‘I was sickened. And Mother said over and over: “Take care of my husband, take care of my husband!”’
It is highly unlikely that Grandma said anything of the kind. She had died of a heart attack. This pathetic plea – Take care of my husband, take care of my husband! – had been inserted into my dying grandmother’s mouth by my mother.
There was one more image that overlapped with the ‘sickening’ scene of the hand being kissed, and this was an image that my mother could not easily dismiss. When she was in Varna for the last time, Grandpa asked Mum to take him back with her, but she – drained by my father’s protracted illness and the gruesome throes of his dying, and then finally his death – feared the burden of the obligation, and refused. Grandpa spent his last years abandoned in a home for the elderly.
‘He tucked a little towel, my gift to him, under his arm, turned and went back into the house,’ she said, describing their last encounter.
It would seem that she had smuggled the towel into this last image. We always brought a pile of gifts every summer for my mother’s Bulgarian relatives. It wasn’t just that she liked giving things to people, she also liked this picture of herself: she would come back from the Varna she had left so many years before, feeling like the good fairy after distributing the gifts she had brought. I wondered why she had inserted that towel into the farewell scene with her own father. It was as if she was lashing herself with it, as if the towel he tucked under his arm was the most terrible possible image of a person’s decline. Instead of undertaking the grand, sincere gesture, which would have meant jumping through troublesome and time-consuming bureaucratic hoops with little guarantee of success, she stuffed a towel into Grandpa’s hand!
Her need to taint her dead was something new. These were not feasts but snacks, focused only on details, which I was hearing for the first time, and, indeed, she may have fabricated them on the spot to hold my attention and confide a secret she had never told a soul. Perhaps the fact that she was in possession of information relating to the dead gave her a glow of satisfaction. Recalling her late friends, sometimes, as if she’d just then decided to take their grades down a notch in the school records, she’d add importantly: I never took to him; I never liked her much either; They didn’t appeal to me; She was always stingy; No, they were not nice people.
Once or twice she even made as if to taint the image of my father, who was, in her words, the most honest man she’d ever known, but for whatever reason she relented, and left him on the pedestal where she herself had placed him after his death.
‘You weren’t exactly crazy about him, were you?’ I asked cautiously.
‘No, but I did love him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he was so quiet,’ she said simply.
Dad was, indeed, a man of few words. And I remember my grandfather as being a quiet man. It hit me for the first time that both of them were not only quiet, but the most honest men Mum had ever known.
It may be that with this tainting of the memory of the dead she was easing her feeling of guilt for things she hadn’t done for them but might have, her guilt for what she had let slip by. She camouflaged her lack of greater attentiveness to the people closest to her with a hardness in judgement. She simply seemed afraid of caring more for others. At some point she had been scared of life just as she was scared of death. That was why she held on so firmly to her place, her stubborn coordinates, and shut her eyes to the scenes and situations that moved her too deeply.
Onion should always be well sautéed. Good health is what matters most. Liars are the worst people. Old age is a terrible calamity. Beans are best in salad. Cleanliness is half of health. Always discard the first water when you cook kale.
It may be that she had asserted things like this before, but I had paid no attention. Everything had got smaller. Her heart had shrunk. Her veins had shrunk. Her footsteps were smaller. Her repertoire of words had diminished. Life had narrowed. She uttered her truisms with special weight. Truisms gave her the feeling, I suppose, that everything was fine, that the world was precisely where it should be, that she was in control and had the power to decide. She wielded her truisms as if they came with an invisible stamp of approval, which she smacked everywhere, eager to leave her mark. Her mind still worked, her feet still moved, she could walk, though only with the help of a walker, but walk she did, and she was a human being who knew for a certainty that beans are best in salad, and that old age is a terrible calamity.
Are You Alive and Well?
She often phoned the ‘old witch’, especially now that she was no longer able to go and visit her. Pupa was my mother’s oldest friend not only in terms of age, but in how long the two had known each other.
‘If it weren’t for the old witch, you wouldn’t be here today,’ Mum would say and repeat the family legend about how Pupa, as a newly minted resident, assisted the obstetrician when my mother was in labour. (‘Lord, what a hideous child,’ Pupa said when they pulled you out. My heart sank with fright. But you weren’t at all ugly, that was just the old witch having a giggle!)
‘Ah, Pupa! Her life has not been easy,’ Mum would say, pensively.
Pupa had been in the resistance movement, she had joined Tito’s Partisans and fought in the Second World War. She went through all sorts of things; she nearly died several times, and was furious at her daughter, also a doctor, claiming that all her troubles were her daughter’s fault. Without her, the old witch groused, I would have died quite nicely long ago.
