The Last Days of My Mother (11 page)

“Eva Briem,” Mother said, oblivious to where I was going with this until she noticed the tattoo and shot me a look.

“My pleasure,” Hans replied. “It truly is my pleasure to meet a brother and sister in Christ. May the Lord be with you and bring us together again. Hallelujah!”

“Did you see that?” I roared with laughter when the bull was out of earshot. “Did you see the fucking swastika
tattooed
on his
forehead?
”

“It was obviously old. Very, very faint.”

“As if that changes anything. These creeps don't change overnight just because they join a cult. They're hateful people and always will be. I told you this was a racist gathering. I. TOLD. YOU. SO.”

To make up for my little victory I promised to get Mother another Campari. She agreed to forgive me only if I promised to be wholeheartedly entertaining for the rest of the evening, which I did. But then my worst fears came true: there was an exodus from the bankers' party over to the Nazi ball. The Klambra boys had taken over a leather couch a short distance from our table. Benni was cackling at his own jokes and Daniel sat stone-faced with his featherbrain engaged in some inner dimensions of kinky sex and insider trading. They sat there with their coke-fueled laughter, their tumblers of century-old single malt whiskey mixed with cola, and Cuban cigars, having the time of their lives at the Nazi ball with Mother and me. All the dark and repressed memories that I'd buried
in the graveyard of my brain now clawed their way back to the surface. Benni stared at me, with no apparent recollection of owing me a thing, because he shot out of his seat and shouted across the room: “Hermann! Fucking hell! It's the fucking Herminator!”

“Good evening, Benni.”

“What the hell, man! You in the loop?”

“No, Benni. I'm not in the
loop
,” I answered and was suddenly thrilled to be with my mother at a Nazi ball. “I'm here with my mother, just having a good time. Brain Damage and herbs, it's
da bomb
.”

“Weren't you at the meeting with Sjonni? Here for the greens? The Ice Baron takes care of his peeps, man. Fixrenta is taking over the buy-to-travel market. It's genius, Hermann. Pure genius!”

“Now you listen to me,” Mother said. She found Benni revolting and hated him intensely after my tale of the two million. “We're here to have a good time, or are at least trying to, but you're not making it easy. I have cancer and Trooper and I are here so I can kill myself. But first I just wanted to have a bit of fun, so please crawl back into whatever hole you came out of.”

Benni took a few steps backward. “See you around, Hermann, my man. Peace out.”

“What happened to that cash you owe me?” I called, because my hatred was back from the dead, putrid and vengeful.

“Sorry?”

“My salary that you held back, the two million?”

“What? You're still on about that shit? It's in the past, Hermann, let it be. Danni and I are really onto something in Bulgaria these days, you should come too. It's got everything—huge bonuses . . . you should check it out. We're not talking millions, my man,
we're talking billions
.” I got the feeling this phrase was being used a lot
at Klambra office these days. “So is the Herminator hot for some greens?”

“What are these greens you're going on about?” Mother interjected. “Is the idiocy in Iceland now at such a level that even businessmen can't speak Icelandic anymore?”

“No, Benni,” I said, wanting to put an end to this. “I don't think I'll buy into Bulgaria. Illness and all. It's taxing.”

“Yes, of course,” Benni said, as if Mother's madness was suddenly understandable in light of her cancer. I remembered that his father, the don of the Klambra boys, had kicked it because of a tumor a few years back, and how Benni and Daniel had needed several strippers to help them mourn. “Hang on, Hermann, I'll have a word with Danni. Maybe he can find a solution to this. We have a nice apartment here in the ‘burbs.”

“Shit,” I said and looked at Mother, who shook her head and then her glass, indicating that she needed a refill on her Campari to survive. But surviving would have to wait because Daniel was on his feet in his tight suit, sunglasses and a shit-eating grin that suggested a life of extreme dental care; a deluxe, updated model of Benni.

“Ach,” Mother said, recoiling. “Is that the son?”

