STAMMERED SONGBOOK Page 2

  I had imagined their old age differently. In twenty years or so they would be old, the roles would be reversed and it’d be us who looked after them. But their old age is suddenly on the doorstep, and won’t go away. I smell it in their clothes, they no longer bother to change their underwear every day, I fear—a helper will have to come in. How would he be able to cope otherwise? She traipses round after him all day long. Even on the toilet he is scarcely alone. She clings to him. Everywhere and at every moment that one word she has left, Dad, rings out—ever more hoarsely.

  Is this life then? I wonder aloud at breakfast. Yes, this is life, says Lieven. And we haven’t seen the end of it yet.

  In the intervals between writing—I work from the morning until about four in the afternoon—I am gradually preparing for another farewell: from my grandmother, my mother’s mother. Her shoulder is not healing, after that fall she had a few months back. Increasingly she develops a high temperature, has problems with all kinds of infections and, mainly, mentally she has virtually “gone”. She seems to have no sense of place or time, and when I last saw her she called me “Jozef”, the name of her brother who was killed in the war. She said nothing else, apart from the the mumbled rosaries she prays every waking hour. It would surprise me if she makes it to Easter.

  If she dies, I shall have to support my father for a few days, as my mother won’t be much help to him. She herself, to my relief, reacts calmly to developments. It will be a release, she said to me—strikingly lucidly and without faltering.

  She died on Thursday morning at about ten o’clock, the grandmother. While I was on the train home the Monday before, I had a call from my father, who told me that she was failing fast. My sisters, my brothers and I stood watch by her bedside. I’m glad she remembered me, although she was too weak to talk—she spoke with her eyes and squeezed my hand.

  The calm and serenity with which she awaited the end of her life are moving and in an odd way also consoling. The days I spent alternately working on the novel and with her, and while I was writing in the garden I felt strangely “embedded” in existence.

  My mother is very upset, which for us in itself, strangely enough, is reassuring; although there are days when a real conversation is no longer possible, she is more “intact” than we might sometimes think.

  The funeral, after six days of not really profound grief, was more full of poignant melancholy—one can hardly call eighty-nine a case of cot death. Only after the service, in the cemetery, when the coffin lay there so alone, sunk in the grave, in the pouring rain, did I break down for a moment.

  Now she rests beside my grandfather, which is a consolation, near the avenue to the château. A very beautiful part of the village where I grew up—one of the landscapes that are very dear to Lieven and me.

  After the funeral meal we toured the area a bit, the woods of Alter, and the old arable lands around the Bruges canal. The rain had washed away all the dust from the previous warm days, a bluish mist hung over the countryside and everything looked so green. Ancestral ground too, because at the foot of the embankment of the canal there is still the farm where my grandmother was born. After lying empty for years the house and the animal quarters are now being restored. It did me good to see it all again. In the last few years I have gone home frequently, but almost exclusively to provide sick-care, without taking much time for long walks or thinking things over.

  Now we are left with boxes and cases and the always-too-scanty messages on posthumous paper.

  It comes so easily to us, speaking and writing. One word brings the next with it, one silence splits like a shell around the next. If I am in the kitchen chopping vegetables, I think of her garbled language and wonder: what must it be like in that head of yours? Do all those cells sometimes accidentally intermesh again, and is self-consciousness suddenly created? Who am I and who are you? What do I still mean to you, and who are you to me? I can no longer remember when you were still well. That’s why I hack away so recklessly at that leek.

  At table, as she is drinking a glass of lemonade, it goes down the wrong way and she coughs.

  I hear the timbre of her voice in her coughing.

  I recognize her.

  It gave me a fright, says Lieven afterwards. I suddenly heard Nelly again.

  She hasn’t said anything for months.

  When we told him, when we had to tell him that his wife had Alzheimer’s, he said: I want to look after her myself for as long as possible.

  We’ll sort that out, we said. And we also said it was better if she herself didn’t know. Unless she gave very clear signs of an awareness that something was wrong with her.

  Our doctor said: in my experience it’s better not to give relatively young Alzheimer patients the diagnosis. It’s highly likely they will develop a serious depression on top of their dementia. It’s better if she can enjoy the lucid years she has left.

  We shall have to face it, we said, and together try to make the best of it.

  He was silent.

  Later I rang him.

  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 pot
atoes 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.

  Everything is crumbling.

  On the beach, as she watches the bronzed, horny young people on the silver sand under the palms, she makes as if to lift her skirt and cries out despairingly: look, I can’t do it any more. I can’t do it any more.

