The Discovery of Heaven (61 page)

"Why? What could be nicer than
doing
things with words? Does a writer do anything else? And what about God?"

"Yes," said Onno. "Let's take God. That can never do any harm. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.' "

"Is that from the Bible?" asked Quinten.

"It certainly is! So according to St. John, the creator coincided with the word of creation, and according to the psalmist that was at the same time creation itself: 'He speaks and it is there.' God, Word, World—they're all identical. Nothing more political than Christian theology is conceivable."

"You can also turn it around, and say that it means politics are a religious matter," said Max.

"Do you know whom you're talking to? 'Government is the servant of God armed with a sword': I imbibed that with my mother's milk. It's just that the Christian dogs have never looked at it from the point of view of the philosophy of language. Anyway, that applies not just to politics. When I once said 'I do' at the town hall on your birthday, that was more of an action than a statement, or when I called that strange creature there Quinten. But I wasn't cut out for God, like you perhaps. There's a bad smell about doing things verbally without doing anything. Something that I don't like about it is a certain—how shall I say .. . immoral dimension."

"Immoral dimension ..." repeated Max. "That doesn't sound too good." He had to force himself not to look at Sophia—suddenly he had the feeling that Onno was really speaking about his clandestine relationship with her, but of course that was nonsense.

"The emperor Napoleon beautified Paris," said Onno, and was suddenly silent. Max nodded and waited for what came next. "King Solomon built the first temple in Jerusalem."

"I expect that's from the Bible too," said Quinten.

"Everything is always from the Bible."

"And what about Napoleon and Solomon?" inquired Max.

"The thing is that in the whole of his life King Solomon never once put one brick on top of another. So he didn't build it. He commissioned his architect to build a temple, but he didn't build it, either. It was built by anonymous workers. What right has the person who has least to do with it to take the credit for it?"

"Because it would not have been built without him."

"And it would have been built without the architect? And without the workers? And yet Solomon is of course the sole builder of the temple—the grounds of his power and a deed consisting of three words: 'Build a temple!.' Or rather two:
'Tiwne migdásh!' Build
obviously means saying 'Build.' Isn't that indecent?"

"Exactly," said Max, who suddenly felt criticized in some way. "And having a temple built is still something noble, but take the example of being given an order to do something criminal." He turned to Sophia. "Tell him what you heard yesterday—about that cap."

Sophia looked at the paper pattern that she was pinning to a piece of cloth. Max and Onno could see that she had to concentrate for a moment: these kinds of conversations tended to pass her by. Probably, she thought it was all boyish nonsense.

Yesterday Mr. Roskam, the caretaker, had been invited to coffee, and he had told her about his father, who had been gardener under the father of the present baron. When Mr. Roskam was the same age as Quinten, he had once gone with his father to the orangery, which was still in use as a winter garden. On the threshold the old Gevers had stood, also with his son, also about six at the time, and he had glanced at Mr. Roskam's father's cap. "Fetch a spade, my man." His father had fetched a spade. "Dig a hole." His father had dug a hole. "Throw your cap in. I want that filthy thing out of my sight." His father had buried his cap and stamped down the earth with his clogs, while the two boys looked on. Fifty years later Mr. Roskam still trembled as he talked about it. His father had thought that he would be given a new cap, but that hadn't happened.

"Mr. Roskam?" asked Quinten, who had listened open-mouthed.

"Right," said Onno. "When I hear something like that I remember why I'm left-wing."

"As you say," said Max in an agitated voice, "the immoral thing is that commands like that are
possible.
'Build a temple!' 'Bury your cap!' Take Hitler. He once gave Himmler his very personal order: 'Kill all Jews!'—of course only verbally. But he himself never murdered a Jew, nor did Himmler or Heydrich or Eichmann; that was finally done by the lowliest foot-soldiers. And in Auschwitz it was even more idiotic; there the Zyklon-B had to be thrown into the gas chambers by Jewish prisoners. So there you had the spectacle of the actual murder not being committed by the murderers but by the victims. Whoever did it didn't do it, and whoever didn't do it did it." He met a look from Sophia and suddenly checked himself. So as not to burden Quinten with the past, he never talked about those things when he was there—and actually, not even when he wasn't there.

