Out of Mind (15 page)

'She is still beautiful now.'

I nod. Yes, she will remain beautiful for ever, with those green eyes behind that veil pleated forever by the wind.

'The waters broke,' I say. 'All of a sudden. As if it was raining. She clutched at my shoulders. I got drenched.'

Again I look at the photograph of the woman with the baby carriage, at the veil that seems to want to fly away, at her narrow, hopeful face. Slowly and cautiously I nod. Then I start to talk. A story. A story about the woman with the hat and the veil. Vera. I place her with the baby carriage on the edge of Amsterdam. That is where she lives. I talk about the child in the carriage, who cannot be seen in the photograph but who is my son Fred in the story. I talk about the fields, the glasshouses, the ditches and the footbridges, which lie outside the rectangle of the photograph. I talk about the time in which the photograph was taken, the last year of the war. This does not altogether tally with the tailored suit, but this girl sitting here won't know that, she belongs to a generation born long after the war and in another continent. She nods and she listens. I talk. About the blocked sewers (because the Germans had turned off the electricity in the pumping stations) so that everywhere in the streets deep shit holes were being dug that stank horribly and created a real risk of infectious diseases like cholera and typhoid. I talk about old, stooping Mr Mastenbroek on the third floor who died of starvation two days before the liberation. You can't imagine that now, I say. What hunger is like. That dull, gnawing feeling, which resided not only in your stomach but everywhere. All your thoughts were governed by it. I talk of the arrival of the Canadians and Americans. Eisenhower's and Churchill's triumphal tour of the city in an open limousine. How I stood among the crowds with Fred on my shoulders and tears running down my cheeks. About the freedom celebrations, the first bar of chocolate, the biscuit porridge (thick and nourishing and at first too rich for my stomach, which for months had feasted only on sugarbeet and fried slices of tulip bulb). How everyone fell in love with life again, with one another, how many children were born in the Netherlands roughly a year after that 5 May. I talk and talk and it is as if I am talking myself out of history, as if this were a book from which I am reading, or a text I know by heart; one thing is clear: what you tell you lose. Forever. Abruptly I fall silent and look around in alarm.

Robert is not lying in his usual place. I ask a girl walking about where Robert, my dog, is.

'Vera has taken him with her to Gloucester.'

'But he has to be taken out for a walk at this time.'

'Your wife will see to that.'

'How long will she be away?'

'Not long.'

'Do you know where Robert is?'

'Gone to Gloucester with your wife. In the car.'

'Why didn't she say she was going? Is that why you're here?'

'In a way.'

'I don't mind if you go home. I don't need to be looked after, you know. On the contrary, I rather like being on my own.'

'I'll stay for a while, anyway.'

'As you like. But tell me who you are first. '

'Phil Taylor.'

'The name doesn't ring a bell, but I've always had a bad memory for names. Phil. I suppose you must be a friend of my daughter's, are you? My daughter doesn't live here, though. Never has done. You never see them any more.'

'She'll come.'

'Do you think so? Pop always reproached me that I visited him so seldom. And then he dies and no amends can ever be made. That is the worst of it, believe you me, when someone dies. Those that are left behind have for ever fallen short. All guilt feelings are based on that.'

'Would you like us to go for a little walk?'

'No. I'm waiting for the spring. It can't be long now. I don't mind telling you that I hate the winters here. In November when you hear the foghorn of the lighthouse near here wailing all day, you know it has started again. The cold, the dark, the snow, carrying logs. Have you seen the dog anywhere? His name is Robert.'

'He's gone with your wife.'

'I like that! That's against the agreement. I'm the one who takes the dog out here.'

'He wanted to go with her.'

'I used to be able to take him out only at weekends, but now I have plenty of time. He's getting rather old. The hair around his snout is getting quite grey.'

'Do you mind if I watch television for a while?'

'Of course not, dear. Make yourself at home.'

Yes. I ought to go and visit Pop some time. Of course he'll start talking about the war, as usual. The same old stories about hunger, journeys, rheumatism and his neighbour who joined the Nazi Defence and whom he never looked in the face again. And when he has finished talking about the war he winds his old portable phonograph and puts on Beethoven's second piano concerto. A complete album of big heavy shellac records. I ought to give him my record player. He'd love that. There's an empty carton in the kitchen. I think it would fit in it exactly.

