Out of Mind (9 page)

'What's the name again of that fellow with the dog's face and those little spectacles?' asks Vera.

'Himmler,' I say. 'Do you want to go on watching?'

'No, always that war. Might as well turn it off.'

The picture leaps backward and vanishes into a white dot that continues to glow for a moment on my retina. Himmler, Hitler. I, too, lived through that war. It now seems inconceivable. But even front-line soldiers usually have only a vague idea of the campaign in which they have taken part.

'Do you know what I sometimes wonder?' I say. 'Whether inquisitive extrovert people have more memories in later life than shy introverts.'

'I wouldn't have thought it had much to do with it,' says Vera.

'I used to be so shy my father called me the archaeologist, because I was always looking at the ground.'

'When I first met you that didn't seem to be the case.'

'I've learned to play my part,' I say. 'But in reality I am still a shy person.'

She looks at me with her emerald eyes above the wrinkly pouches of skin. I feel like a baby looking up at the face of his mother. My smile arises in the same way - all by itself - for no other reason than the recognition of the familiar face. I kiss her carefully on the cheek, but my lips slide away to her ear. Tears spring to my eyes.

'Stop it, you're tickling me.'

'I should like to kneel to you,' I whisper.

'Don't talk such nonsense,' she says, gently pulling my hair. 'Come on, silly,' she says. 'Let's go to bed.'

While she gets undressed in the bedroom, I switch off the standard lamp in the living room. I pause in the doorway and look at the furniture. It has nothing to say to me. That is good. Tomorrow it will still be there in the same position. And the day after. That is good. I switch off the light.

'
We're going for a walk, Robert,' I say
. 'Just finish my coffee.'

'Maarten, the doctor says you're not to go out. Here you are.' Vera pushes a bowl of yoghurt and cornflakes in front of me.

'Since when does a doctor decide where I go or do not go? I'm not sick. At least I don't feel sick.'

'You're a little confused. You might get lost.'

'Get lost?'

'Yes, because you sometimes forget which way to go.'

'Not when Robert is there. He knows the way home, no matter where he is, even from the centre of Boston.'

'The other day you lost Robert when you were out.'

I remain silent.

'Finish your yoghurt.'

Clearly, she is inventing stories to test me. If I confirmed them I would be lost. I would lose myself in her fabrications. Maybe that doctor of hers told her to do it. Try to find out if he can still distinguish reality from fiction. A test. Better not reply. Better not respond to anything. I must retain my hold on ordinary life. To think that this should ever have become my ideal, to hold on to the ordinary routine of events. At moments when I can no longer do that, I must try to imitate this routine of events. And if even that should fail, only then would I (and not she) have to start inventing life itself.

Yes, I long for the pleasure of the daily routine, the course from one event to the next. It is necessary to fill your life. But I can still use language. I remember clearly the first time I told my mother a lie. The amazement that my words were believed even though they said things that were not true. That the difference could not be noticed! I was five, maybe six. I was late home. I said the bridge had stayed open 'a very long time because two barges had bumped into each other' (while in fact I had stayed out playing with a friend). Yes, that lie was a tremendous discovery. My father and mother nodded. So beside the visible and verifiable reality there were many others, apparently indistinguishable from the real one.

If need be - if I really have to - I shall invent a life for myself from minute to minute, and believe in it, like my father and mother believed that story about the two barges bumping into each other, one of which 'had almost sunk'.

'Where can the children be?' I say. 'It's late enough.'

Vera does not reply. She gets up.

'Or has the school bus gone past already?' I ask.

'Yes, Maarten,' she says, 'you were still asleep when the bus went past.'

'Did I sleep as long as that?'

'It's because of the medicine. Dr Eardly said it would make you sleep soundly and he was right. I had to wake you up.'

'What time is it, then?'

'Gone twelve o'clock.'

She leaves the kitchen. Robert follows her.

'I'm coming, Robert.'

I always feel a bit stiff in the mornings but that will soon go when I take my walk.

Have I gained that much weight recently? My coat is so tight. And why is the door locked? I tug at the door knob a couple of times. Maybe it is stuck or frozen.

