Thirty Days Read online

  ‘A booking for what?’

  ‘An endoscopy.’ She poked a finger down her throat.

  ‘I think you should definitely take the appointment tomorrow.’ Then I hesitated. ‘Do you want me to drive you?’

  It was too late to take back the pause. She knew what it meant. Despite being lenient in our practice of religious law, we don’t drive on Saturday. The law permits you, however, to drive for medical emergencies. On any other day, I wouldn’t think twice about taking her to hospital, but that night my ambivalence betrayed my inner thoughts: This is trivial. It’s not as serious as the tube that enters through the other end. It’s just gallstones. Do I need to drive her?

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, without showing any offence. ‘I’ll drive myself. One of the kids can pick me up.’

  Then she lit two candles and made the blessing over the flames, exactly as she had done every week since our marriage, exactly as the Jewish women in our families had done for generations.

  Kerryn’s procedure started early that Saturday morning.

  ‘Good luck,’ I said from the bed as she left the room.

  About two hours later she called me on my mobile, her voice still drowsy from the anaesthetic. ‘The nurse is going to call to say I’m ready to be picked up.’

  ‘Okay, I’m coming now,’ I said, doing my best to make up for not driving her.

  ‘Just lie. Tell her you’re waiting for me outside. I’ll drive myself.’

  ‘No, wait for me. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said calmly. ‘They only tell you not to drive as a precaution.’

  She hung up and minutes later the phone rang again.

  ‘Your wife is ready to be collected,’ said the nurse.

  A year earlier, when I’d had my colonoscopy in the same clinic with the same doctor, Kerryn had been there, waiting for me when I woke up.

  To my everlasting shame, I told the nurse I’d be there, and waited in the kitchen for Kerryn to return.

  Ten minutes later she slipped inside the house.

  ‘So, have they fixed your gallstone?’ I asked.

  ‘The doctor’s booked me in for a CAT scan on Monday.’

  I was confused. ‘Why bother with an endoscopy if he can’t find what he’s looking for?’

  ‘He wants to check out some inflammation in my gut.’

  ‘Maybe it’s from all that cholent,’ I joked, referring to the thick stew Kerryn had prepared each week for the past ten years to feed the congregation at our synagogue.

  When I went up to the bedroom later, she was resting and googling her symptoms. I lay beside her and looked over her shoulder at the screen. Stomach pain. Back pain. And that new thing: Inflammation. Countless possible causes came up, including the original diagnosis of gallstones.

  So I relaxed.

  Sunday was a burst of summer weather in the final month of autumn. We were invited out for brunch and Kerryn helped carry platters of food outside, where we sat in the sun with three other couples. She shared her story of the endoscopy and proudly told the group about her self-diagnosis. We talked about ageing, and how we were all doing our best to counter the middle-age blues by exercising.

  The conversation moved on to our trip to Rwanda. For the past few years, Kerryn had accompanied me on these tours, which were part of a university program I ran in Holocaust and genocide studies. As a counterpoint to the wonders of the world, we visited the darkest spots of humanity, where millions had been massacred. Kerryn’s role as a therapist was to counsel the students. They took it in turns to sit next to her on the bus, and revealed their own times of trauma. She never told me what the students shared with her, but I knew enough to intuit that many had suffered sexual abuse, depression or suicidal thoughts.

  To the students, she was Mama Baker, or just Kez, the rock of the group, who kept everyone in check, a role she also played in our family at home. I might have been the one to inspire them with grandiose speeches about global responsibility, but it was Kerryn who cared for them as one human being to another.

  At the end of the last trip, the students carried her on their shoulders into our hotel lift, as though she was a bride in a Chagall painting.

  How I wish I could take us back to that time. I want to gather up all the moments of our two lives and stack them inside that lift as it rose to the highest floor of the hotel. First floor—Childhood Dreams; Second Floor—Adolescent Awakening; Third Floor—Marital Bliss; Fourth Floor—Raising Children; Fifth Floor—Midlife Drift.

  Inside that lift, I could perform a magic trick before we reached the top.

