by J. Bernlef
'Yes,' I say resignedly, 'there comes a time when daughters don't want to be bare any more in front of their own father.'
From the corner of the room, beside the chair, she looks at me thoughtfully, holding her head at a slant. A strand of her blonde hair falls past her left shoulder across the T-shirt. On the pillow lies an open book which she has been reading. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene.
She walks around the bed and pulls me up with gentle force. 'Come,' she says in English. 'It's the middle of the night. You must go to sleep.'
'Oh, is it as late as that?'
Arm in arm we walk down the stairs. There is something stately, something solemn about it, as if I am going to give this girl, whom I do not know, in marriage to an as yet unknown bridegroom. Vera wakes up when the girl switches on the light in the bedroom. She talks to Vera as if I were a stranger.
'He was wandering around,' she says, again in English. The way your parents used to speak when they didn't want you to know about something.
Together they tuck me up in bed. I am not sick, but I let them do as they please. Behind my closed eyelids I see the light go out again. I am lying on my back. Beside me Vera turns over on to her side. At first I don't hear her breathing, but then she suddenly sighs profoundly a couple of times and I hear the deep, regular breathing of a sleeping person.
Nearly fifty years we have been lying side by side like this. It is almost impossible to comprehend what that means. The feeling of being two communicating vessels. Her moods, her thoughts; I can almost read them in her face, like Pop read the temperature on his thermometer. A graph of my love for Vera? An idea that Pop would not have understood. Once he spoke of his love for Mama, whom he always called 'wife'. That was when they had been married for forty years and he gave an after-dinner speech, a glass of red wine in his hand. He compared Mama to a piece of music, to the adagio from Mozart's fourteenth piano sonata. 'Just as clear, bright and unfathomable.' That was what he said. And after that I played the adagio on our out-of-tune black piano and the tears came to Mama's eyes, Pop told me, for I couldn't see it myself. I can't sleep because I need to pee. Then it's no use remaining in bed, I know that from experience.
Someone has left the light on in the hall. Clear, bright and unfathomable. Without women the world would be drab and violent, says Pop. 'Maarten, will you play what I mean but for which my words are inadequate?'
This sentence is the signal for me to walk to the piano. We have agreed on this in advance, Pop and I.
I sit down at the piano, raise my hands above the keys and search. I can't find the beginning. Always I see it before me but not now. Perhaps I ought to make light first. I switch on the wall lamp and stand looking at the keys for a while. Then I sit down again. I close my eyes, hoping that the distances between the keys will return, that I will feel the first notes in my fingers again, but nothing happens. I get up and look for the sonata among the pile of sheet music on the piano. I put the album on the stand and leaf through it until I have found the adagio. There they are, the notes. But they won't come off the page and into my fingers. It would be terrible to disappoint them all. Perhaps I ought to limber up first, just a few notes, so the beginning will suddenly slip back into my fingers. As long as I have the beginning, the rest will come all by itself. Harder and harder I press the black and white keys, more and more keys I press in order to find that one damned beginning. But there are thousands of possibilities. Yet I must find the beginning, I must!
'Maarten, what's the matter? Why are you crying?'
Vera in her dark blue dressing-gown, her brown hair in a wild mop around her head.
'The beginning, I can't find the beginning.'
I hear footsteps overhead, look up at the ceiling.
'That's Phil,' she says, looking up with me. 'You've woken her up with your playing.'
I don't know who she is talking about, but of course I am sorry. 'I was practising for the wedding and I can't find the beginning any more.'
Someone enters the room. A young girl in jeans and a blue T-shirt. She is barefoot, which is odd for this time of year.
'Maarten always plays the adagio from Mozart's fourteenth piano sonata from memory. He's known it by heart for years. And now he suddenly can't find the beginning any more.'
The girl nods sleepily. I can see it doesn't interest her in the least (and rightly, for what a ridiculous situation this is, an old man playing the piano in the middle of the night in his pyjamas).
'I'll get something for him,' she says and leaves the room. Vera goes to the record player beside the television. She crouches by the record shelf. I feel cold, and I want some beer. I go to the kitchen.
