Dying of Cancer
by Murat Nemet-Nejat
I.
At the Hospital Door
Please be quiet.
At the Hospital Door
Please be quiet.
II.
Dying of Cancer
Two Days After the Surgery: First Crisis
I came to the hospital at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. The doctor was in her room. He said to me she'd had a bad night. Bile was coming out of her mouth, but that was quite expected after a cancer operation. They were going to insert a tube into her stomach and that should relieve the pain, and he asked me to leave room for a few minutes.
I waited outside the room for about forty-five minutes. Then, I began to hear gags, wheezes, and one of the nurses came out and hurried to a supply cabinet on the floor. She quickly searched for something, took it and went back in. The noises continued. Soon, the nurse came out again and picked up a needle. This time I had the nerve to ask her, "Is there any problem?" "She's having difficulties accepting the standard tubes." The doctor had already left after his instructions. "Don't you think the doctor might help you?" "Don't worry we are in contact with him."
By now I was fearful that this may be about the last hour of my mother's life. I went to the telephone down the corridor and called my brother. They were having lunch. They were going to visit around three. I told him mother was having a hard time, she was gasping all the time, that they were trying to insert a tube into her stomach and perhaps he should be here. He said O.K. He'd come as soon as he could.
I was alone. In an alcove in the corridor a middle aged couple were sitting on a bench, whispering to each other and trying to keep their five, six year old child quiet, who seemed to be itching to run around. Soon afterwards, the nurse came out of the room and told me that I could go in now. I stepped in. My mother was lying exhausted on her back, her face white, black bags under her eyes, but more relaxed, breathing evenly. Drops of green liquid were flowing from a tube coming out of her mouth into a surgical basin placed on a stool next to her bed.
My brother soon joined us.
The first crisis was over. My mother got better. In four days the tubes came out of her mouth. In twelve days she left the hospital, feeling much better, and I decided to go back to New York, not only to my business but to my wife, Karen, also. We had decided to have a child when we heard that mother had cancer, and she was having a bitch of a pregnancy.
She would spend most of her pregnany on her back in bed, the doctor not knowing quite what was wrong since no X-ray could be taken; but she had a lot of pain. He guessed it was fibroids, but wasn't sure. Later on we were able to take a sonogram. A sound picture. I saw the skeleton of the baby, the one we'd call Rafael, a silhouette of his skull and his body, before he was born.
Pregnancy turns the body medically to a primitive, helpless stage. There are so many modern diagnostic devices one can't use. One can't even operate to see what is inside.
I took several trips to London during next year. I created business opportunities to be there. I also called every week and talked to her. She was doing fine. She was having chemotherapy and doing fine. The illness seemed contained, and she was not having any bad side effects from the treatments. At least, nobody told me so on the phone, neither she nor my brother nor his family. Every month she went to her doctor for a checkup.
Karen's terrible pregnancy continued. Every day she came down for dinner, and then she crawled up to bed in agony. That was it. We waited.
Why Did Karen and I Have a Baby at this Point:
First, at the news of my mother's terrible illness, it was the only thing we could do to assert living, soften the bad news. Karen stopped using birth control a few days, and she was pregnant.
Second, mother always said she wanted to see grandchildren. That was her biggest dream. Karen and I wanted to make her happy.
The Evening Before the Surgery and the Morning After:
The evening before the surgery, around six, my brother, his wife, their children, my son Danny, whom I had brought with me to England, and I were in her room. The room had an aura of hope. The children played around and made noise. We joked, gossiped, told stories. The surgeon walked in. He asked how she felt. "This is the right way to spend the night before the surgery, among one's family," he said. He said good-bye and left. Soon, we left too. The children kissed their grandmother on the cheek and told her we'd see her next afternoon.
The operation was very early in the morning. None of us brothers was there. I woke up at seven in the morning. I realized I didn't have the surgeon's name or his number. My brother was not home. Ruby, his wife, had only the physician's number, not the surgeon's. I waited till nine o'clock. The physician's secretary wouldn't give me the surgeon's number and took my number. I waited till about ten and called back. The secretary said the doctor would call me as soon as available. After eleven, the surgeon rang. "How are you? How did it go?" "The procedure went very well, much better than we had hoped for." "Oh, she'll be alright then?" He must have felt the explosion of hope in my voice. "Oh, no, Mr. Nejat, your mother is still a very sick woman. It all depends from now on on how she reacts to the treatment." "What are her chances in such a situation?" He hesitated a moment, "About fifty fifty I would say."
Then I washed up, left my room and went to the hospital.
How My Mother Understood the Nature of Her Illness:
My mother was told she was having hysterectomy, which, in a way, was true since the sickness had begun in her womb and spread through her body. In that respect, as I said before, the evening before the surgery in her hospital room had an aura of hope.
After the operation my mother asked the surgeon point black what she had. The doctor said hysterectomy. "If it is hysterectomy," she answered, "How come I have an incision from the womb up to my chest?" "Your mother is an intelligent woman," the surgeon told us later. "I can lie to the other patients, but I couldn't lie to her." My mother's surface behavior changed very little after finding out. The doctor had promised that he would not tell us that she knew. She greeted us cheerfully, hoped the best from her chemotherapy, as we all did, except for an occasional bout of despair, of despair, of despair.
The first of these bouts occurred the day they stuck those tubes in her stomach. The doctor had not acted yet - it was Saturday - and she was retching with a pain I could only guess at, constantly spitting a green liquid into a towel. Suddenly, "Whom am I kidding?" she cried. "This will not get any better."
She did feel better, however, after the tube was inserted in her stomach, and as I said, she left the hospital in two weeks, and I returned to the States with my son Danny.
What Is Despair?
There are two kinds of it. How does one feel knowing that he or she is dying? How do I reach across the Atlantic and comfort my mother who in her private loneliness knows she is dying and is filled with more and more fury and for whom there is no help?
I suffer from hypochondria, which is the mirror image of this experience, more precisely a kind of primal dread. Periodically, I get filled with the dread that I have cancer or am about to suffer a heart attack. My eldest brother died of cancer when I was eight and my father of a heart attack when I was fifteen. Now I am forty-four. There has been a gap in deaths in my immediate family until now. Nevertheless, three or four times a year, I get terrified that I am about to die with one of these two diseases. Of course, the terrors of these experiences are more like a nightmare than despair because I come out of it. I can be comforted until the next bout. Karen calls me a hypochondriac with no stick-to-itiveness because as a rule I hate to take medicine. She has to force two aspirins on me when I have a headache. I hate going to doctors. For her the whole thing is quite a joke because, it seems, except for a life long struggle to control my weight, I am quite a healthy person. When I am in one of these states, I connect every discomfort in my body to one of these diseases. For example, a pain in my ass is due to a tumor. A shortness of breath or sleepy arm is an impending heart attack. She has developed a routine which, I must say, is not too far away from my actual behavior. If there is a pain in my finger tip, for example, "oh, my finger tip," she says, touching her finger, and, then, dramatically, moves her hand to her heart, singing, "My finger bone is connected to my heart bone." The joke is very comforting and is like a mother waking her son from a terrible dream.
