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are,’ he says, ‘two sides of the same coin. Without a sense of justice, there can be no cruelty.’
    ‘Of course, but the absence of justice you’ve noted says nothing at all about the nature of fate, does it? Does that rule out fate being cruel? When you simply observe the actions of
the butcher in the concentration camp, you have no idea whether he has any sense of justice – and therefore no idea whether he’s acting out of cruelty or out of complete
stupidity.’
    ‘Well, all right,’ the doctor concedes (there’s probably another patient waiting), ‘we’re all free to think about these matters as we please.’
    But I’m in no mood to be put off with platitudes. Not now. Not under these circumstances.
    ‘No, we’re not all free to do that!’ I shout. ‘First you say that I shouldn’t ascribe human characteristics to fate. Then I show you that you know nothing,
nada
, about the character of fate – human or inhuman, cruel or stupid: you simply don’t know, and then you try to get out of it with some gobbledygook!’
    I’ve jumped to my feet and I’m screaming at him like a fishwife – and it feels wonderful.
    ‘No, that’s not what I . . .’ he mumbles.
    ‘Precisely! There you go! That’s not what you meant! But what
did
you mean? I know your type, I know exactly what you mean. Day in, day out, I do nothing but read
meaningless studies by all those colleagues of yours, big, impressive-looking stories about calcium-ionophores and endothelial cells and shit like that! Advanced motor mechanics, that’s all
it is. How substance A interacts with substance B, and what that means in turn for the permeability of membrane X. And because you guys happen to be smart enough to unravel a few of those
extraordinarily complicated problems – resulting, by the way, in a whole slew of new and even more complicated problems – out of pure euphoria at that success, you now think you can
explain the whole fucking universe. God is dead! Fate is blind! Everything is random! Everything is senseless, irrational, out of control! But as soon as anyone bothers to ask you to defend those
standpoints by force of argument, you guys pretend there’s no one home. Then suddenly everyone is free to think whatever they want. God, what intellectual cowardice!’
    I suddenly realize that I’m shaking all over. The room has gone liquid, the doctor is swimming, office chair and all, to the window and back.
    ‘Oh, fuck,’ I moan, falling back in my chair. I crumple into a ball. Bury my face in my hands. I feel the salt of tears stinging my eyes, but I refuse to start crying now.
    ‘Oh, fuck,’ I say again, and run away as fast as my rubber legs will take me. ‘Mr Minderhout!’ I hear the stunned doctor’s assistant call after me. ‘Mr
Minderhout!’
    The hospital is conspiring against me. Corridors blend into other corridors without getting me where I want to be. Signs point me in the wrong direction. Lifts take me to the
wrong floors. I bump into rolling trolleys. Trip over a child, which begins crying loudly. Its mother curses me up and down.
    I duck into a stairwell where the stairs all lead upwards. I run, jump, three steps at a time, going up. I climb and climb until I reach the highest floor, completely out of breath.
There’s another corridor. At the end of it, daylight is rushing in. I stumble towards it. There’s a sofa beside a coffee table covered in magazines. I fall onto the sofa. The blood is
pounding at my temples. My back is soaked with sweat.
    ‘Are you all right?’ a woman’s voice asks.
    When I look up again, I’m lying, fully dressed, on a hospital bed beside a window. I have a broad view of a park, fields, a motorway. In the distance I see two steeples. Abcoude. And I
think about my father and suddenly I know for sure that I’ll never tell him what’s wrong with me. It would make me feel as inferior as I did when I was a boy and cringed every time he
said, ‘Isn’t it about time