She weighed barely eighty pounds, walked only with a walker and was half-blind – she saw the world only in blurred contours. She lived alone, obstinately refusing to go into a home for the elderly or live with her daughter and her daughter’s family. Neither would she agree to having a paid helper live with her. There was nothing, it turns out, to which she would agree. So her daughter was forced to come by every day, and there was a cleaning lady, who she often replaced, who came daily. Pupa sat there in her flat, with her legs tucked into a huge furry boot, an electric leg warmer. Sometimes she would turn the television on and stare at the blurred images on the screen. And then she’d turn it off and sniff the air. Neighbours, ah, those damned neighbours were piping rotten gas into her flat again through the central heating system. That was her phrase, ‘rotten gas’, because the whole building stank of rot from it. She drove the cleaning lady to search every nook and cranny of the flat, to see if there wasn’t something decaying somewhere, a dead mouse, or food, but the cleaning lady swore there was nothing. Except for the rotten gas there was nothing else which troubled her life. The problem was her death: it simply wouldn’t come. If it had crawled in through the central heating system, she would have gladly given herself over to it. Death doesn’t smell. It is life that stinks. Life is shit!
She’d sit in an armchair with her feet tucked into the big fur boot, sniffing the air. In time the fur boot merged with her and became a natural extension of her body. With her closely cropped hair, a birdish, beak-like nose, she’d elegantly curve her long neck and direct her grey gaze at the visitor.
‘I have told her a hundred times, let me die,’ she’d say, heaping the blame on her daughter. That was her way of apologising for her condition.
‘Do you know what she has come up with now?’ Mum said in a lively tone as she hung up the phone.
‘What?’
‘Every day she orders pastries by phone from a local pastry shop. She has been eating five big slices of cream pie at a sitting.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘I suppose she thinks the sugar in her system will rocket off the charts and do her in.’
‘Surely she’s not thinking that. She must still remember something from her years as a doctor.’
‘I’m telling you, every day she eats slices of cream pie.’
‘So, how are her sugar levels?’
‘Nothing. Between five and six.’
‘Rotten luck.’
‘And she’s fired the cleaning l
ady.’
‘Why?’
‘Must be the lady wasn’t doing the job properly.’
‘How could Pupa tell, she’s half-blind!’
‘Good point. There, I wouldn’t have thought of that.’
Then she added gleefully, ‘As far as cleanliness goes, the old witch used to be worse than I was. I don’t remember anyone going into her house in their shoes. All of us were given rag pickers at the door.’
‘Rag slippers?’
‘Yes, I suppose the rag pickers have gone.’
Cleanliness is Half of Health
From our house, unlike Pupa’s, guests left with their shoes cleaned! My mother would sneak out to nab the shoes that visitors had taken off and set by the door when they came in and she’d take the shoes to the bathroom, where she’d rinse the dust or mud off the soles.
She was obsessed with cleanliness. A glistening flat, freshly laundered curtains, a gleaming parquet floor, freshly aired rugs, a wardrobe in which all the clothes were neatly folded, perfectly ironed linens, clean dishes, a bathroom that sparkled, windowpanes without a single smudge, everything in its place – all this gave her great satisfaction. She terrorised us – my father, brother and me – with cleanliness when I was small. Her daily cleaning rampages were accompanied by the phrase – We don’t want to smell bad the way… – and then she’d give the names of people who, apparently, smelled very bad. Lack of cleanliness was invariably coupled with the word ‘disgraceful’ (Disgraceful! That filth is disgraceful!). When I was small she would box me into the corner with a crate, and on the crate she’d arrange my toys. I stood trapped in the corner until the daily cleaning was done.
The last time I heard that word (Disgraceful!) and that intonation was three years back, during our last visit to my father’s graveside. We usually went there together, and if she couldn’t go, she’d send my brother and me.
‘It’s disgraceful the way people treat their tombs,’ she said pointing to nearby tombstones, and then she added,
‘Here, let’s rinse it one more time.’
To rinse it was to splash the tombstone with water. The whole job of cleaning the stone was arduous. You had to keep taking a bucket over to a water fountain that was not near by, and keep lugging bucketfuls of water back. Usually we scrubbed the tombstone with a brush and detergent, and she’d splash it with water over and over, but this time my mother was not satisfied.
‘So, a little more,’ she commanded.
The path from Dad’s grave to the cab stand was a long one, and she was walking along it, leaning on me, for the last time, though we had no idea then.
‘Now this one always sparkles,’ she said at a tomb we always passed. ‘But these others have been so neglected. Disgraceful!’
In hospital Mum confided in me that she’d sneaked out at night and gone back to the house.
‘Impossible. How?’
‘I slipped out and took a cab.’
‘What did you do at home?’
‘I quickly tidied everything up and then came right back here.’
‘I was at home the whole time; if you had come home, I would have noticed. You dreamed it.’
‘I did not,’ she said, a little anxiously.
I came to hospital every day. The first thing she’d ask when I appeared at the door was,
‘Did you tidy up the flat?’
* * *
Over the last three years we have often had to call an ambulance. It is the easiest and quickest way to sidestep the elaborate bureaucratic procedures and get my mother admitted immediately to hospital. We called an ambulance once when she was in a crisis. As the nurses, supporting her under the arms, were guiding her to the lift, Mum ducked down, spryly, and snatched up the plastic rubbish bag by the door, left there to be taken down and tossed into the bin.