Karen's humor can cure the disease of terror that doctors can't. Nevertheless, I live under the sentence that one day my fears will be justified. Even hypochondriacs get sick, die of cancer, of heart attacks, etc., etc. If a hypochondriac never really got sick, wouldn't it be wonderful? Then, the fear of dying would replace dying itself. Hypochondria would be the key to eternal life, the power of the mind, of fantasy, of words, of logic, of magic over life, over facts. This would be a dream, a wonderful illusion. The Middle Ages did something like that to prove God's existence. God is the perfect creature. Since nothing can be perfect without existing, then God must exist. What crap! Therefore, death is an illusion; a loving being always watches over us. This argument is the perfect dream.
Here is my vision of paradise, the moment of perfect relief, of irrational timelessness:
Vila Nicosa
The most beautiful spot in Portugal
is the gigantic plaza with the equastrian statue in the middle
near Vila Nicosa.
The village was never anything else.
The plaza is paved in stone.
The streets in the village are lined with orange trees.
How We Found Out that Mother Had Cancer?
I was in the States. My memory is unclear. In our regular contacts on the phone, my brother called from London and said that mother had a slight pain in the stomach and doctors decided to take some tests to see what it was. The tests continued seven or eight weeks. During this time she had to go to the hospital to take further tests. At first, our references to these tests on our telephone conversations were desultory; but by the third week it was the first question I asked. For seven weeks, despite additional tests, they found nothing. My brother told me that they discovered nothing. They didn't know what caused the pain. He said that it seemed mother was O.K. Then, on the seventh week he called me and said she had cancer, and she'd be operated on in three or four days.
The casualness of these beginnings is due to my brother's nature of underplaying any possible bad news. To this day - mother is dead now for three years - he has not used the word cancer. Perhaps, to him, it was clear from day one what the tests were for; I only caught up with the facts as the weeks went by, and I don't remember if I consciously thought of cancer until he gave me the bad news. We both thought it would go away, and it almost did; but the magic finally broke down.
What is a mystery to me is that, considering how spread the disease was in her body - the liver had metathesized too - how come the doctors had to take so many tests to discover what she had and almost reached a negative conclusion. I'd have thought they had to take the slightest biopsy to discover what was going on. Where was this illness growing, in a mysterious region of anti-matter? So, my first reaction on hearing the news was a suspicion of incompetence, an angry attack on the conveyor of bad news.
Both the suspicion and anger remained private. I did not express it either to Karen or my brother. The series of tests have an authority of their own. After all, the operation did later confirm that she had cancer; but the thought that if they had discovered it earlier she might have been cured eats at me. The disease did begin in her vagina and at that stage it is curable. I know, even eight weeks earlier it was perhaps too late; but what if the doctors'd discovered it a year ago, or three years ago, whatever it takes. She did visit doctors for various reasons, if nothing else for sleeping pills. The suspicion of incompetence, of being too late, a magical lost possibility, as a private thought dogs me.
The possible sad fact is that my mother was a strong person, and the disease had to go much further before any signs were visible; when I arrived in England she had difficulty walking or climbing the stairs. Obviously, it was not a case of slight stomach pain, and the doctors had every good reason to keep looking.
When I got the news, my mind went into neutral. I only remember things vaguely. I heard the word liver, but I didn't register. Next evening a friend whose husband was a doctor came to visit. She asked what kind of cancer it was. I said I thought it had to do with the liver. She didn't say anything. That's when I realized it was pretty bad.
Two days afterwards, with my six year old son Danny, I went to London, leaving Karen, pregnant, behind.
What Kind of a Person Was Mother?
She was a dream of a mother for an infant. She was the kind of person one admires but finds impossible to live with, a mythological Jewish mother. She did everything for me. After the birth of Danny, when Karen and I asked her to come help us - a decision which almost wrecked our marriage - she carried a nineteen inch T.V. from our car to the elevator because she didn't want me to hurt myself. She was sixty-five then, and I was thirty-six.
When Karen and I delayed having children for five years, she asked me whether I knew how.
When I was in graduate school in New York, she wrote me from London that she would come to buy me a house. I was living in a lousy apartment in the Bronx. She had come to visit me there some time ago, and, though she didn't say anything to me, she was apparently shocked by the conditions. I am wondering why. The apartment had cockroaches; dust balls appeared in the corners between cleanings. All the furniture was second hand and one big upholstered easy chair, which I loved and was my pride and joy, was frayed on the arms. It was my first non-studio apartment, the first I had not rented already furnished. It had my taste stamped all over it. In the glow of that achievement, I had asked her to visit me. I must say all the time she stayed with me she didn't utter a negative word. She used the broom, instead of the vacuum cleaner, to sweep the apartment every day, and she prepared meals for me.
Three months after her leaving, I heard from her. She was going to visit me again to buy me a house. I was furious (though I wish somebody made a similar offer to me today). I told her that if she came I would leave New York and go some place else, and I confirmed it with a letter addressed to my brother. This letter created quite a scandal. My brother thought I was a heartless person, and I stopped all communication with her for over a year.
The vacuum cleaner played another important role in my life. After Karen began to spend a lot of time in my apartment, I took the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and left it without a word in the middle of our my living room on the floor, expecting her to pick it up and clean the apartment. For three weeks, the vacuum cleaner remained at the same place. Neither of us touched it nor said anything about it. We moved round it in the apartment. Finally I asked her, "Aren't you going to clean the place?" "Why," she said, "It isn't my apartment." "But you suggested that I buy a vacuum cleaner." "I wanted to make it easier for you." I did then the only reasonable thing. I'm not sure. Either I put the vacuum cleaner back in the closet or hired somebody from the agency to clean the apartment.
The realblow out with my mother occurred when Karen and I had Danny, our first child. We had lived in England for eighteen months. When we returned, she was pregnant. We were terrified of the first day we would have the baby alone in the house. We then made what Karen considers one of the definitely wrong decisions of our marriage. We invited mother to come and help us with the baby.
I wanted her comfort and wisdom. She wanted her help. My mother's wisdom is based on a mythical past. According to her, all of us brothers slept the night after two weeks, and if Danny didn't, it was something Karen was doing wrong. She wasn't firm enough, she didn't put him to bed late enough, she didn't feed him enough during the day, etc., etc. Also, she told Karen she had done everything herself, "with noo help at all." I can't testify about my birth, but I can testify that we had a housekeeper (Eliza) and a governess (Eliza's sister Bella) when I was three years old.
My mother had come to New York to teach. She, who had a compulsive urge to work around the house, would tell Karen that the room needed cleaning and sit down and watch her clean, or that the baby needed changing and give him to her. I understand years later she saw her job as placing the yoke of motherhood on Karen. She acted as a revengeful, sadistic communicator of tradition, of the place of woman in the house as a vale of tears. Karen, who expected help, walked around in a state of exhaustion. She was told she slept too much or, more subtly, she liked sleeping. And Karen couldn't hire help because my mother was here and that would insult her.
