Out of Mind (8 page)

'Why do you want beer all of a sudden?' she says. 'Anyway, I'd want to ask Dr Eardly first. Alcohol and medicine don't usually go together.'

I don't quite understand what she is talking about, but I do not want to spoil the atmosphere now.

'The door has been mended,' she says, and puts her purse on the piano.

Yet another riddle. Better not ask any further. I nod. She looks at her watch. 'Why don't you lie down for a while?' she says. 'Dr Eardly said . . .'

' . . . What have I to do with Dr Eardly?'

'You don't actually need to go to sleep. Or else play the piano.' She looks at me somewhat anxiously and her voice trembles in spite of her determined tone.

I don't want to be a nuisance, so I get up and go to the piano. I pick up her purse and open it. She will have to pay Greta before long, and she has nothing but American money. But who would refuse dollars? No one. Greta's boyfriend is a prole, Pop says. He doesn't like her because she smells of perfume, which creeps into my shirt collar at which I sniff furtively in my room after the lesson. I am in love with Greta, but she is on no account allowed to know that. She might not want to give me lessons any more. It is for her that I practise. I don't care about Mozart and Bach. Only about that one little hour a week, alone with Greta, side by side at the piano, wrapped in a cloud of daffodil scent.

'Why are you standing by the piano like that?'

Vera's voice. She takes me by the arm. I must go and rest, she says. Only for an hour. No need to get undressed. Just lie down on the bed.

I enter the bedroom and grin. I chuckle softly to myself and start humming as if automatically. Greta's boyfriend is a prole.

When I wake up it is so dark I can't even see the church tower behind the Sweelinckstraat. All around the open belfry runs a wooden balustrade. Grandpa told me that someone jumped off it once. In this room I often dream of that. Or of shooting stars, which Pop sometimes points out to me in the evening sky. Shooting stars that burn up when they enter the earth's atmosphere. Maybe Grandpa will teach me how to play checkers tonight. He promised. I'll lie still until he calls me. I hear him playing his recorder at the back of the house. He also has a piano but it has such a heavy touch that I always make mistakes when he asks me to play something. He is playing long drawn-out notes ending in trills. It must be after five. Grandpa always plays from five till half past. Then he has his drink and exactly at six o'clock we start our supper.

'What time is it?' I ask Vera when she enters the bedroom and switches on the light.

'Quarter past five.'

I nod contentedly and sit up on the edge of the bed. She pulls my tie straight. 'Dr Eardly is here.'

Slightly stiff from lying on the bed, I walk towards the open living-room door in the direction of flute music. Vivaldi by the sound of it.

A man in navy-blue pants and wasp-yellow sweater gets up from the settee surprisingly quickly when I enter. Vera switches off the radio.

'Hello, Mr Klein,' he says. A lot of gold in the corners of his mouth. He can't be older than forty-five. He enquires how I am, in the hearty, quasi-spontaneous tone in which all Americans address strangers. I nod, and pause in the middle of the room.

'Sit down, please, Maarten,' says Vera, but the man makes a gesture as if to say he doesn't care. Then I sit down and he immediately drops down with a thud beside me on the settee and grabs hold of my wrist. Vera does nothing about it. She sits beside us on the two-seater, her hands clasped in her lap, looking at us, frightened and curious at the same time. The man smells penetratingly of aftershave.

'Been to Lorenzo the barber's, have you?'

'How did you guess?' he says, and wants me to straighten my right knee. He taps on it with a little silver hammer that he has taken from a leather case. The lower leg jumps up. 'Excellent,' he says.

'Naturally,' I say. 'There's nothing wrong with me.'

The man glances briefly in Vera's direction, a questioning look in his eye.

'I talked about it with him,' she says. 'We've been looking at old photographs together.'

'A useful and agreeable therapy,' says the man, and puts one leg across the other. No, he doesn't want to drink anything. Not even a Miller? Vera gives a startled look, but when the man shakes his head her face becomes calm again. People's facial expressions sometimes flash by so fast that I have no time to ascribe a meaning to them. Maybe they don't have a meaning. Maybe they are like the moving patches of sunlight among the trees in a wood.

'And how did it go?'

He seems to think I am crazy. The tone they usually adopt here when they address someone over sixty. Amiable condescension mingled with distaste. Be that as it may, let it pass.

