Authors: J. Bernlef
'Cassettes, tapes,' I continue. 'Lots of people do that these days. For later. You hear someone's voice and his whole person reappears before your eyes. Because of the sound of his voice you see him again altogether. Down to the smallest detail.'
It's no good. I can tell, they don't want me to be with them. I turn away and go to the back room, to the piano. I sit down on the stool. I place my fingers in a chord on the keys and suddenly it is as if my whole body fills up with meaningful knowledge again. I begin to play, the adagio from Mozart's fourteenth piano sonata. For how long have I known this by heart? What does that mean, knowing music 'by heart'? It is a knowledge you cannot picture, or put into words, but which pours straight, without the intervention of language and thought, from your fingers into the instrument.
In the other room I hear two women talking softly to each other. I take an album from the top of the piano and place it open on the music stand. The first minuet from the fourth
English Suite
by Bach.
Greta Laarmans always used to rap me on the knuckles here. You're not playing what it says. I can still play, but the tempo has gone. My playing sounds hesitant and slow, heavy and clumsy. I ought to practise more. Suddenly all the pleasure ebbs away from my hands. I press the pedal and let the notes die down in the middle of the minuet. For a long time I stare at the black and white notes, fixed between the staves and bars in the music book. Then I close the lid.
It is silent in the house. Can Vera have gone to bed yet? It happens sometimes that I play for a while at night, before going to sleep. Vera likes it when I play while she is dozing in bed or reading, the book propped against the white bedside table, the little round reading glasses low down on her nose.
It is only seven o'clock on the wall clock. Must have stopped. There is a clock in the kitchen too, an electric one.
Vera is standing in the kitchen, wearing an apron. She stirs a steaming pan of soup with a wooden spoon. I look at the bright red kitchen clock.
'I'm not hungry,' I say. 'It's only seven o'clock, I see, but it feels much later.'
'That's because you're tired,' she says, stirring all the while. 'You didn't sleep well and you've been for a long walk. Why don't you go to bed?'
'Children's bedtime,' I say. I meant it as a joke but the words came out quite differently. As if I were talking to children, real children, who whine to be allowed to stay up longer. (I used to have children myself, Kitty and Fred. I raised them and now they are gone, you never see them any more . . . )
As
a child you often had that.
You'd wake up in the morning and the walls of your room were all wrong around you. In your mind you had to swivel the room around so that everything would be in its proper place again and you were able to get up and go out of the door, into the day.
With my hands clasped under my head I look at the azure-blue cotton bedroom curtains, while in my thoughts I put the rooms of the house back into place. Vera must already be up, although I can hear no sound. The light, even though muted by the curtain, is bare and hard. It must have snowed again in the night, I think.
I get out of bed and open the curtains. It doesn't look as if any new snow has fallen. Robert's footprints lie sunk deep in the snow, less sharp at the edges than would have been the case with fresh prints. The tops of the pine trees point motionlessly into the sky like broomsticks. A narrow path has been trodden from the porch to the moss-green shed in the right-hand corner at the far end of the yard.
I brush my teeth and search meanwhile for words, a formulation of what I feel. As if inside me there were someone who remembers another house, the interior arrangement of which sometimes cuts across that of this house. Rooms ought to be absolute certainties. The way in which they lead into one another ought to be fixed once and for all. You should be able to open a door as a matter of course. Not in fear and anxiety because you have not the faintest idea of what you may find behind it.
I am standing in front of the clothes closet. For today I choose the black suit I bought at Rowland's in Lafayette Street. Because of its deep inside pockets. Even my desk diary fits in them. I can feel something in the left-hand inside pocket.
A picture postcard of a dazzingly white-washed Mexican church. The sun must be straight overhead because there is no shade to be seen. The open door is a vaulted black hole.
Love - Kitty.
A six-year-old postmark. Clearly a joke on the part of some colleague. Wouldn't surprise me if it was Maurice Chauvas. Always full of tales about his escapades. He knows I don't like such jokes. Probably thinks Vera checks through my pockets when I come home from the office. I pull a belt through the loops of my pants, buckle it, and leave the bedroom. Since I have given up beer I have lost a good deal of weight.
