Though I never did taste her sweet kiss, I’ll always remember her name.
When she comes to my dreams it is bliss, the love that I felt was no game.
Someone else who was and still is a devotee of the ideology of group singing is, of course, Camp Commandant Alzheimer. You can tell that he feels cheated by his own capitulating legs, because he’d much rather be wearing boots than those shabby slippers, and instead of sitting in a wheelchair, he wishes he was singing his songs marching. But even so he blossoms completely and puts some vibrato into his flaccid vocal cords when he joins the memory choir. Once he gets going there’s no stopping him and all by himself he rattles off his whole, rather unusual oeuvre:
Sharpen up the long knives on the pavement stones,
Plunge the knives in deep and make the Jew blood flow,
Blood must flow, coming fast and thick,
And we shit upon the freedom,
Of this Jewish republic.
As I said, a very happy man, and living proof that a memory choir like this really is a highly economical way of easing the suffering of the elderly.
They always concluded the choral sessions with a few dirty songs. It’s no secret that old men and women have one-track minds and a passionate interest in the contents of underpants. The more respectable the position they held in their heyday, the greater their love for the racier chanson. Ex-teachers, missionaries who have returned from a malarial zone, newsreaders, justices of the peace, former government ministers, the fathers of large and devout families: they’re all crazy about the smut they once avoided in public. But time knows no pity, King Hourglass comes for us in the end and, when he does, nature reclaims everything culture tried to suppress for all those years.
A perennial hit in Winterlight Geriatric is the famous ‘Ballad of Auntie Bonanza’, which was sung in the streets of our youth by drunk labourers and picked up by adolescent reprobates:
Oh, she’s as blind as a mole with a stinky old hole, it’s yer Auntie Bonanza …
This song always aroused great enthusiasm in Rosa too, who sang along with the following seven lines without a single mistake, as if she’d been rehearsing on the sly in her room.
It’s a shame we don’t get to do performances with this strange choir of ours. How I would have loved to see Moniek De Petter in the audience!
The exercise classes under the supervision of an accordionist and a geriatric physiotherapist never won me over. It was a missed opportunity to see Rosa Rozendaal, but it was too difficult for me to get my musculoskeletal system moving again. Nobody grows more supple with the years and I’d never been what you’d call loose-limbed anyway.
Until recently my day was Friday, dance day. That was when Lorenzo — Frank Sinatra to the power of minus ten — came to plink out evergreens and smoochers on his synthesizer. Although he was never really in tune, the thin moustache he’d cultivated to conceal at least part of his baby face made him incredibly popular with the great-grannies. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t sometimes left an entire estate by a widow whose only joy in life was provided by Lorenzo, the pancake-house pianist.
Someone in my condition can’t display much getup-and-go, so I had to await my fate apathetically and dance with whichever partner the staff, with a pretence of cheerfulness, allocated me. Which mostly meant shuffling around while leaning on a nurse. Strangers in the night. But one day I would be hitched to Rosa and if the pharmaceuticals were able to give her the strength to leave her wheelchair for five minutes then … then I would take her in my arms and dance with her. A jive in a thousand slow-motion beats. And when I had assured myself that none of the alert souls around us were listening in, I would whisper in her ear:
‘Rosa, it’s me, Désiré Cordier. How would you like it if we stepped outside for a moment, to get a breath of fresh air, it’s much too hot in here anyway …’
Between the ages of sixteen and thirty I was a regular theatre-goer and interpreted everything that happened on stage as an abstraction of real life. Nowadays I try to amuse myself by seeing scenes from real life as theatre. Sometimes that’s useful. Like when I was sitting in the garden of the home waiting for the bus that never came. The sun was shining, directing its bright malice at the nation’s students who had to spend the rest of the season studying for their exams. The windows of almost every room in the home were open, and through one of them a fascinating radio play reached me. A powerful voice, suitable for open-air operas and election speeches:
‘So that’s how you do it, is it? Ramming nutrients into the veins of an old man who doesn’t want to eat!’
Unfortunately I couldn’t hear the nurse’s answer, but it was easy to guess from the tirade that followed.
‘Of course my father’s not eating. And why not, do you think? Has he got a problem with his gullet? No. Have his jaws frozen up? No. So, nurse, what could it be? Shall I tell you? Oh, wait, I’ve already told you, my father’s not eating because he doesn’t want to eat! He does not want to! And why does my father not want to eat? Because he’s more or less had it with this life! Because he wants to die, if you understand that better! That’s why. It beggars belief that you seem to be incapable of seeing something so simple. You must be as blind as a bat. As blind as a bat or as thick as a brick. And what do you lot do when someone here doesn’t want to stick the food in their mouth anymore? You inject the whole meal into their arm: starter, soup, main course and pudding, the whole plat du jour, right into the bloodstream! Enjoy your meal, grandad. Just look at the poor guy’s skinny little arms. They’re purple from all the needles you’ve poked into them. You must be a monster to be capable of something like this. And if my father tears the needles out of his arm, which he has every right to do, you restrain him as if he’s a criminal. Even worse, because here in this country you have to do something bloody atrocious before they deprive you of your liberty and tie you up … May I ask what you’re going to do when my father doesn’t have any arms left? When you’ve buggered up every last vein with your catheters? Are you going to start pumping his meals up his arse or what …?’
A beautiful scene, presented with gusto, but, alas, I missed out on the climax thanks to the sudden closure of that particular window.
During this moving performance, I was sharing the bus shelter in the garden with a small, scrawny man I guessed to be in his mid-eighties. I knew him by sight from the corridors and dining room. Sometimes he participated in a snakes-and-ladders afternoon, if you could call it participating; he never did much more than wobble back and forth with his upper body while they wiped the drool off his chin. He wore Jesus sandals and had enormous holes in his socks that his big toes stuck out of. The only thing he could still do properly in this life was roll cigarettes and then smoke them. One after the other.
He coughed.
I looked at him and asked, ‘When’s the 77 due? I have to get to my piano lesson on time.’
‘Seven past the hour and thirty-four past the hour!’ And he spat a tobacco-juice-coloured gob onto the ground.
That seemed an excellent conclusion to our conversation, without a doubt the most fascinating I’d had with a fellow resident since my arrival at Winterlight. He, however, felt differently, and took me by surprise with a disconcerting observation:
‘You’re making a mess of it. I’d take a bit more care if I was you, cos one of these days you’re going to get caught.’
There are nutcases all over the place, especially round here.
‘Pardon?’ I said, not entirely at ease.