The Old King in his Exile

by Stefan Tobler

  Another time, when I asked him if he recognised his own furniture, he replied, ‘Yes, now I do!’

  ‘I should hope so,’ I said, somewhat condescendingly.

  He looked at me disappointedly and explained, ‘You know, it’s not as easy as you think. Other people have furniture like this. You never know.’

  His answer was so perfectly logical and, in its way, convincing, that it really got my back up. It wasn’t possible. Why were we having this discussion at all, when he was capable of such ideas? Surely I could expect that someone intelligent enough to tease out such nuances could recognise his own house. But, sadly, he couldn’t.

  Not that he was always open to persuasion. He might instead examine all the room’s details suspiciously, ultimately arriving at the conclusion that it had been rearranged to trick him. Such episodes reminded me of the thriller 36 Hours with James Garner and Eva Marie Saint, in which Garner plays an American secret service agent with important information about the Allies’ invasion. The Nazis lure him into a trap and drug him. When he wakes up the next day, he is told that he’s in an American military hospital and that the war was won years ago. They tell him that he suffered amnesia. The deception is perfect except for one minor injury that the officer had received and which – although, supposedly, years have passed – still has not healed.

  For years such inconsistencies must have been my father’s daily experience. He was living in constant distrust of his family’s ostensibly plausible explanations. As he said, ‘Home looks a lot like this – just a little different.’

  *

  He often sat alone in the living room, sighing. Each time he did, it frightened me to see how fragile he seemed, how abandoned. He had changed. His worried expression no longer conveyed despair at how much he forgot, but instead the utter homelessness of a person for whom the whole world has become foreign. That feeling of abandonment, combined with his conviction that simply changing locations would cure it, often stalemated him for days.

  When he said he was going home, it was not really in opposition to the place he wanted to leave, but rather to the situation in which he felt uncomfortable. And yet he took the illness with him wherever he went – even to his parents’ house. His childhood home was within spitting distance of his own, but it remained an unattainable destination – not because he couldn’t walk there, but because his arrival never had the effect he ultimately desired. No matter where he went, the impossibility of feeling at home stuck to the soles of his feet. Ill as he was, he couldn’t see how his condition affected his perception of location. But every day, his family could see what true homesickness was.

  We felt so sorry for him. More than anything, we would have loved him to recover his sense of being at home. In a way, that would have signalled that he was in remission, but that’s only possible with cancer and not Alzheimer’s.

  The situation became somewhat easier two years later, as if to confirm the platitude that things get worse before they get better.

  And only years later did I realise that the desire to go home is a deep part of being human. Intuitively, as a cure for a frightening and inescapable illness, our father had named a place where he would feel safe once he reached it. He called this comforting place ‘home’; believers call it ‘heaven’.

  What Ovid wrote in exile – that home is where people understand your language – was true for our father in no less existential a way. Because he increasingly struggled to follow conversations or to recognise faces, he felt as though he was in exile. The people speaking to him, even his own siblings and children, were strangers, because the things they said were confusing and strange. His gradual conclusion that his home wasn’t here made perfect sense. And it was also completely logical that he would keep wanting to go home, convinced that only then would life return to normal.

  *

  ‘I washed my hands here,’ my father once said. ‘Was I allowed to?’

  ‘Yes, it’s your house and your sink.’

  He looked at me in astonishment and, smiling embarrassedly, said, ‘Good Lord, hopefully I won’t forget that again!’

  That’s dementia. Or perhaps I should say that’s life – the stuff of life.

  *

  Alzheimer’s, like everything of significance, shines a light on much beyond itself. Human characteristics and society’s mores are enlarged by the illness as if under a magnifying glass. The world is confusing to all of us, and when you look at it with a clear eye, you see that the biggest difference between the healthy and the sick is simply the degree to which they are able to conceal the confusion. Underneath, chaos roils.

  Even for us generally healthy people, the order in our heads is a fiction of our reason. Alzheimer’s opens our eyes to the complex skills we use just to get through each day. In addition, Alzheimer’s takes on symbolic value in our society, in which it’s no longer possible to see the overall picture or to synthesise all the available knowledge. Ceaseless change can be disorientating and lead to fears about the future. To talk about Alzheimer’s is to talk about the illness of our century. By chance, my father’s life also reflects this development. It began in an era built on strong pillars – family, religion, power structures, ideologies, gender roles, the fatherland – and at the end of it came his illness, at a time when those structures had been toppled.

  As this realisation dawned on me, I started to feel ever closer to my father.

  *

  But at the time I didn’t get it. I’m not always the quickest of people. I blundered on, because I didn’t want to stop believing that I could keep my father connected to reality.

  When he said that his mother was waiting for him, I asked the harmless-sounding question, ‘How old is your mother?’

  ‘Um, about eighty.’

  ‘And how old are you?’

  ‘Well, I was born in 1926, so I’m—’

  ‘Also about eighty.’

  ‘Right, I know that.’

  ‘Your mother’s dead,’ I said, sadly.

  He pursed his lips, nodded a number of times, and then replied with a contemplative look, ‘I almost feared as much.’

