Now and then she cleared up the basement where he lived like a hamster in its hutch. From time to time he earned a little by writing articles and giving lectures, but it was not really necessary; he spent little and could survive on an allowance from his future inheritance. During a family dinner a six-year-old nephew had once asked him: "Uncle Onno, what are you going to be when you grow up?" After the laughter had died down, everyone had looked at him expectantly, and he had said, "That question is too good to spoil with an answer." If he had wanted, he could long ago have become a lecturer at some university at home or abroad; he repeatedly received offers, but had no wish to give up his way of life. He saw himself as an eighteenth-century gentleman scholar; he regarded the didactic industry as vulgar. In his view, professors were rather like swimming coaches: and who had ever seen a swimming coach in the water? No one had ever seen such a thing, because swimming coaches couldn't swim at all, they simply talked a lot at the poolside; but he was someone who plowed his way through the water with a relentless butterfly stroke.
It began one sunny Saturday afternoon, after spring had appeared from the wings and done the splits with great panache; the windows had been opened and balmy air filled the room. Onno had taken some papers to the Unicorn, but his work had not been going well for weeks. His great body lay on the sofa like a stranded ship.
"That wretched Pernier," he groaned. "I wish he had let the bloody thing smash to smithereens back in 1908. Yes, but then he would have glued the fragments together again. There's a whole people hidden in there somewhere, with helmets and axes, but it just stays put and won't budge."
Helga took off her reading glasses and looked up from her book. "Why don't you let it rest for a while? Start something else."
"Do you know what you are saying, woman? I know precisely which people are working on this, and they don't start anything else. What are you reading?"
As though she didn't know, she looked at the cover. "Progress in Library Science."
"That book, dear Helga, is printed, isn't it? And all the books it is talking about are also printed, aren't they? Everyone thinks that printing with separate stamps began in China a thousand years ago, but do you know who invented it?" He waved a photo of the Phaistos disc.
"The people who made this. Four thousand years ago! This has been stamped! And if they were such preliterate geniuses, then there'll be something very interesting here, won't there? And I must be the first person to read it, mustn't I? The wretched thing is that we only have this specimen, and of course you don't make stamps for only one tablet. There must be lots more, but nothing else has been found in Crete. For that matter, there's nothing Minoan about them. Look — this daft sedan chair. What sort of thing is it? What does it mean? We must look elsewhere, but where? In what family?"
"But don't you have anything to go on then?"
"I'll explain to you the position I'm in." He grabbed a newspaper off the floor and made a scribble in the margin. "Write the following number: eighty-five billion, four hundred and ninety-one million, seven hundred and sixty-one thousand and thirty-two." When she had noted this down on the sheet of paper she was using for notes, he continued: "Now imagine an aboriginal cryptographer in the Australian bush, who doesn't even know that they're figures; all he sees is eleven incomprehensible signs: 85491761032, all different except for the two 1 signs. What can he deduce from that? Nothing at all. That's the point I'm at now. Imagine he has the brilliant idea that they are figures. How then is he supposed to discover that they are the alphabetically ordered numerals from 'one' to 'ten'? Beginning with the e of 'eight,' and ending with the t of 'two.' How is he supposed to discover that the numeral 'eight' is the name of the figure 8? He doesn't even know the decimal system, let alone English. How on earth is he supposed to discover that he is looking at Dr. Quist's unforgettable Narration from A to Z? What is the key? And yet he is determined to find out!" "What's that?" he suddenly shouted loudly at the photo. "Hello! Is anybody there? I can't hear you! The line is so bad!" He threw the photo away and put his hands over his face. "I'm completely blocked."
Helga closed her book, putting her forefinger between the pages.
"And why are you so blocked?" she asked in a sing-song tone.
"I don't know," he said with a feigned tearfulness. "I don't know. Perhaps you can only make a real discovery once in your life."
"Could it also be because of those sleepless nights with your new friend?"
The posturing disappeared from Onno's face. He sat up and looked at her. "You can't be serious."
"I'm perfectly serious. Do you realize how overwrought the whole thing is?"
"Helga!" he said in dismay. "What do you mean?"
"I don't know what you mean by that, all I know is that you've been completely blocked since you've known him. You've no idea how much you've changed recently."
"In what way?"
She put the book down and folded her arms. "If you ask me, you're thinking more of him than of your work. You only get home as I'm leaving for the institute. How does he manage it, by the way? Isn't he an astronomer? Doesn't he have to look at the stars at night?"
"I don't have to go to the museum in Heraklion to look at those symbols, do I? And I'm allowed to sleep in, aren't I?"
He got off the sofa and went over to the window. Of course he was thinking less about his work, but was that so bad? It stopped thinking from becoming fretting, and that was much more harmful to thought than not thinking. His exchange with Max was in a certain sense the "something else" that he had started on. She was jealous, of course. "You're not jealous by any chance?"
"I want the best for you."
He sighed deeply and turned around. "Listen. What there is between Max and me can never exist between you and me; and what there is between you and me can never exist between me and Max. That's as clear as crystal, we don't have to waste words on it. To be honest, I think we've already wasted too many words on it."
She got up, took a few steps, stopped and said, "Onno, be careful."
"What in heaven's name do I have to be careful of?" he asked in amazement.
She made a helpless gesture. "I don't know."
"Aha," he said, and went over to her. "Woman's intuition." He hugged her clumsily. "Sorry about that. Women have everything — brains, feeling, willpower — but only men have intuition. That's why there's no female creation of any importance, and that isn't because they've always been confined to the kitchen, because even the best cooks are men. One is forced reluctantly to accept the fact. But they can do one thing that men can't do, and that is give birth to men. That's more than enough." She freed herself from the hug.
"Why do you start waffling on the moment I try to talk to you?"
"You know what Napoleon said, don't you? All his wars were a bagatelle compared with the war that will break out one day between men and women. Therefore I now swear a sacred oath, that when it comes to that I will be the first traitor to my sex, although I know that I will pay dearly for it in the long run."
"All right, Onno. That's enough. You're impossible." She pushed the loose strands of hair back under the hairpins with both hands. "Shall we go to the Vondelpark?"
At that moment there was a shout from outside: "Yoohoo, Onno!"
They glanced at each other and each leaned out of a different window. With his hands in his pockets and a magazine under his arm, Max was leaning against a telephone box by the side of the canal.