J. Bernlef - Out of Mind

'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.

Had Karl heard what I said? He, too, was lying with his back to me. He said nothing in reply. I got up and left.

The next day he did not come to work. Nor the following days. Bahr drove to his house in person. The police did the rest.

We all attended his funeral. It was a beautiful cemetery, near Shipman's Wreck, a hilly area with tall oak trees. Bahr made a speech. He spoke of integrity, and that we would miss him. There was nothing in his words to suggest that Karl had cut his wrists in the bath and had drowned afterwards, as the autopsy showed.

No one mentioned him again. I often thought of that evening before his death. With a little less to drink we might have become friends then, I might have helped him overcome his shame, his shame at being alive while others were no longer. Maybe.

No, that story about pure lust must have eluded him. He was asleep. Thinking of that evening I still see his back moving in tranquil sleep.

'Come,' says Vera. 'Come and sit down, Maarten.'

Before her on the table lies an open photo album. 'Dr Eardly recommended this. A way of putting your memories in order,' she says, sitting down beside me, turning a thick black page covered in photographs, while I stare in silence at the pictures with their scalloped edges.

I recognize the ripple of the wind in a pond, poppies flowering by a roadside, clouds above the sea with dark, frayed, stormy linings, the cropped grass of a lawn with a group of people on it in light, summery clothes, their arms around one another's shoulders. And smiling, of course, always smiling, as if life in the past was one long happy party. When photography was still something special and a print relatively expensive, everyone smiled when having his photograph taken. As if the picture would then be worth more.