LITMIR.BIZ

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easy-going self-deception.

      I wrote two evening-filling plays, one of them actually in alexandrines from start to finish, to make it extra-entertaining, telling myself that I absolutely had to finish them both first and that in addition they made the perfect preparation for this book, this hard eulogy, that would be everything and nothing at the same time, written in a single gush, novel or not.

      I was wrong.

      High-minded cowardice.

      Transparent deception.

      I went to a stomach specialist and lay on my side in order, with the aid of a rubber intestine, to allow a sophisticated garden hose with a miniature lamp and a camera mounted on it to look deep into my innards via my oesophagus. Intestine to intestine, pipe to pipe. A person is only a machine with washers that wear out too quickly.

      On my side and half fighting for breath in panic. Because if there is anything I have inherited from her, apart from minor everyday ailments, it is the self-inflicted lacerations of psychosomatic illness, multiplied by this certainty: with the same malady, only the more gruesome of two possible diagnoses can be the correct one.

      In the inventory of her body, which shaped mine, there was a primacy of dry coughs and minor complaints. But in her legacy and hence in my thoughts there is only room for afflictions that can vie with those of Egypt. In addition: the work ethic as a caricature. Another neurosis that I hated in her and find in myself—I still don’t know whether she and I possess it thanks to our blanket Judaeo-Christian culture of guilt, or else because of the specific hysteria of the shopkeeping classes. Perhaps this is a combination and there is a connection, not even that crazy, between a neighbourhood shop and a woodland chapel, a butcher’s shop and a synagogue, a boutique and a cathedral. Anyway, every time I don’t do what I think I should—correction: whenever I don’t do something fast enough that I have undertaken to do, just like a computer that writes and loads and reloads its own programmes until it short-circuits—every time, then, that according to my subconscious I fall short of the image I want to project of myself, my right eyelid starts trembling (guaranteed: the final stage of a tumour), my wrists and my shoulders tighten up (guaranteed: multiple sclerosis), my fingertips seem to become lifeless, they tingle and flake (it won’t be leprosy, but still something ghastly).

      I get up with a headache and I go to bed with diarrhoea and meanwhile my stomach produces enough sulphuric acid to scorch irreparable holes in its own wall, just as cigarettes smoked the wrong way round would hiss and make holes in a palate. At least that’s what it felt like, the day I decided to call that specialist. That morning I had rolled out of bed and crawled to breakfast on my knees, reduced to the state of a reptile by abdominal pain. One mouthful of coffee and I turned into the foetus of a reptile, made up of contractions and cramps.

      Over the telephone the specialist gave me a concise diagnosis that was intended to reassure me, but that in the few hours that separated our telephone conversation from his physical examination transformed into an imaginary life-and-death struggle.

      I remembered the natural remedy with which she always combated her stomach acid. (‘Acid? [she, with a dismissive gesture] I’ve got a gastric hernia, nothing can be done about that, it’s to do with my weak spine and your difficult birth.’) You peel a raw potato, chew each slice at length and keep swallowing the mash without drinking anything.

      It has to be said: some relief could be detected. The reptile foetus unrolled, sat down on a chair at his laptop and typed in the word that the specialist had repeated five times. Reflux. Twelve million hits. One referring to a Scandinavian hard-rock band with undoubtedly appropriate music. All the others referred in every language on the planet to the symptoms of the phenomenon itself. Because the entrance to your stomach no longer shuts properly, your mouth feels stiff from morning till night, it is as resistant as dried-out leather because of the acid that creeps up during the day like vermin up a drainpipe and that at night laps against your tonsils thanks to the principle of communicating vessels—from stomach to mouth and back again.

      And indeed, my tongue felt like the peeling tongue of an old shoe. My teeth, my pride—at almost every check-up my dentist sighs that my teeth will take me to 100—those once indestructible teeth suddenly felt brittle, vulnerable as china that has been washed too often, dry like after eating unripe cherries. Unless something were done quickly, my teeth, destined one day to crack walnuts and open bottles of beer for my 100-year-old companions, but now bathed daily in vitriol of my own making, would have only a few years to go before they split, crumbled, became inflamed, turned black, stank, fell out all by themselves, were pulverized and blown away. Apart from that—some sites predicted, as always mercilessly objective—the chance of throat cancer was scarcely a risk, it was a certainty, and that Adam’s apple wouldn’t last much longer either.

      ‘You have some scar tissue at the top of your oesophagus and also at the mouth of your stomach,’ mumbled the specialist, peering at his monitor, pushing the garden hose with the lamp and camera attached to it deeper and deeper inside me, as if it were an endless adder that would freely wind its way inside—I was sweating like a trapeze artist who, during a daring new act in the ridge of the tent, is clinging only to precisely that one mouthpiece, with precisely those teeth—‘but apart from that I can’t see much that is spectacular. Losing a few kilos wouldn’t hurt you. I can prescribe you some stomach acid inhibitors, but more exercise and less wine will get you just as far.’ At my insistence he took a few more samples from my stomach wall, to check whether I wasn’t cultivating a handful of open sores, and actually mainly to confirm what I already strongly suspected. I had at least terminal stomach cancer.

      The head of the endless adder turned out to contain, besides a lamp and a camera, a pair of forceps, three steel teeth that moved toward each other to grab and extract a piece of my stomach. I became aware of it. Something was gnawing at me, from inside. A death-watch beetle, a rotting space creature, a caterpillar leaving the cocoon, a just desert—something was nibbling at my guts. I had not felt the intestine itself, you have to drink an anaesthetic beforehand, probably distilled from the poison of a bird spider, which anaesthetizes your oesophagus so heavily that afterwards you mustn’t eat or drink anything for an hour, or else everything will literally go down the wrong way, toward the lungs. Before you know it you’ll be drowning in a cup of tea.

      I didn’t drown, I was simply hollowed out. I was still lying on my side, I was still biting desperately on the mouthpiece, as if I was hanging on to life itself, spinning through in the roof beams of our universe, sweating like a cheese round in the sunlight, with fanatically closed eyes—and yet I saw before me how, deep inside me, an endless mechanical snake, a monster with a Cyclops’ eye and a miner’s lamp on its head, started pinching bits of my stomach. I felt its clawing trident snipping around, at random, and I recognized it, dammit, I recognized the insatiable trident.

      I recognized it twice.

      We once had at home—how old was I? Five? Seven?—a pair of sugar tongs that I could not stop playing with. A silver-plated hollow stick with a button on one side, and when you pressed it on the other side exactly the same kind of primitive claw opened as the one now gnawing at my stomach, eating what was supposed to digest my food. Picking, nipping—a humming bird fighting a closed, carnivorous plant.

      With the silver-plated tongs you picked up a cube and deposited it in a cup. I did it so often not because of the sugar but because of the playful delight of those perfect tongs, which were taken away from me every time, on her sighing orders of course, and I got a flea in my ear into the bargain because I wouldn’t listen at once.

      I couldn’t locate those tongs after she found her way once and for all and inexorably into the closed institution where she would spend her last few months, among other human wrecks—carcasses with limited movement capable only of drooling and relieving themselves, most of them lopsided and tied, like her, to their beds, their armchairs, their wheelchairs. After that unwanted separation my father moved by himself into an old people’s home four streets away from her. He left the flat where they had lived for almost two decades that was situated above the butcher’s shop where they had done business for nearly forty years. Virtually none of their household effects could go with him.

      For a week I was condemned

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