Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  ‘But Ludwig, maybe I would have been dead a long time ago if I’d let them cut into me. You read so much about women who have a breast removed and then die because it spread to the lymph glands or brain.’

  ‘I’m sure there also plenty of women to whom that doesn’t happen.’

  Two girls in white uniforms come in. One of them sits down at her feet, the other settles beside her; they finish the treatment. Visions of hospitals, the earnestness of doctors. You have only that one, irreproducible life – they see dozens come by, just like you. You don’t understand how that can be, that they don’t attach the same importance to your life as you do: the feeling that someone has insulted you gravely.

  My mother looks at me. I still haven’t answered her question.

  ‘Of course I’ll go along,’ I say. ‘What do you think?’

  Her bathroom floor was littered with pills. Yellow pills, red and green. Pills that had rolled away, slipped through her fingers. This was how she treated herself: according to her own plan and her own insights. A yellow parachute unfurled above the sea, a minuscule nuclear explosion on the horizon.

  ‘Guten Tag!’ the homo quacked into the microphone.

  It was four o’clock, time for belly-dancing lessons to begin. An older woman was taking part, watched from a recliner by her young Arab lover. The woman appeared each morning at breakfast in a batik skirt, her white hair still wet, her water-color face expressionless. Africa! The continent of hope for lonely women from the North. Drenched in honey, they drew swarms of starving flies as soon as they touched down.

  That evening we went to a show in the Coquille Room, where the concept of shells was unraveled to the point of being nerve-racking. A man danced with five jugs balanced on his head. Six. Seven. The audience clapped along to the beat of the music. White children were sitting on the edge of the stage. The man was also able to balance seven jugs on the point of a stick, with the stick resting on his lower teeth. There were fat belly dancers, the flesh swaying independently of their bodies.

  ‘So that’s where all the food goes!’ my mother whispered. She was amazed each day anew at the piles of food in the restaurant.

  Armies were fed here, the supply lines were kept open and profuse.

  The wind had died down, but I kept the doors closed, irritated by the inane hissing of the sea. The beach was a complete shambles by now – the despair and the ecstasy after the apocalypse.

  I didn’t understand my own feelings: even now, now that Death was spreading through her from the breast from which I had drunk of life, the heavens were aligned in fruitless, impotent hatred. I’d thought I had gained a certain autonomy, but now that we were together again it turned out that the longing for retaliation had not disappeared. The clarity had existed by grace of the distance we had maintained since parting in Prague. These days, however, I was better able to control my aversion, the bitterness and the whims that tasted of defeat remained largely behind the pickets of my teeth and the smoke screen of my eyes.

  The only memories of a kind of happiness, during those weeks on Djerba, have to do with food – with the regular, copious, distracting food into which we dug with a vengeance.

  Once in Holland, we settled down at a little distance from each other. She hired a holiday cottage east of the city of Groningen, outside the village of Meeden. I moved into a furnished flat in the center of the provincial capital and began my life as a Dutchman. A small, inconspicuous existence that took place within the space of roughly one square kilometer: the walking distance from my apartment on the market square to the casino (where a theater agent had found me a job), the walk along the Diepenring and the routes to the grand cafés and sandwich shops where I started my day.

  All that time, it seemed, she was in no hurry at all to die, that mother of mine. Shortly after our arrival, at my insistence, she had submitted to a checkup at the hospital. A mammogram and echogram were made of breast and armpit, I sat in the waiting room and read magazines and tabloids in a language I had once known fairly well, but which time had now partly erased. I understood everything, but spoke Dutch now like a dead language; people listened in amusement to the misshapen diphthongs, wrongly stressed syllables, the faulty vocabulary; all those misunderstandings. When they switched to English to make things easier for me, I refused with the pride of an ambitious immigrant and went on failing to hit the mark, like a drunken man in a shooting gallery.

