Out of Mind (6 page)

I want to get back to Vera. I want to hold her close and say I am sorry. And that she shouldn't leave me alone like this. All these wrong things happen because I am being left alone.

'Come on, Robert, we must go home at once.'

A sharp wind and the sound of the sea swishing, sighing over the smooth hard sand. I watch the foaming, advancing water. Underneath, a counter-current pulls it swiftly over the sand, back to the sea. If I look at these opposing currents for a long time I grow dizzy.

Most people talk about the 'salty sea air', but I call it the 'white scent'. Those little birds the colour of brown rope, tripping along the tide line, would probably understand what I mean.

I am beginning to regain my feeling, my normal feeling. As if my blood is beginning to flow again. I should take such a brisk walk more often. I used to, in the winter, with Pop. Warmly dressed on our bikes along the Bergen Road to Bergen-Binnen where we would stop for a bowl of pea soup, and then straight on to the beach. There we would put our heavy bikes in the store room of a first aid post and walk all the way to Egmond and back. The Dutch wind was nastier, more biting than this one.

I can see the tall white flagpole of the Atlantic Motel sticking out above the last ridge of dunes. Robert knows exactly which way to go. The wooden steps to the beach are half buried by snow, but the hand-rail shows precisely where they are. Robert sniffs at a yellow plastic crate that juts out of the sand.

On the Atlantic Road I have to pause to catch my breath. Robert keeps running around me impatiently. Then we walk back towards home with the sea and the wind at our backs.

As we pass the Cheevers' brick house I call Robert to heel. Before you know where you are he has disappeared, in search of Kiss, the Cheevers' white Pomeranian.

Vera's light-blue Datsun is parked in front of the porch. I climb the steps and look through the window. She is on the phone. I tap against the glass but she doesn't hear. Then she suddenly sees me. Startled, she drops the phone. I wave and enter the house through the open front door.

When I enter the front room she is sitting by the table with clasped hands. Her face looks helplessly at me, like that of a child who waits anxiously for what the grown-ups have in store for her this time. 'Let me take your coat.' She has to stand on tiptoe to help me out of my coat. I sit down by the table while she puts my coat away. She returns with a book in her hand, a paperback with a green cover. A man in a raincoat looks sideways at a brilliantly lit hotel on top of a hill. The title is
Our Man in Havana.

'Is it about Cuba?' I enquire. I know Vera is interested in politics. She is about to answer but changes her mind and sits down again, placing the book upside down on the table.

'Maarten,' she says, 'where have you been?'

I take a deep breath of relief. 'A long walk,' I say. 'I have decided to go for long walks more often in future. It's good for the circulation. You should have come with me but you had already gone when I left. Where have you been?'

'I've been to see Dr Eardly.'

That gives me a fright. 'There's nothing wrong with you, is there?'

She puts her hands on mine. 'I went for you, Maarten. You are so restless these days. You do things and the next moment you can't remember having done them. Strange things. I went to talk about it with Dr Eardly.'

'I feel perfectly healthy. Strange things? What kind of strange things?'

'When I got home the whole kitchen was strewn with chicken bones.'

'Robert,' I say hesitantly.

'Half a chicken, Maarten. In the morning, on an empty

stomach, you ate half a chicken. And a can of liver pâté. And several pineapple rings and a packet of cookies.'

'A healthy appetite for an old man, that's all I can say.'

'It's no laughing matter, Maarten. But Dr Eardly says we can do something about it together. And he's given me tablets for you, for the night.'

'I sleep very well, actually.'

'Sometimes you get up in the middle of the night. You get dressed. You don't know the difference between day and night any longer.'

'It's all because of this damned winter,' I mutter. I look at her earnestly, almost severely, as if wanting to persuade her. But what I am really doing is begging her to understand something I do not understand myself. Something that suddenly comes over me and vanishes equally suddenly, leaving a dark shadow of panic behind, which slowly ebbs away until only that slight sense of unease remains that I now feel almost the whole day.

'I know what the trouble is,' I say, 'Chauvas said the same to me at a meeting the other day. "My dear Maarten," he said, "don't you remember we discussed that in detail at our last meeting? Look it up in your own minutes." I've been a bit forgetful for a long time.'

