The Discovery of Heaven (59 page)

"You don't have to go there anymore," said Max. "Is that all right?"

Quinten nodded. He stood by Max's desk, twisting the small compass slowly and looking at the wobbling needle, which seemed not to be attached to the compass but to the room.

"Don't you worry," said Sophia.

But it was something else that was troubling him. He focused his eyes on her and said: "All the children were picked up by mommies."

Max and Sophia looked at each other. There it was. Suddenly the fundamental question had been asked. Max didn't immediately know what to say, but Sophia knelt down to him, put an arm round him and said:

"I'm your mommy's mommy, Quinten. Your mommy is much too tired to pick you up. She's lying in a very big house with very nice people, sleeping in a bed, and she can't wake up anymore, that's how tired she is. She can't hear anyone and she can't talk to anyone."

"Not even me?"

"Not even you."

"Not even for a little bit?"

"Not even for a little bit."

"Really not even for a little tiny bit?"

And when Sophia shook her head: "Not even to Daddy and Auntie Helga?"

"Not to anyone, darling."

Thoughtfully, he put the top on the compass. "Just like Sleeping Beauty."

"Yes. Just like Sleeping Beauty."

"What about the prince, then?" he asked, looking up.

Like Max, he saw that Sophia's eyes had grown moist. Max had never seen such emotion in her before. Quinten wiped away Sophia's tears with the palm of his hand and did not ask any more questions. Max went to the mantelpiece and gave him the photograph of Ada and Onno.

"This is Mommy when she was still awake."

Quinten took the photograph in two hands and looked at the face in the square of black hair. "Beautiful."

"That's why you're so beautiful too," said Sophia.

Max expected that he would want to have the photograph, but he gave it back and went to his room. When they were alone, Max wanted to hug Sophia, but that was of course unthinkable.

"That was to be expected," he said. "And what now?"

"We must discuss it with Onno. I don't think we should return to the subject ourselves. I think that what he doesn't ask about he can't cope with."

Max nodded. "One day he'll give another sign."

Sophia brushed real or imaginary crumbs off her lap. "A few weeks ago I read him that fairy story of Sleeping Beauty, and I was halfway through before I realized what it was really about, but by that time I couldn't go back."

"Surely you don't feel guilty about it now?"

"Guilty?" she repeated, and looked at him. "Why should I be guilty about anything?"

The attack in the nursery class had of course also been provoked by Quinten's beauty. He already had his new teeth by the age of four. Theo Kern had had to open a second folder for his Quinten studies; he hadn't managed an exhibition yet, probably because he really wanted to keep them to himself. But not everyone was as jealous. Despite the sign saying
NO
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ART
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CRIMINAL
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by the gate with the two lions on it, cars regularly appeared in the forecourt with newly married couples, who had themselves photographed against the background of the castle, the women in long white dresses, the men in rented suits, gray top hats in their hands, since otherwise they would come down over their ears. Their faces were mostly tanned, halfway across their foreheads a sharp line where there was clammy white, where their caps usually reached.

A couple of times Quinten had already caught the photographers' eyes, after which they had rung the bell and asked Sophia if they could take a series of photos of this astonishingly beautiful boy—for advertising purposes, which would of course pay well.

The fact that he had not cried when he was hit on the head did not surprise Max and Sophia. In fact he had only really cried once. During a heat wave, in July, Sophia had put an inflatable round white plastic bath on the forecourt; when she couldn't find the air pump, she blew it up herself and half filled it with the garden hose. She lifted Quinten into it, called to Max that he should keep an eye on things, and went off to get eggs at the farm.

Half an hour later Max heard him crying. There had been a plague of flies all summer, but now the hot stones of the forecourt were suddenly covered by a black, seething carpet, which gave off a gruesome singing sound, like hundreds of cellos. Surrounded on all sides by the devilish brood, as if on an island, Quinten was standing up in the water, naked, his hands over his eyes, whining and shivering with fear. At the same moment the sight unleashed in Max a rage of an intensity he had never experienced; he himself had only a pair of swimming trunks on, and before he knew il he was running through the swarming, buzzing mass, feeling how he was crushing hundreds of flies under his bare feet, dragging Quinten out of the water in one movement and taking him to safety on the other side of the moat, in the shade under the brown oak tree.

