about her suicide attempt.” He waited for her to agree, and she nodded again. “When I found her—”
“You found her?”
“Of course.” He seemed surprised. “You understand, I’ve been afraid of this happening. I stayed with her as much as possible. But the night before, she seemed all right, so I left her. Only next day I had such a feeling… I went round to her flat and there she was. I stood and looked at her and didn’t know what to do.”
“How do you mean?”
“Perhaps…” he said, “perhaps it was really what she wanted. She’d said again and again that she was tired. I don’t know – I still don’t know if what I did was right. But I thought of you and Max, and I felt I couldn’t take the responsibility.”
When she could eat no more, he stood up.
‘Come along,” he said. “We’ll go and see your mother. Try not to let it distress you too much.”
The hospital was a pleasant, old-fashioned building set in a wooded park. But even as they approached the front door, past a man raking leaves and another shovelling them into a wheelbarrow, her stomach tightened on the lunch she had not wished to eat, so that for a moment she was afraid she might be sick.
Inside the hall, a very clean nurse in a starched apron received them. She had a tight expression and seemed to disapprove of them both, as though she blamed them for what had happened to Mama.
“Follow me please,” she said in German.
They went, Anna first with Konrad behind her. It was more like a nursing home than a hospital – wood panelled walls and carpets instead of tiles and lino. It’s more like a nursing home than a hospital, she said to herself, so as not to think about what she was going to see. Corridors, stairs, more corridors, then a large landing crowded with cupboards and hospital equipment. Suddenly the nurse stopped and pointed, and there, behind a piece of dust-sheeted machinery, was a bed. There was someone in it, motionless. Why was Mama not in her room? Why had they put her here, on this landing?
“What’s happened?” she shouted so loudly that she frightened all three of them.
“It’s all right,” said Konrad, and the nurse explained in disapproving tones that nothing had happened: since Mama had to be under constant observation, this was the best place for her. Doctors and nurses crossed the landing every few minutes and were able to keep an eye on her.
“She’s being very well looked after,” said Konrad, and they went over to the bed and looked at Mama.
You could not see very much of her. Just her face and one arm. All the rest was covered with bedclothes. The face was very pale. The eyes were closed – not just closed normally but closed tight, as though Mama were keeping them shut on purpose. There was something sticking out of her mouth, and Anna saw that it was the end of a tube through which Mama’s breath came thinly and irregularly. Another tube led to the arm from a bottle suspended from a stand near the bed.
“There doesn’t seem to be any change,” said Konrad.
“It is necessary to bring her out of the coma,” said the nurse. “For this we must call her by her name.” She leaned over the bed and did so. Nothing at all happened. She shrugged her shoulders. “Na,” she said, “a familiar voice is always better. Perhaps if you speak to her she will hear.”
Anna looked down at Mama and the tubes.
“In English or in German?” she asked, and immediately wondered how she could have said anything so stupid.
“That you must decide for yourself,” said the nurse. She nodded stiffly and disappeared among the dust-sheeted equipment.
Anna looked at Konrad.
“Try,” he said. “One doesn’t know. It may do some good.” He stood looking at Mama for a moment. “I’ll wait for you downstairs.”
Anna was left alone with Mama. It seemed quite mad to try and talk to her.
“Mama,” she said tentatively in English. “It’s me, Anna.”
There was no response. Mama just lay there with the tube in her mouth and her eyes tightly shut.
“Mama,” she said more loudly. “Mama!”
She felt oddly self-conscious. As though that mattered at a time like this, she told herself guiltily.
“Mama! You must wake up, Mama!”
But Mama remained unmoving, her eyes obstinately closed and her mind determined to have nothing to do with the world.
“Mama!” she cried. “Mama! Please wake up!”
Mama, she thought, I hate it when your eyes are shut. You’re a naughty Mama. Clambering on Mama’s bed, Mama’s big face on the pillow, trying to prise the eyelids open with her tiny fingers. For God’s sake, she thought, that must have been when I was about two.
“Mama! Wake up, Mama!”
A nurse carrying some sheets came up behind her and said in German, “That’s right.” She smiled as though she were encouraging Anna in some kind of sport. “Even if there is no reaction,” she said, “your voice may be getting through.”
So Anna went on shouting while the nurse put the sheets into a cupboard and went away again. She shouted in English and in German. She told Mama that she must not die, that her children needed her, that Konrad loved her and that everything would be all right. And while she was shouting, she wondered if any of it were true and whether it was right to tell Mama these things even when she probably could not hear them.
In between shouting, she looked at Mama and remembered her in the past. Mama tugging at a sweater and saying, “Don’t you think it’s nice?” Mama in the flat in Paris, triumphant because she’d bought some strawberries at half-price. Mama beating off some boys who had pursued Anna home from the village school in Switzerland. Mama eating, Mama laughing, Mama counting her money and saying, “We’ll have to manage somehow.” And all the time a tiny part of herself observed the scene, noted the resemblance to something out of Dr Kildare, and marvelled that anything so shattering could also be so corny.
At last she could bear it no longer and found the nurse who led her back to Konrad.
She felt sick again in the car and hardly saw the hotel where Konrad had booked her in. There was an impression of shabbiness, someone leading her up some stairs, Konrad saying, “I’ll fetch you for supper,” and then she was lying on a large bed under a large German quilt in a strange, half-darkened room.
Gradually, in the quiet, the sick feeling receded. Tension, she thought. All her life she had reacted like this. Even when she was tiny and afraid of thunderstorms. She had lain in bed, fighting the nausea among the frightening rumbles and flashes of lightning, until Max got her a freshly-ironed handkerchief from the drawer to spread on her stomach. For some reason this had always cured her.
They had slept under German quilts like this one, not sheets and blankets as in England. The quilts had been covered in cotton cases which buttoned at one end and, to avert some long forgotten, imaginary misfortune, they had always shouted, “Buttons to the bottom!” before they went to sleep. Much
