— I'm not sure I'm too impressed by that view of things.
— If you like, I'll retract what I said and argue the opposite.
— That won't be necessary.
— It needed only a slight adjustment to bring her to life. Once again starting from the end result that we required, in combination with the genetic material of Delius Junior, we discovered as a possible paternal grandfather a keeper at the Netherlands Museum of the History of Science in Leiden: a certain Oswald Brons, born for no particular reason in 1921. By pure coincidence, the necessary maternal grandmother, Sophia Haken, turned out to be living close by, in Delft, where she had been born in 1923, also for no particular reason. Because of his age, Brons was more or less in hiding in the museum at the end of the war; he often slept there, in the room containing the Surrealist contraption built by Kamerlingh Onnes for liquefying helium, which looks exactly like a monster on the right-hand-side panel of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, the musical inferno, and also like the topmost figure in Marcel Duchamp's Grand Verre.
— What in heaven's name are you talking about?
— Pay no attention. Because of all that genetic fiddling about, I've still got a loose bobbin inside me like a loom. At the end of 1944, in the last winter of the war, the German occupying forces were in the habit of parking trains carrying V-2 rockets immediately south of the Academic Hospital in the hope that this would deter the English from air attacks. They were fired at London from a launchpad nearby. Nevertheless, one December afternoon, just after midday, there was a heavy raid on the station; shortly afterward the false rumor circulated in Delft that the hospital was on fire. Although weakened by hunger and despite the cold, Sophia immediately cycled to Leiden to see whether anything had happened to her best friend, a fellow nurse. As she was passing the museum, a few hundred yards south of the station, the second attack came and she took cover in a doorway — but because the English, under my benevolent influence, were frightened of hitting the hospital, it suddenly started raining bombs around her. One devastated a wing of the museum containing brass telescopes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Amid the chaos of fire, noise, dust, screaming in Dutch and German, firemen, ambulances, and police, she bumped into Oswald Brons. Bewildered, with torn clothes and covered in grazes, he was wandering across the heaps of rubble carrying a huge lens in his arms like a baby, and she took pity on him.
— Minor intervention. Positive effect. How many people dead?
— Fifty-four.
— A slight adjustment, you said?
— Well, what do you want? I didn't invent all that manipulation business, I'm only carrying out your cherubic will. What's more, I prevented the hospital from being razed to the ground. It seems so easy to influence the normal course of events, but reality is just like water; it's liquid and mobile, but it can only be compressed a little by using a great deal of force. When someone falls onto it from a great height, it's as hard as the rock from which Moses struck water.
— Oh, our Moses. . you're touching a sensitive nerve there.
— I'm sorry.
— When was their daughter born?
— In 1946, during the baby boom.
— When did she meet the young Delius?
— In May 1967.
— Tell me the whole story from that moment on, preferably without a commentary. Just tell it in full and with all the details, so that I can select when it's my turn to report.
— For a fuller understanding, it would be better if I started a little earlier.
— When?
— On Monday, February 13, 1967, at twelve midnight.
— Which in fact is February 14.
— Yes, human time is one great paradox.
— What year is it down there now?
— 1985.
— Begin, then. I'm listening.
1. The Family Gathering
At the stroke of midnight I contrived a short-circuit. Anyone walking along the quiet avenue in The Hague with his collar turned up high against the freezing cold (though there was no one at that moment) would have seen all the lights in the detached mansion suddenly go off, as though a gigantic candle had been blown out inside. For those living in the neighborhood, the villa exuded a somewhat somber splendor: it was the home of a legendary prime minister, the strict Calvinist Hendrikus Quist. In the crowded downstairs rooms, where the party was going on, the sudden darkness and the fading of the music into a fathomless cave were greeted with laughter.
"Time for the young'uns!" cried a woman's voice, itself no longer very young.
"Is anyone here technically minded?"
"I'll see to it. Where are the fuses, Grandmother?"
"On top of the electric meter, in the cupboard next to the stairs down to the cellar."
"Someone must have been messing about with them. You don't get a short-circuit just like that."
"I'll go and have a look up in the attic, at the little ones."
"Ouch!"
"Someone must have been using that wretched toaster again. Coba?"
"Yes, ma'am?"
"Did you use that toaster?"
"No, ma'am."
"Look and see if there are any candles left in the sideboard."
"Yes, ma'am."
The only light in the rooms was that cast by the streetlamps. In the dark conservatory at the back of the house a large figure now rose from a wicker armchair. Glass in hand, he surveyed the scores of silhouettes.
"No, Mother!" he cried in a loud voice, emphasizing every syllable. "This has nothing to do with the toasters. It has begun!"
"What has begun?"
"It!" He shouted it with his head thrown back, ecstatically, like an enlightened mystic.
"He's off again," said a man's voice. "Sit down and stop drinking."
"It!"
"Yes, yes. It. It's all right."
"That's right! It's all right. It's also dark, and it's freezing outside. It was about time that it began, that thank heavens it's happened. So be it. Amen— so that the infidels may also understand."
"Onno, you're insufferable."
But the very opposition he provoked was an inspiration. He knew that he was making an exhibition of himself, but he was swept along by his own words.
"Does my ear hear the cacophonous voice of my eldest brother, the most bigoted of Calvinists? What is more terrible than being an eldest brother? I shall say it through clenched teeth: having an eldest brother! Father, make that wretched individual shut up!"
"I don't know if you remember," said a woman in the dark, "but we're celebrating Father's birthday. It's his seventy-fifth birthday, do you remember? It's meant to be a celebration."
"Isn't that my youngest sister? The fair Ophelia? Yes, I remember, I remember. I myself am thirty-three — does that perhaps ring a bell in this company of fanatics and zealots? I remember everything, because I never forget anything. Isn't this the second time in a week that we've celebrated Father's birthday? Father, where are you? I am looking for you, but I am looking through a glass darkly. There you were the day before yesterday at the head of the table, in De Wittenburg Castle: on your right the queen, on your left the crown princess; at the other end, a ten-minute walk away, our poor mother, wedged between the prince-consort and the prime minister; and between you the whole cabinet, eighty-six ex-ministers, a hundred and sixty-eight thousand generals, prelates, bankers, politicians, and industrialists as far as the eye could see; and all of you, too, all the pashas and grand viziers and moguls and satraps by marriage. Hic sunt monstra. If only my abominable eldest brother were not there, the governor of that backward province whose name still escapes me."