Until Sweet Death Arrives

by Amnon Binyamini

  “Your GP will tell you everything,” was the only explanation he gave her as he escorted her and Nahum from the clinic when the examination was over. Before leaving them, he handed Edna a sealed envelope.

  Two weeks later, when they were sitting with Dr. Perry, they were both silent. Nahum, because by now he hardly ever spoke; and when he did, it was with frightening slowness; Edna because she was fearful of what she was about to hear from the doctor.

  Dr. Perry studied the contents of the envelope, shuffled the pages and muttered to himself, “Just as I feared.”

  Edna could not refrain from asking, “Is it something to do with his brain?”

  The doctor scanned the collection of papers again before relating to her question. Then, in an official tone of voice unrelated to their long friendship, he said, “Nahum is suffering from pre-senile dementia.”

  “It’s not cancer, doctor?”

  She called him doctor, as if wanting him to confirm as a doctor, a professional and not as a friend, that Nahum did not have cancer. Excited and tense, she repeated, “It’s not a brain tumor”

  “No, Edna. Nahum does not have a brain tumor.”

  She needed nothing more. “Thank you,” she said, exhaling the trapped air from her lungs.

  Then she added, “Thank God, as long as it isn’t cancer. I was so afraid it might be a cancerous growth in his head.”

  Her mood lightened. This was clear from the way she spoke, her bright eyes, the way she moved her body again and from the kiss she gave Nahum as he sat staring into space, the kiss she planted on the high forehead of the doctor, whose expression had remained so serious in spite of this happy moment. It was apparent also in the way she put her arms around Nahum and the way she stroked his indifferent face, over and over.

  “What’s pre-senile dementia?” she remembered to ask, with her calm, loving gaze on Nahum, only Nahum.

  Dr. Perry’s expression remained unchanged. It had been serious the whole time. Darkly serious. However, in her happiness, Edna had not noticed this. Nahum had left the room by the time Dr. Perry was ready to answer her question. She was at the door, hurrying after him, when the doctor spoke.

  “Alzheimer’s” he said, “Nahum has contracted Alzheimer’s disease.”

  35.

  April 1996

  Someone darted out of the darkness and moved silently across Edna’s room, where she lay alone and half asleep in her bed. She had not slept through a single night since Nahum’s illness was diagnosed. When she opened her eyes she saw the stranger walking around her room, oblivious of her presence. She pretended to be sleeping, but watched the indistinct figure through half-shut eyes. She shuddered when she saw that he was a man wearing a peaked cap. Since the incident with crazy Aharon, wearer of the eccentric hat, she had developed a morbid fear of another such encounter.

  The man opened the door and vanished into the passage. Edna took a deep breath and tried to plan her next moves calmly. She would slowly reach for the telephone, dial the police and tell them to come quickly. She would then huddle under her blanket and wait for them. The police station was only a few minutes away, but before she could act, the man in the cap returned to her room. Her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness and she could see him more clearly. The sight of his stooped back drove out her fear and she turned on the light.

  “Nahum!” she exclaimed. “You scared me! I thought you were an intruder!”

  Edna hurried over to him and snatched the cap from his head. “Where did this come from?” she asked, although she knew he would not answer.

  It was two in the morning. Nahum was wearing two shirts, one of his and one of hers. Edna recognized them as those she had left on hangers in the bathroom before going to bed. Nahum was also wearing short pajama pants and his shoes, which were on the wrong feet. He was carrying an old plastic bag containing some old towels that were now used for house cleaning.

  Edna looked at the cap, now back on his head, and repeated her question, “Nahum, where did you get that cap from?”

  He did not answer and began to pace restlessly around the room. Edna went back to bed. As she lay watching him she became increasingly peaceful and the shattering fear, the alarming appearance of the unwelcome visitor gave way to dizzying fatigue.

  “I’ll get up in a moment, Nahum,” she said, in the resigned tone of someone becoming accustomed to new situations.

