We’ve eaten and now we’re watching TV, he said. Mum is lying on the sofa. She’s had a bath and already has her nightdress on and she’s nice and snug under a blanket on the sofa. Aren’t you, Mum?
Only now do I realize: the days when I call him and she stands behind him prompting him what to say, what to ask, are over.
And only now do I remember that I called her one day and she said a letter had arrived for me, and that I asked her to open it and see what it was. And that she said, yes, I will, wait. And that she hung up and never rang back.
We thought: she won’t get over it. In quick succession her father dead, her only sister dead. She herself has had cancer, fortunately detected in good time, and operations on her intestines and womb. She who prided herself on looking ten or fifteen years younger. She hadn’t been herself for a while — what does that mean, not being yourself?
When we suggested she have an examination she thought the cancer had come back and that we knew and were keeping it from her. So when I said: you haven’t got cancer, but you must realize you sometimes forget things, and that it wasn’t that bad, that there were certain to be pills for it, she was so relieved that she never thought about anything else again.
I’m glad that she had another two or three years’ carefree existence, although it leaves a bad taste to see someone disappearing into oblivion with an unsuspecting smile. We are the ones who are constantly saying goodbye to someone who is still there, and yet not.
The illness rages on. We have arranged for home care. The days of mental fog are beginning to gain the upper hand over the increasingly rare moments of relative lucidity. My father still wants to look after her himself. The disease is also wreaking havoc with her biorhythms, so that he sleeps with one eye open at night, which is untenable in the long term.
I can deal with it — or so I like to tell myself — while maintaining a warm-hearted distance, as it were. I have already said goodbye to her old self, to the woman I knew and who was my mother, once. Now I try to see her as a lively, sometimes restless, sometimes fearful child, who is playing in the recesses of a woman in her sixties and is growing back towards the very beginning.
How superficial life is. What more is a body than a handful of surfaces, piled in cavities, hung up from ribcages, bones? Iron out all those folds, lung tissue, intestinal tissue, all the convolutions of the brain, and you’re not left with much more than so many square metres of self-aware slime, a wafer-thin membrane that breathes, digests, desires and thinks.
He calls. To say she’s had a fall. She was walking behind him while he was vacuuming and tripped over the lead.
I think: why on earth are you still vacuuming, someone’s coming in to help, aren’t they? But I ask: did she hurt herself?
A nasty gash in her forehead, which needed stitches. Now she’s all black and blue, and she’s crying.
She’s been crying for a few days. When she gets up, at breakfast, when the nurse comes to wash her hair, she is quiet. Once she’s dressed it starts up. She squeaks, a soft moaning. It never stops. She comes in whining, gets up from table whining and leaves again whining on my father’s arm. She whines while she drinks lemonade. Still whining, she pushes the biscuit into her mouth.
How long will the place here in the house mean biscuit to her? It has long since ceased to mean her son, or the cats or Lieven.
She whines because she is afraid she’ll have to go back in the car (in the car she’s quiet, says my father), and because she’ll again be dragged from pillar to post all day long, out of the car, into the house, into the car, because he can’t stand being alone with her and her decay (and you can’t ask him to stay at home the whole time).
She whines with misery, with fear, with grief. With the rage that she takes out on his upper arm with her impotent blows. She whines because she’d like to be quiet somewhere, but that somewhere doesn’t exist.
I’d rather not imagine, but I do anyway: her walking doglike after him, the only person she still recognizes and on whom she fixates like a dove on the dovecote. Him first putting her on the sofa, picking up the vacuum cleaner again, but then giving up after she comes trailing after him for the umpteenth time.
The macabre dance of the two of them behind the vacuum cleaner round the table, she getting her feet caught in the cable and falling to the floor. Her crying. The blood. His feeling of guilt. The doctor.
I call back and ask: how can you stand it, I’m all in after a quarter of an hour.
He says: It’s not that bad, I can take it.
Was that absent-mindedness of hers always a portent? How many times did she sprinkle sugar instead of salt on the beefsteak and fail to understand why the gravy turned to caramel? Afternoons when the smell of burnt potatoes wafted towards us as soon as we reached the garden gate — countless. The house was an ordeal for indoor plants: languishing leaves over dried-out clods of compost — while the cactus drowned. In her hands the wash was a bureaucratic nightmare. Shirts, missing for weeks, suddenly turned up again — or disappeared without trace.
What else has she covered up? Was it always there? Are the meshes in her brain now becoming fatally wide? Was it written in her nerve cells, from the beginning?
Christmas Eve, the first Christmas since it became visible. Tarrying in the kitchen, to give the impression that she is lending a hand; her fingers with the knife in them linger above the onion and the chopping board. She studies the onion, the knife and the chopping board. Finally she puts the knife down, takes a tea towel and rubs the work surface clean with it for the umpteenth time, then the edge of the kitchen unit.
We say nothing, ignore it, and roll our eyes. Wondering: does she know? Is she keeping up appearances for herself?
Or did it begin (when do these things begin?) when we noticed that she was mesmerized by the toddlers’ programme on television? With childlike fascination she watched the puppets sliding across the screen, the colourful, constantly changing chequerboard patterns, the dancing, opening and closing parasols.
I like that, she said, these days.
They were going to visit friends. She stands in front of the bathroom mirror flabbergasted: a white mask stares out at her with her own terrified eyes. She tries to wipe it off but simply rubs the white further over her cheeks, her forehead and her nose. She looks at her fingers, at the tube, at her fingers again. She comes into the kitchen like that.
This is funny face cream I bought, she says.
Mum, says one of my sisters, that’s toothpaste.
If a word does not come immediately to mind, I think: it’s started. If I find the salt cellar in the fridge after hunting for several minutes, I panic. This afternoon I was having a pee and I saw that I had put my pen in the mug on the shelf over the washbasin, with the toothbrushes.
They have one last trip together, with a couple they know, to Asia to visit her oldest brother. The doctors think she can manage that.
In their absence my sisters find the house in a state of disorder. Old washing stuffed into the unused washing machine. Secreted washing-up full of dry crusts, waiting for soap and suds.
How long has he been hiding all kinds of things from us?
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world she is shocking the company with attacks of rage, fear and complete derangement. In the plane she won’t sit still. She scolds her best friend, thinking that she fancies my father.