  My mother came out of the doctor’s office, I fetched tea for us from the machine. She was disappointed; on this of all days the wound had been producing a great deal of pus. She blamed her breast for this; it had been calm for some time, closed as she called it, and now, today, now that other eyes had looked at it, the breast had been disobedient. From her talk with the oncological surgeon it appeared that there was as yet no tumor in the underlying gland tissue, it had in any case been difficult to see. It was still too early to determine whether it had spread to her lymph system.

  ‘Could I ask what you’re planning to do about this?’ asked the surgeon, a lively woman with braces on her lower teeth and her hair in a ponytail.

  My mother told her about the course of treatment she’d prescribed for herself, the nutritional supplements, the salt treatment, the iodine she rubbed on it every morning (that smarts, you know!), and finally about her planned visit to the man who had entered our lives like a benedictory priest: Dr. Richard H. Kloos, a Dutchman who had his practice in Cologne. I fixed my gaze on the woman across from us. My mother’s exuberance had to do with the favorable results of a few minutes earlier, the stay of execution that she celebrated as a triumph.

  That was how we left the hospital, with handfuls of new life and the promise that my mother would come in for regular checkups. I walked her to the station, to catch her bus. The city was covered in uniform, milky winter light, the sun was pale as a moon.

  ‘This was the town I longed for as a girl,’ she said. ‘Sometimes we went shopping here, the streets were the longest and broadest in the whole world. Anything you could think of, you could buy it here.’

  In the station restaurant we drank hot chocolate with whipped cream, she ordered a slice of apple pie with more whipped cream to go with it. I knew that the chance of her listening to the counsel of medical science had decreased even further today.

  ‘Could you pass me the sugar?’

  She slid the bowl across the table to me.

  ‘Do you want some of my whipped cream, I’ve got so much!’

  ‘A little bit, thanks.’

  I raised my cup.

  ‘To a painless death.’

  ‘Oh, Ludwig, please!’

  After that I waved to her as the bus pulled away, as fervently as though we were traveling to opposite shores of a great sea.

  We saw each other again when I picked her up in Meeden. We were going to Cologne. In her low-ceilinged living room was a cage with an orange canary in it. The little bird hopped nervously back and forth, a mixture of birdseed and shell sand on the floor beneath the cage crunched under my feet.

  ‘I decided to buy myself a canary,’ she said, ‘but it never sings at all. The birds outside peep the same way. If something doesn’t change I’m going to take him back to the shop. I wanted something I could talk to, but this is hopeless.’

  That odor of holiday cottages, of musty closets, moist blankets. I could smell it right through the haze of incense and guttered candles, the smell of an abandoned place, not heated or maintained by human energy. Her appointment was for early the next morning, so we were going to sleep in Cologne. I hoisted her suitcase, heavy enough for someone leaving home for weeks, into the rental car and waited until she was ready. When she finally sat down beside me she smelled like a seraglio, and said with a touch of impatience, ‘Okay, let’s get going.’

  As the highway opened up before us, I said, ‘Could I ask you from now on to use just a little less eau de cologne? I’m feeling a bit dizzy.’

  ‘So open your window. Come on.’

/>   After that we remained silent until we had passed Zwolle. Then she asked, ‘Have you ever seen that girl from Los Angeles again? The one you were so crazy about?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I dream about her sometimes,’ I said. ‘Every time I spend the first night in a new country, strangely enough. It’s like clockwork. Sometimes a little more often, but always the first night after I’ve crossed the border, when I’m lying in a strange bed, under a strange sky.’

  ‘Strange, yeah.’

  ‘I think I’m the only person in the world who has that. I’ve never heard of it or read about it anywhere. The Unger Syndrome.’

  ‘There must be other people who have the same thing.’

  ‘You’re probably right. But now I’ve coined the term.’

  ‘Have you ever become involved with a girl after that? For a longer period of time, I mean.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re thirty now.’

  ‘Almost.’

  Only at dinner, late that evening in Cologne, did she broach the subject again.

  ‘So why don’t you have any girlfriends?’

  Because you’re still alive, I thought, but I said something else.