  Later in the photos I see that she’s gone. Fog in her eyes. A look I don’t recognize. What’s become of her?

  In the following months it goes from bad to worse. The blonde with which she colours her hair grows out, making way for grey. She loses weight visibly. In the winter months she literally shakes with cold. Overnight she is a woman in her late eighties.

  At each new collapse we swallow, and make the best of it.

  Sometimes we wonder: us too? Soon? When?

  It goes like a flash, decay. If we had imagined a slow decline, at a pace that would be more or less bearable for my father, as far as that is possible, we can lay that dream to rest. In the space of a few weeks the remnants of self-awareness or consciousness that were in her have vanished. It is as if you’re looking from the top of a cliff at a huge whirlpool, as if I am embracing an hourglass of skin and bone. The erosion is unstoppable and horrifying.

  The panic in her eyes, it is as if she is watching the house around her being emptied by a gang of looters, too perplexed and powerless to stop them. Hands grabbing everywhere. We’ve scarcely turned our backs, so to speak, before the thieves have made off with yet another word or a habit.

  Sometimes she sits shaking on the sofa, I don’t know if it’s from fear or grief, or is she cold because her internal thermostat has gone haywire?

  I look at her, she looks back, with a helplessness that cuts you to the quick. I hear the rustling of the rats behind the panelling, gnawing at her nerves.

  A friend whose mother also had Alzheimer’s once said: it’s the most cowardly, sneakiest disease I know. It wrung my mother out like a floorcloth and slung her in a corner.

  I can hear it giggling, the disease, behind the cupboard, under the table, in a cowardly tone.

  Another friend told me about a woman who kept going at home by sticking self-adhesive labels everywhere, on the doors, on cupboards and other furniture, with words like “soup plates”, “cups” or “beer glasses” on them.

  I wondered: does she stick a label on her blouse too, with “Me” on it in mirror writing, so that she knows who it is who bends over the washbasin in the mornings to freshen her face? And how long will it be before she no longer knows what reading is—like my mother; panicking in a whirlpool of labels that have come loose?

  She plants her nails in the flesh of my forearm until it almost bleeds when we take her out for a walk with us, and if she could she would huddle up in me while she stares in fearful incomprehension at the fields that have surrounded her since her earliest childhood.

  In the mornings the restlessness strikes as soon my father has served her breakfast. He puts her in the car and drives off with her. Fleeing from emptiness at home, he tries to find warmth with us and especially with my sisters, which is not always convenient—but we drop what we are doing, if only for fifteen minutes or half an hour. We make coffee, give him a chance to calm down, although we know that shortly, at about four-thirty, she’ll want to be off again, and by about seven-thirty she’ll be in bed and the only sound that rings out will be that of the television.

  You can’t say anything any more, nothing, he sighs. She doesn’t respond to anything. Nothing at all comes back.

  The great sower of feelings of guilt is bringing in its rich harvest. We, feeling guilty because we can’t be there more often than we already are. He, feeling guilty when he has to give up any aspect of caring for her. Arranging for home care, bringing in a home help, and each time having the feeling you’re betraying him because he has the feeling he’s betraying her. We must try to get through this—I can’t imagine the havoc a disease like this must wreak in a family where they’ve never really got on, where all the dormant conflicts are exposed, in all their rawness.

  At night she pulls up her legs in her sleep and then stretches them again. It drives him crazy.

  Perhaps you shouldn’t sleep together any more, I say.

  He shrugs his shoulders: I’ve tried the sofa in the living room a few times.

  After a week or so that habit subsides, but her sleep becomes longer and deeper.

  When will she not wake up again?

  Sometimes I catch myself looking around me and wondering about those in my immediate circle: if you were to die, how great would the pain be? As if something like that can be assessed. Still, I try, as it were, to measure the depth of the knife wounds and tend to weigh the value of friendships and affections against a non-existent loss. Sometimes I sit reading on the sofa and see Lieven’s face on the cushion beside me—and I have to fight back the tears. Sometimes I’m with friends and I think: don’t go yet, don’t fall apart too soon.

  Is that how it will be from now on? Is that the hush of older relations, as I remember them from parties in the past, when I found them nothing but a heap of gout and crutches in the shadow of the pines, surveying the youngsters around them, drinking, cooing and filled with reflection? I mean the awareness that behind your back the chilly wall of the eternal ice age is sliding closer, pushing mountains of rubble ahead of it, and that nothing can be done about it.