The Last Days of My Mother (3 page)

But as Mother said every so often: One week is Yang and the other Yin. Sometimes you just need time to put things in perspective. I had almost given up on the idea of the Netherlands when I saw a TV report on how
lively
Amsterdam was. Bit by bit things started to look up again. I contacted Libertas and received brochures with information and rates, spent my savings on a five-star hotel in Amsterdam, and finally sat down with Mother to discuss things. It took a few days to explain to her what this trip really entailed; leaving Iceland once and for all—the final journey. Her heartbreak was unbridled for a couple days, but then she composed herself. On Saturday evening she appeared in the attic, a bottle of sherry in hand, and told me that she'd browsed through the brochures. The lightness that had engulfed me that first night made a cautious comeback with a touch of grounded strategy. Great expectations swarmed beneath the surface.

“I got out my cards and let them decide. I don't expect to recover, Trooper. I've come to terms with the inevitable. The end is near, but not here yet. I've never seen cards like this before. Do you think that your dreams can come true, even moments before you die?”

I squeezed her hand and the next morning I confirmed our booking with Libertas. The following days were spent preparing for departure. Now we stood groggy in the airport terminal rubbing the last remnants of sleep from our eyes. For a second I tried to imagine what lay in store for us on the other side of the ocean, but the thought flew away before I could catch it.

Chapter 2

“A
hhh,” Mother sighed, walking into the Duty Free area, as if she'd just repeated the Feat of the Long Walk to the Irish pub on her fiftieth birthday. I was becoming increasingly depressed by how much everything had changed since I was last here. The Duty Free store had been moved to another part of the building, I wasn't going away to Ireland with Zola. My face drooped involuntarily, stunned by the ruthlessness of the separation.

I was still at the mercy of such fits of melancholy. The slightest reminder of Zola had similar effects as cannabis poisoning: I'd grow pale and become inconsolable without the omnipresence of high-calorie snacks. Remembering Zola's obsession with ballet and folk music did nothing to ease the pain. For seven blissful years she'd filled my life with a buoyancy that transported me from one place to another, without the anguish and defeat that usually defined my existence. She was relentlessly horny, like a fly that only has a single day to procreate, and she made me try all sorts of things I had little to no knowledge of beforehand.

My fascination with her body didn't fade, even though she suddenly had enough one day, diverting her impulses and appetites
instead toward confectionaries, dismissing me as a graduate from the university of love. The fun and games were over. We'd have sex on a monthly basis, going through the motions out of duty or to avoid a bulletproof reason for going our separate ways. I'd see the female form everywhere, in the most mundane things, like a toothbrush, but Zola was lost to me. It never crossed my mind that these were symptoms of a dying love, that I would stumble naked around hotel rooms where some of the most meaningless sex acts in the world were performed with my involvement. What followed were attacks of self-pity, overeating, and intensive staring into refilled sherry bottles during the months I moved back into Mother's attic.

“Hermann!” Mother shook me as I stood shuddering in the camera department. “Are you lost in space?”

“Yes. Well. No.”

“I'm going to have a drink at the bar. Knowing you, you'll be here for a while spending money on junk.”

We parted ways and I wandered around the camera section where a tanned couple straight out of a magazine glided between the shelves. The boy looked like a professional athlete and the girl like Miss California, lean and blonde with endless legs. Their appeal was so conventional that they could have been off-the-rack, like her short denim dress. I almost bumped into them when she suddenly charged and snaked her body around the boy's, who reacted like a defense basketball player to swiftly secure a position for them between the Samsungs and the Sonys to swap spit. I was relieved when the whiff of animal fat seduced me into the Food Market, where I bought gum and a newspaper, then filled out a questionnaire on Icelandic lamb. I did this in part to make up for Mother's loathing of any and all surveys, which she regarded as an evil of
capitalism and mass surveillance. When I found her at the bar she was staring into the mirror, sporting huge sunglasses.

