Domestic happiness was in the air! He was in the habit of pacing through the rooms when he was thinking, but he never did so when he was not alone; Ada was the first person who did not inhibit him from doing this. The pacing was not simply walking back and forth, just as it is not with caged polar bears or lions, but was determined by a precise geometrical pattern, of which he was himself vaguely conscious and from which he did not deviate one inch. It was formed by the three invisible lines projecting from his furniture: the extensions of the diagonals and the center lines. His chairs, tables, and cupboards, combined with the angles of the corners of the room, were the focus of a complicated network, like an imaginary garden in Lenotre style, which allowed him to step on many points in it, but not all. While he was pacing with his hands behind his back, he sometimes found himself thinking about the future.
When the Westerbork facility was finished in a few years' time, he would probably have to go to Drenthe more frequently than now. He contemplated the bleak evenings there, with nothing to do for miles around. Yokels playing billiards, odd girls, whom he could hardly understand and with whom he dare not try anything, for fear of being murdered with pitchforks and rakes. Wouldn't it be nice if Ada came along now and then? They could rent a pied-a-terre somewhere, in the local solicitor's house, and furnish it to their taste. Ada would have her work too, of course, and in a car you could be in Amsterdam in an hour, or an hour and half…
Since Bruno had realized that Ada had a boyfriend, he was routinely unable to attend rehearsals; because of this she was learning a new piece by Xenakis for solo cello, Nomos Alpha. This did not disturb Max when he was working — on the contrary: the fact that she was occupied, too, relieved him of the responsibility of having to say something to break the silence. Now and then they even made music together. During the war his mother had occasionally given him piano lessons, and later his foster parents had sent him to a music school, but his playing was not of a very high standard; he had bought the grand piano on impulse, at an auction — perhaps just to see it being carried into his house, thereby putting something right. When he did occasionally play with Ada, completely different things happened. She had been to the conservatory in The Hague. She was a professional musician; she knew that making music was not about expressing emotions but about evoking them: and that could only succeed when it was done professionally — that is, dispassionately, like a surgeon operating, regardless of theatrical grimaces conductors and soloists often pulled when they knew they were being watched. At home or in rehearsal, they never pulled those faces, nor did orchestral musicians, because those were the faces of listeners.
Max, on the other hand, was so far from being a musician that it was almost impossible for him to make music — not because it did not affect him, but because it affected him too much. He had an extensive record collection, four yards of records from Machaut and Dufay to Boulez and Riley, but he almost never put anything on for himself. As soon as he struck a note on his grand piano, and then the octave, it already affected him too deeply: it opened a fathomless shaft in him, making him dizzy. When the piano tuner was there, he pretended to look through the newspaper; in reality he was racked by emotions, almost more than when a great soloist was at work, because now it was harmony itself resonating in a pure medium without the intervention of a composer — just like at home the dough always tasted better than the cake itself, but one was not allowed to eat it, although he said a thousand times that he did not want cake. Milk, eggs, butter, flour, and sugar — it was true that in the oven the divine mixture was transformed into a work of culinary art, but at the same time it was ruined. Scores of times he repeated the first four bars of Schubert's Fantasie in F for four hands on the piano with Ada: what happened? A bed was laid down, a few simple notes sounded — and immediately an absolute beauty was attained: what was most exalted, most complex, most incomprehensible in the form of what was simplest. Even after the hundredth time it had lost none of its radiance and yielded nothing of its secret.
"What is it?" cried Max in despair. "What is it in heaven's name? Suddenly it reminds me of something. Yes, I've got it: Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave." He got up, took out the record, and put it on the turntable. "Here, listen, at about bar one fifteen." He raised his forefinger. "Can you hear? It's almost the same, on just the same sort of bed!"
Ada kissed him on the cheek. "You have a merciless ear," she said.
He put his arm around her shoulders. "At least I can talk about it to you, even though you haven't a clue yourself — but no one has. Do you know what Onno once said when I started talking about music? He shook his great head with those quivering cheeks and said, 'Music is for girls.' Well, the girl in question is here. That was good intuition."
"Why is music supposed to be only for girls?"
"You mustn't take him so literally. Once when I bought an ice cream, he said, 'Ice cream is for vicars.' Music doesn't exist for him. He regards it as meaningless sound. For him only words have meaning. What he has against it is probably the flight from reality that it represents for many people, a kind of escape clause to the effect that if all else fails, there's always music. Perhaps he actually finds music a kind of cowardly consolation.
"He once told me that in the Middle Ages the Greek mousike techne— the 'art of the muse'—was derived from the ancient Egyptian word moys, which means 'water.' This made Moses the discoverer of music, because according to the same erroneous etymology, his name was supposed to mean 'rescued from water.' You know — the rush basket in which he was found in the Nile as a baby: the same Moses who struck water from the rock and who had God create the world with a word in Genesis, after which his spirit moved over the waters. Everything always fits. So in fact you're practicing the Mosaic art."
"I'm sure I am. Show me your thumbs."
He put his hands in hers: they were well formed, like the rest of his body, not too broad and not too slim, but his thumbs were both short and spatula-shaped. "I invent it all by sucking on my thumbs," he said.
"Who do you take after?"
"No idea. Maybe my father. Maybe myself. That's why I can just span an octave but can't go any further. What's the name of that pianist who had an operation on his hands in order to be able to span larger chords and then couldn't play anymore?"
"No idea," said Ada, putting his hands in his lap. "And why is ice cream for vicars?"
"Because they have to spoil themselves, of course, seeing that no one else does."
Ada stared at him and nodded. "You love him, don't you?"
"Of course I love him."
Max's eyes suddenly moistened. Ada was amazed to see it happen. She did not know what to make of it, but suddenly she had the feeling that she was the mother of the pair of them.
"Do you two tell each other everything?"
"Everything." Fortunately she did not ask if he loved him more than her. "We even tell each other what we would never tell anyone. That's friendship."
9. The Demons
When the sun had reached its solstice and touched the Tropic of Cancer— that is, at the beginning of summer — a political and musical happening was staged, to round off the turbulent season and in happy expectation of even more turbulent times. Since the riots of the year before, Amsterdam, as Onno put it, had been occupied by invading Dutch troops: uniformed farmers' sons from Christian homes had temporary control of the city, and the main issue was now its liberation, followed by the irrevocable overthrow of the Netherlands by Amsterdam. One of the organizers of the festival had evidently once heard a performance by Ada and Bruno, because they were invited to perform. It was to be her first engagement in Amsterdam, and although it wasn't a real concert, it was still a great honor. Ada was apprehensive about playing her kind of music for the kind of audience that could be expected there; but of course they must give it a try, and she persuaded Bruno to pick up where they had left off.