  In a while, she would get up, lead him to his room, help him to undress and put him back to bed. “In a while”, she told herself, “In a while.”

  “I’ll get up soon, Nahum,” she said, closing her eyes. How exhausted she was, how drained by day after day beginning at dawn, or even earlier, and ending late at night, if at all.

  It had been a hard year for Edna. Her distress grew day by day. Nahum never went back to work at the newspaper and now spent most of his time in the apartment. He gradually became a different person. At first, he had tried to maintain his independence, and had insisted on doing the shopping and driving his car. She did not tell him the truth about his sickness. She wanted to spare him unnecessary suffering.

  “It might frighten him to know what he’s suffering from. In any case, it’s incurable. What good would it do him to know?”

  It was not easy to explain to him why he was not allowed to drive. It was even more difficult to let him know that he was useless and therefore not wanted at the office. His extreme forgetfulness was a great help to her in coping with his failure to understand why he was not permitted to drive or go to his office, because his questions were soon forgotten and his thoughts wandered in other directions.

  She gave him chores in the beginning. She would give him a list and he would go shopping in the neighborhood stores, but more often than not, he would come back with unnecessary purchases. His mistakes in paying were more serious. Sometimes he paid too little and some-times he came home with empty pockets without the faintest idea of what had happened to the money. He occasionally withdrew money from his account in the bank near the apartment. One morning, Edna received a phone call from the bank clerk, who knew the family for years.

  “Mrs. Peterson,” she said, “This is Dorit, from your bank – I’m calling from the inner office. Your husband is at the counter asking to withdraw a thousand shekels from your joint account. I’m calling because this is the seventh time he has been here this morning. Each time, he withdraws one thousand shekels, goes outside and then returns a few minutes later and withdraws the same amount.

  “What’s Nahum doing now?” Edna asked, her voice breaking.

  “I asked him why he didn’t make one withdrawal of the total sum, but he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Excuse me for asking, but is Mr. Peterson okay?”

  Edna thanked the clerk for her alertness and explained that Nahum was having a breakdown and was not himself at the moment. She instructed the clerk and the bank manager to keep her informed about every financial transaction Nahum would try to make from then on.

  Nahum became increasingly confused. He often lost his way and good neighbors would lead him home. Eventually, she had to prevent him from going out alone by locking the door and hiding the key. She accompanied him everywhere. In the evenings, she led him by the hand along the route of his erstwhile energetic nightly walk.

  To Edna’s embarrassment, Nahum no longer recognized most of their acquaintances when they greeted him and tried to make polite conversation. He would stare at them, clearly wondering who they were, what they were talking about and why they were talking to him of all people.

  Edna was even more ashamed when Nahum stopped complete strangers, saying “Hello! I know you. We’ve known each other for years. How are you?”

  In most cases, the person addressed would look from Nahum to Edna and hurry off. Then Nahum would gulp shamefacedly and whisper, “I slipped up again.”

  Very often, when they w
ere out walking – and at home, too – Nahum would fall into moods of dejection and distress when he would cry out loud and sob imploringly, “Something’s wrong with me, Edna. Something’s wrong.”

  Then his sorrow would completely invade his ailing mind and Edna would watch him as he became silent, apathetic and remote, lying in his room for hours, not noticing if it was day or night, giving her cold looks she could not decipher.

  At night, when his body was replete with hours of dozing and rest, he would get up and pace through the rooms, while she waited for fatigue and weariness to return him to bed. This was her reason for moving him to sleep in his study. His wakeful nights no longer distracted her because he confined his pacing to his study, where she had installed a night light for him to see his way around the room. Sometimes he slept in his clothes, sometimes on the carpet, evidence of yet another night of mindless pacing.

  A year went by and Nahum’s condition deteriorated. Edna was tired, too. Her world had changed without warning. She took a forced, unplanned leave of absence from the office.