“Strange how I was never a dean's wife,” she said, blowing cosmopolitan smoke rings at her reflection. “Why has my love life always been so . . . ? Take Jonas for example. It's not my fault that the man was so sickly all the time.”

“I ran into him in the bakery the other day and he seems to be doing better, he's walking again—”

“It was hopeless,” she injected and stubbed out her cigarette. “A man who's in rehab when he's not actually in the hospital? No. What I've never had, Trooper, is a man who could support me. Look at those two over there. It's obvious what they've been up to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Obviously homosexuals.”

“Ah, but of course! I
was
wondering what's up with their asses,” I said, ignoring the disapproving looks from the people on the next table. Truth was, Mother had a real soft spot for gay men.

“Why on earth do all the best men go into this? No wonder women my age have trouble finding a man.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Eva.”

“No, I mean it. Either they're married to some
sad cow
or feeling each other up. Can you name one normal, single man my age?”

I reached for my Food Market bag and pretended to read the celebrity pages of my newspaper. The main story was about Croatian supermodels Milla and Iva.

“Although . . . you know . . . I always thought you'd turn out gay, Trooper,” she continued. “I've never known any child as dramatic as you were. You'd dress up in my clothes, put on makeup, walk around in over-sized heels . . .”

“You raised me in the theater, what did you expect?”

“Sure, but just think, a beautiful woman like me—surrounded by homosexuals her whole life. Then along come these old farts like Emma Gulla . . . apparently she bagged herself a doctor.”

“Who's Emma Gulla?”

“Don't you remember her? Such an incredibly ugly woman. And boring, too.”

A nearby screen announced that our flight was boarding. I picked up our things and prepared to go.

“Wait. Let's have one for the road, Trooper.”

“We'll miss our flight.”

“I doubt they'll take off without us.”

“Eva,” I sighed.

“Alright, alright. I've got a little something with me anyways.”

We walked along the seemingly endless corridor toward the gate. Mother was astonished at the lack of moving sidewalks and gave the flight attendant a long speech about the technological superiority of German airports. The Samsung-girl in the short denim dress sat in the seat across the aisle from me.

“Isn't that the same dress I gave Zola?” Mother whispered, but I was too overwhelmed by the girl's presence to answer. She fastened her seatbelt while her boyfriend wrestled with his laptop, giving me a chance to stare at her legs and wonder how some human of the male sex, some sweaty, hick ape had actually been a part of her conception. I'd much rather believe that the Samsung-girl was the fruit of intense sex between the supermodels Milla and Iva. Mother, however, repeated her suspicions of the girl's mundane part in the material world, took a swig from her flask and said: “Yes, I'm sure that's the same dress.”

“What dress are you talking about?”

“Well, that
dress
I gave Zola. She made it into this huge issue, remember? She could be so incredibly opinionated.”

I remembered. A couple years earlier Mother had held a gala on Palm Sunday, inviting pensioners, neighbors, and distant relatives who had the required weakness for wine. The day before the party Mother had stopped by with a dress she'd bought on a whim for Zola during a shopping frenzy at the mall's end-of-season sale. Zola didn't like showing too much skin and was horrified by the short hemline. Mother insisted she wear it and then made an alcohol-induced presentation of Zola in the dress, parading her about the party, to show off what a fantastic stylist she was, the gorgeousness of the dress, how great Zola looked in it, and how wonderful the whole thing was. The tension escalated as the evening progressed, something detonated between them; there was shouting and crying and we left without good-byes. Zola said she'd had it and demanded that I talk to Mother or she'd never step foot in that house again. The next morning I took a taxi down to Spítala Street. Mother came to the door and welcomed me in high spirits. Now we'd have a fun hangover day! But instead of sharing a drink with her, I brought up the incident.

“What?”

“Just, you know. You were being difficult. That speech, for instance, about Willy Nellyson and his cock.”