'Come along, Robert!'

I wait for the dog and look at the coat stand. Hurriedly I take off Vera's wine-coloured coat and correct my mistake before she catches me when she comes out of the laundry room.

'Have you seen Robert?'

'He's outside.'

'I'll be off, then.'

She posts herself with her back against the front door.

'The doctor says you mustn't.'

'I'm not sick. There's nothing wrong with me. Robert,' I call out, 'Robert, come here!'

'He'll come back of his own accord.'

'Am I never allowed out again, then?'

'Not now.' 'But I want to go fishing. I fixed up with Gerard and Klaas,' I lie to her. 'Go on, let me.'

'Come along to the kitchen. You haven't finished your food.'

'At school they say too much dairy produce is bad for your teeth.' (But what can you do? Once I am out of the house, on my own, I should be able to do what I like.)

I sit down by my plate of mush and chew demonstratively. In a minute she's bound to say: Don't dawdle so over your food.

'Has Pop gone to work yet?'

'Maarten, it's me, Vera!'

'Don't shout at me so.'

She hides her face in her hands. Why is she so upset all of a sudden? Why is she crying so heartrendingly?

'Don't cry. I don't want you to cry.'

'Vera,' she sobs, 'I'm Vera!'

'Of course you're Vera,' I say, 'did you think I didn't know?'

She suddenly get up. 'I'm just going to call in on Ellen Robbins,' she says. 'I'll be back in a moment. You do the crossword meanwhile.'

Strange that she didn't tell me she was going out. Maybe she has gone shopping. I quite like being at home on my own, so I can secretly peep in Pop's desk. On Sundays he lets me draw at it. A white sheet of paper on a baize-green blotter covered in inkstains and the marks left by Pop's blotted letters. When you look for a long time you see all kinds of things in it - animals, faces.

The door of the little cupboard inside the desk, behind which there are three deep drawers filled with papers, is locked, but I have the key in my pocket. I pull out the middle drawer and grope with one hand among his papers. I hold a letter in my hand, part of a letter, for there is no beginning, it starts somewhere in the middle.

In the afternoon I was free and I went for a walk in the Latin Quarter. It was pleasant weather for strolling past the galleries and second-hand bookstores. My fingers itched but my French is too bad to read books in it. I bought only a few antique postcards of Paris which I enclose. Two more days and I shall be back with you. In spite of the delights of the
'ville lumière'
I miss you all every hour of the day (especially you) when seeing all these beautiful things. Kisses, Maarten.

I pull the drawer right out of the desk and turn it upside down, but no matter how I search and grabble among the papers, the rest of the letter does not emerge. Only piles of documents relating to IMCO meetings, when the club still resided in Bonn. I remember those five years in Bonn, from 1962 till 1967 to be precise. But Paris?

I sit down at the desk and reread the letter fragment. Without a doubt my handwriting.

'You've been to Paris,' I say aloud, but the sentence does not help me, I might just as well have made it up, now, at this moment. If I cannot remember it, the words mean nothing. I fold the letter twice and slip it into my inside pocket. Outside, a dog is barking.

'Robert,' I say, and get up from my desk and go to the window.

Barking, Robert dashes over the snow around the house, following me, but all the doors are locked. They have locked me in and left me on my own.

I stand in the back room and watch Robert nervously circling round an ash tree and jumping up against it so that the snow falls from the branches on to his back. This startles him so much that he comes darting towards me like an arrow and leaps up at the window, only to slide back, his claws scratching across the glass. He looks at me with his dark moist eyes full of sadness.

There is nothing for it. Otherwise he will die of cold. I pull a chair from under the table, take hold of the back with both hands, and push its legs through the glass, which falls out with a great clatter. A few more thrusts and the hole is large enough for Robert to jump through. I run my fingers briefly through his damp pelt. He sniffs at the heap of papers beside my desk and then lies down in front of the radiator as if nothing had happened.

