Human nature is so conservative that in someone else's place one always tends to sit where one sat for the first time. So Onno sank into the olive-green chesterfield armchair, had a bottle of Bacardi and a bottle of cola set down next to him, together with a dish of ice cubes, and Max went to his "shelf of honor" on the mantelpiece. Between two bronze book ends, laurel-crowned satyrs with cloven hooves, were the ten or fifteen books that at a certain moment represented the sublime for him. Now and then there were changes, but what was always there was his father's copy of The Ego and His Own, signed "Wolfgang Delius — Im Felde 1917," which his foster parents had been given with a few items of clothing from Scheveningen prison in 1946; all his other possessions had been confiscated and had disappeared. Kafka's Preparations for a Country Wedding, containing his "Letter to My Father," which had never been sent, was on the shelf of honor.
The two of them there in the middle of the night — the three of them in fact, with their fathers! For hours, stopping only for their own commentary, Max read the letter aloud with no trace of an accent. Kafka, who was stripping his soul bare, wanted to get married, could not get married in the shadow of his sire, who at an early age had announced that he would "tear him apart like a fish." Each time some terrible passage like that came, Onno sank farther into his chair as though hit by a salvo of bullets, until he finally lay shaking euphorically on the ground. Max had finally gotten up with the book and shot the words vertically down at him from a height, while Onno cried:
"Mercy! Father! Not the worst! Yes, I will even make the sacrificium intellects for you, yes, I will worship you forever, like the lowliest creature, I, worm that I am, not worthy to kiss your feet, crush me, that your just will may be done!"
Max slammed the book shut and pressed it against his stomach as he laughed. They were unique, immortal! No one would ever understand, but it was not necessary for anyone to understand. Onno hoisted himself back in his chair, refilled his glass to the brim half with rum and half with cola. Max said that the letter was the key to Kafka's whole work. The Trial could only be understood via this piece. Josef K.!
"You were brilliant enough to trace the origin of HAL, but I've discovered where that 'Josef comes from. 'K.' stands for Kafka, of course, and the man who comes into his room at the very beginning of the novel to arrest him is called Franz like Kafka himself, but why is K. himself called Josef, and not Max, after his friend Brod, or Moritz?"
"Franz Joseph!" cried Onno.
"That's it. The arresting officer, the man arrested, and Kafka himself are the trinity of Seine kaiserliche und königliche, apostolische Majestat, His Imperial, Royal, and Apostolic Majesty.
The night advanced, the earth rotated on its axis, and they talked about the problem of why a flag in the wind, a stiff current of air, flutters and why the waves in Max's hair did not move as his hair grew but remained in the same place, just the opposite of the sea, where the waves moved horizontally but the water remained in the same place; and about the war, about Adolf Hitler, whom they called the "A.H.-Erlebnis," and about the twin daughters of Max Planck, the founder of quantum mechanics: the first gave birth to a daughter and died in childbirth; the other looked after the child and married the widower, became pregnant herself two years later, and also died in childbirth. Added to that, one son died in the First World War, while his second son was shot in the Second. Planck's constant!
Later they might perhaps regret not having kept any record of those days; but if they had taken notes it would not have been like it was. Onno might not then have told him what he told him as morning approached: that his mother had hoped that he would be a girl. He was an afterthought, and until the age of four he had walked around with long curls, in pink dresses with ribbons. But he had systematically destroyed the evidence; not only were there no more delightful snapshots to be found in his parents' photo album, the albums of his brothers and sisters had also been purged on devious pretexts.
Max looked at him and nodded. "Now tell me," he said, "what you will really never tell anyone."
However much Onno had had to drink, there was always a point where he was sober. He put down his glass.
"Dreadful! As a student I was living in a rented room, where I was trying to get the philosophy of the concept of law into my head. Next to me there was an unmarried mother, a girl with a baby that cried nonstop. God knows what got into me. One winter evening I ran into her place, at the end of my tether. She was sitting at the table sewing baby clothes; the baby was screaming — for a father, of course! There was one of those old-fashioned coal stoves, boiling hot. I snatched the brat from its cradle, held it up by its ankle with my right hand, grabbed the poker with my left hand, raised the lid of the stove, and held the child above the glow with its head down. I said nothing, I just looked at her. She was frozen. She looked like a photo of herself. The baby, too, was silent for the first time. Terrible! I ought to have been arrested for that and thrown into prison."
He fixed Max's gaze.
"Well," he said. "Now you know. But you didn't just ask me this for no good reason, because you knew I was going to ask you in turn. You asked me because you want to tell me something yourself that you would never tell anyone. Get it off your chest."
Max nodded. "When my foster father was on his deathbed last year," he said rather flatly, "I got a letter from my foster mother. I only saw them rarely by then, because it seems you never forgive someone when they've been good to you. She wrote that he wanted to see me one last time before he died."
"That's enough," said Onno.
The alcohol had worn off instantly. After a while Max stood up and replaced the Kafka book. He stood there aimlessly, and in a sudden impulse lit a candle that was on the dining table. He turned around, looked at his watch, and said, "It's seven o'clock. I'm hungry. Let's have breakfast in the American Hotel — and come to that, I'm feeling in need of a romantic escapade. Perhaps there'll be an early bird there — you never know."
5. Coming Out to Play
Siamese twins derived their name from the brothers Eng and Chang, who in the previous century had lived to the age of sixty-three: in order to amuse Onno, Max had looked it up in his encyclopedia. Since they were joined at the chest, they were known in medical terminology as a thoracopagus; Onno's immediate reaction was to say that since they had grown together through their inner natures, they were a mentopagus.
As a result, they started to change each other's lives.
At the end of March, Onno was again spending a few days at his girlfriend's place; as always he had taken his dirty laundry with him. She lived above a bric-a-brac shop, which was usually shut, on a quiet side canal, in a narrow seventeenth-century house with a gable, the Unicorn. He had met her a few years before at the Art Historical Institute, where she was a librarian. He had fallen in love with her at once, because she looked just as he imagined a librarian should and as they seldom did: tall, slim, with hair up, and a severe Dutch face, like the lady governor of an orphanage in a painting by Frans Hals, only younger.