Dimitri Verhulst - The Latecomer

And if a person in their seventies who has lost their mental moorings is not seen as a hard-luck case, well, it’s because they think you had it coming. You’re under suspicion of not having eaten enough fatty fish when you had the chance. Or nuts. You preferred TV soaps to books with complicated plots, you drank so much alcohol you pickled your brain, you turned your nose up at crossword puzzles and never read foreign-language newspapers. You were the kind of person who preferred to avoid any kind of mental strain, who couldn’t find the energy to keep up with new technology. You are fully and solely to blame for your own dementia! That’s the way some people look at you.

That’s how my wife looks at me. When she visits. Something she, fortunately, does less and less.

It’s my first birthday in the home and I’m in the mood. Hip, hip, hooray for me. OK, to cut costs and reduce stress, I will have to share my party with any other residents who happen to have had their birthdays in the last fortnight. Mostly that works out at two or three birthday boys or girls to make a simultaneous fuss of, and if one of them’s turning a hundred, you’re guaranteed a journalist from the local newspaper will show up to cover the happy event and photograph the celebrated centenarian. The alderman responsible for births, deaths and marriages will also drop by. He’ll give a short speech (always the same one, but with a senile audience that’s the least of his worries), present the brand-new hundred-year-old with a flowering pot plant on behalf of the mayor and all his fellow councillors, wish him or her many, many happy returns, scoff a piece of cake, press the flesh of any eligible voters, and disappear. Residents who are only turning ninety-eight are significantly less fascinating for this alderman (a Christian-Democrat, but I doubt that makes a difference) and the celebration of a seventy-fourth birthday means nothing to him at all. An even better opportunity for the alderman to put in an appearance is when the chance of immortalising four generations in one go has the regional press photographer scurrying our way yet again. Such a moving portrait: a quivering bag of bones with a freshly dropped great-grandson on his lap.

Today, praise the Lord, there is nobody in the birthday batch whose clock is just ticking over to three digits, so the alderman can amuse himself with more useful matters. You won’t hear me complaining. The way he sometimes dares to look at me, I get the feeling he’s the only one who’s seen through my little game. The only one who knows I’ve still got my full complement of marbles, that I’m taking everyone for a ride. It’s a feeling I have, nothing else. Pure intuition.

Curvy Cora: ‘Look at you, Désiré, all squeaky clean again. Off to the dining room!’ Ninety-four decibels.

With a patronising, ‘Why don’t we put today’s birthday boys next to each other at the breakfast table?’ she wheels me round and parks me in the spot that belonged, until very recently, to Rosa Rozendaal. What little hair Rosa had left pointed in all directions. At breakfast, she’d shove a slice of bread into her mouth like a boxer replacing his mouthguard and mutter to herself.

In Rosa Rozendaal’s old spot and right next to Camp Commandant Alzheimer. The camp commandant has already launched his attack on his tasteless white sandwiches, though not without dunking them in his mug of weak coffee first.

I look into his glassy eyes and say, ‘How do you like the butter? Good, isn’t it? Made from the body fat of Jews! A real delicacy!’

This kind of talk always rekindles Camp Commandant Alzheimer’s former glory. It seems to remind his empty head that it once contained thoughts. He parrots, ‘We’ll have more jobs, wider motorways, better railway connections!’ then stabs his knife deep into the butter to demonstratively smear a thick, flabby layer on a new slice of bread. But the man shakes so badly the butter’s soon stuck to everything except his knife.

I whisper, ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’

Now he looks uncomfortable. It’s the uncomfortable look of a dementia-sufferer furiously rifling through his memory in search of something that’s almost certainly not there anymore. The look I have spent hours rehearsing and have now mastered.

‘You don’t recognise me anymore? Look closer! It was the last winter of the war, that cold winter … You shot me dead and threw me on a pile of bodies! No? My face doesn’t ring any bells? Oh, well, I understand. You killed so many. You can’t be expected to remember all those faces. Still, I was one of them. And I’ve come back. Risen from the dead, out of the ovens. To blight your old age. To stick a garden hose up your ancient arse and turn on the tap until clean, clear water’s gushing out of your nostrils.’

The healthcare sector isn’t just underpaid, it’s also understaffed. And so it takes a while before someone arrives to smother the camp commandant’s piggy squeals with a comforting gesture and a quick sedative.

‘Walter, come now, there’s no reason for you to scream the building down just because you’ve dropped some butter on the floor. That’s really nothing to worry about, dear. But next time, just ask us if you want some extra butter on your sandwich. That’s what we’re here for, after all, isn’t it? Is that a deal? OK?’

Of all my birthdays, none began as promisingly as this one, the very last.

I’m crossing the Styx and taking: a tube of toothpaste

(just for a joke), a stray Joseph Roth quote …

All the world’s best ideas mature slowly, like extra-tasty, crumbly cheese. My plan to fake dementia was also built up one step at a time, sometimes without me even realising it. I can’t identify with any certainty just when and where it began but, if I was forced to pick a single moment, I’d say it was that afternoon — when exactly? — two years ago, two and a half maybe, at the pétanque club. Because, yes, I enjoyed a game of boules with my mates. I found it very relaxing. Not my wife. She thought pétanque was an activity for loafers, a game that had been invented by the tax department to maintain levels of alcohol and tobacco consumption, and she often treated me to statements like: ‘When it comes to raking the moss out of the lawn you’re always feeling a little peaky, then suddenly you’re energetic and sprightly enough to make a fool of yourself tossing balls around a sandpit. I have gone down on bended knee a hundred times, Désiré, begging you to please come with me to Sanders Furniture Emporium to look for a new cupboard for the tea towels. And it’s always your blood pressure this or your bad back that; you’re never up to it. As far as you’re concerned, that cupboard for my tea towels can wait forever. But if it’s to go pétanqueing, you never have a problem. Not with your blood pressure, not with your back, not with anything …’

I’ve long stopped sticking up for myself in the face of my wife’s tirades. I’m one of the many, perhaps millions of silent men who armour themselves against their wife’s vagaries with a shield of indifference. It took me years of patient practice. At first I resisted every unjustified accusation. With a clear conscience, I would insist that I never drank more than three glasses, that during our entire marriage I had come home drunk a maximum of four or five times, which, as I now realise, was probably far too infrequently for my mental health. What’s more, I used to have the gall to try to correct her ridiculous view of things. I would say, ‘Listen here, for starters you don’t play pétanque in a sandpit, it’s a bit more elevated than that.’ But as my youth and hair receded, I learnt to be insensitive to her verbal fusillades and kept my replies to myself. By the time the mortgage was paid off, the house surrounded me like a prison. But I boosted my self-respect with acts of resistance: it was her venom versus my detachment. We both stubbornly held our positions and grew old together unromantically, even surviving friends whose relationships were loving. When the mayor of our town honoured us in the town hall on the occasion of our golden wedding anniversary, I felt guilty thinking of those magnificent couples who had been torn apart much too soon by cancer or a fool with a gearstick, and deluded myself that I was right to accept the mayor’s tribute, but only as something I had earned through bravery and self-sacrifice.