‘Ma’am, please!’ shrieked the doctor, catching sight of her.
When I asked her to tell me something from her childhood, now she would answer curtly, describing it as happy.
‘What was happy about it?’ I’d ask.
‘Everything was clean, and Mother did us up so nicely.’
In hospital, with a tube in her mouth and an IV in her arm, she never let go of her handkerchief. She was constantly dabbing her lips. When she had recovered a little, she immediately asked me to bring her a clean pair of pyjamas:
‘Don’t bring them if they’re not ironed.’
Three years ago – when she sank quite suddenly into a lethargy – I took her first to a psychiatrist, probably unconsciously postponing the day I’d have to take her to hospital, which was what happened immediately thereafter.
The psychiatrist followed the routine.
‘Your first and last name, ma’am?’
‘Vacuum cleaner,’ she said softly, her head bowed.
‘Your name, ma’am?’ the psychiatrist repeated, this time more sharply.
‘Well… vacuum cleaner,’ she repeated.
I was flushed by a wave of idiotic embarrassment: I cannot say why at the time I felt as if it would have been easier to bear if she had said ‘Madonna’ or ‘Maria Theresa’.
While she was in hospital – where instead of the harsh judgement of the psychiatrist (Alzheimer’s!) her diagnosis turned out to be more ‘amenable’ – I began to wage my own battle, in parallel, for her recovery. I found someone willing to work from morning to night. He stripped the wallpaper that had nearly fused with the concrete. We painted the walls in fresh pastel colours. We redid the bathroom, laid new tiles and mounted a new mirror. I purchased a new washing machine, a new Hoover, I threw out the old bed in one of the rooms, and bought a bright-red modern sofa, a colourful new rug, a new pale-yellow wardrobe. On the balcony I set out potted plants in new flower pots (which were flourishing that year late into autumn!). I cleaned every corner of the flat and discarded old, useless things. The windows shone, the curtains were freshly laundered, the clothes in the wardrobe were neatly folded, everything was in its place. For the first time I felt I knew what I dared throw away, and what I should keep, and that is why I resisted the urge to toss out a homely old house plant with only a few leaves and left it where it was.
In the upper drawer of the dresser I left untouched the things she treasured: an old watch which had supposedly belonged to my grandfather, my father’s medals (the Order of Brotherhood and Unity with Silver Wreath, the Order for Valour), an elegant box with a sizeable collection of compasses and a Raphoplex slide rule (my father’s things), a key to the mail box from an earlier flat, an old plastic alarm clock with dead batteries, a box of Gura nails (judging by the design probably from East Germany), a silver-plated cigarette box, a Japanese fan, my old passport, opera glasses (from her trip with Dad to Moscow and Leningrad), a calculator with no batteries and a bundle of announcements of Dad’s death, held with a rubber band. I carefully polished the old silver basket-shaped bonbon dish, in which she kept her jewellery: a gold ring, a pin with a semi-precious stone (a gift from my father) and costume jewellery, which she called her pearls. Mum’s ikebana arrangement, the pearls tumbling out of the bonbon dish like writhing snakes, had stood for years in the place of honour on the shelf. I washed all of her dishes carefully, including the Japanese porcelain coffee service she never used. The service was intended for me. (When I die, I am leaving the coffee service to you. It cost me a whole month’s wages!) Everything was ready to welcome Mum home, each thing was in its place, the house glistened to her taste.
My mother came home and walked importantly around her little New Zagreb flat.
‘What have we here! This is the sweetest little surprise you could have given me!’
Come Here, Lie Down…
‘Come here, lie down,’ she says.
‘Where?’ I ask, standing by her hospital bed.
‘On that bed.’
‘But a patient is already lying on it.’
‘What about over there?’
‘All the beds are taken.’
‘Then lie dow
n here, next to me.’
Although she was delirious when she said those words, the invitation for me to lie down next to her stabbed me painfully. The lack of physical tenderness between us and her restraint with expressing feelings – these were some sort of unwritten rule of our family life. She had no sense of how to express feelings herself, she had never taught us and it seemed to her, furthermore, that it was too late, for her and for us, to change. Showing tenderness was more a source of discomfort than of comfort; we didn’t know how to handle it. Feelings were expressed indirectly.
During her stay in hospital the year before, just after she’d turned eighty, my mother’s false teeth and her wig got their little hospital stickers with the name of the owner. She asked me to take the wig home (Take it home so it won’t be stolen). When they removed the tube, I took her bridge from the plastic bag with her name and surname on it and washed it. Every day after that I washed her false teeth, until she was able to care for them herself.
‘I washed your wig at home.’
‘Did it shrink?’
‘No.’
‘Did you set it on the, you know… so it wouldn’t lose shape?’
‘Yes, on the dummy.’
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.) Page 2
