Thirty Days Read online

  We spoke by Skype. The husband in his Provence villa began by regaling me with stories of how doctors are in cahoots with drug companies to cover up longstanding cures for cancer. I could hear a machine whirring in the background. He swung the camera around and showed me a heap of vegetables from which he was extracting juices. I felt as though I was watching a TV advertising channel.

  ‘I’ve taken my wife to the Gerson Institute in Mexico.’ He proudly explained that it is located in Mexico because the American medical system is a conspiracy and won’t permit it to run out of the US. The cure, for a hefty fee, is a diet of natural juices three times a day, and caffeine enemas.

  ‘How is your wife doing?’ I asked. He didn’t rotate the camera to show me her face.

  ‘She’s resting.’

  ‘Charlatan,’ I thought to myself.

  For the past half-century cancer treatments have essentially relied on three approaches: radiation, surgery and chemotherapy. While adjustments have been made, their formulations have only undergone minimal changes. I ordered a DVD of a documentary about the history of cancer called Emperor of Maladies. While Kerryn slept upstairs, I watched the series, wondering if there was anything I could learn from the images of children hospitalised in the 1940s.

  Was I supposed to feel reassured that Kerryn’s disease was the emperor of all illnesses? If so, for all the treatments we were receiving, I worried that the emperor had no clothes.

  There was talk of a new treatment, a disruptive technology that was going to change everything: immunotherapy, a method that targets specific genes and builds up the body’s auto-immune system.

  But first, we needed to await the results of a string of genetic tests.

  A terrible image crossed my mind, as though from an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I imagined Kerryn’s funeral, the grave surrounded by her friends.

  From the back of the crowd, I could see a familiar face, mouthing a message to me, as we poured earth over the grave.

  ‘You should have gone to China.’

  ‘Quack, quack,’ I answered.

  Should I have called that magical rabbi with the fur hat?

  Over the course of a week, there was no medication in the hospital that could stop Kerryn from vomiting. I set up a makeshift stretcher in her room and rarely left her side. I was already taking on several tasks in my role as chief carer. Catching vomit was one of them. Another was answering the hundreds of text messages, which were getting out of hand. Kerryn was too nauseated to look at them, yet even in her state of pain she didn’t want to be impolite. So I commandeered her phone and typed a standard note to all her friends.

  It’s Mark here. Kerryn appreciates your messages but she is too unwell to answer at the moment. Once she is better she will respond to you individually.

  Immediately, I was flooded with responses, mostly composed of emoticons—three red hearts, or lips throwing virtual kisses.

  My other role was door bitch. Friends wanted to visit Kerryn. They understood when I insisted, No visitors. Kerryn’s siblings also wanted to come, but Kerryn wasn’t up to seeing anyone. All she wanted was solitude and silence. Stillness to meditate her way out of her pain and nausea.

  I was the perfect carer for Kerryn.

  Over the years, I had learnt the art of making my presence feel like an absence. That is both the virtue and vice of marriage. You get used to each other. In bed or around the house, you become both ubiquitous and invisible.

  ‘Everyone else is so needy,’ Kerryn said, in a brief pause between vomits. ‘They all want something from me.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Love.’

  The pain from the vomiting was debilitating. Kerryn was turning into a zombie, her staring face sinking into her skull. One word kept crossing my mind—Musselman, borrowed from the camp language for the walking dead. There were times as I watched her when I thought she was dying. It had only been ten days since chemotherapy had begun, and already I felt we were falling over the precipice.

  A nurse often sat on the edge of her bed, caressing her back as Kerryn vomited into the plastic tube. The rub became a meditative moment of bonding. Each vomit was followed by a brief calm. The nurse meditated with her. And then she spoke, not as a nurse, but more like a spiritual counsellor.

  ‘We have to pray that the chemo will work for you. We have to pray together.’

  Kerryn took a moment before answering.

  ‘I’ve been praying a lot,’ she said.

  Satisfied by Kerryn’s religious acquiescence, the nurse continued massaging.

