by J. Bernlef
All around us, snow falls in thuds from wide-spreading fir branches. When the sun comes out presently, there may well be a thaw. High above us a few seagulls zigzag, but in the wood not a bird stirs. Wherever you go, around here, you smell the sea. A strong smell of algae, seaweed and fish, mingled with the mild, rising scent of millions of brown, decomposing pine needles.
We turn left into Fort Hill Avenue and arrive at Eastern Point Boulevard. Across the bay, the wooden houses of Gloucester on their stone foundations lie scattered against the hillsides, painted in the same cheerful colours as the fishing boats: moss-green, dove-grey, flamingo-pink or brick-red. The two sky-blue, bell-shaped spires of the church high above Main Street seem to keep watch over all those scattered snowy roofs. Between the blue spires stands a life-size statue of the Madonna, holding, instead of the Baby Jesus, a schooner in her left arm. Our Lady of Good Voyage.
Every now and then cars and pick-up trucks drive past slowly. The drivers greet me, although they don't always know me. Fifteen years ago Vera and I came to live here. The house belongs to IMCO. An ex-secretary lived in it before, Joseph Stern. After that it was empty for a year. No one wanted to live so far from work. I didn't mind travelling to Boston every morning on the little train. Maybe the oldest and most ramshackle train in the United States, with such dirty windows to the carriages that you could hardly see that you were practically chuff-chuffing through the back yards of the wooden houses of Salem. In the summer I would watch half-naked toddlers playing in brightly coloured inflatable paddling pools, in winter the garden furniture would be stacked and covered in snow. The wooden seats in the train were hard - there was no first-class carriage - but the journey lasted no longer than half an hour and almost all the time closely followed the coastline of marshy inlets full of grassy tussocks, islets and small bays with marinas, wooden jetties and summer chalets along the banks. It was a friendly journey through a friendly world.
When I retired, IMCO allowed me to stay in the house. It was never really mentioned. I simply continued to pay the rent to a real-estate office in Boston and for the rest nothing changed.
You get cold feet in the snow, no shoes are proof against it. 'Come,' I say to Robert who plods faithfully beside me, 'we'll go a bit faster.'
Many of the clapboard houses around here are empty in the winter. They belong to rich people in Boston and these days even as far as New York, who come here in the summer to go sailing and fishing. The clocks stand still in the empty rooms and only a magazine or a newspaper on a table indicates that people lived here last year.
Denial. Of course! Another word for refusal. Five letters beginning with d. I'd been chewing on that for a whole hour. It is as if the winter air is widening my veins. Maybe that's what it is, hardening of the arteries. You become forgetful. It's part of old age.
Year by year things happen to your body. Your feet lose their springiness. You go up and down the stairs once and you have to sit down to catch your breath again. Your eyes start to water when you look at one spot for a long time. The shopping bag moves more and more often from one hand to the other and you meet fewer and fewer people's eyes. But this is different. More a general feeling of unease than a specific symptom. But no, it would be nonsense to think there is something really wrong. 'I'm still going strong!'
I must not make a habit of this, of talking aloud to myself, especially not now that Robert and I are approaching the inhabited world. Robert dashes through a white open gate, and down a garden path. Must have smelt another dog. He disappears behind a house. I walk on. He'll catch up with me soon enough.
Now you can see the harbour clearly, cutting deep into the land; the concrete landing stages and the cranes in front of the white fish factories and cold stores. Here and there, rows of wooden poles of former landing stages stick criss-cross out of the water, in some places still connected by cross-beams.
Cod and lobster. Lobsters as big as your head. Thanks to the tourists there is still a bit of a living to be made here. And some export to Boston and New York in those large, silver- coloured freezer trucks that drive back and forth every day.
I don't have much to do with the world as such any longer, but I still enjoy observing all these daily activities. There's not much going on at home these days. That is why you have to get out, not sit indoors all the time. Your world would shrink too fast.
In the past a ferry used to cross from here to the other side but now you have to walk all the way round the harbour to reach the town. And the nearer you get to the centre the more steeply the road climbs. I am beginning to feel my legs. If the tavern is open I'll take a rest there.
