one of the few items of furniture that had accompanied him from flat to room on his penultimate journey.
That room had gradually become less his living quarters than a shrine, a sanctuary where there was daily remembrance, and without prayers, prayers to a goddess of many manifestations. There was a photo of her on every cupboard and every side table. Three hung over his bed.
One of them was a grotesque print, at least for anyone who did not know the context. My mother, at the time long since retired, is depicted as Mae West. One of her favourite manifestations in this local church community consisting of a single worshipper, which compensated for the modesty of its numbers with the power of its devotion. Every morning and every evening he made his modest pilgrimage, shuffling in a circle round his dining table, from cupboard to drawing-room table to bed to cupboard, watching the treacherous wrinkles and flaps in the carpet, in order to wish each of the photographic manifestations an extensive good morning or good night, as the case might be. When he drank his aperitif he raised his glass now to one then to the other, taking care not to favour one of the figures over the others. He loved them all equally.
Yet he toasted most frequently that one secular saint’s print above his bed, in which his idol wore a festive shiny ultramarine evening dress—Mae West at her finest, including black stiletto heels, a platinum-blonde wig, garish lipstick and false eyelashes the size of butterfly’s wings. In a wheelchair but not yet secured, sitting in it entirely of her own will, actually wheeling around with bravura, from the look on her face not doubting for a moment the success of her statement. It is a souvenir of one of her most treasured roles, in a play about, of all things, old people with dementia. One of her few professional jobs, for the Royal Flemish Theatre, the Brussels municipal theatre that granted my mother a rebirth as one of the women whom she had so admired throughout her life. (‘Just a shame she was so foul-mouthed. [she, with an ugly frown] She went to jail because of it, “Mie Wust” or “My Sausage” as we called her in our young days. Thank God they never called me that. One’s got to be able to laugh at oneself, but Mie Wust? I wouldn’t call that much of a recommendation, not even in a butcher’s shop.’)
His wife, sparkling above his bed as a Dietrich-like Blue Angel in a continuous screening, flourishing as a well-preserved Hollywood icon, triumphant in a wheelchair, with too much make-up but as yet without a twinge of pain, with a piercing gaze in which there is not yet any bewilderment. On the contrary, she seems ready to burst into a faultless monologue and hold the audience in thrall. That was one of the last images which my father, taking shorter and shorter hazy glimpses of the world from which he was slipping away, absorbed, at each glance himself a little less lucid. A happy drowning man who still occasionally sticks his head up in the middle of a desolate sea, sees that it is good and lets himself slide back underwater, blissfully weakening, reassured, without complaint, satisfied, even smiling: look over there, there she hangs, my Josée. Does she look fantastic or doesn’t she? Alert, protective, radiant.
Although when we squabbled she could stare at the same nail for a bloody long time. That’s how she was. My Josée.
Come on now, Dad. Go ahead. We know what you want. Cast a final glance. Raise that tired head one last time. Lift it up one last time from that calm, flat sea of sheets. There’s no need to be embarrassed. If there are people who when they read this want to feel vicarious shame for you, for me, for her—let them skip this page. Let them stop reading completely. They are in the wrong place here. They are not worthy of you.
Come on now. Just once. Look at that photo which, when you were awake and well, you sang the praises of so often, to nurses, the odd-job-man, the old pious, faithful nun on your floor—what’s her name again?—to all visitors, everyone, more than once and again and again, just as in the shop you told the same joke a hundred times, the same bit of gossip to a different customer each time, and the next day the same. You said in your room, pointing to the place above your bed: ‘Have you in all your life ever seen such beautiful legs? I agree they’re on the short side. But apart from that? And she was already seventy-seven!’
One more time. Go on.
Come on now.
-
I HAVE NEVER known anybody so ready for the final chapter as my father. Lucid, almost eager. A week before he died, with him and his GP, and in the presence of a son-in-law and the grandson who was his nurse, I went through the official list of questions which precedes the legitimate assisted dying which my country of origin insists on calling so euphemistically ‘palliative care’. A state governed by the rule of law which has a large number of suicides wants to be sure that new individuals who are dying really want to die. They have to affirm that so often that some people who are dying start feeling guilty about their longing for death. Which is perhaps the intention of some survivors.
I am not going to get worked up over this again. I don’t want to behave sarcastically or despairingly. Death is ultimately most difficult for the survivors. So don’t let me start waffling here about the point or lack of point of such a compulsory questioning of people who are already half dead, inspired by bureaucratic distrust, imposed by religions that have gone to the dogs without a soul and without a future. I am not in a position to lecture anyone about neuroses and strange antics caused by someone else dying. Everyone has their own abnormality. Everyone has their own hereafter. And pity for everyone.
My father definitely did not feel guilty, face to face with his departure. He sounded relieved. Joking like the young rascal of fourteen that he remained all his life, comforting like the reconciler wise beyond his years that he also was, always placating in the background, a slaughterer who wanted to make life easier for everyone else, taking as many burdens as possible on himself, where and whenever he could—even now, dawdling on the threshold of death, his first concern was to avoid the raising of voices and sad scenes. Mad about teasing and being teased, a scallywag of eighty-eight—I really can’t describe him any differently. An eternal rogue who was almost completely bald before he was forty and was constantly struggling with excess weight, since life consists, apart from working and producing children, of wholesome eating, and only fools refuse a good glass, be it beer, wine or old Dutch gin.
Not a father to fight with. Not a patriarch to murder, symbolically or with a real axe.
His mischievous round head of yore had become very emaciated in the space of a few months, and he had to keep tightening his belt, ‘or else my trousers will fall off my bum.’ His metastasized prostate cancer had become bone cancer, affecting and dissolving half his skeleton, spoiling his appetite and his blood with the calcium that was released. That does something to your stomach and to your intestines. Don’t ask me what, I don’t want to know. He was fed liquid and sugar through a drip, a kind of transparent plastic bag hanging on a mobile coat hook. Eating and drinking were no longer possible, almost overnight, whatever he ate or drank he instantly vomited up again into a cardboard vomiting dish—there are people who think up things like that, modern heroes, real heroes, an unbreakable vomiting dish made of calming rough grey cardboard, easy to hold to someone’s mouth because of its shape: a hollow kidney, cut in half, and not cold and condemning like enamel or stainless steel, which would inevitably recall a poisoned chalice.
There were questions on the official list that my father did not answer directly, but rather with a smile and a digging motion of the hand: ‘Dig a hole. Not too much trouble. No waste of money.’ In answer to another question: ‘Give me a jab. Nice and quick. No fuss.’ With a broad grin and a wink.
When I took him cautiously to task and went on seriously asking for a real answer, he looked at me with feigned disappointment, chin on his chest, gazing up with great, bewildered eyes. He even started blinking with those real Bambi eyes of his, grimacing. ‘You’re not going to start messing about, are you? You know what I want. Write it down, lad. And no more messing abart. Or else go straight back to that Antwarp of yours.’ Always those two words, ‘messing abart’ and
