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.