'It was four years ago you last went to an IMCO meeting,' she says.

'Sure, sure,' I say. 'Did you really think I didn't know that?'

'You should take it easy, Dr Eardly said. You should stay indoors for the time being. Your memory is a bit confused. We must steer the past back into its proper channels. Together. Our past, Maarten.'

'Don't look so sad, Vera,' I say. 'There are lots of things I do remember.'

'I can help you,' she says softly. 'We've been together almost fifty years. Dr Eardly said it can all come all right again.'

'What does this Dr Eardly know about me? I've been to see him twice maybe in all the years we've been living here.'

'Don't get excited. He promised to call in one of these days.' 'Doctors,' I sneer. 'Especially in this country with its obsession with health. They do nothing but keep the pharmaceutical industry on its feet, the pill manufacturers.'

'Don't excite yourself so.'

'That's what you said before.'

'I know.'

'What should I do, then?' My voice sounds dull and timid, as though admitting I am sick. Therefore I say, by way of compensation, 'Out of sight, out of mind' (a subtle reference to my condition, because I have guessed all along what this Dr Eardly thinks of me).

'Tell me what you have been doing this morning.'

I mustn't panic. Start from here. From where I am sitting now. The snow outside. The room. This table edge, which I am holding with both hands.

'Take your time thinking about it.'

'Nothing special,' I say. 'Same as usual. Get up, wash, dress, shave, drink coffee, eat breakfast.'

'Chicken?'

'Chicken? No, just the usual slice of toast and marmalade, from that yellow jar with the black lid, you know.'

'You ate half a cold chicken from the refrigerator. A can of liver pâté, a couple of pineapple rings and a packet of cookies.'

'I am finding this a painful account. In broad outline I cannot agree with it.'

'Who are you talking to?'

'Vera,' I say, quickly, and panting slightly, 'listen carefully to me. I don't hurt a fly. I went for a walk this morning, with Robert. Down the path. In the Stevens' yard there was a pick-up truck from Salem. A red one without wheels. You can go and look for yourself. The usual junk. I didn't see Pat. Robert was chasing after some crows. We went to the beach. Into the wind. The white scent was all around me. But I thought that only because other people always talk about the salty sea air. Even Pop does, he always talks about the salty sea air, too.'

'Your father died in 1956.'

I pick up a book that is lying on the table between us and turn it over with a furious bang.

'Did you imagine I didn't know that? To sum up, as Bahr always says at the end of a meeting, I walked along the beach, a little way down Atlantic Road, and then back towards home. Wind at my back. Any other business?'

'You phoned the library.'

'When I came home you were on the phone,' I reply. 'I could see you through the window. I tapped against the glass but you didn't hear me. I waved and when you finally saw me you dropped the phone from fright.'

'It was Joan from the lending department.'

'I don't want you to work there any more,' I say. 'I want you to stay with me from now on, Vera. When I am alone everything goes wrong. I don't know why.'

'I haven't worked there for ages, Maarten.'

'Good,' I say. 'That's all right, then.'

Her narrow head with the brown hair wobbles on her wrinkly neck and her eyes are suddenly so dull and sad that I get up to comfort her. The blood throbs in my temples and I put my hands on her shoulders.

'Not so hard,' she says.

My hands are cold and numb. I withdraw them, I look at the palms and slowly let them drop limply by my sides.

'I know the feeling,' I say, 'as if someone had locked you up inside your own house. That's the feeling. But there is always a way out, Vera, always.'

It is very understandable that she has to cry now. I sit down again. 'I am with you,' I say. 'Whatever happens, I am with you. We'll have to get used to the fact that our world has become smaller, that you see fewer and fewer people, that you startle when the phone rings, that all the days look alike. But we have each other, Vera, don't forget that.' And I stroke her hair softly. Let her have a good cry. I understand.

A human being can look for a long time without seeing anything. Robert can look too, but he is unable to recognize the tea caddy and the cheese slicer. He looks without seeing is what I mean. Try it for yourself. You always drink coffee of a particular brand and when they don't have any in stock at the drugstore you take a different brand, a different tin.

