Thirty Days Read online

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1: REFERRED PAIN

  2: THE C-WORD

  3: FLY ME TO THE MOON

  4: BROKEN IDOLS

  5: CYTOTOXIC

  6: SCREAM

  7: THE BLACK BOX

  8: THE ABANDONED WIFE

  9: DEADLINES

  10: FAMILY SECRETS

  11: SO HAPPY TOGETHER

  12: BUCKET LISTS

  13: ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK

  14: WHERE YOU’LL FIND ME

  15: NEVER LETTING GO

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TO KERRYN

  (1960 –2016)

  For our children,

  Gabriel, Sarah & Rachel

  PROLOGUE

  As a child I was obsessed by magic. I began with sleight-of-hand card tricks, then advanced to circus acts that I mastered through assiduous practice—silver balls multiplied or floated beneath black cloaks, water vanished as it was poured into a jug, and my most spectacular illusion: a dozen steel rings that I whirled on my arms, joining and separating them into sets of twos or sixes.

  Every time I purchased a trick from Bernard’s Magic Store, the old wizard would lead me into a room behind black curtains, where I was initiated into some new element of his arcane knowledge: a hidden hole for inserting a finger inside a painted ball, or magnetic hearts and clubs that could be slid off a rigged card. I might have felt cheated by the mechanics of the chicanery, but each revelation reinforced an unspoken rule: Never give away the secret moves. Once your audience knows how it’s done, it’s no longer magic.

  I also read every Enid Blyton adventure book as though I was an extra member of the Famous Five or Secret Seven. After each story, I would conjure up my own mysteries. I found clues in mundane objects—cigarette butts in our garden, lipstick stains on the bathroom bench, the tattooed number on my father’s forearm. My favourite stories were the fantasies of children f lying away on chairs that sprouted wings, or climbing trees whose branches led to enchanted worlds, places I re-invented in cubby holes.

  One day when I was eighteen, returning from an overseas trip, I discovered that my mother had cleared out my cupboards. All my Enid Blyton books were gone. And when I searched my bedroom for the magic cards and silver rings, they too had vanished.

  When I protested, she told me I was too old for that sort of stuff. I knew she was right, but I still felt annoyed at her for giving it all away to charity in my absence. It was as if a part of my childhood had been stolen—the part of me that still believed in magic.

  Over the past ten months I have watched the most bewildering of tricks, the darkest of illusions unfold before my eyes. I understood what the doctors were telling me—the science behind a tumour that metastasises and eventually prevents blood and oxygen from reaching the heart, until the organs shut down. But those mechanics were not enough to explain the mystery of witnessing the sudden end of my wife’s life, or my tears, which flowed like streams of knotted handkerchiefs out of an empty hat.

  As I sit at my wife’s graveside at the end of her shloshim—the Jewish ritual of thirty days’ mourning, which follows the shiva, a seven-day wake—all I can think about is how to find a miraculous way to restore her to life.

  Her name is handwritten on a wooden stake planted in the ground above her head.

  KERRYN BAKER

  For the past month, I have scoured my memories and ransacked our house for the bits and pieces of her life. I have stared into the empty side of our bed and recalled the thirty-two years when that void was filled with her warm body. I have looked through the photographs she arranged in albums, and rummaged through drawers and cupboards for clues, hoping somehow to decipher the mysteries about my wife.

  I shake my head in disbelief, substituting the mourner’s prayer for a rhythmic refrain: I’ll never see you again. I’ll never see you again. I’ll never see you again.

  There are still so many questions I want to ask her—questions I was afraid of asking when she was alive, things I am afraid of forgetting.

  What were you really thinking as you lay dying?

  What did you think as you watched our love flicker over the decades?

  Did I bring you happiness? Did you still feel imprisoned in the sadness of your childhood?

  Now that she is gone, I am desperate to know her as I never knew her. Her death is mine—the vanishing of a lifetime shared. I am terrified I will forget all the memories we had together.

