Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (58 page)

Other residues of Maarten’s past also come back, or perhaps they’ve never left. The war, especially the terrible privations of hunger and fear during the Nazi occupation of Holland, remains as a kind of permanent subscript for Maarten, ready also to pop out at any time, usurping the present time and space. Finally, not surprisingly, Maarten’s memories of his family, especially his distant and authoritative father, remain as a kind of affective cluster that is still active, not fully processed or worked through. Likewise, Maarten’s earliest erotic longings and experiences remain inside him as a living substratum of sensation and pulsation: his sexual initiation with the beautiful Karen, whose luscious body made him want to kneel in front of her and worship her; and earlier still, his infatuation with his piano teacher, Greta, for whom he hungered with all his might, desiring the impossible: to be able to put his head onto her lap and taste/absorb her overwhelming sensual presence. All this lives, all this moves, showing us that there seems to be a psychic law of energy conservation, decreeing that contemporary losses are matched by long-term resurrections. Or, to put it still more accurately, to reveal—now that the busy present scene of bustling reality is losing its authority, is exiting the picture, going up like a curtain—the never-ceasing affective life of the past, now returned to visibility and force, still playing.

Hence Maarten enters a Gloucester tavern, but when the barmaid turns to face him, he has to hold on to the bar: “Of course, I must have changed a great deal in fifty years. Grown fatter. Her nails are painted bright red. The nature of the work requires it. When the phone rings I hear that her voice is deeper, rawer. From smoking, of course. Even in those days she used to smoke a pack a day. Beautiful firm round buttocks.” It is, momentarily, the beautiful and desirable Karen, with whom he had his first love affair. And he knows it can’t be her, even though it “is” her. Or the way Greta, smelling of perfume, continues to live in his mind, so much so that when he later sees Phil (the young girl hired by Vera to help take care of him) playing the piano, all the pieces fall beautifully, tragically, and absurdly into place:

What does one say in the face of a scene like this? Neither Phil nor Vera could possibly see or grasp the larger gestalt taking form here, as Maarten thinks he is at last showing his adoration for Greta the teacher (speaking English, oddly enough, instead of Dutch). Time avails not; he is in Holland fifty years earlier. The child you were returns and takes over; growing old recedes into growing up. Of course it is an awful mishmash of time and place, and no amount of lovely crystallizing private fantasy can offset the grotesque human errors on show here. But in some deep sense, Bernlef’s story is about finding as well as losing, about things coming together as well as apart. Love endures: what Maarten felt for Greta and Karen decades ago not only has not died but scripts the realia of his life, even gives him an awful second chance. The patterns that now come into focus are permanently at odds with the here-and-now real world, and the people he sees are increasingly counters for the shadows and ghosts of his past.

But none of this diminishes the reader’s dread of seeing a man’s very life become alien and unreadable to himself: he looks at photos of his children and does not recognize them; he sees an image of his mother and likewise draws a blank. His life has become musical chairs. Dr. Eardly appears several times, yet each time he is a mystery to Maarten, who wonders who this man is, sitting in his living room, asking him questions, arranging for a hypodermic; as said, Vera has employed a young woman helper, Phil, to look after Maarten a few hours a day, and even though he is (often) introduced to Phil, she repeatedly slips out of the frame, becomes “other,” sometimes in midconversation. The mobility on show here has a roller-coaster feeling to it—that is what most unsettles about this narrative—since at any and every moment, things slip out of their recognizable skins and become anonymous, threatening. After all, Maarten is in his home, but the things and people in it are metamorphosing at great speed, becoming alien objects whose strange presence confuses and even torments Maarten. Dementia dismantles home. Throughout this entire siege—for that is what it is—Maarten never stops cogitating, never stops responding to the altered scene, and there is great pathos here. When he sees a strange man in his house, said by Vera to be a doctor, his initial reaction is: is
Vera
ill, in need of a doctor? Later, reacting again to the (always new) doctor, he thinks that Fred is sick: Fred, his now-long-grown-up child, moved far away; Fred, now present in his mind as the sick youngster he once was; Fred, filling in the interstices; Fred, enabling Maarten to make some kind of sense of the jumble coming his way.

In one almost unbearable sequence, he experiences his bedroom as a hotel room, shorn now of all its years-long familiarity (a familiarity we think of as an extension of our own skin), transformed altogether, turned alien. Bernlef shows us how much awful interpretive freedom comes into play as Maarten inventories the new space:

This is the voice of sweet reason, yet it has utterly slipped its gears, is functioning independently, tells us that the mind never stops producing its pitter-patter, never stops attending to the scene, never stops assessing, no matter how severed its connections to reality may be. Yes, one might somehow read these lines positively—after all, they suggest that dementia is a form of vacationing, a way of getting new digs at every moment—but I read the lines and shiver, remembering the look on my senile mother’s face in the nursing home, that faraway look that was uninterpretable, as well as what we had to term the non sequiturs that came out of her mouth, concerning who and where and when she was. Was she reliving some long-distant past, known only to her? Were musical chairs in play? Was her heart scripting everything anew? Was home reconceived? The strangeness in Maarten’s “hotel thinking” cuts to the bone, because it displays ratiocination in a vacuum, affixing labels to the changing spectacle, nailing down a world in flux. It also displays the shocking tenuousness of our hold on things, reminding me that Galileo’s audacious claim about the earth itself—
it moves
—can wreak as much havoc on human sanity as it did to the Church’s view of the solar system. Sooner or later, we readers know that
everything
will be stripped of recognition, will be new. Hence we are sickened but not surprised to read the following:

