that he didn't want him to — just that he should save himself the trouble, because it would be to no avail. He looked at the case with his mother's cello in it. Now he was certain. He was going away. He was going to find his father.

"But where are you going to look for him, then?" asked Sophia the following morning at breakfast. "He could be anywhere. Do you know how large the world is?"

"In any case he's on earth. That excludes lots of other places."

"That's true," said Sophia. A smile appeared on her face, and she looked at him with a shake of her head. "You've virtually already found him, haven't you?"

"Yes." Quinten nodded and looked back at her, but without a smile.

They were sitting on the balcony. For the first time this year it was a mild spring morning. In the moat below, the ducks were noisily celebrating the change of season.

"But what if you find him and he doesn't want to have anything to do with you? Are you aware of what's happened to him? He's become a different person. I thought that it would turn out okay too and that he'd turn up again, but he's been gone for four years. He knows where he can reach you, doesn't he, and he hasn't done so, has he?"

"If he sees me and he still doesn't want to have anything to do with me, then I shall know. Then he'll really have become a different person, as you say, and a different person doesn't interest me. A different person isn't my father. Then I'll be finished with it."

"And your school," asked Sophia, without looking up from the apple she was peeling. "What'll happen to that?"

"I know enough. And anyway, the most important things that I know, I didn't learn at school."

"But, Quinten, you're almost there. Another year, and you'll have your high school diploma. Aren't you afraid that you'll be terribly sorry if you don't finish high school? That'll change the course of your whole life. You do want to study, I assume?"

Quinten looked at the bare trees on the other side of the moat. He could still look right through the wood; soon it would again become an impenetrable wall. In the distance a car was driving along the road to Westerbork. His father had once asked him too what he wanted to "be." "An architect," Max had said — but the idea of doing this or that for the rest of his life, and nothing else, still seemed idiotic to him. He wasn't born to gain certainty; he could leave that to others. Something completely different was waiting for him — that was the certainty that had come to him six months previously in the field near Klein Rechteren.

"I don't think so," he said.

Sophia tried again. "You won't be seventeen until next month. Keep at it for another year, then you'll be eighteen; and afterward you can do what you like for a year. Or two years. Then you can still always decide if you want to study or not. But if you stop now, you'll have decided once and for all."

"I'm going to look for Dad," said Quinten.

He was sorry for his grandmother. In order to keep up appearances she got up, brushed the crumbs and remains of bread into her other hand, and threw them over the balustrade, which immediately unleashed a flurry of quacking down below. She too was alone. Her daughter had been struck down by a terrible accident, her companion killed by a meteorite, and now she was being abandoned by her grandson, too. What else was there to do? Moreover, in a few months' time she'd be out in the street — with all her things, those of her daughter, and those of Max.