J. Bernlef - Out of Mind

A huge bed. Lying utterly hopelessly the wrong way round in it. Terrible stink here. My ass smarts, icy cold buttocks I have. I try to raise myself but my ankles are tied down. What has happened to me? Where have I been moved to? Where is this bed? Now?

I recognize all those things around me, sure I do. Behind a closed door sounds an unfamiliar female American voice: 'Fill the bath up.'

Jesus, have I befouled the matrimonial bed? How do you like that! It's not my fault. If you tie a man to his bed! Strapped to the bars, I ask you. Who has done that to me? And where is Vera? I call out but you can bet nobody will come. I can't reach the straps that are cutting into my ankles. I wish I could bear the smell of my own shit as well as Robert.

'Robert! Robert!'

No one. Perhaps they've all gone. Leaving me to rot here in this bed. I hear water running. In a minute the place will be flooded and I can't get out of my bed. I kick about. The bed creaks but the straps don't give a millimetre.

Somewhere a door opens. I daren't look because I have no idea who's coming. And because I am ashamed to be lying here like a beast in my own muck. I keep my eyes tightly shut. I hear someone retching. Feel how hands strip the pyjamas from my body. They want me to move forward. Must open my eyes now and see an old man in the mirror, an old man with a slack wrinkly belly streaked with shit. I smile with relief. At least that isn't me!

Two women lift me into a bath tub, an old one and a young one.

I lie in this water as if I no longer had a body. Only where they touch me, wash me, does it briefly exist again.

Careful, I say to the younger one who dares not look at me because she is embarrassed by a male organ that floats in the soapy water and now rises, purple and gently quivering.

'Don't mind about it,' I say. 'The regime under the belt, Chauvas used to call it. Why do we cover it up so anxiously, why is there such a taboo on it? Do you know what Chauvas thought? Chauvas said the following: May I have your attention, please, because this cannot be put in the minutes, as you will understand, certainly not by lady secretaries. We are afraid of sexuality because it undermines the basis of our whole society: the idea that every person is a unique individual with an organized life. But if every man can, in principle, go to bed with every woman and vice versa then all those stories about predestination, preordination, destiny and eternal love are so much poppycock. We are floating through space like particles, plus ones and minus ones. And where these meet, a fusion may occur. Everybody knows this, but suppresses it. Man is not capable of philanthropic sex because in that case there would be no point in doing anything except this.'

I grab hold of the stiff prick in the water and feel it is my own. From fright and shame I let go.

They pull me upright. They make no reply to my words as the younger one dries me and the other one tries to pull a pair of underpants over my rough damp buttocks, in order to withdraw the subject of the conversation — which fortunately becomes limp again — as quickly as possible from sight. Then they bundle me into a dressing-gown.

'I don't have to go to bed, do I? Did you understand me, madam?' I say to the older one, who looks rather dishevelled with her damply drooping brown curls and her wrinkled neck.

'We've read Freud, too,' says the younger one sharply.

The arrogance of youth. Think they know something about life when they've read a few books.

'Look around you,' I say. 'Not that I approve of Chauvas's conduct. On the contrary. But no one can accept that what he calls his life has been the only possible life for him. It could have been different. If you had chanced to put your prick in a totally different cunt, for instance. Or even stronger; if your father had screwed someone other than your mother or your mother a different man, you wouldn't even have been here in the same form.'

'Go and rinse your mouth out.' It is Vera who says this.

'All right,' I say. 'I will. Right away.'

They let go of me so I can reach the washstand. I pick up the toothbrush and look in the mirror. There isn't anyone there. Everything is white. I throw the toothbrush away. They take hold of me. I let myself be led away, away from the white of that mirror.

Want to eat more. They won't let me. Simply take my plate away. How do you like that? They are strangers here so they give no answer when I ask a question. The simplest things: time, season, what are the plans for the day.

The fingers of my left hand are numb. Put the hand on the table, palm upward. Move my fingers. Clench, relax; clench, relax. Compared with the right hand: as if there's no current going through it any longer. Rub. . rub. . rub.

Thumping footsteps, suddenly very close by. Hurts my ears. Parts of the body are oversensitive, others totally insensitive.

Jump out of my skin with fright when suddenly someone is standing by the sink. A small woman in a lemon-coloured apron. She lets water run from a tap on to white plates. I ask her where Vera is but I get no answer. Her neck is wrinkled and brown from the open air. I don't know where I am.

Grab hold of the edge of the table and let go. And again. There is activity in the space around me that is totally detached from me. Sound of water gurgling away through a wastepipe. Very successful. Pity it stops — maybe we can imitate it.

Want to be near water, very near to water, hold this numb left hand in a fast running shallow brook. Sit motionless on the bank and then, suddenly see, caught in a quivering patch of sun on the silver-white sandy river-bed, the slim shadow of a fish (where does this image come from, from what depths, it is as clear as if I could touch it; it is sad but true: you, Maarten, were once that little boy sitting by the side of that stream!).

A young woman with long straight blonde hair is sitting opposite me at the table. I nod to her, although I do not understand her presence. She asks me why I am rubbing the table with my hand.

I look and feel only now that the hand is rubbing across the red dotted oil-cloth (how long has this been going on?).

When I have raised my head again I must quickly force a smile. 'I have become an old man. Quite suddenly, it seems,' I say. She shakes her head, but I know better.

She gets up and the red of her sweater becomes even redder than the dots on the oil-cloth. She pulls me to my feet. How annoying to have to let go of the table. I grab her hand and she leads me away through an open door into a different space. There stands Pop's desk! I remember being allowed to draw at it on Sundays. A white paper on a baize-green blotter covered in the inkstains and scribbles of Pop's blotted letters. When you looked for a long time you saw all kinds of things in them: animals, faces. I used to copy them.

'As a boy I liked to crawl under that desk with a book. The Travels and Adventures of Captain Hatteras. Captain Hatteras in Search of the North Pole. They all dreamed of that in the days of Jules Verne. I used to like reading about it as a boy. Amundsen, Nansen, Captain Hatteras. Did you know he went mad in the end, and was locked up in an institution? I have never forgotten the ending of The Ice Desert. He is walking in the garden of the institution, which is surrounded by a high brick wall, always in the same direction, northward. Until he bumps into the wall. There, his arms stretched out against the bricks, he remains motionless for hours. And then I put my hands on the wood of Pop's desk and close my eyes and try to imagine what it is like to be Captain Hatteras, alone in a desert of ice floes.'

'Your father is dead.'

'Yes, well, stands to reason, doesn't it, if you're as old as I am.'

Again the edge of a table. And a chair. (Was it already there or has it just been pushed forward?) I sit down. Notice that the rubbing has resumed. Not unpleasant, actually.