STAMMERED SONGBOOK Page 5

  For us doctors are not healers but interpreters: what we know in ordinary words they translate into terms of Greek and Latin origin. Leave philology out of it. I like doctors who don’t know everything either and say that in so many words. They exist, but they’re becoming rare.

  I don’t want her to fall into the hands of some white-coated type who double-checks everything against his protocol of statistically backed bullet points and has scarcely any ear or eye for the person she still is.

  Look and listen, listen closely, says our GP. And talk, but that is difficult with your mum, of course.

  Mum, I remember, one of the first winters where it was clear to everyone how ill you were, sitting here on the chair by the window, and it was cold outside, bitterly cold. You were sitting right next to the radiator, the faintly ticking radiator. If you’d been able to, you would have crawled inside it. You held your hands against the warm side, all your fingers spread wide, and shivered and shivered.

  I don’t know if you remember—no, you can’t possibly remember, I forget how old I was, perhaps about ten. We went to visit Lea in Ghent. We were walking along the Lousbergskaai; you were carrying my younger brother on your arm and at a street corner your foot slipped off the edge of the kerb and you fell.

  My brother finished up on the asphalt, bawling. I remember I picked him up. You crawled to your feet—grazed knees, torn tights. You swore and bit back your tears, and pulled the tails of your jacket straight, that rust-coloured check two-piece, over your fake crocodile leather shoes. I remember thinking, or rather it being whispered from my gut: mothers die too.

  Why do we accept the mortality of our fathers more easily than that of our mothers? Because the tough thread of life is spun from mothers? I think of your fingers on that radiator: so fragile, almost translucent, like the newly opened fingers of a foetus, through which the first blood vessels meander their way.

  You fell, two summers ago, during the very last walk we all went on together. The Ardennes, end of September: the earth a carpet of dry leaves and husks, the smell of dew and vegetable decay. Somewhere on the descent from a hill, down to the river, you fell and I saw you scramble up, like thirty years before. First you wiped your knees clean, bit back your tears, and swore virtually identically—except that you now said it was our fault. We said nothing.

  You could no longer cut up your own food. We saw that for the first time. You picked up your knife and fork for a moment—it seemed to be a ritual between the two of you—and then put them down again, after which my father took over and cut the potatoes and the meat into little pieces.

  We heard that you could no longer take a shower by yourself. That he took you with him, lathered you and held you tight when you were frightened by the water coming out of the showerhead.

  It took you about two hours to calm down when everyone arrived in the house that one of my sisters had rented. Upset by the commotion of playing children, laughter, pleasure, you went upstairs, where it was quiet. You used to be in charge, and let all that exuberant life wash over you. Now you crept away, behind my father.

  She’s like my shadow these days, he said.

  And now you are a blue-veined china doll. You no longer wear tights but thick woollen socks. The winter bends your fingers into small, cold claws. In your footwear your toes curl against your soles. So your slow withering begins. Winter after winter you become a little more bent, you contract around yourself, under the increasingly thick sweaters and coats with which we try to keep you warm—one great vanishing point.

  I shall have to restrain her, he says. Otherwise I’ll never have a moment’s rest. I can’t be everywhere at once. And if she gets into the drawers and grabs for a knife or breaks a glass… She doesn’t know what a knife is any more, or slivers of glass, how sharp they are. I’ve applied for a wheelchair from the Health Service. Then I shall restrain her, there’s nothing else for it.

  Eventually your system will have become too weak to resist infections. A wealth of clinical terms will run riot over your bones. Your blood pressure is already beginning to drop worryingly, and you sometimes lose consciousness in your sleep. It is as if reverse birth pangs are passing through your cells and each wave is taking something else of you with it. Your insides rattle and jangle. The winter may bring the final bout of pneumonia. One day you may no longer have any appetite. You may have a fall, break something, and mess up your dislocated head even more. How far should we go to keep you alive? When does care become another word for torture?