  The more confused he became and the more his mind failed, the more she was confined to the apartment with him to prevent him from burning himself on the gas stove, to guide him to the toilet in case he soiled himself, to stop him from choking on paper he stuffed into his mouth, to feed him so that he should not go hungry, and to reply to his irrational questions although he didn’t listen or understand the answers.

  She was lonely. She was furious. She bewailed her fate. She was exhausted. She hated. She pitied. She was filled with pity – for him, poor man. For herself. She would sob. She sobbed so much. When he embarrassed her, when he became confused, when she became angry, she sobbed. When she was with him, she sobbed. When she was alone, she sobbed.

  She was awakened by a rhythmic knocking, “Okay, Nahum; I’m getting up,” she answered mechanically.

  Nahum was not in the room.

  “I must have fallen asleep,” she decided. The knocking became louder. She realized it was coming from the front door. She wondered who would come knocking at the door in the middle of the night.

  “Who’s there?” she called, fighting to open her sleep-heavy eyes.

  “Me,” Nahum answered. She grabbed the bunch of keys from under her pillow and hurried to the door, wondering how Nahum had managed to get out of the apartment while she had the keys. She found him inside, standing at the door, with the cap on his head. He was wearing the same two shirts and the short pajama pants. The plastic bag full of towels was at his feet. He was holding the door handle with one hand and knocking on the door with the other. He looked annoyed.

  “To work,” he said when he saw her, “I want to go to work.”

  “To work? Now, Nahum?” she asked through clenched teeth, tired and out of patience.

  “I have to go to work. I’m in a hurry,” he answered.

  “Nahum,” she asked, “have you any idea what time it is? It’s two thirty in the morning. Two a.m. Do you hear?”

  “Can you open the door for me, Edna?” he asked. After a glance at his watch, he added, “Edna, I’m late for work. Open the door.”

  She had to use her imagination, as usual, to improvise a convincing answer. Some quickly absorbed explanation that would stop him from trying to leave the apartment. But she was drowsy, her brain was sluggish. She was drained, dull, hollow. Nevertheless, she had an idea. She took Nahum’s hand firmly and led him to the window, giving him no time to resist. She opened the window and gestured with her arm in the direction of the dark street.

  “There. See for yourself. It is in the middle of the night. Everybody’s asleep. Nobody’s going to work at this time of night!”

  Nahum freed his hand from her grip, hurried to the door and started his knocking again.

  “Edna, quick. Open the door for me. I have to go to work.” Immediately afterwards, he began yelling, “To work! To work!”

  His shouts scared her. She quickly latched the window shut. Nahum was quick and alert that night. Far more than she was.

  “To work, to work!” He was screaming now and his screams roused her. Roused her anger. She was furious. Incensed. Incensed at her miserable fate that had forced her into a world she did not want – that was imposed on her. A world whose rules were unknown to her. And how she hated him, her husband, at this moment. How she resented him. But he did not have even a moment of kindness to spare for her. His shouts, which were getting louder by the second, impelled her to drive the key deep into the lock, fling the door open and drag Nahum out into the corridor. If only to keep him quiet.

  “Come on. Let’s go to work.” she said.

  He burst from the building with such force that she was pulled after him into the dark street. Distraught, she did not notice that she was wearing nothing but her nightgown as she ran after Nahum into the unknown, starless night. They were alone in streets that were deserted and silent, apart from a few passing cars and the occasional eerie wailing of dogs.

  Still clutching the plastic bag stuffed with torn towels, Nahum shouted, “To work , to work!” walking quickly with Edna trailing behind him.

  What began as a swift prolonged walk turned into an exhausting, sweaty, tearful marathon that lasted for over two hours. Edna did not direct Nahum, nor did she press or instruct him – she simply dragged after him, concentrating on his hurrying feet, allowing herself to be led without resistance. All she asked was for him to stop shouting in the sleeping city, just to stop shouting. Let him walk. Let him hurry. Let him think he was on the way to work. Just let him be quiet. That was all she asked on this dark night, stretching on to eternity.

