‘Uncle Gerard?’ I say.
A movement at the periphery of my vision, a face behind the kitchen curtains. I recognize that one.
‘It’s me,’ I say. ‘Ludwig, Marthe’s son.’
‘Ludwig. My oh my. Ludwig. I’m flabbergasted.’
‘Uncle Gerard.’
We shake hands. He, the giant, is as tall as I am.
‘Gerard?’
The woman pokes her head out the door. My aunt Edith.
‘It’s Marthe’s boy,’ he says.
We sit at the kitchen table. Only the people here have grown older, the oak furniture and thick tablecloth are ageless. Are the children of black sheep automatically black sheep themselves? I drink weak coffee from a cup that recalls the coronation of Queen Beatrix. Our lives in broken sentences; the locations, not the deeds.
‘My oh my oh my,’ Uncle Gerard says a few times.
My aunt says nothing, keeps her hands folded on the tabletop as though praying. They still farm, but a lot less than before. They’ve leased out some of their land, it was too much for them to keep up. The Natural Heritage Foundation bought a large chunk of it, which has now been left to grow wild.
‘Such good soil . . .’
During a silence I say, ‘But the reason I came here . . .’
The diagnosis, the prognosis, a few details from the files. They don’t know what to say.
‘And in Meeden all that time. Just up the road,’ Uncle Gerard says, shaking his head.
‘But what do you expect us to do?’ his wife says. ‘After all these years . . .’
‘I understand that,’ I say. ‘But I just thought maybe the two of you would want to know. And now – there’s still a little time left.’
Uncle Gerard walked me to the car.
‘It’s a shock to her,’ he says.
A man accustomed to explaining his wife.
‘She just needs some time. We’ll call tomorrow.’
That is what happened. They wanted to see her, my uncle said on the phone.
Now I had to tell my mother. She was sitting on the couch, a magazine beside her, a shawl draped over her shoulders. She was cold all the time now. It was April, life outside was bursting at the seams.
‘Those people,’ she said. ‘What would they do here?’
And then that afternoon, out of the blue.
‘Let them come. If they want to so badly.’
An artery pulsed at the side of her neck, like a lizard’s. The heating was set at twenty-three degrees. She ate little, less all the time. We didn’t talk about what had gone before all this, it seemed never to have existed. We lived in the here and now-pain, now-tired, now-vomiting, now-tired-again, now-headache, now-sleep. We, because powerlessness is also suffering, a derivative form.
In the evening the couch was mine. I would wake up in the same position in which I had fallen asleep. Her shuffling about woke me. She was clutching the toilet, it seemed as though her body were doing its utmost to rid itself of its organs. I gagged with her. The pressure in her brain meant she could barely read. That was how it went, you stood there and watched. The devastation. This was what the end looked like. It was cruel and disgusting. And no-one anywhere with whom one could file a complaint. In how many houses, behind how many front doors, did this take place?
‘Try eating a little bit,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t appeal to me.’
‘As long as you eat more than the cancer, we’re still ahead of the game.’ She did her best. A few bites to humor me. I bought apple sauce, she liked ice lollies. Yogurt and custard pudding were often too rich for her. I ate the custard and searched the kitchen drawers for a bottle licker, which wasn’t there. Beneath her skin the anatomical model began to appear, the tendons, veins, bones. Slowly, the sick old woman shuffled around the house. The heat had already left her. Along with the heat, the color had disappeared as well. The layers were being peeled off, further and further.
‘Without the headache, this would be bearable,’ she said. ‘The headache is the worst part.’
‘You could always go in for radiation. That would ease the pain.’
She smiled faintly, shook her head. Echoes of the old struggle.
‘There they are,’ I said one Saturday morning.
An Opel Astra, gleaming in the sun. I opened the door, a rustle of springtime slipped past me into the house. Uncle Gerard was carrying the flowers. My mother had dressed for the occasion. (Unsinkability.) She got up and walked to the door. They were shocked when they saw her, how could they not be? The last time he had seen her was beside the canal where she had been swimming; I knew he was thinking back on her body.
