J. Bernlef - Out of Mind

'Who's that strange girl there?'

'But Phil isn't a stranger. You went for a walk with her this afternoon.'

'Oh yes, of course. So it is evening now. That's a stroke of luck, isn't it!' (Perhaps I pat her on the shoulder a bit too hard, sometimes I am not in full control of that either, dividing my strength among various activities; taking hold of a glass much too gently so it smashes to pieces, grabbing a towel as though it weighed twenty kilos.)

'Tomorrow is another day!' (This kind of sentence presents the least difficulty; proverbs, set phrases pop out all by themselves, with them my speech comes closest to normal talking.)

I get up and wave to a blonde girl who cheerfully waves back from the settee without moving her wrist.

Suddenly my body reels with sleep. I don't even bother to clean my teeth.

I wake up with a feeling as though I had drunk large quantities of beer. I go to the toilet but only a hesitant, thin hot trickle comes out. I shuffle back on bare feet through the dark passage. At the top of the stairs I see light burning under Kitty's door. Softly I climb the stairs, seeking support from the banisters.

Father and daughter, that is a very different bond from the one you have with a son. With Fred my contact is more choppy, but I like talking to Kitty.

When I enter her room she slaps her hands on her bare breasts in alarm. I smile and sit down on the edge of her bed. 'It's only your father,' I say.

She slides out of the bed on the other side, in her slip, snatches a blue T-shirt from the chair on which she has hung her clothes and quickly puts it on. (And suddenly, in a flash; this is the last time you will see this — how Kitty with her breasts jutting out and a hollow back pulls down a T-shirt tightly to below her darkly caving navel.)

'Yes,' I say resignedly, 'there comes a time when daughters don't want to be bare any more in front of their own father.'

From the corner of the room, beside the chair, she looks at me thoughtfully, holding her head at a slant. A strand of her blonde hair falls past her left shoulder across the T-shirt. On the pillow lies an open book which she has been reading. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene.

She walks around the bed and pulls me up with gentle force. 'Come,' she says in English. 'It's the middle of the night. You must go to sleep.'

'Oh, is it as late as that?'

Arm in arm we walk down the stairs. There is something stately, something solemn about it, as if I am going to give this girl, whom I do not know, in marriage to an as yet unknown bridegroom. Vera wakes up when the girl switches on the light in the bedroom. She talks to Vera as if I were a stranger.

'He was wandering around,' she says, again in English. The way your parents used to speak when they didn't want you to know about something.

Together they tuck me up in bed. I am not sick, but I let them do as they please. Behind my closed eyelids I see the light go out again. I am lying on my back. Beside me Vera turns over on to her side. At first I don't hear her breathing, but then she suddenly sighs profoundly a couple of times and I hear the deep, regular breathing of a sleeping person.

Nearly fifty years we have been lying side by side like this. It is almost impossible to comprehend what that means. The feeling of being two communicating vessels. Her moods, her thoughts; I can almost read them in her face, like Pop read the temperature on his thermometer. A graph of my love for Vera? An idea that Pop would not have understood. Once he spoke of his love for Mama, whom he always called 'wife'. That was when they had been married for forty years and he gave an after-dinner speech, a glass of red wine in his hand. He compared Mama to a piece of music, to the adagio from Mozart's fourteenth piano sonata. 'Just as clear, bright and unfathomable.' That was what he said. And after that I played the adagio on our out-of-tune black piano and the tears came to Mama's eyes, Pop told me, for I couldn't see it myself. I can't sleep because I need to pee. Then it's no use remaining in bed, I know that from experience.

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.