Change has struck in the tavern, too. Where six months ago there was still a billiard room with six of those green meadows on bulbous brown legs, slightly mysterious under low-hanging steel lampshades, there is now a stage crammed with sound equipment and microphones. There is probably dancing here on Saturdays. But the long bar is still the same. I look around. The barmaid is standing by the cash register with her back towards me.
When she turns to face me I have to hold on to the raised rounded edge of the bar with both hands. I order a pint of draught.
Of course, I must have changed a great deal in fifty years. Grown fatter. Her nails are painted bright red. The nature of the work requires it. When the phone rings I hear that her voice is deeper, rawer. From smoking, of course. Even in those days she used to smoke a packet a day. Beautiful firm round buttocks. Again she turns, still speaking into the phone. Her eyes meet mine, then rove further away, around the empty café. When she has finished phoning she puts a cassette into the recorder. I ask her if she would please turn the music off. There is already so much noise in the world. I shan't say anything about the restlessly flickering but soundless television, obliquely to my right, on a protruding shelf above the bar. It is the sun of every establishment, determining the customers' visual focus, and food for conversation.
She nods briefly and does what I have asked her. When my glass is empty she looks at me questioningly. The same light-brown eyes and high cheekbones. Of course it can't be her. I can do nothing but nod, caught once again in that gaze (it can't be her, do you hear, it simply can't be, everyone grows older, excepting no one, no one). She puts a full glass on the beer mat and takes some money from the little heap of change in front of me.
Even these days I still think of her sometimes, the way we used to walk along the straight North-Holland canal where, hidden behind a dike, lay her parents' weekend cottage to which she took me to make love for the first time.
Someone enters, a young man in navy-blue rollneck sweater and jeans. She calls him by his name, Geoffrey. They talk about the band that is coming to play here on Saturday. I don't need to say anything. I only listen and look at Karen, who changes into a girl whom the boy calls Susan and who is then suddenly, in a flash, briefly Karen again, the Karen of fifty years ago, who used to shrug her shoulders in just the same way, the left one slightly higher than the right.
Geoffrey orders a Budweiser which he drinks straight from the bottle. He cracks a joke and as he puts the bottle back on the counter he briefly touches her cheek. She pushes his hand away laughingly, but not too decisively.
Maybe I was too timid. Maybe that was why I lost her. What are you lying there looking at me for? I'm happy you're so beautiful. Let me feel it. And I had to act the lover while I was really still a little boy. With his first girl, every boy must conquer his mother, those big warm breasts between which you rubbed your face, those nipples you sucked at as a greedy baby, who knows, from some primeval memory.
I look at the girl called Susan. How often have I thought of this: to meet Karen once more. For a moment they seemed to fit into each other, this barmaid at the tavern and she. I get up and leave. When she calls after me that I have forgotten my change I merely wave my left hand dismissively above my head, as though wishing, by that gesture, to banish the comparison for ever from my thoughts.
I walk up the steeply climbin
g Hancock Street and Dale Avenue, past neatly cared-for houses with their wooden, empty conservatories and doorsteps swept clear of snow, until I reach Prospect Street. At the back of the Maplewood candy store two women in unbuttoned coats are eating cream cakes.
Philip sits reading behind his overcrowded desk in the second-hand bookstore. He calls me by my surname. Hello, Mr Klein. Mister Kline, that's how they pronounce it here. I go up to him and he looks a bit surprised when he feels my firm handshake. I nod contentedly. Philip scratches his ginger chin-strap beard, apologizes that there is no hot coffee left, and then asks how I liked The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene.
The question takes me aback. I am not attuned to it. It also seems as if I only half understand it. Like an incomplete sentence. You can guess at the rest, but there are more possibilities.
'Haven't got round to it yet,' I say, and in order to please him I select another book by the same author from one of the shelves. Our Man in Havana.
'I saw the movie once,' I explain, 'with Alec Guinness.' He nods but I can tell from his face that he doesn't know the movie. I pay. He accompanies me to the door and holds it open for me.
