They looked at each other in surprise.
"At the same moment!" cried Max.
Both of them, the driver and the hitchhiker, had the feeling that they had discovered the reason for their shock of recognition, as though they had never not known each other. They shook hands solemnly.
"Only death can part us," said Max in the exalted tone that he associated with Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. At the same moment he also thought of the blood-brotherhood ceremony in the Red Indian books: each cut his finger, after which the wounds were pressed together. It was on the tip of his tongue to say: "Actually, we ought to. ." — but he did not.
They were back at his house on the imposing Vossiusstraat and arranged to phone each other the following day. Max offered to drive him home in the car, but Onno refused. As he took out his keys, Max looked after him in case he turned around and waved, but he did not. As he looked for the door key in his bunch of keys, he saw the circles and crosses in the palm of his left hand.
4. Friendship
In the next few months, when their work did not take them abroad, not a day went by without their seeing each other. Max had never met anyone like Onno, Onno had never met anyone like Max — as a self-proclaimed pair of twins, they did not cease to delight in each other. Each felt inferior to the other; each was at once both servant and master, which created a kind of infinity, like two mirrors reflecting each other. Because of their inseparable appearance in the street, in cafes and pubs, people sometimes talked of them as "homo-intellectuals." They were surrounded by misunderstanding and suspicion, because it was threatening: two grown men, who were obviously not gay and seemed to have nothing in common, and who in some mysterious way, precisely because of that, merged almost symbiotically with each other.
If they had been gay, there would have been no problem — they would simply have been a loving couple. But as it was, they confronted everyone with a deficiency in themselves, sometimes provoking an unpleasant mixture of jealousy and aggression, which saw one as an eternal student, who simply could not give up playing student pranks, and the other as an arrogant prick. In order to neutralize this, they fully admitted it and even played it up for good measure. They would discuss the question of what was going on between them only when it was no longer there, when all the days had merged in their memories into one eternally unforgettable day. Even the Greeks, Onno knew, who had laid the foundation of Western culture, had no word for culture. The words only appeared when the thing itself had gone.
Naturally, each of them had a circle of friends, who now also got to know each other, but at the same time Max and Onno became estranged from them, drifted away, leaving them behind in a joint shaking of heads. They generally met at the reading table in Cafe Americain, beneath the art nouveau lamps and surrounded by murals depicting scenes from Wagner operas. Max had often already eaten in Leiden, or had made himself a quick snack at home, while Onno was still having his dinner — that is, there was always a plate with four or five meat rissoles on it next to his newspaper, which he washed down with four or five glasses of milk. He never ate vegetables. "Salad is for rabbits," he was wont to say. He seemed to be totally out of proportion with his body, and perhaps that was why he was so impressively present; his meals were as slovenly as his unbrushed teeth and his clothes. Once, when his face was dripping with sweat, Max said, "Onno, you've got a temperature," — at which Onno wiped his forehead, looked at his gleaming palm, and said, "Christ, you're right!" — only to forget all about it the following instant.
Max, on the other hand, sat regularly in the waiting room of his Communist GP, staring at a large photo of striking Belgian workers in berets, eye to eye with a heavily armed platoon of militia, while there was never anything wrong with him, apart from the occasional dose of clap; and however great his imagined fear of death, his tie never clashed with his socks.
Once, Max started talking about death, which immediately irritated Onno beyond measure.
"Talking about death is a waste of time. As long as you're alive you're not dead, and when you're no longer alive you're only dead for other people."
But that was not what Max meant. He said that on the one hand he was convinced that one day he would die of a heart attack in dreadful pain, but on the other hand he might be immortal. A person could determine his life expectancy by adding the ages at which his parents had died and dividing by two. But both his parents had died violent deaths; if that had not happened, they might have been immortal. And because, according to Cantor, infinity plus infinity divided by two was also infinity, the proposition was proved.
"An extremely embarrassing logical error for a natural scientist," said Onno. "In reality it follows that you have a fifty percent chance of being murdered and a fifty percent chance of being executed, which means that it's a hundred percent certain that you'll die a violent death."
When the rissoles were finished they walked into town, where the wintry cold had disappeared from the air. Sometimes they went to the movies first, to see a James Bond film, or the latest Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a computer called HAL took control of a spaceship. When they emerged into the street — in the washed-out state in which reality grates on one like a gray file — Onno asked why Max thought the computer was called HAL. Because of the association with "hell," suggested Max. Damn, Onno hadn't thought of that. But suppose Max counted one letter on from H,A, and L in the alphabet.
"I," said Max, "B,M. IBM!" he cried. "I take my hat off to you, sir!"
Onno assumed a modest expression. "It's a gift."
While they were drinking a cup of coffee somewhere, with Little Richard wailing from the jukebox, Onno maintained that his eye for that kind of thing was a result of his Calvinist upbringing: it came from reading the Bible, "containing all the Holy Scripture." For him, truth could only reside in what was written, and could not, for example, be seen through a telescope. That higher form of reading was something that the Calvinists shared with the Jews; Catholics never read the Bible, and usually didn't have one— Catholics were illiterates. Pictures and photographs; that was what they understood.
Moreover, the Calvinists were more concerned with the Old Testament than with the New Testament, like the Catholics — who in a supreme display of primitivism actually sang the text. When the Jews were persecuted, Calvinists therefore joined the resistance much more often than Catholics, who were anyway the inventors of anti-Semitism — as often as the Communists, who also derived truth from a book, namely that of Marx, another Jew.
It was as though Max could see his friend's trains of thought sweeping through the air like a lion tamer's long whip, and they inspired him in turn.
"Have you ever noticed," he said, "that the area of Protestantism coincides with the area covered by polar ice in the Ice Age? In the Netherlands the border runs right through the middle: where there was ice is the territory of the Protestants, as far as Hammerfest, and where grass grew is Catholic, as far as Palermo. And where did Calvin live?" he suddenly thought. "In Switzerland! The only Protestant country in the Catholic area when there are still glaciers!"
"I'm shivering," said Onno. "There are shivers running down my spine. Only someone who is not Dutch could make such a shameful discovery. Get thee behind me, Satan! You don't belong here at all."