by J. Bernlef
'Do you remember that time we were given the wrong ones? Quite by chance I knew those people. I saw the woman occasionally at the grocery store, at De Gruyter's, that clean, tiled store where it always smelled so deliciously of roasted coffee which they ground for you in a big round grinder with a silver funnel on top.'
'I know,' I say, 'but I can't remember what was in those photos.'
'Neither can I, except that they weren't our holiday snapshots. We'd been to the Veluwe. Kitty wasn't born yet.'
'And ours? Did we ever get those back?'
'No. I gave the others to that woman. The grocer knew where she lived.'
'This one is in the wrong place, it should be much further back. We were only just married, everything is new, you see?
We were so proud of our home. In those days it was all very modern, with those tubular steel chairs and that stern oak dresser with red lacquered doors.'
'Pop's desk,' I say, pointing at another photograph. She nods.
'And now it stands here,' she says. 'On the other side of the world. I wanted to sell it, but you insisted it had to come. Why was that?'
I look at the desk. 'Some pieces of furniture from your childhood remain important to you in some way. You feel a kind of link with them, it's hard to say exactly why. I remember I was allowed to draw at it on Sundays. A white sheet of paper on a baize-green blotter full of inkstains and little marks of letters Pop had blotted. If you looked at them for a long time you could see all sorts of shapes in them, animals, faces. I used to copy them.'
She turns the pages. These have captions, that makes looking at them a lot safer.
'Winterswick, 1952,' I read aloud. 'What shabby clothes those children are wearing.'
'There wasn't anything else. They weren't that cheap, actually. Fred had just recovered from pneumonia, that's why he looks so thin. And Kitty became sick two days later. Scarlet fever. I spent most of the holiday indoors in the boarding house. You went for lots of walks. First on your own and later with your mother who came down for a week.'
'That can't have been much fun.'
'Oh, yes, it was. It was the first time she really accepted me. Ever since that week I got on well with her. Look, here she is standing in the garden at the boarding house. Heaven, yes, "The Turning-point", it was called.'
Don't panic. After all, she remembers everything. So this is my mother. If I want to know anything about the past I can always ask her. 'Mother,' I say, and I look at the bespectacled woman who leans with broad hands on a white garden gate. 'There probably was no better mother. She looked after me so well that I hardly remember a moment's quarrelling. When she was angry with me she merely remained silent. She would sit by the table with a cup of tea in front of her and look at me in silence with her brown eyes while with one hand she twirled a strand of hair that had come loose from her bun. I used to think that was much worse than having an argument, like I sometimes had with Pop. That accusing silence of hers, those fingers mechanically playing with that lock of hair. Inaccessible in her silent sadness, she was, as she sat by the table.'
'She only wanted to protect you, that's all. She told me so later. You were a clumsy child, you used to fall off everything. You were always covered in scratches and bruises.'
I nod and look at the greying lady in a spotted summer dress with puffed sleeves in front of 'The Turning-point' boarding house. Then I turn the page. 'Goodness, Paris,' I say, pointing at a colour photograph of a wide boulevard lined with busy terraces.
'You took that one when you were in Paris for IMCO. Your hotel was over there, across the road.'
Hôtel Ambassador, it says in thick white curly letters on a wall under a grey stone balcony.
'Hotels,' I say scornfully, 'they seem designed in order to be forgotten.'
Strange how after a certain page - October 1956 - the past suddenly springs into colour. But even the colours do not help me. Maybe it is because of the photographs themselves. A camera makes no distinction between important and unimportant, foreground or background. And at this moment I myself seem like a camera. I register, but nothing and nobody comes closer, jumps forward; no one touches me from the past with a gesture, a surprised expression, and these buildings, streets and squares exist in towns and cities where I have never been and shall never go. And the closer the photographs approach the present, as appears from the dates written underneath, the more impenetrable and enigmatic they seem to become.
Vera points, Vera supplies the commentary. I nod. But I see that she can read in my eyes that her words clarify nothing.
Outside a horn is sounded. Vera gets up. 'That must be Roberts from the hardware store.'
'What is he coming here for?'
'The laundry-room lock is broken. The door won't shut. I'll show him where it is.'
I stay behind, in front of the open album. A moment later I hear hammering and then the sound of a saw moving through wood with quick, expert pulls.
It is a good thing that doors which have been forced open can be repaired again. I have two left hands, but Vera keeps a close eye on any household deterioration. Not a plug gets broken but she has already bought a new one. A few weeks ago she had the children's room redecorated. It was a funny sight, Kitty standing up in her metal cot in the middle of the room. She was scared to go to sleep so far from the wall, she said. I had to read her a bedtime story. Fairy tales. Once upon a time. And suddenly I remember.
Quickly I turn the pages back. There is the photograph Vera showed me a minute ago. Kitty and Johan, her husband, and my son Fred. Vera and I had been married for forty years and that was why they both came over. This here is Janet, the eldest of the Cheevers children further up the road. She has moved now. Kiss, their Pomeranian, is in it, too. He's dead. Run down by a tourist. When Kitty and Fred left, Vera and I both had a hard time of it. We both felt the same, although we didn't mention it to each other. It is possible that we shall never see them again. That was in both our minds, we could tell from each other's face. But we kept silent about it.
When Vera enters I rub my hands and tap on the photograph. I talk so fast that I stumble over my words. With her purse in her hand she listens to me. I love her face when it laughs in that carefree way and little wrinkles of mirth appear in it, especially around her nostrils and mouth. I want to talk about our wedding photographs but I can't find them quickly enough. I would like to see that moment again when we stood, a little apprehensive and uncertain, before the registrar of marriages, while behind our backs sat numerous aunts, who never missed a family wedding, particularly when it was whispered that the bride was expecting, and who searched their purses for handkerchiefs when Vera said yes in a loud clear voice, as you can tell from the photograph.
Her half-open mouth with the snowy-white teeth, the aunts dabbing away a tear here and there. I was so hoarse I had to clear my throat twice before I could answer the registrar's question. And then the wedding reception at her parents' house in Alkmaar, her jovial father who took us to a wooden seaside hotel in Egmond where we had to show our brand new marriage certificate, we looked so young, and indeed we were, I in a suit from the 'Nieuw Engeland' boys' department.
Perhaps those photographs are in a different album. A festive feeling comes over me. I wouldn't mind a glass of beer.
I go to the kitchen and look in the refrigerator. Maybe Vera hasn't been out shopping yet. Shall I ask her to get a six-pack? Miller, that's the beer I like best here. Heineken is better, of course, but far too expensive. They drink that here as though it were champagne. The green label was always like a signal from home when I used to have lunch at Crick's. There was always some at one table or another. I ask Vera if there is any beer in the house.
'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.'
&n
bsp; '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.