  Words: they are all I have, like the magical incantations of the Maharal of Prague, who brought a figure of clay to life to protect the Jews of his ghetto.

  Abracadabra. Or, in its original Hebrew source, Adaber Kedibra.

  I will speak and it will come to be.

  I have never believed in the afterlife. I believe in life, and in honouring the dead through the souls of the living. But since Kerryn’s death, I have felt her spirit take root inside me. I have composed the words of this book as though she were dictating them. At times, I hear her saying, ‘Stop, Marky. Spend more time with the kids.’

  I know she would think I’ve gone mad from bereavement, but this morning I turned the pages of this book to ash by setting them alight in the pot she used each Passover to make chicken soup. I drove along the highway to the cemetery with smoke swirling around my head—that little boy again, tempting magic with fire. At the traffic lights, people stared at me, as if my car was about to explode.

  I must see you again. I must see you again. I must see you again.

  The embers were still hot as I poured them over the earth above her forehead.

  Although I know she can never read these words, I want her to tell me if she approves of the life I have shaped for her. Have I captured the essence of who she was? What if the truth I have discovered differs from the Kerryn I knew in marriage? Will I have to revise the history of my version of myself and of her?

  The poet Robert Graves once wrote that there is only one story that will prove worth our telling. Ten months ago I didn’t know the story that was mine to tell. Given the choice, I would have selected from a different box of stories.

  But who can say when you’ll be dragged back behind the black curtains?

  One minute my wife was there. In a flash she was gone.

  1

  REFERRED PAIN

  She was there at dinner that night ten months ago. I can be more precise about the date because it was a day after our son Gabe’s twenty-eighth birthday. It was the fourteenth of May, 2015. Months later, after writing cards for the birthdays of our two daughters, Sarah and Rachel, she regretted that she would never have the chance to write him a last card, and so she prepared one and told me to give it to him after she died.

  ‘I wish I could write down all my love and you would feel it always,’ she began.

  I now think of that dinner as our Last Supper.

  Our companion was an academic from Italy, visiting Melbourne as a guest of the Jewish Studies department at Monash University, where I work.

  ‘He’s a demographer,’ I told Kerryn when I asked her to join us.

  She flipped the pages of her diary without looking at them. ‘I think I’m playing bridge that night.’

  ‘Demography can be interesting.’

  She pretended to focus on her diary. ‘Okay. But only if you come to my work dinner next Tuesday.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s on cervical spondylosis.’

  ‘Done.’

  She winked at me—that wink.

  Dinner was at my favourite haunt on Carlisle Street, that cafe strip where Jewish life meets St Kilda grunge. The restaurant is called Ilona Staller, a sister restaurant to Cicciolina in Acland Street near the beach. Our visitor understood the joke:
he was amused that the restaurants could adopt the real name and the pseudonym of a fellow Italian who made a reputation for herself as both a porn star and politician. Only in Rome, he laughed, to which I responded, ‘And only in Melbourne, famous for its culinary pretensions.’

  I ordered an item that has become a fixture on the cash register—Mark’s pasta, with a sauce of fresh tomatoes, herbs and eggplant.

  ‘Just like when you were a kid,’ a friend once commented. He knew how my mother always spoiled her Marky with whatever he wanted.

  Our guest, not inclined to go for staple Italian dishes, chose the barramundi. Kerryn also ordered fish, and couldn’t resist adding a side of French fries.

  The conversation swung between global politics, refugees and our guest’s demographic projections on the future of Jews.

  I didn’t think to ask how demography could account for the randomness of life—the death of a single person snatched away by an undiagnosed disease.

  ‘So, who’s your next visitor?’ Kerryn asked in the car on the way home.

  ‘The world’s expert on the death marches.’

  That wink.

