Otherwise the days floated quietly by in Hotel Europa. I melted into the couch with my eyes on the TV remote. Although the partying was considerably subdued these days, I still suspected that my body’s water percentage was no more than 40%, the rest being saturated fats and sherry. I was so bloated from drink that I could see my own face without the help of a mirror. I watched the news to convince myself that woe and misery were not mine alone. It seemed as if people were more or less hopeless: killing themselves, raping, bombing, and babbling about the ever-changing skin color of superstars in order to divert their minds from doomsday.
The TV had almost done me in one Friday morning when the phone rang, cutting through a special report on the link between cancer and artificial sweeteners. It was Helena. She said she had been thinking about what I’d said and wanted to meet up—it was important not only for Mother and Duncan, but also for everyone involved. I didn’t ask her to explain, but agreed to meet her later that day by the main entrance of something she called “Artis.”
“You’ll find it!” she said and hung up before I had a chance to ask for directions.
*
Artis turned out to be the name of the Amsterdam Zoo, which was just a ten-minute walk from the hotel. I arrived a good half-hour before the agreed time and I sauntered through the gates. Wherever I looked there were people strolling about in the sun, little kids with cotton candy and excited school children running around yelling at their imprisoned monkey cousins. In order to avoid the commotion, I first took a seat on a bench and then got up and walked in the opposite direction of the kids.
The zoo was built in the early nineteenth century and had a cozy old-world charm. Two golden eagles stretched out from a solid brass gate at the entrance, which was sheltered by a tunnel of trees surrounded by sculptures and glass pavilions with copper filigree. Whenever I visited such places abroad, I was reminded of the ugly streets of Reykjavík. The contrast of this garden to a street like Sídumúli, for instance, was just overwhelming. Part of the problem was the dubious city planning of talking apes like Danni Klambra, who claimed that Reykjavik’s providence was embedded in the plastic houses he and his father had planned for the city center. Although there was no arguing that the Klambra boys were the human equivalent to a scrap heap, their aesthetic sensibilities were not unique. It was a global trade. Even here in Amsterdam you could find buildings that were acts of terror toward people with human emotions.
I stood in front of a menagerie of endangered European mammals wishing there was similar cage for Danni Klambra, wondering if the problem could be traced to the same degenerate hole spawning the news on TV. Two World Wars, nuclear bombs, and genocide had not sufficed to cull our numbers; we reproduced like termites and eliminated other species that stood in our way. Was there any hope? For me? For Mother? I was submerged in these pessimistic thoughts when I caught a glimpse of my watch and realized Helena could appear any minute. I walked back to the entrance and found her at the ticket booth.
“Hi.” She took me by the hand and led me to a restaurant within the zoo. “I’ve been thinking about what you said and I think you’re right: you’ll never be able to forgive yourself if you mess it up for those closest to you.”
We waited while a waiter in a green uniform took our order and brought us a couple of Cokes; then she continued.
“The thing is that I’ve always done everything my way. When I was fifteen I took off from Highland and moved into a closet with two gays on Koestraat. I felt the rest of the world could just fuck off. I had lost my mother and ended up with Duncan against my will. He took me in because no one else knew what to do with me, and I don’t know if I’ve ever forgiven him for his kindness. It wasn’t Duncan’s fault that I lost my mom, but I blamed him because he took her place. And what happens is that you get stuck in some hole that you can’t get back out of. I was just a kid, of course, but I often think that I was quite selfish. There must have been others who were sad as well.”
She seemed to be slowly honing in on the purpose of this meeting. I still didn’t quite grasp how she and Duncan were connected, but I sensed that I was a participant in the solution of this philosophical issue of having a parent.
“Maybe it’s just selfish wanting to fix things if the only goal is to be able to forgive yourself,” she went on. “But still. Isn’t all sense of morality selfish by that definition? I suppose it’s childish to think like this. I come to some conclusion confirming how mature I am, but then it makes no sense to me after a few months. I want to know. Do I think that I’m wise because I’ve really grown up or because I’m young and stupid? To be young—is that to want to change the world? Or is it all a cliché? I suppose there’s no way of knowing what the future version of yourself will be.”
I would have liked to agree, claim life didn’t map out the future in any way but kept you in constant excitement, that we floated in a happy vacuum toward the next unexpected miracle. A long time ago I had thought these same thoughts, felt the mutations in my soul, experienced diversity in the constant progression of the days, and thought that the concept of maturity was synonymous with wisdom and inner peace, long before the love in my heart outweighed the sorrow it had become.
“If you really were young and stupid you’d never imagine you were young and stupid,” I said.
“But that doesn’t mean that I’m an adult. I’m simply starting to doubt all of this.”
“To simply doubt everything is to be an adult.”
“I don’t think you’re as messed up as you claim to be. If you were that stagnant, you’d never have come on this trip.”
“Well. I do have the body of a sixty-year-old woman, according to my doctor.”
