She walks down the side alley to the back of the house and goes in through the kitchen door, where her mother is trussing the pale, decapitated carcass of a chicken with a white thread. She is tall and slim, slightly taller than her daughter, with a straight, disciplined back. Her own eyes meet Ada's from beneath a head of black hair, which is worn up, but with a colder look, more suspicious, without there being any special reason.
"How did it go?"
"Well."
"Cup of tea?"
"Yes, please."
She is about to go upstairs, but her mother says: "You can't go upstairs now. Daddy's painting your room."
Ada takes her foot off the bottom step in annoyance. "Why the hell is he doing that? Did I ask him to?"
"Don't be so horrid all the time. He's doing it for you. Sit and wait downstairs. He'll be finished in an hour or so."
"Why did he suddenly take it into his head to paint my room? Hasn't he got anything better to do?"
"You'll have to ask him. I don't know either. He went upstairs and said that your room was badly in need of a coat of paint."
"Crazy people are a pain," says Ada, and lugs her instrument into the back room, which doubles as a dining room and a living room.
She'll be glad when she's away from here and can live as she wants to. The good intentions are the worst thing, because they make you powerless. Her mother is a bitch, but her father is a well-meaning freethinker, with no malice in him. If only there were some malice in him, then he would at least be able to understand malice. His wife, for instance. Ada's dearest wish now is for a place of her own, where she can be completely alone. She wants to rehearse, travel, perform, have triumphs — but always to return to her apartment, with the doorbell and telephone disconnected, the radio and television switched off, or maybe completely absent; to be able to devote herself completely to music and reading poetry, or simply to doing nothing at all for hours on end and to thinking, without someone suddenly taking it into their head to paint her room. But for the time being she doesn't have the money; even her father can only just makes ends meet.
It makes her jump when her mother puts a cup of tea and a slice of cake next to her.
"What are you thinking about, Ada?"
"Nothing."
"How did it go with Bruno?"
"Fine." She notices with irritation that her mother is still looking at her. "What's wrong?"
"Why don't you go out with him? He's such a nice boy."
"Oh, Mama, please stay out of it. Do you ever go out with Dad?"
"Come on, don't get so worked up right away. It would do you a lot of good to relax occasionally."
"Just leave that to me."
Once her mother is out of the room, she opens the score and studies the music, pencil in hand. She holds the sheets upside down for a moment and even then she can see that it is marvelous. It is not just that she can "hear" what she sees, it is rather that she sees what the listener sees when he listens: a structural beauty, which exists in space as the sheet of a score but as heard music only in time. This is why she is not that keen on novels, which are read in silence, but does like poems, which have to be given a sound. Not that she thinks all this in so many words; but what is going on in her mind as she looks at the music, beating an imaginary time now and then with her left hand, is based on it — just as a child can speak its language without knowing the grammar.
She puts the score on the floor, lifts the cello from its case, and screws on the spike. While she is tightening the bow, she goes to the dividing door and pushes it open with her shoulder; the small space is oppressive. She takes the instrument between her legs, tunes it, and looking sideways at the music she begins playing, at the same time hearing what Bruno is not playing, and occasionally humming it.
Max opened the door of the shop and, without letting go of the handle, stopped in his tracks. As he listened he put up his forefinger.
"Janáček," he said after a few seconds. "That's not a record. Someone's playing."
No bell sounded. He put his finger to his lips, and they entered quietly. The sound of the cello hung in the narrow space, which was piled with books. They not only filled the roughly made shelves up to ceiling but were also stacked high on the left and right and in the center. A jungle of books, with narrow paths through it. Onno stopped, but Max pushed forward, up steps, down steps, past piles of books, boxes, magazines — architecture, girls' books, Jewish studies, travel guides — around a corner, up another couple of steps… and saw Ada sitting in the back room: in a loose-fitting, long-sleeved white blouse and a small stand-up collar, her head turned away and the cello between her parted legs. Her left foot was placed elegantly a little in front of her; her full black skirt was pushed back, and he saw a slim knee and then the transition from her stockings to the light flesh of her thighs.
I'm going mad, he thought. I want to be fingered and stroked by that woman just like that.
She had not seen him. He went back on tiptoe and whispered: "Duty calls. I'll see you in a little while in the Gilded Turk."
Onno nodded pityingly. "Adieu, unfortunate one."
Max's heart was pounding. Each time was as new as the first. He positioned himself so that he could not be seen. While he listened and looked at her, something changed in him. His excitement did not disappear, but it was as though a space gradually opened up behind it, like when the curtain rises in the theater. Although she was so totally absorbed, it was as though the music actually consisted of audible silence, a silence with a shape like a geometrical figure, which she drew around herself.
Now and then she stopped for a moment and looked for something in the score with the tip of her bow: then there was a silence within silence. Her face framed in black; the gleaming reddish wood of the waisted sound box between her legs, her left hand at the neck; next to her the open case. A line of Mallarmé occurred to him: "musicienne du silence.. ." Why should a line of Mallarmé occur to him? He wanted to go to bed with her, but that was nothing unusual, that was his daily bread — the unusual thing was that a line of Mallarmé should occur to him. Lines of Mallarmé did not normally occur to him. If he wanted, he could always dig up a couple, of course, such as "Un coup de dés n'abolira pas le hasard" — but that was really more of a title; it reminded him of what Einstein had said about dice, perhaps here in Leiden: "The Good Lord doesn't play dice."
Hidden among the books, he observed her. He could hear someone stumbling about above his head. Did he want something more besides going to bed with her a few times?
On impulse, he suddenly stepped into the room.
She started so violently when he appeared that her body trembled. She looked at him, wide-eyed. The reaction of her body, as though it were something stronger than herself, over which she had no control, bound him even more closely to her.
"I want to buy a book," he said, "but no one came. So I simply eavesdropped on you. Fairy Tale."
That was the title of the piece: he obviously knew it. But she was even more astonished at the natural way in which he spoke to her. Men were always a little frightened of her, as she herself was of her mother, but this one didn't seem worried in the least. "Eavesdropping is very rude, if you ask me."
Max burst out laughing. "And that's a musicienne talking! The hi-fi system as bugging equipment!"
Her mother came into the room with a meat knife in her hand: a handsome, buxom woman, with something severe about her; she had a broad lower jaw and a tight mouth. Dressed in a black nun's habit she would make a perfect abbess.