Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

He called Sister’s phone. An unfamiliar female voice answered.

It was Daughter. “She’s resting,” she said. “But we are expecting you. Your room is ready. Also…” She paused, then continued, “I’m really excited to meet you. I’ve been wanting this to happen for I don’t know how long, and I should confess that I was the one who wrote the first email from my mother’s computer. Pawn to King Four. That was me.”

“Then I’m greatly in your debt,” Brother said. “I’ll be there shortly.”

“You should know,” Daughter said, lowering her voice, “that my father finds it hard to forgive slights against my mother. Just as she gets furious on his behalf if anyone criticizes him. They have always been that way, super protective of each other. I’m just telling you in case he’s a little cold toward you when you arrive. He’ll get over it, I’m sure, now that you and my mother have patched things up.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” Brother said.

He remembered the neighborhood from his student days when he had long hair and a Zapata mustache and wore purple shirts and red crushed-velvet flared pants. In those days, on the street with the famous weekend market, there was what people used to call a head shop called the Dog Shop whose owners had, for unexplained reasons, attached a giant human nose to the wall above the entrance. He had read somewhere that in the old days the area’s poor would sometimes steal the dogs of the rich, take them away and train them to answer to different names, and then sell them back to their former owners on this very street. He had gone into the Dog Shop one day and asked if that story was the origin of the name, to be met with stoned hippie blankness. “No, man. It’s just a name, man.” Too bad, he thought. Even then, half a century ago, the culture was already beginning to be a thing without memory, lobotomized, with no sense of history. The past was for dead people. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.

And the restaurant below Sister’s duplex was called Sancho. There were moments when it seemed that the whole world was echoing his work in progress.

He rang the doorbell. A buzzer sounded and the door to the apartment clicked open. Judge Godfrey Simons, in open-necked white shirt and slacks, stood at the top of the stairs to greet him. The welcome, as Daughter had warned, was not warm. “Look who’s showed up at our door after all these years,” the judge said. “Don’t you think there’s something a tiny bit ghoulish about appearing at this juncture after not being bothered to drop us so much as a postcard for donkey’s years? Something a teensy bit macabre?”

Daughter pushed past him. “Stop it, Daddy.” Then, to Brother, “We’re very glad to have you. And he’s not actually nearly as much of a curmudgeon as he sounded just then.” She turned back to her father. “Behave.” He snorted, a good-natured sort of snort, and turned away. Brother climbed the stairs and went in.

When he had imagined Sister on the other end of the phone, his picture of her had been influenced by her grand accent. He imagined her dressed more or less like the queen, in heavy floral-patterned fabrics that resembled sofa upholstery or curtains, and made her look, in his mind’s eye, like human furniture. Sometimes, in an unkindly playful mood, he imagined a tiara on her head and, on her body, the kind of puffy-sleeved, farthingaled ballgown he had seen in Masterpiece Theatre programs about the Tudor royal family. As a result of these fantasies of ballroom wear and upholstery, he was unprepared for the woman he had come to see as she actually was: which was to say, a very sick woman indeed. She was in her bedroom on the upper floor of the duplex, and was unable to come down to greet him, or, as he soon learned, for any other reason. She had lost a lot of weight, and in her nearly emaciated condition needed help to clean herself or perform her bodily functions. The illness was a daily humiliation, but she bore it without complaint. Only her voice remained strong.

“There are several complications which can arise from CLL,” she told Brother, wasting no time after a brief embrace. “The mildest are infections of the upper and lower respiratory tract. I have experienced both of these. Unfortunately, they have been the least of my problems. It can also happen that the immune system fouls up. The cells which are there to fight diseases become confused and attack the red blood cells, as if a lawyer for the defense were suddenly to switch sides and join the prosecution. This doesn’t happen very often, but it is happening to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Brother said, using the words people used when they had no words.

“Oh, I haven’t even reached the good parts yet,” she said. “CLL increases the risk of developing other cancers, such as melanomas and lung cancer, and yes, you’ve guessed it, there are now shadows on both my lungs. That’s the silver medal winner. The gold medal goes to the CLL itself. Very occasionally, it can switch into a much more aggressive cancer, called diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. In the cancer business we refer to this as Richter’s Syndrome, probably because it’s an event of earthquakelike magnitude. In the dying business we refer to it as forget-about-it. This is what I now have. Welcome to London.”

She was attached to what the judge called “her Heath Robinson contraption.” Brother had to dig deep to remember who Heath Robinson was. But the tangle of tubes and drips that were needed to provide what the body could no longer provide for itself made the judge’s meaning clear enough. “Oh, right,” he said. “It’s a Rube Goldberg machine.”

“We don’t need the American version here, thank you,” the judge said. Still not that friendly. “Heath Robinson will do very well.”

It wasn’t right to argue at the bedside of a dying woman, but Brother couldn’t resist going one more round. “Then there’s Gyro Gearloose,” he said. The judge’s face reddened.

“Be nice, Jack,” Sister said.

Nodding with great deliberation, the judge turned to go. “I’ll leave you two to do whatever it is you need to do,” he said. “I’ll be downstairs.” Daughter left the bedroom, too, and then Brother and Sister were alone.

“So now you see me,” she said. “Looking skinny, no?”

She was receiving in-home hospice care. During the day many people passed through. Doctors, nurses, paid professional caregivers, therapists, friends. Later the family took over. Daughter spent most nights here nowadays. She and the judge shared the night shift. “They’re both exhausted,” Sister said. “That’s why Jack’s so irritable. He’s a man who likes his sleep.”

“I can understand that,” Brother said. “I’m the same.”

“It won’t be long now,” Sister said. She had briefed herself thoroughly on the signs of approaching death. “Different patterns of sleeping and waking,” she said. “Check. I never know when I’ll drop off, and I wake up at all odd hours these days. Diminished appetite and thirst, check, and I used to love fine dining and good wines. Fewer and smaller bowel movements, just as well, since I need help getting to the bathroom and cleaning myself, so the less of that, the better. The blood pressure situation isn’t good, and often my heart races, and sometimes it’s difficult to breathe properly. Is this getting to be too much for you? You’re looking a little pale. No? Very well then, we proceed. There’s also, I’m sorry to say, incontinence. I have a rubber bedsheet under here, it’s like being a baby again, imagine how much I love that . And my body temperature fluctuates. Sometimes I’m sweating, at other times my skin feels cold to the touch. It’s a long list. The body fights for life until the very end. We are all death’s virgins, and we don’t easily yield up our flower.