  I carried on fighting for common sense a good while longer. But after I’d had to admit many times how pointless my efforts were, I gave up the battle and once again saw that if you give up, you can win. Was she dead or alive? Who cares? It made no difference. Once I had accepted that my father was reviving the dead a little, and, in so doing, bringing himself a little closer to death, I managed to enter deeper into his suffering.

  Now we were all setting off towards a different life and, as much as this different life left my siblings and me uneasy, we all felt a growing sympathy for our father’s fate. For years I hadn’t been interested in what he did, whether it was playing patience or watching TV, but now I had a renewed interest, not least because I sensed that I might discover something about myself. The question was what.

  Daily interactions with my father were exhausting, but they were increasingly leaving me inspired too. The psychological strain continued to be immense, but I noticed that my feelings towards him were changing. His personality seemed to have been rebuilt. It was as if he were like before, just a little changed. And I was changing too. The illness affected all of us.

  ‌

  What’s your favourite place, Dad?

  Hard to say. I like being out in the street.

  What do you do out in the street?

  Walk. Run sometimes. But I’m not well saddled. My shoes don’t have the right translation.

  So, you like being out in the street, although you can’t go very fast?

  Yes. You see, here inside…

  Don’t you like it here inside?

  What am I supposed to do here? I know, the street isn’t always right, but it’s what I like best, when it’s dry. Out there I can look around a bit. That doesn’t do anyone any harm.

  ‌

  The illness’s onward march was slow but inexorable. Our father could no longer do e
veryday tasks without danger to himself. He would have been lost without other people’s help.

  His wife and children no longer lived in the house in the upper field, so he was sent meals on wheels. Soon, his loss of further skills necessitated hourly visits from a mobile care service. In practice, that meant someone came to get him up in the morning, and in the evening someone put him to bed. It was a blessing that he would sleep for so long, although it wasn’t clear whether he actually slept deeply for twelve hours or just stayed in bed because he liked the warmth – he, the former farm boy, whose childhood bedroom had been so cold that condensation ran down the walls. When the women from the care service or Ursula, Peter’s wife, went into his room just before nine in the morning, he was normally still wrapped up tight in his blanket, although his light had been switched off around nine the previous evening.

  Our father would stand around all day in Peter and Ursula’s garden, waiting for someone – preferably his granddaughters – to keep him company. Things couldn’t go on like that. He had no sense of the frequency and length of his visits. So we started to look for some hourly help in the afternoons. Liliane, a neighbour whom we trusted, played simple board games with him and took him with her on walks and trips. Ursula would take him to spend one or two days a week at the old people’s home as a day visitor. It was a good time and a satisfactory arrangement for everyone.

  Helga took over at weekends and Werner kept an eye on my father’s house and the gardening. My mother and I would sometimes come from Vienna for a few days or weeks. We slept in the house and took care of everything to give the others a breather. We all found our own ways to cope with the new situation, each of us according to our own strengths and skills. God knows we had other things to do and wished our lives were a little easier. In spite of sharing the workload, right from the start it was a strength-sapping effort.

  Even so, the feeling that we were in this together as a family grew. All of us siblings were in the same boat, even if we were taking up different positions.

  That was also the time when I suddenly, very suddenly, became a successful author. It was as if success just came rattling down the chimney. Until then I had been praised, but not read. Now attention and invitations flooded in from around the world, and with them came certain advantages, but also the disadvantage that I had to find time for a kind of work I hadn’t had before. I hadn’t imagined that success would be such a drain on my time, nor did I think it was a good moment to play truant. ‘You have to make hay while the sun shines,’ my father might have said if these things got through to him by then. Success? Failure? It was all the same to him.

  When I graduated and told my father that I wanted to be a writer, he looked at me, grinned, and said, ‘I used to scratch things out myself.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes, out of my nose with one finger.’

  I can clearly remember that moment, standing in my father’s workshop in front of the shelf of paints and varnishes. He had a knack for saying things in such a way that I could never be angry with him. With a twinkle in his eye, he had let me know that I should do what I wanted: I had his blessing, though writing wasn’t for him.

  In the spring of 2006 I was on an almost non-stop book tour. As often as my conscience allowed, I would leave my partner and spend the weekend in Wolfurt. I was a mess. Often I felt torn between love, family, and career. Sometimes one of them seemed burdensome, sometimes another. I was not used to such a nomadic lifestyle, nor to proper time management, and taking on responsibilities was not one of my strengths. I had always seen myself as a playful kind of guy, as someone who couldn’t give up his route across the rooftops. Never mind. We always give our lives a form, and life always smashes it.

  By the start of the summer of 2006 I finally had most of my author engagements behind me. I took my bike apart and packed it into my mother’s car along with my bags. I drove to Wolfurt via Munich, arriving scarcely six hours later with a slight headache. It was the day before my father’s eightieth birthday.

  I slipped into some work clothes, whose smell betrayed how long they had lain around in an empty flat, jumped out of the window, and started picking wild strawberries and raspberries on the hillside below the house. Cherries, too. Then I unpacked my things. When I met my father early that evening, he remarked, ‘Ah, so you thought you’d come and see if I was still alive.’

