The Last Days of My Mother (2 page)

Mother's impatience was palpable. She would grumble about the medical corps being comprised of sadists who flocked to medical school fascinated by stories of Mengele's ghoulish experiments. To her the nurses were variations of Herta Oberhauser, a Nazi nurse who murdered her victims by injecting them with kerosene. Mother had played Herta in a controversial play in a small Montparnasse theatre and knew what she was talking about. I ignored these rants. After all, the sentiment was not a recent development. Mother had suffered from a phobia of hospitals for as long as I could remember, and made several efforts to cultivate in me a similar distrust of the medical profession. It was wiser, she thought, to follow the example of Great Aunt Edda when you were under the weather: have a little drink to ease the pain, and then another just for luck. I pointed out that strong spirits were hardly a cure for cancer and that she had to be a bit more understanding of the hospital staff. And I suppose she tried, even though she failed fantastically.

“Maybe I should have gone to the vet, Herr Doctor?”

“No, no, not at all, Mrs. Briem,” the doctor stammered. “Cell division in people your age is not very rapid, which means that the disease spreads more slowly.”

“Right. And so you will, of course, fix this before that happens.”

“Well,” the doctor began, breaking into a long speech about matters being slightly more complicated. There certainly were cases where doctors had managed to surgically remove sarcoma from connective tissue, but a very large team of specialists was needed for such an operation. Unfortunately, Icelandic hospitals had neither the equipment, nor the manpower for such an undertaking. The operation would have to take place in the United States, but since the procedure was still experimental, it would not fall under the Icelandic Health Care System. Mother would have to pay for it herself.

“There is, however, quite a good chance of getting sponsors for semi-profiled operations of this magnitude. Surgeons may waive their fees, research institutes invest in the operations in exchange for exclusive rights to acquired information.”

“Ok, alright,” I said, my hopes already up. “And how do we do this?”

“I can look into it, make a few inquiries. The fact that this is such a rare case should work in our favor.”

“I don't understand where you're going with this,” Mother said. “Do you think I'm some kind of guinea pig? We both know perfectly well that no one is going to pay for this operation. I'm not a celebrity. And what company will put up a fortune for an old hag from Iceland?”

I'd never heard Mother refer to herself as old, and certainly never as a hag, but this seemed to achieve the desired effect: the doctor was suddenly at a loss for words. He stared blankly at her and fiddled with his pen.

“See, I thought that a doctor's job was to help patients,” Mother continued, “not to breed false hopes of some American Utopia.”

“If we pay for this ourselves,” I interjected, “. . . do you have any idea what that would add up to?”

The doctor cited some astronomical number that was beyond my comprehension. What I did comprehend was that, even if we sold the apartment, withdrew all my savings, sold every internal organ I could spare and the rest of me off into slavery, it wouldn't even make a dent in the costs.

“It's not worth it, Trooper. All this for a shot in the dark? No.”

“As I was saying, this is the most promising option you have,” the doctor mumbled, “but there are alternatives. One is to do nothing: your life expectancy is three to six months. Twelve with chemo. Another is to amputate. That could buy you five years, and with chemo before and after we could . . .”

“You're not taking my leg.”

“Mother . . .”

“Out of the question. I'm sixty-three years old and I've had this leg all my life. Nothing changes that.”

“This is a matter of life and death.”

“Well, then I'll just die!”

She leaned forward in her chair and burst into tears. It was unbearable.

“We'll fight this,” I finally managed to say. “We'll do everything we can.”

“Take off my leg? Pump me so full of chemicals that I won't be able to eat? Just so that I can make it to seventy and invite the leftover, half-dead scarecrows to some pathetic birthday party at the Freemason's Hall? I'm dying, Trooper. It was always a matter of time.”

She stood up and walked out of the room. The doctor handed me a calling card with an emergency number and told me to be in touch as soon as we decided on how we wanted to proceed. We took a taxi back home. Mother went straight to her bedroom and
left me alone in the living room, surrounded by a silence impregnated with years of memories.

