—What in heaven's name are you talking about?
—Pay no attention. Because of all that genetic fiddling about, I've still got a loose bobbin inside me like a loom. At the end of 1944, in the last winter of the war, the German occupying forces were in the habit of parking trains carrying V-2 rockets immediately south of the Academic Hospital in the hope that this would deter the English from air attacks. They were fired at London from a launchpad nearby. Nevertheless, one December afternoon, just after midday, there was a heavy raid on the station; shortly afterward the false rumor circulated in Delft that the hospital was on fire. Although weakened by hunger and despite the cold, Sophia immediately cycled to Leiden to see whether anything had happened to her best friend, a fellow nurse. As she was passing the museum, a few hundred yards south of the station, the second attack came and she took cover in a doorway—but because the English, under my benevolent influence, were frightened of hitting the hospital, it suddenly started raining bombs around her. One devastated a wing of the museum containing brass telescopes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Amid the chaos of fire, noise, dust, screaming in Dutch and German, firemen, ambulances, and police, she bumped into Oswald Brons. Bewildered, with torn clothes and covered in grazes, he was wandering across the heaps of rubble carrying a huge lens in his arms like a baby, and she took pity on him.
—Minor intervention. Positive effect. How many people dead?
—Fifty-four.
—A slight adjustment, you said?
—Well, what do you want? I didn't invent all that manipulation business, I'm only carrying out your cherubic will. What's more, I prevented the hospital from being razed to the ground. It seems so easy to influence the normal course of events, but reality is just like water; it's liquid and mobile, but it can only be compressed a little by using a great deal of force. When someone falls onto it from a great height, it's as hard as the rock from which Moses struck water.
—Oh, our Moses . . . you're touching a sensitive nerve there.
—I'm sorry.
—When was their daughter born?
—In 1946, during the baby boom.
—When did she meet the young Delius?
—In May 1967.
—Tell me the whole story from that moment on, preferably without a commentary. Just tell it in full and with all the details, so that I can select when it's my turn to report.
—For a fuller understanding, it would be better if I started a little earlier.
—When?
—On Monday, February 13, 1967, at twelve midnight.
—Which in fact is February 14.
—Yes, human time is one great paradox.
—What year is it down there now?
—1985.
—Begin, then. I'm listening.
1
The Family Gathering
At the stroke of midnight I contrived a short-circuit. Anyone walking along the quiet avenue in The Hague with his collar turned up high against the freezing cold (though there was no one at that moment) would have seen all the lights in the detached mansion suddenly go off, as though a gigantic candle had been blown out inside. For those living in the neighborhood, the villa exuded a somewhat somber splendor: it was the home of a legendary prime minister, the strict Calvinist Hendrikus Quist. In the crowded downstairs rooms, where the party was going on, the sudden darkness and the fading of the music into a fathomless cave were greeted with laughter.
"Time for the young'uns!" cried a woman's voice, itself no longer very young.
"Is anyone here technically minded?"
"I'll see to it. Where are the fuses, Grandmother?"
"On top of the electric meter, in the cupboard next to the stairs down to the cellar."
"Someone must have been messing about with them. You don't get a short-circuit just like that."
"I'll go and have a look up in the attic, at the little ones."
"Ouch!"
"Someone must have been using that wretched toaster again. Coba?"
"Yes, ma'am?"
"Did you use that toaster?"
"No, ma'am."
"Look and see if there are any candles left in the sideboard."
"Yes, ma'am."
The only light in the rooms was that cast by the streetlamps. In the dark conservatory at the back of the house a large figure now rose from a wicker armchair. Glass in hand, he surveyed the scores of silhouettes.
"No, Mother!" he cried in a loud voice, emphasizing every syllable. "This has nothing to do with the toasters. It has begun!"
"What has begun?"
"It!" He shouted it with his head thrown back, ecstatically, like an enlightened mystic.
"He's off again," said a man's voice. "Sit down and stop drinking."
"It!"
"Yes, yes. It. It's all right."
