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.
One thing: don't go to sleep now. Don't fall asleep. Would like to. Mustn't, though. Hold head straight! Make a firm stand! Be prepared! (Pre-war phrase, blown over from Pop's world to here, to this head which has become much too large to go on living in.)
Beside me a girl in a fluffy, soft-blue pullover. She looks at the snow. She paints her lips. She holds a little mirror up to her face. (The actions possess a faint echo of cohesion.) Suddenly there is such loud laughter in me that everything begins to shake around me and one hand slips away from the arm of the chair with quick, grab-eager fingers in the direction of a blinking little mirror. I look into it. Away with it! Someone takes it from my lap and lays a hand on this ever-swelling head. Of course, he or she notices it too. It's a hydrocephalus. (Can't you feel how light you have become? Soon you will rise to the surface.)
One is being pushed aside. They have brought in someone else. I had been able to see that in a mirror just now. One must develop counter-pressure. (But how can counter- pressure be developed from a void?) Somewhere there must still be some energy available, somewhere in Maarten Klein there must still be a Maarten Klein, surely?
A brush on wood, a stain on the floor, they provide no duration, only a state. (There's no connection any more in anything around here, dammit.)
Words, that's what provides energy, they are themselves energy. A human being should be made of words. Totally. It's so obvious. (At last something of worth again, supply of words there must be, that's what can save the situation, stories, supply, import of stories.)
'Read to me!'
Movement starts up in the room. (You see, when you use the right words something always happens.) A young woman with long blond hair disappears through an open door. Can see her back slipping away. Another woman takes her place, front forward. A pleasant old voice she has, slightly faltering.
'Read!'
Follow her in the space around this chair. See a book being picked up from the table. Book. Words. I eagerly stretch out my hands towards it. I hug and stroke the book. A man in a raincoat and hat. He looks up at a hill with palms and a brightly lit hotel on it. The title is unfamiliar to me, and so are the words. I return the book to the lady.
Now I hear English, the English language. Perhaps it is better so. Only sounds, sounds and rhythm. Cool, bright, unfathomable.
An old woman's voice, trembling and thin, rising and falling, sometimes to the rhythm of the snowflakes outside the window until a fresh gust of wind disturbs the equilibrium between the flakes and the voice. The voice brings movement closer, progress from sentence to sentence. I hear names recur and that amusing play of rising and falling, of question and answer. Then it stops. The voice has gone and everything goes dead.
Am alone again in this space. Squeeze the wooden chair arms with these fingers. On one hand (not this one but that one) is a little scab. (Pick at it.)
An older woman, her brown hair pinned up, wearing a black high-necked dress. (She is as complete as you could wish the image of a person to be.) She sits down facing me and says the picking should stop, it shouldn't be done, she says. 'Otherwise you are lost.'
A small round drop of blood on the back of this, no, of that hand. Rub it out to as large a stain as possible. Squeeze hard. And again. There's another drop.
'You see. As long as blood flows there is still hope.'
She seems to understand that. She nods with a smile around her lips, which purse as they suddenly approach fast. Ugh! I quickly turn my head away, rub over that damp spot on my cheek. (If they start slobbering over you, where will it end.)
Flakes. Plural. There is only plural in the world, multiplication, the world expands more and more. (I understand all about that demonstration out there but don't want to join in, don't take part, one shouldn't let oneself be swept along into that faceless fluttering out there.) Shut your eyes! But it goes on snowing. It snows even inside me. No more defence anywhere.
A doorbell. Someone who wants to come in from outside. That is what that sound means, you can be sure. Someone wants to come in. He or she rings the bell. The door is opened.
A long white car stands in front of the veranda. I hear voices, male voices and thumping shoes.
They all stand there, out of nowhere, suddenly, just like that, tall as houses, a circle of people around me. Men in white jackets with a red emblem on the breast pocket. I want to hold on to my chair but feel no strength anywhere. Watch how they unhook old fingers one by one from the arms of a chair.
Am lifted, slid into a bed with straps, tied down, lifted, I hang aslant in the room. (Men, hold on tight, you have no idea how light is your burden.)
Furniture, piano, an entire interior, a whole room totters and tilts past me. Vera stands by the door. 'Vera!' I want to raise myself, hanging at a slant I stretch out my arms towards her. 'Vera!' Am stuck fast, fettered. They carry me out of the door and I call out to her, 'Vera!', but I no longer see her and am again tilted through a doorway and lie crying in the snow, flakes land on my lips, on my cheeks, and I see her once more, she looks at a thermometer behind a window and then the white doors of the ambulance close and the driving begins in this rocking car which is also a ship Vera and also a snowflake in which I lie tied down and which skims past tree tops where other snowflakes chase along with us, accompany us like falling stars and so we fall through space Vera and glimmer briefly afterwards (or are we already dead) until we fade away or burn out, become white flakes, or black specks, what's the difference?
Question of mistake or exchange?… a tall bare space with concrete flower troughs full of pitch-black earth… no flowers only scuffed kitchen chairs. .men and women in mouse-grey overalls. . sometimes distant, sometimes frighteningly near. SUDDENLY THEY ARE STANDING BEFORE ME
deportation?. . only English is spoken here. . through large windows: a view of a tall brick wall topped with upright green bits of glass… so these people are hidden from the eye of the world. .what happens to them?. . the guards are dressed in white with dark-blue neckties, both men and women. . are clearly under instruction not to listen… I come from the Netherlands, the only one here. .vomit-long and plaintive- as if the person can scarcely muster the strength for it. . once again someone spewing himself inside out.