Thirty Days Read online

  ‘Rav Zusia, why do you cry if you are assured that in the world to come you will be rewarded for your righteousness?’

  He was inconsolable, and his followers were puzzled, until he explained, seconds before he expired: ‘My beloved students. I will not be frightened when I meet my Maker if He should ask me, “Rav Zusia, why weren’t you like our forefather Abraham?” And I do not fear if I will be asked, “Rav Zusia, why weren’t you like Moses or Aaron the high priest?” What terrifies me more than anything is that when I rise to heaven I will be asked the one question that matters: “Rav Zusia, why weren’t you Rav Zusia?”’

  In one of our late-night reflections on her dying, Kerryn made fun of that punchline.

  ‘What if I’m asked, “Kerryn, why weren’t you Kerryn?”’

  We both laughed, but after a wry pause, her tone changed. ‘Was I Kerryn?’ she asked with awesome seriousness. Until then, her focus had been on dealing with the physical issues—the cumulative pain of nausea, cramps, the pressure of the tumour on her kidneys, and the problems with her bowels.

  But she was now asking herself more metaphysical questions—how could she not? This time she opened up and revealed her unspoken fears. She was reckoning with her life, her soul, and turning to me to be her judge.

  I thought about it for a second. I could have answered according to the ritual formula, You are pure. You are pure. You are pure. Instead I told her what we all felt.

  ‘A whole community is mourning for you. A whole community loves you. You, Kerryn, are love.’

  She started to sob.

  ‘You don’t understand. I feel so much love from so many people. From our kids. From you. It’s overwhelming. But don’t you see…? Her words were swallowed in her tears. ‘I don’t think I deserve it. I’m not worthy of love.’

  In that moment, I understood how pure Kerryn was, and also how hurt she was from her childhood.

  Don’t look at the dancing ballerina, my darling. Look at the reflection in the mirror. At the little girl’s eyes that framed it, once upon a time.

  ‘I want to say goodbye to my parents.’

  The words came out of nowhere, one morning while Kerryn was at the kitchen table cutting her toast into strips. Three months had passed since her diagnosis.

  ‘I want to visit their graves one last time.’

  I tried to talk her out of it. ‘Do you really think you can face that now?’

  She picked up a piece of toast.

  I tried again. ‘I thought you always said you didn’t care about cemeteries.’

  Without answering, she turned back to the daily crossword in the paper. After a minute, she took her medications and left the table. Half an hour later, she returned, dressed in a skirt.

  ‘So, are you going to drive me,’ she said, ‘or should I go by myself?’

  She disappeared inside our pantry. I thought she was getting food for the trip, but she emerged with two memorial candles that she kept there for the anniversaries of her parents’ deaths.

  We drove to the cemetery in silence.

  The last time I’d seen Sally was in hospital more than thirty years ago. I was surprised to find her chatting on the phone to a real-estate agent. Even as she was dying, she was making arrangements so that her children’s future would be secured. The last time I’d seen her father Paul was also in a hospital bed.

  The cemetery was eerily quiet, not like on Sundays, when my father often joined the throngs for a funeral or consecration.

  ‘I have more friends here zan at home,’ he would say, as he wandered around the tombstones as if they were houses in a village. ‘Zis one is Shloime’—he would point to a grave—‘and here’s Mendel. You remember, Marky, we used to go for dinners with them?’ He chuckled as he recalled an incident from his early days as an immigrant, when his surname was Bekiermaszyn. Then he shook his head. ‘I can count on vun hand how many friends I have left. Not enough for a card table.’

  Kerryn walked ahead of me to her mother’s grave on the main road. As successful property investors, the family had secured the best plots in the cemetery.

  Kerryn knelt by her mother’s grave and took out a rag she had brought in a plastic bag. She wiped the marble surface and the perpendicular stone where the names of the deceased members of her family were engraved.

  Sally Bursztyn. Her married name, Wein, was added in brackets.

  I watched Kerryn mouthing the words on the stone as she polished them.