"That's right! It's all right. It's also dark, and it's freezing outside. It was about time that it began, that thank heavens it's happened. So be it. Amen— so that the infidels may also understand."
"Onno, you're insufferable."
But the very opposition he provoked was an inspiration. He knew that he was making an exhibition of himself, but he was swept along by his own words.
"Does my ear hear the cacophonous voice of my eldest brother, the most bigoted of Calvinists? What is more terrible than being an eldest brother? I shall say it through clenched teeth: having an eldest brother! Father, make that wretched individual shut up!"
"I don't know if you remember," said a woman in the dark, "but we're celebrating Father's birthday. It's his seventy-fifth birthday, do you remember? It's meant to be a celebration."
"Isn't that my youngest sister? The fair Ophelia? Yes, I remember, I remember. I myself am thirty-three—does that perhaps ring a bell in this company of fanatics and zealots? I remember everything, because I never forget anything. Isn't this the second time in a week that we've celebrated Father's birthday? Father, where are you? I am looking for you, but I am looking through a glass darkly. There you were the day before yesterday at the head of the table, in De Wittenburg Castle: on your right the queen, on your left the crown princess; at the other end, a ten-minute walk away, our poor mother, wedged between the prince-consort and the prime minister; and between you the whole cabinet, eighty-six ex-ministers, a hundred and sixty-eight thousand generals, prelates, bankers, politicians, and industrialists as far as the eye could see; and all of you, too, all the pashas and grand viziers and moguls and satraps by marriage. Hic sunt monstra. If only my abominable eldest brother were not there, the governor of that backward province whose name still escapes me."
"Now I've had enough, I'm going to punch him in the nose!"
"Calm down, Diederic. You're a terrible nuisance, Onno. You yourself were sitting talking oh so timidly to the Honorable Miss Bob in your dinner jacket."
"Oh God, the Honorable Miss Bob, the sweetie. I told her the facts of life. It was all completely new to her."
Onno was enjoying himself hugely. It was mainly his own generation who were turning against him. The previous one did not say much; the next one, which was still in high school, was amused and admiring. That was the way to be. One must have the guts to be like that.
"I can't find any candles anywhere, ma'am."
A boy came in with a pocket flashlight, which gave less light than a candle. "There are no fuses left," he said.
He put the flashlight on the table, transforming the faces of some old ladies, who were nibbling gingersnaps and drinking their liqueurs, into those of Transylvanian witches. But people's eyes were adjusting to the dark, so it seemed to be getting gradually lighter. Onno still maintained the pose of a field marshal surveying the battlefield.
"Go next door, Coba," said his mother, "to Mrs. Van Pallandt's. Perhaps she can help us. But only if the lights are on."
"Yes, ma'am."
"It's less than two months since the birthday of the Lord Jesus," cried Onno, "and there's no longer a single candle to be found in th
is Calvinist bastion!"
"Can you please put a stop to that exasperating chatter?" asked his eldest sister's husband. "For goodness' sake clear off, man. Go to Amsterdam where you belong."
"Yes, heaven be praised that I live in Amsterdam and not in Holland."
"How many rum-and-Cokes have you had, Onno?"
"In Amsterdam," said Onno, raising his glass, "we don't call this liquid rum-and-Coke. In Amsterdam we call it a Cuba libre, but you'll eventually catch on in Holland. So I shall drink a toast to el líder maximo. Patria o muerte—venceremos! He downed his glass in one.
"Long live Che Guevara!" shouted a boy.
"Hey, Maarten, have you taken leave of your senses?"
"The young monkey's showing his true colors."
"Beware of that monkey! That monkey will make short work of you and your horrible Holland. Soon Coba will be in control here, and then it will be the ex-governor of the ex-queen who will have to fetch candles from the people next door, who won't be called Van Pallandt but, for all I know, Gortzak, or some other honest working-class name. The bunch of you are Holland. Without Quists there would be no Holland, and what a blessing that would be for mankind."