  You won’t notice a thing. Whatever awareness or consciousness is still dormant in you, a frightened owl chick somewhere in the tangle of collapsed beams in your head, will glide away into the fog of morphine—we hope.

  I wouldn’t like her to lie there suffering later, he says.

  I wouldn’t want her to be dying and us to be just standing there watching.

  I don’t think she has to suffer.

  We can arrange it, I say.

  The doctor said so too. A moment will come when we all feel something has to be done.

  You can’t determine that moment in advance, there’s no point.

  But it will come, and everyone will realize: it’s time.

  The most probable outcome? That she’ll become increasingly bedridden and one morning won’t get up. That she’ll sink into a coma. That she will lose still more weight, until she is all skin and bone. That her brain function will decline still further, that constant light tremors will pass through her limbs.

  That her immune system will decline and she will eventually be given mush containing antibiotics. That she will lie there with the corners of her mouth twitching, that her eyeballs will tremble, that her whole body will be on the rocks.

  Hopeful complications: that one day she may no longer feel any hunger. That we keep her fluid levels up, but decide no longer to feed her.

  That her heart may give out, before the decline is total.

  Mum, I remember I rang you the evening before you had to go in for surgery, years ago. Five top-heavy children and one miscarriage had played havoc with your body. At fifty-five you were threatening to become completely incontinent. The doctors had just come up with an ingenious system, a kind of artificial sphincter that you could operate with a button in your groin. It was to be a long procedure. Physicians from other hospitals would come and look on with fascination while you were splayed on the tilted operating table and that revolutionary technology was implanted in you.

  I still wonder: is that when it began? The long period under anaesthesia? In a journal from Harvard I read, as the article puts it in clinical terms, “the formation of beta-amyloids was observed in brain cells in petri dishes to which components of the major anaesthetics were added”.

  I keep the article, but don’t read any further.

  I rang you that evening. The nurses had given you an enema, but had taken no account of the fact that you couldn’t possibly retain any liquid. There was a commotion, swearing, the clatter of buckets. Everything’s filthy, the floor, the sheets, you said. Call me back in a little while.

  I remember thinking: if she is to be old, Death, grant her dignity. It was all so far off, I thought.

  Less than ten years later there’s no point any more. You’ve long since forgotten how to use that button. You’ve long since forgotten that you’re a mother and I’m your son.

  To the hospital with a woman who has to undergo an operation but no longer knows who she is, where she is or what will happen.

  She cries like a schoolgirl on the trolley taking her to the operating theatre, calls with arms outstretched “Come, come, Dad” to my father, who watches her go with his heart breaking.

  No learned spectators this time. Just the surgeon who has to undo his own work.

  She comes back with a belly with rubber pipes sticking out of it and above her hip a hole from which a plastic bag hangs, which must be replaced twice a day, incorporating a pink rubber ring, which must be cleaned carefully.

  In the future will I think, whenever I see an elderly lady with your posture, or with features that more or less resemble yours: you could have been like that, if you’d reached eighty-five?

  How would you have grown old if the illness hadn’t been there? On your side of the family there was nothing straightforward, rough or easy-going about old age. It was tough and bony. It bit on crumbling teeth, like your father and grandfather.

  On father’s side dying was welcomed fatalistically. To which side will I incline in old age, dying? Rather the rounded, gentle stoicism of my father, if I were to have a say in it. But do we have the choice? How great is the play between the dictates of the organism that is ours but there again not ours? How many of our decisions are conclusions based on the body, or attempts to avoid those conclusions?

  I’m frightened of getting old, you said quite often, I remember, when you were in your forties. And also frightened of death, dying. Around your washbasin there was always a regiment of anti-wrinkle creams and breast-firming ointments. I should have liked to see you grow old the way your great-aunt grew old, ninety-six when she died. Smoked a fat cigar every evening and poured a stiff whisky into her body, which was the shape of a carpenter’s square. At family gatherings she preferred to sit at the young people’s table. Making quips and meanwhile observing all that young life with her one eye, whose vision had still not grown hazy. One evening she said that the whisky was upsetting her stomach. Before the GP could be called she was dead. Sitting up in bed, hands on her belly.

