The thunderous impact with which a white fireball, like a rocket from the sky, hit the stone on which he was sitting scorched all the trees and plants in the garden. It shattered the windows of Tsjallingtsje's house, the curtains caught fire, and the explosion woke up the whole village. Everywhere dogs began barking, cocks crowing. For miles around, lights went on in panic and out of the windows people began shouting to each other that it must be a gas explosion. The following day even the erratic stone seemed to have partly evaporated.
That was how Max finally made the world press — not because of his cosmological hunch, which remained unknown, but because of the unbelievable coincidence of his being in the place where he was. As far as was known, the only person who shared his fate was a seventeenth-century Franciscan monk in Milan. The direct hit had left nothing more of the unfortunate Dutch astronomer than is left of an ant when two flints strike.
Experts assumed that the meteorite had been the size of a fist. Only tiny fragments had been recovered, from which it could be deduced that this was a stone meteorite, an achondrite, over 4 billion years old, probably originating from the area between Mars and Jupiter.
In accordance with international custom the celestial body was named after the nearest post office: the Westerbork.
50. The Decision
Four days later, at the funeral in the churchyard of Westerbork — to the strains of Janácek's Fairy Tale—Quinten did not dare ask himself what was in the coffin that was descending into the earth. Surrounded by astronomers and technicians, he glanced at Sophia, who stood arm in arm with Tsjallingtsje. Was there anything in it? But what had happened only got through to him with a jolt a month later.
Sophia and he had been invited by Theo and Selma Kern to dinner for Easter. Sophia had provided the wine, and around a great dish of pot-au-feu with horseradish they were talking about the gigantic Easter bonfire that the baron used to light every year on the grounds near Klein Rechteren — a tradition that had not been continued after his death. According to Kern, the reason was that there were no other country noblemen living in the area; they were more to the south, in Overijssel and Gelderland. Gevers had been the northernmost nobleman. Since the old baroness, together with Rutger and his hundred-square-yard curtain, had recently moved in with her daughter in The Hague, who ran a flourishing beauty salon for a select clientele, the rabble would shortly appear in Klein Rechteren too and destroy it.
"I'm a simple man of the people," he said. "My grandmother was a water-and-hot-coal seller in Utrecht, with sand on the floor, but if I have to choose between the nobility and the rich rabble, then I don't have to think for very long. Of course the aristocracy is also rabble, everyone is rabble, but they at least have style."
"You're getting old, Theo," said Selma.
"You're telling me. And just as well."
Quinten looked at him. The sculptor sat on his chair like a gnarled, snow-covered pinecone; his bare right foot was lying on a white linen pouf, the ankle swollen and the skin purplish, as though he had stepped in a jar of blackberries. Did the aristocracy have style? Quinten was reminded of Roskam's father, who had had to bury his cap on the orders of Rutger's grandfather. Yes, perhaps that was style — but a particular kind. On the other hand, the baron had left him lots of money because he had looked after the grave of Deep Thought Sunstar and had taught Rutger to weave. Perhaps the thing was that the aristocracy really thought there were two kinds of people: on the one hand themselves, with the queen at the head, and on the other side ordinary bourgeois people — in the same way that there were men and women. He would like to talk to his father about that, but he had disappeared.
"Do you remember the Easter eggs that you and Arendje always hunted for under the rhododendrons?" asked Selma.
How could he forget something like that? Again he could feel the branches on his back as he crawled over the ground, over the damp, withered leaves, between which a suddenly a bright color glowed, completely formed, like when he had a liberating brainwave while he was thinking about something. The troubling thought that Arendje would find more eggs than he did..
"I always kept the most beautiful ones," said Sophia. "Shall I get them?"
When she had left the room, Theo said to Selma: "Do you know what Max once said to me? 'A chicken is the means whereby an egg produces another egg.' I don't know in what connection, but I've never forgotten."
"Poor Max. ." sighed Selma.
A little later Sophia put a large, old-fashioned candy jar with a wide neck and a screw top on the table. While she told them that the jar came from her mother's bequest, Kern stared at the colored contents and it was as though he could scarcely control his emotions.
"All of those were painted here in this room, QuQu," he said, "while you were tucked up in bed. By all of us here at the castle."
After Selma had cleared the plates away, Sophia carefully laid the eggs on the table one by one. Quinten did not know that she had kept them all, but he recognized his finds almost without exception. She arranged them neatly in four rows of eight. Kern took his foot off the pouf, put on a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses, and bent forward.
"Can you see who painted what?"
Carefully putting one sort with another, Quinten began to change the places of the eggs. Suddenly he had the feeling that they should actually be in eight vertical rows of four rather than in the four horizontal rows of eight. There were Kern, Max, Proctor, Themaat, and Spier and their five wives— that made ten people; but Elsbeth Themaat and Judith Spier would probably not have joined in — they never came upstairs. It would be nice if there were four eggs from each of them, but there was only one from Mr. Spier: on the otherwise unpainted white shell there was an elegantly red painted A? on one side, and a blue Q? on the other. The capital italics obviously referred to Arendje, but now he was suddenly reminded of Ada. He assigned three eggs to Themaat, with pale geometrical patterns: diamonds, circles, triangles. The somber, dark-brown ones, sometimes black with zigzagging lightning bolts, were of course by Proctor, while it was probably Max who had limited himself to plain, bright colors, which now in some way contained his death. There was no mistaking Kern's work: expertly painted clown's faces, flowers, and animal heads. Clara had also made it simple for him by depicting umbrellas in all states of openness. He had more difficulty with Selma and Sophia. The remaining eggs were all abstract in design, with dots, stripes, and bands. He decided that the beautiful ones were by Selma and those with the clashing colors by Sophia.
The others looked in silence at what he was doing. After he had finally arranged the eggs by person, Kern said:
"You don't have to say any more." He glanced at it for a moment, then looked up and said to the two women, staring at the constellation on the table, "That's what's left of our community."
At the same moment Quinten realized that this was the truth. After the death of Max, only these three old people were left, of whom his grandmother, at sixty-two, was the youngest. Upstairs was Nederkoorn, below Korvinus, and soon it would be completely over. What was there to keep him here any longer? Everything around him had been destroyed, everyone was dead, had left, was inaccessible; even Kern's dovecotes had been empty for six months. Suddenly he got up and went to his room without saying anything.
He put his bronze box on the table. Because the key of the padlock had disappeared one day from between the loose bricks behind the oil stove, he had straightened a sturdy paper clip and, according to Piet Keller's lessons, had made a skeleton key with it. He carefully unfolded his father's letters and looked at the last sentence, although it was just the same as he remembered: Forgive me and don't look for me, because you won't find me. So it was something of a last wish that Quinten should not look for him! In fact it didn't say at all that he didn't want him to — just that he should save himself the trouble, because it would be to no avail. He looked at the case with his mother's cello in it. Now he was certain. He was going away. He was going to find his father.