She looked around her in alarm. She had been locked up! She suppressed a surge of despair. What could happen to her for one guilder and five cents? Of course this was the usual procedure—it was done to drum it into her; soon another official would appear, she would be given a telling off, would have to pay, and would be allowed to leave. But until the door had opened, it was still closed. She put her bag of shopping on the table and sat down. In a film she would now shout that she wanted to see her lawyer. Hordes of men, women, and children had preceded her here. The top of the table was made of grubby plastic; it had deep holes in various places. In the corridor she heard occasional voices, and the rattle of trucks bringing new goods for sale. She looked at her watch and thought of Onno, who was now conferring in his room and had no idea that she was shut up in the dungeon of a department store. She took a guilder and a five-cent coin out of her purse and put one on top of the other.
When after a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, still no one had appeared, a wave of terror suddenly went through her. It was past five-thirty—it would soon be closing time. Suppose they had forgotten her! Imagine having to wait here till tomorrow morning! She got up in a sweat and began walking back and forth, biting her nails. Should she pound on the door? Start screaming? But perhaps that was precisely what they were waiting for; perhaps she was being observed from somewhere. She scanned the cement walls to see whether she could find anything. But just when she had decided to wait precisely five minutes longer, the key was turned.
On the threshold stood the security man who had apprehended her, with a policeman.
"What is your name?"
With eyes wide, Ada looked at the man in the black uniform, with the black boots, and with the black truncheon at his side.
"Ada Brons," she stammered, not being able to believe that she had been reported to the police.
"Do you admit that you stole this?" he asked, pointing to the doll, which the security man was holding up.
Ada took the coins and offered them in her open hand. "Here's the money. I'm sorry."
The policeman shook his head. "I must ask you to come to the station with me."
"To the station?" she repeated, perplexed. "Why?"
"So you can be charged."
He put his hand under his uniform jacket, and to her dismay, Ada saw that he was getting out handcuffs. The sight of that gleaming polished steel tore her apart. Her resistance broke and, sobbing, she threw the money at the two men.
"You're crazy! Crazy!"
"Calm down, miss. Nothing will happen to you. These are just the rules."
When the handcuffs clicked shut around her wrists, her first thought was how she could ever play the cello again. The space between her hands was not even sufficient for a ukulele. While they walked down the corridors to a back entrance, the policeman carried her shopping bag.
It was already dark outside; in a courtyard stood a small police van with barred windows. Shortly afterward they drove to the Warmoesstraat police station, which was around the corner, on the edge of the red-light district.
She was delivered to the duty officer's counter, where her handcuffs were taken off. A fat drunk woman with disheveled hair was screaming at a policeman, so young that he looked as if he had dressed up, and tried to involve Ada in her dispute; but she fell silent when two detectives brought in a semiconscious man, the front of whose shirt was red with blood. Ada was shown to Room 21, where she had to wait on a wooden bench in front of an ocher-painted door. When her handcuffs were taken off, her dismay and rage also disappeared. She felt as if she had fallen in the water but was now on shore.
Inside, she was received by a graying sergeant seated at a high black typewriter, which resembled the steps of a mausoleum. He looked at her paternally and asked her whether she had been guilty of this crime before. She was unable to explain to him why she had committed it now with such a trifling little thing. With a sigh, he put a black sheet of carbon paper between two forms straightened out on the table and put them in his machine.
When she observed that it was strange that there should be all this fuss over a guilder and five cents, he said: "It's not a matter of a guilder-five—it's about shoplifting. If a thousand people steal something worth one guilder-five and we do nothing about it, why should we prosecute someone who steals fifteen hundred guilders' worth? Or someone who's stolen fifteen hundred guilders?"
"That's true," said Ada. She had a feeling that the calculation wasn't quite right, but it seemed more sensible not to point this out.
"If we do nothing about it, then in ten years' time nothing will be done about someone who's stolen a bike or a car radio, and in fifty years' time nothing will be done about murder. You wouldn't want that to happen, would you?"
She thought of the orchestra. "Will I have to appear in court?"
"That could well happen."
"And what will I get?"
"A fine, I think, and possibly a suspended sentence as well. What's your job?"
When he heard that she was a cellist, he leaned back for a moment, took off his reading glasses, and looked at the ceiling with a thoughtful smile; it reminded him of something, but he said nothing. He took down all the facts, constantly pulling back one arm that stuck from the paper, checked on the spelling of the word mamushka, and pulled the sheets out of the typewriter carriage with a screeching jerk. Before he asked her to sign, he read the statement to her, in which she, the accused, Ada Brons, born July 24, 1946, in Leiden, a cellist by profession, stated that on October 27, 1967, in Amsterdam, she had removed from the premises of the Bijenkorf department store, with the purpose of unlawfully appropriating it, a mamushka-model pencil sharpener belonging to the Bijenkorf department store or some other person.
"You put the carbon paper in the wrong way," said Ada.
The sergeant looked at the second form: it was empty. The text was on the back of the first sheet in mirror image. He shook his head.