"That's what I mean," said Onno.
"The Führer's orders have the force of law.
With Hitler you always find everything in its purest form. If words become deeds, deeds evaporate and the hell of paradox opens up and engulfs everything. There's something completely wrong with the world, and at the same time it can't be any different than it is. Perhaps it's my midlife crisis, but on rainy afternoons, toward dusk, I gaze out of a window at the ministry sometimes and already look forward to the day when I leave politics. Everyone in The Hague precisely wallows in that immoral constellation, but I will be happy when I can talk just as I normally do—like now. If I want to do something, I want to do it by doing it—like all decent people. Just now I opened an institute in Leeuwarden: with words, which were a deed; and afterward I had to do something else, namely pull a curtain off a statue. So that was a deed that wasn't a deed but a symbolic act. That's an ignoble existence! And if the day is even gloomier, I sometimes think of the queen in her deathly quiet palace: Her Majesty has to perform such nonacts day in day out, all her life, never being able to speak her own words, only ours. One ought to abolish the monarchy out of pure politeness."

He got up and stood at the window. "Politics," he said after a while, "harms everyone's soul. In politics your potential archenemy is always in the first row of the auditorium. That's why I have to distrust everyone—my friends first and foremost; and that in turn means that I constantly have to despise myself."

No one said anything else. Max looked in alarm at his hands, Quinten at his father's powerful back, while the words that he had heard swirled through his head like a swarm of bees.

After a while Onno turned around and said to Max: "Of course you were intending to lobby for your toy again, weren't you? Those completely superfluous thirteenth and fourteenth telescopes. I realize I've now made that virtually impossible for you. But because I would be playing politics again by using that, I shall in my infinite goodness not do so."

With relief Max realized that Onno's remark about friends he could not trust was not addressed to him.

" 'Build two mirrors!' " he said in the same tone in which Onno had quoted Solomon. "I don't know how you say that in Hebrew."

"Tiwne shté mar'ot!
I regard it as wasted public money, social relevance nil, but I can tell you that I've meanwhile found a gap for it, at the expense of a couple of institutes abroad, which won't thank me. King Onno—builder of two mirrors in Westerbork," he said in an august tone. "When I can't even grind a pair of lenses, like Spinoza. What a wonderfully good person I am." He looked around. "What's happened to Quinten?"

"You never know with him," said Sophia.

Quinten had gone outside. In the forecourt stood the car with the two aerials—which one moment was standing still and next could be traveling at eighty miles an hour. The chauffeur was smoking a cigarette on the balustrade of the moat and gave him a friendly nod. Quinten thought the car was nicer than Uncle Diederic's, the governor's. He walked pensively across the bridge and glanced at the two wheels by the path to Piet Keller's door. The queen was sitting in her deathly quiet palace and wasn't allowed to say anything. Now he as quite sure: the queen was his mother. Otherwise his father would surely not be in the government and not have such a beautiful car, with a chauffeur; and his uncle was her governor in Drenthe, in that fancy house in Assen, looking after him. But his father had kept it hidden from him too, because of course it was a secret.

Perhaps they knew about it at school, otherwise they wouldn't be so rotten to him. They were jealous, because they themselves all had ordinary mothers, with flowered dresses and curls, and they lived on farms or in funny little houses that were stuck together. He could understand the children in his class, but they spoke differently from him, and their faces were different. Their hair was sometimes almost white and their eyes were like fishes' eyes. The boys liked soccer, which went against the grain with him, being the queen's son. Such a lovely round ball—who would think of kicking it? You might just as well kick people. You didn't do things like that as the queen's son. But the Jews all had to be killed, said Hitler, in gas chambers—Max had been talking about that again.

Perhaps he was a Jew himself; he must ask him. Max got very excited when he started talking about Hitler. What a rotter: wanting to kill Mr. Spier. . . . When he thought of "Hitler," he saw a huge muscular figure in front of him, a cannibal with long blond hair waving in the wind, who slept in a giant's bed on the heath at night.

