"Mrs. Hartman," he called to Helga, putting on a whining boy's voice. "Can Onno come out to play?"
Onno and Helga looked at each other again, now along the front of the house. Disaster. They both realized at the same moment that this was the end — that in his innocence Max had suddenly laid bare the heart of their relationship.
A quarter of an hour later Onno finally came out.
"Did you have to do your homework first?" asked Max.
Onno did not look at him. He walked beside him in a rage. "The things you do to your friends… It's over. All your fault. I left the front door key on the table."
"My fault? What have I done?"
"It's none of your business. I'm not talking to you anymore." He stopped and looked at him with disgust. "Do you know what's wrong with you?" When Max looked back at him with a puzzled expression, he repeated: "Don't you know?"
"Not that I'm aware of."
"Don't you know? Then I'll tell you: I don't like your intuition. I don't like your intuition one little bit."
Max had no idea what he was getting at; he knew almost nothing about Onno's relationship with Helga. They never talked about women, or about cars, money, or sports; at most, about woman as such, as Onno was in the habit of putting it — and never about their own girlfriends. Max did not talk about his, because he did not allow himself time to get to know them— and because Onno would have found it disgusting to listen to. And Onno did not talk about Helga, because that was not done. The few times that Max had met her, they had said scarcely a word to each other — not because he did not like her, but he saw her as belonging to a different world. She would never have caught his eye, even if he had sat opposite her in a train for an hour; and through her he realized how completely different he was from Onno. He couldn't imagine a woman that they would both be interested in.
He had never been in Helga's flat, and Onno never invited Max to his place on the Kerkstraat. He was in the habit of saying that mankind was divided into guests and hosts and that he simply belonged by nature to the first category; besides, it was cheaper. That was what he said, but that was not the reason. Taking Max to his parents' house and introducing him to his family, to his father, was just as inconceivable, although people in The Hague had long since heard, with raised eyebrows, about his strange friendship with Delius's son, and of course they would have liked an opportunity to size him up. No, the reason was that in himself too there was an area where he never admitted anyone — not only not Max, not only not Helga, but not even himself. There, in an inhospitable region, was a hermit's cave, a Carthusian monk's cell, where a leaden silence reigned — something that seemed to wait threateningly for him, that he would rather not think about and that he had never talked to Max about.
He walked along the canal, shoulders drooping, whining like a broken man. "What am I to do now? You've wrecked my life. I don't have a home. You have a home. I have just a humble shelter against the rain and the wind. Who'll do my laundry now? You've ruined me once and for all, and of course that was your intention all along. I'll wind up in the gutter, with unkempt hair and a beard and a crazed look in my eyes, begging for alms. What did you actually come for, you bastard?"
"I never come for any special reason," said Max, "but I have great news. I've just been to the dentist's and in the waiting room there was an old issue of Time. There's an important article about us in it."
"About us," Onno repeated. "In Time."
Max opened the magazine and pointed to a commemorative piece on the Reichstag fire, which had taken place on February 27 thirty-four years before.
"What about it?"
"Good God! Wasn't I born on November 27, 1933, and weren't you supposed to have been born on November 27 too? Didn't we come to the conclusion that we're nonidentical twins! Don't you understand? Nine months!
We were conceived during the Reichstag fire! While Van der Lubbe was setting fire to the curtains in Berlin, our parents were climbing on top of each other in The Hague and Amsterdam!"
Onno stopped, stretched his whole body, and spread his arms in triumph, while a broad smile passed across his face. "Death, where is thy sting?" he cried. "I can face life again!"
6. Another Meeting
Two months later — their delight in their friendship showed no signs of waning — Onno had a meeting with a colleague from Jerusalem in the Natural History Museum in Leiden. He had gotten no further with the deciphering, and the Israeli was as curious about his progress as he was about the Israeli's. When he emerged from the colossal building later that afternoon, Max was waiting for him outside in the sun, sitting in a strange little public garden next to the adjacent Science Museum, with his eyes closed and his head thrown back. They had agreed that Max would show him the observatory.
Onno expressed his contempt for blockheads who sunbathed — his own white Calvinist flesh had never seen the sun — but Max said it was part of his job: after all the sun was a star. They went into town for a cup of coffee first. Onno told him with relief that Landau, his most important rival, had obviously not made any progress either; so that threat had been removed for the moment. They reacted differently to the atmosphere of the little town with its low houses than to Amsterdam; they felt something like tenderness, such as someone from London or New York must feel in Amsterdam.
"We're walking this way now," said Max, "and while I was waiting for you, I was reminded of two other men who also walked this way."
"Everyone has walked this way. Even Einstein."
"With Lorentz, yes, and with De Sitter, but I don't mean him."
He meant Freud and Mahler. As far as he remembered from biographies, it had been in the summer of 1908. Freud was staying in a boarding-house in Noordwijk, from where he was about to travel on to Italy, when a telegram arrived from Vienna: Mahler had problems. He was suffering from impotence and could no longer make love to his wife, Alma — who was later also to turn the heads of Franz Werfel, Walter Gropius, and Oskar Kokoschka. He needed immediate help. Mahler took the train to Leiden, where he met Freud in a hotel. They walked around the town for four hours, and Mahler was subjected to a sort of emergency analysis, which indeed seems to have had some effect.
A little girl ties a rope to a lamppost, starts turning the rope; a second girl moves her upper body forward and backward a couple of times in the same rhythm, jumps into the imaginary egg, and begins skipping. And as they walked along, Onno responded with the same suppleness to the anecdote.
"Well, well, Herr Obermusikdirekor, you are suffering from overpotency. In my psychoanalysis I have coined the term astronomical satyriasis for this. It is a disease that inspires the greatest possible disgust, even in specialists, despite their being familiar with the dark side of human nature."
"But what if I like it," whined Max. "Cure me, Herr Professor. I want to stop liking it. I want to be monogamous, like you, or impotent — whatever you are. I'll double your fee."
"The fact that you immediately bring up money points to an anal-erotic fixation, which conjures up scenes before my inner eye from which even Dante would shrink. Did I hear you say you like it? Surely it can't be true?"
"It is!"
"Occasionally, even experienced mountaineers are faced with precipices that force them to say, 'This is too much.' When I tell my friend Ferenczi about this, he'll say, 'You can convince me of lots of things, Sigi, but this is impossible.' "