Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

He went over to her, put his hands on her shoulders, and gave her a kiss on her forehead; a strange, sweet-and-sour smell penetrated his nostrils. Immediately afterward, she pressed her crown against his breastbone for a moment, which reminded him of Gijs, Verdonkschot's billy goat. When she raised her face, it was wet with tears. It was the first time that he had seen her cry.

"Granny!"

"Don't worry about that. When did you want to go?"

"As soon as possible." Only when he said this did it become final for him.

Again Sophia controlled herself. "But where on earth are you going, Quinten? In which direction? You can't simply just get on the first train that comes along."

"Perhaps that's a method too. First I'm going to see Dad's lawyer tomorrow. He knows where he is, doesn't he?"

"But he won't tell you. He's got his professional code of ethics."

"I can at least try. Perhaps he'll let something slip out, or something will slip out that I can use. And mightn't Auntie Dol know more than we think, too? Anyway, perhaps it's best if I go to see her first."

Sophia looked at him red-eyed. Suddenly she could no longer restrain her tears; her face contorted, she sat down, put her hands over her eyes, and said in an almost sing-song voice: "Quinten… something dreadful's going to happen when you've gone. ."

He had never seen her like this before. Helplessly he sat down opposite her. "What makes you think that?"

"I don't know…" she whispered, with her shoulders heaving, "I feel it."

"What nonsense! No one knows what's going to happen. Perhaps I'll be away for a few months, and then I'll keep you posted about everything. And after that I can always go back to school again. Otherwise I'll take the state examination."

He himself did not really believe that, and he saw that Sophia didn't believe it either. Holding a napkin to her eyes, she got up and suddenly went inside, with her face averted.

Quinten looked at the apple peel on her plate: one long uninterrupted spiral, like she always made. You could make it as long as you wanted, he thought — infinitely long if only you peeled thinly enough. He breathed in the mild air deeply. It was over; in fact, he was not there any longer. But at the same time it seemed as though through that awareness everything struck him more intensely than ever before, just like at Christmas the burnt-out, guttering candles on the tree flared up once more and then went out, with the floor covered in colored wrapping paper and unwrapped presents.

Max had always told him to stay in his room on Heiligabend until the Christmas tree had been decorated and the candles lit. "Come on!" From the harsh electric light of his room into the warm candlelight — a dark world from the distant past… He got up and went over to the stone balustrade. Deep in the wood an owl croaked. On an artificial island on the other side, the pitiless coots had built a new nest, around which everyone else swam respectfully. Fancy his unemotional grandmother suddenly becoming so tearful! But was he to stay here because of that? Would he have to look after her, as she had looked after him for all those years? His decision was made. He was going. He was going to look for his father. Deep in himself he felt the unshakable certainty that nothing and no one could stop him.

"Quinten?"

Via Max's bedroom, where Max's made-up bed had already frozen into an untouchable museum exhibit, he went into Sophia's. She was kneeling on the floor, in front of the open bottom drawer of the chest of drawers. In her hands she had a tiny compass. Much smaller than the one on the edge of Max's desk, it was no more than three quarters of an inch across.

"Take this with you," she said, and gave it to him, with the cool, distant look in her eyes again. "It belonged to your granddad. He always carried it when we went walking on the heath, in the years after the war. It was still big in those days."

The needle was fixed, but after he moved a pin at the side, it wobbled into motion: it still worked. A black leather shoelace had been threaded through the ring. Without saying anything, he allowed Sophia to put the instrument around his neck. He realized with relief that she had resigned herself to his departure. He had never known Granddad Brons; for Quinten, he belonged more to history than to himself, like most things in the crammed drawer. Although it was not locked, he had never rummaged in it; nor did he want anyone to poke their nose in his own things. He bent down and took out a yellow card from the chaos of photos, letters, folders, dolls, girls' books, a woollen rabbit.

" Certificate of Report ," he read, " As required under Article 9, first clause, of Decree No. 6/1941 of the Reichskpmmissar for the occupied territory of the Netherlands, regarding compulsory reporting of persons of wholly or partly Jewish extraction. " He turned it over. " Haken, Petronella. Number of Jewish ancestors in the sense of Art. 2 of the decree: one. " He looked inquiringly at Sophia.

"That's my mother's," she said. "Her grandmother on her mother's side was Jewish."

"That means—" Quinten began.

"Yes, that you've also got Jewish blood in you."

"You never told me that!"

"It wasn't worth mentioning. Work it out."

"My great-grandmother was a quarter, you an eighth, Mommy a sixteenth, and me a thirty-second." He put the card back and said, "No, it's not much. Did Max know about this?"

"To tell you the truth, I never thought about it."

His aunt and uncle could only repeat that they did not know where Onno was, either. Dol was the only person in the family to have had a letter from him, and since then she had not heard anything either; nor had he tried to get hold of his stored things in any way. Only on one occasion — already eighteen months ago — had Hans Giltay Veth written to them; Onno wanted the certificate of his honorary doctorate returned to Uppsala. They had done that, although they did not know the reason, nor did the lawyer.

It was their last day in the suburb near Rotterdam. They were just able to receive him in the midst of their moving. Uncle Karel, the surgeon, had finally laid down his scalpels, and they were going to move permanently to their second home on Menorca, where Quinten had stayed a couple of times during summer vacation.

In the dismantled front room, as they sat with plastic cups of mineral water on nailed-down boxes, the conversation that he had had with Sophia repeated itself: about interrupting his studies, and if he was so sure that what he was doing was sensible, and about where was he going to look. He had the feeling that Onno had almost disappeared from their lives. His things had already been collected a few weeks ago by a storage company; they were now in a warehouse in the docks. Sophia had been informed about it, but she had obviously not wanted to burden him with that message. While he waited for the train to Amsterdam on the platform, the expression that his uncle had used for his father constantly echoed through his head: dropout.

In the lobby of the lawyers' office building behind the Rijksmuseum the name J.C.G.F. Giltay Veth, M.L. stood among a long list of other names. The bearer of it came to see him himself: a fat, kindly man in his early fifties, with a small pair of reading glasses on the tip of his nose. In the elevator up to the top floor he told Quinten that he had known his father since they were students together. Although Onno could say terrible things, Giltay Veth had seldom laughed so much as he had with him. His room looked out over the entire center of town. He pointed out the palace on the Dam in the distance to Quinten, with Atlas carrying the globe of the world on his neck— like someone, thought Quinten, who was himself outside the world.