By about his fifth birthday, in 1973—the year in which Max and Onno turned forty and Sophia fifty—Quinten had extended his territory to the whole of the wooded area. Every day he visited the former coach house where Theo Kern carved his large pieces. In the tall space full of stones and dust and tools, plaster carts, tables full of sketches, discarded furniture, and the constantly bubbling coffee machine in the corner, where everything was focused on work, he felt even more at ease than in Kern's apartment in the castle, in Selma's presence. He would sit on a lump of stone for hours watching the sculptor extracting heavily built female figures and ornaments for government buildings from the blocks, walking around over the sharp splinters in his bare feet like a fakir.

Now and then something alarming happened to him. He would suddenly stop, half close his eyes, bare his teeth to the gums, and raise his hands high in the air, shuddering, as though he had to defend himself against the image with a supreme effort. Then the good-natured gnome was suddenly changed into a ravenous beast. A moment later his face relaxed completely again, as though nothing had happened. Quinten saw that he himself no longer remembered behaving so strangely.

According to Kern, sculpture wasn't an art—anyone could do it. All you had to do, he said one day, was to remove the superfluous stone. "At least that's what Michelangelo used to say."

"Who's Michelangelo?"

"Someone like me, but different. He made that over there,"—he pointed to a photograph pinned to a wooden beam with a drawing pin: a statue of a man with a wild face, a long beard, and two horns on his head.

"Is that the devil?"

"What makes you think that?"

"Well, those horns of course."

"Yes, I don't understand those either. But in any case it's Moses. Someone from the Bible."

"What's the Bible?"

Kern's mallet came to rest. "Don't you know that? Hasn't your father ever told you? A whole book of stories, which lots of people think really happened."

Quinten remembered the huge book that stood on a lectern in his grand-dad's house in The Hague from which he sometimes read aloud. That was the Bible of course.

Kern looked at the photo with a sigh.

"I couldn't make anything like that, QuQu. I get commissions from Assen Council, but he got them from the pope. You have to know your place. I myself don't really like color very much, but he could paint beautifully too. For example, he painted the Sistine Chapel—not bad at all. That's in the Vatican: the pope's family chapel."

"Who's the pope?"

"The head of the Catholics. Those are people who believe in God. And now I expect you're going to ask who God is?"

"Yes," said Quinten. He was sitting on a block of dark-blue granite, hands between his thighs, and nodded three times.

"He doesn't exist, but according to those who believe in him he made the world."

"Max says the world started with a bang."

"Then I expect that's right. In the Sistine Chapel you can see God: he's floating in the air and he's got a beard, like Moses."

"And you."

"But his isn't nice and white like mine. When you're older you must go and have a look in Rome. There's plenty more to see there, for that matter."

"How on earth can you paint someone that doesn't exist?"

"You make something up. Or you use a trick. Michelangelo simply painted some old chap or other who came into his street every day selling pizzas; he made him float in the air and then everyone said it was God. If I had to make a sculpture of God for Assen Council, then I'd simply be able to carve my own head."

"And yet," said Quinten, "you could make a sculpture of God himself perfectly easily if he doesn't exist."

"You'll have to tell me how you're supposed to do that."

"Well, you take a block of marble and you carve it until there's nothing left."

He looked at Quinten perplexed, and then burst out into a thundering laugh. "Then I take it to Assen. 'Here it is,' I'd say. 'God! Do you see! Nothing!' Do you think they'd understand? And pay me? No way! They wouldn't even pay for the marble. They're as thick as two planks."

"Who's the devil, then?"

"Christ, Quinten! Who's the devil? Why don't you ask the lady vicar. The devil is the archenemy of God!"

"Doesn't he exist either, or does he?"

"No, of course not."

"Well then, I know how you can make a statue of the devil too."

Kern lowered his mallet and chisel and looked at Quinten. "How, then?"

"You've got to fill the whole world with marble."

Quinten could see that he was confused.

"Where on earth do you get things like that from, QuQu?"

