Thirty Days Read online

  Turn left for life. Turn right for death.

  Memories of the births of all three of our children came back to me. Our first was named Gabriel because he was an angel, and Paul after Kerryn’s father. He was born in Jerusalem’s oldest hospital in a room divided by a curtain—on the other side an Arab woman ululated all through her labour. But the noise was nothing compared to my mother’s shouts. She ran up and down the corridor proclaiming to the nurses in a Hebrew she’d learned in the Displaced Persons camps of Germany: L’savta me-ostralya yesh neched—‘The grandmother from Australia has a grandson.’ Our son was circumcised eight days later in a hotel that faced the mythical spot where Abraham had raised a knife to his son Isaac.

  Sarah was named after her maternal grandmother, Sally, and bears the closest resemblance to Kerryn. My mother always reminds her granddaughter of the time she went on a holiday to Surfers Paradise with her grandparents. The trip cost a fortune in telephone bills because every time my mother went onto the balcony to smoke, Sarah would creep into the bedroom and call Kerryn, sobbing, ‘I want my mummy, I want my mummy.’ In the days after Kerryn’s death, I watched my mother clutching Sarah, whispering, ‘When I hold you, Sarah, I feel that I am holding your mother.’

  And what about Rachel, born as a New Year’s baby? My mother—who figures a lot in this narrative of other people’s lives—always says that her granddaughter is a mirror image of her. One can see it in a photograph of twelve-year-old Genia taken immediately after the war. ‘Of course, now that I’m old, you don’t look like me,’ my mother will always say, ‘but back then, when I was beautiful, we had the same face.’ My father thinks Rachel mirrors his traits: born with business nous, pragmatic, and bursting with enthusiasm.

  Happy families create their own lexicon, invented when children are young, and often spoken by parents in a babyish voice even when the children have grown up. So much of our lives were spent with one or more of our children in bed, tickling them, or embracing them with love that surpasses even the deepest marital affections, or simply sleeping with them between us, and waking at night to listen to their breaths, imagining the worst when they were silent.

  But on this day, as adults in their twenties, they each said in their own way: ‘I need to be there for Mum when she wakes up from her operation. Her face was always the first thing I saw whenever I woke from an anaesthetic.’

  As we waited for the surgeon to emerge, for some reason, I thought of all the inventive birthday cakes Kerryn had made for each of the children—choo-choo trains, animals, chocolate footballs—but none matched the annual cake produced for Rachel on our summer beach holidays. Kerryn might not have been the baker on those celebrations, but she was the orchestrator, enlisting all the children to create a gigantic sand-cake, before it was washed away as the tide came in.

  I always deferred to Kerryn to tell our family stories—she had a memory for detail, and would repeat them excitedly, her entire body contorting into the shapes of the event. Of how, for example, on a skiing weekend, we acceded to the children’s demand for one more ride, just one more, and how Sarah slipped through the hands of the chairlift catcher, and we watched her disappear into the misty darkness.

  Is this how it ends? we thought. The machinery was switched off and Sarah, only six years old, was left dangling on her own above a mountain crest, barely able to clutch the safety bar. The wait at the bottom of the slope felt like an eternity, but she was eventually returned to us, waving excitedly from the front seat of a skidoo.

  Is this how it ends? I thought once more, as the surgeon approached us in his purple hospital pyjamas.

  ‘I’m afraid the news isn’t good,’ he said, lowering his mask. ‘The cancer has spread more than I expected. There’s nothing we can do.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ said Gabe.

  ‘I’ve done my part. Your oncologist will help you from here.’

  ‘You can’t just abandon us,’ we all pleaded.

  ‘I promise I’ll bring up her case in our weekly research meetings. I won’t forget your mother. I can see you’re a special family.’

  I know he meant it, but I also know that these gods watch their patients die daily. Our idol lay smashed to pieces on the floor.

  We returned to Kerryn’s bed and all four of us lay with her.