  ‘But sometimes, I just say fuck.’

  The nurse was jolted by the expletive. As was I. And then we all burst into laughter at the contrast to all those healing prayers.

  Yes, fuck. It was not spoken in anger. It was not directed at anyone. It was simply radical amazement at her condition.

  It was what Sarah said when she walked into the house the day of the diagnosis and embraced her mother. ‘What the fuck.’

  Yes. What the fuck!

  That, indeed, is a prayer. It is the prayer of Rabbi Levi of Berditchev who, two hundred years earlier, turned to God and accused him. How dare you?

  The language might have been more polite, but the sentiment was the same, and echoed by my mother as she railed against Kerryn’s fate.

  ‘If I didn’t have enough of You when you abandoned me as a child,’ she screamed, pounding her fists at God, ‘now I’m finished with You forever!’

  Personally, I had no quibble with God, in part because I’m not a believer, but even if I was, I stand on the side of the believers of ancient times, who resisted simplistic theories that pass for high-minded sermons. Take the case of the sudden death of an innocent boy whose fate was hotly debated in the Talmud more than two thousand years ago. His father had asked his son to climb a ladder and bring him a freshly laid egg from a nest. This was no naughty boy from an Enid Blyton book. The boy was so pious that he rushed without hesitation to fulfil his father’s orders. What’s more, once he reached the top rung, he knew that scripture directed him to shoo away the mother bird before removing the egg. As he reached for the egg, the ladder cracked and the boy tumbled off and fell on the crown of his head to an untimely death.

  How was this theologically possible, the rabbis wailed? For they all knew that in scripture there are only two commandments out of six hundred and thirteen whose fulfilment merits the reward of ‘a lengthening of one’s days’. One is honouring parents, which the boy was certainly doing by obeying his father’s orders. And the other is the commandment to shoo away a mother bird from its nest, presumably out of sensitivity for the potential life enclosed in the egg.

  The rabbis debated the conundrum day and night.

  Maybe the boy had evil thoughts in his heart, one said.

  Or maybe he was a reincarnation of a bad soul.

  Or perhaps his truncated life refers to the promise of eternity in the world to come.

  But no, the rabbis, concluded. There was no mystery to it. The boy’s mother had nagged her husband to fix that rickety ladder for years. They lost a son for one reason only. Not God, not wickedness, but because nature follows its own course.

  A broken ladder will collapse, just as a metastasised cancer will spread, just as a drunken driver crossing the border between Poland and Germany will crash a car and kill my grandmother, just as a murderer with evil intentions will kill an entire village.

  So, all that is left to do is pray from the deepest seat of our souls, and cry out the holiest of words.

  Fuck.

  •

  A week after Kerryn’s first chemotherapy, the cancer continued pressing on her kidneys, immobilising her left leg. At her doctors’ urging, she was making attempts to eat. I sat with her over breakfast in hospital as she munched on cornflakes, then vomited them undigested into a bag. Meanwhile, I ate the lavish extras we ordered from the menu. Croissants. Poached eggs.

  Finally, we were introduced to the pall
iative-care team. The head was a wonderful doctor, a Catholic operating within a Catholic system, who displayed the most altruistic form of caritas, charitable compassion. She was insistent, with the oncologist’s support, that Kerryn be moved to a different section of Cabrini in order to overcome her symptoms.

  ‘You mean a different ward?’ I said.

  ‘No, we have a network of hospitals. We are suggesting a hospice in Prahran,’ she said.

  The subtle change in terminology from hospital to hospice set off alarm bells for me. I had been to that place before. It is an institution where people go to die. A close friend had spent her last days there. I’d gone to visit her, bidden her farewell on her deathbed, then given a eulogy at her funeral.

  So, my fears were not unfounded. Kerryn was dying.

  But the palliative-care doctor insisted I had nothing to fear. She reeled off statistics. ‘About forty per cent of our patients are there for short-stay rehabilitation.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘You’re in the forty per cent category.’

