The Discovery of Heaven (20 page)

Onno opened his legs and crossed them again. "I've been setting my indelible stamp on domestic politics. We're in the process of designing a strategy to obtain recognition of the GDR at the party conference. That will please you."

"Onno .. . I'm not sure if you understand me properly. Do you ever read anything except the newspaper these days?"

"Yes, I know how you feel about it. It's not about the GDR but about the Netherlands."

"Why don't you do something useless, as befits a gentleman."

Onno nodded. "We shall see which of us turns out to be more of a gentleman." After a short silence, he added, "I'm glad you're back, so that besides the socially relevant drivel of my comrades in the labor movement I can also enjoy your shameful views." He took hold of his glass of rum-and-Coke and began twisting uncomfortably in his chair. "But I have a dreadful confession to make." When he saw that Max was alarmed, and expected something really awful, he said, "Something very nice has happened between Ada and me."

In the days when chemistry was still an adventurous science, it sometimes happened that adding one liquid to another led to a completely incomprehensible fizzing, change of color, and rise in temperature: this was how Onno's news entered Max's mind. It was as though he saw Ada's figure appearing physically, moving diagonally from him to Onno, like a chess piece, the black queen.

"What a surprise, Onno. Since when?"

"A couple of weeks."

Max couldn't make head or tail of it. He was happy for Onno, but still couldn't imagine the two of them together, in bed, and he didn't want to imagine them, but at the same time he saw her naked body before him as he looked at Onno.

"Congratulations. You couldn't have done better."

"Of course I should have asked you for her hand, but you weren't there."

"No. You'd sent me away."

"Hold on, you don't think—"

"Of course not."

Max laughed. He wanted to ask how and where they had met, but it was no concern of his. It was no longer his business. If Onno didn't tell him of his own accord, he didn't want to know. Only now did it sink in that it was all finally over between him and Ada—whereas it had been over for a long time. Neither of them had gotten in touch, but the question whether he had let something slip through his fingers must no longer be asked; if that was the case, then it was his own fault, and in any case it was irrevocable.

Onno put his glass down, sank to his knees and folded his hands. "Do I have your blessing?"

"Isn't it a primary requirement of courtesy among civilized people that you should offer your woman to your friends?"

Onno hoisted himself back into his chair. "That's true. Thank you very much. Consider it a repayment for Helga."

Within a few weeks—the summer was coming to an end—Max had actually forgotten that the situation had ever been any different. The first time he saw Ada again was after a performance of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. She had gotten her job, and the season was opening with Bruckner's Seventh. He sat next to Onno in the full auditorium on his best behavior and surveyed the colossal organ, which looked like the Torah shrine in an Oriental synagogue. The adagio with its merciless cello passage churned him up. He never went to concerts, it affected him too deeply, and now it was even more intense than usual—not only, because Ada was playing, but particularly because since his journey he had become more vulnerable, like someone after an operation.

Meanwhile Onno tried to pass the time by reading the program notes: the little Austrian had incorporated his emotion at Wagner's death in the adagio—and Onno thought: adagio, Ada-Gio, Giove, Iuppiter, Zeus, Ada, and the Supreme God. There she was on the platform, on the right, subject to the will of the conductor.

In order to get closer to music, he had studied a textbook on harmony— during meetings at the Amsterdam party headquarters, in pubs, and in back rooms in hotels in the woods; no longer did anyone have to explain to him what "C sharp minor" meant, but that had not helped. When another conspirator asked him why he was not listening, he had said without looking up from the book, "I don't read with my ears,"—whereupon the stern questioner was embarrassingly downgraded in the hierarchy by the laughter of the others, perhaps for the rest of his political career. Onno had, however, discovered that he had perfect pitch.

After the concert they went to a pub behind the Concertgebouw furnished with secondhand items, as crowded as a tram in the rush hour: there were grubby local artists, divorcées, students, concert-goers, orchestral musicians in tails and evening dresses. When Ada came in and fought her way over to them, Max and she had greeted each other cheerfully, with a sort of tense relaxation, kisses on the cheek, as though things had never been any different, and without alluding to the change, even with a glance.

