Next Max also began to have doubts. He had let himself be carried along by the first flush of enthusiasm, but when things stagnated, he wondered what he actually wanted. In five years' time at the most, Quinten would be leaving home—was he to stay living here with Sophia? The task he had undertaken would then have been completed, after which nothing would tie him to her except memory.
One evening, when he was slightly tipsy, he suddenly plucked up courage to raise the subject: "Listen, Sophia, something else about the castle. In a few years' time, when Quinten—"
"Of course," she immediately interrupted him. "Then our ways will part."
Using the alibi that they could not simply abandon Theo, who after all had lived longer at Groot Rechteren than all of them, he was able to convince the others simply to let events take their course and to hope that the new owner would leave things as they were.
All this passed Quinten by. He also took Gevers's substantial bequest for granted: looking after Deep Thought Sunstar's grave and teaching Rutger how to weave a carpet were perfectly natural, after all!
Because he knew that he was going to be kept back a grade this year, he did even less schoolwork than usual. In the evenings, in the total silence, a little dazzled by the light on his open books, he stared at the tall black window in his room, in which he could only vaguely make out the transition from the dark sky to the even darker wood.
His father was somewhere out there in the night now—far away, perhaps in America, or even on the other side of the world, in Australia. But in any case not infinitely far away, like his mother. And anyway perhaps he was close by; perhaps he only implied that he was leaving Holland so that no one would look for him there: perhaps he was simply living with a farmer nearby. But if you didn't know where someone was, that really made no difference. What was he doing at this moment? He'd wanted "to think something through," he had written to Max. What was that? What did he mean by that? He took his father's letter from the bronze box, in which he also kept the secret maps of the SOMNIUM QUINTI. He did not need to read it again, because he knew it by heart: he carefully brushed with his fingertips the paper on which his father's hand had rested. The idea that he would really never see him again seemed just as impossible as the idea that the sun would not rise tomorrow.
He locked the box with the antique padlock that he had been given by Piet Keller; he hid the little key between the loose bricks behind the oil stove. After placing his hand on the case of Ada's cello for a moment, he went to the window to look at the spiders again.
They looked awful and he hated them, but they fascinated him. Because the light in his turret room attracted the insects from the wood, five or six large spiders had realized that they should spin their webs in front of the glass. He didn't understand them. On the one hand they were ingenious, subtle architects, who wove gossamer-fine webs patiently, and in a material that reminded him of the stuff that for the last few months he had even found in his pajama bottoms when he woke up in the mornings: that had always been preceded by a blissful dream, which he could never remember and which had nothing to do with the Citadel. But when their work was finished, they emerged as equally patient but gruesome murderers, who pounced mercilessly on their prey, bit it to death, spun the wings so that they were crushed together, and sucked it dry. How could those things be reconciled—that architectural sophistication and that savage aggression?
There were spiders that waited at the edge of their web until something wandered into their fatal silver trap, but there were also spiders that sat in the middle. And one evening he suddenly saw that the lucid structure of their webs in a certain sense was a geometrical representation of their repulsive bodies, with the eight hairy legs—a kind of transparent extension of it, just as algebra is the abstraction of mathematics. He had to know more about this, and he decided to put it to Mr. Themaat.
"Do you know what's wrong with you, QuQu?" said Mr. Themaat the following day, with the resignation of someone who had met his match. "You ... anyway, leave it. I don't know what's wrong with you."
Then he told Quinten that for the umpteenth time he had hit the bull's-eye. He spoke more slowly than he used to; his exuberant fits of laughter no longer occurred, either. It was as though his head had grown into a motionless extension of his trunk; his wide-open eyes stared out at Quinten from a practically expressionless face. Quinten had heard from Sophia that it was because he had to take so many pills—they made you like that. He looked like a wax image of himself, like at Madame Tussaud's, but it was clear from what he said that his intellect had not been affected.
Via the spider's web, he said, Quinten had hit upon the "homo-mensura-thesis": Protagoras's argument that man was the measure of all things. In Roman antiquity, Vitruvius had said that temples should have the ideal proportion of the human body, as had been the case with the Greeks. In the Middle Ages that prescription had been linked to the Old Testament notion that God had created man in His own image, which gave human measurements a divine origin, with as a New Testament addition of course the central fact of Christ's body. In architecture that had led to churches and cathedrals in the form of a Latin cross, that is, the rough scheme of the human figure; but only in the Renaissance did those views evolve into a sophisticated philosophical architectural system.
"Lie down on the ground," order Mr. Themaat.
Quinten looked at him in astonishment. "Me?"
"Yes, you."
When Quinten did what he had been told, Themaat rose from his rocking chair slowly, as in a slow motion film, and asked Elsbeth if she had any string in the house.
"String?" she repeated suspiciously. "What on earth are you planning to do, Ferdinand? Are you going to tie him up?"
"Just give me it."
She took a ball of white wool out of a basket. "Will this do?"
"Even better."
