by Hanna Krall
2
“AIDS is a problem for your neighbors,” Benjamin G. wrote me in a letter. “At most, you know the people who are dying by sight. But one day someone whose address is in your address book will die. Then someone with whom you once slept. Then someone who is really close to you.…”
I have the telephone numbers of some of Benjamin G.’s friends in my address book. They lived in Berlin. Konrad was a pastor and Wolfgang Max Faust, an art critic. I had taken a long walk with the pastor, just as with Peter Schok. For some reason, people who have a life-threatening disease set aside time for me, even though they have so little of it. Perhaps they want to enjoy their world by showing it off? Perhaps they wish to make a gift to other people of the place that is dear to them?
On a hot spring morning, the pastor gave me the gift of the Havel River and the meadows bordering the Havel. We visited the Cecilienhof, where the Potsdam Conference was held (enormous strapping fellows, two meters tall, dressed like soldiers of Frederick the Great’s guard, were performing drills in the courtyard), and the nineteenth-century Russian settlement, with little wooden houses that looked like they came from Irkutsk. We were accompanied by the smell of prematurely dried grasses and the steaming river. It turned out that Wolfgang Max Faust, the pastor’s friend who had AIDS, recorded each of those days in his journal.
“It was a little too loud,” he wrote.
Or, “To do what needs doing and remain without desires.”
Or, “Death is an experience of the body. I think about it with my body, not with my head. Everyone should open himself up to welcoming the death within him.”
Or, “In art it’s no longer a question of art. It’s a question of our life.…”
And so forth.
He published these notes in a book with the subtitle The Quotidian. Art. AIDS, and then he hanged himself in the cellar with a radio cable. Pastor Konrad felt he didn’t have the strength to conduct a funeral service. He asked another pastor who was suffering from AIDS to do it. That pastor got permission for the funeral from the hospital. They buried Wolfgang Max Faust in the loveliest Berlin cemetery, not far from Marlene Dietrich.
“If I had to die now, I would say ‘Was that all?’,” Wolfgang Max Faust observed one day.1
Yes, as Benjamin G. predicted, I, too, have people with AIDS in my address book.
A stupid feeling.
3
Peter Schok was the next to get sick. He already had a new lover. Benjamin G. explained their breakup to me as Peter Schok’s fear of true love. The fear might be the consequence of Peter Schok’s Jewish ancestry, Benjamin G. said. The link between his ancestry and his fear was unclear, because Peter Schok was born ten years after the war, and his mother had spent the war years in Great Britain, but this explanation gave the affair the stamp of tragedy and brought Benjamin G. some relief.
The virus settled in his brain. After his surgery, the doctor said the patient had one year to live.
It was January.
Peter Schok visited a woman artist whom he was friends with and asked for a pleasing picture. He selected a lithograph titled Only So Far, No Farther.
He looked through volumes of contemporary Dutch poetry. He selected a fragment of a song by Ivo De Vijs: “When I die, come all of you/Be strong or weep, everything will be permitted on that day/All right, let it be crowded and noisy with talk,/On that day I will be in charge of silence.”
He listened to several recordings of Jewish songs and also the music from the film The Rose.
He ordered an obituary notice from the printer’s, such as families send out to their acquaintances to notify them of a death. They are usually decorated with a black frame, but Peter Schok asked to have the cheerful lithograph on the first page. Inside there was to be Ivo de Vijs’s song and four words: “Peter Schok died on …” and an empty space for the date.
4
In the spring, the premiere of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, directed by Benjamin G., took place, and although they each had a new partner, Benjamin personally accompanied Peter Schok to the theater.
Peter Schok, already emaciated and weak, sat in his wheelchair repeating, “Look around; everyone is looking at us.” Which was true. In Amsterdam, when one man is in a wheelchair and another is pushing him, every passerby looks at them. Everyone knows that it is a gay man pushing his friend who is sick with AIDS.
The performance was very pleasant. It combined Molière’s text with the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully, Louis XIV’s court composer. The guests sat among the musicians, drank wine, and had the impression that they were guests of the gentleman at a concert in his home. Peter Schok sat in the first row. Black spots, the mark of AIDS, had come out on his feet but had not touched his face. Listening intently in his elegant suit, Peter Schok was beautiful, as in the distant good days.
They had bought the suit in Poland, when he and Benjamin G. were still together. They were on vacation in Zakopane. On the last day they were supposed to go to Kasprowy Wierch, but Peter Schok had returned the hard-won reserved-seat ticket and gone instead to Krupówki, to a jewelry store.
“Why are you doing this? You don’t even love her,” Benjamin G. marveled, when Peter Schok chose the prettiest string of pearls for his mother.
The next day, they left for Wrocław to see Tadeusz Różewicz’s Death in Old Scenery and before the performance they bought Peter that suit—elegant, a dark blue with a discreet gray stripe.
During the summer the suit had become so loose that he needed new trousers. They again went by wheelchair and asked for the smallest size in the C&A department store. They were waited on by a nice, sturdy, fifty-ish woman. They loved her. Salespeople usually speak with the man who pushes the wheelchair and avoid looking at the one who is sitting in it, but this woman addressed Peter Schok every time.
In October, Peter Schok and his friend Gerrit asked the doctor what they should expect.
