"I don't know if I want to, Onno."
"And, of course, I'm the one who determines what you want?"
"No, not for some time. How do you know that I haven't long since found another boyfriend, who is now lying languidly on the sofa?"
"Because I know that no grass can grow where I once stood."
"Onno, have you really not changed at all?"
"I'll be with you in a quarter of an hour — and if you don't open the door, I shall abolish the Art Historical Institute tomorrow. First thing in the morning."
"Of course all you want to do is bring your dirty laundry."
"Listen, dear Helga. Do you know how the Habsburgs were buried?"
"I beg your pardon? The what were buried?"
"The Habsburgs. The Austro-Hungarian monarchs."
"How they were buried?"
"Surely you know?"
"What in heaven's name are you getting at?"
"Listen. The cortege of the coffin arrived at the Kapuzinergruft in Vienna and then the major domo or someone knocked three times on the door with his staff. From inside you then heard the trembling voice of an old monk, asking, 'Who is there?' And then the major domo said, 'His Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesty, emperor of Austria, king of Hungary' and another five hundred and eighty-six such titles. Afterward there was a silence inside, after which he knocked three times on the door again and rattled off the same list. And after he had knocked for the third time on the door and the monk had again asked, 'Who is there,' the major domo answered, 'A poor sinner.' And only then did the doors slowly open."
"And what do you mean by that?"
"Do I have to make myself clearer? With my tail between my legs, I'm telling you that I've had enough of playing outside — if that still means anything to you."
After first appropriating the rooms of the apartment, Quinten had broadened his world to the whole castle with the result that he kept getting lost every day. From the wonderful baby who had teethed after three months, a toddler had emerged who delighted everyone with his beauty. Selma Kern said repeatedly to Sophia that her husband was addicted to QuQu's appearance. He was often called QuQu, since Mr. Spier consistently addressed him as Q — moreover to point him to the door just as consistently, since he did not wish to converse with someone who didn't say anything back. "You learn Dutch first, Q."
However, at the Kerns' on the other side of his own floor, he was always welcome; if the artist was not carving in his studio in one of the coach houses, he could not take his eyes off the child. Martha, his ten-year-old daughter, a skinny blond girl, was also crazy about him and had resigned herself to the fact that he could not speak. With her legs crossed, she sat with him on the ground and handed him a pinecone or a shell to study, or pointed the white doves out to him. Once when a dove alighted on his crown and stayed there cooing softly, Kern spread his arms out in pleasure, as though he wanted to fly himself, and remained in that attitude looking at Quinten, who did not move either and in turn didn't take his eyes off Selma, in her black dress.
"This is just out of this world!" he exclaimed.
A large folder already contained scores of drawings of Quinten, in which the eyes became bigger and bigger, made vivid blue with the tip of the middle finger with methylene powder; he also appeared subsequently with a scepter and an orb in his hands, seated on a voluptuous cushion, or as pope with a tiara on his head. According to Selma, Kern's daughter had never inspired him in this way. He had asked Max whether Onno would agree to him exhibiting the series one day; whereupon Max assured him that he could probably persuade Onno to open the exhibition, but then he would have to be prepared for the latter to claim all the honor for himself as father. Undoubtedly, he would dream up some kind of structure in which there was nothing left for the artist but the stupid duplication of reality— that is: the proof of his complete superfluousness.
"He would probably call that the 'parrot principle' or some such thing," said Max — again realizing how Onno had become part of his own being.
Upstairs, at the Proctors', among the gruesome black umbrellas, Quinten looked at the electric train — saw how when the train was approaching the curve, suddenly little Arendje pulled the handle of the transformer right over to the right with a jerk, so that the train derailed and fell on his back, and he convulsed with laughter, thrashing his legs in the air with demonic pleasure. Quinten looked at this with the same expression he had used when looking at the train.
Then he went exploring in the northern part of the attic. One room there was always locked, and invariably that was the first one whose handle he rattled. When that had no effect, he clambered around in the baron's musty, crammed storage room, over rolled-up carpets, books tied with string, among upturned chairs and tables, fallen chandeliers, cupboards, boxes, and piles of clothes, on which he sometimes fell asleep — and where he was finally found by a relieved Sophia or Max:
"I've got him!"
On his second birthday he still could not speak, or at least he had not yet said anything comprehensible; what he did do was display more and more strikingly that strange combination of curiosity and aloofness. He did not wish to be hugged, although he allowed himself to be occasionally, by Sophia; the toys Max bought for him did not interest him any more than a potato, a screw, or a branch. He could look for minutes at the flow of water from a tap, at that clear, cool plait that kept its form and glow although it was made up of constantly new water.
No one knew what to make of him. He was too beautiful to be true, seldom cried, never laughed, said nothing; but no one doubted that all kinds of things were going on beneath that black head of hair. Once he stood motionless on the balcony looking at the balustrade, at the gray stone banister on the wooden amphora-shaped pillars. Max squatted down beside him to see if there was perhaps an insect walking along them; but only when Quinten carefully put his forefinger on a certain spot did he see that there was a tiny, fossilized trilobite, from the Paleozoic period, about 300 million years old. At the same moment he realized that the creature that Quinten had discovered had lived at about the moment that the extragalactic cluster in the constellation of Coma Berenices — "Berenice's Hair" — had emitted the light that was now reaching earth.
Quinten looked at him.
"That's a trilobite," said Max, "a kind of silver fish. What would you like? Shall we free it?"
He took a file out of Sophia's manicure case, placed the point at an angle beside the little fossil, and gave it a slight tap with a pebble, so that it flew up and disappeared into the gravel. But Quinten bent down and already had it in his hands.
"When you're grown-up," said Max, "you must become a paleontologist."
When he was lost, he might also be in the cellar. On his way there he always first tried the handle of the door of Mr. Verloren van Themaat, downstairs in the paneled hall, opposite the Spiers' apartment. But the door only opened on the weekends, and during holidays. The art historian was about sixty, a tall, thin, rather stooped man with thin gray hair and fine features; behind a pair of metal-rimmed glasses, he usually looked withdrawn, as though he were sizing you up, but suddenly he burst into exuberant, almost manic laughter, in which all his limbs participated. His wife, Elsbeth, was probably scarcely forty — in any case about five years younger than Sophia; they had no children. Max was a little intimidated by the professor: an academic intellectual of the severe Dutch kind, who overlooked nothing.
Once, with Onno, Max had divided intellectuals up according to the Catholic monastic orders: he himself soon turned out to be an unscrupulous Jesuit, while Onno first maintained that he was a coarse Trappist, since he always just did his duty in silence; but finally he joined the cultivated, well-behaved Benedictines, who devoted their souls to God after a successful worldly life. In that spectrum Themaat was a strict Carthusian, who Max felt saw him as an intellectual libertine where astronomy was not concerned.