  Later in the night, I awoke to the sound of Kerryn groaning. She must be having a nightmare, I thought, and pricked up my ears to catch any words that might help us interpret it the next morning. I drifted back to sleep but was roused again, this time by Kerryn rolling around in bed, moaning.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It must have been the French fries. I’ve got a terrible stomach-ache.’

  ‘You should take a Qvikeez,’ I said, imitating the Yiddish lilt of my father, who routinely burps after a meal, before offering everyone around the table his indigestion tablets.

  Kerryn managed a laugh as she stumbled into the bathroom where she rummaged through a drawer filled with tablets.

  Whatever she took must have worked; within minutes she was asleep again. I felt envious of her ability to hit the pillow and doze off. I’d already fed my addiction to sleeping pills that night, so resorted to a novel, Crossing to Safety, which I was reading for the third time, until my eyelids eventually closed.

  In the morning when I woke, she was sitting in an armchair.

  It was Friday, her day off. She was going out for breakfast with some girlfriends.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I yawned.

  ‘Better. But my back hurts.’

  ‘How about taking one of my Voltarens?’

  ‘Next, you’ll be offering me your prostate tablets,’ she said, zipping the side of a boot.

  As she headed for the door, she stopped and turned. ‘But I think I’ve diagnosed it. Fatty foods. Sharp pain. It must be gallstones.’

  Even though she was a doctor, I was always impressed by her ability to pinpoint medical conditions.

  ‘Don’t you think you should do something about it?’

  ‘After breakfast.’

  I closed my eyes and went back to sleep for another hour.

  Now when I sleep my mind wanders to her grave. I try to shut out the images staring back at me. The decaying skin, the same skin she lathered in the creams that line her bathroom cabinet. The eye sockets. It wasn’t that long ago she started wearing reading glasses, scattered in strategic positions through the house.

  ‘We’re getting older,’ she would say. ‘Next thing my teeth will fall out.’

  How long does it take for a body to become a skeleton? Is it even her under the ground?

  The images of Kerryn meld with my Holocaust obsessions. I can’t help but see the pictures my father showed me when I was writing about my parents’ Holocaust stories in The Fiftieth Gate, images so central to my visual vocabulary: the bulldozed bodies in the camps, the pyramids of anonymous flesh.

  How do you mourn all those people? How do you live after such atrocity? In my university classes, I teach the calculus of six million as one plus one plus one. Every person has a name.

  Marky. I’m not a Holocaust victim and you’re not an Auschwitz survivor.

  When we were in Rwanda for a study tour, we visited a village in the south, a schoolhouse where fifty thousand people were killed in a single day. The skeletons had been covered in lime and laid out on racks. You can distinguish the women from the men by the children threaded through their mothers’ arms, or a beaded necklace stuck to a bone. Hollow mouths are frozen in a final scream of agony.

  The signs warn tourists not to take photos, but I sneaked in a series. I asked a survivor, the last of the Murambi massacre, to stand next to the skeletons. He held a key to the doors of the classrooms. He pointed out the skeletons of his wife and children, naming each of them. His own name was Emmanuel—‘God is with us’ in Hebrew.

  Was he aware of the travesty of his name?

  I cherish only one name, which I recite silently in between the words of my prayer, the mourner’s Kaddish.

  Yitgadal. Kerryn. Veyitkadash. Kerryn. Shmei Rabba. Kerryn.

  And, like Emmanuel, I carry the keys to many doors.

  Mark. I wasn’t killed with a machete and neither of us is a Tutsi.

  There is the front door of our house, which I keep locked, refusing visitors, who still come to console me even though the seven days of public mourning are over.

  There is the door to our bedroom, my private memory palace, with its king-sized bed. I lie diagonally across the frame and juggle our pillows—hers and mine. I open and close the four doors of her wardrobe, slide the hangers along the rack, naming each item of clothing—One Kerryn, Two Kerryn, Three Kerryn. I can dress her like a Barbie doll, guided by thirty-two years’ worth of outfits. Jeans for Saturday night at the movies. An unstructured vest for a dinner party. That pair of black trousers for work. A pale blue dressing-gown—Six Kerryn—that she sewed in time for our son’s birth, and another speckled one that she wore to the hospice on that final day.