I had grown up in this apartment, left home and returned again well into my thirties with my tail between my legs to hide away once more in the attic. The inflation of my body over the past few months provided a strong argument for those who believe that obesity is a growing social problem. In the mornings I'd stand naked, gawking at myself in a full-length mirror. My bloated body resembled a fisherman wearing a flesh-toned parka over neoprene waders. I blamed glandular hyperactivity, but deep down I knew that the real culprits were the bakery across the street and the sherry-marathons Mother and I regularly indulged in. It had been four months since Zola left me to shack up with that French dentist and his lantern jaw. Since then my life had been devoid of substance. I lived in a world limited by the seams of my pajamas. The diminutive nature of this world was confined to even less significant acts like fly-tying and online car racing. In the evenings I'd come down and have a drink with Mother—her own home brew, which she claimed was better than any wine sold in the liquor store. Almost every aspect of my body and personality surrendered to the law of gravity. My face was bloated and the rest of me was somehow rubbery, as if I were one big tennis elbow, from head to toe. There was nothing to suggest, as I had claimed when I first moved in, that my stay in the attic was a temporary arrangement until I found a flat for myself. I came into Mother's life like a stand-in for the company she craved, and we'd grown used to this little by little; spending our days drinking sherry and reading tarot cards while I continued to tell myself: Tomorrow I'll get going, tomorrow I'll get off my fat ass and start a new life.

But it wasn't until that day, the day Mother was told that she was dying, that I faced reality. I walked around studying the apartment
in a trance, lightheaded from the inevitability of impermanence. Each nook and cranny became a tunnel to the past. Freud in dust form. A biography of molecules. My life floated by and suddenly I was overcome by relief—this was not the end of everything, but a new beginning. Time itself, that mismatched resin of shapeless days and self-pity, became an unbroken, unwavering and crystal-clear image before my very eyes. From now on, each day would be a work of art and the brushstrokes governed by this one goal: to make Mother happy during the last days of her life.

I was filled with such exuberance that I laughed out loud, as if nothing had ever pleased me as much as Mother's imminent death. I ate a pepperoni stick and poured sherry into a tall glass of Coca-Cola, surfed aimlessly on the Internet like a bar-hopping drunk until I finally found a website on “Ukrain,” a miracle drug developed by Dr. Wassyl Nowicky. The reports were astounding. A Danish man, who had spent weeks rotting away in a semi-coma, deserted by friends and family, had recovered fully thanks to this treatment and even won a regional marathon a few months later.

Was this the answer?

Dr. Nowicky had developed the drug from greater celandine extract. The formula was created in Ukrainian research labs during the Cold War, and then developed further in Austria, the alchemist's current country of residence. He had struggled for decades to get the drug registered but fate was against him. The authorities spat on him. Hounded by both an Israeli terrorist organization and the CIA, Nowicky stood alone, out on the margins with his flower. Inevitably he associated himself with the left-wing, which would no doubt work in my favor when trying to convince Mother to take Ukrain. She hated Conservatives more than death.

As I sat in front of the computer knocking back sherry, a blanket of calm settled over my soul. I was slightly intimidated by the idea of taking Mother to some former Soviet country, but they seemed to be the only ones with a formal license to use Ukrain as a treatment for cancer. I pictured vodka parties in the Carpathian Mountains, fat mustachioed men in caviar baths after a long night of drinking, and Mother nostalgically exchanging dollars on the street for local currency. She had travelled to Eastern Europe in the '80s to feed her spirit, as she called it,
for the soul still had value in the Old Soviet
. “Unlike the States,” she went on, “with all its consumerism and shareholders. No, Trooper, I'd rather drink water with Comrade Boris.” She was referring to a severe hangover in Moscow when they had all run out of alcohol and had to make do with water.

