Out of Mind (16 page)

When the jeep stops in front of my house Vera comes out on to the veranda. How thin she is! The American helps me get out. I hold the rug tightly around me for I still feel dreadfully cold.

'Maarten!' She takes my hand and drops it again at once. She shouldn't do that. I want to take hers again but she walks over to the American who has stayed beside his jeep. She shakes hands with him and also with the little boy. She talks to the man who waves his black-gloved hands dismissively in front of his chest and jumps back into the jeep. As he reverses he waves with one hand and I wave back from the veranda, until the jeep has disappeared from sight among the trees, past a bend in Field Road.

'At last,' I say to Vera as she comes up the steps. 'At last the time has come, darling.' I follow her into the house and put my briefcase under the coat stand.

'It really can't go on like this any longer, Maarten!'

I enter a room and take stock of the interior. Strange, how people put chairs and tables and cupboards at random around a room. As a result I cannot decide where to sit down.

Maybe it is also because of the cold. My fingers tingle as if I had just come back from ice skating.

Vera wants to take the rug away from me but I hold it tightly by two corners around my neck.

'The American gave it to me.'

She lets go. 'Maarten,' she says, 'what have you been up to? Where are your thoughts, for God's sake?'

Where are my thoughts? A coming and a going. No one knows where from and where to. But one thing is certain: what we have been waiting for all these months has happened at last.

'Thank God they have come at last. Five years we've had to wait for them. It's still cold outside but it will slowly get warmer. I was allowed to sit in the front of the jeep.'

'What are you talking about, Maarten?'

'We've been liberated, Vera. Don't you realize?'

She is less pleased than I am, but that has always been so. She never was as exuberant in showing her emotions. You always have to spur her on a bit. Therefore I put one arm around her waist.

'Come, let's do a freedom dance.'

She takes a few awkward steps with me and then wriggles loose.

'At least Uncle Karel can grow his moustaches again,' I chuckle. I feel beautifully warm now. I put the rug over a chair and dig my hands into my pockets.

Vera comes out of the kitchen with a glass. 'Here, drink this.' At one draught I drain the glass. It makes me warm and dozy. I sit down on the settee and look in the direction of a sound. A green Chevrolet comes up the drive, followed by a large white Ford. We're having company, just as I am beginning to feel so tired that it seems to be snowing even inside the room. Close my eyes for a moment. Only for a moment.

Another American. I shake his hand cordially. He is called Eardly. Dr Eardly even. So he's an officer, even though he is in mufti now.

'I've just had a ride in one of your jeeps,' I say in fluent

English. I have no trouble with that. Very satisfying. Again I grab his hand. Tears spring to my eyes. 'If you knew how long we've been waiting for you.'

'You have been a bit naughty,' says the American. 'Walking out of the house without a coat, that's very dangerous at your age.'

Come, come, I am not that old. Vera is standing beside him. How small and slender she is compared with him. There have been times these last months when I feared she would become sick, she looked so haggard. At the slightest exertion she had to sit down. I thought there was something wrong with her lungs but it was simply malnutrition. Now we shall soon have plenty to eat again.

'It's cold everywhere,' I explain to him. 'The only place where you can still get more or less warm is in bed.'

Suddenly there is a blonde girl standing in the room. She is wearing a bright red sweater. She doesn't look as if she works in the army. But maybe the American forces have women in civilian dress working for them, secretaries probably. She takes me to another room and tells me to sit down on that bed there. So she is more like a nurse.

'I am actually quite tired,' I mutter, while I feel her pulling off my shoes. 'It must be the emotion.'

She does not reply and starts undressing me. There is no need for that. But she carries on regardless. She is strong and bends my arms back in order to strip off the shirt. Somewhere to the side a door opens. A man with a square face and short-trimmed hair enters with a syringe in his hand. I try to get off the bed but that blonde one holds me down while I feel the needle jab into my arm.

'I want to live! I want to live!!'

'Don't strap him down,' I hear a man's voice say. 'No need for the straps.'

