The Last Days of My Mother (8 page)

“Good for you, Trooper. Like old Edda used to say: When you make a special order, it better be special. No need to be shy about asking for that little extra shot.”

We toasted each other in the glow of candlelight while the place gradually filled with people in intimate conversation with the night. Fueled by the vodka I became sentimental, let my mind wander through the past, not unlike the TV shrink Dr. Phil, according to Mother. I needed to help her find a man.

“I suppose the only solution is to find a gigolo. The men here in Holland seem as uninteresting as the ones in Reykjavik. Like that doctor. Seems completely asexual.”

“You can't expect the doctor to hit on you during your examination.”

“Is there something wrong with hoping that the few men who stray into my life make the tiniest of efforts?”

I had to admit that this lack of sexual harassment truly was a travesty, but she threw her hands up in frustration and asked me to give her a break.

“‘Sexual harassment.' Ach. Another term invented by your sanctimonious generation. No wonder we're having a hard time picking up men, except for cold fish like Emma Gulla. She just orders them from catalogs.”

“Isn't she the one that's always so happy?”

“Oh, Trooper, what do I know? I've just never been able to figure out love. Maybe it's just for boring people. Do you think that's it? That love is just for boring and ugly people like Emma? Look at the two of us.”

We stared into the flickering night and called out to the melancholy, to the nostalgia that lived in the newly fallen darkness and the lights, in the crowds and the stars, in all these endless possibilities that didn't find their way to us, but planted us here, mother and son, each with a pint of special.

“When you think about it, Trooper, at the end of the day—we've at least always had fun. Now tell the bartender to turn off this noise and play some real dancing music. Soon I'll be dead and have less time for dancing, but tonight we dance. On the tables and up into the ceiling, like this, until the lights go out. We'll dance, my dearest Trooper. Just dance!”

Chapter 6

O
n Monday morning the focus returned again to matters of life and death, Ukrain or no Ukrain.

“Whether to take up arms against the fall of Spring? And the world of Summer—or to suffer the frost?” Mother recited poetry between bites of bacon, along with quotations from
The Iron Lady
, the controversial play about Nazi nurse Herta Oberhauser; anything to divert her attention from the upcoming doctor's visit. In her opinion she was going to suffer nothing less than a sadistic blitzkrieg by a professional torturer. Whenever I tried to discuss her treatment she would turn on me and ask me to leave her be; she needed peace and quiet to recall Herta's defense monologue. She would then go into detail about her erratic sleeping patterns, noises in the hallway that had woken her and how she had retreated onto the balcony with a glass of red wine around three in the morning. That had led her to open her book—
Catherine the Great, a Biography
—which turned out to contain some quite racy revelations of the Empress's extensive debauchery.

“She had her fun with poor Grigori for a few years, a perverse little youngster with a cock like a horse. When she got bored with
him she made him bring her new lovers. By the truckload—imagine the luxury. There was something inherently wrong with her. The woman was insatiable.”

I didn't have much to say on the matter, but pointed out that we really needed to get up to our rooms; the doctor would arrive any minute.

“Why do we have to do this? I find it terribly unfair to have to get all these shots on top of everything.”

“Don't worry about it. The doctor is so used to giving injections that you won't feel a thing.”

“Oh I'll feel them! It's serious business having someone stab you with a needle.”

Since she seemed determined to view the doctor's visit as pain and suffering, I decided to let him cut off Black Beauty to ease the strain. My plan was to laugh off the jab to show Mother how easy it was. In the end I had to suppress my panic because the doctor was afraid he'd jab me in the eye if I didn't sit still.

“There!” The doctor said when he finally managed to stick the needle in the right spot. “Now we let the anesthetic take and meanwhile turn to the big matter.”

He walked across the room in his green tailcoat, a flat tweed cap on his head and knee-high leather boots on his feet, and fetched a small case he'd left at the door. The locks on the case clicked open and he took out a tray with numerous small medical bottles that were marked: UKRAIN 5mg – 1 AMPOULE AM TAG. He produced needles, cotton wool, and gauze from a small leather pouch. He placed everything onto Mother's bed, took off his coat, and sat beside her. He then tied a rubber tube around her upper arm and used his fingers to find a suitable vein.

“Now, Mrs. Briem, I know that you don't like injections but I can assure you that my needles are the least painful injections available for Ukrain shots. You saw how easy it was for your son.”

“Trooper is completely ignorant when it comes to injections. Is there really no other way? Can't I just drink it?”

“No, I'm sorry, the drug really has to be given intravenously if it is to work. You will need a daily shot for five weeks to begin with. After that we'll have to see, depending on how your body reacts to the treatment. There, we're done!”

Mother stared in astonishment at the doctor, like a person who'd just woken to find they'd slept through a war. “What? You're done?”

“Yes, all done.”

“Did you see that, Trooper? How he did that? I must admit I didn't feel it a thing. You're obviously no Nazi, doctor.”

“Pleased to hear that.”

“You see, I played Herta Oberhauser once, she was a nurse who used needles to torture people. She was as obsessed with needles as Catherine the Great was with lovers. It truly is a miracle, doctor, that you're already done. I could visit the Museum of Torture now. Show them how to take it.”

She stood up and poured herself a schnapps, her face like an atom bomb indicating the travesties awaiting the city's museums. The left side of my own face was steadily becoming more paralyzed. I felt like I'd fallen asleep after drinking glue.

“Look at you!” she said and pointed at me. “Quivering like a leaf over a petty mole! I've been telling my son for years now that not all women are into men with moles.”

I made vague grunting noises in protest and used strong gestures to strengthen my case.

“It's true, Trooper. That mole has overshadowed everything that is charming about you.”