Every evening I came home, Karen took me to our room and complained to me bitterly about one thing or another my mother did and asked me to talk to her. When I did, she had her own version. Usually, in such cases, one can see the same event seen from different perspectives, for example, one saying, "What did I do wrong?" and the other saying, "Don't you realize that is an awful thing to say?" In our triangle, it was worse. Here, in these fourteen weeks, Karen and my mother openly accused each other of lying. I constantly had to ask questions to come to the core event between them. My mother said she helped. Karen said she did no such thing. Only after great effort did it become clear that she helped, but with the wrong things. Karen wanted her to take one of the feedings so she could sleep. She did the dishes though we had a dishwasher. At times, I sensed that mother was really saying that Karen should nurse her baby and that she was doing it all wrong. I had to be constantly judge and jury between them, allot praise or blame, be a King Solomon between them, a really pain in the ass position to be in.
Finally, we decided that facts were irrelevant. Mother had to leave. We thanked her for her help and within a week of that decision she had returned to England with a cloud, a whiff of scandal hanging on all of us.
Karen always felt that my mother's presence robbed us of the opportunity of sharing the birth of our first son together and drove a wedge between us. Though she was furious at her, she grew fond of her the next five years.
I realized through the years that her presence delayed a confrontation between Karen and I as two parents.
My mother's funeral was attended by a very large number of people. Usually, a man's funeral in the Persian Jewish community in London is attended by a greater number than a woman's because a man's business associates besides his immediate family attend it. A woman's is a private affair attended by family and family friends.
My mother's funeral was mobbed. I remember standing beside the pine box and looking at the grey and brown fedora hats back into the wall. In the house people had to stand up out in the garden. Only after one or two hours did the men leave, and old women with head scarves were left sitting around coffee tables, munching pistachio, dry apricots, and chatting. Then, they left, and a few of her friends remained cleaning up and talking in the kitchen. They were all women thirty years her junior. In her seventies she hated women of her age, found them old fashioned, boring, etc. Men loved to be her friends, talk to her, play cards with her. Patriarchs, who wouldn't say more than hello or good-bye to their wives during the day and whose card games were as sacred and segregated as a synagogue, loved to have her join their games. She loved playing and always bitterly complained of losing. She blamed her bad luck for it. "I always get such terrible cards." It was the only vice she admitted to and apologized for it by saying, "What else do I have to do?"
It was in that kitchen that one of her friends whispered to another in awe that Hannah (that's my mother's name) was more like a man.
That I already knew. What I didn't know was what I will tell soon, a shocking discovery that also took place in that kitchen. I heard it from my brother's wife, Ruby, to whom my mother's friend, Malka, told it.
Why Did Men Love and Respect Mother?
1. Because she was their spy, a propagator of male values in the family. She was a man in drag, and men instinctively knew it.
2. In the fantasy of the Eastern man, at least the Middle Eastern man, who has absolute control over his wife, to whom he has to explain nothing, neither talk nor be faithful to her, for whom a daughter is no glorious reflection on him, there is an erotic woman who is his equal, with whom he can match wits. That's why there is the tradition of the courtesan in the East, an intelligent object of desire. An Eastern man, who won't take shit from or give shit for a wife, who is an object of domesticity, is a closet yearner for equality between the sexes. That's an erotic state for him. For him a night of perfect passion can occur with wine, conversation and dalliance with a brilliant woman within the walls of a sealed boudoir.
Of course, such a relationship is forbidden to a son.
To men my mother was such a woman, independent, who spoke her mind, different from the women they knew. She was and was not one of them. Their card games had an erotic tinge to them.
The picture is reversed in the West where, at least in the last twenty years, the acceptable relationship between the sexes is more equal. As a rule, a civilized middle class American man wouldn't be caught dead asking from his wife what an Eastern man can expect. Consequently, the male fantasy here is a dream of absolute power, possession, of total control. The eroticism is sado-masochistic, and a prostitute or a call girl is the ideal object of that desire. In this love the prostitute can't remain a person; she needs to be quartered, the passion concentrated on small, isolated sections of the body, therefore erasing, humiliating, murdering both the victim and the actor. The object of this absolute, angry desire can never become a person. If so, the four walls surrounding the private act disappears, and the flow of passion stops.
An affair is a completely different animal. It is a dream of perfect happiness, of complete nourishment, the fantasy that one will find home in a different garden. An affair is a dream of domesticity, of being taken care of, that one's wife doesn't understand him, doesn't give him enough, etc. It is an integral part of this fantasy that the secret walls surrounding the affair will be broken down, and the man, or the woman, will go from one mate to another.
The other is a fantasy of rebellion against oppressive conditions, a revengeful, angry act of destruction, all tinged with love and desire, whose power is so strong that, if the walls of secrecy are broken down, the actor is afraid to be engulfed in it. The privacy, segregation of the act is a desperation. Concentrated on a little detail like a beauty mark or the neck, etc., its reward is a fleeting, costly moment of melancholy bliss.
Progression Towards Death:
As my mother's illness progresed, I got progressively angrier. The fifteen months from the surgery to her death can be divided into two. The initial period of hope when her condition improved, she regained her strength and the chemotherapy was successful. She went to the movies then and during my family's visits to London she told Karen and me all sorts of wonderful things about her early life, about my father, about me as a child.
For example, as a baby child I was very naughty but very sweet and never left her side. I was so small (she described my size by dividing her left forearm into two with her right hand; her arms were short for her body and very capable) and I was so dark that she wasn't sure I was her baby. She even showed the picture of her red-haired, blue-eyed father to Karen to emphasize the point. Karen and I were looking at the family album. Karen saw my picture in a baby carriage, with a bashed forehead, my eyes squinting in the light, peering into the camera. My mother said I always ran around and fell and bashed my head. To this day I have a scar on my forhead. I looked dark, but I don't know if it was because I was in the sun the whole day or I was a dark baby. Karen noticed one picture in which my oldest brother Yaakov's face and body, who had died of cancer thirty-four years ago when I was eight, was torn out. I was very familiar with this photograph. I had seen it many times when I was a kid and spent my time going through the pages of our family albums and looking at all the relatives who lived in Iran or in Israel, my grandparents, my uncles, my aunts or cousins, whom I never knew as a lonely boy in Turkey. This was the first time I noticed that Yaakov's picture was torn out. Karen asked her what the missing picture meant. She didn't speak for a moment and stared. "I was a mad person after Yaakov died, " she said. Then I noticed that all the pictures in the album where Yaakov appeared were cropped. The album was filled with them. I also noticed Yaakov's photograph, which was on the second floor of her house all the years she lived in London (father's picture was on the first floor; they were both in our house in Turkey and she had brought them when she moved to London) was gone. It was no longer there on the wall where we were sitting. It was an enlargement of the snapshot that was also on Yaakov's gravestone.
I realized then the great grief in my mother's life caused by Yaakov's death at eighteen, the fire that engulfed her, me, my brothers and even my father, was gone. She had left him behind.
I suffered two great losses in my childhood. One was Yaakov's death when I was eight. Though I loved him, he was a kindly, generous brother, the meaning of his prolonged cancer and death was that it turned mother mad. She was consumed for years by his loss, she cried, pulled her her. She had little left to give us. After thirty-two years, these few days before her death, I recovered a little bit of that loss.
The second loss was my younger brother Selim's birth when I was three. My mother, who loved babies, dropped me like a sack of potatoes when he was born. I was sent to the nursery school. That's why the discrepancy between the child who hung to her apron strings and the scrappy baby in the carriage who kept bashing his forehead.
