Out of Mind Read online

  OUT OF MIND

  J. Bernlef

  Translated by Adrienne Dixon

  First published in English in 1988

  by Faber and Faber Limited 3 Queen Square London wcin 3au This paperback edition first published in 1989

  Originally published in Holland in 1984 by Em. Querido's Uitgeverij B. V., Amsterdam as Hersenschimmen

  © J. Bernlef, 1984, 1988 English translation © Adrienne Dixon, 1988

  A touching dream to which we all are lulled

  But wake from separately.

  Philip Larkin

  Maybe it is because of the snow that I feel so tired, even in the morning. Vera doesn't, she likes snow. To her there is nothing better than a snowy landscape. When the traces of man vanish from nature, when everything becomes one immaculate white plain: how beautiful! She says it almost as if enraptured. But this state of affairs never lasts long here. Even after a few hours you see footprints and tyre tracks everywhere and the main roads are cleared by snow ploughs.

  I hear her in the kitchen, making coffee. Only the ochre- coloured post at the school bus stop still indicates where Field Road passes our house. Actually, I don't understand what has happened to the children today. I stand here by the window every morning. First I check the temperature and then I wait until they turn up everywhere from among the trees in the early morning, with their schoolbags on their backs, their colourful hats and scarves and their shrill American voices. The bright colours make me feel cheerful. Flaming red, cobalt blue. One boy wears an egg-yolk-yellow anorak with a peacock embroidered on the back, a boy with a slight limp who is always the last to climb into the school bus. It is Richard, son of Tom the lighthouse keeper, born with one leg shorter than the other. A sky-blue, fan-shaped peacock tail studded with darkly staring eyes. I don't know where they can all be today.

  The house creaks in its joists like an old cutter. Outside the wind rolls through the crowns of the otherwise bare, bending pines. And at fixed moments the dull, lowing thrusts of the foghorn beside the lighthouse on the last rocky spur of Eastern Point. At fixed moments. You can set the clock by them.

  Minus three says the outdoor thermometer, Pop's Heidensieck thermometer, a glass stick in a moss-green protective wooden case, screwed to the window pane. Centigrade to the left, Fahrenheit to the right. Pop and his Heidensieck. He didn't believe in weather forecasting, but he did believe in recording facts. It wasn't for nothing that he had been a clerk to the court practically all his life. Morning and evening temperatures, noted down in a black marble-grained exercise book. The first and the last thing he did, every day. A kind of ritual. At weekends he took out the exercise book and, sitting at his desk, worked out his graphs on the basis of the recorded temperatures. These graphs, drawn with a hard Faber pencil on salmon-coloured graph paper, he kept in a folder. Why did he bother with all this? Only once did he ever talk about it to me, shortly before his death, in his cottage close to the inner dunes at Domburg. My time is too short, he said, and the system is too big, too slow and too complicated for one man on his own. I merely register facts. But you suspect a system behind those facts, I said. Yes, he said, you might say that. Unless all facts turned out to be aberrations, he added with that thin, ironic little smile of his. But then it would no longer be a system, I suggested. Or a system of which we can have no conception, he said.

  Strange that I should suddenly think of him, as I stand here in Gloucester, on the coast north of Boston: of my pop and his Heidensieck thermometer. Even his grave in the Netherlands must have been cleared by now.

  Yes, he used to like systems. As for being fatherly, he would look right over your head, his watery blue eyes fixed on something the rest of us around the table were unable to see. In fact, we were slightly afraid of him, Mama and I. He looked down on us, quite literally. And in a different way as well. If he was in a good mood he would take me out on to the balcony in the evening and point out the constellations, the brightly sparkling planets. A few times we saw a falling star. He tried to explain to an eight-year-old that what we could see up there in the evening sky was an ancient past, that we were unable to see the real state of the universe, that we could at best calculate it. A number of those stars you could see up there do no longer really exist, others do. I didn't understand this, but I asked no questions. Such things he said only when he was in a good mood. Usually he sat down at his desk straight after supper and started working. He lived to the age of seventy-four. Three more years and I shall have caught up with him, so far as age is concerned.

