Purity (65 page)

“I appreciate your respecting her wishes.”

“Your mother is a fighter. I've had many patients not as sick as her give up and take the colostomy. And of course you know the story of her leaving Germany. She was in a situation of indignity that she refused to accept. With the will she has, she should have lived another thirty years.”

So began my admiration of my mother. It's odd to say this, given how sick she was, but she gave me hope about my own life. My situation with Anabel was surely no more of a torment to me than her bowel was to her, and abandoning her mother and siblings couldn't have been easier than what I had to do to Anabel. If my mother could fight through it, so might I.

Her surgery seemed to have excised the phrase
dumb old mother
from her vocabulary, along with others like it. She came home from the hospital without her self-deprecation. Under the influence of Cynthia, who was now a single mom and living in Denver with her daughter, her political views had also softened. “I'm starting to think that money really is the root of all evil,” she said to me one night. “As soon as you have money, you have envy. That's the problem with the Communists, they envy the rich, they're obsessed with redistributing money. And, I'm sorry, but I look at Anabel's family and all I see is the harm the money did to it.”

“That's why she rejected it,” I said.

“But rejecting money is just another way to be obsessed with it. It's just like the Communists. The productive workers get exploited by the lazy ones. I'm sorry to say this, but it's not right that Anabel doesn't work—that
you're
the one who has to make up for her obsession. She would have been better off not having money in the first place.”

“Her family is messed up, for sure. But she's not lazy.”

“When I'm gone, you're going to have a little money from this house. And I do not want that money going to support Anabel. That money is for
you
. It's not much, but your father worked hard, I worked hard. Please promise me you won't give it to the daughter of a billionaire.”

I considered my hardworking parents. “All right,” I said.

“Do you promise?”

I made the promise, but I wasn't sure I would keep it.

That summer, I started eating meat again. I went to Nevada and wrote a story for
Esquire
about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository. I also nursed my mother through her radiation sickness and saw a lot of Cynthia and her little girl. Now it was Anabel to whom I made Sunday-night phone calls. She claimed to be having productive thoughts, and only when she said things like “Don't forget me, Tom” was it less than nice to hear her voice. She wouldn't have guessed that I was eating meat again, and I didn't mention it.

My mother continued to surprise me. After she'd recovered from her second, conclusively discouraging surgery, in October, she asked me to take her to Germany before she died. She'd been following the political developments there, the swelling exodus of East Germans through Czechoslovakia, and for the first time in many years she'd tried sending another letter to her family at its old address. Three weeks later, she got a long letter back from her brother. He and his wife were still living in the old place, his mother had died in 1961, his little sister was twice divorced, his older son had been admitted to the university. At least as my mother translated it to me, his letter was devoid of resentment, as if her disappearance were just another fact from a difficult childhood he'd long since put behind him. There was no mention of the many earlier letters he hadn't answered. I wondered if he might never have been resentful, only fearful that the Stasi would frown on his corresponding with an escapee. And now people had stopped being afraid of the Stasi.

On the strength of my three semesters of college German and my mother's story, I contracted with
Harper's
to write a firsthand account of communism's collapse. My mother had lost a lot of weight and was looking truly scarecrowish, but her bowel was still functioning somehow, and she didn't have a stoma. One evening, when I was helping her put her simple affairs in order, she set down her pen and said to me, “I think I'm going to die in Germany.”

“You don't know that,” I said.

“I'm done here,” she said. “Cynthia is a good mother, a fine person, and you're on your way to a fine career. I think Denver and I have had enough of each other. A life is a funny thing, Tom. People talk about putting down roots, but people aren't trees. If I have any roots, they aren't here.”

She worried that she'd forgotten her German, but she was so good at language, had learned English so well, that I considered this unlikely. On our last night in Denver, Cynthia came over to our house without her daughter. When it was time for her to say good-bye, forever, I tried to leave her alone with my mother.

