Dimitri Verhulst - The Latecomer

‘Do you know Bohumil Hrabal?’ I asked, thinking I should take advantage of the opportunity while I was still able to talk a little.

‘How am I supposed to know him? I’m senile!’

‘A writer!’ I continued. ‘From Prague. The man was already in his late eighties when his health started to deteriorate, and he was admitted to a home. He’s supposed to have met a fairly poetic end there, falling out of a window while feeding the birds. But according to those in the know, he deliberately threw himself out of the window, piss-pot, wheelchair and all. A voluntary defenestration, which was a little more symbolic in his hometown than it would be here.’

He interrupted me.

‘Watch out, you babbling idiot and shut your gob. That fat nurse whose armpits start to reek in the morning after she’s lifted her first three emaciated grannies out of bed is waddling this way. No doubt to snap at us that our bus is running late and ask if we don’t want to go inside for five minutes for a cup of coffee.’

‘What? Is the bus late? I’ll never learn to play the bloody piano.’

I’m crossing the Styx and taking: a tube of toothpaste (just for a joke), a stray Joseph Roth quote, the wondrous memory of an ardent kiss I never got, bread crumbs, greater solace than a good Berliner ever offered me, a stanza of ‘Auntie Bonanza’, the longing for a T-shirt emblazoned with the words LIFE BEGINS AT SEVENTY-FOUR, more hope than certainty that someone will be waiting for me on the other side. And that’s all.

Moniek De Petter was beside herself with rage when she caught me puffing away like a pro in the canteen during one of her obligatory visits. A roll-up of my own manufacture, produced with tobacco my wandering comrade had deposited in my room. And a nice glass of wine to go with it — or at least a glass of wine. It was only then that I became, in her eyes, the embodiment of mental degeneracy, even if she still thought my erratic behaviour could only be the result of excessive and clearly inappropriate medication and reserved her first dressing-down for those she saw as the chief culprits: what kind of useless doctors were they, letting their patients smoke and get sozzled? She was going to put in a complaint, an official complaint! She’d go straight to the heart of the Medical Council! And then they could hang onto their braces, because soon they’d be struck off and lucky to get a job chasing a dustcart!

‘My husband’s been an intellectual his whole life. He used to chat to the sparrows in the back garden in Latin to practise his languages. And look at him sitting there now with that filthy thing in his mouth. He looks like a beggar straight out of the Fourth World.’

Of course, it wasn’t as if I could do anything about it; I’d simply forgotten I’d given up. A typical symptom of my disease, neither more nor less.

My daughter’s astonished reaction during what proved to be her last visit was much warmer.

‘God, did you use to smoke? You never told me. And now I think about it, I’ve never seen a photo of you with a cigarette either. Even though I’ve been poring over those old albums of yours a lot recently.’

She then lit up one of her own. She didn’t even need to cadge it off someone, she just fished it out of her handbag. One-upmanship in the surprise department. Because that was something I didn’t know: her being a smoker.

‘It’s a treat I’d given up hoping for, Father, one day being able to enjoy a cigarette in your presence. Well, maybe not entirely in your presence … But in your proximity at least. Still, my whole life I’ve kept this poisonous but very tasty habit from you and sometimes I found it hard to believe you didn’t realise I was a smoker … How could you not have cottoned on to my smoking in the shed when I was a teenager! I did it because I enjoyed it. And more than that: those cigarettes were the perfect companion for a slightly lonely, aimless adolescent. It was either smoking or stuffing myself full to the gills with sugary garbage. As far as I’m concerned, I made the right choice. And it’s not as if I didn’t have more than my fair share of overripe spots anyway, without encouraging them. But I kept my smoking secret, of course, chewing coffee beans so my breath wouldn’t give me away, a fairground con I can’t imagine smart parents falling for. Unlike you two. I’m pretty sure Mother would have taken a swing at me if she’d found out her well-bred young daughter had lowered herself to the suicidal pleasures of the hoi polloi. She would have cursed me up and down for a whore, like she did when she checked the laundry basket and found out I’d taken to wearing black underwear. Black underwear and a smoker, a combination like that would have done her head in. Especially considering she’d already discovered that I’d gone to the doctor behind her back to get a prescription for the pill. That already made me the scum of Gomorrah and the first nail in her coffin. She threatened our GP with everything imaginable: he should be ashamed of himself for encouraging unmarried underage girls to get up to all kinds of perversity. That kind of thing … It was around then that she changed doctors. You didn’t really pay much attention. You had your nose in a book and I’m sure you found intimacies like that too delicate a subject for a father to discuss with his daughter.’

Gulp.

‘Maybe you were brave enough to broach the more sensitive subjects with Hugo, man to man.’

Gulp.

‘… You see, I’d already left home, becoming what they used to call an independent woman, and you still didn’t know I was a confirmed smoker. A pack a day, easy. In the end I found it simplest to just keep the peace by not smoking on the few occasions I came round. I just had to get by on a temporarily reduced dose of nicotine. New Year and other family get-togethers always cost me my nails. And if I finally gave in to my addiction and stepped outside for a moment under some pretext, it was incredibly exciting to be smoking in the garden again. As if I’d turned the clock back to sixteen. But here I am, sitting with you, all grown-up, in the dreaded forties, at the wrong end of them, and I’m smoking in front of my father for the very first time. Absurd, isn’t it?’

Absurd … But was she talking to me or to herself?

Just then Rosa Rozendaal was wheeled into the canteen by a kind and ambitious nurse who was hoping to break through Rosa’s depression with some coffee and a piece of cake. A change of atmosphere, even just from a room to the canteen, can do wonders for a worn-out soul. And anyway why did Rosa hardly ever get any visitors? Where was her husband? Was he already pushing up the daisies? And her children, what was keeping them? Or didn’t she have any?

She bit into her cake and smiled for once. They’d remembered to put in her teeth. Well done.

‘You don’t know who I am anymore, do you?’ My daughter was talking to me again.

She sighed and once again reached into that colossal handbag of hers, a portable lost and found, and after some rummaging fished up a lighter. I couldn’t refuse the cigarette she offered me.

‘If only you knew,’ she continued with forced normality, ‘how unique this place is in this day and age. I don’t know any other public space in the whole country where you can still smoke inside. But it makes sense. Try explaining the public-health dangers of passive smoking to someone with dementia, whose thoughts are way back in the twentieth century. I’m guessing you wouldn’t understand just why you have to go and stand out in the cold and rain like a naughty schoolboy to smoke your ciggies.’