‘Here, let’s rinse it one more time.’
To rinse it was to splash the tombstone with water. The whole job of cleaning the stone was arduous. You had to keep taking a bucket over to a water fountain that was not near by, and keep lugging bucketfuls of water back. Usually we scrubbed the tombstone with a brush and detergent, and she’d splash it with water over and over, but this time my mother was not satisfied.
‘So, a little more,’ she commanded.
The path from Dad’s grave to the cab stand was a long one, and she was walking along it, leaning on me, for the last time, though we had no idea then.
‘Now this one always sparkles,’ she said at a tomb we always passed. ‘But these others have been so neglected. Disgraceful!’
In hospital Mum confided in me that she’d sneaked out at night and gone back to the house.
‘Impossible. How?’
‘I slipped out and took a cab.’
‘What did you do at home?’
‘I quickly tidied everything up and then came right back here.’
‘I was at home the whole time; if you had come home, I would have noticed. You dreamed it.’
‘I did not,’ she said, a little anxiously.
I came to hospital every day. The first thing she’d ask when I appeared at the door was,
‘Did you tidy up the flat?’
* * *
Over the last three years we have often had to call an ambulance. It is the easiest and quickest way to sidestep the elaborate bureaucratic procedures and get my mother admitted immediately to hospital. We called an ambulance once when she was in a crisis. As the nurses, supporting her under the arms, were guiding her to the lift, Mum ducked down, spryly, and snatched up the plastic rubbish bag by the door, left there to be taken down and tossed into the bin.
‘Ma’am, please!’ shrieked the doctor, catching sight of her.
When I asked her to tell me something from her childhood, now she would answer curtly, describing it as happy.
‘What was happy about it?’ I’d ask.
‘Everything was clean, and Mother did us up so nicely.’
In hospital, with a tube in her mouth and an IV in her arm, she never let go of her handkerchief. She was constantly dabbing her lips. When she had recovered a little, she immediately asked me to bring her a clean pair of pyjamas:
‘Don’t bring them if they’re not ironed.’
Three years ago – when she sank quite suddenly into a lethargy – I took her first to a psychiatrist, probably unconsciously postponing the day I’d have to take her to hospital, which was what happened immediately thereafter.
The psychiatrist followed the routine.
‘Your first and last name, ma’am?’
‘Vacuum cleaner,’ she said softly, her head bowed.
‘Your name, ma’am?’ the psychiatrist repeated, this time more sharply.
‘Well… vacuum cleaner,’ she repeated.
I was flushed by a wave of idiotic embarrassment: I cannot say why at the time I felt as if it would have been easier to bear if she had said ‘Madonna’ or ‘Maria Theresa’.
While she was in hospital – where instead of the harsh judgement of the psychiatrist (Alzheimer’s!) her diagnosis turned out to be more ‘amenable’ – I began to wage my own battle, in parallel, for her recovery. I found someone willing to work from morning to night. He stripped the wallpaper that had nearly fused with the concrete. We painted the walls in fresh pastel colours. We redid the bathroom, laid new tiles and mounted a new mirror. I purchased a new washing machine, a new Hoover, I threw out the old bed in one of the rooms, and bought a bright-red modern sofa, a colourful new rug, a new pale-yellow wardrobe. On the balcony I set out potted plants in new flower pots (which were flourishing that year late into autumn!). I cleaned every corner of the flat and discarded old, useless things. The windows shone, the curtains were freshly laundered, the clothes in the wardrobe were neatly folded, everything was in its place. For the first time I felt I knew what I dared throw away, and what I should keep, and that is why I resisted the urge to toss out a homely old house plant with only a few leaves and left it where it was.
In the upper drawer of the dresser I left untouched the things she treasured: an old watch which had supposedly belonged to my grandfather, my father’s medals (the Order of Brotherhood and Unity with Silver Wreath, the Order for Valour), an elegant box with a sizeable collection of compasses and a Raphoplex slide rule (my father’s things), a key to the mail box from an earlier flat, an old plastic alarm clock with dead batteries, a box of Gura nails (judging by the design probably from East Germany), a silver-plated cigarette box, a Japanese fan, my old passport, opera glasses (from her trip with Dad to Moscow and Leningrad), a calculator with no batteries and a bundle of announcements of Dad’s death, held with a rubber band. I carefully polished the old silver basket-shaped bonbon dish, in which she kept her jewellery: a gold ring, a pin with a semi-precious stone (a gift from my father) and costume jewellery, which she called her pearls. Mum’s ikebana arrangement, the pearls tumbling out of the bonbon dish like writhing snakes, had stood for years in the place of honour on the shelf. I washed all of her dishes carefully, including the Japanese porcelain coffee service she never used. The service was intended for me. (When I die, I am leaving the coffee service to you. It cost me a whole month’s wages!) Everything was ready to welcome Mum home, each thing was in its place, the house glistened to her taste.
My mother came home and walked importantly around her little New Zagreb flat.
‘What have we here! This is the sweetest little surprise you could have given me!’
Come Here, Lie Down…
‘Come here, lie down,’ she says.
‘Where?’ I ask, standing by her hospital bed.
‘On that bed.’
‘But a patient is already lying on it.’
‘What about over there?’
‘All the beds are taken.’
‘Then lie down here, next to me.’
Although she was delirious when she said those words, the invitation for me to lie down next to her stabbed me painfully. The lack of physical tenderness between us and her restraint with expressing feelings – these were some sort of unwritten rule of our family life. She had no sense of how to express feelings herself, she had never taught us and it seemed to her, furthermore, that it was too late, for her and for us, to change. Showing tenderness was more a source of discomfort than of comfort; we didn’t know how to handle it. Feelings were expressed indirectly.
During her stay in hospital