'Seeing photographs is quite different from looking at photographs,' I say. 'Anyone can look at photographs, but seeing a photograph means being able to read it. On the one hand you have people and their cultural products, on the other hand nature. Trees, lakes, clouded skies speak a universal language in photographs that can be understood by anyone. Outside time, as it were. By contrast, people, building, roads, coffee cans and the like can be read only in a specific context, in time. You can't read that photo album on the table for the most part because you lack the necessary background information. You weren't there. In other words, you cannot form any further pictures about what is in there, because you cannot remember what could once be actually seen. It isn't your past.'

I glow with effort. He is clearly finding it so interesting that he takes his diary and starts writing something. When I stop talking in order to give him a chance to write his notes, he says, 'Please carry on.'

Vera also seems to hang on my lips. But now that I have stopped, no more will come.

'Philip sends his regards to you - Philip, the bookseller,' says the man, putting a notebook into his inside pocket.

'Oh, him. I haven't seen him for ages.'

'You went there only the other day. You bought
Our Man in Havana
from him. A very good Graham Greene. Made into a movie as well. Who played the main part again?'

I shrug my shoulders. Then Vera whispers a name. 'Alec Guinness.' Damn, she's right. This fellow does look like Alec Guinness. Let's hope he didn't hear her, because it may not be much of a compliment. Same jowls and broad rims to his ears. I have to make an effort not to start chuckling.

'Maybe I did,' I resume the thread. 'When you don't have to go anywhere any more you just walk as you please. There's no harm in it. It can't go wrong. It's not all that good either, but be that as it may . . .'

He nods and suddenly gets up. He gives me a cool, dry hand. I wonder if he plays the piano? He has the hands for it. When I am about to ask him, he has already turned his back on me and is following Vera into the hall.

Peace and quiet, keep indoors, familiar surroundings, carry on with the therapy, I hear a man's voice say. And Vera's timid voice in reply: 'Sometimes he's like a stranger to me. I can't reach him. It's a terrible, helpless feeling. He hears me but at such times I don't think he understands me. He behaves as if he were on his own.'

I know exactly what she means. Like it was just then, when it all went wrong. All of a sudden I had to translate everything into English first, before I could say it. Only the forms of sentences came out, fragments, the contents had completely slipped away.

Furiously I glare into the front room. I seem to lose words like another person loses blood. And then suddenly I feel terribly frightened again. The presence of everything! Every object seems to be heavier and more solid than it should be (perhaps because for a fraction of a second I no longer know its name). I quickly lie down on the settee and close my eyes. A kind of seasickness in my mind, it seems. Under this life stirs another life in which all times, names and places whirl about topsy-turvy and in which I no longer exist as a person.

'Curious,' I say to Vera as she enters the room. 'Sometimes I just have to lie down for a moment. I never used to.'

'It doesn't matter. Have some time to yourself.' She sits down, picks up a book.

'Have some time to yourself.' I repeat the phrase because it appears strange to me.

She turns the pages but she isn't reading. I can tell from the look in her eyes that she doesn't understand me.

'It should be: have some time in yourself. That describes the situation better.'

'Is that how you feel?'

'Less and less so.'

'What do you mean?'

'Like a ship,' I say, 'a ship, a sailing vessel that is becalmed. And then suddenly there is a breeze, I am sailing again. Then the world has a hold on me again and I can move along with it.'

'I find it so hard to imagine it, Maarten. I can't see anything wrong with you at all. It is as if you were looking at something, at something that I can't see. Are you afraid at those moments? What exactly happens to you then?'

'I don't know. I can't remember. Only that feeling of a sudden heaviness, as if I am sinking through everything and there is nothing to hold on to.'

'Dr Eardly says it will all come right again with rest.'

'Do you know what I sometimes think, Vera? Why do I have so few memories from my childhood? I think a happy childhood leaves few memories. Happiness is a condition, like pain. When it's gone it's gone. Without a trace.'

'But there are other things that you remember perfectly. You remember everything about the elevator at the Postjesweg. I had forgotten all about that until you started talking about it.'

I nod. A small engineering miracle. It was a machine but its wheels and cogs worked so slowly that it looked as though the vegetable boats were being lifted trembling and swaying from the depths by some magic force. I often wave from the bridge at the market gardener sitting in the poop and sometimes he waves back with his cap or woolly hat.

'Who are you waving at?'

I look at my raised right hand and quickly drop it. Reality comes to my aid in the shape of a black car that stops behind Vera's Datsun in front of the house.

'Dr Eardly, that must be Dr Eardly,' I say quickly.

