Thirty Days Read online

  Wherever I went I felt like a mourner, almost like a leper. In the streets or supermarket, I would be greeted with downcast faces reserved for a bereaved person during the week of public mourning. I found black humour in my pariah status and invented a system for scoring the different gestures I encountered.

  Two points for the morose bowed head. Four points for the sympathetic shoulder touch. Six points for an uncalled-for hug or sloppy kiss. Eight points for tears. And ten out of ten points for interrogating me about the precise prognosis. A visitor from Jerusalem brought a red string for good luck, which she tied around Kerryn’s wrist, promising her it would bring divine intervention. She had done it once before for another friend.

  ‘What happened to your friend?’ I asked.

  The red-string charmer was embarrassed to say that her friend had died. I wanted to give her back the string so she could untangle all the theological contradictions.

  The hardest part for me was answering the constant barrage of questions, which always began with ‘How are you?’

  How do you answer that?

  I devised a stock response. ‘Okay, given the circumstances.’

  The truth was I was feeling like a widower-in-waiting, going through the Jewish rites of mourning in reverse. The status of being in limbo, of living life in the presence of death, made me feel like an onen—the person, in shock and distress, who has just learnt of the death of a relative and must wait a day or two for burial. This person in mourning is exempt from the performance of any ritual obligations.

  I exempted myself from anything other than caring for Kerryn. I took leave from work and refused to move from her side. If she chose to go out, I would simply wait at home for her to return. It was as if her body was attached to mine, and I was dying with her. A part of me wanted to share her fate. How bad could it be to be unburdened of the pressures of life? I confused the irreversibility of death with the comforts of a daytime snooze, thus trivialising the existential terror Kerryn was experiencing daily, even if most of her communications were about her agonising aches.

  I was losing not only my wife but everything she embodied for me—the mother of our children, the source of all my memories, the person who was supposed to carry me into old age and care for me. My lover.

  I needed to escape, not death, but the pull towards sharing this period with others. I suggested to Kerryn that we go to my parents’ apartment in Surfers Paradise. Within a day, we were there. We felt like honeymooners, hugging each other, reminiscing over long dinners.

  In bed, I wanted to caress her stomach to soothe it. At first she let me place my hand over her nightie, and then directly on her skin. It was a gesture of love and intimacy, but I also had the sensation that my fingers were in direct contact with the disease.

  ‘Tell me something you haven’t told me,’ Kerryn said.

  I had to think hard. ‘You know everything,’ I answered.

  ‘There must be something.’

  ‘Well…’ I told her that when I was a child we had a live-in housekeeper who was crazy. I mean really crazy; in the end she was institutionalised. Once, after she had apparently done something wrong, she showed me her breasts.

  ‘Pleez,’ she said in her thick Sicilian accent, ‘no tell Missa Baker what I do.’ And she pressed my small hands against her sagging breasts.

  ‘You’ve told me that before,’ Kerryn said.

  But this I hadn’t told her.

  ‘And then, for a period after that, she used to touch me.’

  ‘How many times?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Once? Twice?’

  ‘No, more.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Eight. Nine. I remember it was when I had my first ejaculations.’

  Kerryn started to cry. ‘Marky,’ she said, ‘you never told me you were abused as a child.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t abused. She wasn’t normal. And I think I wanted it.’

  ‘Listen to yourself,’ said Kerryn, acting now as my therapist. ‘You still blame yourself. You feel shame and guilt that an adult would do this to you.’

  It was true. I did feel shame, which was why I’d never told her. Never told anyone, certainly not my parents.

  ‘You poor, poor thing,’ she said, hugging me, the dying one embracing the living.

  Yes, perhaps I do mean it: everyone should have cancer—for a day. I certainly felt as if I did. It reconnects the ties of intimacy. It forces open secrets that have been suppressed. It reminds you of who you love most. It dispels fantasies that can carry you away to thoughts of an alternative life.

  ‘I want to touch the sea before I go,’ Kerryn said.

