The Last Days of My Mother (6 page)

I promised to call the
Guinness Book of Records
to let them know. Almost everything we came across defied haters of beauty. The program was in full swing. It was highly unlikely that any mother and son in the history of mankind had ever had as much fun before noon.

To celebrate, she fished out her lifesaver and offered me a capful, which I gulped down as fast as I could. It tasted like every type of alcohol known to man with a touch of brandy in the foreground, which was probably what she poured into the flask the last time she filled it.

“Here, have some more,” she said and got out a miniature she'd pocketed from the hotel minibar. “You could do with a pick-me-up.”

“No more for now, thanks. I'd prefer a beer and some coffee first. How about finding a seat and having a look at the map?”

“Great idea, Trooper. If there's anything I've learned on my travels it's that you can never sit down enough . . . but I can't say I've ever had much use for maps. My map is in my heart.”

I resisted mentioning her disastrous trip with the
Friends of Romania
group that ended with me flying to Slovakia to take her home.

“Here,” she walked into a weird café where two men took turns frying pancakes and cutting people's hair. We got a table by a window looking out over the canal and ordered coffee and pancakes. “They've even got Internet here. Would you check my email for me and see if I've got any new messages?”

I agreed and asked for her password.

“Milan Kundera, one word.”

“The poet?”

“He's a writer, Hermann. And not just the best writer in the world but also the most beautiful man I've ever set eyes on.”

“Wow.”

“I know. And so it's a great password. Not a chance I'll ever forget it.”

I went through her mailbox, conscientiously reading aloud to her every single email, including a distraught message from Obed
Kanutsi, a wealthy Nigerian fellow who had been terribly wronged by an unjust government and modestly asked for 1,000 dollars to pay for his escape, promising, of course, to back the loan with very generous interests.

“We have to help him, don't we Hermann?”

“Nope. It's spam.”

“But what about this watchmaker in Switzerland? Won't he be disappointed if I don't buy something?”

“These aren't personal letters, Eva. You don't have to feel bad about deleting them.”

“If you say so.”

After a short argument I decided to be the villain and deleted all her mail, checked my own inbox quickly and then played a couple of racing games for fun. An ad from
Russian Bride
flashed in the top right corner and immediately caught Mother's attention.

“Look at that, Trooper! You're being offered sex.”

“Everything's available online now.”

“What luxury for these young generations, to be able to just pick a prince from a website. Isn't there something for dying women in their sixties?” Mother laughed at her own joke but quickly turned serious again. “I mean it. Can't you find me a good man? Just for three months or so, can't be more than that if we're to have time for all those museums. The Cannabis Museum, The Museum of Torture . . . And Van Gogh! How are we going to manage all that?”

“You'll do that with the guy, I guess.”

“You never know what these men are thinking. Like Jonas? Do you think he would have been interested in going to the Museum of Torture, limping about like some . . .”

“. . . bondage gimp?”

“No, thank you very much! There was never any of that with Jonas. He was a terrible pervert of course, like most men, but nothing that was any fun. He just wanted me to stroke him, like you would a child's head. Which reminds me.” She pulled a pack of condoms from her handbag:
Durex. Ribbed for her pleasure
.

“This, my dear, is for you.”

“I'm not 15, you know.”

“I have no idea what your age is when it comes to sex, Hermann, but I do know, because I'm a woman of insight, that there are temptations all around this city and it's always better to put safety first. Especially men like you who haven't seen much action lately.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes. A man who mopes in his mother's attic and hardly ever leaves the house—unless you've been molesting the furniture it seems pretty clear that the only pleasure you've had in that area is that which you give yourself.”

I took the condoms and put them in my pocket, claiming they wouldn't last me the week. The fact of the matter was that this analysis of my love life was sadly right on the money. Aside from the three weeks of whoring in Dublin after the breakdown, my sexual organs had indeed seen very little action. In my teens and well into my twenties I was so terrified by sex that I didn't dare seize the few offers I got. Globalization was a term I associated mainly with hep C, herpes, and AIDS. If I threw caution to the wind and slept with a woman it was only after double bagging my gear, which not only made it look bigger, but also like it had been given a shot of Tetraquinine. As a result, my sex life was mostly limited to masturbation—until I met Zola. When our relationship ended my mind
was so infused with fantasies about the female body that the risk of Hepatitis didn't even deter me. A seriously drunk hotel manageress, a housewife with a furry animal, and a woman who at first seemed fairly run-of-the-mill but turned out to have an abundance of chest hair—I tried it all. The hibernation that my genitals had been in the last couple years of our relationship caused me to jump back into the saddle, a starved man with his raised meat sword, ready to poke any old potato. The little luck I'd been graced with in the looks department had run out and I had to rely on a different sort of charm. That meant that I attracted all sorts of freaks, women who were so alternative looking or with such unusual tastes and needs that sex became more of a behavioral experiment than an erotic act, which was probably the reason I gave it up after I moved back into the attic.

“But maybe I should go and see what's on offer in the Red Light District. I've heard that these gigolos can deliver orgasms on cue.”

We emptied our cups and went back out to enjoy the lovely weather. I told her what came to mind as we soaked in the surroundings. Like that the house on our right was built by Jacob van Campen, the master of Dutch baroque. That the Royal palace from 1646, which Van Campen designed with Rome in mind, was an exquisite example of the golden age of architecture and paved the way for Wren's classicism.

“When your mind goes off, Trooper, it's like a tornado in Tangiers. One doesn't expect anything and then out of nowhere you whip up something like this.”

“I just read that in a brochure.”

