by J. Bernlef
'Is it about Cuba?' I enquire. I know Vera is interested in politics. She is about to answer but changes her mind and sits down again, placing the book upside down on the table.
'Maarten,' she says, 'where have you been?'
I take a deep breath of relief. 'A long walk,' I say. 'I have decided to go for long walks more often in future. It's good for the circulation. You should have come with me but you had already gone when I left. Where have you been?'
'I've been to see Dr Eardly.'
That gives me a fright. 'There's nothing wrong with you, is there?'
She puts her hands on mine. 'I went for you, Maarten. You are so restless these days. You do things and the next moment you can't remember having done them. Strange things. I went to talk about it with Dr Eardly.'
'I feel perfectly healthy. Strange things? What kind of strange things?'
'When I got home the whole kitchen was strewn with chicken bones.'
'Robert,' I say hesitantly.
'Half a chicken, Maarten. In the morning, on an empty
stomach, you ate half a chicken. And a can of liver pâté. And several pineapple rings and a packet of cookies.'
'A healthy appetite for an old man, that's all I can say.'
'It's no laughing matter, Maarten. But Dr Eardly says we can do something about it together. And he's given me tablets for you, for the night.'
'I sleep very well, actually.'
'Sometimes you get up in the middle of the night. You get dressed. You don't know the difference between day and night any longer.'
'It's all because of this damned winter,' I mutter. I look at her earnestly, almost severely, as if wanting to persuade her. But what I am really doing is begging her to understand something I do not understand myself. Something that suddenly comes over me and vanishes equally suddenly, leaving a dark shadow of panic behind, which slowly ebbs away until only that slight sense of unease remains that I now feel almost the whole day.
'I know what the trouble is,' I say, 'Chauvas said the same to me at a meeting the other day. "My dear Maarten," he said, "don't you remember we discussed that in detail at our last meeting? Look it up in your own minutes." I've been a bit forgetful for a long time.'
'It was four years ago you last went to an IMCO meeting,' she says.
'Sure, sure,' I say. 'Did you really think I didn't know that?'
'You should take it easy, Dr Eardly said. You should stay indoors for the time being. Your memory is a bit confused. We must steer the past back into its proper channels. Together. Our past, Maarten.'
'Don't look so sad, Vera,' I say. 'There are lots of things I do remember.'
'I can help you,' she says softly. 'We've been together almost fifty years. Dr Eardly said it can all come all right again.'
'What does this Dr Eardly know about me? I've been to see him twice maybe in all the years we've been living here.'
'Don't get excited. He promised to call in one of these days.' 'Doctors,' I sneer. 'Especially in this country with its obsession with health. They do nothing but keep the pharmaceutical industry on its feet, the pill manufacturers.'
'Don't excite yourself so.'
'That's what you said before.'
'I know.'
'What should I do, then?' My voice sounds dull and timid, as though admitting I am sick. Therefore I say, by way of compensation, 'Out of sight, out of mind' (a subtle reference to my condition, because I have guessed all along what this Dr Eardly thinks of me).
'Tell me what you have been doing this morning.'
I mustn't panic. Start from here. From where I am sitting now. The snow outside. The room. This table edge, which I am holding with both hands.
'Take your time thinking about it.'
'Nothing special,' I say. 'Same as usual. Get up, wash, dress, shave, drink coffee, eat breakfast.'
'Chicken?'
'Chicken? No, just the usual slice of toast and marmalade, from that yellow jar with the black lid, you know.'
'You ate half a cold chicken from the refrigerator. A can of liver pâté, a couple of pineapple rings and a packet of cookies.'
'I am finding this a painful account. In broad outline I cannot agree with it.'
'Who are you talking to?'