  Our oncologist refused to put a date on Kerryn’s prognosis. He spoke in vague terms, not because he would not tell us the truth, but because of the nature of medicine. ‘No human is a statistic,’ he explained. ‘Kerryn holds certain advantages that could make her an exception on the prognostic charts. She’s young, strong and healthy.’

  ‘Healthy?’ I wanted to interrupt.

  ‘There are new discoveries being made all the time,’ he continued. ‘One of my patients has been on oral chemotherapy tablets for years.’

  Our ears collectively pricked up. ‘Years?’

  He gave the analogy of HIV. ‘It hasn’t been cured but contained. People who used to die from AIDS are now living with it and living a long time.’

  We went home both sceptical and optimistic, as we prepared Kerryn for her first bout of chemotherapy.

  •

  You never know how things will turn out. A year ago, my nephew’s father-in-law went cycling with a group of friends in Positano. Who knows what happened to him, dressed in his lycra and helmet, as he turned a hairpin bend? In a split second, he flew over a scenic cliff and his life ended. He didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to his family or his beloved grandchildren. He would barely have had the chance to say, Fuck, is this how it ends?

  In the wake of the bike accident, telling my brother Johnny and his wife Anita about Kerryn’s diagnosis not only deepened their despair, but raised the question that was on all our minds. How would our parents cope? At the best of times, my mother could not deal with loss. At funerals, she moaned and groaned louder than anyone, explaining that each time she was re-experiencing the loss of her mother after the war. She regularly delivered dramatic orations about her past—how, after jumping three times from a train to Bełżec death camp, her mother had survived only to be killed in Berlin in a car accident. ‘For a little girl to lose a mother,’ she whimpered, ‘that was the worst.’

  And now she would have to face the threat of losing her ersatz daughter—her Kerrynu—who cared for her, who took her to doctor’s appointments, to have her ears checked, who sat with her for hours, soothing her pain. In her growing deafness, my mother had become locked inside her own thoughts. There were times I wondered if she was developing dementia, but I knew that wasn’t it. Her tongue, when unleashed—usually against one of her sons—was as caustic as ever. Her brain was not in decay, but her thoughts had become amplified by their imprisonment, isolating her from friends and family. I could no longer communicate with her and was angry that she had allowed herself to decline prematurely.

  My father had a favourite line when he used to return a few days before my mother from Surfers Paradise. ‘Mummy’s in Surfers,’ he would say, ‘and I’m in Paradise.’

  Despite their palpable and deep affection for one another, he was lonely. He found a few hours of refuge working in his clothing factory each day. At night, he would return and sit on the couch watching TV. The cable network listed the shows he had taped: The Chaser, Hitler’s Generals, Deal or No Deal, The Nazi Camps.

  How to tell this elderly couple about Kerryn’s illness? We could have postponed informing them, but Kerryn insisted we tell them before they heard from friends. She knew that only she could bring them any comfort. And so together we drove to their cluttered apartment. Kerryn squeezed next to my mother in a wide armchair, her arms wrapped around her.

  She broke the news gradually. ‘I’m not well,’ she said with a sad face.

  My mother misheard. ‘Yes, darling, I haven’t been feeling well lately. It’s a virus that won’t go away.’

  ‘Genia,’ Kerryn said louder, ‘I’m not well.’

  ‘Who? You?’

  My
father leaned forward in his chair, blinking rapidly.

  ‘What is it?’ said my mother.

  ‘Here,’ she said. She put my mother’s hand on her stomach, as though she were pregnant.

  ‘What is it?’

  Kerryn said the word quietly. ‘Cancer.’

  My father heard. He leaped up from his chair and moved to the next room, already in tears.

  ‘What are you saying?’ my mother repeated, urgent now, taking her cue from her husband’s reaction.

  ‘Cancer,’ Kerryn said, louder this time.

  ‘What? I can’t hear you.’

  But she had heard, in the same way she selectively took in anything that disturbed her.

  With whatever strength Kerryn had, she shouted the word loud enough to be heard down the street.

  My mother reverted to Yiddish and started beating herself on her chest. ‘Don’t tell me this. Not my Kerryn. Not you. God help us. God help you.’

