Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  I asked her what he had promised.

  ‘Does he say the cancer will go away by taking a rest, by meditating, by loving yourself ?’

  ‘It’s possible to program yourself at the cellular level, that’s all he says. Rather than cutting everything away, he goes to the root of the disease.’

  ‘And that’s how he heals people?’

  ‘He’s actually very modest. He says it’s possible, not that it always happens. You’re in control of so much yourself.’

  The healers who seemed most credible, it struck me, were those who admitted they were not perfect. Precisely by not being perfect, by leaving a wide margin for failure, they allowed for the possibility of being healed.

  An older woman, living in a holiday cottage with a canary. Sometimes, on the street or in a restaurant, the whispers and the turned heads were a reminder of the life that had gone before. Now she was back where her life had started, Bourtange was just down the road. She had made a long journey, at the end of it she had come home; to get there all she had to do was cross what they once called the Bourtanger Moor. Aunt Edith, Uncle Gerard, we hadn’t talked about them since, we didn’t know whether they still lived there, whether they were still alive. The rupture had been resolute and irrevocable. The circle had been closed to her. By moving to Meeden she had sought rapprochement, as unemphatically as possible. If asked, she would have denied it.

  She did not go back to the oncological surgeon.

  ‘Why would I do that?’ she said. ‘It’s going fine this way, isn’t it?’

  ‘You promised you would.’

  ‘It has to have a purpose. I don’t see the use of it.’

  She drifted further and further away, increasingly beyond the reach of common sense – she created her own good-luck rituals and found comfort with faith healers and anthroposophists, with the sorcerers. With their lips they claimed to have no intention of luring her away from regular medicine, but supported her in every decision that boiled down to exactly that. Fearing the law, their occult message was dissipated through subterranean vents, the sermons-in-the-field of the natural healers; they were slippery as eels in wet grass. I did not believe their intentions were malevolent. That would have been easier to take, criminal intent, hurting the other in order to reap profit for one’s self. I would have understood such intentions; after all, there are enough people like that. The audacity lay in the fact that they truly believed that their laying on of hands, their home-brewed medicines, their signposts to spiritual transformation would make the cancer go away. Brazen claims, cloaked in false modesty and a humbly stammered who am I that I should be given this gift? The ill person, that weakened, halting organism, suddenly robbed of the health which it had always enjoyed so lightheartedly, is incapable of sealing the breaches. As a result, unfounded messages of hope and comfort come rolling in.

  My powerlessness was total. I could locate no fissures in my mother’s rejection of doctors, operations, radiation, chemo-or hormone therapy. Her opinions were as hard as a church pew. She worked actively on a world view in which doctors and hospital management teams were mere marionettes of the pharmaceutical industry. At the house in Meeden I found magazines and books that fed the paranoia. When a real and probable cause of death came into view, she created for herself an enemy worth fighting.

  ‘The important thing for me isn’t that breast,’ she said. ‘I could live very well with only one breast; the important thing is to listen to what this is telling me. I don’t want to deny myself that opportunity.’

  As principled as she was in her rejection of the physicians’ order, she was opportunistic in equal measure when it came to alternative healers. A woman in the town of Noordwijk aan Zee had tested her polarity with a biotensor and concluded that she did not have cancer at all. These were viruses, and her body was riddled with them. The therapy focused for some time after that on combating viruses. This ran in conjunction with the daily consumption of huge doses of vitamins and minerals, on the advice of a doctor who adhered to the principles of orthomolecular medicine – a pseudo-scientific school of thought that prescribed huge overdoses of nutritional supplements to make up for supposed deficiencies. On his advice she had the amalgam in her teeth replaced with white fillings, in order to reduce toxic load. During meals she swallowed handfuls of pills from a flat plastic box with twelve compartments. Before breakfast she would choke down a paste of bitter almonds.

  And the cancer? It didn’t budge, despite all these efforts. She denied the lack of results.

  ‘Otherwise I might not still be here,’ she said.

  I slammed doors and pulled out of the drive with my tires spitting gravel.

  I dreamed she was dead. It cut me in two.

  She was not afraid of death, she said. She believed in the eternal nature of energy, dying was only a transition from one phase to the next. The transition: in our talks, that was her euphemism for the irrefutable reality of death. I looked at her and I listened, and knew that my puzzlement at this strange creature would never end. I tried to figure out the background to her radical methodology, why she would ignore a medical intervention with a good prognosis. I wanted to understand the psychology of that intolerable irrationality, of that absurdity, but couldn’t actually ask about it because we didn’t speak the same language. I had to put on my ears crooked and tip my brain to one side in order to grasp even a fraction of her notions.

