One morning I took the car to Bourtange. I had found the address in the phone book, I knew what I was looking for. I drove slowly along the canal. My memories took place in a different season, but I was that little boy on the scooter. The farm, the dismal bricks. I climbed out like someone in a film, and the events that followed were also part of the scenario I’d anticipated. A dog begins to bark, after a little while a stable door opens. A man comes out. Blue KLM overalls, leather clogs on his feet. It almost has to be him, but I don’t recognize him.
‘Uncle Gerard?’ I say.
A movement at the periphery of my vision, a face behind the kitchen curtains. I recognize that one.
‘It’s me,’ I say. ‘Ludwig, Marthe’s son.’
‘Ludwig. My oh my. Ludwig. I’m flabbergasted.’
‘Uncle Gerard.’
We shake hands. He, the giant, is as tall as I am.
‘Gerard?’
The woman pokes her head out the door. My aunt Edith.
‘It’s Marthe’s boy,’ he says.
We sit at the kitchen table. Only the people here have grown older, the oak furniture and thick tablecloth are ageless. Are the children of black sheep automatically black sheep themselves? I drink weak coffee from a cup that recalls the coronation of Queen Beatrix. Our lives in broken sentences; the locations, not the deeds.
‘My oh my oh my,’ Uncle Gerard says a few times.
My aunt says nothing, keeps her hands folded on the tabletop as though praying. They still farm, but a lot less than before. They’ve leased out some of their land, it was too much for them to keep up. The Natural Heritage Foundation bought a large chunk of it, which has now been left to grow wild.
‘Such good soil. .’
During a silence I say, ‘But the reason I came here. .’
The diagnosis, the prognosis, a few details from the files. They don’t know what to say.
‘And in Meeden all that time. Just up the road,’ Uncle Gerard says, shaking his head.
‘But what do you expect us to do?’ his wife says. ‘After all these years. .’
‘I understand that,’ I say. ‘But I just thought maybe the two of you would want to know. And now — there’s still a little time left.’
Uncle Gerard walked me to the car.
‘It’s a shock to her,’ he says.
A man accustomed to explaining his wife.
‘She just needs some time. We’ll call tomorrow.’
That is what happened. They wanted to see her, my uncle said on the phone.
Now I had to tell my mother. She was sitting on the couch, a magazine beside her, a shawl draped over her shoulders. She was cold all the time now. It was April, life outside was bursting at the seams.
‘Those people,’ she said. ‘What would they do here?’
And then that afternoon, out of the blue.
‘Let them come. If they want to so badly.’
An artery pulsed at the side of her neck, like a lizard’s. The heating was set at twenty-three degrees. She ate little, less all the time. We didn’t talk about what had gone before all this, it seemed never to have existed. We lived in the here and now-pain, now-tired, now-vomiting, now-tired-again, now-headache, now-sleep. We, because powerlessness is also suffering, a derivative form.
In the evening the couch was mine. I would wake up in the same position in which I had fallen asleep. Her shuffling about woke me. She was clutching the toilet, it seemed as though her body were doing its utmost to rid itself of its organs. I gagged with her. The pressure in her brain meant she could barely read. That was how it went, you stood there and watched. The devastation. This was what the end looked like. It was cruel and disgusting. And no-one anywhere with whom one could file a complaint. In how many houses, behind how many front doors, did this take place?
‘Try eating a little bit,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t appeal to me.’
‘As long as you eat more than the cancer, we’re still ahead of the game.’ She did her best. A few bites to humor me. I bought apple sauce, she liked ice lollies. Yogurt and custard pudding were often too rich for her. I ate the custard and searched the kitchen drawers for a bottle licker, which wasn’t there. Beneath her skin the anatomical model began to appear, the tendons, veins, bones. Slowly, the sick old woman shuffled around the house. The heat had already left her. Along with the heat, the color had disappeared as well. The layers were being peeled off, further and further.
‘Without the headache, this would be bearable,’ she said. ‘The headache is the worst part.’
‘You could always go in for radiation. That would ease the pain.’
She smiled faintly, shook her head. Echoes of the old struggle.
‘There they are,’ I said one Saturday morning.
An Opel Astra, gleaming in the sun. I opened the door, a rustle of springtime slipped past me into the house. Uncle Gerard was carrying the flowers. My mother had dressed for the occasion. (Unsinkability.) She got up and walked to the door. They were shocked when they saw her, how could they not be? The last time he had seen her was beside the canal where she had been swimming; I knew he was thinking back on her body.
A meeting like this, an event from which you withdraw, back into your shell, rattle my cage when it’s over. But that’s impossible! You’re the intermediary, the man in the middle, fluff pillows is what you have to do, make coffee, green tea, you’ve bought little cakes with pink icing because that’s what they served you. They sit around the table, the subject lies between them. Conversation as though someone’s walking on glass.
‘So what now?’ says my mother, echoing her sister’s words. ‘Now I’m going to die.’
The old feuds mobilize new forces within her.
‘I did everything I could. It just wasn’t supposed to be.’
‘Mostly alternative things, though, weren’t they? That’s what Ludwig said.’
‘Alternative isn’t really the right word for it. It should be standard, and the other stuff should be the alternative.’
My uncle and aunt remain silent in order not to have to say that she’s dying now of a cancer that could have been treated easily, because that’s what I told them.
‘If you think you did the right thing, then that’s the way it is.’
(Aunt Edith signs the Treaty of Versailles.) Then they talk about the old days. Their father’s farm. Aunt Wichie is still alive, she’s eighty-eight, she’s already outlived him by almost ten years. An outsider would think he was looking at two families flashing each other bits of history from behind glass. Uncle Gerard mostly keeps his mouth shut. So do I. It’s about the two of them. Whether she’s planning to stay here, Aunt Edith asks. My mother looks at me and smiles.
‘That depends,’ she says.
Then it’s time for them to leave. The fruit trees across the way are in blossom. Blackbirds chase each other, cackling beneath the barberry. The people are tired to the bone.
The pain she talked about was not the pain she felt.
‘As long as it’s bearable, it’s bearable,’ the GP said.
We talked about my role in nursing her. Terminal care, Dantuma said, was a completely different story.
Uncle Gerard called, asked me to come, they needed to talk to me. I got a shortbread biscuit along with the coffee. Aunt Edith started.
‘We’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘Gerard and I. .’
He nodded.
‘. . and first of all we want to say that we think it’s really good what you’re doing there all by yourself, we admire that. But we think it would be better for her to come here. For as long as she has left. Then you don’t have to do it all on your own. It’s going to get really difficult. Nobody can do that alone.’