A meeting like this, an event from which you withdraw, back into your shell, rattle my cage when it’s over. But that’s impossible! You’re the intermediary, the man in the middle, fluff pillows is what you have to do, make coffee, green tea, you’ve bought little cakes with pink icing because that’s what they served you. They sit around the table, the subject lies between them. Conversation as though someone’s walking on glass.
‘So what now?’ says my mother, echoing her sister’s words. ‘Now I’m going to die.’
The old feuds mobilize new forces within her.
‘I did everything I could. It just wasn’t supposed to be.’
‘Mostly alternative things, though, weren’t they? That’s what Ludwig said.’
‘Alternative isn’t really the right word for it. It should be standard, and the other stuff should be the alternative.’
My uncle and aunt remain silent in order not to have to say that she’s dying now of a cancer that could have been treated easily, because that’s what I told them.
‘If you think you did the right thing, then that’s the way it is.’
(Aunt Edith signs the Treaty of Versailles.) Then they talk about the old days. Their father’s farm. Aunt Wichie is still alive, she’s eighty-eight, she’s already outlived him by almost ten years. An outsider would think he was looking at two families flashing each other bits of history from behind glass. Uncle Gerard mostly keeps his mouth shut. So do I. It’s about the two of them. Whether she’s planning to stay here, Aunt Edith asks. My mother looks at me and smiles.
‘That depends,’ she says.
Then it’s time for them to leave. The fruit trees across the way are in blossom. Blackbirds chase each other, cackling beneath the barberry. The people are tired to the bone.
The pain she talked about was not the pain she felt.
‘As long as it’s bearable, it’s bearable,’ the GP said.
We talked about my role in nursing her. Terminal care, Dantuma said, was a completely different story.
Uncle Gerard called, asked me to come, they needed to talk to me. I got a shortbread biscuit along with the coffee. Aunt Edith started.
‘We’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘Gerard and I . . .’
He nodded.
‘. . . and first of all we want to say that we think it’s really good what you’re doing there all by yourself, we admire that. But we think it would be better for her to come here. For as long as she has left. Then you don’t have to do it all on your own. It’s going to get really difficult. Nobody can do that alone.’
‘Maybe Dantuma can arrange a place in a hospice,’ I said. ‘And besides, I don’t know whether she’ll want to. She’s not’ – and here I couldn’t help laughing – ‘the easiest person.’
‘Marthe will realize that it’s the best thing for her and for you,’ Uncle Gerard said. ‘She can’t leave this up to you on your own.’
‘But where would I stay?’ I asked. ‘I don’t want to drive down here every day from the city . . .’
‘Plenty o’ room here,’ Uncle Gerard said.
That was the message I took back to Meeden. She wasn’t in the living room. I poked my head into her room. She was lying on the bed.
‘So glad,’ she panted, ‘you’re back.’
Tears were running down her cheeks. The nigh
tstand had been knocked over, the flame under the oil had been extinguished in the fall. An epileptic seizure. The first. She couldn’t be left alone anymore, not even to pop out for some shopping, the risk of another seizure was too great for that. It didn’t take me much effort to convince her to move to Bourtange. Maybe she had only been waiting for someone to ask.
She lay in the guestroom, where the blue-flowered wallpaper was the same as ever. I sat on the edge of the bed, bending over her the way she had once bent over me, when she’d said goodbye before her big trip. For the first few days she still came down the stairs at times, but that soon stopped. She no longer had the strength to get out of bed. The bedroom smelled of urine, Dantuma inserted a catheter and gave her morphine. The pounding pain in her head obstructed the blessing of a deep, uninterrupted sleep.
The poplars along the canal wore exuberant, fresh green. I walked down to the locks, it wasn’t far, not the Homeric journey of my memories. Once she was no longer around, I would have no-one left. Only a father in the jungle. No more shared past, not a single remember when. The Last of the Mohicans meets Alone in the World, only now you’re crying for yourself and not for some dead Indian or for a little orphan boy roaming the back roads of France. Not my kind of thing, crying; I always feel like someone’s watching. I always cry in tandem.
