The Last Days of My Mother (4 page)

I still don't know why the move to Dublin was so ill-fated, what forces finally tore us apart. I had loved Zola with a fervor that I couldn't put into words, but that was the gauge for all my days and dreams for the future. When she left me I broke. I cried, filling up the glasses I downed in Dublin's hotel minibars until I returned to Iceland a ruined man, red-eyed and crushed by a despair I thought I could never shake. A couple of days later I moved in with Mother.

As soon as the plane takes off from Keflavik she turns to me, on her third drink, as if she'd been listening in on my thoughts: “You know, Trooper, nothing has grieved me more than love.”

Chapter 3

F
our hours later we found ourselves outside the terminal building in Amsterdam. Shards of sunlight pierced the thick cloud lining and formed a rainbow over the parking lot. I felt like I was in an ad for a cellphone company with a theme of Nordic happiness and that I should call all my friends at fantastic roaming rates. The filtered rays cast a gray hue over the morning and reminded me of Lóa, a school friend who'd abused tanning beds and ended up with melanoma. It turned out that I didn't have the maturity or strength of character to stand by her in her illness and she put an end to our friendship from her hospital bed, paler than she'd ever been, one foot in the grave. Years later, around the time Zola and I were breaking up, when I had as good as buried the incident, Mother pointed out that I was hardly likely to hold on to a woman when even the dying felt they were better off without me. She had a knack for putting the events of my life in context; the harsher the statement, the truer it rang. Like a veiled subconscious with make-up, she knew me better than the feet that carried me.

“I'll wait here while you find us a car,” she said and sat down on a bench. I left her there with our luggage and walked toward an old fashioned car I'd spotted out in the parking lot. The car had
a Libertas logo on its side doors and leaning against it was a short and slender man in his forties with black hair, dressed in a white shirt and khakis.

“Mister Hermann Willyson, sir?” he asked in English. “I am your driver. I shall drive you to Lowland.”

“Hello,” I said, offering my hand. “I think Mother and I need to check in at the hotel first and get rid of our luggage, if that's okay? My mother is, well . . . it's been a long journey.”

“Very good, sir. I shall drive you.”

I walked back to Mother, who was stubbing out a cigarette on the sidewalk. The driver followed and stopped by the bench. “Mam Briem, Mam, I am the driver,” he said and smiled, picked up her bags, and walked back to the car.

“We have a chauffeur? How fancy.”

I took her arm and led her to the car, which impressed her just as much as the driver. When we drove off he turned down the Bollywood music blaring from the radio. “Mam Briem, Mam,” he said when we got out on the freeway.

“Eva,” Mother insisted. “For heaven's sake call me Eva.”

“Eva, Mam? OK. Does EvaMam want to go to the hotel, Mam, or straight to Lowland?”

“Whatever suits you best, dear. I'm up for anything.”

She leaned back and stared out the window. The seats were soft and the view clear through the large, untainted windows that made Mother admire the vehicle even more. “We'll go to the hotel,” I said, leaning toward the driver. “Mother needs to . . .”

“
Nei, nei, nei
,” she said slowly but loudly, with her legs stretched out over the backseat. “No special needs,
bitte schön
, not on my behalf. As if we're not perfectly fine here in this luxury?” She waved a cigarette over the driver's head to indicate that she would like to
smoke in the car, and within seconds the interior became a version of my past. The acrid smell awoke memories of being carsick in Mother's friend's minivan during poorly-air-conditioned road trips. I rolled down my window and breathed in Holland. Mother was in her own world so when I pulled my head back into the car I felt duty-bound to strike up a conversation with the driver and asked about the car.

“It's an Ambassador, sir. Indian car. 1800 ISZ.”

“Oh? I didn't know you could get them here.”

“I brought it with me from Nainital, sir. That is my town in India.”

“And did you drive all that way?”

“Exactly, sir. I drove.”

“That must have been some road trip?”

