The Discovery of Heaven (52 page)

34
The Gift

"Healthy baby born to brain-dead mother,"
reported the morning paper the following day; Ada survived the operation without complications, and the weeks following—during which Quinten had to remain in the incubator— brought new changes.

The director of the observatory kept his word: he had made an appointment for Max with an old friend from his student days, a Baron Gevers, who lived a few miles south of the radio observatory at Westerbork and, as he had informed Max, had a place to rent. It was a sunny June day when Max drove there from Dwingeloo, with the caretaker's description of the route in his head. On his right, the sun flickered like a strobe light between the alder trees along the provincial road as they flashed by, which meant he had to resist something like a threatening hypnosis; as always he glanced at the space on the left of the road where there were two trees missing.

After driving along the main highway for a few miles, he took a turn-off into a winding woodland path by a collapsed barn. There were still fallen trees everywhere, their crowns forever in their bare wintry state, their roots, which had been torn out of the earth, already dried out and whitish. To his amazement he suddenly saw a group of Indonesian boys creeping through the bushes, in improvised battle dress, as though there were a war on—a moment later he had the feeling that he had dreamt it. And now and then the wood gave way to meadows with a farmhouse, fields, maize plantations, the path crossed an unmanned level crossing—and at the moment he saw the house looming up, he thought of what Goethe had once said, according to Onno: "Humanity begins with barons."

The low, white, quite small country house, from the look of it dating from the beginning of the last century, lay at the end of a lawn and radiated restrained distinction. At the same time it also looked like the center of a working farm. Next to it there were stalls, a haystack, sheds for agricultural machinery. It was called Klein Rechteren. The drive was flanked by large erratic stones and was strewn with gravel, which crunched feudally beneath his tires and forced even the Volkswagen to the slow sedateness of a Bentley. Because his intuition told him that he couldn't park his car right outside the door, he parked it opposite. When he got out, he saw a peacock sitting on the eaves.

The door was opened by a boy of about twenty with Down's syndrome. He looked up at Max with bewildered beady eyes.

"Mommy!" he shouted at once in a hoarse voice, without taking his eyes off Max.

A slender lady of about sixty appeared in the hallway. Max introduced himself and then also shook the warm, broad, motionless hand of her son, who turned out to be called Rutger. In the conservatory at the back of the house, where the doors to the terrace and the vegetable garden stood open, he was given a cup of China tea.

"I'm expecting my husband any moment. How is our Jan getting on? We haven't seen him for quite a while. He occasionally stays here when he has to come to Dwingeloo."

She was talking about the director. Although the director had of course explained exactly Max's own circumstances to them, she did not allude to them. That might have been discretion, but also something else; he felt a little uncomfortable with the cool politeness of her conversation, and he had the impression that this was the intention. Should he come to live here, he must be quite clear from the outset that this was no charter for familiarity.

Next to her stood a round table with framed family photos on it; also a photo of a white horse. Max looked at Rutger now and again with fascination. He sat in a wicker chair, the back of which spread to enormous dimensions like a throne, fiddling about, with his tongue hanging out. To his left a ball of violet wool lay on the ground; by means of a reel, with three small nails in it, he was weaving a woollen thread into a rope, which must by now be hundreds of feet long and lay in a colorful heap at his feet.

"Make very big curtain," he said when his eyes met Max's.

Max nodded at him in encouragement and looked at his mother.

"He's been working on it for about ten years, that very big curtain. I cut a bit off now and then, otherwise eventually we won't be able to get into the house anymore."

"And he doesn't notice?"

"Not if he doesn't see me doing it."

"Perhaps," said Max, "he has no sense of the length of that thread because he has no sense of time."

The baroness looked at him with an expressionless face. "Maybe."

Max had the feeling that he had gone too far: whoever talks about time is also talking about death.