  When Mama died in 1950 he started recording other aspects of the weather, not only the temperature. Snowfall. Storm. The first signs of spring. The flocks of starlings that flew over his roof in the autumn, that he described as 'innumerable' in his almost calligraphic script that so well suited the impersonal nature of his statements. Six years later he, too, died. His heart suddenly stopped. I unscrewed the thermometer from the window frame of his cottage and took it with me. I don't really know why. It is a very ordinary thermometer.

  You can always hear Vera coming from afar, so much do the cups and saucers rattle on the tin tray. Aspen-leaf, I sometimes say jokingly to her, but she doesn't think that is very funny. It is caused by a worn neck vertebra, says Dr Eardly. There is not much you can do about it. Nothing, in fact. Old age.

  'Where can the children be?'

  'The children? In Holland, of course, where else should they be?'

  'No, I mean the ones from here.' I point outside. 'Cheever's children and the Robbinses and Tom's little Richard.'

  'But Maarten, it's Sunday today. Come, your tea is getting cold.'

  How could I have forgotten! And tea? I could have sworn it was morning. But as I look through the other window in the direction of the sea I can tell it must be later. Behind the grey haze lurks a pale sun. It must be this mist that has deceived me. Mist blocks the light. Before sitting down I cast a quick glance at the wall clock. Gone three.

  I smile into Vera's mocking green eyes with the dark flecks in the pupils. The other day I came across an old photograph of her. She is standing on the deck of a pleasure steamer, leaning with her back against the double white rail. A trip to Harderwijk. The sun shines on her springy hair. It was thick then. She is smiling, you can see her small, regular teeth. The dress she was wearing I cannot remember now, but it was definitely light in colour. I still see us standing on the poop deck together as we sailed out of the IJ. Were we already married then? But the picture I have of her - I mean inside - does not resemble the young woman in the photograph, and not the Vera sitting opposite me either. It is a picture in which all the changes she has undergone have been united. That is why it is more like a feeling than a picture.

  Vera. Her gestures even now always abrupt, incomplete; the attentiveness with which she picks a dead leaf from a plant and examines it from all sides, as if to ascertain the cause of death; the way she purses her lips when she is thoughtful, or shakes her head gently when she reads something she finds beautiful. I am the only person who can see in her all the women she has been. Sometimes I touch her, and then I touch all of them at once, very gently. A feeling only she can evoke in me, no one else.

  I stir my teaspoon around in my cup, just like she does. A familiar tinkle of metal against thin china.

  'Is anything the matter?' she asks. She looks at me scrutinizingly.

  'No,' I say. 'Why?'

  'This morning you let your coffee get cold. And I asked you twice to fetch wood from the boet. But the only one who came back with wood was Robert, with a piece in his mouth.'

  She laughs. She still has small teeth. But these aren't real ones. She says boet instead of shed, because she comes from North Holland, from Alkmaar, just like me. But I simply say shed.

  'I felt
a bit tired this morning,' I say. 'I'll get you some in a minute.'

  'No need, I've already done it myself. You're getting absent-minded, Maarten.'

  'My memory has never been very good.'

  I can tell from my voice that I am trying to defend myself against her teasing reproof. 'It's because of the snow,' I say hurriedly, 'the monotony. When everything around you is white, the distinctions fall away. I'm looking forward to spring, aren't you?'

  'They've forecast more snow.'

  'Goodness me.'

  I fold my hands, look at the tobacco-brown spots of pigmentation between the swollen veins and before I realize I have said it once more: 'Goodness me.' It simply slips out.

  She puts her hand briefly on my head, on my thin hair. When she smiles you can tell she has false teeth. Only when she smiles. Otherwise, her cheeks are still round and almost without wrinkles. In the lobes of her small ears sparkle tiny silver ear-studs, Zeeland ear-studs, from her great- grandmother in Zierikzee.

  'Drink your tea.'

