Arnon Grunberg

Everything Is Going to Be Okay

Somerset Maugham said that the writer must not wait for experiences to come to him, but must go in search of them himself.
In any event, starting in the summer of 2006 when I first traveled with the Dutch army to Afghanistan, I have actively gone in search of experiences. My stints as chambermaid in Bavaria, masseur in Romania and steward in a Swiss club car were part of that quest.
But sometimes the writer stumbles upon an experience he has not been looking for at all.
My mother was born in Berlin in 1927. Since my father’s death, almost twenty years ago, she has lived alone in the house on the south side of Amsterdam where I also lived from the age of eleven.
My sister, who is eight years older than me, left the Netherlands in 1982 to settle in Israel, where she become more religious and Zionistic than ever. She moved to a settlement on the West Bank and lived there in poverty: the search for spiritual values comes at a cost. Today she has seven children and a demanding husband. In September there is a very clear risk of her becoming a grandmother.
I myself left the Netherlands in 1995 and moved to New York. A few years after leaving Amsterdam I developed the habit of calling my mother once or twice a day. Most of my girlfriends resigned themselves to that ritual, and were quite understanding when my mother would call me back on occasion at the most inconvenient moments; her life was full of situations she felt compelled to describe as “emergencies”.
Those spontaneous conversations never lasted long, fifteen minutes at most. My own calls, on the other hand, were always made at fixed times. Just as Muslims pray to Allah at pre-established hours, so did I call my mother at fixed moments.
There were times when it was hard for me to concentrate on my mother’s stories. She kept careful track of when the neighbor left for her bridge club and when she returned, and once she told me, sounding slightly scandalized, that the neighbor lady had taken the gardener out to lunch.
Callus as it may sound, the neighbor lady’s doings were never of particularly great importance to me, but then the prayers of a believer may be murmured with greater urgency on one particular day than on another.
During those phone conversations, in fact, I myself rarely said much. Mostly because I didn’t feel the need, but also because I knew that my mother could easily become upset by seemingly piddling details. People lie and dissemble not only to protect themselves, but often to protect the other person as well.
When friends asked why I called my mother so often, I told them: “She’s dependent on me.” One friend said: “Maybe you’re the one who’s dependent on your mother.” There is a distinct possibility that I, like a great many people, have no inherent capacity for real freedom. Just as others enslave themselves to an ideology or organization, so had I – to a certain extent – enslaved myself to my mother.
Last winter, while I was with my girlfriend on Key West, my mother informed me that things were not going well with her. I didn’t pay too much attention at the time; for as long as I’ve know her things have not been going well with her. The fluctuations in her misery were, at best, a matter of degree.
But the voice on the phone that day grew increasingly weak, until all that came out at last was a hoarse whisper. When I asked: “Are you eating well?” she replied: “I can’t.” I decided to ask one of my exes, a good friend, to drop by my mother’s house with some fruit or vegetables. A pantry is something one can always replenish. According to my ex, my mother looked like a hermit who had been secluded for the last twenty years. She had wrapped herself in a number of shawls, beneath which she wore a coat that I myself had worn at the age of fourteen.
She snatched the fruit and vegetables out of my friend’s hands and, before closing the door, whispered: “I can’t have any visitors at the moment.” A few days afterwards I was suddenly unable to reach my mother by phone. Convinced that she was lying dead in her house, I phoned my ex again and said: “I have sort of a strange request. I think my mother is lying dead in her house. Could you go and take a look? The neighbor lady has the key.” Even under such circumstances, a person proves to be pragmatic by nature. I was on the point of leaving for a trip to Turkey and Iraq, and one of my first thoughts was: “Couldn’t she have picked a better time to die?” While the ex was on her way to my mother’s house, I went out to lunch in New York. It is my firmest conviction that one should do one’s best to honor one’s daily rituals, no matter what. I would be lying if I said I was not in a panic. But the greater the panic, the more crucial the ritual.
While I was sipping my espresso at one of my regular luncheon spots, the ex called: “I’m in front of your mother’s door. Should I go in?” “Yes, go on in,” I replied.
Five minutes later she called back.
“I went through the whole house, but I can’t find her anywhere.” “That’s impossible,” I said.
“Maybe she’s lying in the garden,” my ex said. “Do you think maybe she jumped off the balcony?” “That doesn’t sound like my mother but, well, I guess she could have fallen.” My ex went to take a look in the garden and then in the shed, but my mother wasn’t lying there either.
“She’s gone up in smoke,” my ex said.
I was not sure my mother was dead, but what was certain was that she had vanished.
A few hours later the mystery was cleared up. The Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam called me. My mother was in intensive care. She didn’t have her diary with her and didn’t know my number by heart.
She soundly extremely chipper.
“There’s a very nice male nurse here,” she said when I got her on the line. “I told him I had lived through Auschwitz and he said: “Well, then you’ll live through intensive care too.’” I myself was less sure. The fact that one has survived a concentration camp during adolescence does not mean one will survive coronary care as an old person.
The next day I flew to Amsterdam. By then my mother was no longer in intensive care, but in the cardiology ward.
