Thirty Days Read online

  Before she died, she described me as her shadow, her guardian, servicing her needs with endless cups of tea, preparing, in a plastic container, the pills she had to down during breakfast. Now she shadows me, a ghostly presence, still so vivid, so alive. I watch her dressing; I hear her speaking to me at the kitchen table. Her voice has not faded.

  Everyone says time will heal, but time is also my enemy. What if I forget the timbre of her voice? Her laughter?

  I drive her car and open the glovebox. As if it were the scene of a crime, I hesitate to touch its contents. The forensic evidence of her belongings: a packet of tissues, a scarf, a pair of gloves. After she died in the hospice, I went out stunned to the car with her sparse belongings, and sat in the driver’s seat—her seat. For the first time in ten years, the engine wouldn’t start. I thought the battery had run down but that wasn’t it. The engine had died. I looked up at the sky. Was the earth still rotating on its axis?

  Over and over, I breathe her last breaths. It is the moment that remains stuck in my head. I physically enact that heaving, holding my breath, imitating her death, as if that is how I can reconnect to her.

  Yet my lungs involuntary exhale, my body forces its way back to life, returning me to the realm of fantasy. She has become my dybbuk, a ghost that has taken possession of my soul. I think of the wizened narrator in the Yiddish movie about a dybbuk, filmed in prewar Warsaw before its actors and viewers were deported. Two fathers trapped on a boat in a life-threatening storm vow that, if they survive and their wives give birth to a son and daughter, their children will be betrothed as bride and groom. Decades later, the daughter’s father forgets his vow. As the bride encircles the wedding canopy with another man, her bashert’s spirit takes possession of her body and screams his pain through her throat.

  Did I break a promise that set off a chain reaction culminating in Kerryn’s cruel fate? If I let her possess me now can I repair the past and restore it to the order that prevailed ten months ago? Joined in mourning to her ghost, I do not recognise myself. Who is this widower who is feeling so much pain? I hide in my house and don’t answer the phone. Our bed, our grave. As Paul Celan writes in his poem ‘Death Fugue’, I consume black milk by day and night. I ponder the poet’s fate after surviving a Nazi labour camp. Suicide.

  Why her? Why not me? Would the children have been better off losing their father rather than their mother?

  How will I find life now that she is dead? In which direction do I take my first steps?

  Even after her death, I return to Cabrini Hospital and hover outside the chemotherapy ward. I want them to inject me with toxic fluids to kill my dying cells so that the living ones can fight back and regenerate. But what will be left of me? Will I ever be the same again? How much of me died with her?

  ‘I love you,’ I said at her deathbed.

  ‘I love you,’ I say out loud to the empty side of our bed. No answer.

  I say it louder in my head. ‘Listen to me. I love you.’

  But she refuses to respond.

  Some say that love is all that remains after death. In the words of Thornton Wilder in his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, ‘Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.’

  I fear that inevitable time when the bridge of solid brick will show cracks, and become words on a faded tombstone, or in a book that is hidden in the cleft of a dusty library shelf.

  ‘I love you.’

  I hear Kerryn’s voice answer me, but I know it is an act of ventriloquism that allows me to manipulate her, to mould her in my image, to ask and answer all the questions. Love after death is a magical illusion. I can cherish the memory of my wife, shed tears over her, dance with her ghost, but, in the end, her silence has turned our love into a monologue.

  I want to live but I don’t know how to do it without her. For now, during these thirty days, I lean towards the kingdom of death. I take a sleeping tablet. Then another one to dull my mind, to meet her in my dreams, or to simulate death through sleep. But I know I will one day be reawakened, because only in life can I nurture her spirit, and allow her dybbuk to be transformed into the memory of a love that once was.

  3

  FLY ME TO THE MOON

  It happened in a moment, as soon as Kerryn got home.

  ‘How was work?’ I asked.

  ‘I could barely keep my eyes open,’ she said. ‘And in between seeing one of the patients I went to the bathroom and vomited!’

