Thirty Days Page 10

  If I allowed myself to forget, I could have been in a hotel anywhere in the world. There were so many oceans we had crossed, so many stamps in our passports, so many stories to recall. But in this room there was only one journey that encircled all the others, a map that stretched invisibly before us, marking out the rest of Kerryn’s life.

  There could be no forgetting why we were in the hospice. The reminders were everywhere: the tangle of wires, sprouting from the bedhead, attached to machinery that beeped and flashed numeric sequences in blue and red; the envy I felt for the neighbours across the road, who turned off the lights, certain of their next morning; the sign, Cytotoxic, that hung from the doorhandle as innocently as though it read Do Not Disturb; the heads that poked out of rooms, war-torn lovers in tracksuit pants, emerging for a breath of fresh air; the plaque on the painting honouring the memory of someone who once occupied this room and died; the nurses wearing red-chequered shirts to disguise their true purpose as angels of mercy, as they dispensed a magical elixir of compassion and morphine.

  Abracadabra.

  That night, sleeping in the converted couch-bed alongside Kerryn, I had my first death nightmare. In my dream, I drove in the dark to Norwood Road, our first marital home, where a shadowy intruder was lurking behind the front door, near the piano. I woke shouting for help, my heart racing with terror. The figure could only have been the Angel of Death. My cries woke Kerryn, who comforted me. It was supposed to be the other way around.

  The next evening the patient in the adjacent room died. We sat with the door shut and our heads bowed. But we could still hear the sounds of death—the body bag, the muttering of Hebrew prayers.

  From the foldout couch, I watched Kerryn’s cancer-ridden stomach rising and sinking with breaths that still signalled life. I removed the battery from the wall clock and stopped the ticking hands.

  Just before Sally died, she bought Kerryn a piano. No one ever played it, but we loved its shape, and kept the lid open in our small terrace home in Norwood Road. We were houseproud: we decorated the kitchen with plants hanging from the ceiling, and added a fountain at the centre of a small outdoor courtyard. We turned the dining room into a study with tall pine cupboards, prioritising my university research over formal entertainment.

  Kerryn was working as a resident doctor at the Alfred and then the Austin Hospital, a long commute from home. I had completed my Honours year and was employed part-time, ghostwriting speeches for a community organisation. On my business card, where I was described as Director of Research, I handwrote, To my wife, our first career card.

  But I was looking for an escape route: on the advice of one of my teachers, John Foster, I considered research in the field of German Jewish history, and began the process of choosing a university. The Ivy League was my preference, so I went on a short trip to America to explore which one would best suit my interests.

  Re-reading the letters I wrote to Kerryn during this period, I felt as if I was prying into the lives of strangers. Time had cast a blank screen over my state of mind in my twenties. Was this really me, whose thoughts were so tortured and vulnerable? And what of my uxorious feelings for Kerryn, written only a year after we were married?

  Was this us I was reading about, or characters in another story?

  4 January 1984

  To my darling darling Kerryn,

  These past few days have provided that rare occasion when one catches a momentary glimpse of one’s own situation. I’m frightened that in ten years’ time I will amount to nothing. That at the ripe age of thirty-five, when one should almost be able to see the peak of one’s success, I will hardly have risen from the bottom. In short, I am terrified that I will be a failure. My darling Kerryn, I am scared for us more than for myself. Here we are, in our early twenties perfectly in love. In the past year we have seen that the only stable thing in life is us, and that the only real happiness we have is when we are together. All our ideas, plans and intentions will probably be frustrated in the end. I feel like a time bomb: to myself; to you; to us—triggered to explode in approximately ten years’ time.

  Perhaps, I asked rhetorically in my melodramatic letter, I should have studied law after all, made my parents happy, and chosen the comfortable life in Australia. But, I continued, I knew this was impossible for me and feared the impact it would have on our relationship. ‘What I know, darling, is that I love you so much that I would hate more than anything for you to be hurt when happiness is in our reach.’