The first thing she said when I came in was: “They’re not doing anything for me here. No one even looks at me. In intensive care I at least got intensive care. But here they don’t even give me a second look.” A doctor told me that one of my mother’s heart valves wasn’t functioning properly anymore, she would have to have an operation. But my mother, convinced that an operation would be the death of her, said: “First I’m going to go home for a while. The operation can wait.” Ten days after she had been admitted, they let her go home. For starters she would now receive more supporting care. During the process of that supportive care, however, a number of striking discoveries were made. My mother, for example, had lived for most of that last winter on a diet of crackers, twenty-five different kinds of homeopathic medicine, tea and aloe vera juice, which she drank in great quantities. Aloe vera was supposed to be a cure-all. Her fear of doctors and death –for my mother, the distinction between death and the hospital was tenuous at best - had caused her to plunge headlong into homeopathy with the fanaticism of a young warrior. When I asked whether she had ever actually visited a homeopathic physician, she replied: “No, you can buy all of this down at the health-food store.” The hospital had arranged for a homecare nurse to visit my mother a few times a week, to check whether her medicines were having a good effect. They had put her on diuretics, and a psychiatrist at the hospital had prescribed a medicine to reduce anxiety. All my life, my mother had bowed to only one master, fear: since her stay in intensive care, her respect for her master had increased tenfold.
The nurse made it through only a single afternoon with my mother.
When she had left, my mother called me and said: “I don’t want her around. To start with, I don’t need a nurse. And secondly, she’s too expensive.” “But your insurance pays for it,” I countered.
“I don’t care. That cow is too expensive.” The nurse never came back. My mother was left with a girl who performed light housekeeping and who more often than not failed to show up, and a man who had served in the Israeli army and was now into reiki.
“He gives me energy with his hands,” my mother explained. “But sometimes he touches my breasts.” “Does that bother you?” I asked.
“Why should I care?” my mother replied.
In April, a new problem reared its head. My mother had a prolapsed uterus. Her womb was hanging out. Our telephone conversations now revolved mostly around her womb.
“I measured it this morning,” she said. “It’s hanging out five centimeters.” A week later she said: “I measured it again. It’s seven centimeters now.
“Shouldn’t you go to a gynecologist?” I asked.
“Oh, I know exactly what he’ll say,” she answered. “That I need an operation, but because I have heart problems I can’t have an operation. You never pay attention, do you?” In June my mother began complaining of diarrhea. The man who did reiki took her to see a doctor, who said she should drink a tonic potion that tasted so horrible she became nauseous just thinking about it.
In July I went to Amsterdam myself.
One afternoon I found my mother shivering in bed. Every five minutes she got up and ran to the toilet. Running isn’t quite the word for it; it was more like crawling and staggering. She had even stopped bothering to get dressed. For the first time in years, I saw my mother naked. Her uterus was, indeed, hanging out completely now. I had the sense that it wasn’t my mother I was seeing, but a monkey, a deathly ill monkey.
On top of the toilet tank was a knife she apparently used to scrape the muck out of her underpants.
“You need to go to the hospital,” I said. “But everything is going to be okay.” With unexpected force, she screamed: “Stop repeating that nonsense. It’s driving me crazy.” My mother was admitted to Slotervaartziekenhuis. In intensive care they discovered that she had a neglected bladder infection, which had resulted in blood poisoning.
Three days later she left intensive care: the infection was under control. Two days later she was back again. Her heart was unable to pump away the fluid they had administered to combat the infection, and her lungs were filling with water. She was on the verge of drowning.
In the middle of the night they called to ask whether I wanted to come to the hospital to talk to my mother before they put her under. She was receiving artificial respiration.
Talking was out of the question by then, but my mother could hear what people said.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
My mother remained in the hospital for more than a month. Then they told her she would have to go to a rehabilitation center.
“I’m not going to any rehabilitation center,” she shouted. “I know what those centers are like.” So instead, I arranged for a Philippine lady to move in with my mother. She now has round-the-clock home care. My mother calls the home care “guardianship”. She is now under constant guard, and she likes that. The lady cooks for her, massages her and goes for walks with her. A visiting nurse comes by twice a day to make sure she takes a list of medicines as long as your arm.
In the afternoon I come by and stay to keep my mother company while she eats.
She is a peculiar eater. During the last few years she had subsisted on the most temperate of foodstuffs from the health-food store, but in the hospital she suddenly developed a dependency on cream ice.
“Look at the lovely chicken the Philippine lady made for you,” I say.
“It makes me sick just to look at it,” my mother says.
“But I bet you wouldn’t say no to a bowl of cream ice?” “Yeah, a little cream ice would be nice right now.” “Well, you’re going to eat your chicken first,” I shout. “You can’t live on cream ice, otherwise you’ll get sick again. And if you get sick again, then this time you can call my sister. Then I wash my hands of you.” “All I wanted was a little ice cream,” my mother says.
At such moments I know I will remain childless. When I’m 83, I don’t want my children screaming at me to eat my chicken. All I want then is to be alone, with a friendly lady from the Philippines, preferably somewhere in the Swiss Alps.