  I found clues in language. I’ve got it pretty much under control, she would say. That was an indicator. I built a little theory around the word control, and the loss of same. To do that I first had to understand the effect on a human of revolving doors, the lobby behind them, the elevators and corridors, the desks covered in papers, the doctor with pager and pens in his breast pocket. As soon as you enter the revolving doors you begin to shrink, you stand powerless opposite the scope and efficiency of the machine. You are turned inside out, they read the message written in your organs and announce it to you in a language you do not yet understand but will quickly come to master. With electrodes on your body and machines sighing all around, you work your way to a conclusion, a diagnosis, a prognosis. The straw to clutch at, the thread to dangle by, you had never known how enormously important they would be one day. In the revolving doors you leave behind much of who you are, beneath the bleak incandescent lighting and suspended ceilings you shrivel to the size of your defect and finally become one with it. You lose the authority you never really had anyway; no-one has a say when it comes to his own cells. Then, narcosis, the ultimate loss of control. A stranger’s hands grub around in your organs, scissors clip, scalpels cut, retractors prop your body open and drains suck out your juices. You are not present, you could just as well be someone else, it’s not about you. All those concepts you once applied to your status as an individual no longer exist.

  No history, only current events.

  That was how I imagined her wordless fear.

  We went back to the hospital only when she thought she felt something in her breast.

  ‘Maybe it’s just an infection,’ she hushed.

  Let it be a tumor, was the thought that shot through my mind, let the bastards be proven wrong.

  But the results produced no triumph.

  ‘We clearly see a tumor now,’ the surgeon said.

  There are no other sounds. Only that voice, that little sentence. The same woman as last time.

  ‘We can’t be completely sure whether it’s formed secondaries yet.

  And I don’t think it looks good, as you put it. The infiltrative mamma carcinoma, the tumor, which started in the milk ducts, has spread to the inside. And the underlying tumor has, as it were, drawn the nipple back. Made it disappear. Had you noticed that?’

  ‘I had noticed that, yes,’ my mother said.

  ‘There are ulcerations on the breast. We’ll have to deal with those right away, if you don’t do anything the holes in the skin will become larger and larger.’

  ‘Oh, but I’m not at all sur
e that I want that.’

  Everything about Dr. Rooyaards fell silent. Except for her eyes, where an expression seemed to deepen.

  ‘I’d really have to think about that first,’ my mother went on. ‘I don’t want, now that I’ve come this far . . . no.’

  She had already regrouped; the surprise, the shock, encapsulated in an instant – she had once again taken control.

  ‘I have the impression,’ Rooyaards said, ‘but correct me if I’m wrong, that you think I’m saying these things because I’m somehow against you. But that is not the case, Mrs. Unger, believe me. I see a malignancy in your breast, a red, tumorous tissue. It needn’t be too late. You have to seize this chance. If you don’t, then you will truly have given up a real opportunity to recover. That would be such a pity, Mrs. Unger, such a pity. You owe it to yourself. You do want to get better, don’t you?’

  For a moment I was in love with her. She was beautiful in her plea – gestures of restrained, impotent anger, a powerful force being held in check and reduced in language to the proportions of reasonability. A tour de force, a lovely thing to see. For just a moment there I thought it might work, that Marthe Unger would allow herself to be lured to this side of the fence. Then the ax fell.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have to remain faithful to myself. I have to . . .’

  That was all there was. The judgment remained suspended in that vacuum, the decision about how she was going to die.

  And I wanted her dead, oh yes. It had all taken long enough. Applause, curtains and zip back home. I would sing as I cremated her body. Her just deserts. Her faithlessness, the egoism. The whims, the irresponsibility and the recklessness; the fears which, in addition to life itself, she had awakened in me with a kiss. For all these things there was only one appropriate sanction.

  You have no idea what it’s like, that’s why you’re able to think such things. You don’t know a thing about it.

  I smelled it whenever I came in, the smell of rotting. Her body had already begun decomposing, while inside there, inside that skin, there was still someone living who insisted that spontaneous remissions occur quite frequently. She stuffed perfume-drenched handkerchiefs into her bra to stanch the flow from her nipple, but the smell came right through it, right through her clothing and the shroud of Chanel No. 5. Incense drifted through the room like a mist. Did she know that her end had come? That the net was drawing closed? I begged her not to wait any longer for an operation.

  ‘But then I would only be doing it for you, Ludwig. Is that what you want, for me to be unfaithful to myself because you wanted me to let them cut into me?’

  Once the day and the hour had been established, would the anger stop then? Perhaps one lays down one’s weapons as soon as there is nothing more to be lost or won. When the days of your life are still unnumbered, you lived in a carefree eternity, it could end tomorrow or never, who’s to say? Within that free space you have every opportunity to fight your wars, to defend your interests, to run amok with impunity.

  Until it slams to a halt.

  We were not the ones present anymore, the only things in the room were my despair and her denial. More often than that, I felt nothing at all. Then I would sit there looking at her with the cold eyes of a fish, not knowing whether her death would bring me joy or sorrow.

  The windows were wide open all the time now. The canary still did not sing. The stench was unbearable. The thought of turning my back on her did occur to me, it occurred to me often, but I knew I lacked the strength for such radicalness. Why remain loyal for a lifetime and then jump ship just before the end?

  ‘Maybe you should put some more eau de cologne on it,’ I say. ‘You stink.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate, for once.’

  ‘It smells here of the Third World. The alley behind a restaurant.’

  ‘If you’re going to start in again, then just go away.’