'Vera,' I say, quickly, and panting slightly, 'listen carefully to me. I don't hurt a fly. I went for a walk this morning, with Robert. Down the path. In the Stevens' yard there was a pick-up truck from Salem. A red one without wheels. You can go and look for yourself. The usual junk. I didn't see Pat. Robert was chasing after some crows. We went to the beach. Into the wind. The white scent was all around me. But I thought that only because other people always talk about the salty sea air. Even Pop does, he always talks about the salty sea air, too.'
'Your father died in 1956.'
I pick up a book that is lying on the table between us and turn it over with a furious bang.
'Did you imagine I didn't know that? To sum up, as Bahr always says at the end of a meeting, I walked along the beach, a little way down Atlantic Road, and then back towards home. Wind at my back. Any other business?'
'You phoned the library.'
'When I came home you were on the phone,' I reply. 'I could see you through the window. I tapped against the glass but you didn't hear me. I waved and when you finally saw me you dropped the phone from fright.'
'It was Joan from the lending department.'
'I don't want you to work there any more,' I say. 'I want you to stay with me from now on, Vera. When I am alone everything goes wrong. I don't know why.'
'I haven't worked there for ages, Maarten.'
'Good,' I say. 'That's all right, then.'
Her narrow head with the brown hair wobbles on her wrinkly neck and her eyes are suddenly so dull and sad that I get up to comfort her. The blood throbs in my temples and I put my hands on her shoulders.
'Not so hard,' she says.
My hands are cold and numb. I withdraw them, I look at the palms and slowly let them drop limply by my sides.
'I know the feeling,' I say, 'as if someone had locked you up inside your own house. That's the feeling. But there is always a way out, Vera, always.'
It is very understandable that she has to cry now. I sit down again. 'I am with you,' I say. 'Whatever happens, I am with you. We'll have to get used to the fact that our world has become smaller, that you see fewer and fewer people, that you startle when the phone rings, that all the days look alike. But we have each other, Vera, don't forget that.' And I stroke her hair softly. Let her have a good cry. I understand.
A human being can look for a long time without seeing anything. Robert can look too, but he is unable to recognize the tea caddy and the cheese slicer. He looks without seeing is what I mean. Try it for yourself. You always drink coffee of a particular brand and when they don't have any in stock at the drugstore you take a different brand, a different tin.
When you want to make coffee the next day, you look everywhere for the tin of coffee. The remembered image of the old tin is so strong that it makes the new brand, the tin there right in front of your nose on the kitchen shelf, invisible. To see something you must first be able to recognize it. Without memory you can merely look, and the world glides through you without leaving a trace. (I must remember this well, because it will enable me to explain a great deal to Vera.)
I am standing by the window in the back room and looking at two scrawny squirrels chasing each other up the trunk of a crooked birch tree. Look at those swaying grey plumes. Whoops! A little dance step would be in pace here . . . no . . . not pace . . . step . . . pace ... in place! A leak. There is a small leak somewhere. Hampers the thinking process. That is the sort of thing Simic would have said, at one of those rare moments when he raised a point. Tall, thin, taciturn Karl Simic, as brittle as china, cautious, timid, looking warily out of his dark, slightly squinting eyes. Dampens the thinking process. Simic used to play the piano rather well. The whole of Ravel's Boléro. Out of his head. Even though
he was drunk. A song about a ship with so many guns. He sang the words to it, in German, his eyes raised to the ceiling. I only ever went to his house once. On the occasion of his forty-fifth birthday. Neither chick nor child did he have. After a few whiskies in that cocktail bar in Boston he invited me home. He lit only one small reading lamp. In the half-dark he told me a story of how his wife or girlfriend had deceived him with his best friend, that he had found a letter which left him in no doubt, how he had gone out and bought a bottle of bourbon and had drunk it all, with that friend while they argued about the literary qualities of Hemingway's novels. In the end their disagreement ran so high that the friend had shouted: Next time there is a war you won't survive the camps but I will.
Simic then muttered something and I had to bend forward to hear what he said. He shouldn't have said that, he whispered. He shouldn't have said that. Why not? I asked. Because it's the truth, he replied.