A young woman (where has she suddenly sprung from, is the front door open by any chance?) tries to push me away from the record player.

'I will not be prevented, miss. My father sits at home with one of those old wind-up phonographs and music is the only comfort and refuge left to him. Clear, bright and unfathomable. Perhaps you could lend me a hand packing it.'

'Your father is dead.'

It is with good reason that her face wears a somewhat shameful, perplexed expression.

'That is most unkind of you, what you said then.'

I turn and walk to the window. Behind me sounds soft violin music. I don't know the piece but it is pleasant to listen to. I feel the damp window pane with my hands. Here comes Robert, belting along among the trees. I turn around with a jerk. 'Open up double quick! Robert has found us!'

The blonde girl from earlier (so I can remember her for a while at any rate) gets up and goes to the hall. I go back to the record player and look at the black plastic arm, which moves slowly through the grooves of a rotating disc towards the hole in the centre of the sea-blue label. I see only the rotation and every now and then a groove rising briefly. I crouch so as to be closer to the movement. As if of its own accord, my head begins to spin too.

'Poppa, I'll come and see you soon. As soon as Vera is back we'll come.'

Robert comes and stands beside me. I put my arm around his neck. So I squat together with the dog close to the record player until my knees give with fatigue and someone behind me is so kind as to help me to my feet. Robert's dark brown tail wags as we walk to the front door together. Vera is standing in the hall with her coat on.

'Wait,' I say, 'I'll get my coat, too. We really should go and see Pop. We haven't been there for ages.'

She shakes her head, looks timidly at the rope-coloured mat on which she is standing as though on an island.

'We can't, Maarten. Your father is dead.'

I nod. I understand. Tears run down my cheeks.

'You're all so good to me.' I sob. They tell me I should lie down for an hour or so. I am given a cup of warm milk and a capsule, against my grief for Pop, they say, which still goes on stirring inside me without forming thoughts or tears. It is more like a cool brightness, as in an unfurnished room.

Lying in bed I look out, into the bare woods. Among the thin, straight trunks of the pines and birches and the dead branches on the ground, the snow creeps slowly into the soil. The wood sucks up the snow and uses it for its new leaves and buds that are still hidden in the snow-covered branches. Any moment now, spring can break out. That happens very suddenly here. You wake up one morning. An age-old scent of humus and leaves rises from the ground and penetrates into the house through the cracks. You open the window wide. What you hear is not the cheeky solitary sound of a single stray squawking crow, but an incessant chorus of chirping and twittering. Small songbirds that have returned to the wood in their thousands.

I must go outside, I must be there when it happens, walk among the trees, on the springy ground. Hear the dead branches breaking underfoot with a crackle. Walk among the dark mossy boulders and rocks, that glaciers left on this spit of land millions of years ago. 'But there is one problem.' I whisper so as not to be heard. They won't let me go from here. Maybe they mean well, the ladies who live here, but I must do what my heart tells me. Fortunately, they have their television on loudly, so it should be easy. The door to the living room is closed, a stroke of luck. A dance orchestra shrieks into the air with all its trumpets at once as I softly open the door and close it again and turn right, straight into the wood.

I follow a narrow path which you can find only when you know where it runs. It really exists only because I know it. In this way I avoid the houses of people who might be able to see me.

Quite chilly still. A coat would have been welcome. Yet I do not go back. The boulders sticking up from the ground stubbornly show their white-veined surfaces. They inspire me with awe. They control this spit of land, hold it in check. Above me the sky is such a hard blue that I daren't look at it.

The path curves to the left and then gradually descends to the coast.

The dead wood is still too wet to break under my feet, it merely bends. I sniff and smell the sea. The white scent. There can hardly be breakers today, at least I don't hear the splashing of waves, although I must be quite near now.

I stumble and graze my right hand on a rough pine trunk. Here and there the snow has been blown up into a thick bank so that you can no longer see the projecting roots of trees. I lick the graze and see the rope-coloured slopes of the dunes through the last trees. In places they are still covered with snow.