  She looked at her watch. Four thirty. Nahum slowed down. He was showing signs of tiredness. He looked at her; she feared what was coming. Just let him not shout, she prayed silently. He gave her a long look and she mumbled, “I haven’t got any strength left.”

  He came to a standstill and suddenly asked, “Are you tired, Edna?”

  She could not believe her ears and did not answer.

  “Where are we, Edna?”

  She stared at him in wide-eyed disbelief. All of a sudden he sounded sane, logical, intelligent. Normal. She saw a street sign and told him, “We’re on Pinkas Street. I can’t believe it. We’ve come as far as Pinkas Street!”

  As if he had nothing to do with it, Nahum asked, “Pinkas Street? What are we doing here, Edna?”

  Edna was at her wits end. She gave him a tired look and said, perhaps to Nahum, perhaps to herself, “Nahum, you insisted on going work in the middle of the night. You were very aggressive. We have been roaming the streets of Tel Aviv for over two hours.”

  Suddenly, he said, “Edna, look what’s happening to me. I’m lost. Lost. Rescue me, Edna. I feel as if my brain has gone. I’ve no brain left, Edna. Help me, Edna. Help me.”

  He began to whimper and buried his head on her shoulder, sobbing. Edna embraced him, caressed him, cried with him in the middle of the night, in the sleeping city. A city unaware of two people leaning on one another, with no salvation in sight. Beyond salvation.

  There, in the darkness, she wanted to tell him that she could not help him. Nobody could. She wanted to tell him that his fate was bitter and blunt. So was hers.

  Instead, she said, “Come to me, Nahum. Hold me. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be alright.”

  He did not believe her mouth. He believed her eyes, her despairing eyes.

  “Look what you look like, Edna,” he said, withdrawing from the sad look in her eyes.

  “Look how you’re dressed, Edna, in the middle of the street, in the dark, in your nightie and barefoot!”

  Edna started to laugh.

  “And look at you,” she said, “Look at you, Nahum. You’ve put on two shirts, one of which is mine.”

  They laughed together, a free laugh that lifted them out of their misery, their weariness, their a
nguish. It was a wild, non-committal laugh. Still laughing, they started the long walk back to their apartment with their arms still around each other, like a young, penniless and carefree couple.

  She helped him to undress when they were safely home and helped him into his bed. The first light of dawn extinguished the flashes that had lit his brain in the darkness, making him like any-one else for a few transient moments. He now returned to his illness. His alienated expression revealed to Edna that the measure of intelligence that had flowed in his brain an hour earlier had vanished without a trace. She tried to get him to lie down, but his body was rigid. Gently, she persisted in her efforts to put him under the covers, but he remained sitting on the bed. Her tears did nothing to erase the emptiness that masked his gaze.

  36.

  Warden Berman hurriedly chewed the last mouthful of enjoyment from the slice of brown bread. He swept the crumbs from the table and drank copiously from the chilled can of diet soda before slowly getting to his feet. He crossed to the metal cabinet, took a file of papers from the shelf and left the room. He had to get a move on. A prisoner was going to be released today. He knew from experience that for the prisoner, every second of delay in the hours before his release seemed stolen from him; it was the longest day of his life and the last phase behind bars was the hardest to bear.

  The prisoner was waiting for him dressed, polished and perfectly shaved. Most probably, the prisoner would now tell Warden Berman that he had not slept a wink all night and would try to skip the formalities involved in the release. The warden searched his prisoner’s face for signs of joy and excitement at the prospect of freedom.

  He could not resist remarking, “I expected to see you smiling.”

  There was no response from the prisoner and Warden Berman decided to let him be.

  “Where to?” the prisoner asked dryly.

  “Stores,” Warden Berman replied as dryly, as he picked up some of the bundles on the floor of the cell and led the way. When the equipment was handed in, they proceeded to the clinic, where the doctor gave him a full examination and then to the paymaster – the last stop on their rounds. The identity card he received brought with it the first breath of freedom for the prisoner. The warder was sure he detected a flash of joy in the prisoner’s blank eyes.