  Daughter of Moshe and Esther.

  When she read the names of the children, and then of her mother’s brothers, she began to cry. I put my arm around her.

  I could not fathom the turmoil that must have been in her mind at that moment. From the tragedy of her mother’s and her father’s deaths, a feud with Kerryn’s uncles had erupted, ending up in a court case that tore the family apart. Sally had been divested of not only her entitlements, but also her legacy as a businesswoman.

  My name was listed on the tombstone alongside the spouses of Sally’s older children. Had she lived another thirty years, thirteen grandchildren could have been engraved on her tombstone, and four great-grandchildren, with more on the way.

  If only.

  Kerryn was lighting a memorial candle on the grave. It was as if she was lighting a candle for herself. She was only five years older than her mother was when she died. I began to cry with her, tears for the pain of what had passed, and for the pain of what was to come.

  Whose names would be written on Kerryn’s tombstone? I didn’t dare say it aloud, but there would be no grandchildren.

  All I could see was the future tombstone, engraved with the name—Kerryn Baker—daughter of Sally and Paul, husband to Mark. But it was the other three names that would be there—the names of our children—that filled me with immeasurable pain.

  ‘She was a strong woman,’ Kerryn said, kissing her mother’s grave. ‘She fought hard to live longer.’

  She sat on the edge of the stone, as though she was sitting with her mother at the kitchen table.

  ‘I don’t think I can be that strong,’ she said, choking on her tears. ‘I don’t know how she survived for seven years with so much pain.’

  ‘Don’t you remember what you told me?’ I protested. ‘You said you don’t want to live your mother’s story.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she sobbed, ‘I can’t fight what’s inside my body. I just don’t know how she did it.’

  ‘She didn’t do anything special. The chemo helped her get through. Just like it’s helping you.’

  ‘No, it was more than that. Her mind was more powerful than the chemo. I’m not like that.’

  ‘Kerryn, I wouldn’t be able to bear one injection, let alone everything you’re going through.’

  Only in the months to come would I understand that no act of willpower or heroism can ward off death when the time comes. Medicine fights cancer as best it can. But the mind can’t halt the spread of malignant cells; it can’t beat secondary tumours.

  ‘In any case, it’s not about strength,’ I said. ‘It’s about something more.’

  ‘More what?’

  ‘Grace. The way you carry yourself. The love you attract from so many people.’ I sat down next to her and held her in my arms. ‘We still don’t know how things will turn out. But one thing we do know is that you had none of the crap she had in her life. We’ve been blessed, can’t you see? A long marriage. Three children who adore you. You’ve been the best mother and wife that anyone could wish for. I know you suffered when you were young, but we’ve had the best years together.’

  My voice petered out as I repeated those words, the best years, because we both knew that soon Kerryn’s best years would come to an end, here, in this cemetery.

  ‘And’—I couldn’t stop myself—‘was your mother really that strong?’

  ‘Please, Mark. Not in front of her grave.’

  I had once made the mistake of bringing up the story in front of friends. Kerryn had glared at me in tha
t powerful way of hers, signalling, stop.

  Only in her last months would she speak openly about these matters, as though by exposing her secrets she could make amends on behalf of her family. Perhaps she believed her death was expiation for all that had gone wrong.

  But why should she have borne the guilt of her parents’ feuds? Do all children carry unwarranted shame, even as adults?

  It happened while her parents were making an attempt at reconciliation. Things weren’t working out and the acrimony was escalating. One day, like a scene in a movie, the children came home from school and Sally was gone. She had taken seven-year-old Glenn away with her to Israel. She left Paul to look after the other children. To be sure, Sally never concealed her hide-out, but her sudden vanishing seemed like a punishment for her husband. And her three older children were casualties.

  Sally stayed away for four months and placed Glenn in a school in Tel Aviv. The parents argued and screamed down the phone. The children took turns pleading with their mother to return.

  When she finally came home, she was unrecognisable. She’d had a face lift and a nose job. The children were shocked. The parents divorced soon after.