  There was no way of ignoring her next question—the kind of overwhelming question of which T. S. Eliot writes, O do not ask, ‘what is it?’

  But Kerryn did ask. ‘Have we heard back from the doctor?’

  I was evasive: ‘His office called to say that he wants you to ring back.’ Was I a coward for not telling her I already knew?

  I stood behind her as she dialled the number in her study. Her voice trembled as she spoke to him. Then she hung up, swivelled her desk chair around and burst into tears.

  ‘I’ve got cancer, Marky.’

  I leaned over and hugged her tighter than I had in many years, her tears sticking to my neck.

  Only now can I look back on the thirty-two years of our marriage and recognise them as a long middle act in a drama that bookended Kerryn’s childhood and death. It’s tempting to divide her life into units that suggest a progression leading to an inevitable outcome. And in this story, despite the randomness of events, the past does curl back on itself, highlighting how even our unscripted lives carry stories with narrative coherence.

  Kerryn’s diagnosis dropped a dark curtain that split our history into two halves: BC—Before Cancer—and AC—After Cancer. While I can’t recall every detail of our lives during those early AC days, there is truth to the notion that your entire life can pass before your eyes in a flash.

  How did we even get together? It was the question I kept coming back to. Whatever I thought at the time was proved wrong by the exchanges and surprise discoveries that unfolded over the ten months of Kerryn’s illness, and the thirty days after. One thing I knew for certain: if there was any divine magic that had conspired to bring us together in our early years, my mother unwittingly did her best to undo our potential union.

  Chance—or destiny—had placed us in the same school in Grade Two. Once again, however, a more logical explanation might be that Mount Scopus Memorial College was a natural choice by both sets of parents for the children of refugees. Although I was a year older than Kerryn, we were placed in the same class—another sign, perhaps, that our marriage was bashert. But before I had a chance to take my seat at a desk next to my future wife, my mother made a phone call to the principal requesting that I be moved to Mrs Traeger’s class. The logic of her petition was bamboozling: five years earlier, my brother was taught by this same teacher, and, as far as my mother was concerned, his intelligence provided absolute proof of Mrs Traeger’s superior pedagogical skills.

  That fateful move set me on a different trajectory from Kerryn’s for most of our school years, and might have undone all plans for our union. But as the Yiddish saying goes, ‘Man plans, God laughs’—even at rival super-mothers.

  ‘So, who got the better deal?’ Kerryn asked, as we sifted through class photos after one of her chemotherapy sessions.

  She pulled out a photograph from Grade Three and showed it to our children. They ran their fingers over the faces of the uniformed pupils until they found her. Kerryn was seated on a bench in the front row, a little girl in pigtails.

  I pointed at a plump teacher standing on the left side of the class formation, arms folded.

  ‘Yackakbom,’ Kerryn laughed, recalling the nickname of Mrs Yaxley. ‘She once stamped on someone’s wristwatch and broke it.’

  ‘That wouldn’t happen nowadays,’ said Gabe, our oldest child.

  I plucked out our Grade Four photos like a stack of cards. I was sure I had a winning hand.

  ‘
The legendary Mrs Rubin,’ I said, pointing to my teacher, with her buckteeth and thick black-rimmed glasses. ‘She made us chant the timetables. If you got to the end you had to prance around the class singing I’m the King of the Tables.’

  ‘Did you dance?’ asked Sarah, a doctor like her mother.

  ‘Not me,’ I conceded. ‘But Grade Four would have been an aerobics session for Mum.’

  I jumped to the Grade Six photos.

  ‘Mr Minogue,’ I said. ‘Our history teacher. I can still smell the alcohol on his breath. You know what he used to throw at us? Dry snot balls.’

  ‘Disgusting,’ they all chorused, schoolkids again.

  ‘And once, when I giggled during a lesson on Tutankhamen, he dragged me outside the classroom by the ears, threw me against the lockers, and yelled, Who do you bloody think you are, Baker? The greatest historian in the world?’