Then I suddenly understand everything. 'You've got the wrong man. I wasn't on the wrong side. Maybe I was no hero, but I wasn't on the wrong side. I never hid any fugitives in my house, that is true. I wouldn't have minded, but I never came across any. Or I didn't recognize them in time. Or it was too late, all finished, and I never realized what trouble he was in. Not even afterwards. He was drunk. He was singing. I had no idea. If I had known that the next day . . . maybe he was still drunk when he did it.'

Vera comes into the room. Thank God.

'She is my witness. I have never done anything wrong. Isn't that true, Vera? Not even that time in Paris. That wasn't me. That wasn't really me.'

She nods reassuringly and sits down on the edge of the bed. Why is she crying? Could it be that I am mistaken and that the war has only just begun? Have we been occupied instead of liberated? Is everything starting all over again?

'Has the war started again?'

'Go to sleep now, Maarten,' she says hoarsely. 'No one will do you any harm.'

'Is there no war?'

'It's peace.'

Why is she crying, then? I'm glad she is here. She is the only one I still trust. 'You must never leave again,' I whisper and take her hand. 'Do you hear, Vera, never.'

Headache, headache and thirst.
Move these lips, maybe words will come back into this head.

Turn the light on! (Good boy.)

What was before this? As if I've come up from a hole in the ice. And so hot. Must get out. (Get out, then!) Wasn't there always someone lying beside you?

Step by step. Luckily there is light burning in this corridor. Wooden floors, straight boards, with joins it would be better to avoid. Watch out for splinters. Pull up your knees, high up!

At the back of this head there's something buzzing. This body is pressing me out. Like a turd I am being pressed out of myself. I can think this with words, but they do not cover what happens. Meanwhile it happens, outside me. (Again an inadequate term.)

The light switch is usually to the right of the door. So it is here. Hi, dog. Wave, don't talk.

It thumps somewhere in my head. (Or is it this house that is making that noise?) I cautiously push the curtain aside, take a few steps back. In the black glass hangs a room, a piano, a desk. An old man in pyjamas looks at me, imitates a live man with his hollow black eyes and his long white thin hands which he now raises, defensively, palms turned outward, to breast level. Quick, close the curtains!

Good God. A man is hovering above the snow out there! A man, a piano, a desk, a whole room floating above the snow out there in the night. Cross the floor to that table over there!

Hi, dog. Licks my hand with his rough tongue. 'We must wait till it gets light outside.' (Then we can define our position and take the necessary counter-measures.)

A book with a padded cover, kind of oblong album. (Take the cover between thumb and forefinger, open it!)

Nothing but photographs, black and white ones and colour ones. And there is that man in the snow again, only younger. The hatred in those eyes, out there in the snow. No one has ever looked at me like that before. He must go. All pictures of him must go. There's a fireplace over there. Logs are lying beside it, stacked in a potato crate. On the mantelpiece lies a box of matches. (Somehow or other I already knew this. Perhaps a case of
déjà vu.)

First tear the photograph carefully from the page and light it and then place it among the wood chips. Small, quivering, yellow-blue flames creeping around the first log. Men sitting in a meeting around a gleaming table. Little bright-blue flames along the serrated edges of the photograph where blisters bubble up which pop and then, as they turn chocolate brown, quickly crawl to the middle until the whole meeting room has disappeared.

Pictures of people in a park, people on a beach, that same man again, on the deck of a ship beside a woman who is here standing alone on a rock, laughing, her hair blowing loose. A child in a playpen. A boy and a girl hand in hand posing in front of a bright red swing.

Let them vanish, let them go black and vanish, fly away like dark flakes of soot out through the chimney, turn into black specks in the snow on the roof. I hum softly. The dog beside me likes it, too. At any rate, he is lying with his head between his forepaws beside me and watches my hands as they pick the photographs out of the album and drop them one by one in the crackling, smoking fire.

Two women, two women in rustling garments, a young one and an older one. They speak English and take a book of photographs out of my hands. (Better do what they want, I'm no longer as strong as I was, seriously weakened, as it turns out.)

Get up. The throbbing starts again. Dizzy. And thirst. Don't want to go outside between them. (Do they want to turn me out because I am becoming too difficult?) 'Not to that man in the snow!'