No one can say exactly when hope was abandoned. I think every one reached that point a different time. Later I found out, her surgeon had given up hope at the surgery. "I give her a year," he had told her doctor. My mother upset his prediction by three months, a 25% error. No one quite said the word, but each new drug suggested a failure. "We will try a new medicine." The drugs became more and more experimental, and, finally, this is a new medicine. If it doesn't help, we don't know what to do. Then, we heard no more of drugs. Her visits to the hospital continued. On the telephone I heard she went once every few weeks; she stayed a few days and left.
In the last few weeks I was very angry. I visited my mother last time three months before her death. By that time I already knew. She could still walk but with great difficulty, about the way she was before her surgery. She lived in a house alone, and I, who came alone, stayed with her during the visit. In the evenings we went for dinner to my brother's house. After dinner (she ate some, not different from other times really since she always insisted she didn't eat much), we moved to the den. The T.V. was turned on; a bowl of fruit was on the coffee table. She sat in a chair by herself and glowered. I couldn't talk to her. When I sat next to her, she didn't respond. I looked at her and smiled. She got annoyed and asked why I was mocking her. It was horrible.
At the end of this visit, I said good-bye to her in the hallway. She had no strength to escort me to the car. In the old days she had made me walk under a mirror three times, look at myself in it, kiss the Torah. Now, she said good-bye. Three or four times I went to the door, then back to her and embraced her again. She accepted the embraces and wished me a good trip. That was it.
What I found out in the kitchen (from my sister-in-law Ruby) after the funeral was that my mother called her friend on the phone the moment I left, told her crying that I was unable to leave, that I came back and back to her, poor boy, that she couldn't say anything, I think, not to hurt me. I was too fragile, I suppose.
The knowledge came too late. I left angry, stewing until her death.
This noncommunication, this silence had twisted consequences. I was visiting London to be with her. In the last visit I interpreted her moody withdrawal as her awareness she was dying and her fury at the fact, that nothing could help her. I tried to reach across this gap to comfort her, but she refused. In a self-centered reaction, I took her withdrawal as rejection whereas she thought I was too fragile to hear bad news. She treated me like a rare crystal, easily to be chipped. By feeling rejected, instead of seeing she was the one dying, I acted like one.
Our weekly telephone calls were often initiated by her when she asked how I was. After this last visit the calls became rarer. I thought she was rejecting me, and in my anger I didn't call because she didn't care. I heard she was in the hospital. I called her there. She had no phone. I left a message. She did not return my call. In the last three months, I was self absorbed with fury, protecting myself in this euphemism of feeling. I couldn't see the most obvious thing, that she did not call me because she was too weak, that she had no phone because no phones were permitted in her section of the hospital, that she had shrunk to ninety-five pounds by her death.
Coincidences:
Three things happened during that year. My mother died. I got involved in a lustful, humiliating obsessive love for a bitch, Roxane. Of which I will talk later. And my wife Karen went through her excruciating pregnancy. On April the 13th she gave birth to Rafi through caesarean section. She was O.K. She had false labor twice, and we spent two different nights in a hospital room, then left. Though we had prepared for natural child birth, for the caesarean I was not there, but waited in the hall. Suddenly, a nurse brought him to me. He was a sturdy little baby with a barrel chest, wrapped in a towel. I held him and looked at his mooshy pink face in wonder. I cooed. I didn't notice that people stopped in the hall and watched us.
Four days after Rafi's birth I got a call from my brother that perhaps I should go London. I delayed. Karen was still in the hospital recovering slowly. When she came home, I still delayed. I remember the first time I saw her after the caesarean propped up by pillows in a chair. She looked dazed. She pleaded that she needed my presence in the house. I waited. When I called London, my brother said mother was the same, that I should hurry. Finally, on the 28th of April, Karen feeling better, I took the plane. When I arrived at Heathrow, my younger brother Selim met me. Tears in his eyes, he said that mother had died the night before when I was on the plane. I held myself till we arrived home. Avram, his wife Ruby, their children and my mother's friends were there. They said how my mother wanted to see me, how she was happy that we had a new baby, how Avram was in the hospital every day, that she had become under ninety pounds by the end. There, sitting in a couch, I cried uncontrollably for a long time. I remember screaming that I would never forgive myself for failing to be there, and others consoling me that no, I couldn't come, that I had to be with my wife.
After the funeral I returned home and sat shiva in New York.
As I said, I saw mother the last time three months before her death. I always wondered why others respected her so much since I saw her manipulative side. I tried to answer this question. Karen had her answer for it. She felt mother was generous, that everything belonged finally to her children. To me these answers made no sense. Other men admired her wit, her wisdom, her intelligence. To me she possessed none of these. She was not educated, showed no understanding for what I was doing. She didn't see me as a man. "Oh," she said, "You think your mother knows nothing. Your mother has seen so much in life. You will appreciate me one day." She turned out to be right. I felt an excessive emotionality was the only thing I took from her. I could not understand other people's respect since I loved her but couldn't respect her. I got a glimpse of an answer in my last visit, which I now remember more clearly.
During that visit mother had one of those inexplicable remissions cancer patients often have. She got up in the middle of the night and cleaned the house. "You don't know how wonderful it feels to be able to do so," she said to me next morning. That day we went to a movie together, I don't know what but it was one of the comedies of the day, and in the evening, we sat and talked. "You think I always looked like today?" I looked at her wrinkled face, which I hoped would be around a long time. "No," she said. "I was so beautiful you wouldn't believe. I was thirteen when I married." That I already knew. "Your poor father was a child too. He was only eigthteen." For the first time I heard mother talk about father with affection. "I was so beautiful that your father's brothers wouldn't leave me alone. I had to lock my door at night. Before we were married three months, your father had to leave Iran on business, and I was left in his family's house preparing the opium pipe for his mother, cleaning after her, and pushing back his brothers. His brothers were like animals. I hated them. They had no honor. I would go to my father and complain, and he would cry with me and curse the day he had given me to that terrible family. Your father came back finally. He had begun a business in Turkey. And after two weeks he was ready to leave again. The night before he was leaving, in our room, I told him that he was not leaving unless he took me with him. He was stunned. 'But who is going to help here with my mother in the house?' I don't care. A wife's place is with her husband. He didn't ask anything else. Next day he announced to the others that we were leaving and, despite their objections, in a week we left for Turkey. That was a scandal because what I did was unheard of; those days no wife was supposed to follow her husband on business." She had moved father, the way she had tried to move me all my life.
So mother was the initiator of that odyssey that began in Meshed, Iran, continued to Istanbul, Turkey, and ended in New York, U.S. She'd left Iran for the same reason I'd sent her back from New York, to protect a selfhood. Otherwise, I would have been born and grown, if ever, in Iran. My tyrannical mother, who tried to extinguish any spark of independence in me, was herself a rebel, who refused the cards dealt to her in life, stood her ground even though nobody around her did so, and changed her lot. Despite her protestations, she belonged to that race of closet adventurers, dreamers, explorers, like the Vikings or the Portuguese conquerors of America or the long, spanning arcs of torchlight of The Oresteia's messanger, who change the world or destroy it or themselves doing so.
