"But I'm possible!"
"The fact that you are possible is certainly the ultimate mysterium tremendum ac fascinans. I have experienced a lot in the course of my practice — Little Hans, the Wolfman, all complete lunatics — but a phenomenon like you robs me of my last vestige of faith in mankind. I conclude from your revolting way of life that in your Sexualhysterie you would actually like to mount every woman that ever was but that your lewd priapic frenzy finds itself limited to the living. Those from the past have escaped your extraordinary appetite and those from the future will escape it. What you would prefer would be to possess every woman in space and time in one fell swoop, in the shape of the supreme woman: the primeval woman. Am I right in assuming, mein Lieber, that your mother's first name is Eva?"
"Donnerwetter!" laughed Max. "That hit home! Now I understand why my Nervenarzt recommended that I consult you." He had once told Onno his mother's name, but the slant Onno had put on it gave him a slight jolt.
"I can see right through you, Herr Generalkapellmeister."
"But if Eve is my mother, verehrter Herr Doctor, am I Cain or Abel?"
Now Onno seemed to be thrown, but not for long. He stopped and shouted: "The Lord will not see your sacrifice, seven times accursed one! Only mine shall be seen!"
As he said this, with the aplomb of which only he had the secret, Max's eye lighted on a cover in the window of a secondhand bookshop. They were in a narrow street behind the Pieterskerk, which rose like the Jungfrau above the low houses of the old town center.
"Look at that. Talk of the devil." He pointed to a copy of Alma Mahler's Mein Leben.
"Come on," he said, putting his hand on the door handle. "I'll buy it for you, as a fee for your analysis."
In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what — apart from the eternal innocence of animals — offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer, or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pieta: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap. No, the image of hope is someone passing with a musical instrument in a case. It is not contributing to oppression, or to liberation either, but to something that continues below the surface: the boy on his bike, with a guitar in a faded mock-leather cover on his back; a girl with a dented violin case waiting for the tram. The hallowed halls beneath concert platforms where orchestral musicians open their cases everywhere on tables and chairs and on the floor and take out their shining and glittering instruments, after which imprints of those instruments remain: negative clarinets, flutes, bassoons with their mouthpieces and connections, hollowed out of soft reinforced velvet; and while the space gradually fills with the muted cacophony of all the instruments thronging around the A like sparrows and seagulls and starlings and thrushes around a hunk of bread, the lids of the cases of double basses, as tall as a man, are opened like the doors to another world..
Or the young woman, who after rehearsal lays her cello back in its case and closes the lid?
She takes the score that has fallen apart off the music stand and arranges the sheets until the title sheet is nicely on top: Pohádka (Fairy Tale). Spiky, almost Japanese, black hair in a ponytail frames her pale face in a pure square; swaying like silk, it follows every movement of her head, always coming to rest in mathematical order. Her face is severe, the lips a little pinched, like those of someone who knows what she wants. Her pianist, a thick-set man with lank ginger hair and an expressionless face, is sitting hunched forward with his arms folded on the grand piano, his chin resting on them, and looks at her deep-brown eyes below the dark, sharply outlined eyebrows.
"What are you thinking about, Ada?"
His studio, a large rectangular space in a formal school building, is filled with his collections: rows of old portable gramophones on shelving on the wall, dusty trumpets, violins, and other musical instruments, crowded bookshelves, heavy tables from the flea market with scores of old salon music, rows of 78 records in damaged paper sleeves, worn Persian carpets on the floor, and a pair of large brown leather armchairs for sitting in, picking up a book, and cutting off from the outside world.
"That the coda still isn't right. We simply can't perform like this."
She is younger than he is, only recently graduated from the conservatory, where he teaches piano; but it's obvious that she takes the lead in the duo they comprise. He is a good pianist, which interests him less than many other things, such as the archaeology of popular music.
He has set up a group for performing it, which people listen to with a hilarity quite out of keeping with the manner of the playing. For that matter he himself is incapable of laughter, or at least he never laughs; he has built his personality around the decision never to laugh. This is often laughed at, although people seldom cry about someone who never cries. He lacks the ambition to make his name as a pianist; the fact that he is performing with Ada has less to do with the music than with Ada, and she knows it, but she puts up with it. They have performed a few times, for student societies, but that has already produced a favorable review in the newspaper. She sees a great future for herself as a soloist, an international one, featuring cello concertos, famous conductors, concert platforms in Paris and Milan. Ros-tropovich! Pablo Casals!
"Shall we have a bite to eat in town later?"
She had been expecting some such question, and she is annoyed at him for embarrassing her yet again. Surely he must have realized by now that she's not interested in anything like that. Of course she can tell him she doesn't want to go to bed with him, but then he'll say that he didn't ask her, though of course that is what it comes down to. He'll think she's frigid, and maybe she is — despite being twenty-one she has never slept with a man— but it must be possible to work with someone without it immediately leading to this.
Or does she have to put an end to their partnership if things are like that? What she'd like as a next step is to form a trio, or a quartet; the repertory for cello and piano is too small to be able to continue for long. What she's looking for are musically motivated people, but until she has found them she needs him.
"Do you mind if I just go home, Bruno? I'd prefer to put in bit more practice."
"The two things aren't mutually exclusive, are they? You have to eat, after all."
She nods. "That's true. But you know how it is."
"How is it, then?"
She doesn't want to be having this conversation at all. Of course this is what it is like in ten-year-old marriages, when one can no longer see anything in the other person: insistence, hope, despair — with a threat of violence on the horizon.
"Just leave it." She's ready to go, one hand on the handle of the case, the other clenched in an unhappy fist, with the four fingers wrapped around her thumb so no one will see that she bites her nails, though of course that makes it all the more apparent. "See you tomorrow."
Carrying the cello case in her arms like a sarcophagus, she descends the stairs into the street. Bruno's studio is not far from her parents' house, where she still lives, and on the way she has a sudden flashback from a dream of the previous night: a lush bay, with a thin, high amber cloud above the sea in the form of an ancient, gnarled tree trunk, which slowly changes shape; she tries to hold on to it, to remember more — she catches a glimpse of a black figure, strangely elongated horizontally, with a pointed hat and a long lance — but the horn of a braking car and a finger pointing to a forehead puts an end to it…