the others put together? My version of the fact of her life is perhaps doomed eventually to be the only one remaining, and hence will be all that is truly left of her. But at least, I hope, for a few years, a decade, perhaps two—what is the duration of a book in an age that seems to be turning away from books? But even then: for those few years, that decade, her voice will still sound, her star will shine, only through me. Why? Because I am the only one who spends my days weighing words and arranging sounds?
You can’t call that awareness an injustice, but for a long time it had a dislocating effect. I felt sick with embarrassment and downright rage in advance at the pretension, the polite predation that dares to call itself ‘literature’—that bloodsucking monster that vegetates on the lives of all those unfortunate enough to find themselves in the proximity of anyone who imagines he is a writer, himself included. Nothing is safe, everything is usable, the distortions in his memory, the fabrications from his neighbourhood, the gossip from his paper, and eventually everything seems only to have happened to provide him with excellent material, even the death of his own mother. Anyone who writes is a vulture.
I’m prepared to play the vulture as much as you want, but not here. This? This must not and will not become literature. Not here of all places, I beg you, I beg myself: no, not the same old boxes of tricks again, full of culturally correct curlicues and grace notes, full of approved writer’s affectations alongside artistically justified metaphors. I have gone beyond literature with capital letters. And at the same time, believe me, there aren’t enough capital letters and punctuation, there is a lack of hyperbole to sing the praise of the courage of an eighty-year-old woman who, when she realized what was happening to her, simply wanted to die and, when she no longer realized anything, went on living stubbornly, and went on breathing, to the bitter end. There are simply too few syllables to curse the shame of her decline, her unequal struggle. Her fate, and in her fate that of everyone.
That’s why this must have nothing to do with literature, and at the same time it must be an improvement on the Bible, an immortal poem such as has never been composed. A militant ode, lofty and compelling and merciless, as if for the most fertile and toughest of all summers. And yet, at the same time, adamantly: a dry account, a list of scenes and tableaux, stripped of frippery and pretensions, quite simply ‘life as it is’, imperfect, fragmented and chaotic.
Nothing but capital letters and booming internal rhymes, and at the same time just naked facts. Nothing and everything at the same time, and preferably vomited up in one gush.
So get writing.
Or not.
First I compiled an anthology of my essays and reviews. Reworking them so thoroughly that I might as well have rewritten them entirely. Not a soul noticed the difference. Meanwhile I had anyway been nicely and meaningfully employed. I had gained six months, another half a year. Cowardice as easy-going self-deception.
I wrote two evening-filling plays, one of them actually in alexandrines from start to finish, to make it extra-entertaining, telling myself that I absolutely had to finish them both first and that in addition they made the perfect preparation for this book, this hard eulogy, that would be everything and nothing at the same time, written in a single gush, novel or not.
I was wrong.
High-minded cowardice.
Transparent deception.
I went to a stomach specialist and lay on my side in order, with the aid of a rubber intestine, to allow a sophisticated garden hose with a miniature lamp and a camera mounted on it to look deep into my innards via my oesophagus. Intestine to intestine, pipe to pipe. A person is only a machine with washers that wear out too quickly.
On my side and half fighting for breath in panic. Because if there is anything I have inherited from her, apart from minor everyday ailments, it is the self-inflicted lacerations of psychosomatic illness, multiplied by this certainty: with the same malady, only the more gruesome of two possible diagnoses can be the correct one.
In the inventory of her body, which shaped mine, there was a primacy of dry coughs and minor complaints. But in her legacy and hence in my thoughts there is only room for afflictions that can vie with those of Egypt. In addition: the work ethic as a caricature. Another neurosis that I hated in her and find in myself—I still don’t know whether she and I possess it thanks to our blanket Judaeo-Christian culture of guilt, or else because of the specific hysteria of the shopkeeping classes. Perhaps this is a combination and there is a connection, not even that crazy, between a neighbourhood shop and a woodland chapel, a butcher’s shop and a synagogue, a boutique and a cathedral. Anyway, every time I don’t do what I think I should—correction: whenever I don’t do something fast enough that I have undertaken to do, just like a computer that writes and loads and reloads its own programmes until it short-circuits—every time, then, that according to my subconscious I fall short of the image I want to project of myself, my right eyelid starts trembling (guaranteed: the final stage of a tumour), my wrists and my shoulders tighten up (guaranteed: multiple sclerosis), my fingertips seem to become lifeless, they tingle and flake (it won’t be leprosy, but still something ghastly).
I get up with a headache and I go to bed with diarrhoea and meanwhile my stomach produces enough sulphuric acid to scorch irreparable holes in its own wall, just as cigarettes smoked the wrong way round would hiss and make holes in a palate. At least that’s what it felt like, the day I decided to call that specialist. That morning I had rolled out of bed and crawled to breakfast on my knees, reduced to the state of a reptile by abdominal pain. One mouthful of coffee and I turned into the foetus of a reptile, made up of contractions and cramps.
Over the telephone the specialist gave me a concise diagnosis that was intended to reassure me, but that in the few hours that separated our telephone conversation from his physical examination transformed into an imaginary life-and-death struggle.
I remembered the natural remedy with which she always combated her stomach acid. (‘Acid? [she, with a dismissive gesture] I’ve got a gastric hernia, nothing can be done about that, it’s to do with my weak spine and your difficult birth.’) You peel a raw potato, chew each slice at length and keep swallowing the mash without drinking anything.
It has to be said: some relief could be detected. The reptile foetus unrolled, sat down on a chair at his laptop and typed in the word that the specialist had repeated five times. Reflux. Twelve million hits. One referring to a Scandinavian hard-rock band with undoubtedly appropriate music. All the others referred in every language on the planet to the symptoms of the phenomenon itself. Because the entrance to your stomach no longer shuts properly, your mouth feels stiff from morning till night, it is as resistant as dried-out leather because of the acid that creeps up during the day like vermin up a drainpipe and that at night laps against your tonsils thanks to the principle of communicating vessels—from stomach to mouth and back again.
And indeed, my tongue felt like the peeling tongue of an old shoe. My teeth, my pride—at almost every check-up my dentist sighs that my teeth will take me to 100—those once indestructible teeth suddenly felt brittle, vulnerable as china that has been washed too often, dry like after eating unripe cherries. Unless something were done quickly, my teeth, destined one day to crack walnuts and open bottles of beer for my 100-year-old companions, but now bathed daily in vitriol of my own making, would have only a few years to go before they split, crumbled, became inflamed, turned black, stank, fell out all by themselves, were pulverized and blown away. Apart from that—some sites predicted, as always mercilessly objective—the chance of throat cancer was scarcely a risk, it was a certainty, and that Adam’s apple wouldn’t last much longer either.
‘You have some scar tissue at the top of your oesophagus and also at the mouth of your stomach,’ mumbled the specialist, peering at his monitor, pushing the garden hose with the lamp and camera attached to it deeper