"Watch where you're going, QuQu!"

He looked up. Selma Kern cycled past in her enormous dress. The statue his father had unveiled today might have been carved by Kern. You only had to take away the superfluous stone, and then a cloth. Perhaps Mr. Kern sometimes pulled that frock off Mrs. Kern, so that she suddenly stood naked in the room. He started laughing. What a sight! And maybe Max did that with Granny—when she crept into his bed at night, because she was cold; but he didn't want to think any more about that.

He looked at Kern's studio: he wasn't there; the padlock was on the door.

The door of Mr. Roskam's workshop was open—he could see him shuffling around in the dark. His father had had to bury his cap. Just imagine, his father had to bury his cap on the orders of the baron. He'd never do that! Anyway, he didn't even have a cap. I wonder if Mr. Roskam ever talked about it to the baron—I'm sure he didn't. He was obviously very ashamed, or perhaps he'd forgotten about it.

He walked past the lady vicar's house to the orangery, where Etienne was just driving off in his car. He turned down the window and said: "You can't go in now, beautiful. I have to run to the village. Come back tomorrow."

Once he had heard the loose planks of the bridge bumping, he carefully considered the situation. Mr. Roskam and his father had come out of the gardener's house, where the lady vicar now lived, and the old baron had stood with his son there on the threshold. So the Roskams must have been standing more or less on the same spot where he was now. But the ground was hard here; you couldn't dig a hole here. He looked around to see where he would dig a hole if he had to. He took a couple of steps from the hardened section to the start of the soft forest ground, which was now covered with fallen leaves. He took a stone and put it on the spot where the cap must be. Then he ran back to Mr. Roskam.

He was already old. He was trying to twist a nut off a tap with a pair of pliers, but didn't really have the strength anymore. When Quinten looked into his sad eyes, he wanted to say right away that he'd found his father's cap, but he preferred to surprise him.

"Well, QuQu, on the warpath?"

"Can I borrow a spade from you?"

"Buried treasure?"

"Yes," said Quinten.

"They're over there. Take the small one. But bring it back, mind, and not too late—it's getting dark earlier again."

Back at the orangery he moved the small erratic stone aside, brushed away the leaves with one foot, and stuck the spade in the ground. How deep would the cap be? No more than a foot or two. In order to increase the chance of finding it, he decided to dig a trench about a yard long, then he was sure to find it. Carefully, so as not to damage the hat even more than it already was after fifty years, he began shoveling the earth away. A few inches down he struck a stone, which he threw aside. A little later another stone appeared. He started to get worried that the cap was farther back, or to the side, but of course he couldn't dig up the whole area. It was just as well he hadn't said anything to Mr. Roskam. It was already growing dark. Suddenly there were four arrowheads on his spade, just like those in the orangery in Verdonkschot's windows. Antiquities!

He made a much bigger find than a cap! Wouldn't Etienne and Mr. Verdonkschot be pleased! He looked again at the two stones that he had thrown aside. No doubt about it! Hand axes.

Excitedly, he stuffed the finds in his pockets, filled up the trench, stamped down the ground, and brushed the leaves back in place so that no one else would have the idea of coming to look for prehistoric remains here. He was also glad that Gijs was in his shed and couldn't have seen him working. He decided not to say anything to Mr. Roskam, because he might ask him why he had started digging there; and what was he supposed to say then?

The light in the workshop was on, but the nut still wasn't loosened.

"Well?" said Mr. Roskam without looking up, when Quinten put back the spade. "Did you find any?"

"Yes."

"Good."

Fortunately he didn't ask anything else. But the chauffeur had gone and sat in the car, from which soft music was issuing. The engine was running almost inaudibly; he had obviously gotten cold. Upstairs at the front there was no light on, but when he came in everyone was sitting in the same places in the dusk.

"You've been up to something," said Sophia.

"I've been looking for Mr. Roskam's father's cap."

There was a silence, which was only broken after a considerable time by Max: "Mr. Roskam's father's cap . . . you've been looking for it. . . ?"