  ‘Maybe because I don’t really need anyone anymore, as you once told me.’

  ‘Did I say that? I’m surprised you remember.’

  I examined her face in search of hidden meanings, but she seemed to have truly forgotten about it, the evil spell, the shadow at my back.

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve actually forgotten saying that.’

  ‘Really, I have. What did I say? That you didn’t really need anyone anymore? That’s true, isn’t it? You can’t expect someone else to compensate for your defects. People should be together because they’re free to do that, not out of dependency.’

  ‘It meant something else, back then.’

  ‘But it’s not because you prefer boys, is it? That’s not why you don’t have girlfriends, is it? I mean, it could be, right? It happens more often to boys who are very much focused on their mother, when there’s no father figure around.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  ‘I want so badly to be a grandmother.’

  I shook my head, a punch-drunk boxer. The bite of schnitzel had concealed a clump of gristle. I raised my napkin to my mouth and discreetly spat out the meat.

  ‘Nice?’ she asked.

  ‘Mmmmm. Could you pass the salt?’

  This is how the day began:

  She: I think that’s such a nice thought, that we don’t breathe ourselves, but that we are breathed.

  I: Briefed?

  She: Breathed. That we are breathed.

  I: By whom, exactly?

  She: Oh please, let’s not start at breakfast.

  A little later we were standing before the Privatpraxis of PD Dr. Med. Richard H. Kloos, Arzt für Allgemeinmedizin und Naturheilkunde, and coincidentally the world’s last wearer of bowties. The body of the good doctor himself, it appeared, was seized regularly by heavy tremors. The cups on his desk rattled, the water rocked in the pitcher. The bowtie and the tremors lent him credibility, just as the seer is often blind and the shaman lame or crippled. Those are the afflictions with which the god has smitten them, so they can speak the truth profoundly. I heard my mother saying . . . to give my own body a chance first . . . thoroughly detoxify . . . so much old pain . . . And he: Everything is connected with everything else, everyone produces cancer cells all day long. Back in 1912, Rudolf Steiner said . . . That’s right, he knew about the effectiveness of mistletoe as well. It’s so good for people, mistletoe, it’s a gift. I had cancer myself, that’s when I found out about the power of mistletoe, I owe my life to mistletoe! I want do something in return for mistletoe!

  And once again the storm of muscular contractions shook the table. When it was over he arranged his bleached locks and dabbed at his moustache as though it had been knocked out of place. My mother nodded contentedly. She was in the presence of a peer, she didn’t have to defend herself. Dr. Richard H. Kloos didn’t even have to work hard in order to convince her to follow the fifty-thousand-euro course of treatment. I tried with all my might to catch his meaning when he proceeded into a lecture about Natural Killer Cells – dendritic cells, each and every one of them capable of destroying five thousand cancer cells. The armies of cancer and anti-cancer paraded around the table. The treatment he had developed boiled down to a form of own-blood therapy and was allowed only in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. From what I understood, my mother’s blood would be tapped off and the monocytes, the baby white-blood cells, would be separated from it. Within seven days, Richard Kloos said, the monocytes would be converted into healthy dendritic cells and then injected back into the bloodstream. The treatment would involve six visits to the clinic.

  ‘Two to four hours after the treatment you come down with a kind of flu. There is so much going on in your immune system that it produces symptoms of feverishness. I would advise you not to travel during that period, but to take a hotel and wait until you recover.’

  When he was called out of the room for a minute, my mother said contentedly, ‘A real man of science.’

  He then took us on a tour of the clinic. We saw the long rectangular boxes into which the patients were put during their treatment. The temperature inside was then cranked up to a maximum of forty-two degrees centigrade; it was at that temperature, Kloos said, that the protein in cancer cells began to coagulate, while the protein in normal, healthy cells did so only at forty-four degrees. We peeked into a room where a woman was lying on a waterbed.

  ‘She’s developing an electron field,’ Kloos said.

  He stood in the doorway and winked at my mother. I heard him say,‘. . . that’s exactly what Rudolf Steiner said, isn’t it?’

