Little Caesar (31 page)

We left Cologne and followed the snarl of autobahns. That part of Europe looks, on the map, like the web of veins on an old woman’s leg. From beside me came a voice dipped in the bittersweetness of self-pity.

‘I felt sort of sad last night when you didn’t want to take my arm.’

I said nothing. She said, ‘What I thought was: there will come a day when you’ll get down on your bare knees and beg to be able to still give me your arm.’

Above the fields, the cloud cover roiled, veils of rain hung from the sky.

‘Even in death you still manipulate me,’ I said.

Six disastrous trips to Cologne followed. In addition to the patent agonies of war, torture and famine, there is also the agony of family. Along the high quays of Cologne, above the river that swept deep and wide through its channel, I thought with irksome regularity on the words Randy Newman had written with the Rhine in mind.
I’m looking at the river. But I’m thinking of the sea
. The first two times I stayed with her during the treatment in the box, that stage prop from the theater of illusionists in which Richard H. Kloos was a player as well. Her head, resting on a towel, was the only thing sticking out of it. I sat in a chair beside her and watched as she was slowly warmed up. Her face grew redder and redder. The sweat poured off her. Sometimes the skepticism and the chill in my soul left, to make way for the irrational hope that this via dolorosa would lead to healing, that it was actually possible. Kloos, after all, had said that fifteen percent of the women who came to him were completely healed by his treatment. Sixty percent showed partial remission, and twenty-five percent died anyway. One hundred percent of everyone who came here tried to wriggle their way into that fifteen percent. They all did their best. Belief was the most important condition. Anyone who did not believe had given up all hope of being healed and was lost. And so they believed, the women I saw shuffling down the hall, skinny and exhausted in their fluffy bathrobes, they believed in the magic power of dendritic cells and the magic hand of Dr. Richard H. Kloos, the mediator between life and death. They believed in the face of everything, in order to win a place in the Lucky Fifteen. I dabbed at her face with a cloth, which I had to change for another after the second time, so freely did the sweat run.

At one point she wept silently, tears mingled with the sweat. I laid my hand for a moment on her forehead, the soaked hair, and said everything would be all right. Thin, stupid comfort. A formula with no heart. Through her exhaustion I saw, for the first time, traces of fear in her eyes, like a horse sinking into quicksand. The mammal’s fear of life going on without it, while it disappears into ultimate darkness. Suddenly these torments no longer constituted the road to healing, but the gates to the unspeakable suffering that awaited; tears dripped onto the towel. I raised the straw to her lips, she sucked water from the cup.

The third time we went she said she would rather have a nurse beside her.

‘I can do it from now on without you there,’ she said. ‘I sort of know what’s coming. I’d rather have someone there who’s giving it their full attention. I had to ask you to wipe my face the whole time. You had such a cold look in your eye. You made me feel kind of dirty.’

Shortly after the first treatment at Dr. Kloos’s clinic, a woman who had become my mother’s special friend in adversity died. Her breast had been amputated, the cancer had returned after a few years, she had been living off an outside chance. My mother went to her funeral. When she came back she said she wanted to be cremated. She repeated her phrase about
not planning to die soon, but still
. . . What she really wanted was to be burnt on a wooden platform on the banks of the Ganges, but she didn’t want to force that kind of logistical feat on me.

She was waiting for a miracle. Dr. Kloos may not have healed her, yet still she felt a part of that sixty percent, the ones who exhibited partial response. There were new miracle makers, whom she referred to as
physicians
and
scientists
, one of whom lived in the woods in Drenthe Province. He said, ‘Marthe, it’s one minute to twelve. You have to start working on loving yourself, on your self-appreciation, right now. It’s not too late.’

I asked her what he had promised.

‘Does he say the cancer will go away by taking a rest, by meditating, by loving yourself ?’

‘It’s possible to program yourself at the cellular level, that’s all he says. Rather than cutting everything away, he goes to the root of the disease.’

‘And that’s how he heals people?’