Low, hard shrubs and dry thistles prick me through the cloth of my pants. Better stay at the foot of the dunes, try to cross them from one dip to the next, in wide curves.

My God, how cold. I would like to sit down but the ground is so hard. If only I could see our cottage at last. Pop explained to me once how you can determine your direction with reference to the position of the sun, but I have forgotten how to do it. Brambles stick out of the snow in a stiff tangle of branches. Here and there I see the footprints of birds, and little heaps of dark, dried-up rabbit droppings. The low light stings my eyes. I must be near the sea now. Then I can follow the shoreline and cut across the beach to our cottage where Mama is sure to be getting worried. Maybe Pop has already gone out to look for me. I want to be found. I want to go home.

Suddenly something creaks under my feet. The road, the shell path! Now I'll soon be there. I am so happy I have found the way that I break into a trot. Then I see part of the mouse-grey roof appear behind a dune.

I almost trip on the steps to the porch. I grab at the step nearest the front door which gives, opens all by itself, as if someone had seen me coming and opened the door for me. I walk into the room. A white lacquered table, four chairs. They're not at home. There is only my briefcase leaning against a table leg. I bend down, open the briefcase. A hammer, a screwdriver. I place them in front of me on the table and stare first at the tools, then out of the window. It seems as if the hammer and screwdriver are saying in all their simplicity: you are alone, Maarten, alone. I look round me. On one of the wooden walls hangs a family portrait behind glass. A man in the uniform of an American soldier, his cap merrily pushed back on his short-cropped hair. A young woman with a wide, painted mouth carrying a baby on her arm. Our Lady of Good Voyage. A girl with pigtails is holding her right hand, the heel of one of her little patent leather shoes resting on the toe of the other. They look at me in a cheerful, admonishing way, but I do not recognize them. How did I come here? Incomprehensible. Like this briefcase here. I take the hammer and the screwdriver and put them into the briefcase. Then I hear the sound of a car engine. I stand up, take the briefcase and go outside.

Standing on the porch I clutch the briefcase with both hands against my stomach. The sound approaches fast over the hills; low and throbbing and then suddenly with a high- pitched shriek when the invisible driver changes gear. Then I see the broad ribbed nose of an army-green jeep popping up above one of the dunes. For a moment the jeep stands on the top, droning. Then it slowly rolls down towards me, leaving broad wheel-tracks in the sand. The driver wears a black woolly sweater and jeans. On his head he has a moss-green cap. Boots and black gloves. Beside him sits a pale little boy in a bright yellow jacket. The man drives the jeep in a skilful curve alongside the balustrade of the porch.

'Mr Klein,' he calls out twice in succession, as if I didn't know who I was. Cautiously I shuffle down the steps and walk towards the jeep. The man gets out, pulls a plaid rug from the back, puts it around my shoulders and helps me into the jeep. When I am seated my jaws begin to chatter.

'I was working in the lighthouse when I saw you, Mr Klein. Had you lost your way? You were tramping about the dunes in such strange twists and turns. I thought, what's that fellow doing there?'

'Wandered away from home, clearly.' It sounds as if I am talking about someone else. Then I see the briefcase in my lap. 'I'd forgotten my briefcase. I'd gone to collect my briefcase.'

'Mr Klein,' says the young man with the blond springy hair that sticks out from under his cap in all directions, 'I'll take you home. Straight away. Before you catch cold, without a coat on. What were you doing all by yourself?'

'A little stroll. I didn't have the dog with me. Forgotten. That's why.'

These words do not really belong to me. Every now and then the little boy looks over his shoulder at me with big frightened eyes. He does not answer when I ask him his name, but perhaps he cannot hear me because of the noise of the engine. There is a blue peacock embroidered on the back of his jacket. A blue peacock with a fan-shaped tail full of dark eyes that stare at me steadily. I turn my head away, preferring to look into the wood with its blown-down trees and broken branches. In the bends I have to let go of my briefcase and grab hold of the metal back of the driver's seat in front of me.