“Yes,” Willem agreed, “this process looks very similar but here, of course, instead of growing food, they are creating new land.”
“It must be very interesting to you and the person you work for—the Dutch know more about this than anyone!” Bo proffered. The thin edge of a conversational wedge that was aimed at getting Willem to divulge more about the queen. Did the Chinese know that she was in Texas? Did they merely suspect it? Or did they know nothing?
“Oh, I don’t think you give your own country due credit,” Willem returned. “Earlier I was driving along the river where it runs between the levees, higher than the surrounding land. It put me in mind of the Yellow River, which as you know has looked very much the same since long before Dutch people began constructing their sad little windmills.”
Bo nodded. “Both a flood control measure, and a weapon.” He uttered a phrase that meant something like “water instead of soldiers.”
Willem recognized it. “You might be interested to know that the Dutch used exactly the same tactic. William the Silent, Prince of Orange—yes, the ancestor of the person I have the honor of working for—opened the dikes in 1574 as a way to rout an invading Spanish army. The gambit succeeded. Every year it is celebrated with a festival in Leiden.”
“Your adopted hometown,” Bo added, quite unnecessarily. “So you are a student of history. You’ll know that whenever those Yellow
River levees broke, it was a great catastrophe. The emperor was viewed as having lost the Mandate of Heaven.”
Bo said this with all due wryness, as if to emphasize that he was not some pedantic blinkered scholarly idiot. Willem chuckled. “If you are trying to draw some analogy to the person I work for, then let’s keep in mind that her mandate comes from the people. In the Netherlands no one believes in heaven anymore.”
“In Amsterdam, The Hague, perhaps that’s true,” Bo returned. “Do you ever go into the east, though?”
“You mean, the east of the Netherlands!?”
“Yes.”
“It is a twenty-minute drive from those cities you mentioned!”
“You are busy. Twenty minutes must seem an age.” Bo took a sip of his tea. “Those clodhoppers in—what’s it called? Brabant?”
“North Brabant, yes.”
“They are still religious, I’m told. Conservative. Even reactionary.”
Willem didn’t like where this was going, but there was no getting around the fact that just a few hours earlier he had been standing in the hallway of his father’s house looking at a shrine, dedicated to everything Bo was alluding to.
“In my experience, people all over the world think the same way,” Willem said. “If there is a disaster, it means that whoever is in power has lost the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ and must be gotten rid of.”
Bo said, “Western historians write about this phenomenon in China in a patronizing style, because they believe that the West—”
“Has evolved beyond all that superstitious nonsense. I know.”
“Don’t you think that that proclivity for self-delusion makes Western leaders vulnerable?”
Willem shrugged. “You raise an interesting philosophical question of a sort that is amusing to ponder in one’s free time. My job is to remind a powerless constitutional monarch to send handwritten thank-you notes to schoolchildren and to see to it that the name cards are properly arranged on the tables at state dinners.”
Bo looked away, apparently thinking that what Willem had just said was so stupid that it simply couldn’t be responded to without
a breach in etiquette. But it would always be thus. The Chinese were either too obtuse to understand constitutional monarchy—preferring to see it as a paper-thin cover story to conceal what was really going on—or else they were so infinitely more sophisticated that they understood the realities in ways that the self-flattering Europeans never could. Either way, the Chinese seemed to have much firmer opinions on the matter than Willem did. Willem was willing to entertain the hypothesis that Queen Frederika actually could wield serious temporal power, but it seemed too far-fetched, too at odds with the unassailable constitutional bedrock of the Grondwet to which he’d sworn himself.
“You are—what’s the English word? Underemployed. A man of your experience and erudition—arranging place cards? Really?”
Since that sounded like the germ of a job offer—which could only lead in the direction of incalculable disaster—Willem said, “I couldn’t be happier in my role.”