“No, stay with us,” my mother said. “I want you to hear what I have to say.” She turned to Cynthia. “I want to apologize for not being a better mother to you when you were young. I made excuses for it, but that's all they were, excuses, and I don't deserve any of what you've done for me since then. You've been the best daughter a mother could ever ask for. You were the great gift your father gave me. If I've been lucky in nothing else, I've been lucky in you and Tom. I want you to know how deeply I appreciate everything you've done, and how sorry I am that I was ever unkind to you. You're a wonderful person, more wonderful than I deserve.”

Cynthia's face had crumpled, but my mother remained dry-eyed, dignified. German. In the shadow of death, she was no longer the person I'd known. She'd become the person I hadn't known, the German person. The decades of her unhappiness, the years of her dronings, now seemed like a long failure to find a good way to be American.

By the time we left for Berlin, the Wall had been breached. (I mentally rearranged my unwritten story, as journalists do, to make it more about young Clelia.) After resting for a day in Berlin, we proceeded by train to Jena. Looking out the window at a town shrouded in coal smoke, my mother commented, “Thirty-five years they've had to make it even uglier. Thirty-five years, my God, of manufacturing ugliness. People will forget, but I don't want you to forget: this part of Germany paid for its guilt.”

I wrote this down in a notebook. East Germany may have been a giant penitentiary administered by the Russians, the Stasi may have embodied the worst excesses of German authority and bureaucratic thoroughness, and anyone with brains or spirit may have fled the country before the Wall went up, but the inmates who'd remained behind to expiate the country's collective guilt had paradoxically been liberated from their Germanness. The ones I met in Jena were humble, unpunctual, spontaneous, and generous with what little they had. The country's economy had been a sham from the start, and although the inmates had played along with the rules, attending the political-education meetings, licking their attendance stamps and pasting them into little books that reminded me of the Green Stamps of my youth, their real loyalties were to one another, not to the state. My uncle Klaus and his wife cleared out of the bedroom that had once been Annelie's and gave it to my mother. They had a telephone but rarely used it. Friends simply appeared at the door and were ushered in to the weeklong house party with which my mother's return was celebrated. There was endless beer and bad white wine and cream cakes. My presence was awkward, since I couldn't understand much of the conversation, and I was relieved when, at the end of the week, my mother proposed that I leave her alone with her brother and come back to visit only on Saturday nights and Sundays. “You need to write your article,” she said. “They've offered to take care of me, but I want them to have a break every week.”

“You're sure this is what you want to do.”

“That's how they do things here,” she said. “They take care of each other.”

“You're sounding like an old Communist.”

“It's been forty years of terrible waste,” she said, “a whole country of wasted lives. It's a country of big children, people being naughty behind the teacher's back, people tattling on each other, people getting their dumb certificates for being good little socialists. People submitting to the system because they're German and because it's a system. The whole thing was stupid and a lie. But they're not arrogant, not know-it-alls. They give what they have and they take me the way I am.”

The closer she came to dying, the more sure of herself she became. She'd concluded that the meaning of a life was in the form of it. There was no answering the question of why she'd been born, she could only take what she'd been given and try to make it end well. She intended to die in her mother's bedroom, in the company of her brother and her only offspring, without the indignity of a colostomy bag.

I went back to Berlin, teamed up with a couple of young French journalists I'd met, and ended up squatting with them in a Friedrichshain apartment whose tenants had simply walked away from it and showed no sign of returning. For a month I made the weekly trip down to Jena, with an extra trip at Christmas, while my mother grew ever thinner and grayer. Thankfully, her pain was mostly tolerable. When she had a sharper attack of it, she rubbed her gums with the morphine that Dr. Van Schyllingerhout had given her to smuggle along with us.

My last meal with her was breakfast on the second Sunday of January. She'd been up a few times in the night, doing things that her dignity precluded my witnessing, and her eyes were hollow, the contours of her skull crisply visible beneath her thin skin, but she was still bright Clelia, her heart still beating, her brain still oxygenated and filled with her life. I was happy to see her eat an entire hard roll with butter.