Standing in the middle of the kitchen, with the handle of the refrigerator door in my hand, I suddenly hear the adagio coming from the living room. Clear, bright and unfathomable. Slowly, almost solemnly, I enter the room to the rhythm of the music.
In the centre of the room stands Vera, amid the furniture. I have never seen her like this, so forlorn and so small as she stands there barefoot on the wooden floor in her dark shiny dressing-gown among the gleaming furniture. Her hands seem to be groping for a hold in the air.
I know I must have done something wrong. I want to go up to her and ask her, in order to bridge the distance between her and me. But then I am seized from behind and feel, right through my pyjama sleeve, a dull stab of pain shooting up in my left upper arm.
Vera is sitting on the settee. She is listening to Mozart's adagio. She has tears in her eyes. Like this she looks exactly like Mama.
I am led away by a stranger but I suppose it must be all right if Vera is suddenly so happy again. Therefore I smile and nod to the young woman beside me. I behave as though this were the way life is supposed to be.
A huge bed. Lying utterly hopelessly the wrong way round in it. Terrible stink here. My ass smarts, icy cold buttocks I have. I try to raise myself but my ankles are tied down. What has happened to me? Where have I been moved to? Where is this bed? Now?
I recognize all those things around me, sure I do. Behind a closed door sounds an unfamiliar female American voice: 'Fill the bath up.'
Jesus, have I befouled the matrimonial bed? How do you like that! It's not my fault. If you tie a man to his bed! Strapped to the bars, I ask you. Who has done that to me? And where is Vera? I call out but you can bet nobody will come. I can't reach the straps that are cutting into my ankles. I wish I could bear the smell of my own shit as well as Robert.
'Robert! Robert!'
No one. Perhaps they've all gone. Leaving me to rot here in this bed. I hear water running. In a minute the place will be flooded and I can't get out of my bed. I kick about. The bed creaks but the straps don't give a millimetre.
Somewhere a door opens. I daren't look because I have no idea who's coming. And because I am ashamed to be lying here like a beast in my own muck. I keep my eyes tightly shut. I hear someone retching. Feel how hands strip the pyjamas from my body. They want me to move forward. Must open my eyes now and see an old man in the mirror, an old man with a slack wrinkly belly streaked with shit. I smile with relief. At least that isn't me!
Two women lift me into a bath tub, an old one and a young one.
I lie in this water as if I no longer had a body. Only where they touch me, wash me, does it briefly exist again.
Careful, I say to the younger one who dares not look at me because she is embarrassed by a male organ that floats in the soapy water and now rises, purple and gently quivering.
'Don't mind about it,' I say. 'The regime under the belt, Chauvas used to call it. Why do we cover it up so anxiously, why is there such a taboo on it? Do you know what Chauvas thought? Chauvas said the following: May I have your attention, please, because this cannot be put in the minutes, as you will understand, certainly not by lady secretaries. We are afraid of sexuality because it undermines the basis of our whole society: the idea that every person is a unique individual with an organized life. But if every man can, in
principle, go to bed with every woman and vice versa then all those stories about predestination, preordination, destiny and eternal love are so much poppycock. We are floating through space like particles, plus ones and minus ones. And where these meet, a fusion may occur. Everybody knows this, but suppresses it. Man is not capable of philanthropic sex because in that case there would be no point in doing anything except this.'
I grab hold of the stiff prick in the water and feel it is my own. From fright and shame I let go.
They pull me upright. They make no reply to my words as the younger one dries me and the other one tries to pull a pair of underpants over my rough damp buttocks, in order to withdraw the subject of the conversation - which fortunately becomes limp again - as quickly as possible from sight. Then they bundle me into a dressing-gown.
'I don't have to go to bed, do I? Did you understand me, madam?' I say to the older one, who looks rather dishevelled with her damply drooping brown curls and her wrinkled neck.
'We've read Freud, too,' says the younger one sharply.
The arrogance of youth. Think they know something about life when they've read a few books.