I feel a bit cold. A cup of hot tea would do me good. I go to the kitchen and turn on the gas. The kettle, where is the kettle? 'Kettle,' I say, 'kettle,' but the thing is nowhere, not in any of the kitchen cupboards. Perhaps in the living room. Vera sometimes uses it to water the plants. Not there either. I open the store cupboard but no matter how I search behind plates and glasses, I cannot find a bar of chocolate anywhere. Nor are there any pear drops or aniseed balls. Maybe she has gone to the store. I sit down at the piano and first press the practice pedal before I start. Grandpa is having his afternoon snooze upstairs so I must play very quietly. The keys move heavily and stiffly. Or is it that my fingers are too cold? Then I hear the front door open. 'I'm in here, Grandma,' I call out to her from by the piano.

In a wine-red coat with large black bone buttons Vera rushes past me to the kitchen, sniffing loudly. Then she comes back and runs towards a broken window. She looks first at the shattered glass and then at me. 'Jesus,' I hear her mutter. Then she goes to the telephone. I sit down on the settee and fold my hands. Fear wells up in my stomach and then in my mouth. I swallow a few times and then I hear her talking to someone about a broken window pane. She doesn't say I did it and I appreciate that (although I cannot remember how that window came to get broken). How are you to feel guilty if you can't remember anything about an incident? If you see only the consequences without knowing the cause? You have to refuse. Otherwise there is no end to it and anyone could always blame you for everything. And yet I feel guilty.

When she has finished her call she bends down and pulls papers together that are lying on the floor beside the desk. I can easily help her. I get up.

'Take your coat off first,' I say.

'It's freezing cold in here.'

She's right. I go to the hall and take my coat from the hook.

'Where are you off to?' she says in a very frightened, screechy voice when I enter the room with my coat over my arm. Calmly I put it on.

'Nowhere,' I say, 'I feel cold, that's all.'

She pushes the drawer into the desk and sits down on the chair. 'Maarten, what does all this mean?'

That is precisely the question. The meaning, the cause without which the consequences are senseless, inexplicable. In confusion, and perhaps also in order to gain time, I fumble in my inside pocket. I unfold the sheet of paper. Then I remember.

'The worst was that letter about Paris,' I say, and start automatically walking around in circles. 'I first thought it was a letter of Pop's but then it suddenly turned out be be my name at the end. And only then did I see it was also my handwriting. Only then. You look.'

I hold up the paper between forefinger and thumb. 'I can't remember how I have lived exactly, Vera,' I whisper with my coat on in the middle of the room, holding up the letter in my hand like a piece of evidence (like a scene from a bad play, equally ridiculous).

'Don't take it to heart,' I say therefore. 'I'll remember in a minute.'

'It was in 1963,' she says.

'When we were living in Bonn,' I say.

'You see, you do remember.'

'Bonn, yes, but not Paris.'

'I'll show you some photographs of it later. You were at an IMCO congress. Something about European interaction.'

'Counteraction they probably mean. Eating and drinking and putting spokes in one another's wheels.'

'That's what you said then, too.'

'And I still think exactly the same,' I say with determination. 'As long as they know. There's someone coming. Look, it's William. Where's Kiss? He hasn't brought Kiss with him.'

'Maarten, will you remember once and for all: Kiss is dead. Has been for a long time. So please don't start about that dog again to William. I'm only too glad he's willing to help us with that broken window.'

'William is a good lad. A bit quiet, but when you give him a pint or two he loosens up all right.'

'We don't have any beer.'

'Then I'll make tea. Oh, yes, by the way, have you seen the kettle anywhere?'

'I'll make the tea myself. Later.'

'I couldn't find the kettle.'

'It's where it always is, on the draining-board by the window.'

While Vera opens the door I go to the kitchen. There stands the kettle. I must have looked right through it. It smells of gas in here. I check the enamel controls but all four point to zero. Maybe there is a leak somewhere in the pipes. That is dangerous, an engineer will have to be called in. I go to the living room.

'Hi, William,' I say. William is crouched in front of a broken window and carefully pulls a large pointed piece of glass out of the frame. 'Nice of you to call on us. Haven't you brought Kiss with you?'

William does not reply. As usual. In a while we'll pour a few pints into him and then his tongue will loosen. You'll see.

'It is nice of William to help us with that broken window, isn't it, Maarten?'