Out of Mind (14 page)

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 again.'

'She has changed. Or maybe I am the one who has changed. She is a beautiful woman.'