  Kerryn squeezed my mother’s hand. My mother pulled away and faced her daughter-in-law, then turned to the ceiling to talk to God.

  ‘Take me. Take me!’ she wailed.

  It was an old refrain, the one she had carried since childhood, wondering why she, alone of all the Jewish children in her town, had survived. When I wrote The Fiftieth Gate, there was only one section she wanted me to delete, the one in which I recounted how her father was on the Judenrat, the Jewish Council, which accorded him privileges on the day the town’s Jewish population was transported by train to a death camp. He had used his protektzia—his special connections—to save his daughter.

  ‘Take me’ was the silent refrain that lay beneath her years of depression.

  ‘Give me your cancer!’ My mother continued shouting, flapping her arms. ‘I don’t want to live. I’ll throw myself off a bridge. I’ll smoke and I’ll smoke until I’m gone. Take me—not you! You should live more years than me.’

  My father had returned from the bathroom, where he kept a bottle of Valium. He popped a pill in his mouth, then handed one to his wife with a glass of water. Then he took a second pill. And for half an hour, he wept and broke our hearts, while Kerryn, who was facing the prospect of her own death, consoled the two people who had cared for her like a mother and father after her own parents had died.

  That moment now merges with the sight of my parents at Kerryn’s funeral. They were heavily sedated, but nothing could stop my mother from plucking the shovel from the earth as though it was a dagger. My brother tried to stop her.

  ‘Let me be,’ she said, pulling herself free. ‘I have to do this for my Kerrynu.’

  She looked at my father.

  ‘Come, Yossl.’ She gestured to him.

  He stumbled to the grave, and heaved the earth in spadefuls, an old man reliving the trauma of his own childhood in the camps.

  During the week before chemotherapy, Kerryn and I began to prepare for the possibility of her dying. At her urging, I called our lawyer and told him we needed to redo our Testamentary Will.

  ‘Do we really need to think about this now?’ I asked Kerryn.

  She shrugged. ‘Let’s pretend I’m healthy and we’re just being responsible parents.’

  But there was no room for pretending once the discussion turned to what the lawyer called the Gigolo Factor. The main issue had shifted from guardianship of the children to guardianship of what, in legal terms, was called ‘the survivor’.

  I commented that I’d always wanted to be a survivor. My joke fell flat.

  ‘What happens if Mark remarries?’ she wanted to know.

  The mere mention of it shocked me. ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ I insisted.

  We discussed the options, which were limited, and in the end agreed to write a Letter of Wishes that protected the interests of our children.

  ‘You realise that a Letter of Wishes isn’t binding,’ our lawyer told us.

  ‘You have my honour,’ I addressed him as a witness, then turned to Kerryn and vowed, ‘I would never do anything that betrays our legacy.’

  ‘Just don’t marry a bitch.’

  The early symptoms that had led to Kerryn’s diagnosis—back pain and indigestion—subsided for a few days. We asked ourselves if it was really true, and not a bad dream. But a week later her backaches became constant and she lost movement in her left leg. I now had to lift her foot to help her get into a car or onto the bed.

  After one of her tests in hospital, she asked the nurse to release her in time for an appointment at the hairdresser. At the salon, I sat in a barber’s chair, caught in a maze of mirrors that connected our two images an infinite number of times. As her hair was smoothed, I watched her writhe in pain, attempting to relieve her aching back. It was as if I could visualise the individual cancer cells multiplying.

  In that week before chemotherapy, the cancer made an advanced assault on her body.

  Likewise, an assault was made on our house by a battalion of ants. Each morning, I would wake before Kerryn to remove the long black trails that covered the walls and shelves of our pantry. I vacuumed the ants off surfaces and crevices, knowing they would find a way back hours later. No spray could remove the proliferating specks.

  One morning, when I came down to the kitchen, the floor was flooded. I traced it to a hose that had ruptured when I moved the fridge to block a suspected entry point for ants. It was as if our house was succumbing to Kerryn’s illness.