“Oh?” I managed to snort despite the numbness. “Then I must declare that many women are into fungus.”

“I must invite them into my museum one day,” the doctor said and slid the knife up to my right temple. “This little guy will have pride of place in my collection. Even such a tiny organism can grow up to two or three inches if cultivated properly.”

I didn't know what kind of psychedelic drug the good doctor had mixed into the local anesthetic, but I suddenly went cold at the sight of the knife, no longer so sure that Mother's claims of the inherent sadism of the medical profession were unfounded. Wasn't there something perverse about a man who collected abnormalities from people's faces?

“I'm not sure we should do this,” I stuttered, shying away from the knife. “Maybe we should let Black Beauty stay in his natural environment?”

“You won't feel a thing and the cut will heal in a couple of days or so,” Dr. Frederik said, ignoring my protests. “There we go! Here he is.”

The mole fell from the blade onto the petri dish, where it disappeared under the lid.

“This calls for a toast,” Mother said and poured us drinks. “To my health and to Trooper's love life, which should now take a turn for the better. I must say, you're a fine doctor, Doctor. I know a lot of old timers who're bound to fall ill any day now, and when they do I'll tell them to come to you. This has been such an experience.”

When the doctor was gone I left it to Mother to prepare for the Museum of Torture. I had a date with Helena the homeopath, who had put together a potent mix of herbal remedies, by order of the
good doctor, to maximize Mother's love of life. The store was in Warmoesstraat, in the very heart of the Red Light District, and was famous for being the first Smart-Shop in Amsterdam, selling a weird blend of sex toys and alternative medicine. I finally found the store after wandering through a maze of canals and tall, narrow buildings leaning curiously over the streets. The space was tight and cut in half by a long table around which the customers stood, examining the merchandise. I was growing quite curious about an electrical cervix when a blind German lady bumped into me and apologized in her native tongue. I can't say I was surprised that the first person I met in the sex shop was German. I had learned of Germany's extensive interest in sex from watching the TV series
Liebe Sünde
, available on Mother's tattered VHS tapes back home. An old friend of hers in Mainz sent her the tapes in return for flatbread. Over time the collection of
Liebe Sünde
grew rather impressive, and on occasion I had ended up watching the shows with her and finding out the latest developments in sex gadgets. Mother leaned toward the unabashed German way of discussing latex and insisted it would do me good to follow the series.

“
Guten tag
.” The shopkeeper had no doubt heard my exchange with the blind woman and figured that I was German, too. She pointed to an egg, a
Spitzen-Ei
that I had picked up from the floor, and encouraged me to speak my own language.

Overwhelmed by my lack of linguistic cunning, I backed out into the street and right into the arms of a madam. “I give you everything, good hands, good tongue, nice ass.” Terrified of being rude I felt I should accept at least some minimal service, but to my relief she turned to the next passerby when I hesitated. I was bathed in the glowing red lights from the whorehouses all around me; it suddenly felt like Amsterdam was nothing but a pit of hookers, trannies, and
packs of Italian men. A gigantic African man with a street organ offered me a piece of hashish in exchange for my jacket, and the hooker turned her attention back to me. The city was so overrun with price-tagged sex that I wanted to teleport to Ikea. People on their way to work squeezed past teenaged girls who choreographed the mundane reality with pornographic moves on their smoke break. Someone had procured them from Brno, Bangkok, or Budapest, dragged them out of their parents' tiled kitchens, smelling of porridge and sweat, shown them their Mercedes and fucked them all the way into the red booths. Like most people, my mind strayed regularly toward sex, but now in the middle of the orgy where everything was for sale, I just wanted to get out of there. Then I realized that I still held the
Spitzen-Ei
in my hand, so I stormed back into the shop, setting of the alarm that for some strange reason had not sounded when I had stumbled out with the thing. I forced a smile and waved the object in the air. “
Nur meine Ei
.” Finally I managed to tell the shopkeeper that I was looking for Helena.

“Through there,” she said, pointing to a beaded curtain. Behind it was a small space where the alternative medicine was kept. Helena sat on a high stool in heated discussion with a short man in a white suit. She was pointing to the curtain and seemed to be ordering him to leave. He turned away quite calmly, greeted me with a smile, and walked out.

“What was that?” I asked and handed her back the book she'd hurled during the argument.

“I can't talk about it,” she said and snatched the book out of my hand. “He has a prescription from Fred, because he treats everyone the same, and then the little shit uses the opportunity to insult me with his preaching. I'm going to close up for a bit. Let's go for a coffee somewhere.”

She grabbed a bag from under the counter and led me past a sales stand on the floor, where I managed to knock over a display of vitamin drops.

“How big is that space?” I asked when we were safe and sound out in the street.

“Forty-three square feet. I rent my little nook from the owners of the store. All modern commodities for 600 euros.”

“For forty-three square feet?”

“That's Amsterdam for you. All space is infinitely expensive. There's a reason for perversions like fisting. Everyone is trying to save space by holing up in someone else's ass.”

I found fisting a farfetched result of extortionate real estate prices, but Helena continued ranting and pointed to the next street corner where two small businesses—Asian Sexy Fetish and Dental Surgery 4U—shared a space. Above the business was a low window with a sign that read “Te huur”: For Rent.

“The height of the ceiling in there is just over five feet and yet that dump can be rented out. In fact, it's the perfect place for toothless dwarf-whores.”

“Doesn't it bother people that there's porn everywhere they look?”

“People can get used to anything and everything. I know a lot of people who find porn quite mundane and think of sex shows as a form of theater. The human race is just a species of ape in fancy clothes. We don't need Darwin to tell us that.”