Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

A meeting like this, an event from which you withdraw, back into your shell, rattle my cage when it’s over. But that’s impossible! You’re the intermediary, the man in the middle, fluff pillows is what you have to do, make coffee, green tea, you’ve bought little cakes with pink icing because that’s what they served you. They sit around the table, the subject lies between them. Conversation as though someone’s walking on glass.

‘So what now?’ says my mother, echoing her sister’s words. ‘Now I’m going to die.’

The old feuds mobilize new forces within her.

‘I did everything I could. It just wasn’t supposed to be.’

‘Mostly alternative things, though, weren’t they? That’s what Ludwig said.’

‘ Alternative isn’t really the right word for it. It should be standard, and the other stuff should be the alternative.’

My uncle and aunt remain silent in order not to have to say that she’s dying now of a cancer that could have been treated easily, because that’s what I told them.

‘If you think you did the right thing, then that’s the way it is.’

(Aunt Edith signs the Treaty of Versailles.) Then they talk about the old days. Their father’s farm. Aunt Wichie is still alive, she’s eighty-eight, she’s already outlived him by almost ten years. An outsider would think he was looking at two families flashing each other bits of history from behind glass. Uncle Gerard mostly keeps his mouth shut. So do I. It’s about the two of them. Whether she’s planning to stay here, Aunt Edith asks. My mother looks at me and smiles.

‘That depends,’ she says.

Then it’s time for them to leave. The fruit trees across the way are in blossom. Blackbirds chase each other, cackling beneath the barberry. The people are tired to the bone.

The pain she talked about was not the pain she felt.

‘As long as it’s bearable, it’s bearable,’ the GP said.

We talked about my role in nursing her. Terminal care, Dantuma said, was a completely different story.

Uncle Gerard called, asked me to come, they needed to talk to me. I got a shortbread biscuit along with the coffee. Aunt Edith started.

‘We’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘Gerard and I. .’

He nodded.

‘. . and first of all we want to say that we think it’s really good what you’re doing there all by yourself, we admire that. But we think it would be better for her to come here. For as long as she has left. Then you don’t have to do it all on your own. It’s going to get really difficult. Nobody can do that alone.’

‘Maybe Dantuma can arrange a place in a hospice,’ I said. ‘And besides, I don’t know whether she’ll want to. She’s not’ — and here I couldn’t help laughing — ‘the easiest person.’

‘Marthe will realize that it’s the best thing for her and for you,’ Uncle Gerard said. ‘She can’t leave this up to you on your own.’

‘But where would I stay?’ I asked. ‘I don’t want to drive down here every day from the city. .’

‘Plenty o’ room here,’ Uncle Gerard said.

That was the message I took back to Meeden. She wasn’t in the living room. I poked my head into her room. She was lying on the bed.

‘So glad,’ she panted, ‘you’re back.’

Tears were running down her cheeks. The nightstand had been knocked over, the flame under the oil had been extinguished in the fall. An epileptic seizure. The first. She couldn’t be left alone anymore, not even to pop out for some shopping, the risk of another seizure was too great for that. It didn’t take me much effort to convince her to move to Bourtange. Maybe she had only been waiting for someone to ask.

She lay in the guestroom, where the blue-flowered wallpaper was the same as ever. I sat on the edge of the bed, bending over her the way she had once bent over me, when she’d said goodbye before her big trip. For the first few days she still came down the stairs at times, but that soon stopped. She no longer had the strength to get out of bed. The bedroom smelled of urine, Dantuma inserted a catheter and gave her morphine. The pounding pain in her head obstructed the blessing of a deep, uninterrupted sleep.

The poplars along the canal wore exuberant, fresh green. I walked down to the locks, it wasn’t far, not the Homeric journey of my memories. Once she was no longer around, I would have no-one left. Only a father in the jungle. No more shared past, not a single remember when. The Last of the Mohicans meets Alone in the World , only now you’re crying for yourself and not for some dead Indian or for a little orphan boy roaming the back roads of France. Not my kind of thing, crying; I always feel like someone’s watching. I always cry in tandem.

This morning she thought we were on Kings Ness, she was worried and sad because we were going to lose everything. Now, in her terminal unrest, those things affect her more than they did at the time. She groans quietly in pain, like a little dog. She can barely work down her pills. With angelic patience, Aunt Edith feeds her little sips of water. I’m glad we came here, that her deathbed stands where her cradle once stood. Sometimes Uncle Gerard and I are cheerful — just the two of us, Aunt Edith is not equipped with that particular feature — and laugh loudly at jokes that aren’t even that funny. A herald of relief? The canary’s cage is hanging in the front room. The bird is silent as the grave.

She’s so afraid sometimes, from the inner depths her demons are now freeing themselves. I sit in a chair beside her bed and watch her body withdraw from life, as Elias Canetti wrote: the dying take the world with them. Where to?

Dantuma injects her with sedatives, and an antipsychotic to ease her confusion. She crawls back into herself, deeper and deeper all the time.

Sometimes, like a swimmer, she surfaces for air.

‘Ludwig,’ she says, ‘my faithful Ludwig.’

Then she’s gone again, back into the depths where no-one can follow.

One time she awoke with a start.

‘Come! Come!’ she said agitatedly.

I leaned over her, she threw her arms around my neck and pulled me down with unexpected force. Her mouth was on my neck, the dry, cracked lips, sucking greedily at my flesh. A lover’s kiss, the last attempt to return to life — with a scream I pushed myself away from her.

‘Jesus Christ!’

I rubbed my neck, where the vampire kiss still burned.

Aunt Edith came running up the stairs.

‘It’s nothing,’ I said, ‘I was only startled.’

She lay in bed grinning, her obscenely large teeth bared.

Dantuma boosted the dosages of Dormicum and Haldol. Above her cheekbones was a gauntness, her temples had receded to hollows. The emerging pattern of her skull. When we saw the dark spots appearing on her arms, the prognosis became more precise. Her calendar was reduced to days, hours. One more time she raised her head above water. She saw me, around her lips appeared the shadow of a smile.

‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ she whispered.

Through a clump of tears I said, ‘Yeah, Mama, I’m all right.’

She closed her eyes, frowned slightly.

‘Funny,’ she murmured. ‘You never called me Mama before.’

The crematorium in Winschoten. The female funeral director, Aunt Edith, Uncle Gerard and me. Sitting at the back is a man we don’t know. Aunt Wichie has written me a card. Aunt Edith hands it to me. Regular, thin handwriting, the way she was taught eighty years ago at a village school in the peat district. I put the card in my inside pocket. First the funeral director, who tells us what we are going to hear. I already know, I picked it myself. Moody Blues, ‘Nights in White Satin’, an abridged version. Then ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ — songs she sang on the streets of Los Angeles. I step up to the front. I’ll call you Mama. Ignore the embarrassment. I will tell the people how beautiful you were, honeysuckle, roses. Don’t worry, I won’t go too heavy on the mush; your life, after all, is reflected painfully enough on this day. This is your audience: a man we don’t know, your sister and brother-in-law with whom you weren’t on speaking terms and me. . well, you know how that was. It takes two, and we never pulled our punches. Too heavy, this? An anecdote then, the light touch. About your vanity. That once, deeply insulted, you told me someone had guessed your age as forty-five. But you are forty-five, aren’t you? I said. You: But then that’s still no reason to say it!