'Look around you,' I say. 'Not that I approve of Chauvas's conduct. On the contrary. But no one can accept that what he calls his life has been the only possible life for him. It could have been different. If you had chanced to put your prick in a totally different cunt, for instance. Or even stronger; if your father had screwed someone other than your mother or your mother a different man, you wouldn't even have been here in the same form.'
'Go and rinse your mouth out.' It is Vera who says this.
'All right,' I say. 'I will. Right away.'
They let go of me so I can reach the washstand. I pick up the toothbrush and look in the mirror. There isn't anyone there. Everything is white. I throw the toothbrush away. They take hold of me. I let myself be led away, away from the white of that mirror.
Want to eat more. They won't let me. Simply take my plate away. How do you like that? They are strangers here so they give no answer when I ask a question. The simplest things: time, season, what are the plans for the day.
The fingers of my left hand are numb. Put the hand on the table, palm upward. Move my fingers. Clench, relax; clench, relax. Compared with the right hand: as if there's no current going through it any longer. Rub . . . rub . . . rub.
Thumping footsteps, suddenly very close by. Hurts my ears. Parts of the body are oversensitive, others totally insensitive.
Jump out of my skin with fright when suddenly someone is standing by the sink. A small woman in a lemon-coloured apron. She lets water run from a tap on to white plates. I ask her where Vera is but I get no answer. Her neck is wrinkled and brown from the open air. I don't know where I am.
Grab hold of the edge of the table and let go. And again. There is activity in the space around me that is totally detached from me. Sound of water gurgling away through a wastepipe. Very successful. Pity it stops - maybe we can imitate it.
Want to be near water, very near to water, hold this numb left hand in a fast running shallow brook. Sit motionless on the bank and then, suddenly see, caught in a quivering patch of sun on the silver-white sandy river-bed, the slim shadow of a fish (where does this image come from, from what depths, it is as clear as if I could touch it; it is sad but true: you, Maarten, were once that little boy sitting by the side of that stream!).
A young woman with long straight blonde hair is sitting opposite me at the table. I nod to her, although I do not understand her presence. She asks me why I am rubbing the table with my hand.
I look and feel only now that the hand is rubbing across the red dotted oil-cloth (how long has this been going on?).
When I have raised my head again I must quickly force a smile. 'I have become an old man. Quite suddenly, it seems,' I say. She shakes her head, but I know better.
She gets up and the red of her sweater becomes even redder than the dots on the oil-cloth. She pulls me to my feet. How annoying to have to let go of the table. I grab her hand and she leads me away through an open door into a different space. There stands Pop's desk! I remember being allowed to draw at it on Sundays. A white paper on a baize-green blotter covered in the inkstains and scribbles of Pop's blotted letters. When you looked for a long time you saw all kinds of things in them: animals, faces. I used to copy them.
'As a boy I liked to crawl under that desk with a book. The Travels and Adventures of Captain Hatteras. Captain Hatteras in Search of the North Pole. They all dreamed of that in the days of Jules Verne. I used to like reading about it as a boy. Amundsen, Nansen, Captain Hatteras. Did you know he went mad in the end, and was locked up in an institution? I have never forgotten the ending of The Ice Desert. He is walking in the garden of the institution, which is surrounded by a high brick wall, always in the same direction, northward. Until he bumps into the wall. There, his arms stretched out against the bricks, he remains motionless for hours. And then I put my hands on the wood of Pop's desk and close my eyes and try to imagine what it is like to be Captain Hatteras, alone in a desert of ice floes.'
'Your father is dead.'
'Yes, well, stands to reason, doesn't it, if you're as old as I am.'
Again the edge of a table. And a chair. (Was it already there or has it just been pushed forward?) I sit down. Notice that the rubbing has resumed. Not unpleasant, actually.
'My favourite place to sit was under the desk. I'd push the chair back and crawl underneath the desk with a book. The Travels and Adventures of Captain Hatteras. In the end he went mad from all that whiteness around him. He ended up in an institution. While he was there he used to walk all the time in a northerly direction. Until he couldn't go any further. Until he ran into a wall. Then he would stand still for hours.'