"Onno—"
"Ignore him. Simply ignore him, then he'll shut up by himself."
"Anyway, you're a Quist too."
"Me? Me a Quist? What an unforgivable insult. I'm a bastard," he said solemnly. "A cuckoo in the next—that's what I am."
"You're cuckoo, all right," said one of his aunts at the table with the flashlight, which was becoming weaker and weaker.
"And who is the father of the cuckoo?" asked his eldest sister.
"Mother and I will never reveal that. Never! Isn't that so, Mother? We have sworn not to."
"What have we sworn?"
"Oh, now you're playing dumb. Don't you remember that handsome prince from that distant country who came to Holland on a white horse?"
"What on earth is he talking about?"
"If you ask me, the fellow's no longer completely compos mentis."
Onno put his hand on his heart.
"About the Seventh Commandment, woman."
"Did the prince have a black beard by any chance?" asked his other brother, a professor of criminal law in Groningen. "Was he dressed in a green uniform, with a pistol perhaps?"
Onno faltered, set his glass down, put both hands against the wall, and began shaking with laughter.
"He's enjoying it, the windbag."
"Mother!" shouted Onno with a choking voice. "They know! It's come out!"
"What has come out?"
"That you deceived Father with Fidel Castro."
"Me, deceive Father? Wherever did you get that idea? I don't even know the man."
"Joke, dear, joke."
"Funny kind of jokes they tell here. I've never deceived Father."
"You deceived me!" cried Onno, standing up and raising a trembling forefinger like a prophet. "With Father! By conceiving me!"
At that moment his youngest sister, two heads shorter than he, loomed in front of him and took his hand. He allowed himself to be led into the room like a clumsy circus bear.
"That's really enough, Onno," she said softly. "There are limits."
"Who told you that?"
"I don't mind at all, I can take a dig or two, but you're embarrassing Mother. She can't follow your strange sense of humor."
"Strange sense of humor?" he repeated. "I mean every word. Doesn't anyone understand that? Not even you? If even you don't understand me, who will? Oh, where is there someone who understands me!"
"Stop it. You're simply being provocative, and you're enjoying it."
"Of course, of course, but I also mean it. I also mean what I don't mean."
"Oh yes, tell me more."
"No, you don't want me to tell you more at all. When I'm dying I shall crawl to you on my knees, but even you don't understand a thing. No one understands me!" he cried pathetically and suddenly at full volume again.
"That's true," said his eldest sister's husband. "So hurry back to your crossword puzzles, then we here in Holland will make sure you can go on doing your puzzles in peace."
Onno cupped his hand behind his ear.
"Do I detect a shrill tone there? Is that because no one will believe that a certain seedy public prosecutor from the provinces is the brother-in-law of the great, unforgettable, world-famous Onno Quist?"
While he beat his chest with both fists, the door opened and admitted a flock of children, led by a little girl of about seven. She was wearing a white nightgown, which came down to her bare feet. She cried: "Who's that drunk man?"
Onno surveyed them with a look of horror. "Brood of vipers! Are they all going to become ministers and judges and ambassadors' wives in their turn? Oh God, take those children and smash them to pieces against the rocks! Otherwise there will never be an end to it."
"Uncle Onno! Uncle Onno!"
"I'm not anybody's uncle. How dare you? I'm only my own uncle. Misunderstood, sneered at by everyone, and kicked into a corner, I wander lonely and magnificent in the rarefied realms of the Utterly Different."
"That clown is beginning to make me feel ill," said the provincial governor. "Father, can't you put a stop to it?"
There was a silence. Onno, too, suddenly stopped talking. Far away, in the front room, near the plush curtains, sat Quist. Onno could not see him, and looked in his direction, eyes peering, as when one tries to focus on a faint star.
"Oh," said Quist, "the lad will turn out all right."
