Out of Mind Read online

  I can see the fishing industry going to the dogs here in Gloucester. The rusty fishing vessels are small, dirty and old-fashioned, and the fishermen are quite unaware of the development of modern, all-automatic fishing fleets on the other side of the globe. I know about it through my work, but I don't tell them. When I occasionally go to the tavern I only listen to their stories. At sea you don't learn how to talk, one of them said to me the other day. You're too busy. And when you're free for a moment there is always the sea about you and you must never take your eyes off it. IMCO, would that mean anything to them? There is surely nobody who knows it stands for Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization? Not even Vera. She has always said IMCO right from the start, without ever asking what those letters actually meant.

  I used to take the minutes at meetings. Later they had a secretary for that, and I switched to doing the catch targets, together with Karl Simic. He never said much. And certainly not about himself, unlike, for instance, Chauvas who always chattered nineteen to the dozen. Catch targets. There were years when I used that phrase every day. No, I don't really think about the office much anymore. Occasionally of that tall, skinny Karl Simic, even though he is dead now. Simmitch, that's how you had to pronounce it. A Yugoslav name. He lived on his own in an apartment in Boston. And one morning they found him dead in his bath. When I heard that, I was sorry I had never struck up a friendship with him. But he was just like me: shy and reserved. When we were working you could hear a pin drop.

  'What were you doing in the kitchen so long?'

  'Catch targets.'

  'What?'

  'Oh, nothing, a phrase from work. I was suddenly thinking of the office. And of poor Karl Simic who committed suicide and none of his colleagues understood why, except me, but I kept my mouth shut. What is left of it all, apart from some faded old minutes and reports full of advice that no one ever took?'

  'You men are always so keen on being important and having meetings.'

  'I was a cog, a well-paid cog, admittedly. But how that

  intergovernmental machinery fitted together exactly I still don't know to this day.'

  She has switched off the television. I sit down beside her on the settee. We are silent. Then she puts her hand on my knee.

  'You shouldn't always wear the same old pants,' she says.

  From the front room comes the ringing of a bell. It stops and then starts again. An irritating, intrusive sound that stridently advances among the furniture. At last it stops.

  'Wasn't that the phone?'

  'No,' I say, 'you must have imagined it.'

  'Maybe it was Ellen Robbins,' she says. 'She said she might drop by this evening.'

  She gets up and walks out of the room. I feel an impulse to follow her but, of course, that is silly. She'll be back in a moment. I intertwine my fingers and squeeze them.

  It should soon become day now. If only spring would come soon. Once it is spring again Robert and I can walk on the beach or along the bay. I throw pieces of driftwood into the waves and he brings them back to the beach. A pointless pastime which we both enjoy, each in his own way.

  I go to the window and press my nose against the glass. Black. Vera was up first, as usual. She has opened the curtains. I close them again. It's much too early to have them open on such a cold wintry morning. Even the schoolchildren are still in bed. I rub my hands together. Wouldn't mind my coffee now. I sniff. Nothing. She can't have started pouring the water on yet. Might as well read a little first.

  I take the book from the fireside table and open it where I left off yesterday. I read in bed last night. It happens sometimes that I then fall asleep and the next day I cannot remember what I last read. I leaf a chapter back and put the bus ticket to Rockport inside the front cover.

  Vera enters the room. Not in her navy-blue dressing-gown but in black cotton pants and a loose lime-green jacket over a white blouse. In her hands she is holding long shreds of paper, strips of torn newspaper.

  'Did you do this?' she asks.

  I shake my head. 'Maybe Robert?' I suggest hesitantly.

  'Since when do dogs tear newspapers into strips in the toilet?'

  She goes to the wastepaper basket beside the piano and drops the paper into it. I watch her and cannot understand why these dumb bits of newspaper make me feel so embarrassed. And it still isn't getting any lighter, it still won't become light.

  'If you're closing the curtains, then close all of them,' she says. 'I'm going to phone Ellen Robbins. It's such foul weather, she'd better not come this evening.'