A tractor approached down the path at the end of the vegetable garden, driven by a heavy figure in workman's clothes; only his sand-colored hat, the brim of which was turned up on one side and down on the other, indicated that this was not a simple farmer. He came into the conservatory in green boots and introduced himself with a hard, callused hand, without coming in. There was something severe, but not unfriendly, about his face; he sported a cultured, small white mustache.

"You're just in time, I've already had ten phone calls. Shall we get right off?"

For the second time Max realized that relationships must be clear, even though he had been recommended by a friend. As he went through the vegetable garden to the road next to his landlord-to-be, he became extraordinarily curious about what awaited him. Without entirely admitting it to himself, he hoped for an idyllic coach house among the trees, with a lawn in front; but to be on the safe side he prepared himself for a melancholy turf cutter's cottage on a canal, waiting motionless for drowning toddlers. It was clear that this would not happen when Gevers said that they could go on foot, because it was close by. Max told him about the Ambonese he had seen crawling through the woods.

"Those are those stupid Moluccans from Schattenberg," said the baron, "a few miles farther on. They're preparing for the liberation of their island on the other side of the world."

The Schattenberg estate: that was the present-day name of Westerbork camp.

"I really thought I was dreaming," said Max.

The baron nodded. "The world is made of dreams. Fortunately, there are only a few left and they'll be gone soon too, thanks to the observatory."

They met two girls on horseback, who called out, "Hello, Mr. Gevers!" cheerfully—and a few hundred yards farther on, where the road curved slightly, there was a turn-off toward a large wrought-iron gate, fixed to two carved, hard-stone plinths surmounted by shield-bearing lions. A bridge over a narrow canal led to a long drive flanked by a double row of trees; at the end of it there was a second bridge, across a moat, to the forecourt of a castle.

"Groot Rechteren," said Gevers with a motion of his hand, and pushed open the creaking gate.

A castle! As they walked over the loose planks of the bridge toward the drive, Gevers told him that he had been born here, like his father and grandfather before him, but it was all getting too expensive, staff particularly, and it was no longer heatable without going bankrupt. They had moved to Klein Rechteren. The castle had been temporarily divided up into flats, which were occupied by fairly respectable people—except for one, where there was a Communist, but that was now vacant.

Looking at the large, broad castle that he was approaching step by step, Max was speechless. At the sides and in the back it was surrounded by huge trees; it made an impression of neglect and it was not particularly beautiful—obviously it had been repeatedly converted and expanded over the course of the centuries—but it was unmistakably a
castle:
a building that was as different from a house as an eagle from a chicken. The facade, probably dating only from the nineteenth century, was flat and symmetrical; at the level of the attic, in the straight pointed gable above the entrance, was a clock without hands. On the ground floor there was a series of arch-shaped cellar windows; a double staircase led to the terrace with the main floor, flanked by high windows divided into small panes; the upper story ended on the right in a large balcony. Beneath it stood a container on the forecourt, into which someone was throwing planks and all kinds of rubbish. The back turned out to be older; the pointed roof of a square tower could be seen crowned by a weather cock. Could it be true that he was going to live in this fairytale place? Perhaps there by that balcony? What had he done to deserve it?

The castle was the center of a small hamlet. On the left there were newly planted saplings, which turned into coniferous woods, but on the right there were a number of small houses, a coach house, converted stables, and barns.

On the lawn in front of what had probably been the porter's lodge, a man with a scythe was cutting the grass around a colossal erratic stone, and looked up and said, "Hello, Baron,"—which elicited a benevolent "Hello, Piet." Half visible between the buildings and hedges was an orangery, where there was also someone moving; under the trees a billy goat was trying to reach farther than the length of the rope around its neck would allow.

Everything looked occupied; there were windows open everywhere. Shaded by the colossal crown of a brown oak tree, on the bank of the moat, two black swans glided past with the majesty of a more exalted existence, while among the water-lily leaves, at the foot of head-high rhododendron bushes, a couple of ducks were making a vulgar din.

