Thirty Days Page 4

  It was taken in the summer of 1977, a couple of weeks after our final exams. We were seated on the same towel at Mount Martha beach. Bare-chested and scrawny, I was wearing board shorts. More modestly dressed in a T-shirt, Kerryn was positioned a comfortable distance from me. This time I was staring forwards, but the children were sure our hands were touching. If not for her illness, I would have admitted the truth: my eyes were in fact fixated on a white bikini in the corner of the frame, on whose owner my heart was set.

  •

  Only after she died did I find official proof of Kerryn’s version of the story. Having worked with oral testimony, I am fully aware of the fallibility of memory, and how our subjective constructions can reveal deeper truths than the actual facts. So, what truth was I claiming by insisting that she chased me? Was it just wishful forgetfulness driven by an inflated male ego, or the way, for whatever reasons, a certain narrative of the past seems more convenient in hindsight?

  ‘Kerryn was a superwoman,’ one friend commented during the week of the shiva.

  ‘Yes, she showed remarkable strength during her illness,’ I said.

  ‘No, always. But I don’t think you ever realised it.’

  The comment struck me hard in the gut. Did I overshadow her by prioritising my own ambitions, or was I blind to the extraordinary sway she held with her friends and our children—and with me?

  How can I be trusted to relay our story?

  Certain facts were indisputable from the beginning. After that photograph of us at Mount Martha we went our separate ways. Kerryn started medicine at the University of Melbourne. I was off on a gap year to Israel. Kerryn would never have been allowed the freedom to take a break before beginning her studies. Nor would her strict mother have contemplated a prolonged absence in a war-torn region of the world. She was even forbidden to ride a bike.

  The story that became ours to tell revolved around a party that I gatecrashed with a female friend soon after I returned from my year away. At the time, I was immersed in a socialist Zionist youth movement, a world apart from Kerryn’s medical studies. She was sitting in a corner of the room. I knelt beside her and we got talking. I don’t remember what we talked about, but it must have been compelling because I dumped my companion and offered to drive Kerryn home after the party. My guess is that I was seduced by her classiness; she was different from my comrades, whose favourite antic was moon-arsing.

  Only ten days after Kerryn died did I discover some of the letters I wrote to her during this early phase of our lives. The correspondence, bound with an elastic band, was stored in a shoebox marked ‘Kerryn’s Letters’, hidden away in a cupboard in our laundry. Finally, here were my primary sources, the archives of a historian: cards going back to her eighth birthday, aerogrammes written from her girlfriends during their gap year away, and condolence messages and telegrams about the death of her parents. I never realised she was a hoarder of memorabilia. Had I found the key to uncovering the truth about the woman I had lived with for more than three decades? The truth, as I now know it, is that I was smitten and she resisted.

  How could I have erased this from my memory? If this fact was distorted in my mind, what right do I have to represent her in any form? Are biographies best left to be written by strangers and not lovers?

  But the truth is also in her own handwriting, composed on Ansett Airlines letterhead in May 1980 on a flight to Surfers Paradise. I can picture her asking the hostess for paper. In her letter to a girlfriend, she confesses she has become friends with ‘the same Mark Baker that I scoffed at and disliked throughout school’. To add to my humiliation, she crows that she had to explain to me that my feelings towards her weren’t reciprocated. But, thankfully, she continues, ‘he’s over his sudden burst of feeling towards me’.

  My ‘sudden burst of feeling’ didn’t fade. I can see what Kerryn meant when she also wrote that ‘unlike me, he’s not restrained in expressing his innermost feelings’. Young love makes all of us appear fools, so I’m probably not alone in exposing the folly of my words, recovered from one of the shoeboxes.

  Kerryn,

  I’m typically against soppy revelations, cowardly exposing feelings on a piece of paper when it should all be expressed face to face. But that all failed, so what’s to lose? I only ask one thing, that after you’ve read this through ONCE, it goes straight into the bin. I don’t need my feelings preserved as a monument to show your grandchildren.

  Well, here goes: Fuck, shit, fuck, fuck. I love you.

