J. Bernlef - Out of Mind

'Hello, Mr Klein,' he says. A lot of gold in the corners of his mouth. He can't be older than forty-five. He enquires how I am, in the hearty, quasi-spontaneous tone in which all Americans address strangers. I nod, and pause in the middle of the room.

'Sit down, please, Maarten,' says Vera, but the man makes a gesture as if to say he doesn't care. Then I sit down and he immediately drops down with a thud beside me on the settee and grabs hold of my wrist. Vera does nothing about it. She sits beside us on the two-seater, her hands clasped in her lap, looking at us, frightened and curious at the same time. The man smells penetratingly of aftershave.

'Been to Lorenzo the barber's, have you?'

'How did you guess?' he says, and wants me to straighten my right knee. He taps on it with a little silver hammer that he has taken from a leather case. The lower leg jumps up. 'Excellent,' he says.

'Naturally,' I say. 'There's nothing wrong with me.'

The man glances briefly in Vera's direction, a questioning look in his eye.

'I talked about it with him,' she says. 'We've been looking at old photographs together.'

'A useful and agreeable therapy,' says the man, and puts one leg across the other. No, he doesn't want to drink anything. Not even a Miller? Vera gives a startled look, but when the man shakes his head her face becomes calm again. People's facial expressions sometimes flash by so fast that I have no time to ascribe a meaning to them. Maybe they don't have a meaning. Maybe they are like the moving patches of sunlight among the trees in a wood.

'And how did it go?'

He seems to think I am crazy. The tone they usually adopt here when they address someone over sixty. Amiable condescension mingled with distaste. Be that as it may, let it pass.

'Seeing photographs is quite different from looking at photographs,' I say. 'Anyone can look at photographs, but seeing a photograph means being able to read it. On the one hand you have people and their cultural products, on the other hand nature. Trees, lakes, clouded skies speak a universal language in photographs that can be understood by anyone. Outside time, as it were. By contrast, people, building, roads, coffee cans and the like can be read only in a specific context, in time. You can't read that photo album on the table for the most part because you lack the necessary background information. You weren't there. In other words, you cannot form any further pictures about what is in there, because you cannot remember what could once be actually seen. It isn't your past.'

I glow with effort. He is clearly finding it so interesting that he takes his diary and starts writing something. When I stop talking in order to give him a chance to write his notes, he says, 'Please carry on.'

Vera also seems to hang on my lips. But now that I have stopped, no more will come.

'Philip sends his regards to you — Philip, the bookseller,' says the man, putting a notebook into his inside pocket.

'Oh, him. I haven't seen him for ages.'

'You went there only the other day. You bought Our Man in Havana from him. A very good Graham Greene. Made into a movie as well. Who played the main part again?'

I shrug my shoulders. Then Vera whispers a name. 'Alec Guinness.' Damn, she's right. This fellow does look like Alec Guinness. Let's hope he didn't hear her, because it may not be much of a compliment. Same jowls and broad rims to his ears. I have to make an effort not to start chuckling.

'Maybe I did,' I resume the thread. 'When you don't have to go anywhere any more you just walk as you please. There's no harm in it. It can't go wrong. It's not all that good either, but be that as it may. .'

He nods and suddenly gets up. He gives me a cool, dry hand. I wonder if he plays the piano? He has the hands for it. When I am about to ask him, he has already turned his back on me and is following Vera into the hall.

Peace and quiet, keep indoors, familiar surroundings, carry on with the therapy, I hear a man's voice say. And Vera's timid voice in reply: 'Sometimes he's like a stranger to me. I can't reach him. It's a terrible, helpless feeling. He hears me but at such times I don't think he understands me. He behaves as if he were on his own.'

I know exactly what she means. Like it was just then, when it all went wrong. All of a sudden I had to translate everything into English first, before I could say it. Only the forms of sentences came out, fragments, the contents had completely slipped away.

Furiously I glare into the front room. I seem to lose words like another person loses blood. And then suddenly I feel terribly frightened again. The presence of everything! Every object seems to be heavier and more solid than it should be (perhaps because for a fraction of a second I no longer know its name). I quickly lie down on the settee and close my eyes. A kind of seasickness in my mind, it seems. Under this life stirs another life in which all times, names and places whirl about topsy-turvy and in which I no longer exist as a person.

'Curious,' I say to Vera as she enters the room. 'Sometimes I just have to lie down for a moment. I never used to.'

'It doesn't matter. Have some time to yourself.' She sits down, picks up a book.

'Have some time to yourself.' I repeat the phrase because it appears strange to me.

She turns the pages but she isn't reading. I can tell from the look in her eyes that she doesn't understand me.

'It should be: have some time in yourself. That describes the situation better.'

'Is that how you feel?'

'Less and less so.'

'What do you mean?'

'Like a ship,' I say, 'a ship, a sailing vessel that is becalmed. And then suddenly there is a breeze, I am sailing again. Then the world has a hold on me again and I can move along with it.'

'I find it so hard to imagine it, Maarten. I can't see anything wrong with you at all. It is as if you were looking at something, at something that I can't see. Are you afraid at those moments? What exactly happens to you then?'

'I don't know. I can't remember. Only that feeling of a sudden heaviness, as if I am sinking through everything and there is nothing to hold on to.'

'Dr Eardly says it will all come right again with rest.'

'Do you know what I sometimes think, Vera? Why do I have so few memories from my childhood? I think a happy childhood leaves few memories. Happiness is a condition, like pain. When it's gone it's gone. Without a trace.'

'But there are other things that you remember perfectly. You remember everything about the elevator at the Postjesweg. I had forgotten all about that until you started talking about it.'

I nod. A small engineering miracle. It was a machine but its wheels and cogs worked so slowly that it looked as though the vegetable boats were being lifted trembling and swaying from the depths by some magic force. I often wave from the bridge at the market gardener sitting in the poop and sometimes he waves back with his cap or woolly hat.

'Who are you waving at?'

I look at my raised right hand and quickly drop it. Reality comes to my aid in the shape of a black car that stops behind Vera's Datsun in front of the house.

'Dr Eardly, that must be Dr Eardly,' I say quickly.

Vera gets up, puts the book she was holding in her hand upside down on her chair and goes to the door. I can read the title. Our Man in Havana. Rings a bell. I probably read it long ago, though I haven't the faintest idea what it is about.

'Hi, William,' I say as the eldest Cheevers boy follows Vera into the kitchen carrying a carton full of purchases.

William nods. He is tall, broad and shy, in his padded blue anorak and jeans. And, of course, those stitched training shoes that every boy around here ruins his feet in these days. A good lad, but you have to chat to him a bit before he loosens down. . up!