When your father died, you could not be dragged away from the bed where he was laid out. During the days before the funeral you went into the room at every opportunity, appropriate or not. Normally you seldom set foot in your parents’ house. I saw you several times a day sitting on the chair at the foot of the bed, or on the sofa in the corner of the room, staring at his dead body.
It’s as if I’ve got so much still to tell him, you said.
Neighbours came and helped with addressing the envelopes for the mourning cards. Friends called to pay their respects. Gallons of coffee were poured; there was much chatter, snuffling, uproarious laughter and chat. A shame that the dead man couldn’t be there himself. He would definitely have brought the gin bottle up from the cellar and refilled glasses copiously. Amid all the commotion I nevertheless wondered: what will become of us? A web of children and descendants enclosed the grandmother in her stoical grief at the head of the table. And what next, when will it be our turn? White neon light, the smell of ether, humming monitors and the nurse who comes and whispers in my or his ear: we’ve turned the gentleman down gently for you, if that’s all right?
When she died, your mother, thirteen years later, you cried your eyes out, although the two of you had always had a difficult relationship. That’s what I’m like, these days, she said. I don’t know why I’m so quick to cry, I used not to be like that.
We already knew you were ill. Her emotions are becoming primary, said the doctors. Departure after departure.
Apart from your father, your sister was the only dead family member to whom we all went together to pay our respects. She was laid out in town, in a mortuary that did its dogged best not to look too cheerful, but not too depressing either. You pulled the sheet with the body under it straight, smoothed the folds with the flat of your hand and stroked your sister’s forehead, with your eyes full of tears. She feels cold, so cold, just feels so cold, you kept repeating.
It’s strange to observe yourself gradually starting to think about your mortality and doing so in such a sober way, as if it is part of our hidden biological clock that from a certain age you start preparing for the inevitable. Sooner or later I shall draw up the balance and I’ve been practising stoicism for years, which was not the strongest suit of those who went before me in death, at least on your side of the family. I saw how they clutched the sheets of their deathbeds in their fists. I, on the other hand, would prefer the covers nice and smooth when I snuff it. But in my view that is wishful thinking. We leave life behind as a half-cleared table, a desk full of papers, an unmade bed.
Life doesn’t amount to much. We’re born and then we die. Until about the age of thirty you are busy learning to read, write, drive and enter into human relationships that are a little more like embraces than head-on collisions, and even then we still quite regularly put the guard rail to the test. I wouldn’t want to be twenty again for all the tea in China, unless a good fairy allowed me to take what I’ve learned with me. And even then… what have I learned? I don’t know. It’s more in my bones than in my language. It strikes me as improbable that you can be wise and experienced in a body that hasn’t yet been through anything. Wear and tear is a form of experience. A reed that has bent a hundred times will do it more supply than a young twig that still has to learn how not to crack.
I wish I could think of you as you were, but I can’t. Memories well up in us or ambush us, but they never provide us with shelter. Nostalgia does not issue from the tension between a dreamed or an imagined past and a reality that looks totally different. Nostalgia is the experience of the immense distance between between us and our recollections. Memory swiftly opens its fluid dwellings to us, so it seems, but when put into words it threatens to harden into a country house, open on Sundays from two to five, guided tours on request, please don’t touch anything.
I wish that I could remember you again as the woman you were before the disease started spinning its mesh of holes in your mind, that I didn’t again and again collide with that darkness, the teeth-grinding shroud of your pain and your boundless suffering.
I have a perfect picture in front of me of how she used to be, says Lieven, it’s still completely intact. Perhaps because I can’t bear to see her as she is now. Perhaps because I see her less. And I also think: there’s no point in mourning already.
So everything must be smashed, he says.
You were the centre, you and Father. We were children and you were parents. A whole universe revolved around the two of you. Everyone was welcome. The seven of us were rarely alone for dinner. Parties in the garden, in the walled inner garden of the house where we were simply happy. Friends, boyfriends, sweethearts, lost souls in need of family affection — they were all welcome. Life, messy, exuberant, nonchalant, hard and beneficent, danced around you.
If I were a Hellenic divinity, I would transform you into two intertwined trees, with broad crowns under which on hot afternoons people could sleep, make love, read on blankets and party at tables.
But everything must be smashed.
Others who have died have strengthened me in all kinds of strange ways. With their lips that had fallen silent, before the earth covered them for ever, they quickly spelled out to me what probably matters most as long as we’re breathing: that love is attention. That they are two words for the same thing. That it isn’t necessary to try to clear up every typo and obscure passage that we come across when we read the other person attentively — that a human being is difficult poetry, which you must be able to listen to without always demanding clarification, and that the best thing that can happen to us is the absolution that a loved one grants us for the unjustifiable fact that we exist and drag along with us a self that has been marked and shaped by so many others.
I am afraid your slow dying, this eternal suspension between life and death, will continue to be an open wound for a long time to come. The ruin, the loss is so total. It swallows everything up. Strips you of door frames of language. Knocks window-panes from their rebates, tears the paper from your walls and scrapes the plasterwork and stones till they give way. Perhaps, perhaps a calmer land will stretch out beyond bewilderment.
I am beginning gradually to unlearn the art of hope, and as hope evaporates despair does not increase — on the contrary. Every day I wake on the edge of perplexity, the crude ore from which the new day will distil pleasure or desperation — or one of the countless alloys both contain. Growing older: getting up in the morning with permanent wounds, the stinging of which, on the way to the bidet or the breakfast table, seeks a precarious balance between despair and ecstasy. The body is again not a perfect fit. We are like adolescents, when we used to hang around angrily in the gap between our most intimate image and the image that was expected of us. Perhaps we are late adolescents: too young to be called old, too old to be young, with gout in our knees and more fragile teeth.
Later, when everything is over, I should thank my friends for the gentle Wailing Walls they erected around me, but perhaps I shall have to ask their forgiveness for all the moments when with almost voyeuristic pleasure I absorbed their bodies. The natural, worldly elegance with which they hold cups, make roll-ups, direct a ballet of pots and pans in the kitchen, and even when they are asleep they don’t fall apart but their organism keeps them intact until they wake up again.
And on the bus in town, I don’t look around me, I seem to be rather grazing with my eyes — sometimes I put my sunglasses on, even though there are clouds. The alarming ease with which feet negotiate steps, the toes lift the heel, the soles spring, and, going round corners, bodies regain their balance without informing us — and the way dogged nature goes on dreaming up new variations on the age-old theme of curves, arses, tits and balls, winks and quips, etcetera. I never tire of staring at it and try to smile as you sometimes used to, in those unguarded moments when a person thinks one of those countless thoughts that they share with no one: a sigh through one’s nose, half mocking, half bewildered — one’s own small respiratory philosophy.