  Open the door. Abracadabra, and the girl has gone.

  Is there a place of vanishing other than death? A spot—as Dorothy would sing—over some rainbow where we can live an alternative life to the one we have been given?

  Pick a dream, any dream.

  ‘I wouldn’t change my life for anything,’ Kerryn would say later.

  ‘Even with what you now know?’

  ‘Not if I have to give up my children.’

  I waited.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she teased. ‘And you, too.’

  We returned home from brunch and the sky, still bright, was irresistible. I set off on one of my regular jogs along the beach.

  ‘This will be my last summer run of the year,’ I said to Kerryn.

  ‘I hope your winter pants are two sizes bigger.’

  I marvelled at the beauty of Melbourne: the cruise ship on the bay, the clear view of the city skyscrapers, the mix of languages one hears on the track that cuts close to the sand, and the seagulls hovering over the water before soaring away.

  2

  THE C-WORD

  Monday was the day everything changed. The evidence accumulated rapidly: a blood test early in the morning, followed by an ultrasound. I received Kerryn’s text message just as I was leaving for a meeting.

  Three words I still have on my phone: ‘It’s not gallstones.’

  I cancelled the meeting: ‘Sorry. Something urgent has cropped up.’

  I stayed in my office at the university, but my thoughts kept veering back to Kerryn.

  For a long time, I had joked with friends that our lives were too good. We had a stable family, exciting careers, two parents on my side, and the only illness I could complain about was indigestion, which could be relieved with daily pills.

  Kerryn was confident about her future. A year ago, she’d had cosmetic surgery on her eyes. She wanted to put on her best face as she stepped into the coming decades. People said Kerryn was classically beautiful, that she bore a resemblance to Glenn Close. She was attractive in a mature and sophisticated way, matched by her style of dress, which always reminded me of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Her hair was naturally curly, but she straightened it, and her nose was slightly in the mould of Barbara Streisand’s. Unlike her more vain husband, she never surrendered its subtle hook to rhinoplasty, a procedure I rationalised as a medical directive required for a deviated septum.

  ‘Classy’ was a word people used about her, although I prefer my uncle’s verdict upon meeting her before we married. Two Yiddish words borrowed from biblical archetypes: eidel, meaning soft, or gentle, and chen, describing someone who has grace, and who bestows favour on those she meets.

  Her inimitable wit is evident in the card she wrote for me when I went in for my nose job.

  1.30 a.m., 11th May 1982

  My dearest Mark,

  Many may consider your actions today as merely one form of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’. However, I am forced to disagree.

  I have known you (or is it nosed you) for a very long time now and it is plain to me, ‘as plain as the nose on your face’, that your motives are pure.

  I am sure you did not arrive at your conclusion rashly but it seems to me that the answer was ‘under your nose’ all the time. And the only thing I find scary about today is that, when you’re advised in the future to simply ‘follow your nose’, you m
ay not know which way to turn.

  Good luck, my darling.

  Kerryn was known for her intelligence, yet as she approached her fifties, without any evidence to substantiate her fears, she downloaded apps to forestall memory loss, hoping that the bridge games, the crossword puzzles she completed each day and her skill at sudoku would also sharpen her brain for old age. Inspired by a trip we took to Cuba, she had tried the previous year to convince me to do salsa classes with her. I was more interested in Havana cigars than dancing.

  ‘It’s good for agility of mind,’ she said, ‘and romance.’

  There was nothing romantic about the class, especially my stepping on her toes. After two sessions, we gave up.

  We both thought I was the one at risk of losing my mind—not for any objective reason, but Kerryn was stoic, while I was a hypochondriac. When I caught a cold, I lay paralysed in bed. Kerryn simply took a Strepsil and headed off for work.

  We had a marital pact. If I develop Alzheimer’s, shoot me.

  How would we know when it was time?

  ‘The moment I no longer recognise our kids. Then you can pull the trigger,’ I said.

  ‘What if it’s me you don’t recognise?’ she said.