  Of course, it is evening. 'What's for supper?'

  'I'll heat up a pizza. It's Sunday, after all.'

  'Of course,' I say. 'Sunday. All right with me.'

  I try to read the book I am holding in my hands, but the words refuse to form sentences. It is as if I suddenly no longer know English, even though I have been virtually bilingual these last fifteen years. At home we speak Dutch together, but as soon as someone else is present we effortlessly switch over to English. And it also happens quite often that we catch ourselves still talking English together long after the guests have left. I stare at the sentences. Slowly they slide back into place. Something flutters to the floor. I bend down and pick it up. An old bus ticket. I put it at the back of the book.

  In the front room I hear Vera on the phone.

  'Yes, I thought so. But Maarten said I was imagining it. . . That's what I was going to suggest too. We'll be in touch.'

  I heard her put the receiver down.

  'You see, it was the phone just then.'

  I nod.

  'So you did hear it?'

  'I remember hearing something,' I say, 'but I don't think it was the phone.'

  'But it was.'

  She goes to the kitchen. I hear her opening the flap of the oven and a moment later the dull plop of the gas leaping into flame. I am still holding the book in my hands. When Vera returns, I say, 'Yes, I remember now. Just as I was about to get up, it stopped. That can happen to anyone. Was it Ellen Robbins?'

  'Yes, it was Ellen Robbins. She thought we weren't in, that maybe I had forgotten what we had arranged. Will you keep an eye on the clock? It needs another ten minutes. I'm going to put on a jersey, I keep feeling cold.'

  I want to ask her, but she has already left the room. Ten minutes. The big hand is now on the seven. When it is on the nine, ten minutes will have gone. But what then? What has to be done? I shut the book and push it away from me. I stare at the black hands of the gold-coloured wall clock. There is no second hand on it. It looks as if the clock has stopped. It is a modern one, it doesn't tick.

  I go to the kitchen, sit down at the table and look at the bright red kitchen clock on the wall, an electric one with a gold-coloured second hand that moves round the clockface with little jerks. I don't let my eyes stray from it for an instant. I have always been a man of the clock. Punctual. That is more than you can say of some people.

  One more turn and then the big hand will be on the nine. Then ten minutes will have passed. Time is up. I get up from the chair and go to the living room. 'Vera,' I call, 'time is up.' I walk across the room, into the corridor. 'Vera, Vera, the ten minutes are up,' I call, as calmly as possible.

  Then I hear her answer coming from the bedroom. 'Turn the oven off then, will you?'

  I don't know how fast to get back, to carry out this instruction. When I hear the rushing sound of the gas cease, I sit down at the kitchen table with a sigh of relief. It is only thanks to her answer from behind the closed bedroom door that I have been able to carry out this task. Otherwise I would not have known what to do. It worries me that you can suddenly be so cut off from the most ordinary everyday actions. I have no explanation for it.

  Vera is wearing a grey-blue, thick-knitted jersey with a broad, wide-open neck. She has pinned up her hair.

  'Why have you put your hair up like that?'

  'I usually do when I have to do the cooking.'

  'Do you have to do the co
oking now, then?'

  'It's already done, really. You're right, it's no more than a habit.'

  She puts on her flowery kitchen gloves and pulls the baking tray with a pizza on it out of the oven.

  'Pizza,' I say in surprise.

  'Yes,' she says, 'it's Sunday, after all.'

  'Pizza day,' I nod, and I get up from my chair to fetch plates and cutlery. Vera cuts the pizza into four parts with a meat knife. She flicks two dark bits of meat on to my plate.

  'Anchovies, I don't like them.'

  'Pizza,' I say, 'I like pizza.'

  'We ought to have a glass of red wine with it,' she says. 'Do you remember in Rome, by that large square? I can't remember what it was called. There was a big fountain in the middle. We had a pizza so big it didn't fit on the plate, it was hanging all over the sides. Two gypsy beggar girls in those long ragged skirts saw that I couldn't possibly eat all of it and just as I was about to give them each a piece they were ordered off the terrace by one of the waiters. Those indignant dark eyes as they looked over their shoulders when they walked away! Later we saw them on a wide sidewalk in front of another terrace, dancing like two grown-up women. Do you remember?'

