There was a great silence around him.
2
Their Meeting
As Onno Quist was leaving his parents' house, in another, considerably less distinguished, area of The Hague a man of the same age had reached orgasm in four or five waves, accompanied by loud cries.
"Well, well!" he gasped when it had subsided, both surprised and appreciative. "Thank you."
He was lying on the floor, and with his eyes closed he stroked the woman who had collapsed on top of him like a half-empty balloon; and somehow, something was wrong. He felt a leg where in fact there could be no leg; her head was at a point where he expected a foot. He stroked a rounding that was probably the beginning of a breast but might also have been that of a buttock, raised his eyebrows in resignation, sighed deeply, and dozed off. . .
He had met her in Rotterdam a few hours earlier. Some students from the Economics University had organized a "revolutionary carnival" there, and he had read the announcement on a noticeboard in Leiden, where he worked. He lived in Amsterdam, but because he had nothing to do, he had driven to the party later that evening after work. Deafening music in decorated rooms, people dancing everywhere; even the stairs were full. At an improvised Cuban restaurant, Moncada, he ate a hunk of meat, and in a Flemish tavern, the Racing Shorts, he ordered an orange juice. In a side room an "occult market" had been set up: at trestle tables all kinds of individuals were offering their services, free, with Tarot cards, horoscopes, pendulums, crystal balls, and I Ching paraphernalia. He searched the throng for girls he might be able to chat up, but everyone was accompanied, had dressed up—there were scores of boys in Che Guevara berets—and were enjoying themselves; he soon began to tire of the relaxed, unerotic atmosphere. Human beings were not on earth for their pleasure, he believed—fucking was an imperative—and after an hour he decided he might as well go back to his car. He was tired, but he mustn't give in to that, either; there was still time to fix up something in Amsterdam.
On his way to the exit he again passed through the room with the wizards and witches, but in the meantime it had virtually emptied. As the atmosphere became more intense, interest in higher things had disappeared; most people were already busy packing up their supernatural equipment. Only by the stall of a woman in a purple sweater was there still a girl sitting with her hand, palm upward, in that of the lady, like a saint showing her stigmata.
She was an attractive girl. She was no more than nineteen or so, with her blond hair in a ponytail. With feigned interest he stopped and listened to what the palmist had to say. With a slim pen she drew lines, crosses, and circles alongside significant twists in the lines of the hand, which reminded him of markings on astronomical photographs. In general the patterns seem to present a favorable picture, but certain side branches of the lifeline did give cause for alarm: they pointed to a serious illness at the age of about forty; it was also better not to have a grille on the Mount of the Sun. The girl looked at her hand and nodded in understanding.
"I think what you're doing is quite scandalous," he said suddenly—first and foremost, of course, to make himself known to the girl, but he also meant what he said. "I hope she thinks it's all nonsense, because that's what it is; but meanwhile it's been planted in her head—your threat about that illness. For twenty years." The two women looked up at him, the girl with an amused look, the astrologer with a morose glance over her semicircular reading glasses. She was his own age, perhaps a little older; dark-brown hair lay in strange twists across her head, as though an enormous lizard had nestled there, an iguana. Something in her face immediately grabbed him. He saw her small breasts in her sweater, between them a pendant with a flat metal hand on it—and at that moment he knew that he wanted to go to bed not with her client, but with her.
"Scandalous," he said, still looking at her.
Perhaps the girl had seen the change; she got up, said goodbye politely, and left.
"I think we have a bone to pick with each other," he said severely.
When she got up to pack, she turned out to be very slightly built: her beastly crown did not even come up to his shoulders. Without a word she put on her coat and went outside. Wondering how he was to break through that silence, he followed her to the car park. When she had put the key into the door of a small car, she suddenly turned to him and gestured invitingly.
He burst out laughing. "I've got one too. I'll follow you."
A little later, in his dark-green sports car with the white cloth hood, which was raring to go faster, he dawdled behind her along the road to The Hague, with a constant semi-erection because of the situation.
"A fortune-teller!" he cried as they passed Delft, and banged his wooden steering wheel. "That's all I needed!" He felt in his element and began singing a Mahler song: "Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht, fröhliche Hochzeit macht ..." Tears welled up in his eyes. Melancholy, lust, music—suddenly everything overwhelmed him as he watched the red taillights.
"I'm alive!" he shouted. "I'm alive!"
She lived in a pedestrian apartment building, plonked down crudely in a street full of nineteenth-century workers' houses. Even as she walked along the back balcony she remained silent. In a small, warm apartment she lit candles and incense sticks, and handed him a bottle of wine with a label that did not inspire confidence. As he took the bottle between his knees and stuck the corkscrew into the cork, sitar music filled the room.
"Of course," he said. "Ravi Shankar."
They clinked glasses and drank, still looking at each other. He did not like the wine and put down his glass. What next? He was sitting in the small armchair; she was on the sofa. He got up, knelt down in front of her, and laid his right hand palm upward in her lap.