"Imagining that happening to me in my old age. It's time I retired. Do you know what?" he said, tearing everything in half with two large hands. "Let's say it never happened. I wish you well."
21
The News
"Can't you sleep?" whispered Onno.
"No."
It was a week and a half later. He had gone on working until after midnight and had gotten into bed beside her without putting the light on; he must have dropped off to sleep, but he had suddenly awakened again in the certain knowledge that her eyes were still open. He couldn't see her.
"Of course you're consumed by remorse because your life has taken a fatally criminal turn."
"That may be it."
He turned over onto his back, crossed his arms under his head, and stared into the darkness.
"Why is it that criminals should be beset by insomnia? Sleep is the sister of death, says the poet, but in that case murderers of all people should sleep very well. Conscience is obviously the opposite of death. Anyway, do you know why it is that human beings have to sleep?" he asked, "that we waste a third of our precious time on it? If you think about it, it's completely ridiculous and demeaning, lying there stupidly with your eyes shut—a typical prewar phenomenon. Just like unemployment in the 1930s."
"Well?"
"The stupid habit originated when our forefathers crawled out of the sea onto the land. At that time the sea had a temperature of 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit, exactly the same temperature as our blood is at present. During the day that was no problem, because then the sun shone on the primeval Quists and the primeval Bronses, but at night it cooled down and then they became lethargic, just like bats and such creatures still do during hibernation. We ourselves are now homoiothermal, but sleep is a legacy of our poikilothermal stage, if you see what I mean."
"How do you know all that?"
"It's a result of my wretched inability to forget what I've once read. My memory's my curse—but take heart, now and again I make up things and add them. For example, I could now invent the idea that the n
ature of dreams is a reminiscence of our earlier existence in the sea. Things are just as idiotic in them. Take that half-floating sensation in your dreams—you know what I mean? The only other place it happens is in water. Instead of Sigmund Freud, perhaps we should turn to Jacques-Yves Cousteau."
Ada said nothing. It was as if he were alluding to things he couldn't possibly know about. A number of coarse animal cries rang out in the street, emanating from the Germanic spirit of beer. Onno listened to the faint tick of the alarm clock and, having expounded his theory, felt himself drifting off again; an animal figure appeared before him and then slowly changed into something resembling a portable cage.
"Onno?"
He woke with a start. "Yes?"
"What time is it?"
"About two o'clock."
"Do you know what day it is today?"
"Monday. Why?"
"The sixth of November. It's your birthday."
He opened his eyes wide. "Bloody hell!" he said. "Thirty-four—I've made it!"
"Made what?"
"I've survived the age Christ died at."
They kissed, and while he still had her in his arms, Ada said after some hesitation: "I've got a present for you."
"It's not stolen, I hope?"
A slight shudder went through Ada's body. It was an effort for her to keep her voice under control: "As long as you like it. . ."
"I won't look a gift horse in the mouth."
"I've missed my period."
Although he was a man of language, he had scarcely ever heard a sentence that heralded the possibility of a fundamental change in his circumstances. Sentences like "You're under arrest" or "You're seriously ill" or "I'm leaving you" had been spared him up to now, seeing that he did not misbehave, was healthy, and had never really become attached to a woman; he had never yet heard the news that people who were really close to him were dead. Occasionally he had heard sentences like "After the revolution you'll be a beachcomber on Ameland," and there was even one sentence that he could not decipher, but all in all his life—despite the war—still had a virginal quality. "I've missed my period ..."—the sentence seemed to have a shape: dark and elongated, like a torpedo launched from the tube and disappearing into the waves. He wanted to turn on the light, but he lay there and stared in the darkness at the spot where the old school poster with the picture alphabet on it must be hanging.
"When were you due?"
"Over a week ago."
"Are you often late?"
"Never. Always bang on time."
"And you haven't forgotten to take the pill at all? Not even in Cuba?"
"I'm quite sure of it. Do you want to see the strip? All twenty-one have gone."
"No, please. And you don't have to convince me you haven't flushed them down the toilet. It's unbelievable! It's as big a mess in the pharmaceutical industry as everywhere else. If you really have a baby, we'll put it in a shoe box and send it to the complaints department at the factory. That'll teach them." He sensed that she gave a start; he put an arm around her and said in a different voice, "If you have a baby, Ada, we shall bring it up lovingly, but with an iron hand, the sole aim being that it shall honor its father."
"What do you really think, Onno?"
"To tell you the truth, I've no idea. It's obviously been on your mind for days, but how am I supposed to know what I think all at once?" He really did not know. It was a moment like when the hour of the great god Pan strikes in the classical landscape: the onset of the motionless, scorching midday heat. "For the whole evening I've immersed myself in the breathtaking problem of how social benefits should be linked to civil servants' salaries— and then you suddenly tell me you're pregnant. Good grief!" he cried. "Now I hear myself say it, it's suddenly dawned on me. You can't be serious! Is it true?"
"If you were to leave the room," said Ada, "I'd be sure that I wasn't alone."