  I want us to share everything and to be able to say anything. You’ve become the pivotal point of my life. If ever I have an experience with someone now, I’d just wish I was with you instead. I think things could have worked and although tonight you told me they won’t, I know they can. Oh well, it’s only one of the trillions of injustices that occur in this disorderly world of ours. But of all the injustices, why this one and why us???

  Good night.

  By rights, I could be angry at Kerryn for keeping the letter after I had pleaded with her to rip it up. But now that she is not here, I love her for keeping it, for reminding me what it felt like to be wounded by love at twenty, and for setting the record straight about our courtship.

  I can hear her now:

  Don’t get romantic on me, Mark Baker. I don’t need you to quote my words back at me after my death. I never forgot. You did.

  Whether it was as a result of my entreaties or not, there were signs she was relenting. In another letter to her best friend, she wrote: ‘Mark Baker is a very good friend. However, there are four more gruelling years of study ahead of me before I can really make any sort of commitment, and who knows what I will be feeling in four years’ time?’

  Four years! It’s a letter I wish I could read back to her now.

  In fact, things accelerated. I’m left wondering how it happened—without Kerryn to answer my questions.

  And there’s still her own persistent question, now echoing in my thoughts:

  Why could you not admit that you pursued me?

  While Kerryn’s interest in me grew, she was wavering between several suitors. ‘I’m not sure what I want,’ she wrote to the same girlfriend, acknowledging that being a doctor was an achievement, but not enough to bring her satisfaction in life. There was one thing, however, that she was certain about: ‘I know I want love.’

  I should jump for joy as I read those words, but I can’t when I read her caveat: ‘I haven’t found it yet, but I hope soon I will.’

  •

  The only other note I have from that period is a poem I wrote in 1981, which I entitled—in capital letters—STEP SOFTLY, SLOWLY, OVER THE LILY FIELD. PETALS ARE EASILY LOST. It’s an embarrassing poem, but the kitsch phrases convey my feelings at the time.

  I also discovered among her papers that there were other fools who courted her with poetry and love letters. I hope I’m not displaying unworthy schadenfreude when I hereby declare myself—on behalf of all the magicians and demigods who stitched our fate together—the victor.

  Why me? I want to ask her now. And in that final reckoning of your life, Kerryn, could you honestly swear that I gave you the love that you dreamed of in your youth?

  The truth is we were vastly different. While Kerryn was studying medicine, I was holed up in a cloistered religious seminary, from which I fled after three months because the conditions were too spartan. I enrolled at the Hebrew University, where my interest in studying the Holocaust began. I shall never forget my teacher, who framed his lectures around the question, How was it humanly possible? And answered by calculating in Deutschmarks the meagre cost of burning a Jew on the pyres of Birkenau. My response to our worthlessness was to remain in Israel and become a soldier, but at the last minute my mother flew in on a rescue mission and used the currency of guilt to drag me back home.

  Our contrasting twenty-first birthday parties exemplify just how different we were. Hers, held a year after mine, was a barbecue with a small group of friends on the banks of the
Yarra River.

  The barbecue was a surprise party, Mark. Don’t you remember? You organised it.

  How could I have forgotten that I organised her party?

  Mine was an extravaganza. Drawing on my skills at role-playing as a youth leader, I planned an elaborate re-enactment of the 1946 bombing of the British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. I enlisted some friends to sing British war songs from our front balcony. The dancing was to AC/DC, escalating to a frenzied circle of pumping fists and roaring of TNT, Oy, Oy, I’m dynamite.

  And at that moment, perfectly timed to the word dynamite, the music was replaced by a sound-recording of a massive explosion. Everyone was careened to our back garden, where my youth movement protégés were in the pool performing water-ballet. From a balcony, I emerged in a Ben Gurion mask reciting a poem by the Hebrew nationalist poet, Nathan Alterman. No nation is given on a silver platter, I declaimed.

  Kerryn was at the party, not invited by me, but accompanying a friend of mine.

