In a nutshelclass="underline" I’m at peace with my ugliness.
When I summon up an image of my grandmother, I generally see her as a woman of around sixty. Which means that I now think of my grandmother as someone who is significantly younger than me.
Rosa Rozendaal’s appearance had been frozen in my memory the way she looked when we were standing together in the car park of the Albatross Party Centre, just before my bungling banished her from my future. A girl, almost a woman, in the warm but much too short springtime of her life, with the hairdo that happened to be all the rage back then.
Long before computer programs that could accurately anticipate the aging of a face had been designed (with the aim of tracking down people who had been missing for decades), I, as a young monkey, enjoyed fantasising about how my friends would look once they were grandads: who would be bald, who would be grey, who would be crippled and who would be sprightly. I imagined them with moustaches, hunches and gummy mouths. But I never touched my image of Rosa. It would have been sacrilege.
Instead of my imagination, time had gone to work.
And that’s why I declare war on the callow romantic who claimed that beauty’s ruins were more beautiful than beauty itself. Because war is what he deserves. War, or at least a better pair of glasses. Because there was no way the impact of this withered old woman’s appearance could bear comparison to the uproar she caused in the hearts of every healthy young man who laid eyes on her more than half a century ago.
Was she looking at me, or was it my imagination?
Rosa. Rosa pimpinellifolia. Rosa majalis. Rosa rubiginosa. Rosa tomentella.
Along with my euphoria at this reunion, I was also seized by a degree of despondency. Personally I wasn’t bothered by the setting in which I would spend the rest of my life. On the contrary, the surrounding misery was part of the game. But seeing Rosa live out her days in this place, in such a state of neglect, saddened me. If she could take a few firm steps back in time, Rosa would quickly aim her car straight at an oak to avoid this dismal end.
At the very least I would have expected her to have been admitted to a more luxurious nursing home. Though on the other hand, if you consider the price they already charged for an institution as dilapidated as this: an average monthly wage, not counting doctor’s bills, medicine and nappies. And you still have to give your laundry to your kids. And what you get for that hard-earned cash is a fair chance of lying on the cold floor for three hours if you happen to tumble out of bed, simply because there aren’t enough staff to regularly stick their noses into every room. Take my neighbour, for example, who recently spent an entire night lying naked on the floor, whimpering all the while, and had to wait until the sun was up and the first trolley with nursing supplies was thundering down the corridor. It’s a pathetic thing, listening to the bleating of someone who hardly has the strength to move his vocal chords.
I know that Liesbeth in room 16 has oral cancer. She has to rinse her mouth three times a day but that’s often simply forgotten and not just by her. Her rinsing cup fills up with threads of pus and little bits of flesh that fall off the insides of her cheeks and they don’t get round to replacing it until a full day later, if then. The difficulties she has chewing are not always communicated clearly to the kitchen either, so sometimes on a Sunday they might serve her a gristly steak and even make a big song and dance about it. ‘Look what I’ve got for you today, Liesbeth, a delicious steak! If you listen closely you’ll hear it moo, that’s how fresh it is! A Sunday treat! Enjoy …’ And Liesbeth, the sheep, is much too well behaved and full of blind respect for a home that still, tenuously, falls under the auspices of an order of nuns. She keeps her trap shut and leaves the steak untouched on her plate. And who can blame her? Maybe starvation is a gentler death than cancer.
As soon as Rosa appeared on the scene I gave up the hard-won peace of my room and willingly let the staff drag me out to all kinds of moronic activities. The manager of the home explained this behavioural watershed to my wife with the words:
‘Your husband has adapted wonderfully well to what is for him a new, strange and often frightening environment. After being admitted, many of our residents keep up the delusion that they will only be staying here for a few days at most, and then fall into a deep and persistent depression when it finally gets through to them that their ties to the home front have been severed forever …’
That explained me happily abandoning my radio in favour of an afternoon of bingo or, on a comparable level, snakes and ladders, in the hope of seeing Rosa there too. It was clear that I was venturing onto thin ice. Childish as these games are, they present numerous pitfalls for anyone who’s only pretending to be gaga, and the chances of my being unmasked were too great for comfort. I wasn’t even sure if approaching someone else was consistent with my syndrome. Dubious. If I spent too long looking at Rosa, keeping her in my sights as it were, and sat down next to her at the table whenever I had the chance, would I be undermining the plausibility of my dementia? No idea, but caution was called for.
What’s that? Arts and crafts? Come and get me! I painted Christmas-tree decorations on command, Easter eggs and carnival masks, I made paper chains and blew up balloons, or at least demonstrated an intent to do so (making sure, of course, to get more spit than air in the balloon).
But most of all I looked forward to the singing session, which they called memory choir. An innovation in aged care. Because now that it’s been scientifically proven that the songs of one’s youth stand relatively firm in a leaking memory, so-called memory choirs have sprung up here and there in old folks’ homes. Singing — that’s all the Vienna Fogeys’ Choir has to do. The ancient past, memories of fun songs, melodies from a bygone era. According to the specialists it does the old dears good to exercise their memories, and singing improves both their morale and their self-confidence. It would never have occurred to Nurse Dirk, our choir’s conductor, that one of the residents might have been a member of a choir as a child. I mean a real choir, where you put your heart and soul into Bach cantatas. The repertoire of the memory choir was limited to golden oldies, popular crap, entertainment for the masses. Common denominators are seldom elevated. It wasn’t the end of the world; I kept my cantatas to myself and yodelled along to the musical success stories of an earlier age. And realised, to my own astonishment, that all those lyrics had indeed been resistant to the erosion of time. Without my making the slightest attempt to remember them.
Rosa sometimes passed on the ‘crafternoons’ and bingo sessions, to her credit, but when the memory choir was assembled she was almost always there. If I managed to be allocated a chair next to hers, I was the happiest man in the world and surrounding galaxies, and sang along with an enthusiasm I hadn’t thought possible:
I might not remember your name, but I’ll never forget your sweet kiss,
Your love was to me just a game, but now in my dreams it is bliss,
I never met another girl who meant so much to me,
I said goodbye and led a life of lonesome misery.
Every now and then Rosa and I looked at each other while warbling Ray Franky’s tired old hit and I couldn’t help but notice that she was no longer a shrivelled vegetable in a wheelchair: she was a happy woman. During those magical moments a big grin appeared in the mass of grey skin that made up her face. Her yesterday had gone away, but she was happy as long as that one song lasted.