Yet another room. How many rooms are there around me? I am being turned over. They strap me down. Undoubtedly as a precaution. Everything here is in movement. Like on a ship. Amazing that those two stay on their feet. They say nothing. Hard, closed, women's faces under artificial light. Resolute, overconcentrated, busy. Every wrinkle and crease becomes rigid in this merciless light. It is utterly silent, apart from the throbbing which is now close behind my eyes.

'Something wet on my head, please.'

I get it at once. Coolness seeping in through my skull. Water runs into my mouth. I suck at it greedily.

Am alone now. How silent it is. Where has the world gone? Gently shake this head. Shake everything out of it. (Maybe one will then become again who one was before?) Through a chink in the curtains, somewhere over there, appears a thin strip of hesitant light. Seem to feel that this body has become light. (Atmospheric changes? Vanished thoughts? Spring coming perhaps?)

No way back, no way forward. Fill this space more and more. (Breathe as little as possible, therefore, so as not to expand even more in the emptiness around me.)

There is a cloth, somewhere above my eyes, but I cannot reach it. Am stuck. Maybe I am not really large at all, but small, maybe I have lost the sense of my own dimensions.

Don't know. Is that why they have tied me down, are they afraid I will fall out of bed with this enormous head?

Shake gently, no words, only humming, melodies skimming close above the ground, humming like bees, bumblebees above the grass. Humming against throbbing. Still and yet moving. Less and less body, specific weight. And full of heavy water, which somewhere down below seeks a way out in a warm stream.

Don't. . . don't. . . don't undo. (Have become as light as air.) Don't. (Yet it is done.)

Grab hold of me, great sharpness hurting my hands. It smarts between those legs as they walk, or rather are dragged, to a tiled space full of steam. Can't see a thing.

It's better like this, warm water and nothing to be seen. Behind the steam questions are being asked. I can tell they are questions and I nod. Nod . . . just nod. It gets across.

'Water all right?'

Yesyes, water all right, we nod. Let me sink. Like him.

Arm hoisting me up under my armpits. Up we go. Careful, I have become so light all of a sudden.

'Lots of clothes!'

Get nothing but a bathrobe, belt tied around me.

Through doors. How many? And all those directions, enough to make you dizzy.

'Up to the North!' My voice still sounds distinct, still does, but much feebler. (Wear and tear?)

Vera's hand. (Surely that is her hand?) Don't take your eyes off now, follow now, until a large, flat area of wood comes into view, a smooth, gleaming expanse, in front of which you are set down, seated, bent double. Hold on to wood, this thick wooden edge. Otherwise you will rise or capsize.

Now it is also in the words themselves. Light sentences come first, shoot up like corks, intended or unintended, the better sentences are too long and too heavy, they go on hovering somewhere under my tongue.

This is eating. Can eat by myself, honestly, am no longer a little baby. Eating . . . lots . . . lots. No time for cutlery which clatters out of sight into the depths beneath me. Quickly stuff it into my mouth. (Before they take it all away again, start polishing me up, rub my cheeks with a rough cloth.)

Light hollows out. Human beings are so full of holes. Human beings should be more closed. In the end you can't keep anything inside any more.

Lovely smooth wood to rub. Movement which prevents emptying. Better not look aside either. Straight ahead, those eyes!

Voices calling that it is snowing again. Your back towards it. Don't tolerate any more fluttering.

Am moved once again. (Question: 'Can you walk by yourself?') Could, but a little too dangerous just now.

Leaning heavily on that mohair arm. Let go. Fall. A tumble into a hard chair. Wood on either side. Wooden slats around my body. Grab hold of them, again the chasing flakes outside that I can't help seeing now. There is thick snow on the blue roof of Vera's Datsun. (This was one of those old-fashioned, good old heavy rows of words.)

Persevere, find the happy mean between rising and sinking in yourself. Congeal around a centre; a centre of gravity.

Question: 'How are you feeling?'

A question that can be answered. Wait a moment. Wave briefly with those hands. Like this. Only very briefly. Quickly grab hold of the wood again. Wait a moment. 'Not enough gravity!'

Wind drawing patterns and whirling about in the flakes; drawing streaks and stripes across the window panes. Winter falls deeper and deeper (and there is less and less that one can set against it). Judging by the snowflakes the wind now comes from all sides.