When Onno heard this, he put his glass on the windowsill and made his way to the front room between the heavy pieces of furniture and the outstretched legs—a journey in the course of which the average age of the guests gradually increased. At the other end of the suite his father was sitting in the winged armchair like a dark red boulder: a last erratic stone that had come to rest, having been driven along by the terminal moraine of his times. Beside him was the oak lectern, on which lay the massive seventeenth-century Authorized Version, as large as a suitcase, with silver trimmings and two heavy locks. Onno could not make out his face. He dropped to his knees and pressed his lips to his father's high black shoes. The leather was warmed by the feet it was covering.
Onno sat up, and suddenly said in a lighthearted tone, "Farewell, all. I'm going home."
"What time is it?" asked his mother. "Surely there are no more trains running?"
"I'm going to hitch a lift."
"What nonsense, you can sleep here."
His brother-in-law laughed. "I wouldn't dream of giving a lift to such a sinister figure in the middle of the night."
"We've got a bed too," said his eldest sister. "You can come in the car with us. We're all going home; it's twelve-thirty."
"I'm going to Amsterdam. I've got a date."
"Stop being silly. You haven't got a date."
"Let him have his way," said the public prosecutor.
Had the insults already been forgotten? Obviously, his family regarded him as a natural phenomenon: after the storm, the branches that have been blown down are cleared up, and there's an end of it. He spread his arms wide in farewell and went into the hall whistling softly.
"You can't find a thing here in this Stygian darkness," said his youngest sister, with the almost completely extinguished pocket flashlight in her hand.
As he began rummaging among the piles of coats, the key squeaked in the lock. "Heavens, you're muddling everything up," said Coba, retrieving his coat as she passed.
"Shall I drive you to the main Wassenaar road?" asked his sister, while he unbuttoned his coat again and this time rebuttoned it symmetrically. "It's over half an hour's walk."
"I'd like a bit of a walk."
"You're restless."
He gave her a kiss on the forehead and went out. As he closed the garden gate, the lights came on again all over the house.
The Hague lay silent in the darkness. There were scarcely any cars about. The houses were lighter
-colored than in Amsterdam, but almost all the windows were dark. The civil servants were asleep and dreaming of putting an end once and for all to the disturbances in the capital that had been going on for years, with tanks on the street corners and dive bombers firing rockets at the university institutes, after which they would be appointed governor of the pacified city.
In his heavy full-length winter coat, Onno walked in the direction of the main road to Leiden. Although it was freezing he was not wearing gloves, but he did not put his hands in his pockets: he held them on his back, where they gradually became purple with cold, without him noticing. Here, where he had spent his whole youth, he knew every stone, but that awakened no nostalgic feelings in him. Moreover, he did not look around him; nor did he reflect on the evening that had just passed. Stooping a little, with a slightly labored gait in his clumsy, and as always unpolished, shoes, he walked through the deserted streets, with a circular clay tablet constantly in his mind—sometimes one side, sometimes the other.
He suddenly seemed like a different person. He kept his tongue on the left side of his mouth between his teeth and chewed on it gently, as he always did when he was thinking. There was a sleepy look on his face, but that was not because of tiredness or alcohol; it was the sleepiness of thought. Thought is never action, forward, up and at it, as people think who do not know what thinking is; it is not like a forest explorer cutting back creeping vines, but more like someone letting himself relax into a hot bath.
The tablet, the so-called Phaistos disc, was the size of a dessert plate. Both sides had a pattern, which resembled nothing so much as a hopscotch diagram of the kind that children draw on the street with chalk: a spiral moving inward in a clockwise direction, ending in a central point. It looked like a maze, but it was definitely not one. It was impossible to get lost in it—there was only one way, and that led to the center. The diagram was divided into compartments filled with primitive signs, such as a helmeted head, a number of human and animal figures in profile, an ax, something like a portable cage, and many other illustrations. Onno looked at the rebus, whose 242 signs and forty-five syllables in the sixty-one compartments he knew better than his own body, and which in another sense was still a maze—while ever new connections formed in his mind, disappeared, emerged again in modified form, linked with other linguistic facts and signs, Philistine, Lycian, Semitic . . .