When you want to make coffee the next day, you look everywhere for the tin of coffee. The remembered image of the old tin is so strong that it makes the new brand, the tin there right in front of your nose on the kitchen shelf, invisible. To see something you must first be able to recognize it. Without memory you can merely look, and the world glides through you without leaving a trace. (I must remember this well, because it will enable me to explain a great deal to Vera.)

I am standing by the window in the back room and looking at two scrawny squirrels chasing each other up the trunk of a crooked birch tree. Look at those swaying grey plumes. Whoops! A little dance step would be in pace here . . . no . . . not pace . . . step . . .
pace ...
in place! A leak. There is a small leak somewhere. Hampers the thinking process. That is the sort of thing Simic would have said, at one of those rare moments when he raised a point. Tall, thin, taciturn Karl Simic, as brittle as china, cautious, timid, looking warily out of his dark, slightly squinting eyes. Dampens the thinking process. Simic used to play the piano rather well. The whole of Ravel's
Boléro.
Out of his head. Even though he was drunk. A song about a ship with so many guns. He sang the words to it, in German, his eyes raised to the ceiling. I only ever went to his house once. On the occasion of his forty-fifth birthday. Neither chick nor child did he have. After a few whiskies in that cocktail bar in Boston he invited me home. He lit only one small reading lamp. In the half-dark he told me a story of how his wife or girlfriend had deceived him with his best friend, that he had found a letter which left him in no doubt, how he had gone out and bought a bottle of bourbon and had drunk it all, with that friend while they argued about the literary qualities of Hemingway's novels. In the end their disagreement ran so high that the friend had shouted: Next time there is a war you won't survive the camps but I will.

Simic then muttered something and I had to bend forward to hear what he said. He shouldn't have said that, he whispered. He shouldn't have said that. Why not? I asked. Because it's the truth, he replied.

We didn't drink bourbon that night, but vodka on the rocks.

In the end Karl was so drunk that I had to lay him on his bed. He weighed little more than a child. He went on singing. Sombre Slav songs of which I didn't understand a word. There were lots of books in his bedroom. And a large painting of a ballet dancer floating in the air. I sat on the edge of the bed. Karl had finished singing. I was no longer quite sober myself. He was lying with his back towards me. I started telling him about Vera and about the only time I had been unfaithful to her. In Paris.

She sat down opposite me in an overcrowded restaurant that Leon Bähr had recommended to me. Fat and dark, she was wearing a shiny black silky blouse; there was something gypsy-like, something unbridled about her. It is difficult to avoid the eye of someone who is sitting opposite you at a table hardly fifty centimetres away.

I was eating
entrecôte au poivre.
She ordered the same. I took a
coupe dame blanche.
So did she. I was always one course ahead of her and watched how she ate, with tiny little bites, leaving nothing on her plate. I noticed how thin her fingers were only when she caught up with me at the coffee and cognac stage. She held her glass as if it were a baby's hand. She was slow and she was graceful. Unlike most fat people, she had not yet lost power over her body.

We touched glasses very lightly and said our names. Maarten, Sylvie. As if these were the names of the glasses. And that was true. Our names, our pasts, did not matter that evening. This ritual was repeated three more times. Soon we were the only ones left in the restaurant. In clumsy French I had explained to her why I was in Paris. She worked somewhere in an office, she told me.
Allons,
she motioned me, when she noticed the waiters and waitresses in their white aprons standing leaning against the bar watching us.
Allons.

We went. She lived close by. She pressed the light button in the hall of the apartment building and suddenly walked quickly ahead of me on tapping heels.
Vite,
she said, it will go out after a minute. Apart from her name and her occupation, that was all she told me that night, in a curiously light, almost girlish voice. For the rest, she made soft, contented, grunting sounds, deep down in her throat.

It was an event that happened to me but which I also wanted. It was complete. Maybe because we had no past for each other nor wanted to acquire one. We moved in and over and out of each other. Pure lust, it was. Pure and anonymous. Finally she turned her enormous back with the imprints of my teeth in her left shoulder blade towards me and fell asleep. I got up, dressed, and vanished from her life. Outside, the dawn glimmered. Blackbirds sang. Only when the night porter at the Ambassador Hotel said my name did I remember who I was.