  Dad felt that we should honour the dead. He took us with him to the neighbour who had been ill for so long that we thought he was showing off, but who did finally breathe his last one Saturday afternoon. We still thought he was a show-off, laid out jauntily in his Sunday suit, with
his yellow-blue fingers round a rosary. He who never set foot in the church acted posthumously as a model of piety, an apparently respectable and pious gentleman, who while he was alive preferred to spend much of the day shuffling round in a grubby dressing gown, in his underwear and stocking feet. He regularly beat his four daughters black and blue until they followed his dictates, but my father said that it takes all sorts to make a world, so we went to pay our respects to the body.

  He took us with him to the old man, a little way down the street, who couldn’t get to the oxygen in time when he had an asthma attack. I recall—I remember—that he became a widower early, far too early, and that he always cried when Dad visited him. I had never seen an old man cry; I thought that tears dried up as you got older.

  I saw Dad crying the day his mother died and all the family were called to the home and he arrived too late to say goodbye. The day after he took us to see her. In my memory he carries the three of us, my sisters and me, my brothers are too small, in his arms—but that’s not possible, as I was already eleven.

  You always stayed at home when we went with him to pay our respects to the dead, even then. He took my sisters and me to an outhouse behind the home, close to the laundry, where clouds of steam and the smell of soap were wafting out of the open windows. We had to wait, said a nurse, until Granny was ready, and when they brought her they had spread a purple cloth over her dress and put her glasses on.

  The dead have a busy time no longer being there.

  I remember being sad but not being able to cry, fascinated as I was by the phenomenal stillness of death, which I could not stand, and which had declared her body a playground for its inertia. As the years went on the fear I felt at the time cut a deep furrow in me. Mostly it stays closed, sometimes it springs open, usually at night or at sleepless moments when half-waking dreams appear and I see her lying on that bier, under that coarse purple sheet, and the razor-sharp realization hits me: she’s dead. It hit me last February. Alone at home, too restless to write and not knowing where to crawl and hide, I ran the bath and it didn’t help when fear kicked in with the force of a birth pang or a cramp.

  I did not see your father in his coffin, or your mother. I didn’t want to. I saw her a few days before her death, and we had said our goodbyes. I held his hand the evening before. The night before his death none of the three of us could get to sleep. Without knowing what the others were doing, we each got up. I sat on the sofa for hours in our dark apartment. Veerle started cleaning the kitchen cupboards, my other sister cleared out the fridge, as if we felt that “something” was about to happen. I didn’t go to the laying-out. There are still dreams in which I see him on his deathbed. I bend over and have the fright of my life when he suddenly grins and waves.

  When your father died, you could not be dragged away from the bed where he was laid out. During the days before the funeral you went into the room at every opportunity, appropriate or not. Normally you seldom set foot in your parents’ house. I saw you several times a day sitting on the chair at the foot of the bed, or on the sofa in the corner of the room, staring at his dead body.

  It’s as if I’ve got so much still to tell him, you said.

  Neighbours came and helped with addressing the envelopes for the mourning cards. Friends called to pay their respects. Gallons of coffee were poured; there was much chatter, snuffling, uproarious laughter and chat. A shame that the dead man couldn’t be there himself. He would definitely have brought the gin bottle up from the cellar and refilled glasses copiously. Amid all the commotion I nevertheless wondered: what will become of us? A web of children and descendants enclosed the grandmother in her stoical grief at the head of the table. And what next, when will it be our turn? White neon light, the smell of ether, humming monitors and the nurse who comes and whispers in my or his ear: we’ve turned the gentleman down gently for you, if that’s all right?