  'Yes,' I say, 'Rome. The Trevi Fountain.'

  'No, that was a different one. That's the fountain you have to throw coins in and make a wish. I wished for a daughter.'

  'And?'

  'I got a son.'

  I nodded. 'There are many fountains in Rome,' I say. 'I remember. It was before the war.'

  Vera nods. She has little blushes on her cheeks, from talking, from remembering. I dare not quite look at her. I spear the leftover piece of pizza on to my fork and hold it so high that Robert has to jump at it with wide-open mouth.

  'Pity we have no photographs of that trip,' says Vera.

  'Yes,' I say, 'Rome. Rome, city of fountains.'

  'Three years later it was war.'

  'All over now,' I say. 'In the end everything is all over.'

  I get up to make coffee while Vera washes the plates and puts them in the plate rack. I look sideways at her. She must now be almost as slim again as then, on that vacation in Rome of which I remember nothing. Luckily she told me all about it. My God, what would I do without her in this situation (and the worst is that I cannot form a precise picture of what that means: this situation)?

  After coffee we play a game of chess. I give up half-way, I can think of nothing but vanished memories and therefore dare not think of the past any more. Even less dare I talk to Vera about it. Perhaps it is only temporary, perhaps they will come back. Memories can sometimes be temporarily inaccessible, like words, but surely they can never disappear completely during your lifetime? But what are they exactly, memories? They are a bit like dreams. You can retell them afterwards, but what they really are, whether they are real, you don't know, no one does. I have sometimes heard Robert dream, at night, squealing thinly and plaintively from the living room. And sometimes Vera mutters a few words in her sleep, under her breath and unintelligible. I never dream. That is to say, I do not remember having dreamt for ages.

  'Do you ever hear me dreaming these days?' I ask. 'Aloud, I mean.'

  'Not that I know,' she says. 'I suppose I am always asleep myself.'

  I had hoped I would sleep well last night. Vera slept. She always sleeps soundly, has done ever since she started using sleeping tablets three years ago. I was suddenly awake, awake and totally lucid. A branch kept knocking, at ever-lengthening intervals, against the veranda railings. Then even that sound ceased. My head was one large brightly lit space, completely empty. And outside it, there was total calm, winter darkness and Vera's regular breathing.

  I got up and sat down at the kitchen table with a glass of milk. Robert scrambled out of his basket and stood motionlessly before me for several minutes. 'Something is the matter, Robert,' I whispered. 'You have noticed that correctly, but God knows what it is.'

  It must be this wretched winter. That is the only thing here, the winters last too long for my liking.

  Suddenly Vera is standing before me in her dressing-gown with a face as if fire had broken out. What are you doing here in the dead of night, sitting at the table fully dressed?

  Yes, of course, that was rather strange, that I was dressed. I do occasionally get up at night, but I only put on my dressing-gown and my slippers.

  I couldn't find my dressing-gown, I said, by way of explanation. She asked if anything was the matter. Nothing, I said, except that my head feels transparent, made of glass or ice, very clear and yet I am not thinking of anything.

  Read for a while then, she said, or do the crossword. She pushed the newspaper towards me across the table. You gave me a fright, she said. I wake up all of a sudden and you're no longer there. You shouldn't worry yourself, I said. Take another half of a sleeping tablet and go back to bed. I'll do the crossword and then I'll go back to bed, too.

  Of course it is a stupid pastime, but it makes time fly, I'll say that. I was only half through when it started getting light. I looked at the clock. Half past seven. Not worth going back to bed. Why not surprise Vera with coffee in bed? I always used to do that on Sundays when I was home from work, from IMCO. Coffee and a rusk. And then we'd make love. Not too noisily, because of the children. She would hold it in her hand and circle with her thumb over the tip and push it inside herself. That used to be all she needed to do and I'd come, but these days it usually takes much longer. Sometimes too long. Then we both grow too tired to carry on with it and fall asleep again.