We didn't drink bourbon that night, but vodka on the rocks.
In the end Karl was so drunk that I had to lay him on his bed. He weighed little more than a child. He went on singing. Sombre Slav songs of which I didn't understand a word. There were lots of books in his bedroom. And a large painting of a ballet dancer floating in the air. I sat on the edge of the bed. Karl had finished singing. I was no longer quite sober myself. He was lying with his back towards me. I started telling him about Vera and about the only time I had been unfaithful to her. In Paris.
She sat down opposite me in an overcrowded restaurant that Leon Bähr had recommended to me. Fat and dark, she was wearing a shiny black silky blouse; there was something gypsy-like, something unbridled about her. It is difficult to avoid the eye of someone who is sitting opposite you at a table hardly fifty centimetres away.
I was eating entrecôte au poivre. She ordered the same. I took a coupe dame blanche. So did she. I was always one course ahead of her and watched how she ate, with tiny little bites, leaving nothing on her plate. I noticed how thin her fingers were only when she caught up with me at the coffee and cognac stage. She held her glass as if it were a baby's hand. She was slow and she was graceful. Unlike most fat people, she had not yet lost power over her body.
We touched glasses very lightly and said our names. Maarten, Sylvie. As if these were the names of the glasses. And that was true. Our names, our pasts, did not matter that evening. This ritual was repeated three more times. Soon we were the only ones left in the restaurant. In clumsy French I had explained to her why I was in Paris. She worked somewhere in an office, she told me. Allons, she motioned me, when she noticed the waiters and waitresses in their white aprons standing leaning against the bar watching us. Allons.
We went. She lived close by. She pressed the light button in the hall of the apartment building and suddenly walked quickly ahead of me on tapping heels. Vite, she said, it will go out after a minute. Apart from her name and her occupation, that was all she told me that night, in a curiously light, almost girlish voice. For the rest, she made soft, contented, grunting sounds, deep down in her throat.
It was an event that happened to me but which I also wanted. It was complete. Maybe because we had no past for each other nor wanted to acquire one. We moved in and over and out of each other. Pure lust, it was. Pure and anonymous. Finally she turned her enormous back with the imprints of my teeth in her left shoulder blade towards me and fell asleep. I got up, dressed, and vanished from her life. Outside, the dawn glimmered. Blackbirds sang. Only when the night porter at the Ambassador Hotel said my name did I remember who I was.
Had Karl heard what I said? He, too, was lying with his back to me. He said nothing in reply. I got up and left.
The next day he did not come to work. Nor the following days. Bahr drove to his house in person. The police did the rest.
We all attended his funeral. It was a beautiful cemetery, near Shipman's Wreck, a hilly area with tall oak trees. Bahr made a speech. He spoke of integrity, and that we would miss him. There was nothing in his words to suggest that Karl had cut his wrists in the bath and had drowned afterwards, as the autopsy showed.
No one mentioned him again. I often thought of that evening before his death. With a little less to drink we might have become friends then, I might have helped him overcome his shame, his shame at being alive while others were no longer. Maybe.
No, that story about pure lust must have eluded him. He was asleep. Thinking of that evening I still see his back moving in tranquil sleep.
'Come,' says Vera. 'Come and sit down, Maarten.'
Before her on the table lies an open photo album. 'Dr Eardly recommended this. A way of putting your memories in order,' she says, sitting down beside me, turning a thick black page covered in photographs, while I stare in silence at the pictures with their scalloped edges.
I recognize the ripple of the wind in a pond, poppies flowering by a roadside, clouds above the sea with dark, frayed, stormy linings, the cropped grass of a lawn with a group of people on it in light, summery clothes, their arms around one another's shoulders. And smiling, of course, always smiling, as if life in the past was one long happy party. When photography was still something special and a print relatively expensive, everyone smiled when having his photograph taken. As if the picture would then be worth more.
Vera puts her forefinger on male and female figures and mentions names. Kitty, Janet, John, Fred. Three years ago, in Rockport.
