Little Caesar (32 page)

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,’ my 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.

‘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.