  Why didn’t I invite her? And what on earth did she think of this crazy theatrical performance? Somehow, in thirty-two years, I never asked her.

  The differences between us extended to almost every aspect of our upbringing. In my house, we had a fixed dinner menu that I can still recite by heart. Our table was set meticulously, in accordance with my mother’s mild OCD—doilies, serviettes like origami masterpieces, each dish served on gold-rimmed plates. We had our set seats on 1970s round-backed chairs—my father at the head of the table, my mother near the telephone.

  In Kerryn’s house, no one entered without formally kissing Kerryn’s mother and her grandmother, Buba Esther, on the cheek. Everyone officiously said ‘Love you’ as they left. The table was set with cut-up vegetables in a steel container and the rest of the food came from cans. Leftovers were collected in chipped enamel doggy bowls, something that would have horrified my mother, who never kept food for the next day.

  Sally treated me warmly but she must have wondered about her daughter’s new boyfriend. Indeed, she made it clear to me that her preference was for one of her son’s close friends, who was also studying medicine. I don’t blame her. I was lost in a maze of weird therapies, focused on organising Holocaust commemorations, only half-heartedly studying my Arts subjects, and I spent all my time planning educational activities for school-age kids. My hair was disrespectfully long, I was Orthodox, not traditional like Kerryn’s family, and I was likely to lure Kerryn away from her mother to Israel, a place that held no attraction for either of them.

  So why did they tolerate me?

  I suppose Sally hoped our relationship was a passing phase, or thought I was better than the non-Jewish boy Kerryn brought home, before he was cast out because he wasn’t of the faith.

  That, too, was another difference between Kerryn and me. At the time, my whole being was imbued with a Jewish spirit that drove my faith, politics, dress code and culture. I was like a character from Fiddler on the Roof, living not in Anatevka, but in an imaginary shtetl south of the Yarra River.

  When we first started going out, I was only twenty-one and Kerryn twenty, but in those days—at least in our circles—dating led quickly to marriage. As it became apparent we might be heading in that direction, Kerryn’s mother tried to redeem me by sending her potential son-in-law to a psychologist. Her purpose was not to offer me therapy but to encourage me to consider a career change.

  I don’t know if it was fear of my potential mother-in-law or doubt about my future with Kerryn, but I acceded and enrolled in Psychology 101. For once my mother and Sally—bantamweight parenting champions—agreed on something. Much to everyone’s disappointment, after a few months, I opted to pursue a career in academia.

  Was it my persistence or her own sudden epiphany that led to Kerryn’s decision to commit to me? I’ll never know. All I can say is that our relationship developed through intense conversations late at night on Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, at the time the only area of Melbourne open after midnight.

  I know my explanations are inadequate. If I were writing about the causes of the French Revolution or the Final Solution, I’d be failed for using the obtuse language of epiphanies. In the end, love defies rational categories, and for all my talk of destiny, our union came down to a mix of chance, persistence, choice and a magnetic attraction to our differences—Kerryn’s dignified poise versus my amplified weltschmerz. Or perhaps it was just the luck of timing—the courage to make a move at the opportune time—a first kiss that unleashed a potion to transform desire into romance, until we were bold enough to label it as love.

  Sex before marriage was taboo, as was touching. Kerryn was quite conservative in those days, and I was still plagued by the residual guilt of my religious inclinations. But, eventually, we lost our virginity together. I wonder now whether she kept prior experiences from me in order to make the ritual appear reciprocal.

  Those early days of passion are the privilege of youth—plunging onto beds, racing up eight flights of a dark stairwell to enter through the fire escape in the dead of night. All of that belongs to forbidden sex or, at the very least, to the initial days of love. I remember it well during our first holiday to Noosa Heads: maintaining the fiction of a trip away with Kerryn’s girlfriends for the sake of the matriarchs at home. The hotel was basic, but all that mattered was the bed, which we used the second we arrived.

  What happens to that youthful lust once domesticity and routine take over? There were times in our lives when it ebbed and flowed, but most couples will admit that they had a heyday of sexual energy, replaced—if one is lucky—by a different form of intimacy that carries a couple through to old age.

