them if they’re not ironed.’
Three years ago – when she sank quite suddenly into a lethargy – I took her first to a psychiatrist, probably unconsciously postponing the day I’d have to take her to hospital, which was what happened immediately thereafter.
The psychiatrist followed the routine.
‘Your first and last name, ma’am?’
‘Vacuum cleaner,’ she said softly, her head bowed.
‘Your name, ma’am?’ the psychiatrist repeated, this time more sharply.
‘Well… vacuum cleaner,’ she repeated.
I was flushed by a wave of idiotic embarrassment: I cannot say why at the time I felt as if it would have been easier to bear if she had said ‘Madonna’ or ‘Maria Theresa’.
While she was in hospital – where instead of the harsh judgement of the psychiatrist (Alzheimer’s!) her diagnosis turned out to be more ‘amenable’ – I began to wage my own battle, in parallel, for her recovery. I found someone willing to work from morning to night. He stripped the wallpaper that had nearly fused with the concrete. We painted the walls in fresh pastel colours. We redid the bathroom, laid new tiles and mounted a new mirror. I purchased a new washing machine, a new Hoover, I threw out the old bed in one of the rooms, and bought a bright-red modern sofa, a colourful new rug, a new pale-yellow wardrobe. On the balcony I set out potted plants in new flower pots (which were flourishing that year late into autumn!). I cleaned every corner of the flat and discarded old, useless things. The windows shone, the curtains were freshly laundered, the clothes in the wardrobe were neatly folded, everything was in its place. For the first time I felt I knew what I dared throw away, and what I should keep, and that is why I resisted the urge to toss out a homely old house plant with only a few leaves and left it where it was.
In the upper drawer of the dresser I left untouched the things she treasured: an old watch which had supposedly belonged to my grandfather, my father’s medals (the Order of Brotherhood and Unity with Silver Wreath, the Order for Valour), an elegant box with a sizeable collection of compasses and a Raphoplex slide rule (my father’s things), a key to the mail box from an earlier flat, an old plastic alarm clock with dead batteries, a box of Gura nails (judging by the design probably from East Germany), a silver-plated cigarette box, a Japanese fan, my old passport, opera glasses (from her trip with Dad to Moscow and Leningrad), a calculator with no batteries and a bundle of announcements of Dad’s death, held with a rubber band. I carefully polished the old silver basket-shaped bonbon dish, in which she kept her jewellery: a gold ring, a pin with a semi-precious stone (a gift from my father) and costume jewellery, which she called her pearls. Mum’s ikebana arrangement, the pearls tumbling out of the bonbon dish like writhing snakes, had stood for years in the place of honour on the shelf. I washed all of her dishes carefully, including the Japanese porcelain coffee service she never used. The service was intended for me. (When I die, I am leaving the coffee service to you. It cost me a whole month’s wages!) Everything was ready to welcome Mum home, each thing was in its place, the house glistened to her taste.
My mother came home and walked importantly around her little New Zagreb flat.
‘What have we here! This is the sweetest little surprise you could have given me!’
Come Here, Lie Down…
‘Come here, lie down,’ she says.
‘Where?’ I ask, standing by her hospital bed.
‘On that bed.’
‘But a patient is already lying on it.’
‘What about over there?’
‘All the beds are taken.’
‘Then lie down here, next to me.’
Although she was delirious when she said those words, the invitation for me to lie down next to her stabbed me painfully. The lack of physical tenderness between us and her restraint with expressing feelings – these were some sort of unwritten rule of our family life. She had no sense of how to express feelings herself, she had never taught us and it seemed to her, furthermore, that it was too late, for her and for us, to change. Showing tenderness was more a source of discomfort than of comfort; we didn’t know how to handle it. Feelings were expressed indirectly.
During her stay in hospital the year before, just after she’d turned eighty, my mother’s false teeth and her wig got their little hospital stickers with the name of the owner. She asked me to take the wig home (Take it home so it won’t be stolen). When they removed the tube, I took her bridge from the plastic bag with her name and surname on it and washed it. Every day after that I washed her false teeth, until she was able to care for them herself.
‘I washed your wig at home.’
‘Did it shrink?’
‘No.’
‘Did you set it on the, you know… so it wouldn’t lose shape?’
‘Yes, on the dummy.’
My attention to her, to her intimate affairs, meant, I figured, far more to her than physical contact. I asked the hospital hairdresser to come and cut her hair short, and she liked that. The hospital pedicurist trimmed her toenails, and I tended to her hands. I brought her face creams to hospital. Her lipstick was her signal that she was still among the living. For the same reason she stubbornly refused to wear the hospital nightgown and insisted that I bring her own pyjamas.
We went to a café near her flat for her eightieth birthday. She went through her customary routine: she got carefully dressed, put on shoes with heels, her wig, her lipstick.
‘Is it on right?’
‘Terrific.’
‘Should I pull it down a little more over my forehead?’
‘No, it’s better as it is.’
‘No one could tell it is a wig.’
‘Never.’
‘So, how do I look?’
‘Great.’
We sat in the café, outdoors, until a summer rain shower sent us inside.
‘How could it rain on today of all days! My eightieth!’ she complained.
‘It’ll pass in a minute,’ I said.
‘I get rained on for my eightieth birthday,’ she protested.
We sat in the café for a long time, but the rain did not let up.
‘We’ll take a cab! I cannot allow myself to get wet!’ she complained, though the chance that there would be a taxi willing to drive us 150 metres was slim. She was anxious about the wig. I protested that the wig would be fine.
‘I could catch my death!’
We called a cab. Her inner panic burned down like the candles on the birthday cake, which she blew out several hours later, in the company of her friends.
For the last thirty years, since my father died, she has withdrawn into her home. She was left standing there, caught off guard by the fact that he was gone, at a loss for what to do with herself. Time passed, and she continued to stand there, like a forgotten traffic warden, chatting with neighbours, while with us, her children, and later, her grandchildren, she complained about the monotony of her life. She despaired, often her life seemed a living hell to her, but she didn’t know how to help herself. She blamed us for a long time, her children: we had pulled away from her, we had left home, we no longer cared about her the way we used to, we had alienated ourselves (her phrase). Her list of refusals grew from one day to the next: she refused to live with my brother and his family (Why? So I can serve them, do all the cooking and washing?!), or to trade her flat for one in their neighbourhood (I’d be doing nothing but babysitting