I remain silent.
'You should concentrate more,' she says. 'You know it all, but you must try harder.' She taps briefly with a gleamingly lacquered nail against my forehead.
I pull the album towards me and turn the pages back. Then it is as if a mist clears.
'Look,' I say. 'This was the boat elevator at the Postjesweg. Other people called it a ferry, but it wasn't, it was an elevator. The market gardeners from the Sloterpolder used to assemble here with their punts and flat-bottoms to go to the market. One by one the boats entered a kind of steel trough. Then the big cog-wheels overhead began to turn and each boat was lifted by thick cables into the Kostverlorenkade, swaying and trembling. Sometimes as many as forty boats were waiting, beside and behind one another, laden with vegetables and fruit in those flat crates they used to have.'
'And this was taken from the window at home. Where you see all those green-houses and wooden shacks another world began, a water world full of punts, flat-bottoms, rafts and white foot bridges across the ditches. In the winter you could skate there endlessly. Frisian runners. Can you feel them still, pinching your feet, with those tight, brightly coloured straps and those stiff leather heels?'
I look at Vera. She nods. 'I remember it all,' she says. 'I went there with you often enough.' I am so happy to hear her say this that I want to go on talking, without the photographs.
'At the beginning of the war you could still sometimes get stuff from the market gardeners in the polder, but in the last two years they had become price conscious. The heirlooms some people took there, in return for a head of lettuce or a few bunches of carrots!'
'You were lucky to have that job,' she says.
That is true. People working in the municipal buying department were closer to the fire. You knew when something or other arrived by barge. Then it was sometimes possible to fix things before distribution began. Of course it wasn't right, but everyone did it. In a way we were all of us petty crooks in those days, and the crazy thing was that it suited everybody perfectly. It brought a lot of suspense and excitement into people's lives.
'Do you ever think of those days now?' I ask.
'Rarely,' she says.
'It's things from the war I remember best,' I say. 'They're sharp, as if everything was standing still then, as if nothing moved.'
'Yes,' she says. 'That's how I feel too. Days that never came to an end. Maybe it was partly because of the hunger. Hunger and cold.'
'Pea soup!' We both say it at the same time, that utterly Dutch concept. Pea soup. And it makes us laugh.
'Those bay windows were
no good,' I say. 'After the war practically all of them had to be replaced. They jutted out too far, they caught too much wind, certainly in that storm we had that time.'
'I had no idea it was so dangerous.'
'Peas,' I say, 'I'd managed to get hold of half a pillowcase full.'
'We were as happy as kings. I was so nervous, as if I was cooking dinner for the first time, I was so scared I might spoil something.'
'Fred had crawled under the table, the wind was making such a din. It roared in all the chinks and cracks.'
'It was lucky he'd crawled out of harm's way when it happened.'
'I can see you now,' I say. 'Your hair flying in all directions because of the wind suddenly crashing in, and that plate of soup in front of you, suddenly full of splinters.' 'A miracle we weren't hurt ourselves,' she says.
'I was furious. Especially because I couldn't blame it on the Huns.'
'We put the soup through the sieve, but we daren't take the risk.'
'You were about to,' I say, 'you were standing in the kitchen straining the soup. You slowly and carefully poured it into a funnel over a sieve you had put on top of the saucepan. You cried when I said you had to throw the soup away.'
'Such things you never forget.'
'No,' I say, 'such things stay with you forever.'
She turns a few more pages. 'Here,' she says, 'in the tea garden, do you remember? The camera moved because I was scared Fred would fall from that branch.'
I nod. I see myself, about thirty-five years old. I am wearing a sweater with a dark horizontal stripe, and shapeless grey pants. With a half-blurred face I look up at a child that sits astride a stripped branch. I nod again. I would love to know.
'Usually you took the photos,' she says. 'That's why there are so few of you.'
'I wasn't much of a photographer, though. And I often forgot to take the film out and take it to the store.'