  One moonlit night, we took off our shoes and walked along the sand. It was the first time Kerryn acknowledged that she was doing something for what might be the last time.

  There were other secrets that needed to be shared.

  A few months after Kerryn’s diagnosis, we were at home having dinner with our children when Sarah announced she had something important she wanted to discuss with us.

  My first thought was now? Surely not while we were dealing with the most serious crisis in our lives?

  A few months before Kerryn’s diagnosis, Sarah had moved out of home, to Fitzroy, the local capital of Hipsterville, and was living in a share house with friends. All of this seemed normal. She was also expressing cynicism about the ‘bourgeois’ lifestyle we lived in our Caulfield ghetto. My hunch was that her unease had to do with a boyfriend. Was she about to tell us she was dating a non-Jewish boy?

  The topic of Jewish dating is often incomprehensible to outsiders, as well as to a younger generation of Jews raised on the values of free choice. In an open environment of tolerance and diversity, where traditional marriage structures are breaking down, it’s hard for my generation to maintain what amounts to a taboo against dating outside the faith, or what we call ‘marrying out’. Perhaps Sarah assumed this was a Buba and Zaida issue, not something that her own Australian-born parents should struggle with anymore.

  I have to admit that the question of taboos still existed as far as Kerryn and I were concerned. Being Jewish is complicated. In some ways, it is a unique identity—not reducible to religion, ethnicity, immigration, culture, family ties or group memory. For us, it embodied a tension between two sets of interlinked values: on the one hand, a shared liberal outlook, of autonomy, of openness to all people, and recognition of the dignity of every individual; on the other hand, an allegiance to a collective culture, transmitted through millennia via family and group identity. I was ready for a conversation with Sarah about this, about the duality of our values, about the dynamic tension between the rights of the individual and the imperatives of the collective. The subtext of the Holocaust, only one generation removed, could also not be concealed. It was a cheap and unfair card to play—though not beneath me.

  But I already had a parental instinct that Sarah wanted to raise something else.

  ‘I know now isn’t a good time to say this,’ Sarah said, ‘but I feel I have to be honest with you, especially because of Mum.’

  Kerryn and I stared at her, our mouths full.

  ‘What I wanted to tell you is…I’m umm…I’m dating a girl.’

  Our mouths opened. No words came out.

  Sarah filled the silence. She told us that she refused to be labelled and that she rejected the words lesbian or gay. She simply wanted us to know that, even though she recognised this news might come as a shock, she had to be open with us, so she could stay close to the family at our time—and her time—of greatest need.

  We regained our composure and asked a few questions, the obvious ones.

  Her responses were endearingly honest.

  Mark: ‘How long have you known?’

  Sarah: ‘It’s not like I’ve been in a closet or anything. It’s all new to me.’

  Mark: ‘I don’t care if you’re dating girls or boys. I have only one request. I’d
like your partner to be Jewish.’

  Sarah: ‘Dad, of course. Whoever I end up with will be Jewish.’

  Mark: ‘Good. That’s all that matters to me. I want Jewish grandchildren.’

  Kerryn: ‘And I just want you to be happy.’

  That was the end of the conversation, followed by huge hugs and an audible phew from Gabe and Rachel, in whom Sarah had already confided.

  ‘I feel so lucky,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Lucky?’ I said. ‘We’re in deep shit.’

  ‘I mean lucky to have you.’ She looked at her mother and burst into tears.

  Behind closed doors, Kerryn and I smiled at each other and repeated Sarah’s words, ‘What the fuck?’

  Sarah’s announcement was another sign that the future we had imagined for ourselves was changing shape.

  We might not be able to control our future, but Sarah’s sexual identity was not part of the problem, and once she settled into a relationship, we spoke openly and proudly about it with our friends, reserving the right not to tell Buba and Zaida until they were more ready to face the complex issues being navigated by us and their grandchildren.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ my father said, months later: ‘Vot voz wrong with ze boy she voz dating?’

  ‘A crazy world,’ said my mother. ‘But I’ll always love my Sarahleh.’