  As I re-read the other letters in that box, I wondered why I stopped writing to her with such heightened passion. Did something change us? Did we feel at some point that we no longer needed to communicate our intimacy through the poetics of love?

  Here is a card written for her birthday a month before our first wedding anniversary in 1983:

  For my Darling,

  Today (as always) I shall be two people at once.

  You & Me

  I love you,

  Your Mark

  In later years, my words were replaced by flowers, usually the same pink roses that decorated the tables at our wedding, until Kerryn announced that she no longer cared for flowers as gifts. Was it a hint that she wanted words again? A hint I didn’t take.

  While Kerryn was sick, one of the ways we reminisced about our marriage was to watch old television series, as though we were viewing the days of our own lives. I ordered a copy of Thirtysomething, which we had devoured when it came out, when we were at that same stage of life as the characters.

  ‘How could we bear all those annoying kids crying?’ Kerryn said.

  ‘You mean ours or theirs?’

  ‘Both,’ she said. ‘And look at their hairstyles. Didn’t we have mirrors in the eighties?’

  We only got through a couple of episodes, because Kerryn always fell asleep from the after-effects of chemotherapy, and I dozed off from boredom. But there was one series we re-watched from beginning to end. Not for a second did we feel we were wasting the hours as we relived our experience of Brideshead Revisited. Set in England, it evoked a magical, distant era, with its guilt-ridden Catholic families. Our attraction then had been to the world of Oxford, peopled by dandies and spoiled aristocrats who couldn’t let go of their teddy bears. We were mesmerised by the stoic voice of James Ryder, played by Jeremy Irons, who looked back nostalgically at the peak of his youth, before war and disillusionment withered him. In search of our own peak experiences as we neared the end of our university studies, we held Brideshead parties at our home, anticipating each episode and dressing up in costume. Sometime during the series, Kerryn and I looked at each other and knew instantly where we wanted to sow our dreams, in the same way my parents must have viewed Australia as a foreign place that would carry no memories of the past.

  And so began an adventure that we looked back on as the heyday of our lives.

  ‘Brideshead saved us,’ said Kerryn from the couch, meaning Oxford, where we were whisked away from her accumulated trauma into a new world, propelled by our burgeoning marriage and careers.

  I doubt I would have been accepted to Oxford, or any university, if not for the private tuition I received while on a belated honeymoon during Kerryn’s final year of medicine. Our chaperone, Kerryn’s brother Glenn, was a master of logical thinking.

  We travelled on a Eurotrain to Berlin, crossing Checkpoint Charlie before it was a tourist attraction, in search of my grandmother’s grave, which had been left unvisited on the eastern side. And after visiting Dachau, we countered the sadness with a trip to Rome, where we threw coins into the Trevi Fountain, wishing for luck we thought we lacked. As the train sped through Europe, I whiled away the hours with Glenn, learning how to exercise my left cerebral hemisphere by locating precisely where Jill must be seated on a row boat if John is in the front seat and Susan two seats away with only one spare seat left behind them.

  Now I wonder why I didn’t ask Kerryn to help me.

  The university year in Oxford began in October, three months
before Kerryn would complete her residency requirements to become a fully fledged doctor. So, after two years of marriage, we agreed I would head off on my own in time for first term, Michaelmas, and return to collect Kerryn for Trinity term—names that fuelled our gentile fantasies of refuge in safe territories.

  The photographs of me at the time show my newly assembled fashion, all corduroy and tweed, pretentiously drawn from the opening scenes of Brideshead. I must have taken the train from Paddington Station to Oxford dozens of times, but I never tired of entering that mediaeval kingdom, of catching the first glimpse of the spires as we approached the university.

  At first, despite my best efforts, I stumbled with the Oxford mannerisms. At dinner I told a pale-faced boy I’d come down from London, to which he stuttered, like one of Anthony Blanche’s circle of dandies, ‘My dear, Oxford is up-pp.’

