Vera shouldn't worry herself so. I quickly enter the room and then stop in my tracks, stiff with fright.
A big robust woman is sitting in my place at the table. A stern female in a mouse-grey suit and black hair in a bun with a wooden pin stuck through it on the back of her head. She says my name and then I recognize her. Of course.
'Hello, Ellen,' I say, timidly as a child, and spontaneously shake hands with her. As if by this gesture I want to make amends for having stared at her without recognizing her just now.
'How formal you are today, Maarten,' she says. She laughs and Vera laughs a little too. Maybe everything is funny, although I cannot see what exactly there is to laugh at. But be that as it may. .
'How is Jack?' I ask.
Their faces stiffen. Mysterious, how quickly people's facial expressions can change. You can't read thoughts. Language says you can, but reality is different. Faces are like the surface of the sea. They change constantly under the influence of countless contrary and invisible undercurrents.
'I always recognize people best by their voices,' I say. 'I have a bad memory for faces, but voices I recognize at once.'
The conversation must proceed. Their faces, on either side of the round patch of light from the lamp, still wear that rigid, plaster-cast expression.
'And when someone is dead,' says Ellen Robbins. Her voice trembles and Vera puts her hand on Ellen's arm in a protective gesture.
'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.