She finished her Coke and returned to the subject, talking about Duncan’s illness, which was the reason she called me in the first place. He had one of those types of cancer people somehow learn to live with, never quite at death’s door but still only half there. Now he hung out at home in Highland using his illness as an excuse for doing nothing, which was very unlike the old Duncan, who felt that everything but dancing on tables was a waste of time.
“So I was thinking—if your mom’s lonely and Duncan’s lonely, maybe we should arrange for them to meet.”
I was beginning to see the light. Milan Kundera and the Knight in the Kilt embodied in a dying lord in the countryside . . .
“I know it’s a bit far-fetched,” she said, cutting off the violins that had started playing in my head, “but it wouldn’t hurt having a little party. It was Gloria’s idea. She thinks the two of them might hit it off.”
“So this is the professional opinion of a matchmaker?”
“Exactly. This is a professional opinion.”
We stood up and sealed the deal with a handshake before strolling back to the gate. We would meet in Lowland at the end of August after Helena came back from her trip and when the guesthouse restaurant would be available for a garden party, some nice afternoon when the hottest summer days were over.
I was happy to have a few weeks to prepare for the party. Ambiguous activity scratched at my core and wouldn’t let me be no matter how I tried to ignore it. Black, white, black, white, black: this sudden dazzling light in the eyes of my emotional life had steadily amplified over the past weeks. I was gripped by extreme optimism that immediately vaporized into the grayness of rainclouds until it opened up again and retreated, hovering for a moment until I came to myself and everything went still, just a slight breeze under the cloud bank; I sat down and surrendered to the gloom.
When I returned to the hotel there was a party in the lobby. My good friend Dmitri wanted me to drink a Guinness with champagne to show foreign guests how people had survived in Iceland since the ninth century, but I wasn’t in the mood.
Instead I made some chai and exposed myself to the bathroom mirror. I just had to lean a little to the right for my body to be entirely on one side. My torso actually resembled another face: the eyebrows of the red nipple-eyes had not bee
n groomed for a very long time, the round bellybutton-mouth was slightly droopy and adorned with a moustache, surprised by an ever-expanding chin that seemed to stretch further out into the world, munching on the only organ of mine that had the slightest potential of having an impact on the future.
I had known for a while that I needed a change of lifestyle, though not by depriving Mother of her parties or giving up on our adventure—we had come too far for that. The proof was in my morning breath, this green odor that answered if I huffed into my palm and sniffed. It was in my shapeless muscles, deteriorating posture, fatigue, memory loss, and the unpleasant fact that my face was completely androgynous after a close shave. Mother was becoming less and less dependent on her lifesaver and stuck mostly to her chai, which released her from the pressures of drinking wine; the opportunity to not consume 3,000 extra calories a day in the form of alcohol was simply too good to miss. For the first time ever, I decided with rock-solid determination to lose weight. I would cry over my fate until the corpse rose out of the haze; life would fill my body and I would become aware each waking hour that I was among the living. Without gulping down sherry-cola, without wanting to throw up after heartfelt canoodling with a leg of ham.
The effort started as expected with hunger pains and torment in the hotel gym. For the first three days I was convinced I was about to die. When I woke up on the fourth morning I was sure I had moved up a level of existence, had obtained new karma after a sad demise on a squat machine in Hotel Europa. But due to the mercilessness of the higher powers I had woken up in my room as if nothing had happened. Mother didn’t know how to take these antics of mine. On one hand, nothing was quite as pathetic as a man on a diet, but on the other hand there was the upside, the possibility that I might snag a girlfriend. Over time she’d gotten used to me going on the occasional fat-burning stint, eating vegetables to wean my stomach off fatty foods and ordering white wine in restaurants instead of my beloved lager. Mother would use the opportunity to ask for a pint and a schnapps, laughing hysterically when the waiters got it wrong and switched the drinks in front of us. It was always funny when I was the girl. It did me no good to point indignantly to her potbelly. Unlike me, she was simply a woman who filled out her dresses, her feminine curves healthy for her age; quite a few people would call them erotic. “You, Trooper, however, are fat.”
But when she took a peek into the hotel gym and saw I was serious, she seemed to have a change of heart. Maybe all this running would bring out the long-awaited correction to my physique that was owed to us by the creator? She had always been astounded by how unfortunately one genetic pool could line up. Despite sincere efforts of the parents to create a healthy child, everything had gone topsy-turvy in this conception. The slightness that characterized Willy’s bulk had been passed on to me, but lengthwise; I grew outward, so my size was all horizontal. In fact, everything about me but my build should have made me petite.
“But now you’ll fix that, Trooper,” she said as she got ready to leave the gym. “I think it’s heroic of you to do this now, while you’re still almost young. Some people never get rid of the blubber. Just carry all that weight through marriages and divorces, all the way to the grave. Like old Edda. We had to have a custom-made coffin for her.”
She said good-bye and left me to struggle with the bench press. In the roughly three weeks leading up to the party I lost 16 and a half pounds so fast that I looked slightly hollow. The bathroom mirror could hardly keep up with my dwindling body. My facial expressions became more apparent, my nose declared independence from my cheeks, and my body took on human form.
