My powerlessness was total. I could locate no fissures in my mother’s rejection of doctors, operations, radiation, chemo-or hormone therapy. Her opinions were as hard as a church pew. She worked actively on a world view in which doctors and hospital management teams were mere marionettes of the pharmaceutical industry. At the house in Meeden I found magazines and books that fed the paranoia. When a real and probable cause of death came into view, she created for herself an enemy worth fighting.
‘The important thing for me isn’t that breast,’ she said. ‘I could live very well with only one breast; the important thing is to listen to what this is telling me. I don’t want to deny myself that opportunity.’
As principled as she was in her rejection of the physicians’ order, she was opportunistic in equal measure when it came to alternative healers. A woman in the town of Noordwijk aan Zee had tested her polarity with a biotensor and concluded that she did not have cancer at all. These were viruses, and her body was riddled with them. The therapy focused for some time after that on combating viruses. This ran in conjunction with the daily consumption of huge doses of vitamins and minerals, on the advice of a doctor who adhered to the principles of orthomolecular medicine — a pseudo-scientific school of thought that prescribed huge overdoses of nutritional supplements to make up for supposed deficiencies. On his advice she had the amalgam in her teeth replaced with white fillings, in order to reduce toxic load. During meals she swallowed handfuls of pills from a flat plastic box with twelve compartments. Before breakfast she would choke down a paste of bitter almonds.
And the cancer? It didn’t budge, despite all these efforts. She denied the lack of results.
‘Otherwise I might not still be here,’ she said.
I slammed doors and pulled out of the drive with my tires spitting gravel.
I dreamed she was dead. It cut me in two.
She was not afraid of death, she said. She believed in the eternal nature of energy, dying was only a transition from one phase to the next. The transition: in our talks, that was her euphemism for the irrefutable reality of death. I looked at her and I listened, and knew that my puzzlement at this strange creature would never end. I tried to figure out the background to her radical methodology, why she would ignore a medical intervention with a good prognosis. I wanted to understand the psychology of that intolerable irrationality, of that absurdity, but couldn’t actually ask about it because we didn’t speak the same language. I had to put on my ears crooked and tip my brain to one side in order to grasp even a fraction of her notions.
I found clues in language. I’ve got it pretty much under control, she would say. That was an indicator. I built a little theory around the word control, and the loss of same. To do that I first had to understand the effect on a human of revolving doors, the lobby behind them, the elevators and corridors, the desks covered in papers, the doctor with pager and pens in his breast pocket. As soon as you enter the revolving doors you begin to shrink, you stand powerless opposite the scope and efficiency of the machine. You are turned inside out, they read the message written in your organs and announce it to you in a language you do not yet understand but will quickly come to master. With electrodes on your body and machines sighing all around, you work your way to a conclusion, a diagnosis, a prognosis. The straw to clutch at, the thread to dangle by, you had never known how enormously important they would be one day. In the revolving doors you leave behind much of who you are, beneath the bleak incandescent lighting and suspended ceilings you shrivel to the size of your defect and finally become one with it. You lose the authority you never really had anyway; no-one has a say when it comes to his own cells. Then, narcosis, the ultimate loss of control. A stranger’s hands grub around in your organs, scissors clip, scalpels cut, retractors prop your body open and drains suck out your juices. You are not present, you could just as well be someone else, it’s not about you. All those concepts you once applied to your status as an individual no longer exist.
No history, only current events.
That was how I imagined her wordless fear.
We went back to the hospital only when she thought she felt something in her breast.
‘Maybe it’s just an infection,’ she hushed.
Let it be a tumor, was the thought that shot through my mind, let the bastards be proven wrong.
But the results produced no triumph.
‘We clearly see a tumor now,’ the surgeon said.
There are no other sounds. Only that voice, that little sentence. The same woman as last time.
‘We can’t be completely sure whether it’s formed secondaries yet.
And I don’t think it looks good, as you put it. The infiltrative mamma carcinoma, the tumor, which started in the milk ducts, has spread to the inside. And the underlying tumor has, as it were, drawn the nipple back. Made it disappear. Had you noticed that?’
‘I had noticed that, yes,’ my mother said.
‘There are ulcerations on the breast. We’ll have to deal with those right away, if you don’t do anything the holes in the skin will become larger and larger.’
‘Oh, but I’m not at all sure that I want that.’
Everything about Dr. Rooyaards fell silent. Except for her eyes, where an expression seemed to deepen.
‘I’d really have to think about that first,’ my mother went on. ‘I don’t want, now that I’ve come this far. . no.’
She had already regrouped; the surprise, the shock, encapsulated in an instant — she had once again taken control.
‘I have the impression,’ Rooyaards said, ‘but correct me if I’m wrong, that you think I’m saying these things because I’m somehow against you. But that is not the case, Mrs. Unger, believe me. I see a malignancy in your breast, a red, tumorous tissue. It needn’t be too late. You have to seize this chance. If you don’t, then you will truly have given up a real opportunity to recover. That would be such a pity, Mrs. Unger, such a pity. You owe it to yourself. You do want to get better, don’t you?’
For a moment I was in love with her. She was beautiful in her plea — gestures of restrained, impotent anger, a powerful force being held in check and reduced in language to the proportions of reasonability. A tour de force, a lovely thing to see. For just a moment there I thought it might work, that Marthe Unger would allow herself to be lured to this side of the fence. Then the ax fell.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I have to remain faithful to myself. I have to. .’
That was all there was. The judgment remained suspended in that vacuum, the decision about how she was going to die.
And I wanted her dead, oh yes. It had all taken long enough. Applause, curtains and zip back home. I would sing as I cremated her body. Her just deserts. Her faithlessness, the egoism. The whims, the irresponsibility and the recklessness; the fears which, in addition to life itself, she had awakened in me with a kiss. For all these things there was only one appropriate sanction.