“That was just a joke.”

“And then you asked Zola if I was any good.”

“Really? In bed?”

“That was the only way to interpret it.”

“Oh. And what did she say?”

“That's beside the point. You need to learn to behave in company.”

She asked if this was a message from Zola and I told her to knock it off, that she knew very well that this wasn't about Zola.

“Well, I don't remember you speaking to me like this before you met that woman.”

“
That woman
. Is that how you think of her? The woman who took days off work to . . .”

“Oh, Trooper, let's not bring that up.”

“By all means, let's. I want to know what you mean.”

“Well, nothing really. I just don't recall you making a habit of attacking people before this relationship.”

“I'm not attacking anyone. You were the one who . . .”

“Know what, Trooper? There's no point in this. I worry about you, that's all. You're so terribly codependent.”

After this I was stuck for a while in no man's land between the two women, like melted cheese between two slices of toast. I talked to Mother on the phone every now and then, but spent my days with Zola. I woke up next to her and cooked with her and in the evenings after we'd tidied up, I'd tell her stories from work about people who wanted to buy out their neighbors in order to build a sauna in the basement, and colleagues who bought dogs to go jogging with but ended up keeping them in a pet hotel while they themselves developed a high-maintenance cocaine addiction. Zola had no faith in my profession. She believed real estate agencies were the final indicator of the degeneration of modern man, the moral bankruptcy of capitalism, and the distorted image of people who stare into the bathroom mirror to define their lives, but perceive nothing but the tiles. I should quit and elope with her to Ireland.

“Ireland!?” Mother was practically foaming at the mouth.

“Just for a while. Zola's going to study geology.”

“I'd think the best place for that would be
Iceland
.”

“We just want a change of scenery.”

“Ahh . . . well, of course you do,” she said in a calmer tone tainted with newfound excitement. “This will be great! I've got lots of frequent flyer miles.”

In order to appease Zola I decided to enroll in a practical course in Dublin's Trinity College, settling on a diploma in Freudian Analysis. My first class was unlike anything I'd tried before. I became a spokesman for phenomenology, an advocate of idealism; dressed in striped shirts and tweed jackets that underlined my transformed status in human society. Fellow students envied my naïve passion for Sigmund and wondered at the intimate, personal relationship I formed with him. As I stared into my own essence, a whole new world of theory opened up like a blender for the miscellaneous gumbo of soul and psyche.

The guileless euphoria over my relationship with the psychoanalyst only lasted a couple of weeks, however. I realized that even though my Austrian friend had great insight into the human soul, his writings were lacking in practical solutions. I was left with a deep, almost tormented understanding of an impossible situation, and in my desperation I went and bought insanely expensive tickets for
The Lord of the Dance
—
Michael Flatley
in order to entertain Mother during her visit. But instead of seizing the opportunity to take a break from each other, Zola and Mother both insisted on going and ended up getting hammered in the local pub after the show. I never understood what happened, but assumed that Zola's wild nature had echoed the hysterical humor Mother would embrace after her third drink and abandon on the thirteenth.

Yet the cracks were starting to show. We'd moved abroad to get away from it all but somehow ended up with Icelandair's most common export; our apartment became a haven for binge drinking
friends who wanted a weekend off, worn out and overworked, tormented by sleet and something they called “Despiceland Syndrome”—one of those viral concepts from some TV show that people used and abused to express their disdain for Iceland. I had no idea we had so many friends in Reykjavik and was taken aback by the constant turnaround on our living room couch of different bodies; naked, snoring, and even fucking. When an old classmate of Zola's from elementary school called and asked to stay while she held a three-week art exhibition on Grafton Street I was so miserable that I threw up on one of her paintings and took a thirteen-hour walk out of the city, ending up in a hotel room by an emerald lake complete with a couple of romantic swans. There was no phone in my room and I didn't reach Zola until the next afternoon. She forgave me, but that was the beginning of the end.