  ‘You should have said yes,’ said Rachel, our youngest, always keen to praise others.

  ‘Mum deserves that accolade from school. Ask her about the Renaissance.’

  In a snap, Kerryn recited the catechism she had learned in Grade Six from Mrs Fuzy, a pint-sized sergeant.

  ‘The Renaissance was a period of time in history when there was a new spirit of enquiry, of interest in learning, a desire to develop new ideas and take part in new activities.’

  ‘I raise you one poem,’ I said, shuffling the photos. ‘Augustus was a chubby lad, fat rosy cheeks Augustus had.’

  ‘And I double you with this: An area of inland drainage is an area drained by a river, the waters of which never reach the open ocean.’

  ‘My royal flush: Nad Babim Yarom pamyatnikov nyet.’

  ‘What’s that?’ chimed the children.

  ‘Yevgeny Yevtushenko. A Russian poet. Krutoi obryv, kak gruboye nadgrobye.’

  ‘Your dad’s mad. And he’s cheating—he learned that at uni.’

  ‘It’s a poem about Babi Yar,’ I said, ‘where they murdered twenty thousand Jews in the pits.’

  ‘Mum’s right,’ Rachel said. ‘You are mad. Why would you learn that off by heart?’

  ‘Because your grandparents went through the Holocaust.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘No. We’ve been lucky.’ I paused. ‘Until now.’

  I saw their faces drop and quickly changed the topic. ‘I bet Mum remembers this song. We learned it together in primary school, in the Junior Dining Hall, where we watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon.’

  ‘That would have been awesome to watch live,’ said Gabe.

  ‘Fly me to the moon,’ Kerryn crooned, resting her head against a pillow on the couch. ‘Let me play among the stars.’

  ‘No, not that. But I wish that’s where we could go.’ I smiled at her.

  ‘And never come back. We’d eat cheese for the rest of our lives. And drink chardonnay.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I want to know if you remember the song from school.’

  I dragged Kerryn up from the couch. She stood in her nightie and dressing-gown, sluggish from the chemotherapy. I held out my hands. She raised hers until our fingers entwined.

  ‘So, do you remember yet?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I’ll give you a clue. The first four words.’

  I started to sing, improvising a clumsy choreography.

  ‘Full to the brim…’

  She broke into a huge smile. She finished the line.

  ‘…is my fine korobishka.’

  Two steps to the left, and we danced in unison.

  ‘Packed, with cotton, silk and lace.’

  ‘What’s a korobishka?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘I think it’s a basket,’ I said.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Kerryn. ‘We’ll have a picnic, and pack a korobishka full of chocolates and photographs.’ Then, turning our school folk dance into a gentle whirl, she switched back to her favourite Sinatra song.

  Let me see what spring is like, on Jupiter and Mars.

  We sang in harmony, line by line, the children staring at us in wonderment.

  In other words, hold my hand.

  In other words—I knelt on the floor, as if proposing marriage to my ailing wife—baby, kiss me.

  The question still wasn’t resolved and became central in my quest to make sense of our lives. How did I end up sharing a marital bed with the shy girl from school?

  The children were my helpers in dragging out bits of information about the tortuous paths that eventually led us to become a couple. We would gather on the couch in the TV room, or talk over the kitchen table, doing our best to ignore Kerryn’s diminishing appetite and waning energy levels. They laughed when I told them how I gravitated towards what was classified, to my shame, as the cool crowd, while Kerryn’s friends were tamer and tended to be more Anglo in background, with rambling heritage homes in the eastern suburbs. Some even claimed descent from the convict era, and attended synagogues where the men wore top hats, as though they were English aristocrats and not thieves exiled from their motherland.

  There were many events Kerryn and I had both attended, and we gossiped about them during our marriage, as if we had experienced them together. Our children wanted more details about our schooldays: I told them how we used to play Tiggy, but that I never found myself clasping their mother’s hand. Nor did I remember Kerryn’s presence in any of the other games that were intended to satisfy our developing urges—Spin the bottle or Torchie.