This morning she thought we were on Kings Ness, she was worried and sad because we were going to lose everything. Now, in her terminal unrest, those things affect her more than they did at the time. She groans quietly in pain, like a little dog. She can barely work down her pills. With angelic patience, Aunt Edith feeds her little sips of water. I’m glad we came here, that her deathbed stands where her cradle once stood. Sometimes Uncle Gerard and I are cheerful – just the two of us, Aunt Edith is not equipped with that particular feature – and laugh loudly at jokes that aren’t even that funny. A herald of relief ? The canary’s cage is hanging in the front room. The bird is silent as the grave.
She’s so afraid sometimes, from the inner depths her demons are now freeing themselves. I sit in a chair beside her bed and watch her body withdraw from life, as Elias Canetti wrote: the dying take the world with them. Where to?
Dantuma injects her with sedatives, and an antipsychotic to ease her confusion. She crawls back into herself, deeper and deeper all the time.
Sometimes, like a swimmer, she surfaces for air.
‘Ludwig,’ she says, ‘my faithful Ludwig.’
Then she’s gone again, back into the depths where no-one can follow.
One time she awoke with a start.
‘Come! Come!’ she said agitatedly.
I leaned over her, she threw her arms around my neck and pulled me down with unexpected force. Her mouth was on my neck, the dry, cracked lips, sucking greedily at my flesh. A lover’s kiss, the last attempt to return to life – with a scream I pushed myself away from her.
‘Jesus Christ!’
I rubbed my neck, where the vampire kiss still burned.
Aunt Edith came running up the stairs.
‘It’s nothing,’ I said, ‘I was only startled.’
She lay in bed grinning, her obscenely large teeth bared.
Dantuma boosted the dosages of Dormicum and Haldol. Above her cheekbones was a gauntness, her temples had receded to hollows. The emerging pattern of her skull. When we saw the dark spots appearing on her arms, the prognosis became more precise. Her calendar was reduced to days, hours. One more time she raised her head above water. She saw me, around her lips appeared the shadow of a smile.
‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ she whispered.
Through a clump of tears I said, ‘Yeah, Mama, I’m all right.’
She closed her eyes, frowned slightly.
‘Funny,’ she murmured. ‘You never called me Mama before.’
The crematorium in Winschoten. The female funeral director, Aunt Edith, Uncle Gerard and me. Sitting at the back is a man we don’t know. Aunt Wichie has written me a card. Aunt Edith hands it to me. Regular, thin handwriting, the way she was taught eighty years ago at a village school in the peat district. I put the card in my inside pocket. First the funeral director, who tells us what we are going to hear. I already know, I picked it myself. Moody Blues, ‘Nights in White Satin’, an abridged version. Then ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ – songs she sang on the streets of Los Angeles. I step up to the front. I’ll call you Mama. Ignore the embarrassment. I will tell the people how beautiful you were, honeysuckle, roses. Don’t worry, I won’t go too heavy on the mush; your life, after all, is reflected painfully enough on this day. This is your audience: a man we don’t know, your sister and brother-in-law with whom you weren’t on speaking terms and me . . . well, you know how that was. It takes two, and we never pulled our punches. Too heavy, this? An anecdote then, the light touch. About your vanity. That once, deeply insulted, you told me someone had guessed your age as forty-five. But you are forty-five, aren’t you? I said. You: But then that’s still no reason to say it!
Canned laughter, please. Uncle Gerard’s chuckle is really a bit too paltry.
