"Wish I'd said it myself," said Onno over his shoulder, whereupon the other looked up with a shrewd smile and said,
"You will, Onno, you will."
Ada was standing at the back, greeting people on all sides.
Onno went over to her. "Well?"
"Did it," she said, exchanging kisses with Max without looking at him. "As long as I don't broadcast the fact that I belong to the Concertgebouw Orchestra."
"And Bruno?"
"You know what he's like. He was very cool about it and said he might be able to find the time, but of course he was over the moon."
"Koen!" called Max to the man behind the bar. "La Veuve!"
Onno looked at him with eyebrows raised. "Since when have you drunk alcohol?"
"Since now. This must be celebrated. Cuba! Just think of it!"
The ice bucket with the champagne in it was brought to them and they clinked glasses.
"To the friendship of peoples!" said Onno, kissing Ada on the crown from his great height.
"Suppose," said Max, only thinking it as he said it, "we were to go too?"
But he realized at once that this was the obvious solution. Far away over there, in a subtropical region, the sun might pierce the Polish mists that had been shrouding him for weeks. Cattle trucks, selections, gassings — over there on that Red island the black pool might be.. not filled in, because that was impossible with something infinite, but perhaps be illuminated by a glow which meant that mankind was not written off as a hopeless failure. Not that Cuba would be the branch of heaven he was looking for, but perhaps there might be an inkling of something like it.
Onno and Ada looked at each other.
"Yes, why not?" said Ada. "What's stopping you?"
Onno shook his head. "How do you think we are going to do that? It's in three weeks' time. We need visas and heaven knows what else. We could be terrorists out to murder Fidel Castro. We'll never make it at such short notice with those Bolshevik bureaucrats, and from the Third World at that. Even a letter takes two months."
"I haven't got a visa either."
"But you've got an invitation."
"Listen," said Max. "We can try at least. How about the three of us going to the embassy tomorrow. We'll put our passports on the table and say, 'Just give us a stamp, because we're friends of the Cuban revolution.' "
"Why is it," Onno wondered, "that I, after all one of the most sensible people I know — and that's being modest — have such a stupid friend? That's not how the world works, old boy!"
Suddenly Max felt completely sure of himself. He took a gulp of champagne, leaned forward, and said, "I don't know how the world works, Onno, but perhaps that's my strength. If you ask me, it doesn't work at all, any more than the contents of a dustbin work. If you ask me, the world, at least on earth, is one gigantic, improvised mess, which for inexplicable reasons still more or less functions. Mankind doesn't really belong in the universe at all, but now that it's there, everything is possible in all kinds of ways. After all, history has proved it, I would have thought, and you as a politician should know that. If you begin by saying, 'That's how the world works, and this is possible and that is impossible'—then you'd better go back to the Phaistos disc. It's all just fallible people, floundering about, that is, and that's perhaps why you should always simply do what your heart tells you and not limit your own room for maneuver in advance with considerations that other people may or may not raise."
Was it the champagne? In any case his words had struck home. Onno looked at Ada in astonishment, and said: "He seems to be giving me a good scolding. But he's right. Let's give it a try. What can happen? Perhaps it's a political discovery that's been staring us in the face all along. And anyway," he said, pulling the bottle out of the tinkling ice, "when Columbus set out to discover America, Cuba was where he first landed, and he thought it was the El Dorado that Marco Polo had written about."
As they drove into The Hague the following morning, with Ada sitting sideways at the back, Max pointed out the spot where he'd stopped in February to give Onno a lift.
"Silent night," Onno began singing, "unholy night…"
"Oh, thanks," said Ada. "If he hadn't stopped, you would never have met me."
"True," said Onno. "Idiotically true, but I played a crucial part in it too, because if I hadn't had an appointment in Leiden that day, Max would not have met you."
"And," said Max to Ada, "we owe that to your father."
"To my father?"
"If he hadn't put Mein Leben by Alma Mahler in the window, we would never have gone into In Praise of Folly."
"Alma mater." Onno nodded. "But ultimately my father is behind it all, of course. If he hadn't seen fit to have his birthday on that first day, nothing at all would have happened."
"Or if I hadn't gone to celebrate carnival in Rotterdam," said Max. "Life is one string of coincidences. Although… what is one to make of Schönberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone system? He had an irrational fear of the number 13. In his compositions he often numbered the bars 12, 12-a, 14. And what do you know? He died on Friday the thirteenth."
"So he was a hysteric." Onno laughed. "All composers are hysterics."
"Not at all," said Ada. "He had a presentiment of what would happen. I believe everything is predetermined. It's all in the lines in your hand."
Still looking at the road, Max's eyes widened for a moment, but he thought it better to say nothing about what it reminded him of.
"Oh," sighed Onno passionately, "how marvelous that would be."
"On the contrary," said Max. "It would take all the fun out of it. Predetermination is impossible in this universe anyway, because of Planck's constant. That makes everything uncertain."
"God in his infinite wisdom also created Planck's constant," cried Onno with his finger raised. "Planck's constant is God's revelation in nature. That's why we have free will and are able to sin. Why are we on earth? We are on earth to sin and in so doing to glorify God."
Although they had no appointment and Ada was supposed to be at the consulate alone, the Cuban ambassador was prepared to receive them— which of course was not unconnected with the name Quist. To Max's disappointment, he was not a bearded desperado with a cigar clenched in his teeth and a pistol belt on his desk, but a refined gentleman in his late seventies, in a dark-gray suit with a waistcoat. He had thin white hair and the aristocratic pallor of a high functionary at the former Spanish court. Ada's visa was granted automatically by virtue of the letter of invitation, and the pianist could also come and report; he would notify the ICAP of their arrival today by telegram, and they could pick up their plane tickets here in a few days' time.
After Ada had been led away by a secretary to complete the formalities, the ambassador told Onno that he'd met his father a few times at official functions. As the longest-serving diplomat in the Netherlands, he was the doyen of the diplomatic corps, which was also the reason Havana refused to let him retire every year; in his position he could maintain contacts with all sorts of colleagues who were forbidden by their governments to say a word to a Cuban ambassador. He was quite prepared to do it for Fidel — back then in New York he had collected the money for Fidel's Granma expedition, which had led to the revolution — but increasingly he would rather enjoy his old age in Cuba. Not that he was criticizing the Netherlands in any way, of course, or at most the climate.
Onno saw his chance.
"Yes," he said. "It must be marvelous there. If it hadn't been on such short notice, we'd have liked to go ourselves."
"You'd like to visit our beautiful island in the company of your girlfriend?" he asked with feigned amazement. "Why don't you go another time?"