“Yes, sir.” He seemed determined not to be tricked into a lengthy conversation but after a long pause he added: “I got a new engine in Carta.”

I liked this reserved driver. A man who drove over 6,000 miles across two continents and found the most notable part of the journey when he changed his engine, had to be a very responsible driver. The traffic thinned the farther we got from the city. The driver pointed to a sign in Dutch and turned off the highway onto a narrow road that cut through a rural area. Farmhouses appeared sporadically in the fields until we came to a place where a few buildings convened around a small church building. Next to the church stood a restaurant and a large house with the Dutch flag flying high. Two men sat on the porch in front of the restaurant staring into their beers while a young woman seemed to be giving them an earful, gesturing in frustration and then walking off. Spring was sneaking into Lowland. Squirrels nibbled on seeds by the roadside while the
sun baked the winding track and disappeared behind the trees. In the outskirts of the hamlet lay an even narrower trail to a gate with the name “Libertas” on it, and an alley of trees running through the grounds. The driver got out to open the gate, then got back behind the wheel and burped like he had done every fifteen minutes since we left the airport. He would later explain that people who ate spicy food every day had a livelier gastric system than salad eaters and that there was no point in trying to contain the burping.

I felt my mind and body relax as we drove under the continuous canopy. It was serene, the weather was still, and nothing disrupted the silence except the soft purr of the engine. I rolled down the window again and felt the crisp coolness left by the morning rain seep into the car. The humid breath of the foliage made the earth smell of carbon, rotting wood, and the vegetation that winter had concealed beneath snow. I found myself staring at a few extremely thin men with golf clubs standing on the other side of the tree tunnel. They were ashen and almost transparent compared to the robes hanging loosely on their skeletal frames. Once in a while they stopped in the groves and swung their clubs without discernable results, like a bunch of happy corpses.

I'd warned Mother long before we set off that she might have to get over her fierce aversion to drugs; she would probably be handed a joint upon arrival. Mother still slept in an XXL T-shirt that said: “Just say NO!,” a garment that our cousin Matti had given her after he learned that little Kiddi, his only son, had mortgaged the ancestral home to pay for his LSD habit. Ever since, Mother had detested recreational substances other than alcohol. She often talked about how awful and sad it was that she could not build a little summer cottage on the land she grew up on. The dealers had cheated her of that. They were thugs from Estonia and Lithuania who had
invaded the country to ruin our youth, men who raped women and swindled the very land away from good Icelanders. Mother had never forgiven the Baltics for declaring independence during very difficult times in the history of the USSR. She blamed it on Iceland's former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson, “a lounge socialist who snuggled up to the conservatives as soon as he got the chance.” And now these Baltic mobsters were flocking to Reykjavik with their dope, that's all the thanks we got for supporting them in betraying old Soviet Russia. Pimps and junkies, like the ones who corrupted little Kiddi. She would never be manipulated into taking these chemical death drugs that robbed good people of their health and reason. That road was a dead end: bankruptcy and emotional ruin.

“Old Lowland,” the driver said and pointed to a handsome house at the end of the track. The grounds opened up as we drove on: yellowish fields sheltered by evergreens that spread out between whitewashed buildings. Rusty machinery grew into the ground, on top of which sat a lady enjoying an ice cream. The scene looked like something from Mother's subconscious on a good sherry day. She loved Fellini and Buñuel and some Czech fellow who made movies about pigs and old cars. It all reminded me of these friends of hers from the silver screen.

“Here, Mam,” the driver said, looking toward the building in front of us. Mother's head seemed to pop out of the glass pane. She started and looked around.

“Jetlag, Mam,” the driver said. “I don't know it myself but I've heard about it: some are unlucky and can't sleep, but you are very lucky, Mam. You slept on the freeway.”