Themaat said that Quinten should put his ankles together and spread his arms. Crawling on his knees, he then put the thread on the carpet in a pure square bordered by Quinten's crown, the tips of his middle fingers, and his heels. Then he had to move his feet slightly apart and his arms slightly upward, whereupon Themaat draped a second white thread in a circle along the soles of his feet and the tips of his fingers. Quinten got up carefully and looked at the double figure. The circle was resting on the lower side edge of the square; to the side and at the top, it circumscribed it. Themaat took a guilder coin out of his pocket and put it carefully in the middle of the circle which coincided with that of the square.
"And that spot marks your navel," he said, "which linked you to your mother."
A little alarmed, Quinten looked at the coin, which through Themaat's words was suddenly transformed into a shining mystery.
That linking of the "homo circularis" and the "homo quadratus," Themaat told him, had been described before Christ by Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture, but in the fifteenth century Leonardo da Vinci made a famous drawing of it. He took a book out of the case and showed it to Quinten: a proud, naked man in a square and a circle, with thick locks of hair down to his shoulders and four arms and four legs, surrounded by a commentary in mirror writing.
"I expect it's a self-portrait," he said. "And good God, he's like a spider in a web too—and he's got eight limbs as well! What does that mean?" He glanced sideways at Quinten, who had also seen it right away. "Aren't you frightened that you're gradually venturing into areas where no one can follow you anymore?"
"How do you mean?"
"I don't know."
Quinten looked at the figures on the carpet again and said. "It also looks a bit like the ground plan of the Pantheon."
Themaat exchanged a glance with Elsbeth and said with a solemn note in his voice: "The awareness that the divine body is determined by two perfect, elementary mathematical figures placed man in the center of cosmic harmony. You can understand that this was a colossal discovery for those humanist architects, like your great friend Palladio."
Quinten did not take hi
s eyes off the white square and the white circle, the guilder in the middle. Might that configuration also be the essence of his Citadel? Was this the last word? He was reminded of what Max had once said to him: that in the limitless universe the circumference was nowhere and the center everywhere—but also of the hoarse, blood-curdling voice in his dream, which had said that behind the bolted door was "the center of the world."
He looked at the guilder and suddenly saw his mother in front of him in her white bed: but that was oblong. Did the oblong go a step farther than the square? But the circle would then of course automatically become an ellipse, with two centers: the orbit of the earth around the sun!
At that moment he felt fingers in the hair at the back of his head, slightly to the right of the center. It was Mrs. Themaat.
"Quinten! Did you know that you were getting a white hair here? Just here, in this spot!"
46
The Free Market Economy
Within a few months it had become clear that people fought over castles just as they had done in the Middle Ages. It was a fight that took place in the black of night, between virtually invisible parties, which the residents had no part in but which would probably end in their expulsion by the victor. The longer the war lasted, the better it was for them. The first purchaser was a rich poultry farmer from Barneveld, the lord of life and death of millions of chickens. When he appeared one day at Groot Rechteren in order to survey his new property, which he had acquired unseen, he looked exactly as one imagined such a person: a large, heavy man with a harsh voice, a cigar, and an excellent disposition, who never appeared again. He left it to his estate manager, a graying gentleman of noble extraction who had also adapted his appearance to his title—but, Max felt, with something just a little too measured and aristocratic about his knickerbockers, green socks, and highly polished brogues, since he was, after all, the servant of a vulgar poultry farmer.
The new owner had not made any statement about the use to which he wanted to put Groot Rechteren, but according to the manager he was definitely not going to live there; he had a splendid villa in Lunteren. In the village, rumors began circulating that the castle was going to become the main building for an anthroposophical center for the mentally defective, with three units in the park taking sixty pupils each—which was supposed to have been sold to a pension fund. That was supposed to have been a precondition of the baroness's for the sale, although the lady vicar said she knew nothing about this.
Because it had been he who had frustrated the tenants' association, Max felt obliged to do something to resolve the uncertainty. He was completely absorbed in the preparation for an exciting international research program on a new wave band on quasar MQ 3412, from which the condition of the early universe could be studied—but nevertheless he regularly sat wasting his time in the town hall in order to get some clear idea of the plans. But the alderman and the officials, who of course were fully in the picture, and who were undoubtedly pleased to see the name Westerbork linked to a medical facility, proved even more impenetrable than the horizon of the universe to which he had now come so close.
Six months later, the anthroposophical lunatic asylum suddenly vanished from the scene. The rent had to be transferred immediately to a different bank account, in the name of someone who did not even deign to view his acquisition. He lived in a large country house in Overijssel, in the middle of the woods, where Max visited him. He looked like the postage-stamp clerk at the post office counter; his skinny wife was slightly hunchbacked; and on the lawn a hollow-eyed gardener with a scythe gave him a bloodthirsty look. It was all as menacing as in a Gothic novel, and Max could not even find out what the new landlord did for a living, let alone what his plans were. According to Mr. Rosinga, who lugged the oil drums upstairs in the winter, people were now telling each other in the village that Groot Rechteren was going to be converted into a luxury hotel-restaurant, but Piet Keller had heard that it was going to house a police training school.
