A Saturday in November

It felt like a late-summer day. Above the trees, still thick with leaves, clouds piled up into towering white masses, untroubled by autumn storms. Business at the wine shop had been slow, as it always was when the weather was fine enough for people to sit drinking on their own terraces in the afternoon.

It was nearly three o’clock, time to close. I could hardly wait. It was warm enough to sit in a beer garden. First, though, or perhaps instead, I would visit my mother. She had recently been placed in a nursing home after a stay in hospital, where, for the benefit of the next generation of medical professionals, she had been subjected to rather more treatment than was strictly necessary. She no longer recognised me.

I hadn’t seen her all week, having allowed even the most trivial excuse to prevent me from driving to the home. Weren’t these visits, by now, really just about me and the soothing of my conscience? What difference did my presence make to my mother, who took me either for one of her long-dead brothers or simply for a friendly stranger?

Friendly? A stranger? As though my mother had ever considered a stranger friendly! Dementia had only deepened her naturally reserved disposition. On her worst days she wouldn’t speak to me at all, barely raising her head to look at me.

I loathed the home, and I loathed myself for having been unable to spare her it. Although I knew I had done everything I could—even to the point of a loud and open confrontation with the chief physician in the hospital corridor over the necessity of a third general anaesthetic in two days—I felt responsible and guilty, and utterly beyond absolution.

The building alone repelled me: a neoclassical monstrosity painted Schönbrunn yellow, always overheated, always stuffy. Inside, an aromatic medley of assorted incontinences, unaired beds, clothes worn for too long, vegetables steamed to mush in industrial-sized kitchen pots, and the ubiquitous chamomile or peppermint tea, whose vapours drifted through the corridors in clouds.

My stomach always turned a little as I entered the lobby, made my way along the corridors and finally puffed up the stairs to the second floor. I disliked taking the lift: what if there was a corpse on its way down to the refrigerated rooms in the basement, and we got stuck?

The week before, the visit had been easier. That day, too, had been sunny. I had managed to slip away a little early, brought along a chilled bottle of Pinot Gris, wheeled my mother around the nursing home’s garden for a while, and then settled beneath a pergola with her to raise a glass to the fine weather.

She had been lucid and alert, had praised the wine from the Palatinate and had even consented to another of the establishment’s unfortunate inmates joining us, after he had asked permission with somewhat rusty good manners and been rewarded with a plastic cup of wine.

And although hardly a word was spoken, it had almost turned into a little party.

The memory made me realise how nervous I was. A woman in her eighties who could no longer use a telephone ought not to be left entirely to the nursing staff for a whole week. Of course they would notify me if ’something‘ appeared to be imminent—a telephone call, from whoever it might be, that call I had dreaded all my life—but that wasn’t the point. I wanted, if at all possible, not to arrive too late, like someone summoned home by telegram from overseas who, despite all the speed of modern travel, must reckon with the possibility of not reaching his mother in time.

What did in time actually mean in a case like this?

I ordered a taxi for shortly after three. The accounts, the tidying up—they could wait until Monday. I felt I would be wasting time if I submitted to the long walk to the train and the equally long journey into town. A taxi would get me to the home in half the time. Perhaps there would even be time for a beer after work, my back against the sun-warmed wall of a pub, before the gathering dusk brought a sudden chill.

The taxi driver was Turkish and spoke flawless Bavarian.

„In a bit of a hurry, are you?“

„What makes you think that?“ I asked.

„You look it,“ the driver replied. „Off to see your sweetheart?“

„You’re a mind-reader, are you?“ I tried to smile.

„Can’t keep the ladies waiting! They’ll be gone before you can blink!“

The driver put his foot down as though he were on his way to collect a lottery jackpot. In scarcely fifteen minutes we had arrived. I jumped out of the taxi, to hell with the receipt, avoided the visitor-packed entrance hall and hurried through the rear entrance, officially reserved for staff. I knew that the door, supposedly secured by a numerical code, was rarely shut. I dashed up the stairwell to the second floor.

The fourth door on the left bore my mother’s name—but also that of her roommate. A loner all her life, my mother had been condemned by her admission to the home to spend the final chapter of her existence in enforced companionship with a complete stranger. The thought made me shudder. What would I do in her position? Throw the other woman out of the window? How much trouble could you get into, after all, for forcibly claiming a little privacy in a place where people were simply waiting to die? Though perhaps, by then, you were too weak for that. Too indifferent, even.

The bedroom door stood ajar, as though a nurse were inside or had just stepped out to fetch something.

For all the sunshine, the room lay in half-light. The bed at the far end, by the window, belonged to her roommate. It was empty.

My mother’s bed stood against the wall on the right. She was lying on her left side, in her nightdress, with the covers only half pulled over her.

„Well, sleepyhead?“ I whispered. „Isn’t it a bit early to be turning in?“

I touched her gently on the right shoulder. She felt warm.

„Hello, Mum. It’s me. Richard.“

I touched her shoulder again, giving it a little shake this time. It yielded, though there was a peculiar resistance to it.

„Mum, wake up!“ I was no longer whispering.

It took a few seconds for the primal fear inside me to rouse itself from decades of slumber, for the thought to dawn on me that this might be the moment when there really was something to be afraid of.

Then something wrenched me out of the room.

I ran to the staff room—empty, as always—caught sight of a nurse disappearing into another room, caught up with him and dragged him back with me.

„Please, come and look at my mother! She won’t wake up!“

The nurse was experienced enough not to resist. Once inside my mother’s room, he sat down beside her on the bed, shook her, spoke to her and gave her cheek a light slap. Finally, he pinched a fold of skin on her neck between two fingers and twisted it. When even that brought no response, he turned to me and shook his head.

„I’m terribly sorry,“ he said, and I could hear the sincerity in his voice, though for him this must have been routine, „but I’m afraid your mother has just passed away.“