STAMMERED SONGBOOK Page 4

  He likes strong flavours.

  I’d so like to have a cheerfully demented mother. One of those good-humoured, ever-upbeat ladies who still go to the hairdresser’s, albeit at three in the morning. One of those cackling aunties or out-of-control grannies who wet themselves laughing and miss the cup when pouring tea—our Hollywood dementia patients.

  I can’t stand them, the colour-photogenic senile models, the pin-ups of those countless books which prattle on with such insufferable exuberance about Alzheimer’s also creating opportunities. Give me anything, if necessary a moaning harpy, a Bacchanal of ungovernable surliness or lewd talk. Not this wreck of a woman, so lean and emaciated by now that it strikes me how wide the crown of her head is, making me wonder: was she brought into the world with forceps sixty-five years ago?

  She now walks to and fro round the house, all day long. She gets up off the sofa, goes to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the bathroom, from the bathroom back to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the hall and back again. I can count myself lucky that she no longer wants to go upstairs with a pair of shoes in her hands to put them away in a last paroxysm of domesticity in a wardrobe that has long since been dismantled.

  The house smells of dust and emptiness upstairs—downstairs, all day long, the shuffling of soles across the floor and that human frame, clothes, skin and steel wire, from the front door to the back door, the arms lame alongside the body like a stray puppet in a clock mechanism.

  Constantly sitting, crying, getting up, searching, sitting, crying and getting up again. No touch brings any rest; no song can calm her down. Only “Mum, for Christ’s sake sit down” helps—sometimes.

  Gradually I begin to understand the euphemism lurking beneath the charming designation “home care”. Looking after sick family members yourself, with the support of district nurses—it sounds good.

  Home care, as if we were still living in the late nineteenth century, when families averaged twelve hundred children apiece and there was an extensive network of cousins, aunts, uncles and relations more or less under one roof.

  The district nurse is on sick leave, drained and burnt out and out of circulation for about three months. The home help who comes to clean has to recover every so often from her hectic daily round up hill and down dale to the umpteenth farm where an elderly farmer or farmer’s wife sits by the stove waiting for help.

  In the paper I read that in England home care produces a saving for the NHS larger than the total education budget.

  In our hospitals the vertebrae of nursing staff who twist their backs lifting the products of the ageing society are grinding.

  Who wipes his arse with whom here?

  Arise you workers from your slumbers, etc.

  She said I can always ring her, the nurse, says my father. Even though she’s on sick leave.

  You can call me, she said. Any time. Just you.

  He needs to go into hospital for a minor procedure, nothing serious, but she has to be admitted too, there’s no alternative. The surgeon has arranged for a room for her in the secure geriatric unit.

  I go with them. Two cases, one for him, one for her.

  She is restless. She seems to realize that something is up, that she will be separated from my father, if only for about three nights.

  She still always feels for my hand when I come to bed, he says.

  Forms.

  We must regard your mother’s stay as an ordinary admission. So we must fill out an admission form, says the duty neurologist.

  Can your mother still wash by herself?

  No, she can’t.

  Eat and drink?

  No, she can’t do that either.

  Can your mother still get dressed and undressed?

  I shake my head.

  Is the home adapted for persons with a handicap?

  They’ve been sleeping and living downstairs for months, I say. But I’m thinking: stop it, woman.

  The next day we find her slumped in the chair by the window, with her chin against the edge of the table that has been clamped onto the arms of the chair. She is crying and frightened to death. Her hands are grabbing in all directions. Her soles are sliding across the floor as they’ve forgotten to lower the footrest. We help her up, and in the skin of her lower jaw is the blood-red imprint of the edge of the table.

  She is silent and I am silent too. She with a head full of holes, I with a mouth full of plaster. Outside drizzle, the grey backs of buildings, wind in folded parasols. In the corridor the jolting of trolleys and the clatter of plates. At the nursing station a telephone bleeps. No one picks up. The nurse says: fortunately she ate well.

  She goes from room to room, up and down the length of the corridor, the side corridor, the stairwell, as far as the glass door with the combination lock and the lift. She wants to go in everywhere, except into her own room. Then fear takes hold, she starts to cry and I can feel her muscles stiffening.

  After the umpteenth attempt I lift her up and am hit in the process, put her in the chair by the window and clamp the table onto the armrests. Then I take her hand in mind and hum songs—for one, two hours. Children’s songs, folk songs, what I can still remember of the Gregorian repertoire.

  She calms down. With her free hand she taps on the back of mine, then on the table top. She puts her thumb and forefinger together and seems to want to write something. Then she looks at me. Some more tears. We hum “Veni Creator Spiritus”.

  When she calms down, sleep comes. One hand hangs in the air above the table top. Behind her glasses the eyelids fall shut, although they never seem to close completely. The eyelashes go on trembling, as if as soon as the eyes close the dreaming phase begins. The muscles in her neck relax, her head falls forward.