“Yes, but how you remember all this stuff is remarkable. Someone whose only interest seems to be racecar games shouldn't know these things. I have no idea where you got this from—well, maybe
your father. He's the only man I've known who got infected by STDs before ever having actual sex.”

I didn't dare ask her if she felt that baroque was my Herpes, but she was right: absorbing and storing facts had always been my strong suit. They just seemed to stick like glue to my cortex and would not budge come what may: strong spirits, arsenic, and eating from Teflon pots and pans had absolutely no effect on my brain. I therefore possessed strange and bizarre knowledge about things I had no interest in or use of. I sucked up my surroundings without wanting to, like a vacuum cleaner with asthma. Each hemisphere of my brain was a capsule of non-cohesive and trivial information, a supermarket of information where wide-eyed people strolled the aisles in bewilderment, at a complete loss over what to do with all the merchandise. Knowledge was wasted on me. I was like a rich brat who receives a 1,000 TB computer for Christmas in order to play computer games while the physicist next door has to make do with an unreliable old laptop.

“I'm actually a conservative,” I said, and was about to explain when a stinging sensation stopped me and I was blinded by tears.

“I'm so sorry, Hermann,” Mother said, wiping away my tears. “That was a bit harsh, I'll admit that. I hit you.”

“Wwwww?”

“Yes, but it was pure instinct. Since when are you a conservative?”

“No, I just meant that I get this huge computer when . . . Was that why you slapped me? It hurts like fuck.”

“I'm sorry, Trooper, I couldn't help myself. But you're saying you're not really a conservative?”

I didn't answer but charged into the next bar to ask for some ice for my cheek. Mother followed me and offered to buy a very special drink with the money I'd given her earlier.

“It's fine,” I said. “But I'd rather you didn't resort to violence whenever I say something you don't approve of.”

“I know, Trooper. I apologize. It won't happen again.”

We sat quietly by the bar and waited while the bartender checked his selection of specials. On Mother's top ten list of world wonders, a “special” drink came in third, after Milan Kundera and the Left Green Party. She defined the level of wonder by the alcohol percentage more than anything else, and the intoxicating effect the special had on the consumer. High acidity was a bonus but the main thing was to have the drink saturated with ethanol. The most common moniker known to the outside world is “cocktail,” but she felt that it didn't do the drink justice because cocktails often seriously lacked the right amount of alcohol and were just a way to sell people overpriced sugar water.

“That's why it's necessary to be in direct contact with the bartender while he's mixing. It's nice to feel a bit tipsy sometimes even though you don't need to become drunk each time you have drink.”

Because of Mother's familiarity with alcoholic beverages and their consumption she found it ridiculous when I showed signs of intoxication. She had even less of an understanding of being “hung over” or downright sick, as I tended to get from drinking. Anything more than a six-pack of beer could send me into an aimless walkabout in the tundras of self-loathing and regret. Mother was different. In her mind a half pint of sherry and some
Spätzle und Sauerkraut
were the best remedy for the sad syndrome others liked to refer to as a hangover. To her, eggs were served scrambled with olive oil and cognac. Mackerel was food you ate with a shot of rum. Plaice was a side dish with an egg yolk and pickled onion, but only if there was port in the yolk.

“Well, here we have some schnapps,” she said, throwing back a shot of Bols, which was on the house as the bartender had failed to come up with a special. “This is just bad enough to prevent you from drinking too fast and yet it's good. God is in the tempo, as they say. I don't understand how you can go on drinking beer like this. Just like Willy—he'd never have a drink before noon and even then he'd always stick to beer. I suppose its like when I went to Sweden and they always had that Mellanöl. Disgusting drink. I can't say I've been hung over very often, but this was like drinking a hangover, it took forever to get a buzz.”

Mother didn't really get drunk that often despite her considerably diligent intake of strong spirits. She often became what she referred to as “being pompette,” slightly lightheaded. If the pom-petting advanced to another level it was simply due to weariness from travel, and she did not enjoy going from one place to another so she drank to withstand it. But becoming inebriated, as a rule . . . that was over and done with. That sort of behavior flirted with forgetfulness and evoked a sense of loss and longing, for Germany, for instance. She'd learned this at AA meetings. She'd also learned that it was better to drink moderately every day than to sporadically gulp down gallons of liquor and lose all control. So each time I had a drink with her she smirked. I was obviously as inept at holding my liquor as Willy Nellyson. It was remarkable with the two of us, and yet neither of us were any good at sports. Both just as devoid of physical grace. She claimed that there had to be something seriously wrong with our composition, for she believed that golfing and tennis were at the core of the world of those who managed to live with a constant lack of alcohol. She was sure that all teetotalers were half-mad with energy and drive. These same individuals
tended, however, to be rather boring, but they had that authority, like Ólafur Ragnar. He would never have become president if he'd been drunk all day.

“You're projecting,” I said, finishing my beer. “You eat an entire apple in under a minute.”

“That's only if I need vitamins.”

“Nope, it's in your character.”

“Oh?”

“You eat an apple in a minute and fast-forward through Nikolaj and Julie because you're so eager to get to the next bit. You're exactly the type who ends up in office.”

“I suppose I'd be a very good president,” she said dreamily. “And I'd bring about some change, I can tell you. For instance: I'd ban these self-jets that drive me up the wall back home. What is wrong with those people? People who never take the bus, but whiz by in taxcabs, waking you up in the middle of the night with all that noise, flying off to go shopping in Italy. I hate these people, just hate them.” She slammed her fist on the table, quaking with anger. “Have you heard anything as idiotic? Flying to Italy to go to a shop? In a self-jet?”