Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

She nodded. "All right."

It was as easy as that. Not even a preliminary kiss was necessary, though it was not cold or businesslike — a kiss might have made it colder and more businesslike: what was simple was at the same time complicated. She remembered a poem by Brecht, set to music by Eisler, on "Simple things, that are hard to do," a kind of love song addressed to Communism; Communism was not at issue here, but maybe there was a kind of love song in the air.

Max led her into the bathroom, laid a white robe over the edge of the bathtub, and closed the door behind him. There were no windows, but she could hear the strong wind through the ventilation grille in the ceiling. Here too there was a definite but not obsessive order, which had already struck her in the room; the bottles and jars were not arranged according to size but by type. All the tops were on, and the tube of toothpaste was not squashed, like a snake in a traffic accident, but had been rolled up to the right point.

She undressed and stood in front of the full-length mirror for a moment — counting herself lucky that she could not see the previous scenes that had undoubtedly been enacted in the glass. Her slim body with its small breasts and inverted black pyramid, which she had so often looked at with uncertain feelings, seemed suddenly transformed into something sacred: it was about to serve the other purpose for which it had been created. Outside, Max put on the prelude from Tristan and Isolde, which struck her as a rather melancholy choice. Placing her right hand on her heart and her left hand on her belly, she felt as if she were standing on a mother-of-pearl dish.

She was greeted by Wagner's oceanic swells as she entered the room. Max was lying in bed; he smiled at her with his head resting on his crossed arms.

"Or are you anti-German? Would you prefer Purcell?"

"I already know myself."

"What do you mean?"

"That I'd prefer to get to know you."

As she hesitantly loosened the belt of the robe, he put his hands over his eyes until she was lying next to him under the sheets. He raised himself on one elbow and looked at her. She saw that he wanted to say something, but although he said nothing, it seemed a moment later as though he had said it, and then he pressed his mouth to hers, took her firmly in his arms, and slid halfway across her.

She began trembling and whispered: "Be careful, don't hurt me…"

Max realized at once that it was her first time. He would have to deflower her, and with anyone else he would have dreamed up some pretext to put a stop to things: a headache; an early start next morning. Every time he had undertaken this task, he had paid for it afterward: for months the girls who had been transformed into women went on ringing the doorbell and phoning, even when he had forgotten them. When a man deflowered a woman, he assumed a place in her life which could only be compared with that of the doctor who had brought her into the world, or of the one who helped her when she was dying. But now, with Ada, it did not occur to him to stop.

She held him between her legs like her cello — and slowly, inch by inch, then back again, then a little further, she felt him penetrating her, while at the same time it was as though he enveloped her and she disappeared farther and farther into him. When she sensed that he had reached her hymen, she clung to him anxiously, while an image appeared to her, something like an eye, or the shutter of a camera. She wanted to call for her mother, but suddenly he was through and filled her completely.

Sobbing and laughing, she began kissing him. He stopped moving. She could feel his blood pounding deep in her belly. He was obviously trying to control his excitement, and when that threatened to fail, he came out of her, lay next to her, and put an arm around her shoulder.

"Perhaps we should leave it at that for today."

His paternal tone amazed her, but she was grateful to him. She said nothing. The record had finished, and she listened to the howling of the wind among the trees in front of the house. Suddenly there she was in an Amsterdam bed with an astronomer, who had put an end to years of fretting and had ushered in a new period in her life. She snuggled up to him and sighed deeply.

He too listened to the wind. He saw the house: light and warm inside, and outside, the damp, chilly night.

"If we went up onto the roof now," he said, "and I squeezed a drop of ink out of my fountain pen and let it blow against a sheet of paper, how great do you think the chance would be of the sentence I don't want Ada to stay with me appearing in my handwriting?"

"That's impossible."

"The chance isn't nil, but the universe is probably too small to contain all the ink needed before it happens."

In the weeks that followed, they saw each other every day in Leiden, where they walked through the Botanical Garden during the lunch hour, drank coffee in the observatory canteen, or had an Indonesian meal in town in the evening. On the weekends he took her with him to Amsterdam, sometimes with the cello in the back of the car. Those Saturdays and Sundays gave him a feeling of peace, which was new. He had had longer-term relationships a few times before, but they had not affected his restlessness in the slightest; even while those girlfriends were with him, he was dying to get away: out into the street, into the pub — not to drink, because he didn't do that, or to have a relaxed chat with someone, because he didn't do that either — but to look for something new.

The thought that somewhere in the town there was a woman walking, or sitting alone at a cafe table while he was at home wasting his time with his girlfriend, was unbearable. Sometimes such a woman appeared to him in a kind of vision: he saw exactly what she looked like and where she was sitting, in what cafe, at what table. On occasion he had found a pretext to get out of the house and run there; but when she turned out not to be sitting there, that was only because he was just too late. Afterward, he would stand on tiptoe outside and scan the street in both directions.

Of course, he had not suddenly changed into a monogamous lover: from Monday to Friday his time-consuming love life continued as before. But on the weekends, when Ada was there, the obsession left him. Not that he relaxed in front of the TV or read a thriller or did a household chore, because he had never understood what "relaxation" meant and he never would. The thought of playing a game, or a sport, or even going for a walk, was unthinkable. He took only study material with him on vacation, and left no church or museum unvisited; if he sunbathed, then it was not so much because he enjoyed it but because one had to get brown: it was less sunbathing than the exposure to light of his whole body according to a precise schedule, including his sides and the insides of his arms and legs. That was also work — because if he were not working or chasing women, he found himself peering into a threatening void that was more than just boredom. However, when he was chasing women he actually wanted to be working, and when he was working he actually wanted to be chasing women, with the result that he was never at peace. Whenever anyone brought this up, he usually answered: "Eternal peace will come in its own good time — I don't need an advance." Now, though, with Ada, he made love in a relaxed, almost bourgeois way, and afterward wanted nothing else, which sometimes worried him. Was he in the process of degenerating in the direction of marriage? At his insistence, Ada was now taking the pill.

His conversations with Onno were also part of his obsession, but with Ada it was different. He wasn't in love. In a certain sense he was in love with all women except Ada. When he looked at a woman, he often had the feeling that his blue eyes could see to the bottom of her soul, as if looking into a clear bay; and perhaps it was true. Perhaps women felt the same and this was the key to his romantic successes, for which he was envied and hated in the pubs. But when he looked at Ada, it seemed to increase his distance from her. He understood nothing about her; for him she had the unfathomable look of a creature from another world, and that was precisely what bound him to her. He experienced her presence in his house not like that of a dog, which has no secrets from human beings, but like that of a cat, which is itself a secret — and to that extent he felt free and unthreatened. And just as a dog belongs to a human being but a cat belongs to a house, so she merged with the order in his apartment and became a part of it. Dogs knock over tables, scoop cushions from armchairs, and carry things out of the room with their heads held high; cats do not even touch what they touch — except perhaps sometimes when they dig their claws into the carpet.