My diet was not without sacrifice. One day, as I was jogging down the hotel stairs with All Time Power Ballads channeling from my iPod into my ears, I had, without noticing (at first very quietly, or so I was told, but then steadily increasing in volume until it resonated throughout the entire gym), started singing along, soaring up to the high notes with Nilsson as he sang beautifully:
I can’t li-iii-iii-ve
If living is without you . . .
It wasn’t until the gym’s supervisor snatched the headphones from my ears that I heard how clear and sincere my singing was.
Chapter 14
On a bright Saturday toward the end of August, Ramji picked us up at Hotel Europa to drive us to the party. The Ambassador snaked through the streets and we left the city at the pace of the settling dusk, under a half-clouded rural sky that floated huge shadows across the land.
“This is wonderful!” Mother said. “What a country we’re in, Trooper. The town we just passed was almost like Koeningsdorf in Germany.”
“I know, it’s great.”
“Is India this lovely, Ramji, or maybe even more beautiful?”
“Very beautiful, Mam,” Ramji replied absentmindedly. He had been unusually shifty and had hardly uttered a word as we passed through one village after the other.
“Is everything ok, Ramjiminn?”
“Yes. Ok, Mam BriemMam. Except . . . no, it’s nothing.”
Mother and I exchanged surprised looks.
“You don’t have to be shy about it, Ramji, if there is something bothering you, my dear,” she said and adopted a very saintly expression. “But you know this, of course, coming from the birthplace of Buddha himself. One needs to flow with the life force. Not allow the troubles of our everyday life to create obstacles.”
“Yes, Mam.”
“Philosophy aside, Ramji,” I inserted. “Is there something bothering you?”
“Yes, maybe a bit. I was thinking, Mr. Trooper, whether you remember Mr. Bubi, sir? Bubi Rotandari?”
“The taxi guy? Is he on your case again?”
“Don’t be so negative, Trooper,” Mother said. “Perhaps there is good news.”
“Right. Ramji?”
“He said, sir . . . He said that he wanted to meet Mr. Hermann and speak to him. He said that it’s important, sir. Business. I think he means you, sir.”
“Of course he means me. He’s insane.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Isn’t it enough that he pinned me to the a sidewalk?” I asked, but Ramji was not to keen to recall the conflict in Nieuwenmarkt.
“Mr. Bubi says that Mr. Hermann, that is you, Mr. Trooper, he says that you can find him a place to keep the cars.”
“What?”
“Yes, Mr. Trooper, that is what he said. That you can find a place to keep the cars.”
I told Ramji to tell Mr. Bubi that I had nothing to say to him. The panic in the driver’s eyes intensified.
“Did he threaten to do something to you, Ramji, if you didn’t get me to talk to him?”
“Mr. Bubi does not make threats, Mr. Trooper, but I know him. He is not like other men. He is very determined.”
“Determined, hah! This guy, a crazy Indian who beat the shit out of me for being a racist, now wants me to find him a garage.”
“Are you a racist now?” Mother asked.
“No, I . . . oh, forget it.”
“Do you know anything about this, Ramji?” Mother asked again and leaned over the front seat. “Trooper is upset because I don’t ask the right questions. But do you know anything? Who is this man he’s talking about?”
“Mr. Bubi, Mam, my old boss. He owns the largest taxi company in Amsterdam.”
“Oh, you hear that, Trooper? Your new friend is a great man.”
I told her that this man, who attacked me at the racist ball and then wiped the sidewalk with my face, was not at all great, but she felt I was being petty.
“Weren’t you just being offensive? Without noticing? Isn’t that what you’re always saying to me? That I’m a racist and god knows what without realizing it? Well, who’s to say that you’re not guilty of the very same thing yourself?”
I didn’t bother answering her. Mother had clearly decided whose side she was on and was just getting started.
“If there is some wrong there,” she continued, “something you’ve done to him, you’ll get it fix
ed, Trooper. The largest taxi company! I think this is something for you to consider, with all those bills at the hotel.”
She took a little sip of her lifesaver to mark the end of her speech and then continued talking to Ramji. We drew closer to Lowland. As we passed a motorcycle parked at the side of the driveway with “Rent your own taxi from Rotandari Taxi” plastered on the side, Mother expressed her delight. “Look at that, Trooper. It’s a self-taxi. I don’t think I’ve seen anything as brilliant.”
Mr. Bubi Rotandari stood in the middle of the courtyard, a sapphire blue turban on his head and the soft breeze in his impressive beard.
“Mr. Hermann!” he shouted when we got out of the car. “You’ve come to do business. Good.” He smiled, walked over and embraced me, lifting me a good five inches off the ground before introducing himself to Mother. “I am Bubi Rotandari. Hermann and I are great friends. He is going to help me find a place in Iceland for my taxis.”
The Last Days of My Mother Page 12
