— Think of what happened to Onno Quist, for example.
— I always think of everything at once, my dear friend. Now, for example, I'm thinking of the fact that you made it happen to him of course. I even suspect that you allowed that rotten environment to emerge in Amsterdam that made what happened to Helga possible.
— You'll soon see the necessity for that. I only intervened when it was strictly necessary. I always use my resources as sparingly as possible, but I simply had to work with the tough rubber that people are made of. If it was still our habit to address them, everything would be a lot simpler — but you've already touched on that: since those dreamers have fooled themselves that it didn't come from on high but from their own depths, we've stopped.
— Reluctantly.
— You were talking just now about the causa finalis. We too started out of course from the simplest way in which our aim could be achieved in theory — namely, that our man would go where we wanted him to be and do what we wanted him to do. But as we calculated back, more and more new obstacles appeared, which made that aim more and more difficult to achieve — until, by improvising, we found the complicated route of efficient causalities, which turned out to be the only possible one. It was not nearly as complicated as our efforts to get him into the spirit and the flesh, but still complicated enough. In my department we sometimes compare it with the course of a river. The simplest way for the Rhine to go from its source in the Alps to the Hook of Holland is of course a straight line about four hundred miles long; but in reality it's twice as long, because the landscape forces it to be. In the same way, our man's route through the human landscape was strange and twisting and now and then quite violent — for example, exactly what happens in Schaffhausen; but — to change imagery — you can't appoint someone as a carpenter and at the same time forbid people to cut down trees. Wait a moment. We're not going to have the same conversation again, I hope?
— The same conversation about the necessity of evil in the world will be conducted forever and ever — that awesome question of the theodicy, on which mankind has been breaking its teeth for centuries. But yes, the grain simply has to be threshed, so that it can be changed into sacred bread.
— These days it's also done with combine harvesters. They're monsters, sometimes twenty feet wide, with six-cylinder diesel engines, which crawl across the fields like prehistoric grasshoppers. At the front of those combines the stalks are swallowed up, after which the grains are shaken loose in the revolving threshing drum; then a compressor separates the chaff from the corn with compressed air. It works pretty well.
— You've put your finger on it. But it's precisely the machine itself that represents the much greater, radical, evil. That technological Luciferian evil is not in the optimistic service of the Chief in the best of all possible worlds, like the providential havoc that you must wreak, but it feeds on it; it eats it away and takes its place, like a virus usurps control of the nucleus of a celclass="underline" a malicious putsch, an infamous coup d'état. Cancer! Royal assassination!
— Don't get so excited all the time. This is just how things are. We have failed. We underestimated human potential, both the strength of man's intellect and the weakness of his flesh, and therefore his receptivity to satanic inspiration — but ultimately he is our creature, and so what we've really underestimated is our own creativity. What we made has turned out to be more than what we thought that we had made. So ultimately in our failure there is a compliment to us: our creativity is greater than ourselves!
— Your optimism is indestructible too, just like Leibniz's. What you are despite all your competence is obviously ultimately an irresponsible bohemian, an artistic rake, who thinks Here goes! But you might ask yourself whether it isn't precisely the reflection of the Chief that makes our creativity greater than ourselves.
— Ha ha! But if that's the case, then our successful failure isn't our responsibility either, but the Chief's — including man's susceptibility to the devil and hence the downfall of the Chief himself, as you have just so eloquently outlined to me. Then with mankind he has dug his own grave.
— This conversation is starting to take a turn I don't like at all. I very much hope that your closeness to human beings and your manipulation with evil hasn't also brought you closer to Lucifer-Satan.
— I wouldn't be making such efforts in that case. But if I can be honest: I do feel a bit sorry for him. Ultimately he's a poor sucker too, who can't be any different than he is. The fact of the matter is that we are playing with white, and he with black. If there is anyone who is condemned to hell for infinity, then it's him.
— He'd like nothing better!
— Yes, that too. That's hell within hell.
— Come on. It's as though someone on earth were to claim that he whose name I won't mention was also a poor sucker and himself actually his most pitiable victim.
— It isn't for people to claim that kind of thing. Them least of all.
— I'm glad that you are saying it, because your post was suddenly hanging by a thread.
— I had the feeling it might be.
— Let's leave it at that, before things get out of hand. Of course it's sad that things had to reach this stage, but at the same time I'm dying of curiosity to hear how you finally managed it. Go on. I'm listening.
51. The Golden Wall
In order to make the decisive event possible, it was necessary to mellow Onno Quist's frame of mind after all those years of solitude — and so I sent to him a stray young raven from the hills. One sunny day around noon it suddenly descended into the open window, shook its feathers, folded its wings, turned once around its axis, and walked in as though it lived there.
Onno looked up from his notes, perplexed.
"What do you want?" he asked. Not having said anything the whole morning, he cleared his throat.
The raven fixed him with one eye and croaked.
"Cras?" repeated Onno. "Yes, of course you're speaking Latin. 'Tomorrow'? What about tomorrow?"
The bird jumped off the windowsill onto the table, stirred through the chaos of papers a few times with its tail feathers, left some droppings, and then went over to a plate on which there were a few remnants of bread. With a loud tapping of its beak, as blue-black as fountain-pen ink, it devoured them and again looked at Onno, as if wanting to know if that was all. After it had eaten its fill, it jumped onto the windowsill, spread its wings, and disappeared — but the following afternoon it was back, at the same time.
In this way something resembling a friendship had begun. Onno had never had anything to do with animals before; they did not feature in his thinking. He had been brought up to believe that they had no souls, but after just a few days he found himself becoming anxious when the bird was late. Although he had not worn a watch since leaving Holland, he always knew what time it was thanks to the church bells. When on one occasion the raven missed a day, he could no longer concentrate. He looked mournfully at the untouched plate of birdseed and leaned outside every ten minutes to scan the sky.
"You don't treat people like this, Edgar," he said the following day with a reproachfully wagging index finger. "Not even as a bird. You don't stand your host up with the food. I trust it won't happen again."