  ‘It’s all in the past,’ Kerryn said, heaving into my shoulder. ‘Everything.’

  She turned to the graves next to her mother’s. It was a double tombstone, with one long sheet of marble covering her grandparents, Zaida Moshe and Buba Esther.

  ‘I don’t want a double bed,’ she said, looking at me. ‘I want you to be free.’

  ‘No matter what happens, Kerryn, we’ll always be the parents of our children.’

  ‘You can remarry, but I want you to look after our children.’

  ‘I’m fifty-six,’ I said. ‘I’m old.’

  ‘We’re not old,’ she said. ‘They were old.’

  She pointed at her grandparents’ grave. ‘They were to blame for the break-up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know why I never told you. After Dad left Mum, they wanted to get back together again. That’s why they sold Milliara Grove and bought that new house in Caulfield. Mum was prepared to forgive him. But Buba and Zaida wouldn’t let her. They pushed him away. They turned him into a nothing in the family business. Who knows, if they hadn’t interfered, Mum and Dad might have stayed together. But Buba and Zaida were probably scared he’d get some of the family money after they died. They were all poison—my grandparents and my uncles.’

  To think that Kerryn had carried such an emotional burden all through our marriage, without my knowing, without my being able to help. I was reeling.

  I remembered her grandmother’s funeral, how the rabbi had pleaded for family peace at the graveside. ‘No more feuds,’ he had bellowed in his eulogy.

  ‘I had such a shit childhood,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could be normal after what I went through.’

  ‘Listen to you. You’re the most normal person I know! You’re the anchor of our family. I’m the crazy one. You keep me sane. How can you say you’re not normal?’

  She touched her heart with a clenched fist.

  ‘No one—not even you—knows what’s inside here.’

  It was a long trek down the road to her father’s grave. As in life, he was marginalised, pushed away to the edges of the cemetery.

  ‘You can’t get further from Mum than this,’ she said, as we walked along the gravel path.

  We found his gravestone among a cluster of strangers.

  Paul was the last casualty of the family war. I’d always pictured him as healthy, although his vitality was mostly expressed in his raucous barracking at Carlton football games. His weakness, however, turned out to be his voracious appetite for chocolate, which apparently raised his cholesterol to dangerous levels. A month after the year of mourning for Sally, he showed signs of heart stress and underwent open-heart surgery. The day after his operation, we were stunned by the news that Paul had been rushed back to the operating theatre and had died.

  ‘It should never have happened,’ Kerryn said, as she dusted the surface of his grave.

  ‘Your cancer shouldn’t be happening either,’ I said.

  ‘One was a medical mishap. And mine? It’s just bad luck.’

  There was one name missing from the tombstone. His sister, Lady Mary Fairfax, didn’t come to her brother’s funeral. She had her butler write that she was too overcome by grief and instead sent a teddy bear for Paul’s one-year-old grandson.

  I looked at my name. So far, I was on two graves as a son-in-law. I had always expected that, before anything else, I would be named ‘son of…’

  How long before I would be etched in stone as a cherished husband?

  For the first time, I let myself imagine that we could die together, and leave it to the children to build a double grave for us both.

  As we retraced our steps, she said, ‘Marky, you have to watch over the kids.’

  Had she read my mind? ‘Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.’

  ‘I mean it. Look after your health. Don’t jog more than twice a week.’

  On our way to the car, we stopped at the washing station.

  I picked up the plastic cup attached to the tap by a chain and poured water over my hand three times, according to the traditional rites of purification after visiting a cemetery.

  I filled the cup for Kerryn.

  ‘Should I be washing?’ she said.

  I poked her shoulders and touched her nose.

  ‘My hand isn’t going through you. So yes, wash.’

  She picked up the cup. ‘Wait.’ She dropped the cup into the basin. ‘I want to see.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Our family plots.’

  ‘I don’t even know where they are.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Your family bought about ten a few years ago. Before they ran out of space in the cemetery.’

  ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  ‘There’s a whole row waiting for us.’

  She turned left, determined to find the plots.

  I chased her. ‘We don’t need to do this.’

  ‘I want to know where I’ll be. Not that I’ll know when the time comes.’

  ‘Kerryn, you’re still alive. We’re going to beat this cancer.’

  ‘So then there’s no harm in looking.’

  She disappeared in a maze of tombstones, until I heard her. ‘It’s here.’

  She always had the best sense of direction. Drop her anywhere in the world and she could instantaneously tell which way was north. I couldn’t tell the direction I was facing from any room in our house, unless I listened for the tram rattling down Balaclava Road. She had also been the one to navigate us to my grandmother’s grave in Berlin: she found it in the snow as if she had X-ray vision.

  We were standing in front of rectangular patches of hard soil separated by thin frames of cement. They could have been garden beds or roadside pavements. We counted out ten—ten investments for the future habitat of the deceased Baker clan.

  I had imagined the future as two spots where my parents would lie side by side. That day was still to come, but I was filled with a dread beyond words that the order of things would probably be inverted.

  ‘Which one’s for me?’ she said.

  ‘Can we please not discuss this?’

  ‘Why? You once told me when we visited the old cemetery in Krakow that you wanted a tombstone with a tin roof. Like that famous rabbi who died hundreds of years ago.’

  ‘I was depending on you to do that for me. Maybe you still will?’

  ‘No, Mark. You know I won’t be here to do that. And I don’t want anything that looks like a postbox. I don’t care, but keep it simple.’

  ‘Enough already,’ I said. ‘Anyway, our children will be the only ones who will bother visiting us.’

  ‘I don’t care who visits me once I’m gone,’ she said. ‘It’s so ugly here. Can’t they plant some trees?’

  ‘Then you do care.’

  ‘No, I won
’t know the difference. But it would be nice to be surrounded by some greenery.’

  ‘I’ll bring you a pot plant if you build me a tin roof.’

  ‘I think you’ll have to give those instructions to someone else,’ she said, as she found her way back to the main path. ‘And no flowers. I hate flowers. They wilt and smell, and then they die.’

  She looked around. ‘Maybe if you park me somewhere over there between Mum and Dad, I can keep them apart.’

  ‘Kerryn, don’t talk like that. You can’t give up hope.’

  ‘Okay. So maybe I can stretch out my hands and bring them back together again.’

  I watched her as she stopped at the basin and washed her hands. Then she bent down and plucked a few strands of grass from the ground. She threw them over her shoulder—a Jewish superstition to ward off death.

  ‘I suppose it can’t hurt,’ she said, and smiled for a second, before she collapsed, sobbing all the way home.

  8

  THE ABANDONED WIFE

  After only one bout of chemotherapy, Kerryn was transferred from the hospital to a hospice. There were strangers dying in all the rooms around us. Was it possible that Kerryn would also die before reaching her next treatment?

  The patients in the hospice were numbered one to twenty-two, arranged in a square like a board game in which one by one the losing players are eliminated and replaced. Each of the doors faced a lounge area, furnished with plush leather couches, a television that flared silently and a chess table, set before a homely fireplace. At the centre of the room was an atrium surrounded by glass walls. Inside was an oak tree, its branches jutting above the roofline towards the sky, visible above.

  Our room was number eight. It resembled a hotel suite, with its own bathroom, spacious cupboards and carpeted floors. There were two armchairs and a blue couch that converted into a bed. An elegant writing desk doubled as a dining table. Breakfast included homemade croissants.

  The most coveted rooms offered a view of the main road, where visitors came and went through a green arched gateway. Ours looked over suburban flats, where I could see people conducting their lives behind half-closed curtains. An old-fashioned circle clock hung opposite Kerryn’s bed, alongside an expensively framed replica of a familiar Monet. As for the icon of Jesus on the cross, one might prefer the subtlety of a Gideon’s Bible in a drawer, but who could deny the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart their titular prerogatives?