  The code, I realised, was not dissimilar to my own religious culture, where the direction to Jerusalem was also always an ascent.

  When I told them what I was studying, the typical Oxford ear misconstrued my accent.

  ‘Jewish history,’ I’d say sheepishly.

  ‘Oh, Georgian history,’ would be the invariable answer, ‘how delightful.’

  In fact, the Hebrew language has a long history in England’s oldest university—with only one caveat. It was taught exclusively to Christian priests studying the Old and the New Testaments, in part to highlight the errors of Jewish readings of the Bible, and to prepare the ground for forcible conversions, or expulsions. My presence at Oxford in 1985 would not have been permitted one hundred and fifty years earlier, but any grudge I might have felt was tempered by the knowledge that Jews had shared a similar fate with Catholics and women.

  Though the Jewish Studies department owned an aristocratic manor in an area called Yarnton, its headquarters was at 45 St Giles Road. I spent many hours meeting like-minded students in the smoke-filled cafe next door, where we were served fried eggs and greasy chips by two attractive Greek sisters. In the Hebrew Reading Room, next to Blackwells Bookstore, I read original Hebrew newspapers, published in the 1860s in Vilna, Warsaw, Odessa and on the Russo-Prussian border, to avoid the censor’s pen. My research focused on the radical politics of the time, particularly the spirit of insurrection that led Poles to revolt against their imperial lords. But my eyes often wandered to the advertisements on the back pages, promoting opportunities for travel on steam ships, just before the period of massive migrations to the New World—the Americas and South Africa, and spilling over to Australia. What broke my heart, and eventually became a new research project, were the hundreds of small, square advertisements outlined in black, placed by women whose husbands had gone ahead to find a new home. The men had never written back, deliberately abandoning their wives and children to penury and to a limbo status as ‘chained’ women in the eyes of Jewish law.

  After a single term in Oxford, I adapted to its ways, taking daily walks in the meadows of Magdalen College. For longer distances, I bought myself a bicycle and was mocked for my Aussie caution, clad in helmet and luminous cross-bands. During my wait for Kerryn, I spent hours on the window-seat of our empty marital dormitory, looking out at the boats punting up the river, waiting to partake in these activities with my wife.

  Before Michaelmas was over, I had purchased a subfusc, which sounded like an obscene word. I scarcely recognised myself in the mirror in the black cape and mortar board. And I wondered what Kerryn would make of her husband, who was dissembling this foreign Georgian life.

  In those few months, I imagined Kerryn as one of the abandoned wives from my nineteenth-century newspapers. She must have wondered what her new husband was doing.

  I knew what Kerryn was doing. She was spending her days at the Austin Hospital and later as a resident doctor at Caulfield Hospital, which was built in the style of barracks for the rehabilitation of soldiers returning from World War I. During the lunch hour she would walk the five minutes to my family home, and sit in the kitchen with my mother, puffing on cigarettes with her. We had moved out of our house in Norwood Road, so she slept in my brother’s bedroom, ironically fulfilling my mother’s ambition to have a doctor in the house. During this time Kerryn formed a unique bond with my mother, untainted by the complex dynamic of her sons’ sometimes uncomprehending responses to her episodes of depression.

  Kerryn became a daughter to my mother, and their partnership was reciprocal. My mother adored Kerryn, and my father’s kindness and generosity offered her a new family story she could live by. Indeed, only now can I see that, while Kerryn’s childhood carried with it a level of privilege, there was a faint echo of my mother’s experiences—the dissolution of a family, the trauma of a bitter divorce, the rapid loss of two parents, and the disorientation that followed when the people she trusted most betrayed her. Kerryn and my mother were bound together by a mute past. No one at the time was prepared to unlock the black box that would have let out the ghosts—to speak, at last.

