The Last Days of My Mother Read Free

treating patients withadvanced cancer and the sensitive work of palliative treatment makes Libertas a viable choice in difficult circumstances.” The more I read the more I felt this was the right choice for Mother. Dr. Nowicky’s magic drug seemed likely to increase her odds considerably, and most importantly—nobody was denied available drugs for easing pain and suffering. “People who are alive are not dead,” the site claimed. “And life is the basis of our foundation.”
    Morphine, Ukrain, Ecstasy . . . in my mind’s eye I saw Mother not only fit and strong, but cruising the racetracks of happiness. “I’ve got it!” I exclaimed, bursting into her room. “We’ll go to the Netherlands!”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?”
    â€œWe’ll go to Libertas and meet with Dr. Frederik.”
    The light in the room deepened and faded away with each word Mother didn’t say, and my belief in the perfect solution choked on her silence. Nearly all her life she had lived with an unpleasant fascination with death, but now, when a thorough examination of her bone marrow confirmed that it was finally time, it was as if she’d never heard that people could actually die. She was in shock.
    â€œIt’s not as if I haven’t been dying all along,” she finally said and whimpered a little because all of this started as the tiniest tickle in her belly in Berlin, the night I first made myself known and Willy Nellyson ran off to Italy. “And there I was all alone, Trooper, and then I had you.”
    â€œSo the story goes.”
    â€œIt’s no story, Hermann, these are stone cold facts. Why did he just up and leave like that? Didn’t even leave a note.”
    â€œI don’t know, but about this clinic—”
    â€œAnd me, there, all alone in Germany. Look how beautiful he was, tall like a prince and sharp as a sword.”
    She handed me the photograph of Willy Nellyson and I remembered why I’d always doubted that this man was my father. Such a paternity claim was as absurd as two weeks of abstinence on Spítala Street. If my looks were a work of fiction, the outcome would be War and Peace or some other endless novel, bulky and thick yet strangely lacking in mass. A paperback. Willy Nellyson, however, was a tall, willowy man with a few stray hairs growing out of his chin, reminiscent of some sort of academic catfish, so peculiarly hunched that he seemed to have had his bones removed, perhaps during the war, so that he could be conveniently folded into a carry-on bag. He had betrayed Mother by running off after I was conceived and, according to her—this was something she said over and again—something within her died after his getaway, something she never got back, scarring her for life. Her epic death flowed like a branching river through my childhood, in different versions that all confirmed the same thing: men were a dubious species poisoning the lives of striking women. Only one thing distinguished Willy Nellyson: he had the perfect cock. This I deduced from a carved ebony dildo Mother kept on the top shelf of the living room cupboard, and which she’d taken down on my thirteenth birthday, handed it over with gusto and said: “This, Trooper, is your father’s penis.” I fondled the wood as if it held promises of a great future and waited, for years and without reward, for my father’s heritage to manifest itself between my legs.
    â€œHow strange a lifetime is. Over sixty years and then . . .”
    She looked defeated. I retreated out of the room and started to ramble dead drunk around the apartment, my mind wandering aimlessly, to Dublin, Moscow, and the distant features of Zola. The next morning I woke up hung over; Ukrain and Libertas only scattered images in a saturated mind. Mother? Dying? Amsterdam? Thesilence of the room grew in proportion with the stench of my bed sheets and for three,