  ‘What’s Torchie?’ asked Rachel innocently.

  ‘It’s where you lie on the floor and wait until a torchlight shines on your face…’

  ‘Settle down, lovebirds!’ yelled Gabe.

  ‘…for a round of French-kissing.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Dad and I were never at the same parties.’

  Most of our early photos, taken on a Kodak Instamatic or Polaroid camera, have been combined by Kerryn in the same album. We often reminisced about the week-long train excursion to the state’s historical gold-rush sites. We both remembered eating sherbets and Redskins from the Ballarat milk bars: she recalled buying them, while I remembered the adrenalin rush of shoplifting.

  And we were both at the Year Ten seminar in rural Victoria, designed to prove God’s existence to us. We were forced to watch Holocaust documentaries like Night and Fog, which filled us with terror, and above all, guilt. I emerged from the seminar convinced that anything other than total surrender to Jewish ritual was to accord Hitler a posthumous victory. Many of Kerryn’s friends became permanently observant as a result of that seminar, but she only toyed with it for two days, before reverting to her moderate and equanimous character, which later saved me from my attraction to cultish circles.

  My first religious fad began long before I met Kerryn, somewhere around my seventh birthday, when I changed my dietary habits and turned strictly kosher. For the next six years, my mother would have to cook special meals for me on Surfers Paradise holidays, while all her friends’ children went to eat spaghetti bolognese at Papa Alberto’s. There was no kitchen in the hotel room of the Chevron Hotel, so she went to great lengths to fry schnitzels in the bathroom while my father waved a towel to keep the cloud of smoke from exposing our illegal activities. One of her favourite stories was about the time she transported a whole cow, as she called her supply of kosher meat. The suitcase was mistakenly wheeled away by a man at the airport and she was left with a case full of nappies. After a few days, when the man discovered blood dripping beneath his bed and suspected that a corpse had been concealed inside the case, he called the police, and then my mother.

  ‘At least you get your nappies back,’ she lashed out at him, ‘But me? You’ve destroyed my son’s holiday dinners!’

  ‘Tell us again how you got together,’ the children kept asking, as if Kerryn and I were contestants in The Bachelor.

  It was a touchy subject because Kerryn and I couldn’t agree.

  ‘She chased me,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not true. You chased
me. I even have proof.’

  She flipped to a page in the photo album and showed me a picture of us in our last year of school. I was standing on a bench in the back row. My head of tight curls was bent forwards, and I appeared to be staring at the girl in the middle of the front row—Kerryn.

  ‘Mum’s right,’ said Rachel. ‘You couldn’t keep your eyes off her.’

  I didn’t go along with their fantasies of a schoolboy crush, because I knew the photographer had simply snapped the camera during one of my many moments of adolescent distraction.

  After ten years at the same school, fate had finally brought us into the same classroom—Mrs Begley’s English lessons, where we read The Go-Between, a story of loss of innocence, and Sons and Lovers. Those books, along with The French Lieutenant’s Woman, would later help to form the impressions I had of Kerryn as enigmatic and exotic. They created a framework for our earliest intimacies.

  The other class we shared was Biology. I was only there because the school expected a male student to be educated in the sciences. But I only had half a brain, tilted severely to the side of humanities, whereas Kerryn’s brain was more balanced—she topped general mathematics in our final year.

  ‘So here’s more proof,’ said Kerryn, sliding a faded photo out of its plastic cover.

  ‘I can’t see a thing,’ said Sarah.

  ‘That’s me,’ said Kerryn, tracing her faint shape on the floor at our end-of-year school party. ‘Now find Dad.’

  It took a minute for them to locate me, sitting on a chair. I was a spectral image, distinguished by my afro curls. Sure enough, as the kids proclaimed, I was staring at Kerryn.

  I was convinced there was nothing between us then, but who was I to burst the bubble? And if any more proof was required, it came in the form of a photograph brought to us by an old schoolfriend three months into Kerryn’s diagnosis.