  Reading that shoebox of hidden letters after Kerryn died was a revelation: I discovered how she’d really felt during my absence. I read the letters one by one, finding in them a love for me so deep that I was shaken to the core. Her words stirred in me the most painful longing for her; I so much wanted to believe in the possibility of resurrection; I wanted her to be there; I wanted to embrace her, so that we could read our letters to each other again, and relive what they expressed.

  The Kerryn who wrote to me back then—did I lose her a long time ago? I wish I could survey all the married couples who read this book and ask: have our marriages maintained the passion of the early days, or dipped in ways that we would prefer not to admit? Do we feel safe in our love, or do we just accept that the institutional framework we signed up to will protect us from those times when we grow distant, less demonstrative, more detached?

  Kerryn and I never stopped loving each other, but the intensity of that early passion was hidden in a shoebox. It wasn’t until those final months, when she was dying, that we made time to remember it. And it wasn’t until after her death that I read the evidence. I wish we—all of us—could revitalise our waning relationships without the threat of them being wrested from us.

  The letters were written on formal letterhead from the Alfred Hospital, and later on pale blue aerogrammes. She wrote the date and time on the top left corner of each letter. Most were written late at night—in my brother’s bedroom, among the World Book Encyclopaedias and photographs of him from his hippy phase. I wonder what the Porter’s Lodge at Wolfson College would have made of one of the letters addressed to Mark Charles William Baker, sent from Kerryn Elizabeth Diana Baker, or another in which I address her as Anna Kerrynina?

  9th October 1984, 1.00 a.m.

  My Darling Mark,

  I’ve got to rush now but I just couldn’t refrain from writing a few words of love to you. I miss you very much, my darling boy. If not for you, I am alone in this very large world—really alone. Through your love and strength I feel secure. Through your love I have gained a dignity and quietness that did not belong to me formerly.

  I feel sixteen years old today, separated from my sweetheart, waiting by the letterbox, hoping for some mail—some form of communication.

  Did you know that I find it very difficult to talk to people—anyone other than you? I am like a shell—unchanged from the outside, but empty on the inside. I dry up my heart when you are away. With you alone and alone with you I can feel comfortable and open.

  Where are you now, my best friend, the one that I love, the one who brings me happiness in this cruel world.

  Miss you,

  Love

  (Guess who)

  Kerryn

  Who would have guessed that this was the same Kerryn who several years earlier had written about me with indifference, who had moved from disliking me at school to accepting my friendship, then slowly responding to my obdurate advances?

  ‘I miss talking to you and telling you all my secrets,’ she wrote
to me. She, who for so many years, closed herself off in a fortress. But once inside her private world, did I do enough over the following decades to keep the gates open, or did I allow them to slowly close again, leaving only a facade of happiness?

  Faced with these letters now, I want to ask her, did I deliver on your dreams?

  I hope this old gal isn’t too much of a burden for you—I would hate to be that. I need your presence in my life to recharge my heart and bring life back into these old bones. My baby—my babaleh—where are you? I need you in my life. There’s so much to do and I feel I can’t cope with it all alone. I need you to help me. I need you to be strong for me.

  I miss you I miss you I miss you

  I love you I love you I love you

  (What a funny thing to say).

  With Love,

  KB

  I can’t help but melt when I read the multiplication of her declarations of love. Is it inevitable that these heightened feelings are replaced by the silent transactions of a longstanding marriage, and that the invented language of affection is transferred to one’s children—our new babalehs? I know I sound corny, but as real as these love letters are, so, too, is the fact that the ink dried up over time.

  Boy, am I lucky I didn’t let that Mark Baker fish slip away.

  I’ve become quite a loner since you went away—preferring no company if I can’t have yours. It’s like I’ve got to hold myself back in some sort of way—like a person in mourning.

  My darling, I think I’m becoming far too dependent on you—do you feel strong enough for all that dependence and need? I love you very much

  Kerryn Baker/Wein

  Kerryn Wein/Baker

  Kerryn Bakermachine

  Reading these letters, I know that, back then, nothing mattered to Kerryn as much as me.