  That’s how she sleeps, one hand hangs in the air for a while, and then sinks down next to the other. Sometimes her breathing becomes more regular, deeper, and a slow tidal movement ebbs and flows through her bones. Her sleeping skull rocks above the table—how thin she is.

  For the fifth or sixth time she walks round the entire physiotherapy room with me, at the end of the corridor. Again she feels her way along the edge of the basket with the bunch of dried flowers, again she tries to pop the colourful pebbles in the bowl next to the bunch of dried flowers into her mouth and I extract them laboriously from between her smacking lips. And again, for the umpteenth time, she takes from a cabinet the little metal churn which, with all the rest of the kitsch, attempts in vain to brighten up the clinical area, and takes it to the kitchen corner and the draining board. Halfway she stops, uncertain, and then with the churn in her hand walks from one side of the room to the other, sobbing.

  When, for the umpteenth time in a row, I sit down on one of the chairs round the kitchen table and say: I don’t know what you want, Mum, but I’m going to rest a bit, she simply comes and tugs at my shoulders and gives me weak slaps because I won’t budge.

  Meanwhile Mrs B. comes in, and stands by another table in the room, in shiny pyjamas and holding a good-sized wallet.

  Well I never, she says. Old acquaintances!

  My mother whines.

  Do we know each other then? Where do you live?

  In Grammene, replies Mrs B.

  That’s possible. Relations of ours used to live there.

  So you don’t know who I am?

  No.

  So what am I doing standing here?

  I wouldn’t know.

  Neither would I, says Mrs B.

  A little later her therapist arrives. Mrs B. reads the paper aloud, the paper of her area. Pigeon-racing. Cycling news. Accident with minor damage and four injured.

  What have you just read? Tell me, asks the therapist.

  Who has read what? asks Mrs B. in astonishment.

  The nurse brings her coffee. Smacking her lips, she looks at the cup that is put on the window sill. Give it to me, give it to me, her hands gesture. The corners of her mouth tremble, as if a last remnant of articulation still animates her lips.

  She drinks greedily and polishes off the biscuit. When the cup is empty and the biscuit finished, she remains restless. She points to the silvery plastic the biscuit came in. All afternoon she makes it crackle in her fingertips and watches mesmerized, puts it in her mouth, sucks on it, crumples it in her fingers and sucks again.

  She looks at me: don’t take it away from me.

  Finally she falls asleep again and I leave her alone. In the doorway I turn round. I see her figure, hunched in sleep, hanging over the table, her arms pulled into her body, neck pulled into her shoulders, head bent forward, fingers curled on her ribcage. Her body is taking over from her, is lowering the blinds over her battered brain and is automatically filling her lungs. She rocks in her sleep. I think: so this is my mother.

  I take the stairs down, behind the combination lock (“please key in the date backwards and push the gate”). The doors of most rooms are open, behind them grey hair, sucking on lower lips. Smell of ether, and the whole muzak of a hospital corridor on an endless grey afternoon. Games with bells ringing, telebingo, buzzing telephones, snatches of Brazilian soaps. This is where they rest then, the worker bees now shrunk to larvae of the welfare state, which is bursting at the seams under their weight…

  Downstairs the nurse says my father is already out of recovery but that he’s in a different room. The man he was sharing the room with died this afternoon and is now being laid out.

  It doesn’t surprise me. This morning, in the bed next to my father’s, I saw a trunk without legs, groaning in its sleep and with the death rattle already audible in its windpipe.

  He’s dead, that guy, says my father.

  Yes, I say.

  Apart from that he is silent, still slightly woozy from the anaesthetic.

  When my s
isters visit towards evening, they haven’t got my message.

  Have you come for the gentleman? asks the perplexed nurse. Didn’t they call you? The gentleman died…

  What? Dead? Mr Mortier. My father? cries Veerle.

  No, the other gentleman, replies the nurse, relieved.

  I thought, that’s it, says Veerle later. We’ll have to cope all by ourselves.

  She falls, for the umpteenth time. In my father’s room, where after the nurse has brought the evening meal, she panics. She gets up. I see her wobble. Shout something because I am standing too far away from her. My brothers are also too late. She goes straight forward on her face. The reflex of spreading her hands in front of her and breaking her fall with her arms has long since disappeared.

  The thud of her head on the floor. The desperation. The frame of her glasses has dug into her eyebrow. She wails tears and blood.

  To Accident and Emergency. The wound must be stitched. Again. I say: we can easily look for different frames for her. My brothers and sister take her away. One pushes the wheelchair, the others take her hands in theirs. Pietà. The sons carry the mother.

  The sitting,

  That sitting of hers,

  next to me on the sofa.

  That sitting without anything,

  and that silence: an empty

  house in the afternoon,

  the tap leaks.