‘He’s actually very modest. He says it’s possible, not that it always happens. You’re in control of so much yourself.’

The healers who seemed most credible, it struck me, were those who admitted they were not perfect. Precisely by not being perfect, by leaving a wide margin for failure, they allowed for the possibility of being healed.

An older woman, living in a holiday cottage with a canary. Sometimes, on the street or in a restaurant, the whispers and the turned heads were a reminder of the life that had gone before. Now she was back where her life had started, Bourtange was just down the road. She had made a long journey, at the end of it she had come home; to get there all she had to do was cross what they once called the Bourtanger Moor. Aunt Edith, Uncle Gerard, we hadn’t talked about them since, we didn’t know whether they still lived there, whether they were still alive. The rupture had been resolute and irrevocable. The circle had been closed to her. By moving to Meeden she had sought rapprochement, as unemphatically as possible. If asked, she would have denied it.

She did not go back to the oncological surgeon.

‘Why would I do that?’ she said. ‘It’s going fine this way, isn’t it?’

‘You promised you would.’

‘It has to have a purpose. I don’t see the use of it.’

She drifted further and further away, increasingly beyond the reach of common sense – she created her own good-luck rituals and found comfort with faith healers and anthroposophists, with the sorcerers. With their lips they claimed to have no intention of luring her away from regular medicine, but supported her in every decision that boiled down to exactly that. Fearing the law, their occult message was dissipated through subterranean vents, the sermons-in-the-field of the natural healers; they were slippery as eels in wet grass. I did not believe their intentions were malevolent. That would have been easier to take, criminal intent, hurting the other in order to reap profit for one’s self. I would have understood such intentions; after all, there are enough people like that. The audacity lay in the fact that they truly believed that their laying on of hands, their home-brewed medicines, their signposts to spiritual transformation would make the cancer go away. Brazen claims, cloaked in false modesty and a humbly stammered
who am I that I should be given this gift?
The ill person, that weakened, halting organism, suddenly robbed of the health which it had always enjoyed so lightheartedly, is incapable of sealing the breaches. As a result, unfounded messages of hope and comfort come rolling in.

My powerlessness was total. I could locate no fissures in my mother’s rejection of doctors, operations, radiation, chemo-or hormone therapy. Her opinions were as hard as a church pew. She worked actively on a world view in which doctors and hospital management teams were mere marionettes of the pharmaceutical industry. At the house in Meeden I found magazines and books that fed the paranoia. When a real and probable cause of death came into view, she created for herself an enemy worth fighting.

‘The important thing for me isn’t that breast,’ she said. ‘I could live very well with only one breast; the important thing is to listen to what this is telling me. I don’t want to deny myself that opportunity.’

As principled as she was in her rejection of the physicians’ order, she was opportunistic in equal measure when it came to alternative healers. A woman in the town of Noordwijk aan Zee had tested her polarity with a biotensor and concluded that she did not have cancer at all. These were viruses, and her body was riddled with them. The therapy focused for some time after that on combating viruses. This ran in conjunction with the daily consumption of huge doses of vitamins and minerals, on the advice of a doctor who adhered to the principles of orthomolecular medicine – a pseudo-scientific school of thought that prescribed huge overdoses of nutritional supplements to make up for supposed deficiencies. On his advice she had the amalgam in her teeth replaced with white fillings, in order to reduce toxic load. During meals she swallowed handfuls of pills from a flat plastic box with twelve compartments. Before breakfast she would choke down a paste of bitter almonds.

And the cancer? It didn’t budge, despite all these efforts. She denied the lack of results.

‘Otherwise I might not still be here,’ she said.

I slammed doors and pulled out of the drive with my tires spitting gravel.

I dreamed she was dead. It cut me in two.

She was not afraid of death, she said. She believed in the eternal nature of energy, dying was only a transition from one phase to the next. The
transition
: in our talks, that was her euphemism for the irrefutable reality of death. I looked at her and I listened, and knew that my puzzlement at this strange creature would never end. I tried to figure out the background to her radical methodology, why she would ignore a medical intervention with a good prognosis. I wanted to understand the psychology of that intolerable irrationality, of that absurdity, but couldn’t actually ask about it because we didn’t speak the same language. I had to put on my ears crooked and tip my brain to one side in order to grasp even a fraction of her notions.