  I called the pest control people. I told them my wife had cancer and they had to do something about the ant nests. Then the plumber came and fixed the hose.

  The kitchen floor had permanent water stains and, for a few more days, the ants still managed to cross the threshold of poisonous chemicals. Our own nest was falling apart.

  It was time for Kerryn to purchase a wig. She was guided by a friend who had recovered from breast cancer, only for the doctors to discover another primary site of the tumour. As the worst luck would have it, her husband was also diagnosed with a form of stomach cancer. He had undergone a stomach resection, and was surviving on a new drug and a new wardrobe of slim-line clothes. We spent many nights at their house talking about cancer. It felt strange to be the odd one out.

  Kerryn tried on her friend’s wigs, and we found the perfect style and colour. They decided they could be cancer twins.

  With her sister Ann, Kerryn took the train into the city to purchase the chosen wig. As she looked at herself in the mirror, she cried, remembering her own mother’s wig from when she contracted breast cancer. The owner of the shop, a Jewish man called Mr Lourie, had known Sally.

  ‘I once dated her,’ he told the sisters. ‘She was the most glamorous girl in Carlton.’

  ‘You also look glamorous,’ I said to Kerryn, when she came home and modelled the wig over her full head of hair.

  But already I was fearful of seeing my wife bald. Shamefully, I kept having to remind myself that Kerryn’s situation was radically different from that of the women at Auschwitz.

  But death is death is death.

  The morning before we went to hospital, I called a friend who was a musician and professional photographer, whose camera we had always trusted to capture our family’s milestones. He arrived early and we all lined up in our garden. For a second we could pretend this was just another celebratory occasion. We posed as a family, hugging Kerryn, and then each of us with her, kissing her.

  I also posed with her as we had in our classic wedding picture, facing one another, my arms around her waist, hers resting on my chest. We looked at each other and I swore to myself that no one would ever view these photographs until after her death, and that I would preserve her dignity by not letting anyone capture her in a post-chemotherapy image.

  Snap.

  As he left, I ran into the street, sobbing, and embraced our friend.

  The next time he visited our home was during the shiva. Instead of a camera, he took out his guitar and played Kerryn’s favourite songs. As we sang our hearts out to ‘Forever Young’, I stared
at the empty chair next to me, until Sarah moved to sit in it. She wrapped her arms around me to comfort us both.

  What else does a person do when facing the prospect of dying? ‘Do I write each of the kids a note?’ Kerryn asked.

  ‘What would you say?’

  She burst into tears.

  I embraced her. ‘There are no words that can capture a lifetime of love.’

  A few days later I found her at her desk in front of her computer screen. She was listening to a song by The Carpenters, ‘Close to You’. I guessed what she was doing. Over the years, she had adopted a theme song for each of the kids. ‘Here Comes the Sun’ for Gabe, ‘I Am Woman’ for Sarah, and for Rachel, the lyrics that described her birth as the work of angels sprinkling ‘starlight in your eyes’. She was synchronising the music to old video footage of the children.

  She had found a calling to occupy her final stretch of time on earth: before she died, she wanted to make the children a movie of their lives—our life.

  She was anxious to finish it before her chemotherapy began, but only managed five minutes of footage that I still can’t bring myself to watch now that she has gone. This unfinished film not only reflects the unfulfilled desires of its creator, but is a reminder of how our own family story never reached a timely conclusion—Kerryn never got to continue to watch the children grow into adults, to celebrate more of their milestones, to become a grandparent with me, to grow old together with grace.

  At the same time, she wanted to shower the children with gifts. She fought through her pain and took each of them on shopping expeditions. When she returned after half a day on the road, she would lie on the couch, exhausted, and make the children try on their new outfits.

  ‘I also want to buy something for you, Marky.’

  For our last wedding anniversary, she had bought me a Georg Jensen watch. The gift had surprised me; all I had for her was a Jamie Oliver cookbook. She took me shopping and insisted that I choose an item of clothing. I walked out with a pair of jeans. Her idea to give gifts was full of love.