Here is my salute to you, ma, my rebellious tyrant:
Dying of Cancer
Two Days After the Surgery: First Crisis
I came to the hospital at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. The doctor was in her room. He said to me she'd had a bad night. Bile was coming out of her mouth, but that was quite expected after a cancer operation. They were going to insert a tube into her stomach and that should relieve the pain, and he asked me to leave room for a few minutes.
I waited outside the room for about forty-five minutes. Then, I began to hear gags, wheezes, and one of the nurses came out and hurried to a supply cabinet on the floor. She quickly searched for something, took it and went back in. The noises continued. Soon, the nurse came out again and picked up a needle. This time I had the nerve to ask her, "Is there any problem?" "She's having difficulties accepting the standard tubes." The doctor had already left after his instructions. "Don't you think the doctor might help you?" "Don't worry we are in contact with him."
By now I was fearful that this may be about the last hour of my mother's life. I went to the telephone down the corridor and called my brother. They were having lunch. They were going to visit around three. I told him mother was having a hard time, she was gasping all the time, that they were trying to insert a tube into her stomach and perhaps he should be here. He said O.K. He'd come as soon as he could.
I was alone. In an alcove in the corridor a middle aged couple were sitting on a bench, whispering to each other and trying to keep their five, six year old child quiet, who seemed to be itching to run around. Soon afterwards, the nurse came out of the room and told me that I could go in now. I stepped in. My mother was lying exhausted on her back, her face white, black bags under her eyes, but more relaxed, breathing evenly. Drops of green liquid were flowing from a tube coming out of her mouth into a surgical basin placed on a stool next to her bed.
My brother soon joined us.
The first crisis was over. My mother got better. In four days the tubes came out of her mouth. In twelve days she left the hospital, feeling much better, and I decided to go back to New York, not only to my business but to my wife, Karen, also. We had decided to have a child when we heard that mother had cancer, and she was having a bitch of a pregnancy.
She would spend most of her pregnany on her back in bed, the doctor not knowing quite what was wrong since no X-ray could be taken; but she had a lot of pain. He guessed it was fibroids, but wasn't sure. Later on we were able to take a sonogram. A sound picture. I saw the skeleton of the baby, the one we'd call Rafael, a silhouette of his skull and his body, before he was born.
Pregnancy turns the body medically to a primitive, helpless stage. There are so many modern diagnostic devices one can't use. One can't even operate to see what is inside.
I took several trips to London during next year. I created business opportunities to be there. I also called every week and talked to her. She was doing fine. She was having chemotherapy and doing fine. The illness seemed contained, and she was not having any bad side effects from the treatments. At least, nobody told me so on the phone, neither she nor my brother nor his family. Every month she went to her doctor for a checkup.
Karen's terrible pregnancy continued. Every day she came down for dinner, and then she crawled up to bed in agony. That was it. We waited.
Why Did Karen and I Have a Baby at this Point:
First, at the news of my mother's terrible illness, it was the only thing we could do to assert living, soften the bad news. Karen stopped using birth control a few days, and she was pregnant.
Second, mother always said she wanted to see grandchildren. That was her biggest dream. Karen and I wanted to make her happy.
The Evening Before the Surgery and the Morning After:
The evening before the surgery, around six, my brother, his wife, their children, my son Danny, whom I had brought with me to England, and I were in her room. The room had an aura of hope. The children played around and made noise. We joked, gossiped, told stories. The surgeon walked in. He asked how she felt. "This is the right way to spend the night before the surgery, among one's family," he said. He said good-bye and left. Soon, we left too. The children kissed their grandmother on the cheek and told her we'd see her next afternoon.
The operation was very early in the morning. None of us brothers was there. I woke up at seven in the morning. I realized I didn't have the surgeon's name or his number. My brother was not home. Ruby, his wife, had only the physician's number, not the surgeon's. I waited till nine o'clock. The physician's secretary wouldn't give me the surgeon's number and took my number. I waited till about ten and called back. The secretary said the doctor would call me as soon as available. After eleven, the surgeon rang. "How are you? How did it go?" "The procedure went very well, much better than we had hoped for." "Oh, she'll be alright then?" He must have felt the explosion of hope in my voice. "Oh, no, Mr. Nejat, your mother is still a very sick woman. It all depends from now on on how she reacts to the treatment." "What are her chances in such a situation?" He hesitated a moment, "About fifty fifty I would say."
Then I washed up, left my room and went to the hospital.
How My Mother Understood the Nature of Her Illness:
My mother was told she was having hysterectomy, which, in a way, was true since the sickness had begun in her womb and spread through her body. In that respect, as I said before, the evening before the surgery in her hospital room had an aura of hope.
After the operation my mother asked the surgeon point black what she had. The doctor said hysterectomy. "If it is hysterectomy," she answered, "How come I have an incision from the womb up to my chest?" "Your mother is an intelligent woman," the surgeon told us later. "I can lie to the other patients, but I couldn't lie to her." My mother's surface behavior changed very little after finding out. The doctor had promised that he would not tell us that she knew. She greeted us cheerfully, hoped the best from her chemotherapy, as we all did, except for an occasional bout of despair, of despair, of despair.
The first of these bouts occurred the day they stuck those tubes in her stomach. The doctor had not acted yet - it was Saturday - and she was retching with a pain I could only guess at, constantly spitting a green liquid into a towel. Suddenly, "Whom am I kidding?" she cried. "This will not get any better."
She did feel better, however, after the tube was inserted in her stomach, and as I said, she left the hospital in two weeks, and I returned to the States with my son Danny.
What Is Despair?
There are two kinds of it. How does one feel knowing that he or she is dying? How do I reach across the Atlantic and comfort my mother who in her private loneliness knows she is dying and is filled with more and more fury and for whom there is no help?
I suffer from hypochondria, which is the mirror image of this experience, more precisely a kind of primal dread. Periodically, I get filled with the dread that I have cancer or am about to suffer a heart attack. My eldest brother died of cancer when I was eight and my father of a heart attack when I was fifteen. Now I am forty-four. There has been a gap in deaths in my immediate family until now. Nevertheless, three or four times a year, I get terrified that I am about to die with one of these two diseases. Of course, the terrors of these experiences are more like a nightmare than despair because I come out of it. I can be comforted until the next bout. Karen calls me a hypochondriac with no stick-to-itiveness because as a rule I hate to take medicine. She has to force two aspirins on me when I have a headache. I hate going to doctors. For her the whole thing is quite a joke because, it seems, except for a life long struggle to control my weight, I am quite a healthy person. When I am in one of these states, I connect every discomfort in my body to one of these diseases. For example, a pain in my ass is due to a tumor. A shortness of breath or sleepy arm is an impending heart attack. She has developed a routine which, I must say, is not too far away from my actual behavior. If there is a pain in my finger tip, for example, "oh, my finger tip," she says, touching her finger, and, then, dramatically, moves her hand to her heart, singing, "My finger bone is connected to my heart bone." The joke is very comforting and is like a mother waking her son from a terrible dream.
