"Surely you don't feel guilty about it now?"
"Guilty?" she repeated, and looked at him. "Why should I be guilty about anything?"
The attack in the nursery class had of course also been provoked by Quinten's beauty. He already had his new teeth by the age of four. Theo Kern had had to open a second folder for his Quinten studies; he hadn't managed an exhibition yet, probably because he really wanted to keep them to himself. But not everyone was as jealous. Despite the sign saying NO ENTRY, ART. 461, CRIMINAL CODE by the gate with the two lions on it, cars regularly appeared in the forecourt with newly married couples, who had themselves photographed against the background of the castle, the women in long white dresses, the men in rented suits, gray top hats in their hands, since otherwise they would come down over their ears. Their faces were mostly tanned, halfway across their foreheads a sharp line where there was clammy white, where their caps usually reached.
A couple of times Quinten had already caught the photographers' eyes, after which they had rung the bell and asked Sophia if they could take a series of photos of this astonishingly beautiful boy — for advertising purposes, which would of course pay well.
The fact that he had not cried when he was hit on the head did not surprise Max and Sophia. In fact he had only really cried once. During a heat wave, in July, Sophia had put an inflatable round white plastic bath on the forecourt; when she couldn't find the air pump, she blew it up herself and half filled it with the garden hose. She lifted Quinten into it, called to Max that he should keep an eye on things, and went off to get eggs at the farm.
Half an hour later Max heard him crying. There had been a plague of flies all summer, but now the hot stones of the forecourt were suddenly covered by a black, seething carpet, which gave off a gruesome singing sound, like hundreds of cellos. Surrounded on all sides by the devilish brood, as if on an island, Quinten was standing up in the water, naked, his hands over his eyes, whining and shivering with fear. At the same moment the sight unleashed in Max a rage of an intensity he had never experienced; he himself had only a pair of swimming trunks on, and before he knew il he was running through the swarming, buzzing mass, feeling how he was crushing hundreds of flies under his bare feet, dragging Quinten out of the water in one movement and taking him to safety on the other side of the moat, in the shade under the brown oak tree.
By about his fifth birthday, in 1973—the year in which Max and Onno turned forty and Sophia fifty — Quinten had extended his territory to the whole of the wooded area. Every day he visited the former coach house where Theo Kern carved his large pieces. In the tall space full of stones and dust and tools, plaster carts, tables full of sketches, discarded furniture, and the constantly bubbling coffee machine in the corner, where everything was focused on work, he felt even more at ease than in Kern's apartment in the castle, in Selma's presence. He would sit on a lump of stone for hours watching the sculptor extracting heavily built female figures and ornaments for government buildings from the blocks, walking around over the sharp splinters in his bare feet like a fakir.
Now and then something alarming happened to him. He would suddenly stop, half close his eyes, bare his teeth to the gums, and raise his hands high in the air, shuddering, as though he had to defend himself against the image with a supreme effort. Then the good-natured gnome was suddenly changed into a ravenous beast. A moment later his face relaxed completely again, as though nothing had happened. Quinten saw that he himself no longer remembered behaving so strangely.
According to Kern, sculpture wasn't an art — anyone could do it. All you had to do, he said one day, was to remove the superfluous stone. "At least that's what Michelangelo used to say."
"Who's Michelangelo?"
"Someone like me, but different. He made that over there," — he pointed to a photograph pinned to a wooden beam with a drawing pin: a statue of a man with a wild face, a long beard, and two horns on his head.
"Is that the devil?"
"What makes you think that?"
"Well, those horns of course."
"Yes, I don't understand those either. But in any case it's Moses. Someone from the Bible."
"What's the Bible?"
Kern's mallet came to rest. "Don't you know that? Hasn't your father ever told you? A whole book of stories, which lots of people think really happened."
Quinten remembered the huge book that stood on a lectern in his grand-dad's house in The Hague from which he sometimes read aloud. That was the Bible of course.
Kern looked at the photo with a sigh.
"I couldn't make anything like that, QuQu. I get commissions from Assen Council, but he got them from the pope. You have to know your place. I myself don't really like color very much, but he could paint beautifully too. For example, he painted the Sistine Chapel — not bad at all. That's in the Vatican: the pope's family chapel."
"Who's the pope?"
"The head of the Catholics. Those are people who believe in God. And now I expect you're going to ask who God is?"
"Yes," said Quinten. He was sitting on a block of dark-blue granite, hands between his thighs, and nodded three times.
"He doesn't exist, but according to those who believe in him he made the world."
"Max says the world started with a bang."
"Then I expect that's right. In the Sistine Chapel you can see God: he's floating in the air and he's got a beard, like Moses."
"And you."
"But his isn't nice and white like mine. When you're older you must go and have a look in Rome. There's plenty more to see there, for that matter."
"How on earth can you paint someone that doesn't exist?"
"You make something up. Or you use a trick. Michelangelo simply painted some old chap or other who came into his street every day selling pizzas; he made him float in the air and then everyone said it was God. If I had to make a sculpture of God for Assen Council, then I'd simply be able to carve my own head."
"And yet," said Quinten, "you could make a sculpture of God himself perfectly easily if he doesn't exist."
"You'll have to tell me how you're supposed to do that."
"Well, you take a block of marble and you carve it until there's nothing left."
He looked at Quinten perplexed, and then burst out into a thundering laugh. "Then I take it to Assen. 'Here it is,' I'd say. 'God! Do you see! Nothing!' Do you think they'd understand? And pay me? No way! They wouldn't even pay for the marble. They're as thick as two planks."
"Who's the devil, then?"
"Christ, Quinten! Who's the devil? Why don't you ask the lady vicar. The devil is the archenemy of God!"
"Doesn't he exist either, or does he?"
"No, of course not."
"Well then, I know how you can make a statue of the devil too."
Kern lowered his mallet and chisel and looked at Quinten. "How, then?"
"You've got to fill the whole world with marble."
Quinten could see that he was confused.
"Where on earth do you get things like that from, QuQu?"
"Just like that.. " Quinten didn't understand what he meant, but he had the feeling that he should go now. He glanced at Moses; under his arm he had some large thing or other, a kind of map, which was obviously slipping out of his hands and threatening to fall on the floor, which he was just able to prevent. In real life he would probably have been a gardener or something. "Bye," he said.
Whenever he came out of the studio, there was the house in front of him. Seen from the castle, the group of outbuildings on the other side of the moat looked rather small and insignificant; the house itself, looked at from there, made a powerful, inaccessible impression. He always stood and looked at it for a few moments. He didn't think of anything — or, rather, what he thought coincided with what he saw: the castle, self-absorbed like his own thoughts, the clock with no hands above the door. Sometimes it was as though it suddenly became invisible for a split second.