'That can't have been much fun.'
'Oh, yes, it was. It was the first time she really accepted me. Ever since that week I got on well with her. Look, here she is standing in the garden at the boarding house. Heaven, yes, "The Turning-point", it was called.'
Don't panic. After all, she remembers everything. So this is my mother. If I want to know anything about the past I can always ask her. 'Mother,' I say, and I look at the bespectacled woman who leans with broad hands on a white garden gate. 'There probably was no better mother. She looked after me so well that I hardly remember a moment's quarrelling. When she was angry with me she merely remained silent. She would sit by the table with a cup of tea in front of her and look at me in silence with her brown eyes while with one hand she twirled a strand of hair that had come loose from her bun. I used to think that was much worse than having an argument, like I sometimes had with Pop. That accusing silence of hers, those fingers mechanically playing with that lock of hair. Inaccessible in her silent sadness, she was, as she sat by the table.'
'She only wanted to protect you, that's all. She told me so later. You were a clumsy child, you used to fall off everything. You were always covered in scratches and bruises.'
I nod and look at the greying lady in a spotted summer dress with puffed sleeves in front of 'The Turning-point' boarding house. Then I turn the page. 'Goodness, Paris,' I say, pointing at a colour photograph of a wide boulevard lined with busy terraces.
'You took that one when you were in Paris for IMCO. Your hotel was over there, across the road.'
Hôtel Ambassador, it says in thick white curly letters on a wall under a grey stone balcony.
'Hotels,' I say scornfully, 'they seem designed in order to be forgotten.'
Strange how after a certain page — October 1956 — the past suddenly springs into colour. But even the colours do not help me. Maybe it is because of the photographs themselves. A camera makes no distinction between important and unimportant, foreground or background. And at this moment I myself seem like a camera. I register, but nothing and nobody comes closer, jumps forward; no one touches me from the past with a gesture, a surprised expression, and these buildings, streets and squares exist in towns and cities where I have never been and shall never go. And the closer the photographs approach the present, as appears from the dates written underneath, the more impenetrable and enigmatic they seem to become.
Vera points, Vera supplies the commentary. I nod. But I see that she can read in my eyes that her words clarify nothing.
Outside a horn is sounded. Vera gets up. 'That must be Roberts from the hardware store.'
'What is he coming here for?'
'The laundry-room lock is broken. The door won't shut. I'll show him where it is.'
I stay behind, in front of the open album. A moment later I hear hammering and then the sound of a saw moving through wood with quick, expert pulls.
It is a good thing that doors which have been forced open can be repaired again. I have two left hands, but Vera keeps a close eye on any household deterioration. Not a plug gets broken but she has already bought a new one. A few weeks ago she had the children's room redecorated. It was a funny sight, Kitty standing up in her metal cot in the middle of the room. She was scared to go to sleep so far from the wall, she said. I had to read her a bedtime story. Fairy tales. Once upon a time. And suddenly I remember.
Quickly I turn the pages back. There is the photograph Vera showed me a minute ago. Kitty and Johan, her husband, and my son Fred. Vera and I had been married for forty years and that was why they both came over. This here is Janet, the eldest of the Cheevers children further up the road. She has moved now. Kiss, their Pomeranian, is in it, too. He's dead. Run down by a tourist. When Kitty and Fred left, Vera and I both had a hard time of it. We both felt the same, although we didn't mention it to each other. It is possible that we shall never see them again. That was in both our minds, we could tell from each other's face. But we kept silent about it.
When Vera enters I rub my hands and tap on the photograph. I talk so fast that I stumble over my words. With her purse in her hand she listens to me. I love her face when it laughs in that carefree way and little wrinkles of mirth appear in it, especially around her nostrils and mouth. I want to talk about our wedding photographs but I can't find them quickly enough. I would like to see that moment again when we stood, a little apprehensive and uncertain, before the registrar of marriages, while behind our backs sat numerous aunts, who never missed a family wedding, particularly when it was whispered that the bride was expecting, and who searched their purses for handkerchiefs when Vera said yes in a loud clear voice, as you can tell from the photograph.
Her half-open mouth with the snowy-white teeth, the aunts dabbing away a tear here and there. I was so hoarse I had to clear my throat twice before I could answer the registrar's question. And then the wedding reception at her parents' house in Alkmaar, her jovial father who took us to a wooden seaside hotel in Egmond where we had to show our brand new marriage certificate, we looked so young, and indeed we were, I in a suit from the 'Nieuw Engeland' boys' department.
Perhaps those photographs are in a different album. A festive feeling comes over me. I wouldn't mind a glass of beer.
I go to the kitchen and look in the refrigerator. Maybe Vera hasn't been out shopping yet. Shall I ask her to get a six-pack? Miller, that's the beer I like best here. Heineken is better, of course, but far too expensive. They drink that here as though it were champagne. The green label was always like a signal from home when I used to have lunch at Crick's. There was always some at one table or another. I ask Vera if there is any beer in the house.
'Why do you want beer all of a sudden?' she says. 'Anyway, I'd want to ask Dr Eardly first. Alcohol and medicine don't usually go together.'
I don't quite understand what she is talking about, but I do not want to spoil the atmosphere now.
'The door has been mended,' she says, and puts her purse on the piano.
Yet another riddle. Better not ask any further. I nod. She looks at her watch. 'Why don't you lie down for a while?' she says. 'Dr Eardly said. .'
'. . What have I to do with Dr Eardly?'
'You don't actually need to go to sleep. Or else play the piano.' She looks at me somewhat anxiously and her voice trembles in spite of her determined tone.
I don't want to be a nuisance, so I get up and go to the piano. I pick up her purse and open it. She will have to pay Greta before long, and she has nothing but American money. But who would refuse dollars? No one. Greta's boyfriend is a prole, Pop says. He doesn't like her because she smells of perfume, which creeps into my shirt collar at which I sniff furtively in my room after the lesson. I am in love with Greta, but she is on no account allowed to know that. She might not want to give me lessons any more. It is for her that I practise. I don't care about Mozart and Bach. Only about that one little hour a week, alone with Greta, side by side at the piano, wrapped in a cloud of daffodil scent.
'Why are you standing by the piano like that?'
Vera's voice. She takes me by the arm. I must go and rest, she says. Only for an hour. No need to get undressed. Just lie down on the bed.
I enter the bedroom and grin. I chuckle softly to myself and start humming as if automatically. Greta's boyfriend is a prole.
When I wake up it is so dark I can't even see the church tower behind the Sweelinckstraat. All around the open belfry runs a wooden balustrade. Grandpa told me that someone jumped off it once. In this room I often dream of that. Or of shooting stars, which Pop sometimes points out to me in the evening sky. Shooting stars that burn up when they enter the earth's atmosphere. Maybe Grandpa will teach me how to play checkers tonight. He promised. I'll lie still until he calls me. I hear him playing his recorder at the back of the house. He also has a piano but it has such a heavy touch that I always make mistakes when he asks me to play something. He is playing long drawn-out notes ending in trills. It must be after five. Grandpa always plays from five till half past. Then he has his drink and exactly at six o'clock we start our supper.