  She was surprised when I suddenly stood in front of her with the tray. Reinstatement of an old tradition, I said. She sat up. She was wearing a loose black T-shirt that must have been Kitty's. I felt like touching her breasts but I did nothing. I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched how she drank the coffee, with small, careful sips, while holding the cup between her slightly trembling fingers.

  She didn't like rusks with aniseed sugar, she said. Anyway, you're supposed to eat them only when there's a birth in the family. I just thought it looked festive, all those colourful grains, I said. And since when did she take sugar in her coffee? Not in the last ten years she hadn't.

  Absent-mindedness, I said. Sorry. I was doing the crossword and I wasn't paying attention properly. So you didn't come back to bed at all? No, I said. Once I start doing the crossword . . .

  I used to be very quick at these things, but last night at the kitchen table nothing would go right. Another word for - another word for - I couldn't think of anything.

  There's been something wrong with my thinking recently. Or could it be that my English is at fault? Since my retirement I am at home with Vera practically all day and speak almost nothing but Dutch.

  A few times I filled in the wrong word. Deliberately. So as not to do what the puzzle wanted of me. It gave me a brief moment of relief. And I drew a moustache under the Pope's nose, almost without thinking about it, the way I used to scribble matchstick men in the margin of my note pad when taking minutes at meetings. Doodles.

  I screwed up the paper with the puzzle and stuffed it right down to the bottom of the garbage can. Vera would no doubt take those wrong words in bad part. (As long as I do not know what exactly is the matter, I must keep all this to myself.)

  Our house has shiny stained wooden floors with a rug here and there. You need only go over it with a soft broom and all is clean. Yet the house gets a bit dirtier every year. In corners and grooves burnt-out matches and hard, withered berries and crumbs accumulate. Vera does not seem to notice. Maybe my eyes are better than hers.

  Because she is wearing her slippers I cannot hear her walking about now, but otherwise all day long we know of each other's whereabouts in the house. And Robert's, of course, with his sharply tapping claws.

  The house no longer creaks, the wind died down last night. Snow is falling again. The thermometer reads exactly zero degrees centigrade.

  Vera is wearing her wine-red corduroy jacket and jeans. She has adapted somewhat to
the American style of dress. In this country an older person must, at least as regards clothes, look like a twenty-year-old. I myself stick to the English suits from Dodgson's in Boston. Charcoal grey with a thin stripe. I don't mind if people can tell I don't come from here.

  'I'm going out for a little walk with Robert,' I say. 'When I come back I'll get some wood for the fire.'

  'Don't forget to put your scarf on,' she says, leaning on the broom. Before going out into the hall to put on my coat I kiss her gently on her left cheek.

  'You might have shaved,' she says, tapping my cheek disapprovingly with a gleamingly lacquered nail.

  'Do you know what it is?' I say when I shuffle down snow-covered Field Road with Robert. 'It all starts with great, confused feelings.'

  Later you remember only a kind of fever, a glow from within, which made everything special, the most ordinary things that you walked past together and looked at and talked about with her. A barn, a notice board, a flock of starlings flying up from a field. You felt a longing to absorb everything she looked at, to forget nothing, not one moment of this world that had suddenly become her world: cool, bright, unfathomable.

  You should never go back to places you used to know. If you do, you destroy that glow, the core of your memories, like Pop, who, old as he was, took the car after Mama's death and went back to all the houses in which he had lived with her. A few had been pulled down, in others strangers were living, behind pleated net curtains and thick-leafed potted plants on the window sill. After his journey his memories seemed more like fiction than fact, he said, and he felt bitter because the world had changed and had not taken account of his past and his loss.

  'So, don't look back!' I say to my dog and I forgot to put on my scarf, after all. Vera is sure to have found out long ago. Sometimes she thinks I deliberately disregard her advice, but that is not so.