  •

  Later that afternoon, Kerryn rang me to say she was going to the hospital for a CAT scan. I offered to go with her, but she refused. ‘I don’t need you to watch me have an X-ray.’

  I tried but failed to concentrate on my work.

  An hour later, I called her. She didn’t pick up. I was staring at the view of the Dandenong Ranges from my office window when she finally rang. It was six o’clock.

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘I’ve just left the hospital.’ I could hear her getting into the car, slightly out of breath. ‘The doctor has the results. He wants me to come in immediately.’

  And then she added, ‘He asked me to bring my husband.’

  It took a few seconds before I realised Kerryn was talking about me.

  Her husband. Over the past thirty days I have spent endless hours reflecting on that moment, and on how our lives became entwined. Jewish people use the term bashert to describe a match. It means destiny, but Kerryn would often say to our children that there was not just one person in the world they were destined to marry, that a relationship was a mix of choice and chance. As a therapist, she believed we have to deliberate carefully about the choices we make when committing to a partner.

  According to Jewish legend, God sits in heaven preoccupied with matching souls. The image is far from the stereotype of God as a majestic lord. Instead, it casts the Almighty in the Broadway role of Yente the Matchmaker from Fiddler on the Roof, a gossipy character who gathers information about the merits of a boy or a girl, usually measured by the lineage of their families.

  Although neither of us swallowed the line about a divine orchestrator, there was one main factor working on the side of destiny: both our families were Polish migrants who found their way to Australia. But a matchmaking God might have been befuddled by the decade that separated their migrations. Kerryn’s family arrived in the mid-1930s. Her father, Paul Wein, didn’t even land in Melbourne, but started off with his parents and sister Mary in Broken Hill, a small mining town in New South Wales, where they earned a living as pedlars. Kerryn’s mother, Sally—or Sureh Itteh as she was known in Poland—came with the Bursztyn clan to Melbourne in 1937, where her grandfather Moshe started a menswear store on Elizabeth Street, a couple of blocks from Bernard’s Magic Store.

  Ten years separate their migration from those of my father and mother, in 1948 and 1952, respectively—a decade that cannot be measured by time alone. In those intervening years, planet Auschwitz was created, turning my parents into members of the small group of Holocaust survivors who spent their youths hiding in forests and enduring the Nazi death camps. I could ask God, or Bernard the magician for that matter, if either of them whispered to Kerryn’s grandparents, telling them to leave Europe before the inferno burned their families, but then I would also have to ask why my own parents were denied the privilege of escaping the torturous years that eliminated so many of my ancestors.

  I prefer to turn to more reasonable explanations that don’t bestow favours of prophecy on one clan over another. By 1938, the doors of Europe were closed. Kerryn’s family was lucky to be among a small number of Jews who obtained a visa before the exit points were shut. On these matters, I know the source of the magic. And if I believed in a God who ruled the world with a controlling hand, my rage would be so overpowering that I would have railed against that divine being who selected some for life and others for death.

  The same reasoning held true when the full realisation of Kerryn’s fate hit us. Why her, of all people?

  To answer that question, we turned to the alchemists of our day—the expert doctors, who had no answers, but had seen the trick performed enough times to know how it must end.

  Kerryn was waiting for me in her car outside the doctor’s surgery. I parked beside her. We both hesitated before stepping outside. It was already dark, a convenient cloak for our fears.

  ‘Here goes,’ she said, taking a deep breath.

  We sat in chairs opposite each other, a clock hanging above her head. I counted the minutes. Finally, we were ushered into the doctor’s room. The last time I had seen him was at my colonoscopy. He had probably never looked into my face.

  He went straight for it. ‘I’m afraid I have bad news for you.’ We listened numbly.

  ‘I wanted to let you know before the biopsies come back tomorrow. I didn’t want to tell you over the phone.’

  He paused. ‘We can’t know for sure, but there are signs of tumour cells.’

  Another pause before he elaborated. ‘I sensed that things weren’t right on Saturday. What you have is very difficult to diagnose. Most doctors don’t pick it up.’

  He made it sound like we should stand up and applaud him.