"Right, now let's see what you can do."
He felt the warmth of her thighs, but she moved his hand to one side like a book that she did not want to read and took hold of his left hand. The hand lay in hers like an item of lost property; her small hand was warmer than his, which aroused him still more. She had still not said a word; they did not even know each other's names. After casting a glance at his short, slightly deformed thumb, she began drawing crosses and circles again—but suddenly she faltered and looked at him in alarm. He was also alarmed. He read something in her look that he would not believe but which he did not want to hear.
He withdrew his hand and laid it on her hip, putting the other on her neck. Pushing his fingers into her thick hair, he pulled her head slightly toward him, which she willingly allowed him to do. He gave a short grunt, and then suddenly leaped forward across her, while she immediately parted her legs. At the same moment they were writhing and biting like fighting dogs, pulling each other's clothes off. Yelling, screaming, they were caught up in a whirlpool and dragged down to a depth of which no memory usually remains...
He woke with a start. He had slept for no longer than a minute. He turned his head to the side. Above the slowly fading glow of an incense stick, a thin white cone of ash bent further and further forward and broke off.
"I must be going," he said.
Again he studied the topology of the chiromancer. It was as though she were also a snake-woman; her posture was an impossible one, like in an Escher drawing. Her curls of hair had worked loose and lay over her shoulders and back like congealed lava, but it might also have been her breast. Without waking her, he wriggled out from beneath her and opened a door behind which he suspected the bedroom lay. He lifted her up. She was as light as a child; he laid her carefully on the bed and pulled the blankets over her. She had not woken. Because he felt agitated, as though he were in a hurry, he did not take a shower; he washed with cold water in the kitchen, dried himself with a clammy tea towel, dressed quickly, and scrutinized the flat.
In the Swedish whitewood bookcase there was a postcard of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding: perhaps because of the pregnant bride's hand, which lay palm upward in that of the bridegroom. The back of the card was blank. He pulled a yellow pencil with an eraser on the end out of his
inside pocket, produced a small pencil sharpener from a side pocket of his blazer, sharpened the pencil meticulously in an ashtray, and wrote: "I'll never forget this.—Max." For a moment he considered leaving his telephone number, but did not. He carefully placed the card on her small desk against a polished veined-pink stone, perhaps invested with magic powers, but perhaps simply a souvenir from a southern beach. Then he blew out the candles, left the incense burning, and gently closed the door behind him.
Sexual satisfaction had washed every part of him clean. He was reminded of a vacation in Venice, when violet-colored mountains suddenly appeared on the horizon after a storm. His tiredness had gone and with Schubert's First Symphony on the radio—probably the Berlin Philharmonic under Bohm—he drove haphazardly down the empty winter streets. He was free! He wanted nothing more now! This was as wonderful as fucking itself, or the certainty beforehand that it was going to happen. Or was it even more wonderful? Was the reason that he wanted to sleep with a woman every day, a different one every day, ultimately to achieve this aim: not to want to for a short time? What a happy old man he would be. But of course that was not how it would be; when that time came, he would want to want what he was no longer capable of. Happiness was not freedom from chains but release from chains. Chains were an indispensable part of happiness!
He had no idea where he was, but by driving straight ahead as far as possible he was bound to reach the edge of town. The Hague was not that big. Suddenly he recognized a junction. On the deserted pavement stood a large man in a long overcoat, who raised his hand.
Surely a mugger would not operate like this, he thought, at one in the morning in the freezing cold. He signaled, pulled over with a rapid movement, and stopped. He saw the man come jogging up in the mirror; he turned off the radio, leaned over, and wound down the window on the other side.
Onno, bending low, looked into Max's narrow, fanatical face. It reminded him of an ibis, the Egyptian Ibis religiosa, with its thin neck and curved beak; there was something dangerous about it, like an ax. Max, for his part, surveyed Onno's full, domineering features. The transition from the forehead to the straight nose was classical, with no curve; beneath was an equally classical small mouth, with curved lips, scarcely broader than his nostrils. It struck him as vaguely familiar.
"Where are you headed?"
"Are you going toward Amsterdam?"
"In you get."
Onno took a step back and surveyed the car disapprovingly. "But under protest!"
"Please, I beg you," said Max in amusement.
Once, with some effort, he had managed to sit—or, rather, lie—down, Max put his foot down and the car leaped forward like a racehorse.
"Nice motor," said Onno with an expression that indicated he thought his benefactor was not quite right in the head.
Max burst out laughing. "Oh, this is nothing. When I grow up, I shall buy a white open-topped Rolls-Royce, and I'll sit on the back seat in a white fur coat, with a beautiful woman at the wheel."
Pulling a wry face, Onno was forced to laugh a little too, and turned his head to one side. He already had the beginnings of a double chin. "Why don't you buy a pram right away?"