  I followed her out of the room.

  ‘Are you telling me the truth?’ I begged, in tears now.

  ‘Mark, I always tell patients and their carers the truth. It’s my job. Kerryn needs help getting over this chemotherapy. Once we control the symptoms, she will be able to go home.’

  ‘For how long?’ I said, remembering that some patients were on oral medication for a period of years.

  ‘No one can answer that question.’

  I started to bargain with her, like Abraham to God.

  ‘Six months?’ I said, picking a period that would carry her through until summer.

  Her response never left me.

  ‘Mark. Have you seen Kerryn’s scans?’

  6

  SCREAM

  Soon after she was diagnosed, the palliative-care team at Cabrini offered to send Kerryn a biographer. It was a standard service: six sessions for a dying patient. Never one to refuse a deal, she accepted. The project was a disaster. At the first session, Kerryn told the biographer her name, and cried for the remaining hour. In the second session, she cried continuously about the fate of her parents. Eventually, through no fault of the volunteer, she gave up telling her story.

  ‘Let me write your story for you,’ I said.

  ‘My life is too boring,’ she answered, ‘It’s not like I survived the Holocaust or anything.’

  It was twenty years since I’d written the memoir about my parents’ survival. Kerryn and I lived a blessed existence; our lives appeared to have nothing worth revealing.

  But Kerryn’s story hardly lacked drama even if she didn’t want to admit it. My fear was that the entire history of our lives together would somehow be erased, so I began to interrogate her, focusing on minute details that hadn’t crossed my mind in decades.

  ‘Where did we park the car when we first kissed?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  I covered my tracks with vagueness. ‘Do you remember what car I drove?’

  ‘A Honda,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t remember what colour it was.’

  ‘Silver.’

  I tried to impress her with facts to prove I hadn’t entirely forgotten the intimate record of our past. ‘Do you remember we went to see ET after your mother died? It was at the Forum Cinema in the city.’

  ‘That was before she died,’ she said. ‘We went from Prince Henry’s hospital.’

  ‘Before or after our wedding?’

  ‘Marky, what does it matter? Why are you asking me all these questions?’

  How could I explain my motivations? We hadn’t yet admitted to each other that it was unlikely she would survive the year.

  I was afraid—afraid not only that I would lose her and our life together, but that my entire adult life would become nothing more than a memory. I was the historian, but Kerryn had always been the archivist. I was the one who wrote the narrative, but she was the one who remembered the how, the when, the who. There were so many things I had already forgotten. Would I wake one day and, like an amnesiac, lose not only my wife but my recollection of the events that tied us together?

  Now I saw my life as a three-act drama. My childhood had been dominated by my parents and the secrecy about their Holocaust trauma. Our marriage covered most of my experiences since turning twenty. And now, at fifty-six, I was living an interlude that meant the drawing of a curtain, The End.

  This wasn’t how I expected my story to evolve.

  It was supposed to be my parents who would allow me to confront the natural rhythms of old age.

  And then it struck me: I would have to add a fourth act, that unknowable time I would face alone, reinventing myself without Kerryn by my side. Would I actually remarry, as she had encouraged me to do?

  In Jewish law, the mourning period for the death of a parent or a child is one year. For a spouse, it’s only thirty days. I would learn at the funeral that children rend their garments on the left side, the seat of the heart. And, according to the same law, I would tear my shirt collar on the right side—the symbol that a husband or wife should be encouraged to remarry quickly.

  Thirty days, one month. Is that all it takes for a husband to move on, after thirty-two years of marriage?

  For now, I needed to learn how to improvise the new script that had been thrown at me. How would I write this fourth act of the story—not only our past, but also the present and future—without Kerryn there to answer my questions?