“The end,” the doctor answered. “Were you expecting anything else?”
5
Peter Schok named the day: Monday, at 8:00 p.m.
He informed the doctor.
He invited his mother.
Gerrit bought smoked salmon and a bottle of French champagne.
The doctor brought a small bag; the mother, a raven-haired woman with thick eyeglasses and the string of Zakopane pearls on her short neck, brought a bouquet of flowers.
Peter was sitting in an ordinary armchair, with a blanket on his knees.
They ate the salmon, drank the champagne, listened to Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. When the music stopped, the doctor turned to Peter Schok.
“Do you know what we are going to do now?”
“I know,” Peter Schok replied.
“Is this what you want?”
“Yes.”
This was an official conversation in conformity with the Dutch law about “medical decisions concerning the termination of life.” The disease was incurable. The patient had expressed his wish. Those present were witnesses. On the following day the doctor would have to file an appropriate report in court. The essential conditions had been fulfilled.
The doctor removed a bottle from his bag and filled a glass with a clear, bright yellow liquid. Peter drank half of it.
“I don’t want this,” he said. “Please give me an injection.”
He had been afraid of injections throughout his life, but now he rolled up his sleeves and spoke calmly to the doctor.
He died in his sleep five minutes later.
Gerrit, a nurse at an old-age home, carried the corpse to the bed. He washed it with professional skill and dressed it in the Wrocław suit.
The funeral home supplied the coffin that Peter had selected and ordered. It had a glass lid and a cooling system concealed under its floor.
His friends came together, alerted by Gerrit’s sending out the colorful obituary notice. Most of them were infected with the HIV virus. They laid down flowers and lit candles. Synagogue music flowed from tapes. Peter Scho
k’s little red cat came up to the coffin and stared at him through the glass lid, astonished by the sight. That was the only detail not foreseen by Peter in the program of his funeral celebration. His friends chased the cat away, but it climbed up again. After consulting briefly, they agreed that it wasn’t hurting anything and they allowed it to stay.
The crematorium is located outside the city, not far from the sea.
Again they listened to Jewish songs, and then the music from the film The Rose rang out. It was sung by Bette Midler, the New York actress who began her career in gay men’s bathhouses; they were the first to hear her songs. As she sang “And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong,” the floor, with the catafalque and coffin, began to descend, like a trapdoor in a theater. The music ceased. The program prepared by Peter Schok was over.
In the silence, and not included in the program, the empty floor returned to its place.
6
Beside the Prinsengracht canal, not far from the church whose bell Anne Frank could hear in her hiding place, there stands or, rather, lies, a monument. It is composed of three pink triangles; that is how homosexuals were labeled in the German camps. The triangles descend lower and lower in the direction of the canal; the last one is immersed in the water. There is a plaque on it with the inscription, “To the memory of the homosexuals who were persecuted during the Second World War, before then, afterward, and whenever.” Every so often, unknown perpetrators tear off the plaque, but gays replace it with a new one. To the question, What connection is there between AIDS and the camps and the war?, they reply that it is discrimination and hatred.
After they returned from the funeral, Peter Schok’s friends placed flowers next to the plaque, which was in its proper place that day.
Dutch regulations require the burial of ashes immediately after cremation. They are sprinkled in the crematorium garden or placed in a collective tomb filled with urns, known as a columbarium, which in Latin means a dovecote. Recently, permission has been given to keep ashes at home. Gerrit took advantage of the new law, brought Peter Schok’s ashes home, and put them in his wardrobe. He asked his friends to mix their ashes, his and Peter’s, and to bury them together when his turn comes, and it will not be long in coming.
7
Benjamin G. asked Peter Schok’s mother why Kaddish wasn’t said at the funeral.
“What’s that?” his mother asked.
“The Jewish prayer for the dead.”
She was taken aback.
“They should have said Jewish prayers for my son?”
It turns out that Peter Schok was not a Jew.
His mother tried to understand why her son wanted to be seen as a Jew, but Benjamin G. didn’t know either. Did he wish to abase himself? Did he wish to elevate himself? Was he trying to enroll in the world that he had looked at with such admiration in the Jewish museum?
8
People who are suffering from AIDS are different and they want to die in a different way. They create liturgies of disappearance. They believe that they will become familiar with death and that they won’t be afraid.
Peter Schok ended the scenario with a request for euthanasia. He believed that he had found an appropriate, simple, tasteful form. He was mistaken. It turned into kitsch, because the form was false. It created the illusion that Peter Schok was deciding about his death. In reality, the decision had already been made, but not by him. Peter Schok only chose the date, the music, and the menu.
Nonetheless, one cannot deny Peter Schok’s courage.
1. Faust, Wolfgang Max, Dies alles gibt es also: Alltag, Kunst, AIDS. ein autobiographischer Bericht. Stuttgart, 1993.
HANNA KRALL was born in Warsaw in 1937 and was a reporter for Polityka from 1957 until 1981, when martial law was imposed and her publications were banned. The recipient of numerous international literary awards, her books have been translated into fifteen languages. She lives in Warsaw.
MADELINE G. LEVINE was Czeslaw Milosz’s prose translator. Her translation of Ida Fink’s A Scrap of Time and Other Stories was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
