‘Mostly Germans here,’ my mother said. ‘It’s very inexpensive. I could spend the rest of my life here if I wanted to.’
Emotion sticking like a fishbone in my craw. The rest of her life, it might be long or short, what is clear in any event is that Death has reminded her of their rendezvous. Was she always so clumsy with knife and fork? I look at her like a collector. I collect memories.
At four in the afternoon I awoke from a deep sleep and started the day for the second time. From the window I could see on the beach the plague of algae I had read about downstairs. Dark brown, a thick layer meters wide, tossed up by the sea. Beyond that, along the remaining strip of sand, were wicker parasols.
The corridors were long and dark, from behind the doors came the sounds of human lives. The wind whistled down the hallways. I almost fell into the elevator, which had stopped a good thirty centimeters lower than I had expected.
I found her on one of the recliners along the narrow stretch of sand.
‘Feeling rested, sweetheart?’ she asked.
She wasn’t wearing a top. I wondered whether that was acceptable in this part of the world, with its Arab prudishness, but noticed that other women were doing the same. There was a bright red spot on her right nipple. It looked scaly, infected.
‘And now,’ I said after a time, ‘what about that?’
I nodded at her breast. She looked at it.
‘This,’ she said, ‘is not cancer, this is a challenge.’
I shook my head slowly, in disbelief.
‘Is that what the doctor said, Mrs. Unger, you have a challenge? It looks scary. Aggressive.’
‘It’s not that bad, is it? Like an insect bite or something.’
‘The crab, Mother, that’s what bit you.’
She shrugged.
‘Those are only metaphors.’
‘What are you planning to do about it? Do you even have a plan?’
‘I have an appointment in Cologne in December. It’s quite a drastic procedure, you know, it makes you very ill, but I’ve heard such good things about it.’
‘Such as?’
‘He sort of heats the cancer, those cells can’t take it and they die.’
‘Only those cells? The other cells can take it?’
‘Don’t ask me how it works exactly. If you really want to know, look it up on the Internet.’
‘I already did.’
‘Not well enough, apparently.’
We drank tall glasses of fruit juice at the nearest outdoor café, beneath a white latticework roof through which the late-afternoon sun threw squares of light. The saddest hour. Families at little tables ate deep-fried dishes. The black waiters were the only ones who smiled. The Arabs looked down on us rather emphatically.
‘So you’re not going to go to a hospital?’ I asked. ‘No chemotherapy or radiation?’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she said. ‘Even doctors advise their wives not to do that.’
She threw up a barricade of unverifiable information that underscored the correctness of her choice, which I found reckless, and which frightened me.
‘We haven’t seen each other for so long, Ludwig, shall we talk about something else?’
She was planning to settle in Holland for as long as the alternative treatments took, perhaps for good. The wanderings since the loss of our house had lasted eight years, she wasn’t even sure that Warren and Catherine hadn’t taken our household goods to the flea market long ago.
‘You’re going to die if you don’t do anything about that breast,’ I said. ‘You do realize that, don’t you?’
‘Not do anything? But I’m doing so much! How can you say that? I’ve gathered a lot of information, believe me.’
‘When did you find out about it?’
‘The first time I went to a doctor was in January. It just wouldn’t heal.’
‘This is November.’
We were silent. Through my straw I sucked up water from among the ice cubes.
‘Paget’s disease,’ I said. ‘That’s what you’ve got.’
‘I know.’
‘A preliminary form of cancer, not hard to treat.’
‘If they cut into you that can cause the cancer to spread, they don’t tell you that.’
‘They.’
‘The doctors, that’s who. In the service of the pharmaceutical industry.’
‘They have taken an oath, you know.’
‘Now you’re being very naïve, Ludwig, please.’
I had hoped that, with the intercession of time, we would be able to deal with each other more mildly, but the only thing time taught was that these things were immutable, that in all things this first day stood back to back with the last one long ago, so that the mood again became poisoned by conflicts and irreconcilable differences. We had remained the same, we had not escaped ourselves or the other, not even now that the disease had taken root in her.
At eight o’clock we met in the dining room. Cooks in high white hats fried little fish and thin entrecôtes beside the pool. The luminescent turquoise of the water looked sweet and edible. There is something magical about the glow of swimming pools in the dark; if I ever have a house I want one with a pool, simply because of that edible light.
The hotel was furnished like a large sailing ship, a mast stood smack in the middle of the central lobby, ropes were slung here and there. Between the staff and the tourists there existed a strictly businesslike contact, when all was said and done each one went home and all memories were lost of this meeting of the peoples. People slipped by each other without touching; watching for a while from a couch in the lobby, one had the feeling that the ship could suddenly drag anchor, and that crew and passengers would be locked forever in this vacuum, with the Buena Vista Social Club on eternal replay.
Similar feelings of endlessness overtook me in the corridors that I moved down on my way to my room. There was an enormous difference in air pressure between the hallways and the rooms, a horrible whistling and buzzing wormed its way under the doors, pressed itself through fissures. Doors slammed violently. Once, by accident, I stepped out of the elevator too soon and wandered through identical corridors in search of my room, but the magnetic key didn’t fit — lost in the labyrinth, with no thread of love to show me the way out. I follow the sandy footprints of children down the sky-blue carpet, the tracks of little prehistoric predators.
The flat coastline described a lazy curve, at night you could see the lights of Zarzis in the distance. Seen from offshore, Africa began hesitantly, without emphasis, the land barely rose above water. Very little grew on the silted soil. A dead, flat coast, without striking characteristics.
The wind came up. That night I closed the doors to the balcony. When I looked out the window in the morning the sea was restless. During the night it had washed away parasols, the water stood in puddles on the little volleyball court. And the sea had brought ashore even more algae. Tons of organic material had been shoved all the way up the terraces, the beach had disappeared completely beneath it. All was foam, chaos. In the midst of that goo stood four men, their trouser legs rolled up. Two of them were carrying shovels. To anyone overseeing the fifteen-meter-wide band of seaweed covering the entire coastline, the shovel was an absurd prop. Later a little red tractor appeared, pulling a trailer, and the men began their Herculean labor. Shovelful by shovelful they scooped up the algae. The parasols remained upturned, no-one seemed to believe anymore in the ruined façade.