"Thank you for the heart-warming reception. I know that you don't belong to the species host, but I need to discuss something with you."
"Salve."
Max followed him to the basement, which after a short period of modest tidiness had again succumbed to the second law of thermodynamics. The chaos caused him almost physical pain. Lost for words, he looked at the mess. He himself could spend minutes carefully arranging the instruments at the edge of his desk, the magnet, the compass, the tuning fork, to the millimeter — here, there was not even the beginning of an awareness that there was such a thing as order.
"Are you really human?" he asked.
"Yes, it leaves you speechless, doesn't it? Only the very strongest can live like this. Upstairs it's a little tidier, but I only go up there to sleep these days."
That he was probably human, after all, was apparent from Ada's cello: the case lay on two upright chairs, standing facing each other next to his desk, like a body on a bed. Onno led the way to the back room, where his bed had once been, and cleared a corner of a sagging sofa; books, newspapers, a pair of gray socks, a toaster, were pushed aside, and in a flash Max also saw the book on Fabergé, which he had given Ada that first day.
"I was at the Wilhelmina Hospital this morning. It's going to be on Thursday, at four-thirty. Oh you don't know yet: the doctors—"
"I do know. I talked to your mother-in-law. That's why I'm here."
Onno had sunk into a small armchair, which dated from his student days and which he bought from a secondhand shop; at the sides there were stripes and scratches in the brown leather, perhaps from a long-dead cat that had once sharpened its claws on it. Had Max talked to his mother-in-law?
He looked at Max with raised eyebrows. "You talked to my mother-in-law?"
Someone may know someone else for years, but if he's asked what color the other person's eyes are, he often doesn't know, because people don't look at someone's eyes but at them. For the first time Max saw that Onno had a brown ring around his blue irises.
"Yes."
"We're listening."
Everything depended on the right tone. Max had not prepared what he was about to say, because then he would have to remember what he had prepared, when it was not a matter of remembering the right things but of saying the right things in the right way.
"Listen, Onno, I won't beat around the bush. The day before yesterday you told me about your dilemma, deciding who the child should live with. Because I had the feeling that I might be able to help you in some way, I contacted your mother-in-law yesterday. She told me two things — first, that the child is going to be delivered next Thursday by cesarean section, because Ada's condition may become critical."
"Which might be the best for everyone. And second?"
"Second, that she had also offered to look after the child herself. But you didn't want it to go to a single woman."
Max waited for a moment to see whether Onno had already realized, but there was no indication that he had.
Onno listened to him with the slightly unpleasant feeling that he was being intruded upon, even if it was by his best friend. Not only in his immediate family were they talking about him behind his back, about things that directly affected his life. He hadn't the faintest idea what Max was getting at.
"That's right." He nodded. "So?"
"I arranged to see her and I've just met her, in the station buffet. I've come straight from there."
What in heaven's name was going on here? Onno sat up. "Isn't that slightly odd? She didn't tell me anything about having arranged to meet you."
"You weren't supposed to know." Max struggled for words. Now he was about to say it for the second time. "Brace yourself, Onno. I suggested to her that she and I should look after your child."
Onno stared at him numbly. What he had just heard could not be possible. "Say that again."
"It's now more or less certain that I'm to become telescope astronomer in Westerbork, and in the foreseeable future I will probably move to Drenthe permanently."
"What on earth are you saying? I remember you saying that you'd feel like an exiled criminal in Siberia there."
"Things have changed for me, Onno. Your mother-in-law is prepared to move in with me, so that your child would be in good hands."
Onno felt as if he were seeing a city collapse and subsequently rise from its ruins in the shape of another city — Amsterdam changing into Rome, the palace on the Dam into St. Peter's. Once before he had had such a sensation. Years ago one winter evening, snow had deadened every noise and every sound in the city and he sat bent over his photos of Etruscan inscriptions: suddenly he saw everything shift into a new constellation, turn on its head, flip, and suddenly his discovery had been made. The sudden metamorphosis of his friend into his child's mentor and that of his mother-in-law into Max's house companion hadn't yet entirely sunk in, but wasn't it the ideal solution? Goodbye to all those cousins and their spouses!
Or was it complete madness, too crazy for words? Max with his dreadful mother-in-law in Drenthe. Surely that would be impossible. He, the frenzied satyr, under one roof with the icy Sophia Brons — what had gotten into him? How had he hit upon the idea of effacing himself in that way? Had his past caught up with him, as a foster child himself? But he had offered it to him; he was sitting there waiting for an answer. Was it perhaps simply friendship?
"Max…" he began — it was as though the resonance of his voice sent tears into his eyes. "I don't know what to say.. "
"Then don't say anything. Or rather say it's okay, and then we'll have it over with."
Onno got up and went out of the room. At the basin, he threw water over his face with both hands. While he was looking for a towel, which was not there, he asked himself whether he could accept the offer. Could he be the cause of such a radical change in Max's life? Maybe Max felt partly responsible, since he, Onno, would never have met Ada without him. Or was the accident involved, because Max had been at the wheel, although he was entirely free of blame? He wiped his face on a sleeve and went back in.
Max had stood up too and was looking at the sheets of squared paper with linguistic diagrams on them that were pinned to the wall; the Phaistos disc was obviously not yet out of Onno's system.
"My ears are still buzzing," said Onno. "Are you sure you're not letting your sense of humor run away with you?"
Max burst out laughing. "I don't think I've ever been as serious as today."
"Perhaps it's been staring us in the face all along, but please help me understand. What's gotten into you? I couldn't stand one day with that creature. What am I to make of it? Is there something going on between you and her, perhaps?"
"Ha, ha," laughed Max. "Don't make, me laugh."
"You're capable of it, but probably there are limits even for you."
"I imagine," said Max with great control, "that I shall live there like a vicar with his housekeeper and her grandchild. She'll cook my food and iron my shirts, collars never toward the point but always away from it. I'll get by sexually somehow — I'm sure to bump into someone."
"But why should you do all that for me?"
"Not just for you. I've had enough of the kind of life I've been living up to now myself. I don't have to go to Westerbork if I don't want to, do I? But I'm going to turn over a new leaf in my sex life too; anyway, it's a practical impossibility to live like a beast in the country. Let me put it like this: in a certain sense it suits me very well. I want to work with that telescope, and otherwise I would have been on my own, in rooms with the local lawyer. Commuting from Amsterdam every day would of course be crazy, certainly in a Volkswagen; and anyway, there are often things to do at night. I'll start an affair with the surgical nurse at Hoogeveen Hospital and then with the German teacher at Zwolle High School. I can teach her a thing or two. And eventually something beautiful will develop between your mother-in-law and the antiques dealer in Assen."