"Are you a son of that Quist?" asked Max in surprise.
"Yes, that Quist."
"Wasn't he prime minister or something before the war?"
"Would you mind speaking a little less casually about my father, Delius, Max? The four years of the Quist cabinet are among the darkest in human civilization. The Dutch nation languished under the theocratic reign of terror of my honored father, against whom I will not hear a word of criticism, and certainly not from someone with such a ridiculous automobile."
"At least it got us home," said Max, stopping the car. "You can't even drive, if you ask me."
"Of course not! What do you take me for? A chauffeur? There are things one simply isn't allowed to know how to do. For example, something else that you are not allowed to be able to do is serve food with a fork and spoon in the fingers of one hand, because that means you're a waiter. Of course you can do it just as well, but a gentleman like me is not used to serving himself. A gentleman like me does that very clumsily, with two hands, and even then I drop half on the tablecloth, because that's the way to do it."
In the light of the streetlamps in the narrow street they could now see each other better. Onno thought Max was actually far too well groomed to be taken seriously; he was wearing the sort of Anglo-Saxon bourgeois outfit, with a blazer and checked shirt, that Onno also disliked on his brothers and brothers-in-law. Max, in his turn, felt that Onno would not cut a bad figure as an organ-grinder; around his ears and under his chin there were also various places he had missed while shaving. Perhaps he was short-sighted, having gone cross-eyed from poring over ideograms.
Onno proposed driving to Max's house; then he would walk back. They noted with satisfaction that there were still people in the street and that there were still lights on everywhere in the houses, whereas in The Hague all life had been totally extinguished. At the high gate into the park Max locked his car and put on his coat; Onno saw that he was also wearing brown suede shoes. He was about to say goodbye, but now it was Max who said: "Come on, I'll walk along with you for a little way."
There was the sound of police sirens from the direction of the Leidseplein: something was going on, perhaps the last throes of a demonstration against the Americans in Vietnam.
"Are you also an honorary doctor of the university of Uppsala?" inquired Onno, "like me?"
"I haven't got that far yet."
"You're not an honorary doctor of the university of Uppsala?" cried Onno in dismay, and stopped. "Can someone like me really speak to you?" Suddenly he changed tone, still looking at Max. "Do you know that your face is all wrong? You have steely, extremely unsympathetic blue eyes, but at the same time a ridiculously soft mouth, which I wouldn't like to be seen with."
Max looked up at him. Onno was almost a head taller. "That's right," he said after a moment's hesitation.
"No, that isn't right."
"It's right that it's not right."
"And that nose of yours would be better cloaked totally in the mantle of love."
"Hunting dogs always have long snouts — they're better for sniffing with. You mustn't take it personally, but a Pekingese can't smell a thing. And anyway, I'm not a doctor cum grano salts like you, but a real one, with a thesis and all."
"I can hear it already. You're one of those fools who think that achievement is more praiseworthy than talent. What was your thesis on?"
"Hydrogen line spectra."
"What in heaven's name is that?"
"You won't understand. You have to be very clever for that."
Max mentioned that he was an astronomer at Leiden Observatory. He had recently had an offer of a fellowship at the Mount Palomar Observatory in California, where a Leiden colleague of his was presently in charge, the man who had discovered quasars; but he was more interested in radio astronomy, with which you could see what was invisible, even during the day. Optical astronomers were pale nightwatchmen, and if a cloud appeared they could just as well get on their bikes and cycle home into the wind; apart from that, he had better things to do at night. He went regularly to Dwingeloo, in Drenthe, to the radio telescope there. A huge synthetic radio telescope was being built near Westerbork, consisting of twelve mirrors, of which one was completed. It was going to be the biggest telescope in the world, and he had high hopes for it.
"By the way, you just said that it all began in the war with you— perhaps it was the same for me. In the middle of town the night sky had a clarity that today you find only at sea, or on Mount Palomar. At a certain moment I was in a kind of boarding school, run by priests. When they sang vespers in the chapel at night, I sometimes woke up and leaned out the window. I think that those quiet nights and those stars and that Gregorian chant and the war laid the foundation for my choice of career, for want of a better word. Maybe because those stars had nothing to do with the war." At the word stars he glanced upward, but the glow of the city was now reflected by a gray blanket of clouds.
"So you were brought up as a Catholic. Or are you still one?"
"I was brought up as nothing."
"How did you wind up in that institution, then?"
Max said nothing. He turned up the collar of his camel-colored coat and crossed the lapels, keeping hold of them with his gloved hand. The fathers below in the chapel sang:
"Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison,
Christe eleison, Christe eleison."
In the sky the Great Bear, Cassiopeia, the pole star — around which the axis of the heavens turned. Where was his mother?
He looked at Onno. "Shall I tell you?"
Onno saw that he had touched a nerve. "If it's not intended for my ears, I don't want to hear."
Max, too, was now surprised at himself. Not that he had anything to hide, but it wasn't something to make polite conversation about. He never talked to his colleagues and friends about it, to say nothing of his girlfriends, and he himself rarely thought about it. It was rather like the talent that Onno had talked about: all human beings were of course unique, and they only discovered that when someone else fell in love with them or when no one ever fell in love with them — but even extraordinary circumstances could seem perfectly natural, simply because they were as they were; and in that case the awareness of their extraordinariness only dawned when others found them extraordinary. A king's son, too, only realized later that flags were not put out for everyone in the country when it was their birthday.
The canals were frozen over. In the murky depths people were still skating; silent figures glided past with their hands on their backs, braking with blades scraping the ice when they came to the bridges, below which the ice was unreliable. As they walked through their city, past the Rijksmuseum, across the bridges with their strange sandstone and wrought-iron decorations of sea monsters that had crawled over the dunes, Max told Onno how his parents — as a result of the First World War — had found themselves in Amsterdam, how they met, how they separated, after which he went to live with his mother in South Amsterdam, behind the Concertgebouw. His father did not want to see them anymore, and when the Second World War came along he must have been overcome by some fateful urge. He reestablished contact with his former Austrian friends from the First World War, who in the meantime, since the country's annexation by Germany, had become pan-German generals and SS-Obersturmbannführer. In fact he, Max, knew all this only by hearsay; he'd never gone into it in depth. Perhaps his father needed to prove his pro-German attitude. He was still married to a Jewish woman; he had committed "a racial crime," even fathering a child with her, and perhaps that had to be put right first.