'Next time I'll stay longer,' I say. 'I like the air here, that smell of old paper and dust and printer's ink.'
I put the paperback in the inner pocket of my lined coat. Through small side-streets I zigzag slowly and carefully downward, in the direction of the bay and the harbour. I walk down Western Avenue. There are large houses here, villas with wood carvings not confined to the eaves but also enclosing the windows in fanciful chalice shapes. The sea is as calm and mouse-grey as the sky. The sou'wester of the fisherman's statue on its plinth is rimmed with snow and the spokes of the ship's wheel, which he grasps with both hands as he peers towards his shipwrecked mates at sea, also carry thin white edges of snow.
A car stops at the kerbside right in front of me. Through the rear window I see Robert, nervously turning on his axis. Vera leans sideways and immediately starts talking to me in an agitated voice while she holds the door open for me.
'I've been sick with worry, Robert came home on his own. I thought you'd had an accident. I've been driving all over until at last I saw you walking here. How could you forget the dog, Maarten? And then coming all this way. A little walk, you said.'
'I went to the bookstore,' I say airily. 'Bought another book by Graham Greene. Our Man in Havana. The one they made that movie of, with Alec Guinness, you remember?'
Her mouth sets in irritation. 'If you intend to stay away half the day you could at least tell me.'
I remain silent. Of course she is right. Robert lays his damp snout on my shoulder and then presses it against my cheek. We drive along the shore. The lights across the bay flicker in a long, faintly curved line. And there, far away at the furthest tip, the illuminated cone of the lighthouse scans the black water at regular intervals. I look at it until a bend in the road removes it from my field of vision. Then we drive home in silence past a wall of snow-covered pine trees.
How dark it has suddenly become. The feeling of anxiety has come back, as if I had been deceived by something or someone today, led up the garden path. When we stop on the gravel in front of the veranda, I quickly get out and open the door on the other side for her. I take her brown purse from her and say, 'I am very sorry, Vera, really I am.' I follow her and Robert into the house, which briefly stares at me with all its black windows at once.
What worries me most of all is that the dog did not go in search of me, did not follow my trail. Could Robert have smelt something about me? Something that made him decide firmly to turn back and go home on his own?
'It's the winter,' I say to Vera, 'this damned long, rotten winter,' while I help myself to more French beans and sprinkle some powder over them from a green canister. 'This winter is making me restless, fidgety.'
'I was only getting worried,' she says.
With two outstretched fingers I touch her cheek. 'I love you, Vera.'
She nods absent-mindedly, as if what I said didn't quite sink in.
'Do you remember us walking there, hand in hand, along the canal, on the old back dike? Below us on the other side lay the polders and in between there was a ditch with pollarded willows along it. We walked above the land, above the red pantiled roofs of the labourers' cottages and farmhouses. Suddenly a splash of sunlight fell from a hole in the clouds right on a group of black-patched cows that went on grazing unperturbed. We stood still on the dike, you and I. You put your arm around my waist. A hole in the clouds, isn't that what you call it? A frayed hole that very slowly closed again from the edges inward. We looked at it, from where we were standing, high above the land, you and I, and then we kissed.'
'I don't know what you are talking about, Maarten.'
I purse my suddenly cork-dry lips. I look at the dull yellow shine of the reading lamp and make a movement as though chasing a fly from my forehead. Then I desperately grab hold of the edge of the table.
'You are tired,' she says. 'I can tell. You slept badly last night, you've been walking around all day. That's why it is. Now why don't you go and shave before Ellen Robbins comes.'
'Ellen Robbins?' I startle at the sudden uncontrolled aggression in my voice.
'Maarten, she comes here so often.'
I nod. Ellen Robbins. Of course. She sails into the room like a battleship.
'Why are you laughing?'
'Ellen Robbins sailing into the room, I mean, coming into the room like a battleship sailing into port.' For a moment I have to laugh so much that the tears spring to my eyes.
'What makes you say that?'