Vera must have left for the library by now. On Monday and Wednesday mornings she works there as a volunteer. Writing out tickets. They still do that by hand there. She has the handwriting for it. Small, upright and clear.
I go to the kitchen and open the door of the refrigerator, which switches on at once as though wishing me a humming, throbbing good morning.
Once you start eating there is no stopping. Chewing does you good. You should always chew well, slowly, until everything is mashed up small. Only then must you swallow. This chicken tastes moreish. Here you are, Robert. I toss him some cleaned-off bones. Let's have a look what else there is. Liver pâté and a slice of cool pineapple out of a can. Robert is still hungry too. He can have half of this packet of cookies, but no more. I'll eat the rest. It's bad to go to work on an empty stomach. Moreover, I am always afraid they'll hear my insides rumble during a meeting. Insides. When you think of that, and you look down the gleaming polished table and you see them all sitting there in their suits, with their papers in front of them, and inside those suits it is full of blood and metres of coiled intestines and a pumping heart, when you think of that, you can hardly stifle your laughter. Nice, this icy cold orange juice, straight from the bottle into your mouth. Some of it goes beside it, but who cares? A quick wipe with a kitchen cloth and you're spick and span again.
'Come on, Robert, it's getting late. We'll clear up the mess later.'
How often have I told Vera not to touch my desk? My briefcase is standing underneath it in its proper place, but where are my papers? Maybe they'll be handed out at the meeting. That often happens at special unscheduled meetings. I'd better take the case all the same, because there are sure to be more papers. Producing documents, we're good at that at IMCO. Reports about the catches of the last quarter, forecasts about the migration of salmon. For as long as I have been working at IMCO these have never yet come true. Only lobster is reliable, both as regards its movements and its numbers. But then, why should fish bother themselves about a bunch of gentlemen somewhere high and dry in an office block in Boston, who want to share out the catches more or less fairly among the different countries of the world? If you start thinking along those lines, Leon Bähr once said to me, you might as well stay at home. So we don't. We bend over computer tables, models and scenarios, and the stacks of papers grow and the fish in the seas swim and swim and have no inkling of our existence.
Hunting for things. If there's anything I detest that's it. Where are my keys? And what imbecile has locked all the doors? Robert follows me like a good dog as I try the kitchen door, the laundry-room door and the outside door. Vera must have double-locked it. How could she be so silly?
I go to the phone and call the library. To a girl's voice I explain who I am and ask if I can please speak to my wife, that it is very urgent because I have to set off for work very soon to attend an important meeting. She asks me to hold the line a moment, but the moment lasts so long that I finally throw the receiver furiously back on to its cradle. I have to get to that meeting. Now. Without a secretary they are nowhere.
On the shelf in the laundry room I find what I am looking for at once. I take a screwdriver and hammer from the wooden toolbox and go to the door.
It is easier than I expected. I wedge the screwdriver between the door and the post. After a few hammer blows the door leaps open towards me. Robert slips out immediately and barks, relieved that he, too, has been freed from his imprisonment.
I quickly return to the hall, put on my coat and collect my briefcase into which I tuck the screwdriver and hammer for the time being. It is a quarter to eleven, I see in passing. I must hurry.
Robert likes nothing better than a walk. He runs ahead of me, sometimes to the right, then again to the left of the path, into the snowy wood, and waits for me further on, with steaming mouth and wagging tail.
This is not an official road but a neighbourhood path. It runs past the Cheevers' brick house and the untidy wooden affair of Pat and Mark Stevens. Their garden is one big junk yard. Today there stands a half-demolished bright-red pickup truck without wheels, which, to judge by the black letters on the door, once belonged to
Nortons Hardware Store.
Just beyond Pat's and Mark's house the woods end and the dunes begin. They are the colour of bleached corduroy. Or matting. The wind has blown ripples in the snow at the foot of the dunes. Like congealed waves. I am the first to arrive, I can tell from the virgin snow all around. It is perhaps a rather strange and yet quite suitable place for an IMCO meeting, so close to the sea. Robert dashes up a dune, but you needn't think, Robert, that those two crows will let themselves be caught by you.
