Free Out of Mind by J. Bernlef Page A

start our supper.
    'What time is it?' I ask Vera when she enters the bedroom and switches on the light.
    'Quarter past five.'
    I nod contentedly and sit up on the edge of the bed. She pulls my tie straight. 'Dr Eardly is here.'
    Slightly stiff from lying on the bed, I walk towards the open living-room door in the direction of flute music. Vivaldi by the sound of it.
    A man in navy-blue pants and wasp-yellow sweater gets up from the settee surprisingly quickly when I enter. Vera switches off the radio.
    'Hello, Mr Klein,' he says. A lot of gold in the corners of his mouth. He can't be older than forty-five. He enquires how I am, in the hearty, quasi-spontaneous tone in which all Americans address strangers. I nod, and pause in the middle of the room.
    'Sit down, please, Maarten,' says Vera, but the man makes a gesture as if to say he doesn't care. Then I sit down and he immediately drops down with a thud beside me on the settee and grabs hold of my wrist. Vera does nothing about it. She sits beside us on the two-seater, her hands clasped in her lap, looking at us, frightened and curious at the same time. The man smells penetratingly of aftershave.
    'Been to Lorenzo the barber's, have you?'
    'How did you guess?' he says, and wants me to straighten my right knee. He taps on it with a little silver hammer that he has taken from a leather case. The lower leg jumps up. 'Excellent,' he says.
    'Naturally,' I say. 'There's nothing wrong with me.'
    The man glances briefly in Vera's direction, a questioning look in his eye.
    'I talked about it with him,' she says. 'We've been looking at old photographs together.'
    'A useful and agreeable therapy,' says the man, and puts one leg across the other. No, he doesn't want to drink anything. Not even a Miller? Vera gives a startled look, but when the man shakes his head her face becomes calm again. People's facial expressions sometimes flash by so fast that I have no time to ascribe a meaning to them. Maybe they don't have a meaning. Maybe they are like the moving patches of sunlight among the trees in a wood.
    'And how did it go?'
    He seems to think I am crazy. The tone they usually adopt here when they address someone over sixty. Amiable condescension mingled with distaste. Be that as it may, let it pass.
    'Seeing photographs is quite different from looking at photographs,' I say. 'Anyone can look at photographs, but seeing a photograph means being able to read it. On the one hand you have people and their cultural products, on the other hand nature. Trees, lakes, clouded skies speak a universal language in photographs that can be understood by anyone. Outside time, as it were. By contrast, people, building, roads, coffee cans and the like can be read only in a specific context, in time. You can't read that photo album on the table for the most part because you lack the necessary background information. You weren't there. In other words, you cannot form any further pictures about what is in there, because you cannot remember what could once be actually seen. It isn't your past.'
    I glow with effort. He is clearly finding it so interesting that he takes his diary and starts writing something. When I stop talking in order to give him a chance to write his notes, he says, 'Please carry on.'
    Vera also seems to hang on my lips. But now that I have stopped, no more will come.
    'Philip sends his regards to you - Philip, the bookseller,' says the man, putting a notebook into his inside pocket.
    'Oh, him. I haven't seen him for ages.'
    'You went there only the other day. You bought Our Man in Havana from him. A very good Graham Greene. Made into a movie as well. Who played the main part again?'
    I shrug my shoulders. Then Vera whispers a name. 'Alec Guinness.' Damn, she's right. This fellow does look like Alec Guinness. Let's hope he didn't hear her, because it may not be much of a compliment. Same jowls and broad rims to his ears. I have to make an effort not to start chuckling.
    'Maybe I did,' I