'Nothing. You have to admit she doesn't exactly move like a ballet dancer.'
Now Vera also laughs a little, fortunately. I look around the room, let my eyes glide along the gleaming furniture, the black piano. Everything is in order again, back in its place. We are sitting opposite each other by the table, Vera and I, a burning lamp hangs above us and just now we laughed together. I take her right hand, rub gently over the wedding ring which she can easily take off these days. Once they had to saw it off her finger when she had to have an operation.
'Do you remember,' I say, 'when you had to have that operation on your stomach, that this ring was stuck rock fast to your finger? It wouldn't come off no matter how they tried. '
'Don't pull so hard. That's twenty years ago. '
'There's something I have to do,' I say. I rub my hands contentedly. 'But what?'
'Shave,' she says.
I shake my head. 'That too. Be that as it may . . .'
A phrase I rarely use, be that as it may. A phrase from work, which I occasionally throw out at meetings as a life-buoy to one of my colleagues if he becomes entangled in a complicated argument. Be that as it may ... A formulation suggesting a summary that never comes. A moment of helplessness for a speaker, which causes the people around the table to avoid one another's eyes in embarrassment. Bahr, Chauvas, Johnson and that haggard-looking Karl Simic.
I walk out of the room, up the stairs. While I am shaving I shall no doubt remember what else I have to do. Robert is waiting for me at the top of the stairs He walks ahead of me, his claws tapping on the linoleum. A dog knows your habits, knows exactly what you are going to do. I grope for the light switch in the bathroom but I cannot find it. Why is it so dark everywhere around here? Vera shouldn't be so stingy with the light.
'Maarten,' she calls from downstairs. 'What are you doing up there?'
I suddenly remember. Fetch wood. Of course!
'Come on, Robert, we'll get some wood from the shed. Come on.'
Quickly I go down the stairs. Vera stands waiting for me below, her hands on her hips.
'Out of the way!' I call out jokingly as I take the last step. 'Robert and I are going to get you some wood.'
'There's plenty of wood left,' she says, taking hold of Robert's collar. 'What were you doing upstairs?'
"Upstairs is part of the house too,' I say, a little sheepishly.
I go into the bathroom. Robert has gone with Vera. He knows he always gets something from her. From me he gets only wood. A stick to run after on the beach or in the woods.
I look at my face in the mirror over the washstand. No one can tell from it what I used to look like. Not even I myself. Be that as it may ... I wet my face, squirt a blob of shaving cream on my fingertips and with the fingers of my left hand rub the slithery foam over my cheeks and chin.
You must make sure to pull the skin straight, otherwise the scraper gets caught in the wrinkles. Black dots in white shaving floss swirl around in the wash bowl and then disappear down the plug-hole. Beard hair. Another word for beard. Moustache, goatee, whiskers. Uncle Karel had whiskers. Until 15 May 1940. When the Netherlands capitulated, Uncle Karel shaved off his proudly up-twirled whiskers. In protest. A first and last act of resistance. At the bank where he worked everyone understood at once. First they had looked surprised when he came in with a bare face. He had run two fingers of his right hand over his upper lip and then, somewhat apologetically, shrugged his shoulders. Everyone had understood, he said. The Germans. Damned Huns. The Queen gone to England. And so the only thing Uncle Karel could do was shave off his whiskers. Almost a logical consequence of history.
'There, now you look smart again, Maarten.'
Don't talk to yourself. At least not when other people can hear you. When you talk you should be addressing another person, not yourself.
It is as if I can hear two voices, women's voices. Surely we don't have company? Maybe the radio.
Cautiously I open the door and go into the hall. Vera's voice. I try not to listen to what the voice in the living room says, and press my nails into the palms of my hands. I stand very still.
'I'm really worried. You can't see there's anything wrong with him. But that makes it all the more alarming. Sometimes he tells me things about us that I was never part of. As if I were a different person in his eyes. And then suddenly he can't remember a whole chunk of his own past. I feel so helpless because I don't know how to help him. And it has happened so suddenly. Practically overnight he has become like this.'