  And then he uttered the two words that would come to define Kerryn’s life, our lives.

  One of the words sounded like ‘plastic’. The other sounded like Linis, conjuring memories of Charlie Brown cartoons in which Linus always carried a blanket. I also thought of our son Gabe, who as a baby sucked his thumb while holding his ‘blankie’.

  I had heard the word tumour, but that didn’t have to mean cancer.

  ‘What signs?’ Kerryn asked, as though she was listening to someone else being diagnosed.

  ‘Don’t ask any questions that you don’t want answered.’

  I was jolted by his response. It sounded unprofessional, but I also realised it was the most compassionate thing he could say. He spoke in generalities.

  ‘It’s a form of stomach cancer. Rare.’

  Finally, the C-word.

  ‘I’m going to get you to see a surgeon as soon as possible, Kerryn.’

  He picked up the phone, and the mood shifted to one of pragmatic formalities. He may as well have been a travel agent booking us a holiday.

  This time I heard the words more clearly. Linitis Plastica.

  I glanced sideways at Kerryn. There was nothing in her expression that suggested panic. I wondered if she’d ever come across those words in the copy of Gray’s Anatomy on her bookshelf.

  After a few seconds, he hung up. ‘We’ve got you an appointment in two days’ time.’

  There were a thousand questions I wanted to ask, tangential questions that avoided any talk of prognosis. What did he mean by seeing a surgeon? Would Kerryn be having an operation? Who was this unknown doctor?

  Our doctor reached out to touch my shoulder and then Kerryn’s, and said, ‘I’m sorry to have to give you this diagnosis.’

  I felt deep pity from him, and from that gesture a mountain of fear awakened in me. My whole body shook.

  Calmly, in typical Kerryn fashion, she thanked the doctor.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ were his parting words. ‘We’ll look after you.’

  We left silently—no tears—and got into
our separate cars.

  That night, there were few words spoken between us. We still held out hope that the biopsy results would turn this whole episode into a bad dream. I spent time on the phone calling family members, easing them into a modified version of the news.

  As proof of our optimism, Kerryn was going to work early in the morning. She had patients to see and wasn’t going to let them down at the last minute. She set the alarm for 5.30 a.m. I don’t know how she did it—how she slept, and how she had the calmness of mind to listen to other people’s problems.

  I looked at pictures of the disease on the internet. It went by different names. ‘Leather-bottle stomach.’ ‘Signet ring cell tumour.’ ‘Gastric adenocarcinoma.’ The condition was predominant among Japanese people. How on earth did she get it?

  I added the word prognosis to my searches and understood why the doctor had been so direct. This was as bad as it gets. Months. A year maybe. More time if the stomach could be resected. What the hell did resection mean?

  I was spinning from the parallel world of arcane medical terminology when the phone rang. It was our doctor. He said he wanted to be the one to tell Kerryn the results of the biopsy. I asked if he could tell me first so that I’d be ready to support her. That was a lie. I just needed to know straightaway.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, what?’

  ‘The biopsy confirms what we suspected.’

  Silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as if he were responsible. We agreed Kerryn would call him as soon as she got home from work.

  I looked at my watch. I still had another hour before the news hit her. What do I do? Do I call the kids?

  I just lay in our bed, frozen, letting my tears soak the pillow.

  The pillows on her side of the bed are uncreased; at night I reach out and swap them for mine, denting them with my head. Or I kick the flat covers into undulating shapes to give the impression of a person lying beside me. I let my hand fall to the left side, stroking the emptiness. When she was alive, I never reached out in that way. Her presence was a given. Now I imagine us making love in ways that we never did.

  Kerryn’s absence follows me like a living presence. I wake several times a night from the sensation that someone is tugging the doona, and then realise I was only dreaming. I conjure her into existence through brooding reveries. If I’m on the couch, watching TV, I pause the show just to stare at the spot where she used to sit. Where are you? I wonder, and then I recreate her on the couch and meditate on her outline—the clothes she wore, the trivial things we talked about during commercials.