Max had the urge to walk on tiptoe. The castle lay in the water as if on the palm of an outstretched hand; the stone bridge over the moat had, according to Gevers, replaced the earlier drawbridge. A couple of cars were parked in the forecourt, the bricks of which had been laid in an artistic undulating pattern, like a horizontal wall. When they were on the steps to the terrace, a refrigerator crashed with a resounding thud into the container, after which a face leered down at them over the balustrade of the balcony. It emerged, from a blue and white plate next to the main door, that the castle was a listed monument. One half of the door was open, secured with a wooden reel on the ground. Before going in, Gevers stepped out of his boots and took his rakish hat off, which suddenly made him still more severe with his bald pate.

In the hall, paneled in dark oak, a small, carefully dressed lady appeared from a doorway; Max glanced into a large room with Empire furniture, a table with framed photographs, a marble mantelpiece with a gold-framed mirror above it. Gevers introduced her as Mrs. Spier.

"Mr. Delius may be the new upstairs tenant."

She gave him a searching look. Her whole appearance was carefully groomed; not one hair of her coiffure dared to step out of line.

"Welcome, Mr. Delius. If we can be of any help to you, do let us know."

"Her husband is a famous typographical designer," said Gevers as they climbed the wide oak stairs at the end of the hall. "For that matter, it's crawling with clever people here; you'll fit in very well. As a simple yokel I'd feel quite out of place in this cultured company."

The violence in that remark did not escape Max. From the way Gevers looked around, it was clear that he didn't like coming here; of course everything reminded him of the past and confronted him with the decline of the castle. The director had told him that Gevers had played a leading role in the resistance during the war; because Holland was a small country, he might also know Onno's father. At the same time, Max realized that this probably meant he knew who his own father had been.

Upstairs there was another hall, actually more of a spacious landing, which led onto various doors; the oak formality had disappeared here. Through a large window in a conservatory the woods behind the castle were visible; on one side of the space stood buckets covered with plastic and wrapped-clay models on slender, tall modeling stands.

"An artist lives there," announced Gevers with a short motion of his head. "Theo Kern; a rather odd type. Outside on the estate, he's got a studio for larger work." He suddenly stopped and looked straight at Max.

"Bloody fine thing you're doing, Mr. Delius, looking after your friend's child. Just wanted to say that. Bloody fine thing." Before Max knew how to reply, Gevers pointed to the apartment opposite, where all the doors were open and there was the chaos of a removal. "Action Group Egg. Headquarters of the revolution in Drenthe. Moving tomorrow or the day after to Assen, in order to bring the province to a state of proletarian readiness."

The baron did not give the impression of being sad about the departure of this tenant. The man who had just leered at them was sitting with a woman and a number of friends on the floor of the balcony room, where they were drinking tea from flowered mugs. He was about thirty, had long hair; stuck in his teeth was a thin cigar, which he didn't take out of his mouth when he spoke.

"Well, comrade," said Gevers. "Having a rest?"

The man gave a brief nod, with a brief smile, but did not get up. That Gevers was a baron was obviously not a neutral fact in this company; except that it didn't add to his stature, like everywhere else, but detracted from it. Rather scornful but not unfriendly, the social worker looked at Max's blazer and club tie.

"Are you moving in here?" And after Max had made a vague gesture toward Gevers: "Congratulations. You'll never find anything like this again. Have a look around if you like." When Max met the eyes of the woman, he saw hate in her eyes—but because this would now become his apartment, perhaps. Of course she didn't want to go to Assen at all.

In the balcony room, which faced south, the ceiling was painted light blue, with white clouds in it; that would all have to'be redecorated. A dividing door gave access to a large room next door, which was linked by a rundown pantry with a tower room at the back. That seemed to him to be the nursery; and because Sophia had to sleep near Quinten, but also near him, it looked as though he would be laying claim to the balcony room. On the other side, the latter room gave access to a spacious kitchen-dining room, which looked out over the forecourt; there was another large room adjoining it, which must be above the front door.