  During the dinner for my father’s birthday, in that restaurant in the fields, she beckoned me from the wheelchair in which she almost always sits now. She beckoned me as she used to at family parties or other occasions where it was hectic: with her forefinger crooked and the hint of a wink.

  I got up almost by reflex from my chair and went over to her, at the other end of the table. She smiled faintly and I smiled back. It can only have been about three steps, but as I walked towards her I saw the clarity disappear from her eyes and the mist rose again. Whatever it had been, it had gone.

  It’s hard to adjust to life and, hardest of all, to death.

  What I can’t cope with is her complete helplessness. The unbearable thought that if there were no one else there, she might survive for only a day or two. She would still have the reflex to drink when she’s thirsty, and for all we know, if they were within reach, she might be able to bring a spoon or a glass to her mouth. But actions like turning on a tap she has long since forgotten. She would not be able to dress or wash herself, or change her underwear; she would be helplessly lost.

  Sometimes I observe her, I see her walking past the kitchen window, back and forth, woodenly, with her hands in front of her, to and fro, to and fro like a pendulum—the loneliness is almost audible, the eternal whistling of a kettle just below boiling point.

  We live in and outside time. The seasons go on succeeding each other, but the usual time seems just a skin at present, surrounding dark, timeless flesh, of which she forms the bitter kernel. I wish time would revolve again. We have become crepuscular beings, searching and groping in twilight, unsure whether it will ever become day or night.

  Sometimes she stops the pendulum movement for a moment. She looks at me as if I am something that has occurred to her.

  And then goes on walking.

  She is a girl with a bag of marbles that splits open, and she looks in terror as they career across the floor.

  She has opened a cupboard and all the crockery tumbles out over her, there’s no end to it.

  She has lost her way in a labyrinth of drying sheets.

  She is stuck in the mud and tries in vain to pull one leg loose.

  She puts a lump of sugar in her mouth and her whole being, or what is left of it, sucks on it for all it is worth and everything in her relaxes, as if her organism remembers what sweetness is—as if her organism is relieved that it remembers sweetness.

  She pulls on the hem of the undercloth on the table. She tries to lay the hem parallel to the edge of the table, again and again.

  She cries and she laughs and she cries and she laughs, four or five times a minute.

  My mother,

  for a whole morning she searches for a word

  as a cornerstone to fill the breach.

  For a whole morning the bitten hole

  of that word stands missing between us.

  Mother’s word for today is erosion.

  She stammers alluvially: the lilacs are still what’s

  that called when they have no leaves—bare.

  Whether there will be ice on the pond is uncertain this year,

  whether it will be strong enough to—

  her fingers skate.

  She says days are wintry

  and they are.

  She also says: what are those clicks, no

  Clocks, you know, in the grass,

  On legs, they’re laying but that one isn’t.

  He’s just crowing. So funny

  those things there

  in the grass with cats.

  Is it so windy today,

  or are those my thoughts?

  Will a day come when no one

  remembers the right mistakes, no one still

  knows what speech impediment

  exactly to feed?

  Will anyone bore through your sandcastles

  of semantics with

  firebreaks and understanding?

  Why, after each mouthful, does she always

  wipe the rim of the cup dry with her thumb?

  Why do simple sweet wrappers suddenly become

  transparent mysteries?

  Why do I see her testing with her lips, the tip

  of her tongue the difficult corners

  of words as if she is

  standing on a narrow ledge with her back

  against the wall—why doesn’t she dare

  to look down, and does she say

  that something’s dizzy there?

  Back home our mother goes visibly downhill. My father cannot see the reality and is balancing on the edge of a depression (for which there must be pills, but what good are they?). It threatens to infect us all. Inwardly I sometimes have the feeling that I am slowly transforming into some dull, colourless metal, with very little resonance. Something like zinc or tin: as solid as it is grey.

  She collapsed. Her muscle tone is weakening. She can scarcely move her fingers or toes any longer. Slowly she is curling into the foetal position. It may be connected with the cold, with this long winter. Perhaps it will soon improve.

  My father clings to any sign that somewhere in that languishing organism the woman he knows still lives. Some while ago I met my brothers and sisters to open up and get drunk—but also to establish whether we all agreed that a point is coming at which we will have to decide to put an end to the suffering. It sounds businesslike, but when the moment comes it will nevertheless be a dreadful decision—or, who knows, who knows, a release.

  We have decided against a thorough periodic examination. The GP will keep an eye on her condition and if there are complications she can always go to the hospital.

  What is the point of shoving her under a scanner every three or four months?

  Subjecting her to the horror of a spinal puncture to find out what we actually already know—that the substances that are making her ill are not going away, on the contrary—would simply be a token of sadism.

  Nor will she be given any pills which supposedly slow the degeneration of her nervous system, because the pills don’t do that. They are magic balls, that’s all, like extensive swathes of medical jargon: magic formulae with an ancient etymology that hangs our mother out to dry between the pages of a textbook.