  The Last Kerryn.

  I can bring her back to life, with curtains drawn, lights off, a scented candle.

  What will it be tonight, darling?

  Let me choose for you.

  How about the dress with triangles of colours, bought in the hope you could wear it to Gabe’s wedding?

  I lay it on the edge of the bed, the hem brushing the carpet. All her shoes are black and look the same to me. I pick a random pair, and position them at her feet. I slide open the drawer where her cancer wig is folded in a plastic bag.

  Did you know I can shampoo my hair in the washing machine? And I don’t have to straighten it with an iron?

  The perks of cancer, she would say.

  But there’s something missing.

  She had asked me to zip up the back of her dress. Then she put on a pearl necklace inherited from her mother.

  ‘Do you think it matches?’ she’d said, as she rehearsed the wedding outfit.

  Where did she put that necklace? Was it in the drawer, hidden under her socks, or among her collection of handbags?

  And then there is her ring. The wedding ring stuck on her finger, which had swelled from all the drugs. She had to look up on YouTube how to remove it. I helped her thread cotton under the ring, and watched her twirl it until it flew off her knuckle, spinning on the floor like a dreidel. She gave it to me for safekeeping. I placed it in my bedside drawer in a velvet pouch.

  Now, I put the ring next to the sleeve of her dress. No, it might fall, so I slip it onto the tip of my right index finger, to match the wedding ring she once placed on my left hand.

  The wig is in place. The pearls are set against her neck. We are ready.

  Stop. I’m not a golem. And you’re not the Maharal of Prague.

  I ignore her.

  I told you to write our story. I didn’t give you permission for this madness.

  The secret is in the Hebrew letters inscribed on the forehead of the lifeless golem—letters that spell the word for TRUTH.

  EMET.

  I run my fingers across her forehead. I trace the letters on her soft skin: aleph, mem and taf.


  My candlelit silhouette ripples across her body. I kneel on the floor, naked, my head buried in her lap. I hear her heart beating, her breath quickening.

  Perhaps my tears will revive her.

  I sing to her. The song we planned to play for our son as we led him to his bride under the wedding canopy: Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’.

  I am dancing with my bride, waltzing circles in our bedroom to the sound of burning violins, at our wedding thirty-two years ago, in the shadows of our memories from start to…

  …the end of love.

  I lift my head. A skeleton looks back at me, adorned with a pearl necklace. I recoil in horror.

  Which dress do you want to wear tomorrow?

  What happened next?

  She went to the doctor. Or was it the hospital?

  For God’s sake, I’m a historian. I need to check my notes.

  Doctors’ bills. X-rays. Tears.

  The primary sources of the kingdom of cancer.

  Write and record!

  Emanuel Ringelblum didn’t let his emotions get in the way. He kept writing and recording history through the war. It became his mission. He amassed all the archives from the Warsaw ghetto and, when he knew they were coming to get him, he hid them in a crate and buried his library.

  And what about the mystical rabbi of the ghetto, the Holy Fire? He continued writing his sacred commentaries even as his devotees were dying. But he saved his words from the fires that consumed the ghetto by burying them alongside the corpses.

  Zakhor is the biblical injunction to remember. It’s written one hundred and sixty-nine times in scripture.

  And I’m struggling to recall what happened on that second day.

  I remember now that it was a Friday because when I came home Kerryn was heating up chicken soup, and we only have chicken soup on Sabbath evenings. But that’s not the real reason why I remember.

  After her visit to the gastroenterologist that afternoon, she returned home assured of her diagnosis of gallstones.

  I can picture her stirring the pot of soup, when she said, ‘The doctor wants me to have a procedure. I could get a booking for next month, or they have a cancellation for tomorrow.’