Karen's humor can cure the disease of terror that doctors can't. Nevertheless, I live under the sentence that one day my fears will be justified. Even hypochondriacs get sick, die of cancer, of heart attacks, etc., etc. If a hypochondriac never really got sick, wouldn't it be wonderful? Then, the fear of dying would replace dying itself. Hypochondria would be the key to eternal life, the power of the mind, of fantasy, of words, of logic, of magic over life, over facts. This would be a dream, a wonderful illusion. The Middle Ages did something like that to prove God's existence. God is the perfect creature. Since nothing can be perfect without existing, then God must exist. What crap! Therefore, death is an illusion; a loving being always watches over us. This argument is the perfect dream.
Here is my vision of paradise, the moment of perfect relief, of irrational timelessness:
Vila Nicosa
The most beautiful spot in Portugal
is the gigantic plaza with the equastrian statue in the middle
near Vila Nicosa.
The village was never anything else.
The plaza is paved in stone.
The streets in the village are lined with orange trees.
How We Found Out that Mother Had Cancer?
I was in the States. My memory is unclear. In our regular contacts on the phone, my brother called from London and said that mother had a slight pain in the stomach and doctors decided to take some tests to see what it was. The tests continued seven or eight weeks. During this time she had to go to the hospital to take further tests. At first, our references to these tests on our telephone conversations were desultory; but by the third week it was the first question I asked. For seven weeks, despite additional tests, they found nothing. My brother told me that they discovered nothing. They didn't know what caused the pain. He said that it seemed mother was O.K. Then, on the seventh week he called me and said she had cancer, and she'd be operated on in three or four days.
The casualness of these beginnings is due to my brother's nature of underplaying any possible bad news. To this day - mother is dead now for three years - he has not used the word cancer. Perhaps, to him, it was clear from day one what the tests were for; I only caught up with the facts as the weeks went by, and I don't remember if I consciously thought of cancer until he gave me the bad news. We both thought it would go away, and it almost did; but the magic finally broke down.
What is a mystery to me is that, considering how spread the disease was in her body - the liver had metathesized too - how come the doctors had to take so many tests to discover what she had and almost reached a negative conclusion. I'd have thought they had to take the slightest biopsy to discover what was going on. Where was this illness growing, in a mysterious region of anti-matter? So, my first reaction on hearing the news was a suspicion of incompetence, an angry attack on the conveyor of bad news.
Both the suspicion and anger remained private. I did not express it either to Karen or my brother. The series of tests have an authority of their own. After all, the operation did later confirm that she had cancer; but the thought that if they had discovered it earlier she might have been cured eats at me. The disease did begin in her vagina and at that stage it is curable. I know, even eight weeks earlier it was perhaps too late; but what if the doctors'd discovered it a year ago, or three years ago, whatever it takes. She did visit doctors for various reasons, if nothing else for sleeping pills. The suspicion of incompetence, of being too late, a magical lost possibility, as a private thought dogs me.
The possible sad fact is that my mother was a strong person, and the disease had to go much further before any signs were visible; when I arrived in England she had difficulty walking or climbing the stairs. Obviously, it was not a case of slight stomach pain, and the doctors had every good reason to keep looking.
When I got the news, my mind went into neutral. I only remember things vaguely. I heard the word liver, but I didn't register. Next evening a friend whose husband was a doctor came to visit. She asked what kind of cancer it was. I said I thought it had to do with the liver. She didn't say anything. That's when I realized it was pretty bad.
Two days afterwards, with my six year old son Danny, I went to London, leaving Karen, pregnant, behind.
What Kind of a Person Was Mother?
She was a dream of a mother for an infant. She was the kind of person one admires but finds impossible to live with, a mythological Jewish mother. She did everything for me. After the birth of Danny, when Karen and I asked her to come help us - a decision which almost wrecked our marriage - she carried a nineteen inch T.V. from our car to the elevator because she didn't want me to hurt myself. She was sixty-five then, and I was thirty-six.
When Karen and I delayed having children for five years, she asked me whether I knew how.
When I was in graduate school in New York, she wrote me from London that she would come to buy me a house. I was living in a lousy apartment in the Bronx. She had come to visit me there some time ago, and, though she didn't say anything to me, she was apparently shocked by the conditions. I am wondering why. The apartment had cockroaches; dust balls appeared in the corners between cleanings. All the furniture was second hand and one big upholstered easy chair, which I loved and was my pride and joy, was frayed on the arms. It was my first non-studio apartment, the first I had not rented already furnished. It had my taste stamped all over it. In the glow of that achievement, I had asked her to visit me. I must say all the time she stayed with me she didn't utter a negative word. She used the broom, instead of the vacuum cleaner, to sweep the apartment every day, and she prepared meals for me.
Three months after her leaving, I heard from her. She was going to visit me again to buy me a house. I was furious (though I wish somebody made a similar offer to me today). I told her that if she came I would leave New York and go some place else, and I confirmed it with a letter addressed to my brother. This letter created quite a scandal. My brother thought I was a heartless person, and I stopped all communication with her for over a year.
The vacuum cleaner played another important role in my life. After Karen began to spend a lot of time in my apartment, I took the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and left it without a word in the middle of our my living room on the floor, expecting her to pick it up and clean the apartment. For three weeks, the vacuum cleaner remained at the same place. Neither of us touched it nor said anything about it. We moved round it in the apartment. Finally I asked her, "Aren't you going to clean the place?" "Why," she said, "It isn't my apartment." "But you suggested that I buy a vacuum cleaner." "I wanted to make it easier for you." I did then the only reasonable thing. I'm not sure. Either I put the vacuum cleaner back in the closet or hired somebody from the agency to clean the apartment.
The realblow out with my mother occurred when Karen and I had Danny, our first child. We had lived in England for eighteen months. When we returned, she was pregnant. We were terrified of the first day we would have the baby alone in the house. We then made what Karen considers one of the definitely wrong decisions of our marriage. We invited mother to come and help us with the baby.
I wanted her comfort and wisdom. She wanted her help. My mother's wisdom is based on a mythical past. According to her, all of us brothers slept the night after two weeks, and if Danny didn't, it was something Karen was doing wrong. She wasn't firm enough, she didn't put him to bed late enough, she didn't feed him enough during the day, etc., etc. Also, she told Karen she had done everything herself, "with noo help at all." I can't testify about my birth, but I can testify that we had a housekeeper (Eliza) and a governess (Eliza's sister Bella) when I was three years old.
My mother had come to New York to teach. She, who had a compulsive urge to work around the house, would tell Karen that the room needed cleaning and sit down and watch her clean, or that the baby needed changing and give him to her. I understand years later she saw her job as placing the yoke of motherhood on Karen. She acted as a revengeful, sadistic communicator of tradition, of the place of woman in the house as a vale of tears. Karen, who expected help, walked around in a state of exhaustion. She was told she slept too much or, more subtly, she liked sleeping. And Karen couldn't hire help because my mother was here and that would insult her.
Every evening I came home, Karen took me to our room and complained to me bitterly about one thing or another my mother did and asked me to talk to her. When I did, she had her own version. Usually, in such cases, one can see the same event seen from different perspectives, for example, one saying, "What did I do wrong?" and the other saying, "Don't you realize that is an awful thing to say?" In our triangle, it was worse. Here, in these fourteen weeks, Karen and my mother openly accused each other of lying. I constantly had to ask questions to come to the core event between them. My mother said she helped. Karen said she did no such thing. Only after great effort did it become clear that she helped, but with the wrong things. Karen wanted her to take one of the feedings so she could sleep. She did the dishes though we had a dishwasher. At times, I sensed that mother was really saying that Karen should nurse her baby and that she was doing it all wrong. I had to be constantly judge and jury between them, allot praise or blame, be a King Solomon between them, a really pain in the ass position to be in.