  When she died, your mother, thirteen years later, you cried your eyes out, although the two of you had always had a difficult relationship. That’s what I’m like, these days, she said. I don’t know why I’m so quick to cry, I used not to be like that.

  We already knew you were ill. Her emotions are becoming primary, said the doctors. Departure after departure.

  Apart from your father, your sister was the only dead family member to whom we all went together to pay our respects. She was laid out in town, in a mortuary that did its dogged best not to look too cheerful, but not too depressing either. You pulled the sheet with the body under it straight, smoothed the folds with the flat of your hand and stroked your sister’s forehead, with your eyes full of tears. She feels cold, so cold, just feels so cold, you kept repeating.

  It’s strange to observe yourself gradually starting to think about your mortality and doing so in such a sober way, as if it is part of our hidden biological clock that from a certain age you start preparing for the inevitable. Sooner or later I shall draw up the balance and I’ve been practising stoicism for years, which was not the strongest suit of those who went before me in death, at least on your side of the family. I saw how they clutched the sheets of their deathbeds in their fists. I, on the other hand, would prefer the covers nice and smooth when I snuff it. But in my view that is wishful thinking. We leave life behind as a half-cleared table, a desk full of papers, an unmade bed.

  Life doesn’t amount to much. We’re born and then we die. Until about the age of thirty you are busy learning to read, write, drive and enter into human relationships that are a little more like embraces than head-on collisions, and even then we still quite regularly put the guard rail to the test. I wouldn’t want to be twenty again for all the tea in China, unless a good fairy allowed me to take what I’ve learned with me. And even then… what have I learned? I don’t know. It’s more in my bones than in my language. It strikes me as improbable that you can be wise and experienced in a body that hasn’t yet been through anything. Wear and tear is a form of experience. A reed that has bent a hundred times will do it more supply than a young twig that still has to learn how not to crack.

  I wish I could think of you as you were, but I can’t. Memories well up in us or ambush us, but they never provide us with shelter. Nostalgia does not issue from the tension between a dreamed or an imagined past and a reality that looks totally different. Nostalgia is the experience of the immense distance between between us and our recollections. Memory swiftly opens its fluid dwellings to us, so it seems, but when put into words it threatens to harden into a country house, open on Sundays from two to five, guided tours on request, please don’t touch anything.

  I wish that I could remember you again as the woman you were before the disease started spinning its mesh of holes in your mind, that I didn’t again and again collide with that darkness, the teeth-grinding shroud of your pain and your boundless suffering.

  I have a perfect picture in front of me of how she used to be, says Lieven, it’s still completely intact. Perhaps because I can’t bear to see her as she is now. Perhaps because I see her less. And I also think: there’s no point in mourning already.

  So everything must be smashed, he says.

  You were the centre, you and Father. We were children and you were parents. A whole universe revolved around the two of you. Everyone was welcome. The seven of us were rarely alone for dinner. Parties in the garden, in the walled inner garden of the house where we were simply happy. Friends, boyfriends, sweethearts, lost souls in need of family affection—they were all welcome. Life, messy, exuberant, nonchalant, hard and beneficent, danced around you.

  If I were a Hellenic divinity, I would transform you into two intertwined trees, with broad crowns under which on hot afternoons people could sleep, make love, read on blankets and party at tables.

  But everything must be smashed.

  Others who have died have strengthened me in all kinds of strange ways. With their lips that had fallen silent, before the earth covered them for ever, they quickly spelled out to me what probably matters most as long as we’re breathing: that love is attention. That they are two words for the same thing. That it isn’t necessary to try to clear up every typo and obscure passage that we come across when we read the other person attentively—that a human being is difficult poetry, which you must be able to listen to without always demanding clarification, and that the best thing that can happen to us is the absolution that a loved one grants us for the unjustifiable fact that we exist and drag along with us a self that has been marked and shaped by so many others.