“Huuur-MAN!” he said and squeezed between us. “Waaassaaap? Douwn widdah mon-nay?” The phrases sounded like Japanese to me,
waa-saap, wid-dah, mon-nay
. As it turned out, after a few more phrases, I had been right: the boys were in Amsterdam to beg. The Icelandic holding company, Fixrenta, formerly known as Klambra Group, had secured a loan for a few billion from the bankers with the champagne. The boys really were in the loop, had hit the jackpot so to speak, and were going to use the money to build golf condos in Bulgaria. They had also bought a four-story building in Herengracht, which was to house Fixrenta's HQ in Europe and a
couple apartments. I should drop in for some
Veuve Clic
—the place was always full of
honeys
.

Daniel's presence and his motor mouth seemed to be driving Mother off the deep end; she was tense enough from having to wait for her drink. I decided it was best to agree to everything he said, so I pretended to accept his offer and thanked him. Told him we'd be in touch. Clumsy
gangsta
-handshake.

“What a creepy man,” Mother said when he was gone. “Fidgeting about like that and going on and on about himself without so much as offering a lady a drink.”

“I'll take care of it. I'll get us something strong from the bar.”

When I returned with a selection of tequila shots, one of the racists had taken a seat next to Mother and seemed to be admiring her earlobes. I found it perverse that a man would try to pick up elderly ladies by complimenting their earlobes and quickly drove him away. It was time to call it a night. We downed the shots, stood up and walked out into the night. A polka-dotted Amsterdam shimmered under the summer sky, the artificially lit darkness ready to gobble up the day and pave the way for the underworld. People shouted profanities at lampposts and threw beer cans, the atmosphere was intoxicated, and there was no Ramji to lead the way. I was about to chase down a cab when the bulky Indian with the turban came running, grabbed me, and stared at me with eyes full of spite.

“I saw where you were,” he shouted. “I saw where you are coming from. Racists!”

I couldn't say anything. After all, I had just come from a gathering of racists.

“You people are a plague on the planet, you are human feces. Feces!

He let go of me and walked off.

“What a brute,” Mother said, insulted by this outburst. “What on earth was he thinking?”

“It's what happens when you go to a Nazi ball. It's time to go home.”

We caught a cab to the hotel, where I made us a long drink while she laid out her tarot cards. She was sorry to tell me that the chances of me finding a woman in the near future were very slim indeed and that I should expect hard times financially as the year wore on. Things looked good in the long run, though.

“But now it's my turn,” she said and lit up as she always did when expecting a prophesy. “I'm sure that my luck is about to change for the better.”

She picked nine cards from the deck and they were all as expected: some difficulties, then tranquility, stability, new feelings and finally . . .

“There he is again!”

“Who?”

“The knight, of course!” Excited, she stuck the card in my face. A regal looking man in a kilt riding across clouds under a golden sunset. “What does this mean, Trooper? Will I meet the knight in the kilt?”

Chapter 9

I
couldn't help but wonder now and again whether our trip was something more than one big question about the quintessential issues: a whole tarot tournament on life, death, and love, and whether the answer in the end would be anything more than a hollow, intangible sound fading into silence. The fact was that I would in all probability have many decades to ponder the so-called big questions, half a lifetime left for anxiety, nostalgia, and self-doubt, while life was slipping further away from Mother with each passing day.

The absoluteness of this fact hit me now and again like cold slush to the face. I suppose all journeys are melancholy because they encapsulate things that can never be repeated, but my trip with Mother was especially so: a rambling journey to the end of the line. When we weren't strolling alongside the canals or relaxing slightly tipsy at the hotel—Mother on her balcony with her newly developed yoga program and me in my room, engulfed in the possibilities of the TV remote—I would often think about how lonely she must be, and how harsh it was to have to face Death and watch him rob you of all that never came to be.

Deep down I was unsure that she would get better on Dr. Fred's Ukrain. The reason was not only that medical science had given us other options, but also that the odds were against us. We hadn't come all this way to ensure the progression of life, but death was just one of the many possibilities framing our journey, not a player in our revelry. Mother was here because she had no other choice and I was simply here to do the impossible: to make her happy for the last days of her life.

