That was how we left the hospital, with handfuls of new life and the promise that my mother would come in for regular checkups. I walked her to the station, to catch her bus. The city was covered in uniform, milky winter light, the sun was pale as a moon.
‘This was the town I longed for as a girl,’ she said. ‘Sometimes we went shopping here, the streets were the longest and broadest in the whole world. Anything you could think of, you could buy it here.’
In the station restaurant we drank hot chocolate with whipped cream, she ordered a slice of apple pie with more whipped cream to go with it. I knew that the chance of her listening to the counsel of medical science had decreased even further today.
‘Could you pass me the sugar?’
She slid the bowl across the table to me.
‘Do you want some of my whipped cream, I’ve got so much!’
‘A little bit, thanks.’
I raised my cup.
‘To a painless death.’
‘Oh, Ludwig, please!’
After that I waved to her as the bus pulled away, as fervently as though we were traveling to opposite shores of a great sea.
We saw each other again when I picked her up in Meeden. We were going to Cologne. In her low-ceilinged living room was a cage with an orange canary in it. The little bird hopped nervously back and forth, a mixture of birdseed and shell sand on the floor beneath the cage crunched under my feet.
‘I decided to buy myself a canary,’ she said, ‘but it never sings at all. The birds outside peep the same way. If something doesn’t change I’m going to take him back to the shop. I wanted something I could talk to, but this is hopeless.’
That odor of holiday cottages, of musty closets, moist blankets. I could smell it right through the haze of incense and guttered candles, the smell of an abandoned place, not heated or maintained by human energy. Her appointment was for early the next morning, so we were going to sleep in Cologne. I hoisted her suitcase, heavy enough for someone leaving home for weeks, into the rental car and waited until she was ready. When she finally sat down beside me she smelled like a seraglio, and said with a touch of impatience, ‘Okay, let’s get going.’
As the highway opened up before us, I said, ‘Could I ask you from now on to use just a little less eau de cologne? I’m feeling a bit dizzy.’
‘So open your window. Come on.’
After that we remained silent until we had passed Zwolle. Then she asked, ‘Have you ever seen that girl from Los Angeles again? The one you were so crazy about?’
I shook my head.
‘I dream about her sometimes,’ I said. ‘Every time I spend the first night in a new country, strangely enough. It’s like clockwork. Sometimes a little more often, but always the first night after I’ve crossed the border, when I’m lying in a strange bed, under a strange sky.’
‘Strange, yeah.’
‘I think I’m the only person in the world who has that. I’ve never heard of it or read about it anywhere. The Unger Syndrome.’
‘There must be other people who have the same thing.’
‘You’re probably right. But now I’ve coined the term.’
‘Have you ever become involved with a girl after that? For a longer period of time, I mean.’
‘No.’
‘You’re thirty now.’
‘Almost.’
Only at dinner, late that evening in Cologne, did she broach the subject again.
‘So why don’t you have any girlfriends?’
Because you’re still alive, I thought, but I said something else.
‘Maybe because I don’t really need anyone anymore, as you once told me.’
‘Did I say that? I’m surprised you remember.’
I examined her face in search of hidden meanings, but she seemed to have truly forgotten about it, the evil spell, the shadow at my back.
‘I can’t believe you’ve actually forgotten saying that.’
‘Really, I have. What did I say? That you didn’t really need anyone anymore? That’s true, isn’t it? You can’t expect someone else to compensate for your defects. People should be together because they’re free to do that, not out of dependency.’
‘It meant something else, back then.’
‘But it’s not because you prefer boys, is it? That’s not why you don’t have girlfriends, is it? I mean, it could be, right? It happens more often to boys who are very much focused on their mother, when there’s no father figure around.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’
‘I want so badly to be a grandmother.’
I shook my head, a punch-drunk boxer. The bite of schnitzel had concealed a clump of gristle. I raised my napkin to my mouth and discreetly spat out the meat.
‘Nice?’ she asked.
‘Mmmmm. Could you pass the salt?’
This is how the day began:
She: I think that’s such a nice thought, that we don’t breathe ourselves, but that we are breathed.
I: Briefed?
She: Breathed. That we are breathed.
I: By whom, exactly?
She: Oh please, let’s not start at breakfast.
A little later we were standing before the Privatpraxis of PD Dr. Med. Richard H. Kloos, Arzt für Allgemeinmedizin und Naturheilkunde, and coincidentally the world’s last wearer of bowties. The body of the good doctor himself, it appeared, was seized regularly by heavy tremors. The cups on his desk rattled, the water rocked in the pitcher. The bowtie and the tremors lent him credibility, just as the seer is often blind and the shaman lame or crippled. Those are the afflictions with which the god has smitten them, so they can speak the truth profoundly. I heard my mother saying. . to give my own body a chance first. . thoroughly detoxify. . so much old pain. . And he: Everything is connected with everything else, everyone produces cancer cells all day long. Back in 1912, Rudolf Steiner said. . That’s right, he knew about the effectiveness of mistletoe as well. It’s so good for people, mistletoe, it’s a gift. I had cancer myself, that’s when I found out about the power of mistletoe, I owe my life to mistletoe! I want do something in return for mistletoe!
And once again the storm of muscular contractions shook the table. When it was over he arranged his bleached locks and dabbed at his moustache as though it had been knocked out of place. My mother nodded contentedly. She was in the presence of a peer, she didn’t have to defend herself. Dr. Richard H. Kloos didn’t even have to work hard in order to convince her to follow the fifty-thousand-euro course of treatment. I tried with all my might to catch his meaning when he proceeded into a lecture about Natural Killer Cells — dendritic cells, each and every one of them capable of destroying five thousand cancer cells. The armies of cancer and anti-cancer paraded around the table. The treatment he had developed boiled down to a form of own-blood therapy and was allowed only in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. From what I understood, my mother’s blood would be tapped off and the monocytes, the baby white-blood cells, would be separated from it. Within seven days, Richard Kloos said, the monocytes would be converted into healthy dendritic cells and then injected back into the bloodstream. The treatment would involve six visits to the clinic.
‘Two to four hours after the treatment you come down with a kind of flu. There is so much going on in your immune system that it produces symptoms of feverishness. I would advise you not to travel during that period, but to take a hotel and wait until you recover.’