He lives in the same world as I, and yet he must experience it quite differently. This can be inferred from his behaviour. Close above the ground there must hover a world of scents which he crosses this way and that, sniffing excitedly. His tracks are recorded in the snow. To me they seem a purposeless network. Nothing but consequences. Not a cause to be found anywhere, let alone a system.
I know my way around here. If I bear left, past these planted rows of marram, I will reach a shell path that leads straight to the slate-grey house where the meeting is to be held.
I climb the snow-blown steps to the veranda and peer in. A white lacquered table with four chairs around it. This is where it is. I am not surprised I am the first to arrive - I always am. I have never yet seen Bähr turn up on time, even though he is the chairman. Johnson and Simic always phone to say they are on their way and Chauvas cracks jokes about his dates that are forever getting out of hand. I do not record the times of their arrival, only the time at which Bahr opens the meeting. A subtle reference to the official starting time mentioned at the top of the agenda. But today there is no agenda, so the gentlemen are clearly not bothered about punctuality.
Beside the grass-green door is a brass bell. I press it but hear nothing. I put my ear against the door and press again. Bell out of order. I turn. Robert is standing on the snow- covered porch, wagging his tail. A few seagulls float on invisible thermal waves over the undulating dune ridge. Not a soul to be seen. Anywhere.
I open my briefcase and take out the screwdriver and hammer. This time it is much more difficult. The hammer blows sound loud, hard and dry, and from time to time I glance briefly over my shoulder, because for the secretary to a meeting to be forcing a door open is not an everyday event, I realize that.
It is very cold in here. No sign of any heating. Robert wanders into the kitchen but there is nothing there except an empty tea canister on the granite draining-board. An almost hostile, bare interior. What possessed them to choose this place as a venue? Or could I have misunderstood? Mistaken the date perhaps? Were documents sent out and did I not receive them for some reason or other?
I sit down at the table and look out of the window across the snow-covered dunes. In the summer I love this landscape with its somewhat pale, scrubbed colours and tough shrubs and stubborn thistles, the wind moving through the rows of marram on the flanks of the dunes. But today my eyes confront a bare and indifferent terrain. The sky above is grey and closed. Damned winter.
I know, a secretary belongs and yet does not belong. He is a marginal figure, really. But when they arrive I shall have a piece of news for them. I shall get up when they come in. I'll wait for them to sit down, get out their papers and arrange them in front of them on the table. Then I'll get up and beg permission to speak.
'Gentlemen. For some considerable time I have had my doubts about the effectiveness of our meetings. You know as well as I do that the recommendations regarding catch quotas (for they are no more and can be no more than recommendations) are being evaded by the countries concerned, who hire ships under foreign flags. The statistics and catch figures of the past year do not conform with reality and besides, no fish has ever let itself be guided in its movements by our computer forecasts. None of this is news to you, although we try anxiously to conceal the relative futility of our organization from the outside world and from each other. However, another factor has now come into play: the fully automatic fishing fleet, originating from Japan. You are surprised? I am sure you are, but if you will allow me to explain.
'First, with the aid of hydrophones, the sounds emitted by feeding fish are recorded under water. These recordings are then played back under water by means of powerful loudspeakers. In this way, fish are lured over great distances to a particular area where a completely mechanized fishing fleet, steered by remote computer control, is in attendance. The fleet uses electrical nets. An electric field is set out in the sea. Any fish entering this field becomes paralysed and is sucked into the holds by means of enormously powerful pumps.'
A feeling of nausea suddenly comes over me. I just manage to reach the porch. As I hang over the rail my stomach empties itself into the snow, a mucky brown, steaming pulp in which even Robert shows no interest. I feel cold.
What am I doing here? In the summer, people from Boston live here, a bald man and his small dark wife. Fortunately the door can still be shut in such a way that from the outside you can hardly tell it has been forced open. I may get into trouble over this. Without looking back I walk down the shell path, in the direction of the sea. If I return along the beach there is little chance that anyone will see me. Let's hope it will soon start snowing again and all my footprints will be covered up.