  Back in his office we waited politely for his tremors – which had started this time in mid-sentence – to end. He resumed, ‘What I can’t tell everyone, but feel comfortable telling you, is that we also accept payment in cash. Off the record, if your insurance won’t cover the treatment.’

  We left Cologne and followed the snarl of autobahns. That part of Europe looks, on the map, like the web of veins on an old woman’s leg. From beside me came a voice dipped in the bittersweetness of self-pity.

  ‘I felt sort of sad last night when you didn’t want to take my arm.’

  I said nothing. She said, ‘What I thought was: there will come a day when you’ll get down on your bare knees and beg to be able to still give me your arm.’

  Above the fields, the cloud cover roiled, veils of rain hung from the sky.

  ‘Even in death you still manipulate me,’ I said.

  Six disastrous trips to Cologne followed. In addition to the patent agonies of war, torture and famine, there is also the agony of family. Along the high quays of Cologne, above the river that swept deep and wide through its channel, I thought with irksome regularity on the words Randy Newman had written with the Rhine in mind. I’m looking at the river. But I’m thinking of the sea. The first two times I stayed with her during the treatment in the box, that stage prop from the theater of illusionists in which Richard H. Kloos was a player as well. Her head, resting on a towel, was the only thing sticking out of it. I sat in a chair beside her and watched as she was slowly warmed up. Her face grew redder and redder. The sweat poured off her. Sometimes the skepticism and the chill in my soul left, to make way for the irrational hope that this via dolorosa would lead to healing, that it was actually possible. Kloos, after all, had said that fifteen percent of the women who came to him were completely healed by his treatment. Sixty percent showed partial remission, and twenty-five percent died anyway. One hundred percent of everyone who came here tried to wriggle their way into that fifteen percent. They all did their best. Belief was the most important condition. Anyone who did not believe had given up all hope of being healed and was lost. And so they believed, the women I saw shuffling down the hall, skinny and exhausted in their fluffy bathrobes, they bel
ieved in the magic power of dendritic cells and the magic hand of Dr. Richard H. Kloos, the mediator between life and death. They believed in the face of everything, in order to win a place in the Lucky Fifteen. I dabbed at her face with a cloth, which I had to change for another after the second time, so freely did the sweat run.

  At one point she wept silently, tears mingled with the sweat. I laid my hand for a moment on her forehead, the soaked hair, and said everything would be all right. Thin, stupid comfort. A formula with no heart. Through her exhaustion I saw, for the first time, traces of fear in her eyes, like a horse sinking into quicksand. The mammal’s fear of life going on without it, while it disappears into ultimate darkness. Suddenly these torments no longer constituted the road to healing, but the gates to the unspeakable suffering that awaited; tears dripped onto the towel. I raised the straw to her lips, she sucked water from the cup.

  The third time we went she said she would rather have a nurse beside her.

  ‘I can do it from now on without you there,’ she said. ‘I sort of know what’s coming. I’d rather have someone there who’s giving it their full attention. I had to ask you to wipe my face the whole time. You had such a cold look in your eye. You made me feel kind of dirty.’

  Shortly after the first treatment at Dr. Kloos’s clinic, a woman who had become my mother’s special friend in adversity died. Her breast had been amputated, the cancer had returned after a few years, she had been living off an outside chance. My mother went to her funeral. When she came back she said she wanted to be cremated. She repeated her phrase about not planning to die soon, but still . . . What she really wanted was to be burnt on a wooden platform on the banks of the Ganges, but she didn’t want to force that kind of logistical feat on me.

  She was waiting for a miracle. Dr. Kloos may not have healed her, yet still she felt a part of that sixty percent, the ones who exhibited partial response. There were new miracle makers, whom she referred to as physicians and scientists, one of whom lived in the woods in Drenthe Province. He said, ‘Marthe, it’s one minute to twelve. You have to start working on loving yourself, on your self-appreciation, right now. It’s not too late.’