"Great to see you again! Had a good trip?"

"Very unusual."

"What did you think of this evening?"

"Marvelous. Congratulations on getting the job."

"Marijke!" she called to a colleague. "Do you want a half of Pils too?"

He scarcely recognized her. She talked and laughed, buttonholed other people, introduced them, disappeared into the throng with them, appeared again, hung on Onno's arm, made dates, waved at people leaving, and seemed perfectly happy. What he did not know was that he had become a different person for her too, since Onno had told her about him.

"Are you coming with us?" asked Onno, when they had paid their bill.

"I'll stick around for a bit," he said, with a glance in the direction of Marijke. "Safe home."

Just as in the past Onno had never seen Ada without Max, Max never met her again without Onno—but they did not see each other that often. More and more of Onno's time was taken up with the party, particularly in the evenings; in general, politics tended to ruin marriages and relationships— although there were some people who went into politics precisely so as not to have to stay at home—but Ada too had her rehearsals and performances. Max himself now had to go to Dwingeloo every week.

Increasingly often, he woke up in the mornings with a dull sense of unease, which was new to him. In fact it began before he was properly awake, while he was still half asleep: a dark pessimism, particularly about his work. Doubts about the soundness of his research program, telling arguments that he could no longer remember when he had opened his eyes; but the gloom remained hanging there like the stench after a fire. Whereas he used to jump out of bed after a few seconds to turn on the shower, now he lay there for minutes on end, wondering what was wrong. He thought of his work, but there was nothing wrong with it—there was something wrong with him. In the course of the morning the gloom lifted, but when he had to go to the east of the country and sat in his car for an hour and a half, the depression sometimes returned.

It was not a real depression, requiring expert advice and pills, because he suspected that it had a demonstrable cause: his journey. What had been dominant in his memory for the first few weeks—baroque palaces and cathedrals on hills, statues of saints on Prague bridges, the Vienna Hofburg, gypsy music in the evenings in art nouveau Budapest hotels, or in shabby cafes with names like Fixmatros—had increasingly given way to the immobile expanse of Gehenna at the center of its satanic triangle. That fathomless, monstrous thing had penetrated further into him than he had thought— perhaps he should not have listened to Onno. Perhaps he needed a vacation to recover from his vacation. He considered ten days in the Canary Islands—it would do him good—but he knew that he wouldn't call his travel agent to fix it up.

Ada soon moved in with Onno. The first-floor neighbors had left, and he had rented their floor as well, so he suddenly had a real house, with its own kitchen and a front door. The basement remained his study, Ada was given the new front room, the back room became their bedroom, and a purpose would be found for the little side room.

"That's where our child will go!" Onno had exclaimed. "The dreadful brat that will keep me awake with its disgusting howling, so I shall unfortunately be obliged to smother it under a pillow."

However, he had no wish for a child, and neither had Ada. After she had spent a few weeks scrubbing, polishing, emulsioning, and painting, watched approvingly by Onno, she simply wanted to get the moving van over from Leiden, but that was too much for Onno. He felt that they should talk to her parents first. Not that it would make any difference, but she was after all their only child, and it wasn't right for him simply to whisk her off without a word. He had never even met them!

"Imagine being a mother and having your child suddenly take off into the blue!"

"And what about your parents, then? Shouldn't you introduce me to your parents? I'm whisking you off too, aren't I?"

"Good God, do you know what you're saying? They'll have a fit when they hear that I'm going to live with someone without getting married. I didn't introduce Helga to them, either. I always have to do everything behind their backs."

For Ada it was all unnecessary. Onno had wanted to meet her parents before—he was curious about them, particularly about her mother: according to him, you must always look at the mother of a child if you wanted to know how the child was going to turn out. It was that remark particularly which had led to her avoiding a meeting: the thought of becoming just like her mother filled Ada with revulsion. She hated her mother and was ashamed of her father, who always said the wrong things. On the other hand, she appreciated the fact that Onno wanted to do this. All told, Max had asked about her parents once; to him they were superfluous, as she was herself in the last resort. With Onno she did not have that feeling of superfluousness; on the contrary, she had the feeling that he could no longer do without her, although he was not the kind of man to say so. The question whether she felt the same was one she did not allow herself to ask.