  I drink the tea. Suddenly I feel irritated. I get up and say, 'I have to go to the washroom.' That's what I used to call it at work. At home I just say 'toilet'. Of course she immediately notices the difference in nuance.

  'Then you'd better take your briefcase,' she says.

  I sit here quite often - an old newspaper aimlessly in my hands - when I want to think about something. But the problem is that it is difficult to think about something you cannot remember. Impossible. The morning. Her request, if I would please fetch some wood. Maybe I didn't hear. Although she asked me twice, she said.

  I always did have a poor memory. At meetings, my diary was always my indispensable companion. But a whole morning which you have simply forgotten a few hours later? Which has passed by as if it had never been? A minute ago I would have sworn it was an ordinary weekday morning. If Vera had not said anything I might still be standing there now, in the back room, my hands leaning on the window sill, like every morning, looking for the noisy schoolchildren of Eastern Point.

  I could have made a better job of those tiles when I put them up. Feel those lumps of cement along the joints. I have always been left-handed, but at kindergarten that was not allowed, cutting with your left hand. The strips for plaiting mats turn out horrid, of uneven width and length. The teacher bends over me. Her dark curly hair tickles my cheek as it brushes past me. 'You'd better get the pencil box, Maarten,' she says softly, wiping my botched plait-work from the table. I look at the strips of paper at my feet on the floor. Then I get up and open the door.

  It is quiet in the corridor. At the end is the store closet. On the top shelf is the pencil box with its scent of wood shavings and graphite, a smell that comes from deep down in the forest, as old as the earth itself. I have to climb on a chair to look for the box with its compartments of different lengths and widths. Behind me stands Vera, beside the washing machine. I totter and grab the shelf with both hands.

  'Stop being so dangerous,' she says, 'and get down from that chair before you fall. What are you looking for?'

  'A carpenter's pencil,' I mutter as I scramble down. If she asks me again I will say nothing, as if I had not heard her. She does not repeat her question. I walk down the corridor into the living room. The television is on loudly. Vera is slightly hard of hearing. I am not, but sometimes, like just then, it suits me to pretend that my hearing, too, is no longer as sharp as it used to be.

  Indeed, what was I doing there? How did I get up on that chair? And so suddenly? All at once I found myself standing on a chair in the laundry room. Without anything leading up to it.

  She has put on her lime-green knitted jacket.

  'Are you cold?'

  'A bit shivery,' she says and points out of the window.

  It is snowing again. There goes Robert with his nose close to the ground. Following a scent no doubt. I see him disappear among the pine trees behind a rock that sticks slantingly out of the ground. The wind has wiped the snow from the top of the mottled dark-grey stone. The veins and cracks on its side show up like a network of fine white lines, a map that I suddenly do not wish to look at. My mouth fills up with spittle.

  I swallow. And again. I swallow once more and let my tongue run along my palate. A cheerful female voice announces the four o'clock news. It will probably soon be dark now. I will wait until I see Vera and myself loom up in the blackening plate-glass of the living-room window, as in the frame of a familiar painting. Then I will get up and draw the curtains. I rub my hands together. Yes, that's what I will do, that is what I am going to do.

  Vera. She has grown thinner. And even smaller, it seems. When she was in her early forties she was almost plump. And then my left hand would go all along her sleeping back and side until I held one of her breasts in the cup of my hand, gently rubbing the nipple with my thumb. Last summer there was a couple screwing down in the wood near by. She had firm young tits. I stood watching behind an ash tree. They didn't see me. Dirty old man? No, it wasn't that. The passion of their fierce movements, down there in the tall grass, the girl's curled-up toes and the summer breeze in the tall bracken among the pines behind them. I thought of the gentle, slumbering movements of Vera and me. I was looking at something that I had known but that lay for ever behind me. The excitement of the unknown has given way to recognition, the recognition of Vera as she is now, as I have seen her become in the course of the years. With most women of her age the young girl they must once have been cannot possibly be reconstructed. They look as if they have always been like that. But in Vera the features and gestures of the young girl have been preserved like a painting underneath. The reckless speed with which she sits down, even now, the exuberant hand-wave when she sees someone she knows, the outward-pointing feet, a leftover from ballet lessons, the straight neck, despite the wrinkles, still turning as proudly and inquisitively as that of an ostrich.