“I need to know what you and Anabel are going to do,” she said.

“I'm not thinking about that now.”

“Yes, but you'll have to think about it soon.”

“She needs to finish her project, and then we're still hoping to have a family.”

“Is that what you want?”

I thought about this and said, “I want to see her happy again. She used to be amazing, and now she's all beaten down. I think if she were happy and successful I'd be happy with her.”

“Your happiness shouldn't depend on hers,” my mother said. “You were a happy little boy, and I know your father and I weren't the easiest parents, but I don't think you were harmed. You have a right to be happy for yourself. If you're with someone who can't be happy, you need to think about what you're going to do.”

I promised to think about it, and my mother went to lie down in her mother's bedroom while I struggled to read a German newspaper. Half an hour later, I heard her go into the bathroom. A while after that, I heard her scream. The scream has stayed with me, I can still play it in my head exactly as I heard it.

She was on the toilet, doubled over and rocking with agony. She'd been on a toilet in distress countless times in her life, but this was, remarkably, the first time I'd ever seen her on one. She would have wished that I hadn't, and I was and remain sorry, for her sake, that I did. She looked up at me, wild-eyed, and said, with a gasp, “Tom, my God, I'm dying.”

I helped her up by the armpits and half carried her into the bedroom, leaving behind a bowl of blood and worse. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. Some part of her jerry-rigged colon had ruptured, and she was dying of sepsis. I rubbed morphine into her gums and stroked her fragile head. Her head was still so warm, I wondered what was happening inside it, but she didn't speak to me again. I said it was OK, I said I loved her, I said not to worry about me. Her breathing became slower and more labored, and then, just past noon, it stopped altogether. I laid my cheek on her chest and held her for a long time, not thinking anything, just being an animal that had lost its mother. Then I got up and called the number my uncle had given me to get a message to him at his little weekend cottage.

Klaus and I thought it was better to have no funeral than a tiny funeral. After the cremation, he and I walked along the river, among the lawns where my mother had sunned herself as a girl, and scattered half of the ashes along the riverbank. The other half I put aside for scattering in Denver with Cynthia. On the morning I left Jena, I thanked Klaus, in halting German, for everything he'd done. He shrugged and said my mother would have done the same for him. It occurred to me to ask what she'd been like as a girl.

“
Herrisch!
” He laughed. “Now you see why I had to help her.”

I looked up the unfamiliar word later.
Bossy
.

On the train back to Berlin I stood at the rear of the last car the whole way, watching the receding track signals change from red to green. It didn't feel so bad to be an orphan. It felt like the first day of a long vacation, a day as empty as the January sky was clear and sunny. The only cloud, Anabel, was in a different hemisphere. My sense of liberation was partly financial—Cynthia and Ellen and I would divide an estate worth more than $400,000—but it was larger than that. My parents had both bowed out now, leaving the entire field to me, and I could see that I'd been hobbling myself for Anabel's sake, for fear of getting too far ahead of her.

I'd promised to call her that afternoon, but scattering my mother's ashes had made me aware of something childish and fundamentally irrelevant in the body-filming project, and I was afraid of betraying this if we spoke. My own body felt so vital, so far from its own death, that I went out walking instead, retracing my mother's long-ago steps, mingling with foreign gawkers along the Wall in Moabit and then finding my way to the Kurfürstendamm.

Near the western end of it, I stopped in a pub to eat a sausage and record my journalistic impressions in a notebook. At some point I noticed a man alone at the next table, a young German with a high forehead and loosely curly hair. He was watching the pub's television with his arms draped across the chairs on either side of him. The wide-openness of his posture, the sense of ownership it broadcast, kept drawing my eyes to him. Finally he saw me looking and gave me a smile. As if letting me in on a joke, he pointed up at the TV screen.