"So why don't you say that one is better than the other and the other better than the first?"
"No, because neither of them are good. At least not good enough. Take Jan-Kees and his Paula. They live in Rotterdam, in a huge house, where I can go every Wednesday afternoon to pick my child up and take it to the zoo. In a way I like them, but they're not my type, or Ada's; I don't want our child brought up there. Hans and Hadewych are better in that respect, but they can be transferred from Denmark to Zambia at any moment, and then from Zambia to Brazil, and then from Brazil to the Philippines, with our child being dragged from one international school to the other and having to say goodbye to its friends every four years. On the other hand, of course, it would see a bit of the world and learn lots of languages, but I would be bound to become a stranger to it: a kind of uncle in faraway Holland. It would only be here for a few weeks in the summer vacation — I don't care for that, either. Now, if Jan-Kees had been in the foreign service and Hans and Hadewych lived in Kralingen, I'd know what to do; but life doesn't seem to be as benevolent as that. So what am I to do now? There's no other option. What would you do if you were me?"
He sat down and Max got up. With his hands in his pockets, he went over to the window and looked out into the dark evening without seeing anything. He knew that the back of his head and his back were transmitting the message that he was thinking calmly, but his heart was pounding and he felt torn. What would he do if he were Onno? Perhaps he was Onno — that is, Onno himself did not know who he might be. How long must it go on like this? Wasn't it time to cut through this knot of lies and deceit once and for all? Shouldn't he turn around, now at this moment, and finally say, "Onno, the child that Ada is expecting may be mine. ." — the words that he had once wanted to write to him, had written but not sent. The thought that he could not do it without Ada's knowledge no longer applied. Nothing happened without Ada's knowledge anymore, since everything happened without her knowledge. It was just that he couldn't bring himself to do it anymore; he had let things go too far. And yet he couldn't simply wait and see and trust that everything would come right. Something had to happen!
Suddenly he made out his reflection in the dark glass. He straightened his tie and ran his hands through his hair, and was reminded of an evening when he had gone to the theater with Onno, to see Oedipus the King; during the intermission, as they were drinking a cup of watery coffee in the foyer, Onno had asked, "Are you always looking in the mirror, you vain sod?" — to which he had replied, "Yes, I always look in all mirrors: in order to calibrate them."
He turned around, put his hands back in his pockets, and sat down on the windowsill.
"You could employ a housekeeper, a full-time help."
"Me have my child brought up by a housekeeper? And then find myself probably lumbered for twenty years with an unfortunate woman who sits in the kitchen crying every evening? I wouldn't dream of it. Anyway, how much do you think that would cost? As you know, as a result of my noble character I devote myself solely to scholarship and the public good, so I earn virtually nothing; I live on a small allowance from my inheritance. But anyway, I could do something about that. For example, I could go out to work, although it goes against the grain. Teaching third-year students the alphabet. I could get a job at some university right away, maybe even in Holland."
"But it needn't be longer than the first five or six years, need it? After that it could go to a good boarding school."
"A good boarding school! Is my child really to be thrust from security into insecurity at the age of six so that for the rest of its life the whole world will be insecure? The English method? Is that really what you'd do in my place?"
Max rubbed his face with both hands.
"No," he said.
"Of course," said Sophia, when Max phoned the following afternoon and asked if it would be okay if he dropped in for coffee after dinner. "You can have dinner here if you like."
That was new.
"Are you sure I'm not disturbing you?" As he heard himself saying that last word, he had the feeling that he was taking things too far, but that turned out not to be the case.
"You know how it is yourself. If there's food for one, there's food for two, and if there's food for two, there's food for three."
"That's true. If there's food for a hundred, there's also food for a hundred and ten. It's hard to understand why there's still hunger in the world."
He took a bottle of Chianti with him and, seated opposite each other at the kitchen table, they tucked into their steaks. While he listened to her view of The Hague family council, he was again seized by the excitement that the situation always aroused in him: an audience with the unattainable Mother Superior, the bride of Christ, soon about to change in the darkness into voluptuous, vociferous Circe.
He had repeatedly asked himself how the transition took place. He tried to imagine what was going on inside her: she hung her clothes over a chair, washed, got into bed, and turned out the light. Was that the moment? Was it the falling darkness that changed her from the one into the other? Or was there no moment of transition at all — was it simply a malicious game, the effect of which she had once discovered with a certain kind of man, like Brons and himself? But what did he have in common with Brons? Well, perhaps susceptibility to this game, but there ought to be a few other shared characteristics — and there were not. With Brons, of course, it had not happened like this at all; it only happened like this with him, and it wasn't a game.
He was convinced that in some way her nocturnal existence really didn't exist for her during the day, just as one couldn't remember one's dreams in the daytime. He was her dream and so he must remain. If he were to say to her during the day that they had had another exciting night, then perhaps she might really not know what he was talking about and throw him out with his weird talk. Her go to bed with him, her daughter's ex-boyfriend— where did he get that idea from? He should act out that kind of male fantasy with the whores!
He listened to her and nodded, wiped his mouth, took a sip of wine, and looked from her moving mouth to her eyes and from her eyes to her moving mouth. He was listening more to the timbre of her voice than to what she was saying — because he already knew that from Onno; for the first time he heard something of a sob in it, a despairing undertone, which might have nothing to do with emotion but only with the structure of her vocal chords. She told him that after the meeting was over she had taken the train with Onno. Between The Hague and Leiden she had said to him that of course she could also take care of the child.
"I said that's the traditional role of the grandmother, after all. If the parents have to go out, a grandmother is called to come and baby-sit."
Onno had said nothing to him about that conversation. He thought of his own mother for a moment, who might have been the other grandmother of Ada's child — the union of life and death.
"And how did Onno react?"
"He was noncommittal, but I could see that he didn't think it was an ideal solution, and it isn't. I'm nearly forty-five, so you can work it out: by the time the child is fifteen, I'll be sixty. It might be possible, but despite all his progressive ideas, Onno suddenly becomes very old-fashioned about that: he believes that there should be a man in the family. Apart from that, I get the feeling he doesn't like me very much. Nevertheless, he'll have to decide quickly."
She had gotten up and was clearing the table. Although Max knew exactly that following a conception on October 8, 1967, nine months meant a birth at the beginning of July 1968, he asked casually: "Yes, in about two months, isn't that right?"