  How I wish Kerryn and I could have reached old age like that.

  4

  BROKEN IDOLS

  Cabrini Hospital in Malvern became our second home that autumn. It is part of a network of institutions founded by Catholic nuns in Boston. There are icons of Jesus in every room, although many of the doctors, and a disproportionate number of the patients, are Jewish.

  Only a few months earlier, we had checked my father into Cabrini. He had been on his regular Sunday visit to Chadstone Shopping Centre, where he liked to gauge the rag trade.

  ‘The clue to business,’ he would say, ‘is not to count people but shopping bags.’

  He called Kerryn—his surrogate medical consultant and travel agent—to say that he was out of breath and had back pain. Kerryn insisted we pick him up immediately. Once we’d found him, seated on a plush chair outside the Gucci store, we drove him straight to Cabrini, where he was kept under observation for a few days.

  The cancer ward was new: a long, narrow corridor painted white from floor to ceiling.

  ‘It feels like I’m walking to heaven,’ Kerryn said. ‘Or hell.’

  Oncologists, we quickly learned, have the hardest job. They have to perform a balancing act: showing empathy yet maintaining a distance, and outlining the facts yet offering realistic measures of hope to forestall despair. Our oncologist struck that balance with a cool, objective tone. He drew diagrams on paper; he explained the chemotherapy regime Kerryn would undertake; he used words that made me think the letter x was included in our alphabet for the purpose of complicating medical terminology.

  Over time, of course, the words slipped off my tongue in the same way I could recite the names of the death camps.

  Auschwitz–Treblinka–Bełżec–Sobibor–Majdanek.

  Epirubicen–Oxalyplatin–Xaloda–Taxol.

  Abracadabra.

  On the dotted graph, treatments were signposted three weeks apart. After the first infusion, Kerryn’s hair would start to fall out.

  ‘And then?’ I asked.

  ‘Let’s take one step at a time.’

  Sarah was in the room. The diagrams bore no resemblance to anything in her medical textbooks. But once she knew the name of the cancer, she immediately made the connection from diagnosis to prognosis. One of the trick questions she’d been taught in prepa
ration for exams was to identify signet ring cells, frequently associated with leather-bottle stomach.

  During the first week of treatment Kerryn underwent a battery of scans, all with animal names—CAT and PET, to add to the oink sound in oncology. Our greatest hope was pinned on the surgeon who specialised in cancerous stomachs. In his office he showed us a three-dimensional model of the scans of Kerryn’s cancer.

  To my eye, it looked like a Rorschach blot designed to test how we were reacting to our predicament.

  Me: Panic. Fear. I’m going to wet my pants.

  I’m sure Kerryn could read the scans but, sensing my bewilderment, the surgeon explained the moonscape images in layman’s language.

  ‘The abdomen is like a cupboard full of shelves,’ he began. ‘The cancerous fluid has seeped through the walls of the cupboard, the peritoneal cavity. So it will be hard to cut out the stomach given that the foundations are covered in rot. It’s as if someone scattered grains of rice through your stomach,’ he concluded.

  Gabe, who had flown from Sydney where he worked as a lawyer, sobbed from the side of the room. His reaction was so heartbreaking, I thought the doctor might alter his diagnosis to calm us down.

  ‘I’m going to do my best,’ the surgeon said. ‘Let’s book Kerryn into hospital on Friday and I’ll open her up and see what we can do.’

  That was when, desperate, I put my arrogant question to the doctor. ‘You realise you’re our god,’ I said. ‘How do we know we’re in the right house of worship?’

  He took my plea in the spirit in which it was intended and listed his credentials.

  In the car on the way home, Kerryn joked: ‘I think he’ll have to use chopsticks to get the rice out.’

  The procedure—a laparoscopy—was done at Monash Medical Centre under general anaesthetic. The children accompanied us. As we waited for Kerryn to be wheeled out, I got lost in the corridors and realised I was in the maternity section. It was the same ward where Rachel had been born.