I found clues in language.
I’ve got it pretty much under control
, she would say. That was an indicator. I built a little theory around the word
control
, and the loss of same. To do that I first had to understand the effect on a human of revolving doors, the lobby behind them, the elevators and corridors, the desks covered in papers, the doctor with pager and pens in his breast pocket. As soon as you enter the revolving doors you begin to shrink, you stand powerless opposite the scope and efficiency of the machine. You are turned inside out, they read the message written in your organs and announce it to you in a language you do not yet understand but will quickly come to master. With electrodes on your body and machines sighing all around, you work your way to a conclusion, a diagnosis, a prognosis. The straw to clutch at, the thread to dangle by, you had never known how enormously important they would be one day. In the revolving doors you leave behind much of who you are, beneath the bleak incandescent lighting and suspended ceilings you shrivel to the size of your defect and finally become one with it. You lose the authority you never really had anyway; no-one has a say when it comes to his own cells. Then, narcosis, the ultimate loss of control. A stranger’s hands grub around in your organs, scissors clip, scalpels cut, retractors prop your body open and drains suck out your juices. You are not present, you could just as well be someone else, it’s not about you. All those concepts you once applied to your status as an individual no longer exist.

No history, only current events.

That was how I imagined her wordless fear.

We went back to the hospital only when she thought she
felt something
in her breast.

‘Maybe it’s just an infection,’ she hushed.

Let it be a tumor, was the thought that shot through my mind, let the bastards be proven wrong.

But the results produced no triumph.

‘We clearly see a tumor now,’ the surgeon said.

There are no other sounds. Only that voice, that little sentence. The same woman as last time.

‘We can’t be completely sure whether it’s formed secondaries yet.

And I don’t think it looks good, as you put it. The infiltrative mamma carcinoma, the tumor, which started in the milk ducts, has spread to the inside. And the underlying tumor has, as it were, drawn the nipple back. Made it disappear. Had you noticed that?’

‘I had noticed that, yes,’ my mother said.

‘There are ulcerations on the breast. We’ll have to deal with those right away, if you don’t do anything the holes in the skin will become larger and larger.’

‘Oh, but I’m not at all sure that I want that.’

Everything about Dr. Rooyaards fell silent. Except for her eyes, where an expression seemed to deepen.

‘I’d really have to think about that first,’ my mother went on. ‘I don’t want, now that I’ve come this far . . . no.’

She had already regrouped; the surprise, the shock, encapsulated in an instant – she had once again taken control.

‘I have the impression,’ Rooyaards said, ‘but correct me if I’m wrong, that you think I’m saying these things because I’m somehow against you. But that is not the case, Mrs. Unger, believe me. I see a malignancy in your breast, a red, tumorous tissue. It needn’t be too late. You have to seize this chance. If you don’t, then you will truly have given up a real opportunity to recover. That would be such a pity, Mrs. Unger, such a pity. You owe it to yourself. You do want to get better, don’t you?’

For a moment I was in love with her. She was beautiful in her plea – gestures of restrained, impotent anger, a powerful force being held in check and reduced in language to the proportions of reasonability. A tour de force, a lovely thing to see. For just a moment there I thought it might work, that Marthe Unger would allow herself to be lured to this side of the fence. Then the ax fell.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I have to remain faithful to myself. I have to . . .’

That was all there was. The judgment remained suspended in that vacuum, the decision about how she was going to die.

And I wanted her dead, oh yes. It had all taken long enough. Applause, curtains and zip back home. I would sing as I cremated her body. Her just deserts. Her faithlessness, the egoism. The whims, the irresponsibility and the recklessness; the fears which, in addition to life itself, she had awakened in me with a kiss. For all these things there was only one appropriate sanction.