This is what a long marriage now comes to: you eye an old face, looking at it with considerable focus, but it is entirely unknown to you. Who is this person? Maarten wonders if she’s been assigned to him, and this is absolutely logical, inasmuch as a strange person in your home must be there for some reason. Then comes the shift to the tie. The tie. Bernlef registers the brutal capriciousness of senile thinking, the breakup of clusters of meaning, the atomistic regime that is now coming into authority. So the unknown woman has about the same “weight” as the missing tie. Here is an egalitarian arrangement that threatens to cancel out all the old priorities and privileges that we fondly believe a life over time offers: that some forms—my spouse, my children, my past life—have a kind of earned resonance and density and indeed dignity that reflect the harvest of our experience, the meaningful shapes of our life. But dementia cashiers this, erodes this connective tissue, for it respects no such temporal or moral or emotional ties, vectors that subtend and bathe our world with whatever significance it is to have. We move toward the absolute erasure of this cocoon scheme, which sometimes goes by the name of love.

For love is a caretaking, memorial proposition. Love relies on time. Love is built on the accretions of our experience. The vision that love casts on the world has no truck with the egalitarian ocular take that our eyes achieve, for love inserts its own rich remembered data, its own weights and measures, parses the visual field, adds dimensionality and resonance, edits the spectacle, thereby achieving the miraculous tapestry that every full life displays. The photographs in your scrapbook or on your desk, the dolls or toys or memorabilia that you still hold on to: these have an echoing private, sometimes unbearably rich meaning for
you
, whereas they are just objects for anyone else. Maarten’s love for Vera has had exactly this richness:

We are free to interpret this passage along strictly theoretical lines: if you’ve lived with someone, you espy their past form in their present appearance. But I’d want to call this also the very perception of love, alive to the actual (but invisible) reaches of loved ones, constituting a plural and layered vision that dwarfs the flat, reductive snapshot that our eyes register. Even earlier in the novel, Maarten says, “I am the only person who can see in her all the women she has been. Sometimes I touch her, and then I touch all of them at once, very gently. A feeling only she can evoke in me, no one else.” At the risk of sounding very sentimental, I want to insist on the beauty of this notation. Enduring love is the recognition that our loved ones alter and become “plural,” but that just amplifies our love, gives it more dimensions, turns the lover into the one who takes measures, keeps tally, remembers, restores. This is the edifice we build by loving each other over time. The rich temporal awareness of shared experiences, of countless earlier days and nights, of an entire textured existence together, of a “we story”: all this makes marriage into a profoundly vertical proposition, shot through with time, built out of the materials of the past, resonating in such a way that the present moment is only that: a moment. I am emphasizing these matters, because they are precisely what will be destroyed in this unflinching novel about the collapse of self, about going out of mind.

Out of Mind
is a heartbreaking novel because it graphs for us what Maarten has had and what he is now systematically losing. We see him repeatedly trying to hold on in a literal sense: to the table, to stair rails, to the physical setting that seems bent on shape-shifting in front of his eyes. But Maarten is on a treadmill, and even the haunting scenes of present replaced by past take place early in his descent. He is en route to greater and greater incoherence, fuller and fuller exile. At first one senses that some things will resist erosion: his past loves, his memories of his family, his guilt at his father’s death and his colleague’s suicide, his psychic scars from the war. The contents of his heart, the affective record of a life. As I’ve said, for each thing that goes, something else comes. Vera recedes, but Karen and Greta appear. And we realize that guilt obeys the same temporal rules by keeping the heart’s injuries alive—damage from long ago such as his colleague Simic’s suicide, his father’s dying—by maintaining them just behind the curtain, ready to re-present themselves as unfinished business, as regret.

The war takes honors here as the major unprocessed, unprocessable abrasion of the heart, even though the conscious memories of it seem relatively picturesque and innocuous; but let his current life move into danger, and out pops earlier crisis. The doctor is about to force a hypodermic into him, and he hisses, “We know that from the war.” A moment later he speaks of heroes and betrayal, of the need to persevere, “no matter how hungry we are.” This reasoning reaches its apogee when he is again jabbed with a needle and threatened with a straitjacket, causing him to shift gears back to the ever-waiting war backdrop: “You’ve got the wrong man. I wasn’t on the wrong side. Maybe I was no hero, but I wasn’t on the wrong side. I never hid any fugitives in my house, that is true. I wouldn’t have minded, but I never came across any. Or I didn’t recognize them in time. Or it was too late, all finished, and I never realized what trouble he was in. Not even afterwards.” We see indices here of wounds that cannot heal concerning ethical failures—not being a hero, not taking in Jews during the war, not realizing that his friend Simic was about to kill himself—that stud his life, that no doubt stud all our lives but that we won’t fully know about until the end, when they will reveal themselves as stubborn residues, undying, wanting to be resolved at last. Once again Bernlef is showing last things in more ways than one. Your heart and spirit never stop keeping score, registering deeds and misdeeds throughout your life; sanity keeps this old record under wraps, but dementia reveals its stubborn hold.