"Just like that.. ." Quinten didn't understand what he meant, but he had the feeling that he should go now. He glanced at Moses; under his arm he had some large thing or other, a kind of map, which was obviously slipping out of his hands and threatening to fall on the floor, which he was just able to prevent. In real life he would probably have been a gardener or something. "Bye," he said.

Whenever he came out of the studio, there was the house in front of him. Seen from the castle, the group of outbuildings on the other side of the moat looked rather small and insignificant; the house itself, looked at from there, made a powerful, inaccessible impression. He always stood and looked at it for a few moments. He didn't think of anything—or, rather, what he thought coincided with what he saw: the castle, self-absorbed like his own thoughts, the clock with no hands above the door. Sometimes it was as though it suddenly became invisible for a split second.

To the right of Kern's studio was a smaller stable that housed the workshop of Mr. Roskam, the caretaker of Groot and Klein Rechteren, who did repairs; the door was usually locked. At the side a covered staircase led to the second floor, where different people lived every few months: sometimes a blond woman, then a man with a black goatee. He had no contact with them, but he did with Piet Keller, who lived on the other side.

On either side of the gravel path, which led to his front door past the large erratic stone, one could see the top halves of cart wheels. At first sight it looked as though someone had buried them up to the axles—but Quinten knew better. It was the other way around: they weren't sticking in but out of the earth; they weren't the top halves but the bottom halves. In fact the cart was under the path, the coach, the golden coach, which he had once seen on television: but upside down, pulled by eight horses, the coachman with the reins up in the box, all upside down in the ground, and there wasn't a queen in it but a much more beautiful woman, the most beautiful woman in the world—and the coach was standing still because they'd all fallen asleep .. .

When Piet Keller had once asked him why he never simply walked down the path but always around the wheels, across the grass, he had said: "Just because."

Keller was in his fifties, a skinny man with a stoop and an unhealthy complexion, usually dressed in a short beige dust coat. His wife sometimes suddenly made strange jerky movements with her whole body, which made Quinten a little afraid of her; his daughter and two sons, all three of them a head taller than he was, had reached an age at which they probably scarcely noticed Quinten. In an adjacent barn he had his workshop, and Quinten was in the habit of watching him, too, for hour after hour. He repaired old locks, which had been sent to him from miles around, not only by individuals but also by antiques dealers and museums. All around were boxes containing thousands of keys in all shapes and sizes, tins full of levers, locks, bars, tumblers, bolts, stops, and other components whose names he had taught Quinten. Countless skeleton keys hung on large iron rings.

"I've got every key," he had once said with a wink, "except musical keys and St. Peter's."

On a trestle table illuminated by a wobbly light, fixed to the wall with wire, lay the locks that he was currently dealing with; next to it was a set of shelves with countless compartments full of screws, nuts, pins, and other small items. There was also a heavy bench with a lathe and drilling and grinding machines. When Quinten was there, Keller usually accompanied his work with a mumbled, monotone commentary: not didactic, simply reporting on what he was doing and what he was thinking. Occasionally, when he was working on a heavy medieval padlock, as large as a loaf, which was locked and of which the key was missing, lyrical notes crept into his reports.

"Look at that, isn't it an angel? We call this a sliding padlock. Can you see those H-shaped grooves? That's where you have to put the key. I'm going to make it in a while. Inside there's a barrier of very strong springs; the ends are now relaxed, making them lock the shackle in the body of the lock."

"How do you know? Have you looked inside?"

"No, and I'm not going to. At least not now. First I'm going to do something quite different." From one of the storage boxes he fished out a couple of long, steel pins, which fitted in the H. Back at his bench, he lubricated them with oil and began sliding them slowly inside, with his eyes looking up, as though that was where the inside of the lock could be seen. "Yes, now I can feel the first curve in the spring blades . . . yes. That's right, yes ... a little further ... now they're compressing . .. yes . . . it's difficult, it's rusty in there .. . perhaps a little careful help with the hammer .. . and now a couple more taps and one more, that should be enough ..." There was a stiff click from inside, and he pulled the stirrup out of the lock.