Finally, we decided that facts were irrelevant. Mother had to leave. We thanked her for her help and within a week of that decision she had returned to England with a cloud, a whiff of scandal hanging on all of us.
Karen always felt that my mother's presence robbed us of the opportunity of sharing the birth of our first son together and drove a wedge between us. Though she was furious at her, she grew fond of her the next five years.
I realized through the years that her presence delayed a confrontation between Karen and I as two parents.
My mother's funeral was attended by a very large number of people. Usually, a man's funeral in the Persian Jewish community in London is attended by a greater number than a woman's because a man's business associates besides his immediate family attend it. A woman's is a private affair attended by family and family friends.
My mother's funeral was mobbed. I remember standing beside the pine box and looking at the grey and brown fedora hats back into the wall. In the house people had to stand up out in the garden. Only after one or two hours did the men leave, and old women with head scarves were left sitting around coffee tables, munching pistachio, dry apricots, and chatting. Then, they left, and a few of her friends remained cleaning up and talking in the kitchen. They were all women thirty years her junior. In her seventies she hated women of her age, found them old fashioned, boring, etc. Men loved to be her friends, talk to her, play cards with her. Patriarchs, who wouldn't say more than hello or good-bye to their wives during the day and whose card games were as sacred and segregated as a synagogue, loved to have her join their games. She loved playing and always bitterly complained of losing. She blamed her bad luck for it. "I always get such terrible cards." It was the only vice she admitted to and apologized for it by saying, "What else do I have to do?"
It was in that kitchen that one of her friends whispered to another in awe that Hannah (that's my mother's name) was more like a man.
That I already knew. What I didn't know was what I will tell soon, a shocking discovery that also took place in that kitchen. I heard it from my brother's wife, Ruby, to whom my mother's friend, Malka, told it.
Why Did Men Love and Respect Mother?
1. Because she was their spy, a propagator of male values in the family. She was a man in drag, and men instinctively knew it.
2. In the fantasy of the Eastern man, at least the Middle Eastern man, who has absolute control over his wife, to whom he has to explain nothing, neither talk nor be faithful to her, for whom a daughter is no glorious reflection on him, there is an erotic woman who is his equal, with whom he can match wits. That's why there is the tradition of the courtesan in the East, an intelligent object of desire. An Eastern man, who won't take shit from or give shit for a wife, who is an object of domesticity, is a closet yearner for equality between the sexes. That's an erotic state for him. For him a night of perfect passion can occur with wine, conversation and dalliance with a brilliant woman within the walls of a sealed boudoir.
Of course, such a relationship is forbidden to a son.
To men my mother was such a woman, independent, who spoke her mind, different from the women they knew. She was and was not one of them. Their card games had an erotic tinge to them.
The picture is reversed in the West where, at least in the last twenty years, the acceptable relationship between the sexes is more equal. As a rule, a civilized middle class American man wouldn't be caught dead asking from his wife what an Eastern man can expect. Consequently, the male fantasy here is a dream of absolute power, possession, of total control. The eroticism is sado-masochistic, and a prostitute or a call girl is the ideal object of that desire. In this love the prostitute can't remain a person; she needs to be quartered, the passion concentrated on small, isolated sections of the body, therefore erasing, humiliating, murdering both the victim and the actor. The object of this absolute, angry desire can never become a person. If so, the four walls surrounding the private act disappears, and the flow of passion stops.
An affair is a completely different animal. It is a dream of perfect happiness, of complete nourishment, the fantasy that one will find home in a different garden. An affair is a dream of domesticity, of being taken care of, that one's wife doesn't understand him, doesn't give him enough, etc. It is an integral part of this fantasy that the secret walls surrounding the affair will be broken down, and the man, or the woman, will go from one mate to another.
The other is a fantasy of rebellion against oppressive conditions, a revengeful, angry act of destruction, all tinged with love and desire, whose power is so strong that, if the walls of secrecy are broken down, the actor is afraid to be engulfed in it. The privacy, segregation of the act is a desperation. Concentrated on a little detail like a beauty mark or the neck, etc., its reward is a fleeting, costly moment of melancholy bliss.
Progression Towards Death:
As my mother's illness progresed, I got progressively angrier. The fifteen months from the surgery to her death can be divided into two. The initial period of hope when her condition improved, she regained her strength and the chemotherapy was successful. She went to the movies then and during my family's visits to London she told Karen and me all sorts of wonderful things about her early life, about my father, about me as a child.
For example, as a baby child I was very naughty but very sweet and never left her side. I was so small (she described my size by dividing her left forearm into two with her right hand; her arms were short for her body and very capable) and I was so dark that she wasn't sure I was her baby. She even showed the picture of her red-haired, blue-eyed father to Karen to emphasize the point. Karen and I were looking at the family album. Karen saw my picture in a baby carriage, with a bashed forehead, my eyes squinting in the light, peering into the camera. My mother said I always ran around and fell and bashed my head. To this day I have a scar on my forhead. I looked dark, but I don't know if it was because I was in the sun the whole day or I was a dark baby. Karen noticed one picture in which my oldest brother Yaakov's face and body, who had died of cancer thirty-four years ago when I was eight, was torn out. I was very familiar with this photograph. I had seen it many times when I was a kid and spent my time going through the pages of our family albums and looking at all the relatives who lived in Iran or in Israel, my grandparents, my uncles, my aunts or cousins, whom I never knew as a lonely boy in Turkey. This was the first time I noticed that Yaakov's picture was torn out. Karen asked her what the missing picture meant. She didn't speak for a moment and stared. "I was a mad person after Yaakov died, " she said. Then I noticed that all the pictures in the album where Yaakov appeared were cropped. The album was filled with them. I also noticed Yaakov's photograph, which was on the second floor of her house all the years she lived in London (father's picture was on the first floor; they were both in our house in Turkey and she had brought them when she moved to London) was gone. It was no longer there on the wall where we were sitting. It was an enlargement of the snapshot that was also on Yaakov's gravestone.
I realized then the great grief in my mother's life caused by Yaakov's death at eighteen, the fire that engulfed her, me, my brothers and even my father, was gone. She had left him behind.
I suffered two great losses in my childhood. One was Yaakov's death when I was eight. Though I loved him, he was a kindly, generous brother, the meaning of his prolonged cancer and death was that it turned mother mad. She was consumed for years by his loss, she cried, pulled her her. She had little left to give us. After thirty-two years, these few days before her death, I recovered a little bit of that loss.
The second loss was my younger brother Selim's birth when I was three. My mother, who loved babies, dropped me like a sack of potatoes when he was born. I was sent to the nursery school. That's why the discrepancy between the child who hung to her apron strings and the scrappy baby in the carriage who kept bashing his forehead.