Max glanced at him for a moment. They had found each other—this was the moment. Did they both realize it? With those few words a bridge had been built. Max knew he had been seen through by Onno as never before, just as Onno felt understood by Max, because his aggressive irony had not met with resistance, as it invariably did, but with a laugh that had something invulnerable about it. They had recognized each other. A little embarrassed by the situation, they were silent for a few minutes.
Once they had left the stately avenue through Wassenaar behind them and reached the dark motorway, Max accelerated to a hundred miles an hour and said: "I have the feeling I know you from somewhere. Wasn't your photo in the paper recently?"
"Of course my photo was in the paper recently," said Onno, as if he had been asked if he could read.
"For what reason?"
"Can't you remember? Have you already forgotten?"
"I confess my shortcomings."
"My photo was in the paper," pontificated Onno, "because I received an honorary doctorate in Uppsala."
"May I congratulate you belatedly? And what was it for?"
"So you can't remember that, either. Tell me, what do you know?"
"Almost nothing."
"It was because I made Etruscan comprehensible. The greatest minds in the world had failed—even Professor Massimo Pellegrini in Rome was too stupid—so I thought I might as well do it."
Max nodded. Now he remembered: the large man in tails, pretending to be astonished as he received the diploma from a lady in an academic cap, as though it were a complete surprise to him.
Onno looked sideways. "And what about you?" he asked. "What do you do for a living? I can't recall ever having seen your photo in the paper."
"What a shit you are," said Max, laughing. "I do astronomy." Motioned right with his head. "Over there. In Leiden."
Onno looked at the town on the edge of the bare fields. "Don't you need to turn off here, then?"
"I live in Amsterdam, thank God. That's why I have a car." Onno put out his hand and said, "Onno Quist." Max shook the hand. "Delius, Max."
3
I'll See You Home
Onno never answered curious questions about his discovery. "You can read all about it in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies," he was wont to say. "I don't work overtime." Now, however, in response to Max's question how he had deciphered the script, he explained patiently that it was not a matter of deciphering, seeing that it had been legible for donkey's years. It consisted largely of the Greek alphabet, but it was not Greek; it was incomprehensible. It was as if someone who knew no Greek were to learn the Greek alphabet and then try to read the Iliad. The Etruscans were an Italic people, he lectured, living in what was now Tuscany. The Roman conquerors called them "Tusci." Latin was full of Etruscan loanwords, such as persona for "mask," but apart from that there were only a few words whose meaning was known, such as those for "god," "woman," and "son."
The problem was that there was no long bilingue as there had been with Champollion's Rosetta stone, with the same text in Etruscan and a known language. So they were connected with the Greeks in some way, and at the same time their language was totally unconnected with Greek. They wrote their language phonetically with Greek characters, like first-year high school pupils did with their names, and like Dutch people did with Roman letters. So that in about the ninth century B.C. this people came from somewhere where there were also Greeks. However—and that was the decisive flash of inspiration—it was of course also possible that the Greeks had once borrowed their alphabet from the Etruscans in order to write their own language, Greek. Of course it was a totally crazy idea; but following that line of reasoning, supported by all kinds of archaeological considerations, he arrived at the Cretan languages, Linear B, deciphered fifteen years previously by his late colleague Michael Ventris, and Linear A from the eighteenth century—which in turn had Semitic origins . . .
"In short, my dear Watson," he said as they were passing Schiphol airport, "through combination and deduction and a lot of luck and wisdom, I found the answer. It's true that Professor Pellegrini still regards me as a fantasist and a charlatan, but that is largely an indication of his autistic nature."
"What did you study?"
"Law." Law?
"It's a family disease."
"But all those languages. .."
"A hobby. I'm an amateur, like the great Ventris, who was an architect by profession. If I have to, I can learn a language in a month. I could read by the time I was three."
"How many languages do you know then?"
"I'm bad at counting. That strikes me as more in your line. How many stars are there?"
"We haven't counted them all yet, and anyway, the number isn't constant. In one galaxy alone there are about a hundred billion. As many as a human being has brai
n cells."
"Speak for yourself."
"In addition there are about a hundred million known galactic systems, as many as I have brain cells, so you can work it out. A one and twenty-two naughts. How many languages are there?"
"A mere nothing. About two thousand five hundred."
"Can you read hieroglyphics too?"
"What kind of hieroglyphics?"
"Egyptian."
"Nothing to it. I can speak them too. Paut neteroe her resch sep sen ini Asar sa Heme nen ab maä kheroe sa Ast auau Asar. Which, being interpreted, is: 'The paut of the gods rejoice at the coming of Osiris's son Horus, upright in heart, whose word is absolute, son of Isis, heir of Osiris.' "
"Goodness me! What does 'paut' mean?"
"Well, that's a bit of a problem. How annoying of you to ask. Most experts believe that it refers to the primeval substance the gods are made of; but in fact it's even more complicated, because in the Book of the Dead the god creator says: 'I created myself from the primeval substance, which I made.' But I won't weary you with such archaic paradoxes."
"They seem quite modern to me," says Max. "Where do you live? I'll drop you off at your door."