He now remembered that on a number of times in the last few days he had noticed something strange in her eyes: as though she were looking not outward but inward, as though he were seeing her from behind a two-way mirror, like they had in shops and brothels. When she looked at him, it was as though she were not seeing him but only herself.
"That's incontrovertible proof. So I won't leave the room. The three of us will stay here forever, because the family is the cornerstone of society. It's just as well that they don't know in the party how right-wing and crypto-Christian Democrat I am deep down." To his own amazement the idea that he might become a father suddenly became attractive, like when a deskbound scholar unexpectedly has the offer of an around-the-world trip. It would turn his life upside down, but why should that always remain as it was?
She gave him a kiss on the cheek. "I was frightened you'd say that we'd have to get rid of it."
"Have to get rid of it?" he repeated, with horror in his voice. "Me get rid of my child? I might want to get rid of you, but certainly not my child! Get rid of a Quist—whoever heard of anything so scandalous? And of course we're getting married, because a Brons is no good to me."
They were still lying in the dark, as though they didn't dare face each other in their new situation.
"I don't care what it's called. As long as it's a normal, healthy baby."
"Healthy, yes, normal, no. For that matter the chance doesn't seem to me very great genetically. Abnormally gifted, with a wide range of interests, dazzlingly beautiful—that's what she'll be."
"She? Do you want a girl?"
"I don't want anything, but it's bound to be a girl. Real men have daughters." Suddenly he started groaning.
"What's wrong?"
"I'm thinking of the scandal in my family. A Quist marrying a pregnant woman is unheard of; my parents will never get over it. Perhaps it's time I introduced you." He felt like smoking a cigarette, but he didn't want to see the light of the match. "Do you know who else it will be a nice surprise for?"
"Max," said Ada rather flatly.
Of course, for the last few days the thought of Max had occurred to her repeatedly, like a fish breaking the surface of a pond, but she had kept suppressing it; for now she wanted to think only of her child and not of the father. Onno groped for her hand, and for a while they lay next to each other in silence.
"What if I'd said we would have to get rid of it?" he asked. "Would you have done it?"
"Not in a million years."
He turned onto his side and put his other hand on her belly. "How big do you think it is now? A sixteenth of an inch? An eighth of an inch?"
"About the size of a globule of frogspawn, I think. The same as you at that age."
"Would you mind moderating your language? Me a globule of frog-spawn . .. you must be out of your mind. I emerged spontaneously from my mother's fontanel, in full regalia, with shield and spear; my father fainted at the sight, the planets left their orbits, and all over God's creation strange portents were seen." He leaned on one elbow and asked in the direction of her face, "Listen, are you sure it's all true? What will you do if you have your period tomorrow?" As he was saying this he realized that it would be a disappointment to him, too.
"I'm not going to have my period tomorrow."
"Have you been to a gynecologist?"
"Not yet."
"You're going to the gynecologist tomorrow. And if you're not pregnant, you're going to stop the pill." He could tell from the pillow that she was nodding. "When's it due? The lunar calender won't present any problems to you as a pregnant woman."
"The eighth of July."
"So it happened . . ."
"On our last night in Havana."
Onno stared into the darkness.
Again he saw her shadow appearing in the doorway of his hotel room with the light of the corridor behind her—submerged far away below the horizon in Cuba. The greatest miracle of all was surely memory. How could Max's Big Bang lead to memory? To everything that existed, okay, but how could it lead to the memory of everything that had existed up to and including the Big Bang itself?
Maria, who had twice patted the place next to her, whereupon he had obeyed her orders like a lap dog—rendered defenseless by misunderstandings, the lying telephone conversation with Ada, and the gruesome photograph of the body on the bier.
She had taken him into her bed, where the spirit of the man with the beard and the big hat was still present, had raped him, and then—past saluting soldiers—delivered him back to the hotel, where he had lain in the bath for hours and spent the rest of the day sighing and groaning and reading the letters of Walther Rathenau to his mother, in a Spanish translation, a crumpled old edition, which the previous guest—some anarcho-syndicalist radicalinski, of course—had left on his bedside table. Disgusted with himself and consumed by guilt, he had gone to bed early and forced himself to sleep; after the telephone conversation with Max he did not wake again until Ada, who was supposed to be sleeping in her own hotel, suddenly arrived and crept into bed with him. It was as if she had had a premonition of his deceit and wanted to make it invisible, like putting a layer of paint over the primer. That alone deprived him of the right to demand an abortion—even if he had wanted to.
For Ada too, beside him, the darkness had filled with that last evening. She had no reason at all to think that she would become pregnant by Max, because she was on the pill; but during their night drive back to Havana, when scarcely a word was spoken, she was beset by a feeling of uncertainty for which there was no basis but which she could not shake off.
She was exactly at that time in the month when she would be fertile if she were not using the pill. Suppose the pill-maker had dozed off! She had read somewhere that it happened once in every so many million times: that would be just her luck. All her life she had been unlucky like that. On the other hand, she hoped that it would happen—not because that would mean it was Max's, but because she wanted a child; she would be out of musical circulation for a few months, but her place would be kept open.
The Discovery of Heaven Page 24