  No one knew how much time Kerryn had left, but no matter how we tried to normalise our lives, it was impossible to avoid the knowledge that time was limited.

  Each anniversary and birthday triggered a new round of emotions. During a family gathering, I hid in a dark room, shedding tears alone. I wanted the rest of the family to continue with the meal.

  The hardest times were the Jewish festivals associated with life and death. We avoided attending synagogue on the Jewish New Year, aware that this would probably be her last. Coincidentally, on the eve of the Day of Atonement, Kerryn was scheduled for a new round of chemotherapy. We might have postponed the treatment, but we thought it appropriate to challenge the themes of the day.

  It was too much for our children to sit in synagogue without their mother and listen to the liturgical refrain—recast so memorably by Leonard Cohen in his song ‘Who by Fire?’ The Book of Life and the Book of Death were no longer abstractions for us. As I watched Kerryn lying on the couch, depleted by the day’s infusion of chemicals, the divine books appeared all but closed, and the sentence of death by cancer almost certain.

  One of the many transitions through our years of marriage related to our religious practice. While I had regularly shifted my observances, Kerryn remained steadily traditional, without taking on any of the strict rules of ritual. I ebbed and flowed with her, reaching a modus vivendi that would allow us to bring up our children on common ground. In 1995, during a year we spent in Israel, Kerryn attended classes at a progressive institute for the study of ancient Jewish texts in Jerusalem’s German Colony, the Greenwich Village of Jewish life. To this day it abounds with Jewish academics, avant-garde synagogues, hybrid Hasidic-hippy movements, as well as fanatical groups under the spell of that messianic complex known as Jerusalem Syndrome.

  Back in Melbourne, we became involved in the establishment of an Orthodox, egalitarian synagogue, modelled on its Jerusalem counterpart, Shira Hadasha, a ‘New Song’. Within a week of its opening, however, a rock was thrown through the window. On the rock was written the Hebrew word for abomination. An ultra-Orthodox rabbi made his congregation cross the road as they passed our precinct, for fear they might be contaminated.

  Each year on the Festival of the Rejoicing of the Law, Kerryn repeated the ritual she had learnt in Jerusalem, of publicly chanting from the Torah. She chose to recite the last portion of the Torah, where the scroll reaches its end in Deuteronomy. As the scroll was rolled back to the beginning, according to the custom of the festival, I would then chant the opening section of Genesis. And so, in the most symbolic way possible, Kerryn and I were joined in the one story, as the scroll was rolled back from its final words, where Moses dies without reaching the Promised Land, to the opening section that recounts the birth of the world.

  The ritual of our spiritual bond was re-enacted several years ago when we were chosen to be Bride and Groom of the Torah, the custom in which a couple blesses the Torah before the recitation of its final and opening verses. In the jocular spirit that characterises the festival, we dragged out our wedding outfits. Kerryn managed to slip into her white dress, albeit with safety pins rather than the zip, while I had to leave my jacket and trouser buttons undone. Together with my parents, we marched into the synagogue to everyone’s gasps of mirthful surprise. We opened the doors of the colourful Ark we had purchased years earlier as a cupboard to decorate our son’s bedroom, before transforming it into a sacred receptacle for the holiest object in our synagogue. On the inside of the door was a brass plaque on which were inscribed the names of the two people who were absent on that day: Sally and Paul Wein, their lives joined in a fictional reunion.

  The last thing I would have imagined that joyful day was that my bride’s voice would be silenced before mine, and that her name would be added to that plaque memorialising the death of her parents.

  ‘I’m craving meat.’

  ‘So we can barbecue a steak.’

  ‘No, I mean a non-kosher steak. A thick juicy one, like when I was young.’

  ‘You mean…’

  ‘Can we? In a restaurant.’

  ‘Does this count as an item on your bucket list?’

  ‘It’s a medical emergency.’ She smiled. ‘I need the iron. Let’s go to the other side of town, so no one will catch us.’

  ‘Our secret,’ I said.