None of this went ahead, either, and the owners continued to succeed each other. Now there was mention of an auction house that wanted to set up shop in the castle; now a recreation center for overworked managers. Meanwhile, nothing more was done about maintenance. Mr. Roskam had cleared his workshop, and no one knew whether or not he had followed the baron underground, into the domain of his father's cap.
Cracks in the external walls became visible; there were leaks; plaster fell from the lath ceilings; and in the corners of the rooms mildewed wallpaper began to come loose from the latching, exposing rough, centuries-old masonry. Autumn leaves blocked the gutters, so the rainwater streamed down the walls and flooded the cellars, which led to a plague of gnats in summer. It was as though the castle had cancer. It deteriorated month by month, and a stubborn spirit of resistance seized everyone: they weren't going to be driven out by the capitalists!
Eighteen months after Gevers's death, in 1983—Max had meanwhile turned fifty, Sophia sixty—the first breach appeared in their community: Keller agreed to let himself be bought out. At that time the owner was a good-natured-looking man in his forties, according to the vicar a Jehovah's Witness, whose wife ran a sex club in Amersfoort. He called himself an "antiques dealer," which meant that he drove to Spain with a "partner" in an empty van every month and came back with a load of peasant chairs, tables, and cupboards, which he stored in the dilapidated orangery. Keller's house was intended for the partner, who gave more of the impression of a lackey who would go through fire for his master.
According to him, no one need have any worries about taking advantage of their protected period of three years; after that the castle would be thoroughly restored, with a link-up to the natural gas network and central heating. The present residents would of course receive the right of first refusal, though they would have to take into account the fact that the rents would then be many times what they were at present. According to Mr. Spier, it would amount to a gigantic brothel under the patronage of the Supreme Being.
But suddenly it turned out that he had in turn also sold the castle. He had kept only the buildings beyond the moat—and when Max and Sophia saw the new lord of the manor, they knew immediately that things were going to be very different.
There was no doubt about it. There was the victor—the exalted market mechanism had finally achieved its worthy goal: a small, self-satisfied man with a bald head and a short beard called Korvinus, the owner of a demolition company. He had obviously decided to shorten the three-year notice period dramatically by means of harassment, because he immediately began poking his finger in everywhere. When Quinten, counter to the new regulations, had put his bicycle on the forecourt again, instead of in the bicycle shed, Max received a registered letter the following day asking him in emphatic terms to prevent this happening. Kern was informed that the communal upstairs landing was not part of his property and could not be used for the storage of goods. Clara was informed that she must no longer put her laundry out to dry on the roof, as was usual in slums. The stone demolition ball, which his workers hurled at house walls with cranes, was in some way or other in his head too.
Every week he was there for one occasion, by common consent solely in order to think up new tricks—but obviously that wasn't enough for him. He needed a jailer. The former storage rooms of the baron's, in the loft, were converted into an apartment, and one day its occupant appeared: Nederkoorn.
Max started when he saw him for the first time, and every time after that. A huge fellow of his own age, with a hard face, always in black riding boots, which he struck with a plaited whip, invariably accompanied by an Alsatian. Max would have most liked to empty a submachine gun into him immediately, but perhaps that would have been precisely more in the spirit of his new fellow resident. He had not introduced himself, never said hello, and spent hours training his dog, Paco, on the lawn opposite Piet Keller's former house. He shared his life with a plump young woman, much younger than he was and three heads shorter, who to Max's astonishment was obviously
in love with him and put an arm around his shoulders when they drove off in their jeep.
But Sem Spier did not limit himself to murderous fantasies.
"I'm going," he announced a few days afterward with a tense face. "I can't live under one roof with that fellow. I'm sorry, that person makes me physically ill. It reminds me too much of something."
Everyone saw that he was serious, everyone begrudged Korvinus his victory, but everyone respected his decision and understood that the last phase had now begun.
The departure of Piet Keller had been something like that of Verdonkschot and his friend for Quinten: more an astonished observation of the fact, which his father had written to him about: that not everything remained the same. Keller's children had long since left home, just like Kern's daughter Martha for that matter, and he had helped him load up the keys and locks and the other things from his workshop, which he had played with so often. When he had asked if the two cart wheels along the gravel path shouldn't come too, Keller had hesitated for a moment and said that he had no room for them in the terraced house where he was going to live. When the hired van had disappeared bumpily over the loose planks of the outer bridge, he had the feeling that Keller—from whom he had learned so much—had never existed.
But he couldn't bear to watch the departure of Mr. Spier. He remembered that when he was a little boy, Granny had always come to tuck him in and turn off the light; after she had given him a kiss and gone to the door, he pulled the blanket over his head and squeezed his eyes tight shut—if he opened them afterward then it must remain just as dark as when they were still shut. There mustn't be any difference any more between open and shut. If the light on the other hand was still burning, because she was clearing something up in his room, that was a disaster; then in some way or other the night was ruined.