He too listened to the wind. He saw the house: light and warm inside, and outside, the damp, chilly night.
"If we went up onto the roof now," he said, "and I squeezed a drop of ink out of my fountain pen and let it blow against a sheet of paper, how great do you think the chance would be of the sentence I don't want Ada to stay with me appearing in my handwriting?"
"That's impossible."
"The chance isn't nil, but the universe is probably too small to contain all the ink needed before it happens."
8. An Idyll
In the weeks that followed, they saw each other every day in Leiden, where they walked through the Botanical Garden during the lunch hour, drank coffee in the observatory canteen, or had an Indonesian meal in town in the evening. On the weekends he took her with him to Amsterdam, sometimes with the cello in the back of the car. Those Saturdays and Sundays gave him a feeling of peace, which was new. He had had longer-term relationships a few times before, but they had not affected his restlessness in the slightest; even while those girlfriends were with him, he was dying to get away: out into the street, into the pub — not to drink, because he didn't do that, or to have a relaxed chat with someone, because he didn't do that either — but to look for something new.
The thought that somewhere in the town there was a woman walking, or sitting alone at a cafe table while he was at home wasting his time with his girlfriend, was unbearable. Sometimes such a woman appeared to him in a kind of vision: he saw exactly what she looked like and where she was sitting, in what cafe, at what table. On occasion he had found a pretext to get out of the house and run there; but when she turned out not to be sitting there, that was only because he was just too late. Afterward, he would stand on tiptoe outside and scan the street in both directions.
Of course, he had not suddenly changed into a monogamous lover: from Monday to Friday his time-consuming love life continued as before. But on the weekends, when Ada was there, the obsession left him. Not that he relaxed in front of the TV or read a thriller or did a household chore, because he had never understood what "relaxation" meant and he never would. The thought of playing a game, or a sport, or even going for a walk, was unthinkable. He took only study material with him on vacation, and left no church or museum unvisited; if he sunbathed, then it was not so much because he enjoyed it but because one had to get brown: it was less sunbathing than the exposure to light of his whole body according to a precise schedule, including his sides and the insides of his arms and legs. That was also work — because if he were not working or chasing women, he found himself peering into a threatening void that was more than just boredom. However, when he was chasing women he actually wanted to be working, and when he was working he actually wanted to be chasing women, with the result that he was never at peace. Whenever anyone brought this up, he usually answered: "Eternal peace will come in its own good time — I don't need an advance." Now, though, with Ada, he made love in a relaxed, almost bourgeois way, and afterward wanted nothing else, which sometimes worried him. Was he in the process of degenerating in the direction of marriage? At his insistence, Ada was now taking the pill.
His conversations with Onno were also part of his obsession, but with Ada it was different. He wasn't in love. In a certain sense he was in love with all women except Ada. When he looked at a woman, he often had the feeling that his blue eyes could see to the bottom of her soul, as if looking into a clear bay; and perhaps it was true. Perhaps women felt the same and this was the key to his romantic successes, for which he was envied and hated in the pubs. But when he looked at Ada, it seemed to increase his distance from her. He understood nothing about her; for him she had the unfathomable look of a creature from another world, and that was precisely what bound him to her. He experienced her presence in his house not like that of a dog, which has no secrets from human beings, but like that of a cat, which is itself a secret — and to that extent he felt free and unthreatened. And just as a dog belongs to a human being but a cat belongs to a house, so she merged with the order in his apartment and became a part of it. Dogs knock over tables, scoop cushions from armchairs, and carry things out of the room with their heads held high; cats do not even touch what they touch — except perhaps sometimes when they dig their claws into the carpet.
When she put a book on the table, it lay there precisely as he himself would have put it down: with the title upward, not on another book that was smaller, not at an angle, and along the golden section between the ashtray and the edge of the table, parallel to that edge. She would never forget to fold the newspaper. When he looked up from his desk and saw her sitting on the sofa, reading poems by Rilke, she was sitting exactly as she should sit. He had never known someone to have the same natural feel for relationships as himself, without having to make an effort and without it turning into petty-minded neatness. They did not talk much, and he liked that too. Musicienne du silence. You could chat with anyone, he believed; being silent together without it becoming embarrassing was a lot rarer. Only when Onno was around was there nonstop talk. If he had something to do at his desk, then Onno had long conversations with Ada, in a rather paternal tone, since that was the only way he could show his sympathy — or perhaps it was more the tone of a father-in-law. It always struck Ada that Max too said much more to her when Onno was there: it was as though she became a different person for him in Onno's presence. Without Onno, for example, he would never have explained so patiently to her that in modern science, what is observed can no longer be seen separately from the observer, since the observer changes what is observed by observing it. Max knew that kind of thing didn't interest her in the slightest, but he still did it, for Onno's benefit in fact — and she preferred him as he was without Onno.
She was not very talkative, either. She could sit for hours at the open window overlooking the Vondelpark, where children and dogs were being taken for walks, where hippies in Oriental dress danced past, singing and adorned with flowers, and where the same boy was always practicing juggling on the grass, learning nothing but how to bend down. On the other side, almost invisible from the park behind bushes and trees, there was a low building containing chapels of rest, to which hearses drove up several times a day and which tearful people went in and out of. For some reason she found this panorama ideally suited to Max: she felt a similar stark juxtaposition of life and death in him. In fact he was always in a good mood, but somehow that was so striking because it was set against a dark background, in the same way that a diamond is displayed on black velvet at the jeweler's.
Only when Max once asked her did she tell him anything about her parents, about their meeting during the bombing of Leiden and how they later set up a secondhand bookshop. She had never felt that she was the child of those two people who were so completely different from her, but rather that she was their foster child, a foundling, who in fact had nothing to do with them. Not that she had any romantic ideas in that direction, because she needed only to look in the mirror and she saw her mother.
"The reverse probably also happens," said Max, "where someone thinks that his parent are his parents, and they aren't."
After that first occasion he had never met her parents again. He, too, felt that he had nothing to do with them, and Ada did not ask him — although her parents had indicated a few times that they would like to meet her boyfriend. He knew that she was grateful to him for taking her out of the house for at least two days a week. And as far as his own parents were concerned, had she asked him about them, he would have told her his story: when she did not, he left things as they were.