No one can say exactly when hope was abandoned. I think every one reached that point a different time. Later I found out, her surgeon had given up hope at the surgery. "I give her a year," he had told her doctor. My mother upset his prediction by three months, a 25% error. No one quite said the word, but each new drug suggested a failure. "We will try a new medicine." The drugs became more and more experimental, and, finally, this is a new medicine. If it doesn't help, we don't know what to do. Then, we heard no more of drugs. Her visits to the hospital continued. On the telephone I heard she went once every few weeks; she stayed a few days and left.
In the last few weeks I was very angry. I visited my mother last time three months before her death. By that time I already knew. She could still walk but with great difficulty, about the way she was before her surgery. She lived in a house alone, and I, who came alone, stayed with her during the visit. In the evenings we went for dinner to my brother's house. After dinner (she ate some, not different from other times really since she always insisted she didn't eat much), we moved to the den. The T.V. was turned on; a bowl of fruit was on the coffee table. She sat in a chair by herself and glowered. I couldn't talk to her. When I sat next to her, she didn't respond. I looked at her and smiled. She got annoyed and asked why I was mocking her. It was horrible.
At the end of this visit, I said good-bye to her in the hallway. She had no strength to escort me to the car. In the old days she had made me walk under a mirror three times, look at myself in it, kiss the Torah. Now, she said good-bye. Three or four times I went to the door, then back to her and embraced her again. She accepted the embraces and wished me a good trip. That was it.
What I found out in the kitchen (from my sister-in-law Ruby) after the funeral was that my mother called her friend on the phone the moment I left, told her crying that I was unable to leave, that I came back and back to her, poor boy, that she couldn't say anything, I think, not to hurt me. I was too fragile, I suppose.
The knowledge came too late. I left angry, stewing until her death.
This noncommunication, this silence had twisted consequences. I was visiting London to be with her. In the last visit I interpreted her moody withdrawal as her awareness she was dying and her fury at the fact, that nothing could help her. I tried to reach across this gap to comfort her, but she refused. In a self-centered reaction, I took her withdrawal as rejection whereas she thought I was too fragile to hear bad news. She treated me like a rare crystal, easily to be chipped. By feeling rejected, instead of seeing she was the one dying, I acted like one.
Our weekly telephone calls were often initiated by her when she asked how I was. After this last visit the calls became rarer. I thought she was rejecting me, and in my anger I didn't call because she didn't care. I heard she was in the hospital. I called her there. She had no phone. I left a message. She did not return my call. In the last three months, I was self absorbed with fury, protecting myself in this euphemism of feeling. I couldn't see the most obvious thing, that she did not call me because she was too weak, that she had no phone because no phones were permitted in her section of the hospital, that she had shrunk to ninety-five pounds by her death.
Coincidences:
Three things happened during that year. My mother died. I got involved in a lustful, humiliating obsessive love for a bitch, Roxane. Of which I will talk later. And my wife Karen went through her excruciating pregnancy. On April the 13th she gave birth to Rafi through caesarean section. She was O.K. She had false labor twice, and we spent two different nights in a hospital room, then left. Though we had prepared for natural child birth, for the caesarean I was not there, but waited in the hall. Suddenly, a nurse brought him to me. He was a sturdy little baby with a barrel chest, wrapped in a towel. I held him and looked at his mooshy pink face in wonder. I cooed. I didn't notice that people stopped in the hall and watched us.
Four days after Rafi's birth I got a call from my brother that perhaps I should go London. I delayed. Karen was still in the hospital recovering slowly. When she came home, I still delayed. I remember the first time I saw her after the caesarean propped up by pillows in a chair. She looked dazed. She pleaded that she needed my presence in the house. I waited. When I called London, my brother said mother was the same, that I should hurry. Finally, on the 28th of April, Karen feeling better, I took the plane. When I arrived at Heathrow, my younger brother Selim met me. Tears in his eyes, he said that mother had died the night before when I was on the plane. I held myself till we arrived home. Avram, his wife Ruby, their children and my mother's friends were there. They said how my mother wanted to see me, how she was happy that we had a new baby, how Avram was in the hospital every day, that she had become under ninety pounds by the end. There, sitting in a couch, I cried uncontrollably for a long time. I remember screaming that I would never forgive myself for failing to be there, and others consoling me that no, I couldn't come, that I had to be with my wife.
After the funeral I returned home and sat shiva in New York.
As I said, I saw mother the last time three months before her death. I always wondered why others respected her so much since I saw her manipulative side. I tried to answer this question. Karen had her answer for it. She felt mother was generous, that everything belonged finally to her children. To me these answers made no sense. Other men admired her wit, her wisdom, her intelligence. To me she possessed none of these. She was not educated, showed no understanding for what I was doing. She didn't see me as a man. "Oh," she said, "You think your mother knows nothing. Your mother has seen so much in life. You will appreciate me one day." She turned out to be right. I felt an excessive emotionality was the only thing I took from her. I could not understand other people's respect since I loved her but couldn't respect her. I got a glimpse of an answer in my last visit, which I now remember more clearly.
During that visit mother had one of those inexplicable remissions cancer patients often have. She got up in the middle of the night and cleaned the house. "You don't know how wonderful it feels to be able to do so," she said to me next morning. That day we went to a movie together, I don't know what but it was one of the comedies of the day, and in the evening, we sat and talked. "You think I always looked like today?" I looked at her wrinkled face, which I hoped would be around a long time. "No," she said. "I was so beautiful you wouldn't believe. I was thirteen when I married." That I already knew. "Your poor father was a child too. He was only eigthteen." For the first time I heard mother talk about father with affection. "I was so beautiful that your father's brothers wouldn't leave me alone. I had to lock my door at night. Before we were married three months, your father had to leave Iran on business, and I was left in his family's house preparing the opium pipe for his mother, cleaning after her, and pushing back his brothers. His brothers were like animals. I hated them. They had no honor. I would go to my father and complain, and he would cry with me and curse the day he had given me to that terrible family. Your father came back finally. He had begun a business in Turkey. And after two weeks he was ready to leave again. The night before he was leaving, in our room, I told him that he was not leaving unless he took me with him. He was stunned. 'But who is going to help here with my mother in the house?' I don't care. A wife's place is with her husband. He didn't ask anything else. Next day he announced to the others that we were leaving and, despite their objections, in a week we left for Turkey. That was a scandal because what I did was unheard of; those days no wife was supposed to follow her husband on business." She had moved father, the way she had tried to move me all my life.
So mother was the initiator of that odyssey that began in Meshed, Iran, continued to Istanbul, Turkey, and ended in New York, U.S. She'd left Iran for the same reason I'd sent her back from New York, to protect a selfhood. Otherwise, I would have been born and grown, if ever, in Iran. My tyrannical mother, who tried to extinguish any spark of independence in me, was herself a rebel, who refused the cards dealt to her in life, stood her ground even though nobody around her did so, and changed her lot. Despite her protestations, she belonged to that race of closet adventurers, dreamers, explorers, like the Vikings or the Portuguese conquerors of America or the long, spanning arcs of torchlight of The Oresteia's messanger, who change the world or destroy it or themselves doing so.
Here is my salute to you, ma, my rebellious tyrant:
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Eldorado
When Pissaro saw gold earrings on little boys, he knew he'd reached his dream. Murat Nemet-Nejat (written around 1985 ) |