They sat cross-legged opposite each other on the bed, with the tray between them, spread marmalade, bit into toast, drank coffee, spooned eggs, and now and again, very naturally, he placed his hand on her vagina for a moment, as though it were part of the process of having breakfast. The erection he gradually got pleased her more than the previous one, although she was amazed yet again at the dimensions that things can assume in this world. While he told her about the gypsies, she gently grasped his cool scrotum, as though weighing it.
" 'Be embraced, you millions,' " she said, quoting Schiller's "Ode to Joy."
His eyes clouded a little, but he had obviously decided not to hurry. "They all surrounded me. ." he said in a slightly intoxicated voice. "It was as though I was the focus of a concave mirror. ."
He faltered. Each of them now had their hands in the other's crotch, and Ada could feel that he could feel how wet she was getting. As he continued looking at her his back arched a little, as though he were in pain; she started smiling. He put the tray on the ground and slid on top of her, groaning and with his eyes rolling, his tongue and penis sinking deep inside her.
"Slowly," he gasped, "slowly. ."
He was talking to himself, because she wanted nothing better. Their bodies moved slowly across the bed, andante maestoso. It seemed to her as though they were floating on the waves, slowly sinking beneath the surface, where the same movement dominated, but increasingly shut off from the outside world, from the air, the light — noiseless, a darker and darker blue, more and more violet..
The doorbell rang.
The net was raised. Max's movement stopped; he leaned on his elbows and looked at his watch.
"Let it ring," whispered Ada with her eyes closed.
"It's Onno. We arranged to meet."
He quickly disengaged himself from her. Her arms slid off him, and he went to the intercom in the hall. "Onno?" she heard him call out. "I'll be right down. One minute."
He hurried into the room and opened the wardrobe. When he saw her lying there, her legs still wide apart, he said, "Bring yourself off," and disappeared into the bathroom.
Ada froze. What had he said? She couldn't believe that he had said what she had heard. Had he really said that she should bring herself off? Had he said that? That she should bring herself off? Eyes wide with astonishment, she looked at the ceiling, unable to move. Was it conceivable that he had been so crude?
"Max.." she started to say, when he appeared in the room dressed— then he pressed a hurried kiss on her forehead and said, "I'll see you at lunchtime, and I'll tell you all about it then. 'Bye now."
A moment later she heard the quick drumming of his feet as he ran down the stairs, then the fainter drumming on the next staircase; on the last staircase she could no longer hear him, and then through the open window came the slamming of the front door.
Silence.
She sat on the edge of the bed in a daze. It had still not sunk in completely, but she knew this was the end. He could never make this up to her: it was though she had suddenly seen the face of Mr. Hyde on that of Dr. Jekyll. Bring yourself off. She didn't know what the two them were going to do, but couldn't it have waited a quarter of an hour? Couldn't he have sent Onno to the pub for a while? The haste wasn't because of any particular urgency, but because it was Onno at the door. He couldn't keep Onno waiting; perhaps he was in a panic that Onno might turn away from him for good. Nonsense, of course, but even that was comprehensible. It wasn't that she could not bear Onno being more important to him than she was in certain respects, but the brutal way that he had trampled on her feelings was intolerable. A slap in the face would have been less awful.
The bathroom was still warm and damp from his shower. Under the stream of water it seemed for a moment that it had been washed away, but when she got back in the room it was there again. Bring yourself off. As though orgasm were what mattered. He hadn't come, either. Suddenly angry, she began to get dressed, and then she saw him again appearing from nowhere on the steps leading from the bookshop. Did she love him? She wasn't sure, so perhaps she did not. Perhaps you knew for sure when you loved someone, but then she'd never loved anyone yet, and perhaps she would have to accept that she never would. All she knew for certain was that she loved music. And yet, perhaps she would have liked a child by him.
Occasionally she had toyed with the idea of stopping the pill and seeing what happened. The thought of a little Max, or Maxima, tottering around the room made her feel as weak as a sugar lump dissolving in a cup of hot tea: she would certainly have loved a child. But it would have jeopardized her musical career, so a child was out of the question. She also knew that he slept with other girls, of course — the signs of it in his apartment, the blond hairs, the lipstick-covered cigarette ends in the wastepaper basket did not escape her — but she didn't mind that much, because she knew that he had forgotten those women before he had even seen them. Now, though, something irrevocable had happened.
She looked around. It was over. She sat at his empty, cleared desk, and opened the drawers, in which he kept his "stationery shop," as he called it: paper of all sizes and styles, scores of notebooks, from minute notebooks to huge ledgers with reinforced corners, notepads of all conceivable kinds, including some with yellow and light-blue paper from the United States, blank, lined, and squared index cards in carefully arranged pyramids, enough for a whole lifetime.
"As far as paper is concerned," he had once said, "I can face the Third World War with confidence."
She took out a simple sheet of typewriter paper and laid it on the desk. From the pen rack she took a yellow pencil with an eraser on the top and, lost in thought, stared at the exhibit-like row of instruments on the edge of his desk: the magnet, the prism, the hourglass, the pocket mirror, the ruler, the magnifying glass, the compass, the tuning fork…
The staff of the National Institute for War Documentation looked surprised when they suddenly found themselves confronted with a Quist and a Delius. And yet it was no stranger than the fact that their own neighbor on the canal should be the German Goethe Institute. In any case it seemed to them to be a matter for the director himself. Via oak staircases and marble corridors marred by shelves of files, Max and Onno were conducted to his quiet room at the back, with a view of the geometrically constructed seventeenth-century garden.
He was writing on a notepad and looked up. They knew his face; a few years before he had made a series of television programs on the German occupation. Now he had been commissioned to make a record of the period day by day, which would take up twenty thick volumes. They could see from his melancholy face that there was nothing he did not know about the war, which he himself had spent in London; he had embarked on this process of mourning, which was to take three times as long as the war, for the sake of his twin brother, who had not been able to escape to England and had been gassed. In a few brief sentences Max told him his own history, which was different.
"What it comes down to," he concluded, "is that my father was shot because he hounded my mother to her death."
"I know, Mr. Delius, I know."
"But he's still my father. I'd like to look at his file."
The director nodded. "And why do you want to do that now?"
Should he tell him about the gypsies? But of course that wasn't the reason. "Perhaps because the time has come."
"Well," said the director, "I can't see what objection there could be. After all, we live in a time of openness and democratization, if I understand it correctly. And you, Mr. Quist — what is your role in this? May I by the way congratulate you on your honorary doctorate? In fact, we're all in the same line, aren't we?"