Mother, who was obviously still half-lost in her dreamy dialogue with the car window, looked quizzically at me:
Where are we?
The
driver beat me to it: “It's very good for Mam to sleep, Mam. Now she is pretty for her meeting with Mister Doctor Frederik.” She giggled at the word pretty and the Indian shot out of the car to open the door for her.

“Now, here we have a proper gentleman who knows how to treat a lady,” she said, laughing as she got out. “May I ask how to address such a gentleman?”

“Ramji, Mam. I am Ramji the driver,” he said and made his way to the steps that led up to the entrance of the building. Tall, French windows looked out into the yard and on the garret there were oval windows with opaque, industrial glass that reflected the surrounding landscape. A fountain with Renaissance style statues stood in the middle of the gravel-filled driveway where Ramji had parked the car. Mother gaped at the vision. While we waited to be taken inside, I told her that the house had been built in colonial times as a hunting lodge for a wealthy merchant, one of Rembrandt's clients. The master painter had probably spent some time in the house, making it one of the country's notable historical buildings.

“They'd like it here, Nikolaj and Julie,” she said, referring to characters from a Danish drama series we watched back home on Spítala Street. “I do hope they make up. I think it's wrong of them to throw everything away because of one mistake. She just has to forgive him. So what if he strayed a little bit, don't we all? But this house . . . it's like Madame Antoinette herself should be strolling about somewhere. What a gem, Trooper. You truly are a genius.”

Ramji came trotting back down the steps. “Is Mam rested?”

“Oh, yes. I think I'll actually have a little schnapps now.” She fished out a miniature from her handbag, a bulbous little flask she called her “lifesaver,” which she prized over other miniatures because it held 100 ml instead of the normal 50. She took a swig
and then handed the flask to Ramji, who at first stared in disbelief, but then smiled and shook his head. Mother laughed and gulped down the rest of the contents. It had taken Ramji half an hour to establish a form of communication with Mother that I couldn't remember anyone else managing, even over several decades. My respect for this gracious, burping driver was constantly growing.

“We wait here until Doctor Frederik arrives, or Helga, Mam,” he said.

“HelgaMam?”

“The director, sir, HelgaMam. She is a very clever lady.”

As soon as he finished the sentence the door opened and out came a woman who surely had to be HelgaMam: she was short but sprightly, in a knee-length, green dress that emphasized her womanly curves, alert and without that affected elegance of career women that always lulled me into a drowsy state of composure. She strode down the steps and welcomed us warmly to Lowland.

“I am so pleased to meet you, Mrs. Briem, right? And Mr. Willyson? I'm Helga Wiestock. Our offices and the doctor's apartment are here on the second floor, but our reception room is downstairs. Would you like a refreshment?”

“I could do with a glass of white,” Mother said in Icelandic and gave her hips a little shake. I had obviously made a mistake by not letting Ramji take us to the hotel. I was about to call it all off until the next morning when HelgaMam spoke.

“I have to apologize for the long ride. Ramji is an excellent driver but . . .”

“Oh, Ramji!” Mother exclaimed, fired up by her lifesaver. “What a wonderful man.”

“I thought he'd take you to the hotel. If you'd rather come back in the morning then . . .”

“Gar nicht
,” Mother answered. “I never get jetlagged. I would appreciate a little schnapps or a glass of white wine.”

“Of course!” HelgaMam didn't skip a beat. “My office is across the field. If you'd care to walk with me I'll tell you a bit about our work here. Then we'll drop in on Dr. Fred and see if he can't get us a drink.”

“
Ein wunderbares Traum, glaubst du nicht, mein Schatz?
” Mother asked, refusing to acknowledge that I didn't understand her theater German. “I was just saying to my son that this is like coming to Versailles.”

“I'm pleased to hear it, Mrs. Briem. Many of our guests prefer to stay at Lowland while others like being in the city. That's just the way it goes. You'll be staying in a hotel in Amsterdam, right?”

“To begin with,” I said. “We're going to look for an apartment.”