  ‘Yours. Soon I won’t be telling anyone anything.’

  We drove to a steakhouse in the northern suburbs, reminiscing about her cravings for cheese blintzes while she was pregnant with Gabe in Jerusalem.

  As we sat in the restaurant among strangers, Kerryn revelled in her transgressive act, inflating its significance by ordering the best non-kosher steak in the house.

  ‘Medium-rare,’ she told the waiter excitedly.

  She dared me to join her, but I couldn’t bring myself to, and ordered fish instead.

  ‘Do you think I’ll be punished?’ she asked as we waited.

  ‘Ha! Maybe your cancer is a test. If you quickly change your mind and order fish your tumour will magically disappear.’

  She laughed, used to my black humour. But I was still hoping magic might play a role in our future, seizing on a mystical notion about redemption being born from sin.

  When the steak arrived, I reminded her of the old joke about the rabbi who dreamed of eating a roast pig before he died. But his devotees followed him to an isolated restaurant, and hid under the table, curious to see what good deed their master was planning to perform.

  As the pig was brought to the table on a platter, an apple in its open jaws, a disciple leaped out from his hiding spot and shouted, ‘Rabbi, Rabbi, how could you?’

  To which the pious rabbi answered innocently, ‘I ordered an apple and look what they bring me!’

  ‘So, is the steak worth it?’ I asked Kerryn.

  ‘The sin more than the steak.’

  Picking a bone out of my fish, I said, ‘Do you feel that I forced you to be religious all these years?’

  She shook her head, chewing on a chunk of meat. Then she swallowed and nodded.

  ‘Really? I forced you?’

  ‘Of course not. We’re a pair.’ She cut off another piece of meat and thrust the fork towards my mouth.

  I bit the steak off the fork, and laughed. ‘Now we’ll have to order an apple. That will fool God.’

  I always feared that I wouldn’t cope after she died, especially on Jewish holidays—the rituals were too infused with her memory. And so, when my period of living in limbo ended with her death, I became a fugitive. In particular, I wanted to avoid the festival of Passover, which we had always celebrated with family in our home. It was le
ss than thirty days since she had died, and I was not up to partaking in the custom of chanting songs of freedom. The table was usually set for more than forty guests. It was always Kerryn who prepared the bitter herbs that symbolised the harshness of life in slavery, peeled the apples and mixed them with cinnamon and wine to produce the effect of cement for building pyramids, and placed the sacrificial shank bone on a silver platter. The timeless ceremony asked us all to imagine that we ourselves had walked through the deserts of Egypt thousands of years ago. I couldn’t face it; I abandoned my children and escaped for a few days to Bali.

  I looked out at the thick jungle in Ubud and refused any symbols of suffering. I deliberately ate bread rather than unleavened matza. For the first time in my life, trapped in my own suffering, I violated the culinary rules of Passover. My pain was turning to rage, but I didn’t know where to direct it. There was only the jungle and, at night, a sky that glittered with stars. Frogs came to life in the ponds along the walkway, and their songs reminded me of the section of the Passover liturgy about the biblical plagues.

  I listened to the frogs, fearful they would devour me.

  I answered them silently, Take me. Take me.

  Surrounded by nature—its beauty, immensity and indifference—I let the water from an outdoor bamboo pipe wash over me. And then, from nowhere, I found somewhere to direct my rage. I hit myself. Would the physical pain subdue the mental pain that was overwhelming me?

  The next morning, I asked for help. I was introduced to a Balinese shaman, who said he would take me on a healing ceremony. I told him I wanted to offer a special prayer for my wife.

  We rose before dawn the following day and drove to a temple known for its cleansing powers. He dressed me in a sarong and held grains of rice against my forehead. He uttered Hindu prayers on my behalf, planted hibiscus behind my earlobes and pressed coloured petals into my palms.

  We stopped at various stations to pay homage before idols—serpentine statues, monstrous animals with human heads. I no longer recognised myself, so deep was my transgression of my own traditions. Pain had made me a stranger to myself.