Of all the requiems I’ve come up with for you in my life, this final one is truly the most wretched. It’s so prosaic, real death doesn’t sound at all like a requiem, it doesn’t echo at all. A requiem is thinking about death, not death itself. Sometimes I used to tell you the texts of my funeral orations, a game, a charm against misfortune. As long as I could tell you about it, everything was as it should be. One time I accidentally predicted what would actually happen much, much later. I told you what I would say if you would die after a long illness. I used the word strong. You bridled. Strong? You could say that about anybody who’s been sick a long time. A little more special, if you please. I replaced it with fearless. Much better, you said. Do that one. This is your day, Mom, here is your word, you fearless one. You chose it yourself.
But that I, in my youthful impetuosity, called you an angel, I take that back. You were not that. Or at least no more than half. The other half truly consisted of more warm-blooded material.
Well then, it’s now up to me to determine how you will be remembered, the counterfeiting has begun. You no longer harass me with who you are. I can love you better that way. Peace, Mother, peace. The loveliest lie wins, as it always has. Too much truth isn’t good for a body. The same thing goes for loss. And now that I have no-one left to lose, I prefer to have you around in my memories as good company. If you have trouble going along with that, then please try a little harder. Try to humor me a little for a change.
I am now someone without you. That knowledge . . .
Better to play something for you. I’ve chosen Beethoven’s Marcia Funebre Sulla Morte d’un Eroe, especially for you. I’ll play it for you as though I were in the Royal Festival Hall. And if you sort of close your eyes and peek through your lashes, then that’s where we’ll be. I’m waving to you. You’re moving further away, you’re all the way at the back of that dark concert hall now, I can barely see you. Goodbye, Mama. Goodbye.
After laying a hand on the coffin and mumbling things, we left the auditorium – the dispatch would take place in our absence. We stood together in the reception room, a bit bedraggled. The unknown man came up to offer his condolences, his eyes averted,.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Nice of you to come.’
And then, to his back, while he was already walking away, I asked, ‘Excuse me, sir, but could I ask your name?’
He turned around, took a few steps towards us.
‘Boender,’ he said.
The Rolodex, and fast! Boender?! Boender!
‘The musician!’ I said. ‘You went with my mother to Los Angeles . . .’
He nodded.
‘A long time ago, yeah.’
The local dialect. Aunt Edith and Uncle Gerard stood there, staring blankly at this encounter that moved me for reasons I didn’t quite understand.
‘Guitar player, right? Route 66?’
‘Yup,’ he said.
&nb
sp; A farmer’s hands, ashamed of themselves. Dark, callused lines on the fingers.
‘Do you still play?’
‘Oh, a little rockin’ in the city. Bars and cafés. Nothing special.’
I wanted to talk to him about her, about how she had been, that mother of mine, before I was there, when she was still young, not quite a girl anymore, but I could feel the situation slipping away from me. He took a step back, with his eyes fixed on the carpet, and said, ‘Well, take care then.’
And disappeared. The ghost who had accompanied her to the City of Angels, tossed aside once the light focused on her. I suddenly realized why he touched me: the convoluted thought that he could have been my father.
MEDIOHOMBRE
Why the hell isn’t there a flight to El Real? The man from Aeroperlas raises his hands in surrender: next week, if I understand correctly. It’s nothing but a ribbon of asphalt in the jungle, that airfield at El Real, where I have to go to find him. Aeroperlas runs a sporadic service there with little prop planes. I feel like kicking something to bits. I walk away, then back to the ticket counter. Is there any other way to get there? He consults with a colleague. I would have to travel to Yaviza, I hear. From there downriver to El Real.
I go back to my hotel in Panama City. The thought of staying here for a week is a burden. I have no sightseeing plans, and I can’t motivate myself to come up with any, either. What had quietly waited in the wings all those years has suddenly become urgent.
Very early the next morning, I deposit my bags in the trunk of the taxi. The new bus terminal: from there, they’ve assured me, buses leave for Darién, the eastern province that borders on Colombia. There’s no road between the two countries, the Pan-American Highway is chopped in two by rivers, mountains and virgin rainforest. With all the horrors that go along with that. In any case, I can almost certainly catch a bus as far as Metetí.
Little Caesar Page 26
