J. Bernlef - Out of Mind

Maybe it is because of the snow that I feel so tired, even in the morning. Vera doesn't, she likes snow. To her there is nothing better than a snowy landscape. When the traces of man vanish from nature, when everything becomes one immaculate white plain: how beautiful! She says it almost as if enraptured. But this state of affairs never lasts long here. Even after a few hours you see footprints and tyre tracks everywhere and the main roads are cleared by snow ploughs.

I hear her in the kitchen, making coffee. Only the ochre- coloured post at the school bus stop still indicates where Field Road passes our house. Actually, I don't understand what has happened to the children today. I stand here by the window every morning. First I check the temperature and then I wait until they turn up everywhere from among the trees in the early morning, with their schoolbags on their backs, their colourful hats and scarves and their shrill American voices. The bright colours make me feel cheerful. Flaming red, cobalt blue. One boy wears an egg-yolk-yellow anorak with a peacock embroidered on the back, a boy with a slight limp who is always the last to climb into the school bus. It is Richard, son of Tom the lighthouse keeper, born with one leg shorter than the other. A sky-blue, fan-shaped peacock tail studded with darkly staring eyes. I don't know where they can all be today.

The house creaks in its joists like an old cutter. Outside the wind rolls through the crowns of the otherwise bare, bending pines. And at fixed moments the dull, lowing thrusts of the foghorn beside the lighthouse on the last rocky spur of Eastern Point. At fixed moments. You can set the clock by them.

Minus three says the outdoor thermometer, Pop's Heidensieck thermometer, a glass stick in a moss-green protective wooden case, screwed to the window pane. Centigrade to the left, Fahrenheit to the right. Pop and his Heidensieck. He didn't believe in weather forecasting, but he did believe in recording facts. It wasn't for nothing that he had been a clerk to the court practically all his life. Morning and evening temperatures, noted down in a black marble-grained exercise book. The first and the last thing he did, every day. A kind of ritual. At weekends he took out the exercise book and, sitting at his desk, worked out his graphs on the basis of the recorded temperatures. These graphs, drawn with a hard Faber pencil on salmon-coloured graph paper, he kept in a folder. Why did he bother with all this? Only once did he ever talk about it to me, shortly before his death, in his cottage close to the inner dunes at Domburg. My time is too short, he said, and the system is too big, too slow and too complicated for one man on his own. I merely register facts. But you suspect a system behind those facts, I said. Yes, he said, you might say that. Unless all facts turned out to be aberrations, he added with that thin, ironic little smile of his. But then it would no longer be a system, I suggested. Or a system of which we can have no conception, he said.

Strange that I should suddenly think of him, as I stand here in Gloucester, on the coast north of Boston: of my pop and his Heidensieck thermometer. Even his grave in the Netherlands must have been cleared by now.

Yes, he used to like systems. As for being fatherly, he would look right over your head, his watery blue eyes fixed on something the rest of us around the table were unable to see. In fact, we were slightly afraid of him, Mama and I. He looked down on us, quite literally. And in a different way as well. If he was in a good mood he would take me out on to the balcony in the evening and point out the constellations, the brightly sparkling planets. A few times we saw a falling star. He tried to explain to an eight-year-old that what we could see up there in the evening sky was an ancient past, that we were unable to see the real state of the universe, that we could at best calculate it. A number of those stars you could see up there do no longer really exist, others do. I didn't understand this, but I asked no questions. Such things he said only when he was in a good mood. Usually he sat down at his desk straight after supper and started working. He lived to the age of seventy-four. Three more years and I shall have caught up with him, so far as age is concerned.

When Mama died in 1950 he started recording other aspects of the weather, not only the temperature. Snowfall. Storm. The first signs of spring. The flocks of starlings that flew over his roof in the autumn, that he described as 'innumerable' in his almost calligraphic script that so well suited the impersonal nature of his statements. Six years later he, too, died. His heart suddenly stopped. I unscrewed the thermometer from the window frame of his cottage and took it with me. I don't really know why. It is a very ordinary thermometer.

You can always hear Vera coming from afar, so much do the cups and saucers rattle on the tin tray. Aspen-leaf, I sometimes say jokingly to her, but she doesn't think that is very funny. It is caused by a worn neck vertebra, says Dr Eardly. There is not much you can do about it. Nothing, in fact. Old age.

'Where can the children be?'

'The children? In Holland, of course, where else should they be?'

'No, I mean the ones from here.' I point outside. 'Cheever's children and the Robbinses and Tom's little Richard.'

'But Maarten, it's Sunday today. Come, your tea is getting cold.'

How could I have forgotten! And tea? I could have sworn it was morning. But as I look through the other window in the direction of the sea I can tell it must be later. Behind the grey haze lurks a pale sun. It must be this mist that has deceived me. Mist blocks the light. Before sitting down I cast a quick glance at the wall clock. Gone three.

I smile into Vera's mocking green eyes with the dark flecks in the pupils. The other day I came across an old photograph of her. She is standing on the deck of a pleasure steamer, leaning with her back against the double white rail. A trip to Harderwijk. The sun shines on her springy hair. It was thick then. She is smiling, you can see her small, regular teeth. The dress she was wearing I cannot remember now, but it was definitely light in colour. I still see us standing on the poop deck together as we sailed out of the IJ. Were we already married then? But the picture I have of her — I mean inside — does not resemble the young woman in the photograph, and not the Vera sitting opposite me either. It is a picture in which all the changes she has undergone have been united. That is why it is more like a feeling than a picture.

Vera. Her gestures even now always abrupt, incomplete; the attentiveness with which she picks a dead leaf from a plant and examines it from all sides, as if to ascertain the cause of death; the way she purses her lips when she is thoughtful, or shakes her head gently when she reads something she finds beautiful. I am the only person who can see in her all the women she has been. Sometimes I touch her, and then I touch all of them at once, very gently. A feeling only she can evoke in me, no one else.

I stir my teaspoon around in my cup, just like she does. A familiar tinkle of metal against thin china.

'Is anything the matter?' she asks. She looks at me scrutinizingly.

'No,' I say. 'Why?'

'This morning you let your coffee get cold. And I asked you twice to fetch wood from the boet. But the only one who came back with wood was Robert, with a piece in his mouth.'

She laughs. She still has small teeth. But these aren't real ones. She says boet instead of shed, because she comes from North Holland, from Alkmaar, just like me. But I simply say shed.