  Physically, he was still in fine fettle. If you met him on the street, you wouldn’t at first think that there was anything wrong with him. He smiled warmly at everyone and manoeuvred his way through short exchanges with little jokes, so that people claimed that he always recognised them and was the same old mischief-maker as ever. Only when the conversation touched on a topic that needed more context and understanding were his weaknesses revealed.

  Now he would sit on the stone wall in front of the house, after first spreading out his handkerchief underneath him, and look down the quiet road. Patiently, he waited for something to happen. For what? He had modest needs. If a car drove by, he would wave. If a woman went past on a bicycle, he would say, ‘Good afternoon, beautiful lady.’

  Nothing to worry about.

  The bells of the nearby church rang out on the hour. My mother went over to him. Seeing that he had some breadsticks poking out of the pocket of his left trouser leg, she suggested he remove them or else he would get crumbs in his pocket. He said, ‘I need them for my morning shave.’

  ‘You can’t shave with them, August.’

  He thought about that and replied, ‘Later today, I’ll put them in the soil in the garden, then they’ll sprout and something beautiful will grow.’

  That was rather more worrying.

  He got up, and after he had picked up and folded his handkerchief with a reserved dignity, he walked around to the terrace behind the house. I followed him. We didn’t say anything but looked west towards Lake Constance, where the sunset lingered as if the day didn’t want to end. There were wispy clouds on the hill above St Gebhard’s Church, blue sky everywhere else. We listened to the quiet murmur of the wind in the birch leaves and the distant thrum of the A14 highway in the Rhine Valley. The family orchard below us was a lush green. There were the fruit trees and the beehive, almost unchanged since he, and then I, had been a child.

  ‘You’ll be eighty tomorrow,’ I said to him.

  ‘Me?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, you. You’ll be eighty, Dad.’

  ‘Not me,’ he said, laughing with mock indignation. He looked at me and added, ‘You, perhaps.’

  ‘I’ll be thirty-eight, Dad, but tomorrow you’ll be eighty.’

  ‘Not me,’ he repeated, amused. ‘You, perhaps.’

  It went back and forth like this for a while, until I asked him how it felt to be eighty. Then he said, ‘You know, I can’t claim it’s anything special.’

  Two hours later, after I had picked some more raspberries, I put him to bed and finally let the rudder drift, falling into bed in a stupor, exhausted from the previous weeks of touring and the long drive.

  Early in the morning I wished my father a happy birthday, which he accepted willingly enough, thanking me. As he sat on the edge of the bed in his underpants, I made the observation that at the age of eighty, his father hadn’t been alive any more. He looked at me in surprise and then smiled weakly. But I couldn’t tell what his smile meant. When I said that we were going to celebrate his birthday in the church hall, he wanted to know which one.

  ‘The Wolfurt church hall,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve always liked visiting Wolfurt. I get along well with everyone.’

  *

  The day went smoothly. It was a Tuesday and the party was planned for Friday. I remember that my mother had baked a fruit flan and that a neighbour brought over a little birthday card, remarking to us that the lane wouldn’t be half as beautiful without August’s smile. That delighted me, because at that point I wasn’t yet aware that his character was largely intact. Back then I believed that the illness was
destroying his personality.

  Helga and Werner came in the evening. We all ate cake and drank wine, and Werner and I watched a World Cup semi-final. Our father sat with us but the game – between Germany and Italy – made little impression on him, because it was tactical without any obvious climaxes. Our father kept asking, ‘So who’s playing? Wolfurt and who else?’

  ‘Kennelbach,’ I kept replying.

  He nodded, as if he should have figured it out by himself, and said in annoyance, ‘They always play like that!’

  When Fabio Grosso scored the first goal, he said, ‘Hold on. That’s not Wolfurt.’

  Werner and I split our sides laughing. And those moments were the highlights of the game for us. If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t remember it now.

  *

  I remember his fiftieth birthday equally well. I was eight. Werner and I shared a bedroom, and from one of its windows we peered excitedly at the party guests on the terrace. It was also the day on which our father, after almost thirty years, stopped smoking.

  Fireworks shot into the sky over Bregenz, because 4 July 1976 was also the two hundredth anniversary of American independence. With their rockets, the Americans put an extra glow on the day, and to us children it reflected on our father.

  His younger colleagues dived out of the window into the swimming pool.

  *

  At his eightieth birthday party he bade ‘All the best, health and happiness’ to everyone in the long line of well-wishers, clasping their hands with both of his own. He appeared to be full of life, was obviously enjoying the event, and didn’t look like someone simply resigned to carrying out his birthday duties. My father told the mayor, whom he had trained during his last year at the parish offices, not to talk so much but to sing something instead. He got some laughs for that.

  My brothers and sister had prepared a little PowerPoint presentation with photos from his long life. I was sitting at the table with many of our father’s siblings, so I couldn’t see the impression the pictures made on him. He was no doubt swept up in the excitement as the guests went ah and oh and laughed. It was only when an image appeared of his grandfather, the smith, in a long leather apron and with a heavy hammer resting on his shoulder, that my father started to talk about his failings as usual. ‘I’m of no use to anyone now – damn it – never mind – it’s hardly earth-shattering news.’