Eating the Underworld (15 page)

I am aghast. It is beyond belief to me that someone who has never met my mother can make these bald, uncompromising statements about her. Erratic and verbally violent are the last adjectives I would associate with my mother. And the Holocaust was rarely talked about in my home. Years later in fact, I will watch a
video of my sister interviewing my parents about their experiences in the Holocaust, an interview she conducted just prior to writing her first book of Holocaust poems. On the video, she asks my father how they treated the topic of the Holocaust with their children. My father replies that they chose not to talk about it, wanting to protect the children and put it behind them.

I've been silent up until now, but I can't allow this to pass without comment. I craft a careful letter. It states that my experience of our home life and mother was very different from the reviewer's description; that my mother was and did none of the things attributed to her in this piece. That she was an exceptionally loving, kind and generous person whom I am proud of and grateful to have had as a mother. I focus my comments on the reviewer. I don't want this letter to be seen as an attack on my sister. All I want to do is speak up for my mother.

I show my father the letter before I post it off. He reads it and says, ‘It is a good letter.' And then it is printed.

On the morning it comes out, Lily doesn't contact me herself, but someone rings on her behalf, furious at me for writing the letter and accusing me of trying to sabotage Lily's career. It does no good to explain that I wrote the letter to share a different view of my mother. He is convinced that my aim was the destruction of Lily's career.

I hang up from this call, only to have the phone ring under my hand. It's my father, fresh from a conversation with Lily. I am shocked to hear that his
voice is tearful. ‘How could you do this to Lily?' he asks me. ‘You are doing it to ruin her career.'

‘But Dad,' I say, ‘I showed you the letter before I posted it.'

‘No,' he says, ‘you didn't.'

I am speechless at this. It was only a few days ago that he held it in his hands.

‘All of Mum's friends are very unhappy that you wrote the letter,' he says. ‘They think that it's not nice.'

I am saddened to think that Mum's friends feel like this. It's an image I keep until years later, when I am having coffee with my mother's best friend. For some reason, the subject of my letter to the
Jewish News
comes up.

‘Everyone was so pleased that you wrote that letter,' she says.

‘Really?' I am startled.

‘Of course.' She looks puzzled. ‘People were glad that at last someone is saying what we all knew about what a wonderful person your mother was.'

After the
Jewish News
letter, Lily stops speaking to me. This is not an entirely unpleasant experience. I am feeling increasingly distressed about the way she continues to depict my mother. To meet and chat pleasantly in social situations would be straining things. It's better for us to be separate. It's a situation that continues for a few years and then, for reasons I am still unsure of, Lily decides that she wants to end our estrangement. She doesn't tell me this directly, but sends the message through Dad.

‘While she continually repeats those terrible things
about Mum in public, I'm not comfortable with her,' I say to him. ‘If she's prepared to talk about it, I'll meet her.'

I don't know what he tells Lily, but I assume she's not prepared to do it.

Dad, however, continues to plead with me to try to heal the rift.

I repeat my message. He repeats his pleadings.

By this time, I am in a real dilemma. This has become a moral issue for me. It feels, rightly or wrongly, like an ethical stand I am taking. I feel as if I'm the only person saying, ‘It's not right to do this to our mother.' For me, it's become a matter of personal conscience.

But in response to my father's pleadings, I waver constantly. Shouldn't I just give in, talk to Lily and make my father happy? I swing miserably backwards and forwards. Each time I see my father, he brings up the subject. He's an old man, he says. He doesn't have much in his life. This is all he's asking. Can't I just give him this one thing? Each occasion inevitably ends with me in tears.

A few years go past. Dad by now is living overseas with Dorka, his second wife. It is the time when I've been pleading with him not to sell his last assets.

Dad, Lily and David are about to arrive in Melbourne for a visit. Lily wants to organise a dinner so that Dad can be reunited with his friends for possibly the last time. Lily writes to me, saying that she apologises for anything that I think she may have done to me. She urges me to come to the dinner and end the
rift in our relationship, so that Dad can have peace of mind.

Finally, I give in. I write back saying that Martin, Amantha and I will come to the dinner. I add that our schism is not due to what she has done to me, but is about her treatment of our mother.

I give the sealed letter to Dad to pass on to her; she has already left for America and I don't have a contact address. At the dinner, Lily says a brief hello, but makes no further conversation.

When, a few months later, I find myself in hospital, diagnosed with cancer, Lily sends flowers and a get-well note. I send thanks. A month later, home again, I answer the phone and am startled to hear Lily's voice. She chats on as if nothing had ever happened between us. I am too bemused to do anything but go along with the conversation. It is oddly surreal; a denial of the reality of the last few years.

But I continue to go along with it. In the wake of my diagnosis, I've decided that I'm letting go of family struggles. It's time to focus on my own life now.

There are a couple more phone calls from Lily and an exchange of letters, all friendly and amicable. She sends me a few pills and potions aimed at helping my symptoms of instant menopause. I'm appreciative and thank her. Then there's her birthday present to me, a black head scarf, and my thank you letter.

A few weeks after that, she's in Melbourne. I am fully expecting her to contact me; I don't have her contact number here. After all, she's been saying for years that all she wants is for us to be friendly. So when
she doesn't call, I am surprised. I can't think of anything I've done to offend her. But I don't spend a lot of time on it. I simply assume she has changed her mind about sisterly bonds and I let it go. I hear no more from her.

