Because of all this, he was busier than ever; sometimes, to his own alarm he realized in bed at night that he hadn't thought of Quinten and Ada for the whole day. Meanwhile his second cousin, the real estate agent, had sold Sophia's place for a reasonable price for conversion into a snack bar, the stock of "In Praise of Folly" had been taken off her hands by colleagues, superfluous effects had been collected by an auction house, Brons's wardrobe by the Salvation Army. Once the moving was complete and they had furnished the rooms at Groot Rechteren, Max and Sophia drove to Amsterdam one warm July morning, where Onno was waiting for them at the hospital.
The staff were very reluctant to part with Quinten. He had been laid in bed next to Ada — as he had been for the last few days, since he no longer needed to be in the incubator. They looked in shock at the angelic child, with his wide blue eyes, next to Ada's motionless, almost marble face with its closed eyelids. The tidal wave under the sheets had broken, and Max felt the sight sinking deep into himself, as something that would never disappear from his memory. The moment a nurse pulled the sheet aside and picked up Quinten, everyone here realized that something irrevocable was happening, like a second birth, a second farewell. Ada, too, was shortly to leave the hospital; they were looking for a nursing home near the castle.
"May I have him?" asked the nurse with Quinten in her arms. "I've never known such a marvelous child. Do you know that he hasn't cried once since his birth? How much do you want for him?"
In the car Sophia sat in the backseat, with Quinten next to her in a travel bassinet. Little was said. Like Max, Onno was thinking of their fateful journey in February, of which this journey was in some senses the pendant, but neither of them mentioned it.
When Onno got out on the forecourt of Groot Rechteren, he looked around him, puffed out his chest, and said: "Right! This is a suitable environment for my worthy son! It's true that nature of itself is cretinous, and feudalism is completely out of keeping with the character of a simple man of the people like me, who as a Socialist through and through thinks only of the welfare of the low-paid, but in this special case the party executive will overlook it."
When Sophia took the travel bassinet carefully out of the car and was about to take it inside, he said, "No, Mother, I'll do that. That is my privilege." He put the handles of the bassinet over his arm like a shopping bag, raised one hand, and as he mounted the terrace began reciting solemnly: "In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti!"
In the tower room Sophia laid Quinten on the chest of drawers to change his diaper, and Max showed Onno the apartment. In Sophia's living room-cum-bedroom he recognized the corduroy sofa and the low table, but here, with a view of the moat and the wood, everything had taken on a completely new look. The portrait of Multatuli had obviously been given to the house clearer. When he saw all this, he wondered what had really possessed Max, but the time to raise the subject had now passed.
Mixed with other things of Sophia's, Max's belongings were mostly in the larger room at the front: the green chesterfield armchair; the grand piano; his books. On his desk again was the row of small instruments, transformed into symbols through their combination and precise arrangement. Although he knew all those things, they too had changed character here. Onno asked whether the rent wasn't astronomical, but Max said that it was scarcely half what he had paid in Amsterdam.
Onno stood at the mantelpiece, on which were the books in the "shelf of honor." Kafka had disappeared from the row, and in its place he now saw a copy of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. There was also a photo of Ada and him, taken last year by Bruno in Havana. Next to it a second, framed old photograph. He had seen at once that they were Max's parents. Without saying anything he looked at Max.
Max nodded. "Risen from limbo," he said.
"Where has that suddenly appeared from?"
Max told him about the visit to his foster mother, without going into the circumstances.
Onno bent forward and studied the couple. "You've got the top. half of your face from your father and the bottom half from your mother."
"Do you remember that you said something like that about my face before — the day we met?"
"No," said Onno, "but I'm sure I hit the nail on the head."
"Of course."
"Are you coming?" called Sophia.
She was sitting under a sun shade on the balcony over which Max had spread two bags of fresh gravel, giving Quinten a bottle. Both Max and Onno were struck by the unity that she formed with the child, as though she were really the mother. Both fathers saw a completely happy woman, who seemed never to have had a daughter.
Kern and his Selma also appeared.
"Max has already told me about you," said Onno, after he had introduced himself with a click of his heels, perhaps as a commentary on Kern's bare feet.
Kern gave the impression that he had not heard. With one hand, covered in clay and stone dust, he gestured toward Quinten, who, as he lay on Sophia's lap drinking, fastened the deep-blue pools of his eyes on the orange stripes of the sun shade.
"Whoever saw such a creature? This is completely impossible!"
"You've either got the gift or you haven't," said Onno proudly. "There are artists who create beauty in a dogged struggle with spirit and matter, like you, but I do it in a lascivious moment with flesh." As he spoke these words he suddenly felt a chill go through him, as though Ada's presence on the balcony were suddenly penetrating his body.
Perhaps because he could not bear Quinten's gaze, Kern had left shortly afterward. In a cooler covered in condensation stood a bottle of champagne, and after Max, with ballistic satisfaction, had made the cork prescribe its parabola into the moat — where the ducks made a beeline for it, flapping and half running over the water, before ducking and waggling their tails and turning their attention to more serious things — the Proctor family appeared. Clara behaved like a woman behaves when she sees a baby for the first time; but when the gloomy translator saw Quinten, something in his face changed: it lightened as if a veil had been removed. The effect of the child on Arendje was even more strange. As Max poured the glasses, he kept a wary eye on the little rascal, who ran to Sophia — in order to be able to intervene at once in case he tried to plant his fist on Quinten's nose.
Instead of that, he hugged him, kissed him on the forehead, and said: "Doesn't he smell nice."
Little Arendje tamed! Proctor looked back and forth between Quinten and Onno — and then said something that made Max's heart leap:
"He looks like you. He's got your mouth."
He couldn't have given Max a greater present. And yes, perhaps that was the case: perhaps he did have the same thin, classically arched lips. It was as though the last remnants of his doubt were washed away by those words like the dirty scum by a jet of water after one had washed one's hands.
After sufficient chairs had been pulled up, the company split into two by sex, with Quinten in the middle of the women. While the latter group swapped experiences with infant care, Onno told Proctor that his wife had been a cellist. He assumed that Max had told him about the accident and said:
"I was first going to call my son Octave in honor of her: after the simplest, completely consonant interval, on which all music is based. Have you already plumbed the Pythagorean mysteries of that simple one-to-two relationship?"
Max had told Onno about Proctor's withdrawn nature, and he could see that Onno was trying to find a way to get through to him.
Proctor made a vague gesture. "I know nothing about music."
"Who does? Music transcends all knowledge. But when I hear the name Octave in my mind's eye, I see a type that I wouldn't want to see as my son. More an elegant, rather effete philosopher on stiltlike heron's legs with a flower in his buttonhole and not the robust man of action that my son must become, as I am myself so signally according to everyone. So I moved from the completely elemental to the cunning two-to-three of the dominant. The pure fifth!"