I was haunted on a regular basis by self-doubt regarding the task. I suspected that however hard I tried, the adventure would never fully be realized while we spent our days aimlessly roaming the city. We drank our morning cup of coffee on the balcony and visited museums and galleries before returning to the hotel to continue our session of specials from the night before. Mother sang Nina Simone songs and told anecdotes of drives in the country and a lost bottle of booze in the woods. Stories from the past became stories of the near future.

But no matter how well I performed I was never more than a stand-in for the guy who's role this should have been. The obvious fact was that Mother needed a lover. Despite an operatic temperament and extraordinary physical strength, she had always been a vulnerable woman and longed to rest in the arms of someone stronger. This had always puzzled me, especially given her incredibly firm opinions on how I lived my own life. She had waited for the solution for years, something that would finally bring her to smooth sailing.

Where this deep longing came from, I didn't know. Through the years she had blossomed in various parallel dimensions, marriages to deans, socializing with royalty, and an intimate friendship with
the Danish TV characters, Nikolaj and Julie, whom she met every now and again according to this alternative reality in the restaurant Skindbuksen in Copenhagen along with her husband, Peter Toft Jensen. It was enough to see Mother at karaoke in her dancing shoes to realize that her dreams were a stark contrast to what really made her happy. But that had no effect on the conclusion: she wanted a man. I'd dreaded this from the beginning and hoped that the issue would be resolved without my help. That we'd meet some former headmaster at a gallery, preferably also suffering from some terminal disease and, after that, Mother would float along on her happy cloud while I'd try some hunting of my own in the bars, like a lion in the jungle of love. But that was not in the cards. Managing the drugs and their effects and nuances was child's play compared to the impenetrable wall that I now faced, to help Mother fall in love for the last time. I finally decided to send in a personal ad to three respectable cultural publications:
Opera Nieuws, Bibliotheek en Boekhandelaar
, and an evening paper that allegedly no one but old socialists picked up. The ad read:

Elegant woman in early sixties looking for gentleman of similar age for conversation, dining, museums, theater & concerts. Reply in English with
photo
and phone no. P.O. Box 3149 in main post office Radhuisstraat & Singel bf. June 1
^st
.

I felt it was necessary to underline the word “photo” because Mother was vain when it came to the looks of her lovers. She loathed short men and spoke in condescending tones about those who'd fallen like single socks out of washing machines. She would go into graphic detail when describing the various physical qualities she
admired in men: broad shoulders, strong features, and a Buddha-belly. She had an aversion to thin men and felt the same way about the obese. She didn't mind if a man wasn't handsome as long as he had enough charm to make up for it. Certain primitiveness in the facial features could flatter a man if the eyes radiated intelligence and the jawline suggested daring. She despised sentimental types, but appreciated kindness. In fact, Mother didn't want a man, she wanted a he-male, and she was ready to forgive the most severe personality flaws, such as serious drinking problems and insanity, if men had that certain masculinity she desired. This had more often than not been her downfall, and I was determined to keep the swashbuckling drunks at bay. The choice of the he-male was most important of all, the final brush stroke in this work of art.

I was quite excited when I finally ventured out into the summer heat the first day of June with my course set for the post office. Over forty responses tumbled out of the post box, and I found nineteen of them interesting enough to make up a little pile for me to examine at length. Of those nineteen applicants, twelve got bonus points for wit, extraordinary good looks, or a lovely turn of phrase. I sorted the letters by quality and called the eligible ones. Most of them thought it strange that Mother didn't call them herself and refused to speak to me. I asked the others to give me a chance. I explained that Mother was an intelligent and interesting woman who'd had to go abroad on short notice. She would very much appreciate it if the prospective gentleman would meet with me, her son, for a quick chat at Café Cutty Sark on Spuistraat before she got back to the country.