To the right of Kern's studio was a smaller stable that housed the workshop of Mr. Roskam, the caretaker of Groot and Klein Rechteren, who did repairs; the door was usually locked. At the side a covered staircase led to the second floor, where different people lived every few months: sometimes a blond woman, then a man with a black goatee. He had no contact with them, but he did with Piet Keller, who lived on the other side.
On either side of the gravel path, which led to his front door past the large erratic stone, one could see the top halves of cart wheels. At first sight it looked as though someone had buried them up to the axles — but Quinten knew better. It was the other way around: they weren't sticking in but out of the earth; they weren't the top halves but the bottom halves. In fact the cart was under the path, the coach, the golden coach, which he had once seen on television: but upside down, pulled by eight horses, the coachman with the reins up in the box, all upside down in the ground, and there wasn't a queen in it but a much more beautiful woman, the most beautiful woman in the world — and the coach was standing still because they'd all fallen asleep..
When Piet Keller had once asked him why he never simply walked down the path but always around the wheels, across the grass, he had said: "Just because."
Keller was in his fifties, a skinny man with a stoop and an unhealthy complexion, usually dressed in a short beige dust coat. His wife sometimes suddenly made strange jerky movements with her whole body, which made Quinten a little afraid of her; his daughter and two sons, all three of them a head taller than he was, had reached an age at which they probably scarcely noticed Quinten. In an adjacent barn he had his workshop, and Quinten was in the habit of watching him, too, for hour after hour. He repaired old locks, which had been sent to him from miles around, not only by individuals but also by antiques dealers and museums. All around were boxes containing thousands of keys in all shapes and sizes, tins full of levers, locks, bars, tumblers, bolts, stops, and other components whose names he had taught Quinten. Countless skeleton keys hung on large iron rings.
"I've got every key," he had once said with a wink, "except musical keys and St. Peter's."
On a trestle table illuminated by a wobbly light, fixed to the wall with wire, lay the locks that he was currently dealing with; next to it was a set of shelves with countless compartments full of screws, nuts, pins, and other small items. There was also a heavy bench with a lathe and drilling and grinding machines. When Quinten was there, Keller usually accompanied his work with a mumbled, monotone commentary: not didactic, simply reporting on what he was doing and what he was thinking. Occasionally, when he was working on a heavy medieval padlock, as large as a loaf, which was locked and of which the key was missing, lyrical notes crept into his reports.
"Look at that, isn't it an angel? We call this a sliding padlock. Can you see those H-shaped grooves? That's where you have to put the key. I'm going to make it in a while. Inside there's a barrier of very strong springs; the ends are now relaxed, making them lock the shackle in the body of the lock."
"How do you know? Have you looked inside?"
"No, and I'm not going to. At least not now. First I'm going to do something quite different." From one of the storage boxes he fished out a couple of long, steel pins, which fitted in the H. Back at his bench, he lubricated them with oil and began sliding them slowly inside, with his eyes looking up, as though that was where the inside of the lock could be seen. "Yes, now I can feel the first curve in the spring blades. . yes. That's right, yes… a little further… now they're compressing.. yes. . it's difficult, it's rusty in there.. perhaps a little careful help with the hammer.. and now a couple more taps and one more, that should be enough…" There was a stiff click from inside, and he pulled the stirrup out of the lock.
He looked at Quinten with a smile. "Yes, QuQu, I could earn my living in a much easier way. But 'Thou shalt not steal.' Just ask the lady vicar."
He pulled out the pins and pushed the shackle back in again, which made a second click.
"What are you doing? It's locked again now!"
He put the monster down in front of Quinten. "You can already pick ordinary locks a bit, but try this one. Perhaps you can take over from me one day — I can't talk my own sons into it."
The lady vicar, Ms. Trip, the head of the Calvinist congregation in Hooghalen, was unmarried and lived twenty yards farther on, with her black cat, in the former gardener's house, which had a large conservatory built on. She had little contact with the other residents of Groot Rechteren— only the Verloren van Themaats occasionally had tea with her; she was a friend of the baroness's. Although she was no older than Sophia, her hair was already snow-white. When she sat on her terrace reading — Karl Barth, or a nice novel — or tended the flowers in her garden, which sloped down to a tributary of the moat, Quinten sometimes stopped and looked at her from the gate. She would give him a friendly nod, but she never waved to him, and he did not think that was necessary. She must know an awful lot, perhaps almost as much as his father, because everyone always said, "You must ask the lady vicar about that" when they did not know the answer themselves. It was mostly about God, or Jesus Christ, but he had never asked her anything. Usually he ran straight on toward the bridge.
Sophia had forbidden him to go across it: it was a very romantic, dilapidated, wobbly construction, with planks missing and which for some reason always reminded Max of a Schubert song: "Leise flehen meine Lieder durch die Nacht zu dir …" On the other side, in the shade of tall beech trees, was the orangery: a low, long building with large windows, where Seerp Verdonkschot lived with his friend. He not only lived there with his friend but also had his antiquities room there. There was scarcely ever another visitor when Quinten went in. For Verdonkschot himself was not there usually either; he worked for the post office — a gruff man, according to Max, embittered because he wasn't taken seriously as a scholar, either by the university in Groningen or by the Provincial Museum in Assen. Perhaps that was because he also put his antiquities up for sale.
His friend, Etienne, a man of about forty who was on the corpulent side, always put his head around the door and said: "Hello, beautiful, are you back? Don't pinch anything, you hear?"
On the wall were colored maps showing the extent of the Beaker culture in Drenthe, and Verdonkschot's prehistoric finds were displayed in two rows of showcases: dozens of stone arrowheads, five thousand years old, hand axes, rusty hairpins, potsherds, half-decomposed pieces of leather. It was not the objects themselves that fascinated Quinten; they didn't really appeal to him. It was the atmosphere in the brightly painted room: the orderly silence, with those dirty old things in it, which belonged deep in the earth and were now lying in the light like the guts of a fish at the fishmonger's in the village.
It was mysterious because it was really forbidden. And the strangest thing of all was the idea that all those things were lying under the glass even when no one was looking at them — at night, too, when it was dark here and he himself was in his bed. That was impossible, of course, because then they'd scream with fear and he'd hear from his bed; but he never heard screaming coming from the orangery at night. Just the call of an owl sometimes. So they only existed when he saw them.
Outside, he always climbed straight onto the erratic stone, which had appeared there too. He sat down and waited until Verdonkschot's goat Gijs came toward him with lopsided leaps. If Gijs had been able, he would definitely have given him a butt with his horns, but the rope was just too short for that.