The hotel’s entertainer, spirited and homosexual, is standing at poolside. The group in the water at his feet is trying to keep up with the exercises as he counts down from ten to one in his shrill voice. I try to avoid him as much as possible, because of the longing glances he tosses my way. He counts down in French, German and English, the ghetto blaster roaring at his back. His swimming trunks are tiny and tight.
She is in the baths, leaning back in a recliner, her body wrapped in a white, much-washed bathrobe. Her feet are resting on a footstool, there are balls of cotton wedged between her toes. She flaps her hands.
‘Have a massage,’ she says. ‘It’s lovely, so relaxing. It would be good for you. Sit down, you make me nervous when you stand there wobbling like that. Would you like a cup of tea? What’s-His-Name, you know, he’ll fetch it for you. Ask him to come over, would you?’
I poke my head around the corner of the relax room and ask the receptionist to send someone over. A few minutes later a man comes gliding in, charm incarnate — smooth and gleaming brown as a waxed piece of hardwood furniture.
‘Thé de menthe for Frau Marthe, subito. And this, who might this be?’
He winks.
‘Your brother? Someone else?’
‘My son,’ she said.
‘Incroyable!’
How much feigned amazement can fit in one face. He hurries away on his white clogs.
‘A real clown,’ my mother says to the vacuum he leaves behind. ‘And a huge flirt.’
And a little later.
‘But I still look pretty good, don’t you think?’
‘The cancer’s not on your face, that’s right.’
I see her sigh but can’t hear it.
‘I wanted to ask you to go along with me to Holland,’ she says. ‘At least for the first period. If you’ve got the time, that is.’
‘Terminal care.’
‘I have no intention of dying yet!’
‘Maybe you’ll become ill. That’s to be expected if you don’t do anything.’
‘But Ludwig, maybe I would have been dead a long time ago if I’d let them cut into me. You read so much about women who have a breast removed and then die because it spread to the lymph glands or brain.’
‘I’m sure there also plenty of women to whom that doesn’t happen.’
Two girls in white uniforms come in. One of them sits down at her feet, the other settles beside her; they finish the treatment. Visions of hospitals, the earnestness of doctors. You have only that one, irreproducible life — they see dozens come by, just like you. You don’t understand how that can be, that they don’t attach the same importance to your life as you do: the feeling that someone has insulted you gravely.
My mother looks at me. I still haven’t answered her question.
‘Of course I’ll go along,’ I say. ‘What do you think?’
Her bathroom floor was littered with pills. Yellow pills, red and green. Pills that had rolled away, slipped through her fingers. This was how she treated herself: according to her own plan and her own insights. A yellow parachute unfurled above the sea, a minuscule nuclear explosion on the horizon.
‘Guten Tag!’ the homo quacked into the microphone.
It was four o’clock, time for belly-dancing lessons to begin. An older woman was taking part, watched from a recliner by her young Arab lover. The woman appeared each morning at breakfast in a batik skirt, her white hair still wet, her water-color face expressionless. Africa! The continent of hope for lonely women from the North. Drenched in honey, they drew swarms of starving flies as soon as they touched down.
That evening we went to a show in the Coquille Room, where the concept of shells was unraveled to the point of being nerve-racking. A man danced with five jugs balanced on his head. Six. Seven. The audience clapped along to the beat of the music. White children were sitting on the edge of the stage. The man was also able to balance seven jugs on the point of a stick, with the stick resting on his lower teeth. There were fat belly dancers, the flesh swaying independently of their bodies.
‘So that’s where all the food goes!’ my mother whispered. She was amazed each day anew at the piles of food in the restaurant.
Armies were fed here, the supply lines were kept open and profuse.
The wind had died down, but I kept the doors closed, irritated by the inane hissing of the sea. The beach was a complete shambles by now — the despair and the ecstasy after the apocalypse.
I didn’t understand my own feelings: even now, now that Death was spreading through her from the breast from which I had drunk of life, the heavens were aligned in fruitless, impotent hatred. I’d thought I had gained a certain autonomy, but now that we were together again it turned out that the longing for retaliation had not disappeared. The clarity had existed by grace of the distance we had maintained since parting in Prague. These days, however, I was better able to control my aversion, the bitterness and the whims that tasted of defeat remained largely behind the pickets of my teeth and the smoke screen of my eyes.
The only memories of a kind of happiness, during those weeks on Djerba, have to do with food — with the regular, copious, distracting food into which we dug with a vengeance.
Once in Holland, we settled down at a little distance from each other. She hired a holiday cottage east of the city of Groningen, outside the village of Meeden. I moved into a furnished flat in the center of the provincial capital and began my life as a Dutchman. A small, inconspicuous existence that took place within the space of roughly one square kilometer: the walking distance from my apartment on the market square to the casino (where a theater agent had found me a job), the walk along the Diepenring and the routes to the grand cafés and sandwich shops where I started my day.
All that time, it seemed, she was in no hurry at all to die, that mother of mine. Shortly after our arrival, at my insistence, she had submitted to a checkup at the hospital. A mammogram and echogram were made of breast and armpit, I sat in the waiting room and read magazines and tabloids in a language I had once known fairly well, but which time had now partly erased. I understood everything, but spoke Dutch now like a dead language; people listened in amusement to the misshapen diphthongs, wrongly stressed syllables, the faulty vocabulary; all those misunderstandings. When they switched to English to make things easier for me, I refused with the pride of an ambitious immigrant and went on failing to hit the mark, like a drunken man in a shooting gallery.
My mother came out of the doctor’s office, I fetched tea for us from the machine. She was disappointed; on this of all days the wound had been producing a great deal of pus. She blamed her breast for this; it had been calm for some time, closed as she called it, and now, today, now that other eyes had looked at it, the breast had been disobedient. From her talk with the oncological surgeon it appeared that there was as yet no tumor in the underlying gland tissue, it had in any case been difficult to see. It was still too early to determine whether it had spread to her lymph system.
‘Could I ask what you’re planning to do about this?’ asked the surgeon, a lively woman with braces on her lower teeth and her hair in a ponytail.
My mother told her about the course of treatment she’d prescribed for herself, the nutritional supplements, the salt treatment, the iodine she rubbed on it every morning (that smarts, you know!), and finally about her planned visit to the man who had entered our lives like a benedictory priest: Dr. Richard H. Kloos, a Dutchman who had his practice in Cologne. I fixed my gaze on the woman across from us. My mother’s exuberance had to do with the favorable results of a few minutes earlier, the stay of execution that she celebrated as a triumph.