My writing this letter means a change like that for you. By the time you read this, I shall have gone. I've gone underground, as we called it during the war. Then, people went underground to avoid the Germans. I've gone underground to escape life itself. Perhaps you may find that odd for a talker like me; perhaps one day you'll despise me because of it and perhaps you already do — but that's how it is. I have gone for you, just as I've gone for myself, you'll scarcely miss me, because not much will change. I've never been a real father to you, always a kind of distant uncle. Max is your father, just as Granny is your mother. There are fathers and sons in the world, and I've always been more of a son than a father. Perhaps you're more of a father than I am. Try and forget me. All I want to do is to think a bit. Just see me as a hermit who's going into the wilderness for the rest of his life.
Forgive me and don't look for me, because you won't find me.
Your Prodigal Father
Quinten looked up and met the eyes of Max and Sophia, who had also read each other's letters. In the morning sunlight, the first wasps had already alighted on the remains of the honey.
"What's a hermit?"
"A recluse."
"Has Daddy gone in the same way as Mama?"
Max had a constant line running through his head: I have lost the world— it was as though Onno's message were hidden beneath it, so that it couldn't really get through to him. He was also alarmed by the sentence in which Onno said that his life had to a large extent been more determined by Max than he himself knew — but from what followed it was apparent that this could not refer to Quinten. In confusion he looked at Quinten and looked for an answer to his question.
But Sophia said: "Of course not. He's simply somewhere, but he doesn't want to talk to anybody anymore. He's mourning Auntie Helga very deeply and that's why he's saying all that. I think that.." Suddenly her words were lost in the ear-splitting roar of a formation of jets flying low overhead; she waited for a moment until the noise changed over the woods into the boom of a distant storm. "Time heals all wounds. It wouldn't surprise me if he's back in a few months."
"I'm not so sure about that," said Max. It didn't strike him as completely impossible, either, but he didn't feel any false hopes should be awakened in Quinten. "In that case he would simply have hidden away somewhere for a while; but when someone writes letters like this, something else is going on with them. Can we read your letter too, Quinten?"
"Not now. I have to go to school."
"I'll call and say you'll be a bit late."
Reluctantly, Quinten handed the letter over, after which he read those of Sophia and Max. He did not understand everything, but he again formed an idea of the bond of friendship there had been between his father and Max. In that letter to Max, it also said that Max was actually his father, but that was of course in fact precisely not the case: the man who had written those farewell letters was not not his father, but his father. Max was only his father in a manner of speaking, just as Granny was only his mother in a manner of speaking.
He looked up. "Can I have Mama's cello in my room now?"
"Of course," said Max. "When I have to go down to that part of the world next, I'll collect it from Auntie Dol."
Quinten sighed deeply and stared across the moat toward the trees and the coach houses. He felt the absence of his father around him much more intensely than he had ever felt his presence; it seemed as though he was now far more present than when he had been there.
What did it all mean, Max asked himself a few months later, late in the evening after returning from Tsjallingtsje's, while he intended to drink a glass or two of wine in the silent castle but had emptied the whole bottle, when times suddenly changed? In the 1960s the students in Berkeley revolted; shortly afterward the Provos appeared in Amsterdam; and then the universities were occupied in Berlin and Paris too. There might still be a causal link between those things, but how come it also happened in Warsaw, on the other side of the Iron Curtain? And why was it that at the same time the Cultural Revolution took place in China, also something that involved young people? There was no connection, and yet it happened simultaneously. Imperial Japan had nothing to do with Hitler's Germany, and yet at the same moment it became just as aggressive.
Did Hegel's World Spirit perhaps really exist, and was humanity as a whole subject to the ebb and flow of mysterious undercurrents that paid no attention to political differences? That was the kind of question to which there was no answer, but on a small scale something comparable was now happening in his personal circumstances. "When troubles come they come not single spies said the insufferable cliche; but since he was approaching fifty, he began to realize that cliches were simply truths. Although it was entirely unconnected, it seemed in retrospect as though Onno's departure had also heralded the end of their stay in Groot Rechteren.
When after a long illness the baron had nevertheless died unexpectedly, as the death announcement said, it had in the first instance a gratifying consequence. As Quinten's guardian, Max received an invitation from a lawyer in Zwolle, where he was informed that the deceased had included Quinten in his will. In an imposing paneled room, which a silent lady entered now and again, to adjust something among high piles of documents folded lengthwise, the slightly emaciated official read him Gevers's testament. It had not escaped the deceased that Quinten regularly cleared the grave of Deep Thought Sunstar of stinging nettles: as a reward, therefore, he was leaving him ten thousand guilders. He was to receive thirty thousand guilders for the fact that he had made the life's work of his son, Rutger, possible: Rutger's "very big curtain" — by now measuring thirty feet by thirty. Forty thousand guilders — that was a lot of money, said the lawyer, and the family was probably not happy about it, but all in all it amounted to the restitution of rent since 1968. They had had free accommodation for all those years.
"By the way, if it interests you.." he said as he was accompanying Max to the front door, "I can tell you that the heirs plan to dispose of Groot Rechteren shortly. You can buy it if you like. You can have it for five hundred thousand, minus the park and Ms. Trip's house, but including the coach house and the other outbuildings. Ridiculously cheap."
"Where would I get half a million from?" laughed Max. "I have to get by on a scientist's starvation wage."
"Have a chat with your bank. And if it's too much for you alone, you could consider setting up a cooperative association with your fellow tenants, which can act as buyer. You never know what might happen otherwise.
Once ownership passes to a third party, you can be given notice after three years, and you'll never get anything like that again. I'm always available for advice. But don't take too long deciding — there are already sharks about."
This heralded a period of confusion and uncertainty, but the first result was an increase in solidarity. They had never gathered together so often in the castle: at Max and Sophia's, among Theo Kern's cooing doves, on the immaculate Empire furniture of Mr. and Mrs. Spier, occasionally also upstairs, at Proctor and Clara's, among the umbrellas; but usually in the library of Themaat, who had not been doing well recently.