Even though Mother's pseudo-communism had diluted with age, I wasn't sure I could handle a replay of her “Eastern Adventures” and felt relieved when I read that some institutes in the West had started offering Ukrain treatment: The Holiterapias Institute in Lisbon, Dove House in Hampshire, Pro-Leben Clinic in Vienna. There was not much information, aside from a link for a treatment clinic in the Netherlands called Libertas. I clicked on this and waited while a photograph of an old mansion appeared on the screen. In front of the building, a few people stood in a semi-circle with the chief physician, Dr. Frederik, in the middle. Above his head was a speech bubble saying: “Welcome to Lowland, where we have been treating individuals since 1963.”

Libertas seemed to be both a treatment center and a hospice. People came to die at Lowland, but also to hope for a last chance at recovery: “Our decades of experience in treating patients with
advanced cancer and the sensitive work of palliative treatment makes Libertas a viable choice in difficult circumstances.” The more I read the more I felt this was the right choice for Mother. Dr. Nowicky's magic drug seemed likely to increase her odds considerably, and most importantly—nobody was denied available drugs for easing pain and suffering. “People who are alive are not dead,” the site claimed. “And life is the basis of our foundation.”

Morphine, Ukrain, Ecstasy . . . in my mind's eye I saw Mother not only fit and strong, but cruising the racetracks of happiness. “I've got it!” I exclaimed, bursting into her room. “We'll go to the Netherlands!”

“What are you talking about?”

“We'll go to Libertas and meet with Dr. Frederik.”

The light in the room deepened and faded away with each word Mother didn't say, and my belief in the perfect solution choked on her silence. Nearly all her life she had lived with an unpleasant fascination with death, but now, when a thorough examination of her bone marrow confirmed that it was finally time, it was as if she'd never heard that people could actually die. She was in shock.

“It's not as if I haven't been dying all along,” she finally said and whimpered a little because all of this started as the tiniest tickle in her belly in Berlin, the night I first made myself known and Willy Nellyson ran off to Italy. “And there I was all alone, Trooper, and then I had you.”

“So the story goes.”

“It's no story, Hermann, these are stone cold facts. Why did he just up and leave like that? Didn't even leave a note.”

“I don't know, but about this clinic—”

“And me, there, all alone in Germany. Look how beautiful he was, tall like a prince and sharp as a sword.”

She handed me the photograph of Willy Nellyson and I remembered why I'd always doubted that this man was my father. Such a paternity claim was as absurd as two weeks of abstinence on Spítala Street. If my looks were a work of fiction, the outcome would be
War and Peace
or some other endless novel, bulky and thick yet strangely lacking in mass. A paperback. Willy Nellyson, however, was a tall, willowy man with a few stray hairs growing out of his chin, reminiscent of some sort of academic catfish, so peculiarly hunched that he seemed to have had his bones removed, perhaps during the war, so that he could be conveniently folded into a carry-on bag. He had betrayed Mother by running off after I was conceived and, according to her—this was something she said over and again—something within her died after his getaway, something she never got back, scarring her for life. Her epic death flowed like a branching river through my childhood, in different versions that all confirmed the same thing: men were a dubious species poisoning the lives of striking women. Only one thing distinguished Willy Nellyson: he had the perfect cock. This I deduced from a carved ebony dildo Mother kept on the top shelf of the living room cupboard, and which she'd taken down on my thirteenth birthday, handed it over with gusto and said: “This, Trooper, is your father's penis.” I fondled the wood as if it held promises of a great future and waited, for years and without reward, for my father's heritage to manifest itself between my legs.

“How strange a lifetime is. Over sixty years and then . . .”

She looked defeated. I retreated out of the room and started to ramble dead drunk around the apartment, my mind wandering aimlessly, to Dublin, Moscow, and the distant features of Zola. The next morning I woke up hung over; Ukrain and Libertas only scattered images in a saturated mind. Mother? Dying? Amsterdam? The
silence of the room grew in proportion with the stench of my bed sheets and for three, four—perhaps five—days, depression inhabited Spítala Street.