Vera gets up, puts the book she was holding in her hand upside down on her chair and goes to the door. I can read the title.
Our Man in Havana.
Rings a bell. I probably read it long ago, though I haven't the faintest idea what it is about.

'Hi, William,' I say as the eldest Cheevers boy follows Vera into the kitchen carrying a carton full of purchases.

William nods. He is tall, broad and shy, in his padded blue anorak and jeans. And, of course, those stitched training shoes that every boy around here ruins his feet in these days. A good lad, but you have to chat to him a bit before he loosens down . . . up!

I use words the wrong way around occasionally, I notice, very occasionally. Maybe I have suffered a very slight stroke. That can happen in your sleep, you don't need to have noticed it at the time, I have read about it somewhere. But as long as you're still conscious of everything it doesn't matter, does it?

I go to the kitchen and ask William how Kiss is, their white Pomeranian. It seems the question is not well received. Vera and William, side by side behind the kitchen table with the red-dotted plastic cloth, remain silent for a moment. Embarrassed like two children. Then Vera says to William: 'Maarten's jokes are a bit gloomy sometimes. Don't take too much notice.' William nods emphatically, with relief. The acne has left deep pits in his cheeks.

'Well, I'll be off, then,' he says.

'Don't you want a beer?' I ask.

Behind William's back Vera motions no with her hands. Why? Why shouldn't the lad have a beer?

'No time,' says William.

'Many thanks,' says Vera.

'No trouble, Mrs Klein,' says William in reply.

How beautiful is this speaking from person to person, one after the other, like beads on a string.

I sit down at the kitchen table and watch Vera unpacking the purchases and putting them away in the kitchen cupboard. Sugar here, tea a shelf lower down. Every household has its own rules. That is why you often can't find your way around in someone else's kitchen.

'Sometimes,' I say, 'when you can't get the usual brand and you've bought a different tin you don't even see the new tin at first. The memory of the familiar tin makes the new one invisible.'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'About coffee,' I say, 'tins of coffee.'

When she has finished tidying up she pushes the empty carton under the kitchen table with one foot and asks me if I would like a bowl of soup. Oxtail soup.

'All right,' I say.

She passes me the newspaper but I push it away again at once. Most of it is the same every day, anyway.

Stirring the saucepan of soup she says, 'Why don't you go and lie on the settee and read the paper? I don't like being watched when I'm busy in the kitchen.'

I put the paper over the book on Vera's chair and close the curtains. Then I switch on the television. I listen while looking at the stylishly groomed women and men of NBC news, busily gesticulating behind their desk. I understand everything they say. I can follow everything. Yes, it must have been a slight stroke, a very slight one. I won't tell Vera, she would only worry.

The food is very thin this evening, but I am not hungry, anyway. Beside my plate lies a green capsule. Vera says I must take it. It calms you down, she says.

'But I am already calm.'

'Even calmer.'

I hold the pill between thumb and forefinger and put it in my mouth and take a spoonful of soup.

'Oxtail soup,' I say. 'Nice.'

'Your favourite soup,' she says.

From the settee we watch the television. A documentary about the rise of Hitler. The familiar scenes of flags and banners and crowds of people, hysterically cheering the moustached little man on the balcony.

I was twenty-one then. I was engaged to Karen and no one in my family except Uncle Karel at the Twentse Bank believed there would ever be a war. Certainly not in the Netherlands. Karen. Would she still be alive? She was the first girl I ever saw naked, in her parents' cottage in Spierdijk. With her arms crossed above her head she pulled off her lemon-coloured summer dress in one movement. She wasn't wearing a bra underneath. She sat down on the edge of the bed, tilted her white buttocks and pushed her even whiter panties down over her knees. She kicked them off her foot and held out her arms to me. I trembled like a reed and did not really know what to do. What I wanted to do at that moment was kneel before her. I had not been brought up religiously but that was what I wanted to do, kneel down to that naked girl with her blonde hair, one strand of which fell between her small pointed breasts. She helped me, but as soon as I felt her pubic hair against my belly I came, from sheer excitement. Leaning on her elbows she looked with a contented smile at the glistening white puddle on her tummy. Never mind, she said. You'll take longer in a minute. Later she told me she had had an affair with a married man, a teacher at school. She never realized how much I adored her. Maybe it was my own fault. I was very shy. Pop always made jokes about it. I'm sure that boy is going to be an archaeologist when he grows up, he said. All he ever looks at is the ground.