  And so I began to shadow her, recording her movements and words. I felt like a royal scribe, jotting down comments in a diary I downloaded onto my phone. I even bought a digital tape-recorder, the smallest one I could find. When I wrote The Fiftieth Gate, I didn’t act secretively. I sat with my parents in their living room and asked them to face a large camera. ‘Tell me your story,’ I said, ‘from the beginning.’ I insisted that they push through their worst nightmares, and I taped every second of the stories they had kept from their two sons for four decades.

  I could have asked Kerryn to do the same, but I knew she would be resistant; she didn’t believe she had a story to tell, and wasn’t prepared to rehearse her end by relaying an autobiography that ended in her fifties.

  My secret diary notes were written furtively. While Kerryn lay on the couch, exhausted, or sorted through files before passing them on to me, I pretended I was answering text messages.

  My diary is filled with unrelated phrases, triggers to jolt my memory.

  Left leg hurting.

  Pulling car by roadside and crying.

  Don’t let me live longer than I have to.

  I began to write longer sentences, gradually forming a record of each day. It became an obsessive ritual. I felt like one of the Marrano Jews, who practised their religion in secret when it was forbidden in mediaeval Spain.

  It seemed wrong to be spying on my wife, yet to admit what I was doing would have been interpreted as a declaration of despair—that I was scripting her last lines, her death speech, before she was ready to rehearse it. I never used the tape-recorder, although I did read the instruction manual and put the device in my pocket, in case I found an opportune time to interview her. I kept thinking about how I would write her story, pretending to myself that I was doing it for her sake, to immortalise her for future generations.

  How does one write any biography? Do I approach the task as a historian, amassing documents and photographs and outlining a chronology of her life? Do I write her biography from the top down, contextualising her within a broader social setting? And what about the things that only a husband knows, secret intimacies that common decency ties to a lengthy statute of limitations?

  The interviewers of the Shoah archive were all given a script. Before the War. During the War. After the War. But the fifty-five thousand who gave testimony were the survivors. The dead never testified. A year before Kerryn’s illness, I assisted a ninety-nine-year-old survivor who was writing his life story. He lived in an
old-age home and we were hoping to celebrate his hundredth birthday. The last time I saw him, I rearranged the fragments of his story into chronological order, and integrated them into a single document on his computer. A few weeks later he died.

  Write and record!

  But Kerryn would have no After Cancer to speak about. I was creating an archive of her life that recorded her death, not her survival.

  And so, to assuage my guilt for spying on her, I reframed what I was doing. I drew on a rabbinic legend that tells the story of the Angel of Death, who was sent down by God to raise Rabbi Nahmani, a famous first-century scholar, to heaven. According to the legend, the rabbi was untouchable while engaged in the study of scripture. The holy words would ward off the Angel of Death, as a crucifix averts the approach of a vampire. The rabbi studied day and night, muttering divine words as a protective shield. Exasperated, the Angel of Death returned to God and reported his failed mission.

  ‘Go back down there,’ God ordered his dark emissary, and taught him to perform a trick to deter the wanted scholar from his perpetual recitation of verses.

  The trick was as simple as something from Bernard’s Magic Shop. The Angel stalked Rabbi Nahmani while he was under a tree teaching his students, and blew a powerful breath into the leaves. The rustling sound startled the rabbi, who feared that Roman soldiers were about to ambush him. In that split second, he ceased his recitations. It was enough time for the Angel of Death to snatch him from the bushes and carry his soul to heaven, where God awaited him.

  I didn’t believe in the main protagonists of the story. The Angel of Death was as fanciful as the stork that leaves a baby at the doorstep; as for God, I never let my atheism get in the way of a good story, or the habits of religious ritual, but this story was bogus. The only character whose existence I believed in was Rabbi Nahmani, whose cause of death was as bewildering to his disciples as Kerryn’s was to me.

  And so, I suspended my disbelief and resorted to the magic of my youth.

  My words would keep Kerryn alive.

  I had to write every day, one digital page at a time, and weave a protective web of stories around my wife. I would write the longest book in the world, exhaust the memory bank of my iPhone, adding terabytes to the hardware, to cope with the decades of stories I would add to her life.