Now, two years later, her silence in the face of my recurrence is sobering, making me realise the true depth of the split between us. It is sad. But, I hope that for her, it brings some resolution. For me, it becomes part of the emotional work brought on by the recurrence—a cleansing that is painful, unpleasant and to which I am dragged in the undignified kicking and screaming position.

A few days after the surgery, Greg announces that it is time to take out my urinary catheter. The nurse looks concerned. ‘Don't you think it's too early?' she says. ‘Well, if it is,' says Greg airily, ‘we'll just put it in again.' Not over my conscious body, I think.

That afternoon, the catheter is removed with a tug, not really painful, it just looks as if it's going to be. I decide I'd better get things moving. I settle down with my hypnosis tape and focus on my bladder. I fall asleep into a dream. I am standing in a field and I am supposed to do battle with something, but I don't know what it is, or how to go about it. Then I hear that an extremely ancient warrior queen has found out about my plight and is coming to help me. At first
I am startled, thinking maybe she is a bit crazy, but she comes anyway in full ancient warrior regalia, on a charger, with a few men. She sweeps into the field, clears out whatever I was supposed to be battling with and sweeps off. I wake a couple of minutes after the dream and realise that I need to urinate. At first, I am disbelieving, thinking it is too soon. But I go off to the bathroom and it all works perfectly. I am bemused by the dream and the ancient warrior queen. Does she represent the archaic, primitive parts of my body's functioning, like the bladder?

Flushed—pardon the pun—by this success, I decide it is my bowels' turn next. The next day, I do my hypnosis and focus on coaxing my bowels into action. A couple of hours later, I feel the urge and head off to the toilet. Proud as a newly toilet-trained toddler, I look forward to sharing my exciting news with Greg. He is aghast. My bowel is not expected to be working yet; it is too early. It may be too stressful on the stitches holding it together. I rapidly start focusing on the stitches healing and holding when I do my tape.

As with my previous stay, I have been in tottering marathon-training mode since my first day after surgery. The definition of marathon involves a complete circuit of the ward—a track that feels approximately equivalent to a Melbourne to Sydney run. I wince my way towards the halfway point in steps as delicate and tiny as a foot-bound Chinese concubine. I have my eye on the lounge room situated at the far end of the corridor. When I arrive, I find myself gazing out at a panorama of the Melbourne skyline. What I am struck by though is a
derelict area to the left, which looks as if it has been abandoned by a construction company mid-chaos. In the middle of the dusty brown debris, rising incongruously like an enormous, exotic flower, is a rainbow-coloured hot air balloon. I have its twin on a favourite mug at home. It is the mug I bought in a careless hurry, merely needing something to drink from at work. When I brought it home, I discovered that the balloon was named—the fine, black lettering stamped onto it spelled out the word ‘Hope'.

I have been having regular night sweats since surgery, but after a few days, they spread into the daytime hours and assume malarial intensity. I switch with manic speed between cold and shivering and hot and sweating. This isn't helped by the internal climate of my room. We're having very peculiar February weather and it's raining and blowing a freezing gale outside. The frigid blast is elbowing its way in through a gap in the window. I beg the nurse for a towel to cover the gap. She comes to inspect the window and, despite the presence of six sane people pointing out the exact location of the draught, stoutly refuses to acknowledge its existence.

The sweats and shivers continue to yo-yo violently. It's not an infection. What can be causing it? Suddenly I realise it's because I've been off my oestrogen for a week. The sudden withdrawal, added to the stress of surgery, seems to have thrown my body's natural temperature-balancing mechanism into disarray. I resume my mini-doses of oestrogen and the sweats and shivers stop almost immediately.

The faint of a few days ago turns out to be because I am very low in iron. Greg decides to put me onto iron tablets. Up until that point, my recuperation has been going smoothly. I'm off the morphine drip and feeling pretty good for a centenarian. The iron tablets change all that. My bowel shows its feelings by going into spasms like a tantruming child. I cease and desist with the iron immediately, but my bowel is not taking apologies. The excruciating spasms continue without let-up for the next few weeks. And in a catch-22, I can't take any serious painkillers, because they'll constipate me and make it worse.

The excitement of going home is tempered by the pain of constant spasms. For the first week, they don't let me think of much else. It's like being in ongoing labour, without the incentive of a baby. I live permanently attached to a hot water bottle; a study in life as a slowly poaching egg. In the brief respites from spasm, I try to take in my new situation.

Greg says that my presentation is very unusual. There's not much literature on relapsed stage 1 ovarian cancer patients, so it's hard to get statistics on what happens to them. A friend tells me about an interstate professor who's an international specialist on ovarian cancer. She suggests it might be worth ringing him to see if he's had any similar cases.

My brother-in-law, a doctor, contacts him. The word comes back that he's seen a couple of women with similar presentations. One had a discreet recurrence five years after diagnosis. She had chemo, but six months later, another tumour developed and
soon after that she died.

The words give me the sensation of swallowing eels. Death. For a couple of days, all I can think about is: will that be me? Then I regain my balance. Okay, I decide, you can look at this two ways. One: because my cancer recurred when so many don't, you could say that it's more aggressive or persistent than most. Bad news. Or, two: you could see it as simply a left-over seed that grew. It's been removed, I'm going to have chemo to clean everything up and then I'm back to where I was two years ago, looking good.

I go for the latter interpretation. One of the advantages of not having statistics to hand is that you can create your own. I decide I'm going to create good ones.

Night Sweats