The Woman from Hamburg (23 page)

“Do you know what we are going to do now?”

“I know,” Peter Schok replied.

“Is this what you want?”

“Yes.”

This was an official conversation in conformity with the Dutch law about “medical decisions concerning the termination of life.” The disease was incurable. The patient had expressed his wish. Those present were witnesses. On the following day the doctor would have to file an appropriate report in court. The essential conditions had been fulfilled.

The doctor removed a bottle from his bag and filled a glass with a clear, bright yellow liquid. Peter drank half of it.

“I don’t want this,” he said. “Please give me an injection.”

He had been afraid of injections throughout his life, but now he rolled up his sleeves and spoke calmly to the doctor.

He died in his sleep five minutes later.

Gerrit, a nurse at an old-age home, carried the corpse to the bed. He washed it with professional skill and dressed it in the Wrocław suit.

The funeral home supplied the coffin that Peter had selected and ordered. It had a glass lid and a cooling system concealed under its floor.

His friends came together, alerted by Gerrit’s sending out the colorful obituary notice. Most of them were infected with the HIV virus. They laid down flowers and lit candles. Synagogue music flowed from tapes. Peter Schok’s little red cat came up to the coffin and stared at him through the glass lid, astonished by the sight. That was the only detail not foreseen by Peter in the program of his funeral celebration. His friends chased the cat away, but it climbed up again. After consulting briefly, they agreed that it wasn’t hurting anything and they allowed it to stay.

The crematorium is located outside the city, not far from the sea.

Again they listened to Jewish songs, and then the music from the film
The Rose
rang out. It was sung by Bette Midler, the New York actress who began her career in gay men’s bathhouses; they were the first to hear her songs.
As she sang “And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong,” the floor, with the catafalque and coffin, began to descend, like a trapdoor in a theater. The music ceased. The program prepared by Peter Schok was over.

In the silence, and not included in the program, the empty floor returned to its place.

Beside the Prinsengracht canal, not far from the church whose bell Anne Frank could hear in her hiding place, there stands or, rather, lies, a monument. It is composed of three pink triangles; that is how homosexuals were labeled in the German camps. The triangles descend lower and lower in the direction of the canal; the last one is immersed in the water. There is a plaque on it with the inscription, “To the memory of the homosexuals who were persecuted during the Second World War, before then, afterward, and whenever.” Every so often, unknown perpetrators tear off the plaque, but gays replace it with a new one. To the question, What connection is there between AIDS and the camps and the war?, they reply that it is discrimination and hatred.

After they returned from the funeral, Peter Schok’s friends placed flowers next to the plaque, which was in its proper place that day.

Dutch regulations require the burial of ashes immediately after cremation. They are sprinkled in the crematorium garden or placed in a collective tomb filled with urns, known as a columbarium, which in Latin means a dovecote. Recently, permission has been given to keep ashes at home. Gerrit took advantage of the new law, brought Peter Schok’s ashes home, and put them in his wardrobe. He asked his friends to mix their ashes, his and Peter’s, and to bury them together when his turn comes, and it will not be long in coming.

Benjamin G. asked Peter Schok’s mother why Kaddish wasn’t said at the funeral.

“What’s that?” his mother asked.

“The Jewish prayer for the dead.”

She was taken aback.

“They should have said Jewish prayers for my son?”

It turns out that Peter Schok was not a Jew.

His mother tried to understand why her son wanted to be seen as a Jew, but Benjamin G. didn’t know either. Did he wish to abase himself? Did he wish to elevate himself? Was he trying to enroll in the world that he had looked at with such admiration in the Jewish museum?

People who are suffering from AIDS are different and they want to die in a different way. They create liturgies of disappearance. They believe that they will become familiar with death and that they won’t be afraid.

Peter Schok ended the scenario with a request for euthanasia. He believed that he had found an appropriate, simple, tasteful form. He was mistaken. It turned into kitsch, because the form was false. It created the illusion that Peter Schok was deciding about his death. In reality, the decision had already been made, but not by him. Peter Schok only chose the date, the music, and the menu.

Nonetheless, one cannot deny Peter Schok’s courage.