Two for the Seesaw

THE AFFAIR (244 pp.) -Hans Konlngs-berger -Knopf ($3.75).

"Do you belong to somebody?" asks the shy Dutch student on a sudden impulse. The girl in the bright yellow dress smilingly answers no. It is Zurich in the invasion spring of 1944. but any day is D-day to Cupid. The arrow of love pins Anthoni and Catherine together in a brief, bittersweet affair. Only when they try to pull apart do the lovers discover that the arrow is poisoned.

This quietly compelling first novel by 36-year-old. Amsterdam-born Hans Koningsberger does what life has been known to do: it mismatches a man and a woman. Toni and Catherine are not meant for each other, but owing to the chemistry of passion, smoke gets in their eyes. Temperamentally, the pair usurp each other's sex roles. Toni is sensitive, day-dreamy, putty-willed. An internee, he longs to escape to Britain, but rarely makes a real move to get there. Swiss Catherine is the fully emancipated "New Woman" who was born in the inkwells of Ibsen and Shaw. She is a self-possessed, self-sufficient artist; it takes a critical panning of her paintings to make her cry. Catherine takes Toni's love as one of her rights, and he diffidently accepts her favors as an unhoped-for privilege.

Despite this disparity of motives, they make tender and tempestuous lovers. With scarcely a lapse of taste or skill. Author Koningsberger captures the many-splendored hues of fleshly delight. His lovers' neopaganism is sunny, not steamy. But the clouds soon gather. Toni, who is an egghead, likes to air his notions on Hegel, physics, films, money and 20th-century man. Catherine would rather listen to a record of Oh! Look at Me Now! five times in a row.

The blowoff comes when Catherine refuses to be a one-man woman and insists on reserving her weekends for an old admirer. "I don't belong to anybody." says Catherine bitterly, meaning, as she unconsciously meant at the beginning of the affair, that she belongs to herself. A chastened Toni finally gives her up, wishing perhaps that he had caught just what she meant in the first place.

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