  All you see is the current manifestation, you and her, today. Far away, invisible now, are the things that happened; she, your young mother, smoking cigarettes absently at Trianon, you with your nose up against the pastry display case, or how she brushes your hair, for a very long time and very slowly, as you lie rolled up like a cat on her lap – but those things no longer play a role in the cruel, acute now in which you pound away at each other’s souls.

  When finally, because there was really no way around it, she allowed them to operate on her breast – that breast seen by so many eyes, desired by countless, now riddled with cancer and reeking horribly – she did so under protest, as though she were being forced into it. She could not admit the defeat, the failure. She felt betrayed. The miracle had not happened. Her belief and dogged faith had not been rewarded. The cosmos, the powers, no hand had reached out to her. She felt wronged and angry, in a voice thick with emotion she said, ‘It’s really hard to keep believing now. Really hard.’

  Her tears were called loneliness, loneliness, loneliness. She entered the night in a white hospital smock with buttons down the back.

  The cone excision, whereby both the nipple and the underlying, damaged glandular tissue were removed, called for post-treatment with radiation, but she refused point blank.

  ‘Your mother might get lucky,’ Dr. Rooyaards told me. ‘There’s no guaranteeing it, but she might.’

  She had counted on a miracle and now all she could do was hope for good luck. Two days later she was allowed to go home, out through the revolving doors, to find her life again, see if it still fit. In the car I asked how she was feeling.

  ‘Oh, good, yeah.’

  At home she lay down on her bed, asked me to bring her her glasses and a scarf. When I came back, she was sound asleep. The smell of cadaver had disappeared. I whistled quietly to the canary, unilaterally, and cleaned its cage. Then I gave it clean water and fresh seed. At the little village Attent supermarket, I did some shopping. Because of my hotel-hopping I had never learned to cook well, but I did know how to whip together pasta with anchovies and tomato.

  ‘Sorry, sweetheart, but I’m not very hungry,’ she said after pecking at her food a few times.

  She went back to sleep. It was pleasant to care for her, her enfeeblement fostered a certain harmony. From the doorway I looked at her and thought about her life, about how she had cashed in on desire, twice over in fact, but that now, in the act of dying, had fallen from the pinnacle of the big top all the way to the ground, all the way to this bed.

  On the nightstand a votive candle was lit beneath a little copper bowl of aromatic oil. Draperies on the walls, Oriental covers on the bed. Her bedroom was a time machine, it took me back to the parts of my biography that were closed off with curtains.

  She opened her eyes. Her hospital voice, ‘I guess I must have dropped off.’

  The skin on her face was full of fine lines, as though she had walked through a cobweb.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Please. Nice. And a paracetamol, please.’

  ‘Are you in pain? All we have is ibuprofen.’

  ‘My head hurts, a little. Ibuprofen is okay.’

  The most pleasant memories have to do with time running short, with days that are numbered. Those weeks after the operation, the waiting at Kings Ness. The hallowed, white mood in the house. Finiteness is the precondition.

  On the table lay a plastic folder with the punch card of patient M. Unger, and the confirmation of our appointment. The date was crawling closer, you could hear it breathing. Again that desk at which we sat side by side, and Dr. Rooyaards behind it. Her glasses were on the table. What it boiled down to was this: the scan showed metastases in the brain. My mother nodded. Kept doing that, a toy dog on the rear shelf. The voice from the other side, ‘I wish it could be different.’

  The standstill of that moment, a frozen throne room, blue as the heart of a glacier; the king has icicles in his beard, the wine stands slanted and hard as steel in the chalices, the queen waits sadly for spring to arrive.

  ‘We all have to go sometime,’ m
y mother said.

  My record button had been pushed; later – when I was once again present – I would play it all back again. How long? was a question, because nothing to do about it was a certainty now. Hesitation from across the desk, depends on so many factors, for example . . . My mother was immediately decisive about forms of therapy that could prolong life. Oh no, not now, all of a sudden . . . no, absolutely not.

  A phrase came to mind, one I didn’t even know I knew: lingering terminal course.

  It was the last time we went out through the revolving doors. Heading for the big thaw.

  Which was then followed by life as predicted. The headaches. The infernal headaches. And, after a few weeks, the vomiting. Each morning the heartrending retching. With every passing day there was less of her left, it seemed as though she were being eaten during the night. There were conversations with the general physician, the making of preparations. The unthinkable. The GP dressed like an Englishman, drove a Land Rover. Dantuma, no first name. He would have preferred to express himself solely in punctuation marks. No more than three months, he told me.

  ‘I’d be surprised if it was any longer than that.’

  If he recognized her at all, he never let on.

  One morning I took the car to Bourtange. I had found the address in the phone book, I knew what I was looking for. I drove slowly along the canal. My memories took place in a different season, but I was that little boy on the scooter. The farm, the dismal bricks. I climbed out like someone in a film, and the events that followed were also part of the scenario I’d anticipated. A dog begins to bark, after a little while a stable door opens. A man comes out. Blue KLM overalls, leather clogs on his feet. It almost has to be him, but I don’t recognize him.