  The house seems bigger than it did once, when Kitty and Fred were still at home. Only Robert goes upstairs now, the ground floor is enough for us. We potter. That is one difference with the past, when you still went to work. You start pottering, you walk around for the sake of walking around. Open a door or closet here and there, and shut it again. For no reason. You see the room, the familiar furniture as it is arranged, the portraits and trinkets, the gleaming glass panes of the dresser in the corner of the room which always reminds me of Grandma's and Grandpa's living room, of Grandma's secret store of candy behind a row of snowy-white canisters with their stern black lettering: 'Sugar', 'Salt', 'Cinnamon', 'Coffee'. Thin bars of chocolate she used to keep for me there, and acid drops or pear drops; words from an improbably distant past, but still with a whiff of their former flavour.

  I look around me. Everything has received its own immutable place. You don't throw things away so easily any more, and if you break something you have a feeling other than the indifference of long ago. You look around you and you know that pretty well all these objects will survive you. They surround you and sometimes you feel: They are looking at me, almost as equals.

  'Look at New York!'

  It is snowing on the television screen too. A mustard- coloured snow plough in Madison Avenue shoves muddy breakers of snow on to the sidewalk. Behind large, illumined showcase windows, store assistants stand watching. I must not forget to fetch wood from the shed. Those logs are really too heavy for Vera. I haven't sawn and chopped them myself for years. I buy the wood from Mark Stevens, who also supplies Tom at the lighthouse. It could do with another log now, though more for the sake of cosiness than for warmth.

  I pick up a book from the low round table beside the fireplace. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. Never seen that lying here before. It doesn't come from the library either. Almost half-way through the book, a bus ticket peeps out from between the pages, a return ticket, Gloucester- Rockport. I haven't seen Vera reading it. Maybe she borrowed it from Ellen Robbins and that bus ticket is hers. (Why do I so much want this to be the case? Why does this innocent book s
uddenly seem an intruder?)

  Poke the fire, it makes such a lovely shower of sparks. Go on, fly away, up the chimney, you lot. Out there you'll all be extinguished by the snowflakes with a big hiss. Black dots on the snowy roof, that is all that remains of the falling sparks. I've seen it many times, coming home from a winter walk in the woods with Robert.

  Graham Greene. Didn't he write Our Man in Havana? I saw the movie once, with Alec Guinness. I remember only a scene of two men playing a game of checkers. But instead of checkers they play with small bottles of liquor. Bourbon and Scotch. Every piece that is taken must be drunk. The loser wins.

  'Do you remember Our Man in Havana, that film with Alec Guinness? Based on a book by Graham Greene?' I deliberately shout a bit, so as to be heard above the television.

  'Vaguely,' she says, wiping a crumb from the corner of her mouth.

  'Based on a book by Graham Greene.'

  'Could be, yes.'

  She does not react to the name. Surely it would have been natural for her to say: That's a coincidence, I am just reading a book by him. Then I would have replied: Not at all a coincidence. I saw that book lying here and it reminded me of the film. Then everything would tally, our words would fit together like pieces of a jigsaw. But she says nothing.

  Walk, I must get up for a moment and walk about. Then it will ebb away again, this feeling of being absent while being fully conscious, of being lost, of losing your way, I don't know what to call this feeling, which can apparently be aroused by the simplest objects, like this book.

  Robert scratches at the kitchen door. Vera can't hear him. I have to hold the door knob with two hands against the wind. The dog immediately pushes his cold nose into my outstretched hands. I stroke his tobacco-brown spotted hide in which snow crystals still glisten here and there. Robert knows the way, straight to the crackling fire.

  From the kitchen window you can usually see the rocky coast through the trees, and the grey, rolling sea, but today there is nothing in the distance except a black hole. Not even a light anywhere. The fishermen have probably stayed indoors in this weather.