When the whistling and hissing of the fatal locomotive and the lugubrious clouds of steam gave way to the news, Sophia turned off the set and asked if he would like anything more to drink. "A glass of wine perhaps?"
"If I'm not keeping you.."
"I never go to bed that early, but you have to go to Amsterdam."
"I can be there in half an hour. It's quiet on the road at this time."
Was she playing a game — or precisely not? After she had poured him a drink from an opened bottle of Rioja, they talked about Ada. She had been to the hospital again that morning: there was no change in the situation, and the doctors had become noticeably more gloomy. Because she had made no secret of the fact that she was a qualified nurse, they talked to her differently than to just any relation. She was given details of laboratory results, examination of motor functions, eye reflexes. Only weeks afterward could a more or less accurate prognosis be given, but there was still hope and there would continue to be for the time being. In medical literature there was even a case known of a forty-year-old man who had been in a vegetative state for a year and a half but nevertheless woke up and began speaking again, although he was largely paralyzed and completely dependent on other people.
Max nodded. Of course, she was now thinking the same as he was: how things were to go on should Ada not regain consciousness. He wanted to broach the subject, but did not dare. In answer to his question as to how the bookshop was going, Sophia said that it was open in the afternoons, but that it could not continue for very long; when someone came and browsed and wanted to buy a book, she sold it at the price that her husband had written in pencil on the flyleaf. But when someone took a pile of books out of a bag to sell them, she didn't know what to do and sent them away.
There was a silence.
"What was Ada like as a child?" asked Max.
Sophia glanced at her hands.
"Should I tell you? Once, just before Oswald and I had to go somewhere, I had an argument with her. She was about eleven or twelve. She had been spreading a terrible story about me: that I had put the cat in a box used for books and drowned it in the Rapenburg canal — when we didn't have a cat at all. Oswald was allergic to cats. When we got home in the afternoon, we found a note here on the table that said she had run away from home and that she was never coming back. The day before we had pancakes for dinner, and as you know you always make too many pancakes; all the leftover pancakes had disappeared. We didn't think it would be too serious, but when she hadn't come home by dinnertime, we began to get alarmed. We called everybody she knew, and later that evening Oswald went to the police with a photo. Of course we stayed up, and in the middle of the night Oswald couldn't stand it any longer. He was quite beside himself, and he got his bike and went to look for her. Even after he had gone a few streets away I could still hear him calling out her name. But half an hour later I suddenly had a strange feeling — I don't know what it was. I went up to the loft and opened the door of the lumber room. She was lying there asleep, with her coat on. Next to her were the pancakes, in a knotted tea towel."
"And your husband cycled through Leiden for an hour calling out her name?"
"Yes. By the time he got home, she had long since been put to bed. She hadn't even noticed that I'd undressed her."
"And the next day?"
"We didn't talk about it anymore."
There was not a sound outside. Max emptied his glass — and on an impulse he decided no longer to be the first to say anything. He poured another glass for Sophia and himself and looked at his pencil sharpener, which was lying on the table. Fairy Tale. There he was sitting in that back room where he had seen Ada for the first time, and a little later her mother.
Time passed, and silence enclosed them like a warmer and warmer bath. At the edge of his field of vision he could constantly see her figure, with the secret deep in her lap. For a few minutes he glanced at her, and for a second she looked back at him, but without expression. He gave no sign of understanding either; he knew for certain that if he had smiled now, he would have destroyed everything.
After the silence had lasted for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, he was certain that he was going to lose. He had met his match. She would sit there in her chair saying nothing until the following morning.
With his heart pounding, he glanced at his watch and said: "It's getting late. I'll think I'll be going."
She also looked at her watch. "Do you have to be back in Leiden tomorrow morning?"
"I'm afraid so."
"And you've been drinking. If you like you can stay over here."
"Well… if I'm not disturbing you…" Brons's things turned out to have disappeared from the bathroom.
29. Irreversibility
In the weeks that followed, he visited Sophia every few days. Each time, he called up first to announce his arrival, because even making a date seemed too intimate; and every morning he thanked her formally for her hospitality. They talked a little, read a little, or watched television; when it was finally really too late to go to Amsterdam, it was all the same to her if he stayed over. And then each time the door opened in the dark and she crept under the covers with him; after letting herself go completely, she disappeared again without him having seen her. Since that first time she had not spoken again, which was also the sign for him to say nothing more in bed. He had never experienced anything so mysterious, but in some way it answered a deep wish of which he had never been conscious. He had attained the unattainable woman!
No one must know; he must never speak to anyone about it — first and foremost not to her. If he once gave an indication that he knew, it would be over at once. She must remain the two women that she was, the daytime Sophia and the nighttime Sophia — if he were to link the two, a short-circuit would immediately disable the mechanism. He must not even use her first name until she had invited him to. Psychiatrists would find it perverse, he considered — Freud would have found it hilarious — but because her mystery was absolutely complementary to his, like a nut to a bolt, he became completely addicted to the situation — quite apart from her long tongue, and the glowing, subterranean biting. If in other cases his desire for the same women always decreased exponentially, it now seemed to be growing even more intense each time after a month. He no longer looked at other women — which had the incidental advantage of a considerable gain in time.
Onno had already asked him a few times where on earth he had been for the last few weeks — he seldom got any answer when he called the Vossiusstraat — to which Max replied that there were regular evening meetings on the program of the new telescope in Westerbork, which was due to be inaugurated that same year. Onno was quite prepared to believe him; he himself did little else but attend meetings anymore. After Berkeley, Amsterdam, and Berlin — where Rudi Dutschke had meanwhile been shot — the students had now revolted in Paris, too. That immediately had another, more serious dimension, in view of the fact that there it was taking place in a revolutionary tradition; the revolt promptly spread to the workers, who occupied their factories, and suddenly things began to get serious in Europe. L'Imagination au pouvoir! A new epoch was about to begin, and in the Netherlands too the new guard must be ready to take over power. In mid-May, in order to bring himself up-to-date, Onno went to Paris for a few days with some comrades-in-arms, where in the crowded cafes around the occupied Sorbonne he saw various activists he knew from Havana, orating with Cuban authority, the illuminated look of victory in their eyes. But, as he told Max after his return, he didn't make himself known to them in the presence of his Dutch friends: they did not need to know precisely what he had been up to in Cuba in order to be able to use it against him one day.