She was able to avoid his going to Leiden and seeing her parents' petit bourgeois living quarters: the following Monday afternoon, when the bookshop was closed, they came to Amsterdam. In the Kerkstraat, Oswald and Sophia Brons shook hands with Onno with the awkwardness of people applying for a job. Brons struck him as a good sort, but he was immediately a little wary of her mother: she looked at him as though he were a thing, a chair in the wrong place. Next they surveyed the empty rooms, and Onno saw that she gave everything the same look: it was simply her look. In the basement, transformed from a wilderness into a reasonably well maintained garden, her father pointed to the tables, still hanging in their old place, and asked: "Don't you do astronomy anymore, Onno?"

"You're mixing up everything again, Dad," said Ada in annoyance. "That was Max, my last boyfriend."

"You haven't kept us very well informed, Ada," said her mother, glancing at Onno. "We had to drag every word out of you."

"Oh, young people these days." Onno nodded. "They do just what they like."

"How old are you yourself?" inquired Brons.

"What a mean question. I estimate that I am the same number of years older than her as you are than me, Mr. Brons."

"I'll work it out when I get home. But you're still being very formal with me."

"But I can't be informal with my father-in-law! That would undermine the whole social system."

Her mother looked at him from beneath Ada's sharply defined eyebrows. "Do you plan to get married?"

"Mama, please ..."

"Why can't I ask?"

"Because I don't like it. As though marriage were the greatest thing on earth. When we decide to get married, you'll hear; for the time being we are not intending to, no."

They arranged to come back when everything was finished, and at the suggestion of Sophia Brons they went for tea at the Bijenkorf department store, where she wanted to do some shopping.

While Ada and her mother lost themselves in the perfumed, mirrored mazes of the store, Onno and Oswald Brons found a table in the cafeteria by the window. Feeling awkward and surrounded by women, they looked out over the crowded Dam. The wide steps of the national monument, an erect pylon of pre-Freudian innocence, were covered with hippies in multicolored garb sitting or lying about, guarded by strolling policemen in black uniforms and two mounted gendarmes. Brons said that all that lolling about down there was a desecration of those who had lost their lives, while Onno made a gesture that indicated there was something to be said for that view, but on the other hand. . .. On the other side of the square, beneath the facade of the royal palace—which Onno and his political allies believed should become the town hall again, as it had been at the time of the Dutch Republic— children were sitting in the street watching a performance of a puppet show.

To Onno's alarm Brons put a hand on his arm. "Onno, look at me. Promise me that you'll look after Ada."

"I promise," said Onno in an ironically solemn tone, as though taking an oath.

He wanted to pull his arm away, but that was out of the question, of course. The hand remained there, so that a little later he felt its warmth. He looked uncomfortably into the faithful eyes of the bookseller. It was clear that he was trying to say something but that it was difficult for him to begin; perhaps he'd prepared it and was now trying to remember.

"Ada is a very difficult girl," he said. "For herself especially. As a child she was very withdrawn; she never really had any girlfriends. She wanted to, but for some reason she always provoked aggression, without consciously trying to. At school there were constant plots against her by other girls. They talked about her behind her back, ridiculous stories were spread about her."

"Why was that?"

"No idea. Until she was about sixteen or seventeen she was in a kind of sleepy cocoon. She looked at you in a way that made you wonder whether she could really see you. And she wasn't just bad at school—we had the feeling that she didn't understand what study really meant. She went from one school to another, but it made no difference."

He took his hand away and waited for a moment until the tea had been put down in front of them. Where on earth did that asymmetry come from? Onno wondered. Why was the love of parents for their child axiomatic and the reverse not? Why should "Honor thy father and thy mother" be a commandment, and "Honor thy child" not?