Outside, a woman walks down a snowy garden to a blue car. She waves. I wave back. People are friendly here, that cannot be denied. She starts the car and reverses out of a drive (the view would be less empty, easier to cope with, if trees, like people, all had a name of their own).
A girl opposite me asks, why I am rubbing the wood with my left hand.
'Otherwise I can't see the hand any longer.'
'See?'
'Yes.'
'Otherwise you can't feel your left hand any longer?'
'More or less. Yes, exactly. As I said.'
She has picked up an oblong book and opens it. Black pages. She turns the book over and pushes it towards me.
'No pictures, please.'
'But it's your own photo album.'
In order to please her I leaf through it. Wedding photos. Photos of children. I turn the album round and point at one of them.
'I never see them anymore. Kitty was supposed to come over. Have you met her?'
'I'm sure she'll come.'
'And Fred even less. You never see them anymore. They're no longer your children.' (Try not to cry now.)
'What's this?' She puts her finger on a photograph of a man walking beside a wide river. Across the water there is a row of big houses, strung along the bank which lies in the shade. The man is walking in the sun along a quay wall. He looks sideways into the camera.
'A river,' I say. 'The Rhine, maybe?'
'But who is that man?'
'Could it be me?'
'Of course. You haven't changed that much.'
'Yes, now that you say so, it is me. But I'm not so sure about the river. The Rhine?'
'And who is that?'
A woman in a little black hat with fluttering veil, pushing a baby carriage. Old-fashioned, tailored two-piece suit.
'Mama I suppose. My mother, I mean, I beg your pardon. With me.' I look from the photograph to her face. 'Or am I wrong?'
'Have another look.'
'I honestly don't know just now.'
'It's your wife. It's Vera.'
'Please put the book away.'
'You must go on looking. If you go on looking and you think of her very hard, you're sure to recognize her a
gain.'
'She has changed. Or maybe I am the one who has changed. She is a beautiful woman.'
'She is still beautiful now.'
I nod. Yes, she will remain beautiful for ever, with those green eyes behind that veil pleated forever by the wind.
'The waters broke,' I say. 'All of a sudden. As if it was raining. She clutched at my shoulders. I got drenched.'
Again I look at the photograph of the woman with the baby carriage, at the veil that seems to want to fly away, at her narrow, hopeful face. Slowly and cautiously I nod. Then I start to talk. A story. A story about the woman with the hat and the veil. Vera. I place her with the baby carriage on the edge of Amsterdam. That is where she lives. I talk about the child in the carriage, who cannot be seen in the photograph but who is my son Fred in the story. I talk about the fields, the glasshouses, the ditches and the footbridges, which lie outside the rectangle of the photograph. I talk about the time in which the photograph was taken, the last year of the war. This does not altogether tally with the tailored suit, but this girl sitting here won't know that, she belongs to a generation born long after the war and in another continent. She nods and she listens. I talk. About the blocked sewers (because the Germans had turned off the electricity in the pumping stations) so that everywhere in the streets deep shit holes were being dug that stank horribly and created a real risk of infectious diseases like cholera and typhoid. I talk about old, stooping Mr Mastenbroek on the third floor who died of starvation two days before the liberation. You can't imagine that now, I say. What hunger is like. That dull, gnawing feeling, which resided not only in your stomach but everywhere. All your thoughts were governed by it. I talk of the arrival of the Canadians and Americans. Eisenhower's and Churchill's triumphal tour of the city in an open limousine. How I stood among the crowds with Fred on my shoulders and tears running down my cheeks. About the freedom celebrations, the first bar of chocolate, the biscuit porridge (thick and nourishing and at first too rich for my stomach, which for months had feasted only on sugarbeet and fried slices of tulip bulb). How everyone fell in love with life again, with one another, how many children were born in the Netherlands roughly a year after that 5 May. I talk and talk and it is as if I am talking myself out of history, as if this were a book from which I am reading, or a text I know by heart; one thing is clear: what you tell you lose. Forever. Abruptly I fall silent and look around in alarm.