It was mostly families we talked about in Berlin. We talked about Don Carlo and fathers and mothers and brothers. We talked about men and women and aunts and uncles and children and Jesuits and love and weddings and life and friends and lovers, the whole lot, I suppose. The things that happen in families. Which includes almost everything, doesn’t it? We were going around the city looking at the sights and telling each other these stories. Family stories and love stories come right and wrong, she said.
Is love still a good word for love, she asked me at one point. I mean, how can you answer that? Of course it’s still a good word. It’s the best word there is for love. What other word is there that would work any better? Chemistry? She said they were always making young words out of the old words, changing the meaning so you don’t recognize them any more. And love is one of those words like home and hope and passion, all those words that people never put back in the right place, she said.
I think being away in Berlin allowed us both to be quite open with each other. It helped us to forget what was happening to her, it was all on hold. There was a comfort in not having to think about what was imminent, I suppose. As long as we kept moving and telling each other stories, as long as the streets were going by and we had all these family things to talk about. I think it was not having to explain anything that made it easier to explain everything, if you get me.
4
She’s on a lot of steroids to help with her breath-ing. She’s searching in her see-through bag and takes out some medication. She reads the label and drops it back into the bag. She holds up the bag and looks inside. Because it’s easier to find things like that from the outside. She reaches in with her hand once more and takes out other medication, then looks at the label and drops that back into the bag also. It’s hard to know if she’s picking out the same one each time or if they’re always different.
She said your life is a pair of lungs. Time is a pair of lungs. Could that be right? You’re only as good as your lungs and her lungs had run out of time, something like that she said.
She described to me what it’s like going into hospital for a breathing test. The nurse gets you to sit down in front of a machine called the pulmonary function test. You put your lips around a nozzle that looks like a gum shield attached to the machine, then the nurse tells you to take in a deep breath until your lungs are completely full up and you hold it for as long as possible. Then you blow all the way out until your lungs are completely empty. And when you’re ready, she said the nurse says it all like a breathing song. Take in a deep breath, all the way in, right up to the top of your lungs and hold it, hold it, hold it, she says, hold it, hold it, very good, now blast all the way out, all the way, all the way, keep going, she says, all the way, all the way, all the way, keep going, every last bit, very good, excellent, well done, she says, until your face has gone all red from the effort and the nurse tells you to relax and breathe in normally and let’s try that again, one more time.
As well as the steroids, she’s also taking painkillers. And they’ve given her Xanax, too, so she can relax and sleep at night.
At the hotel she told me that she was afraid sometimes. I’m afraid of drowning, she said. I’m afraid my lungs will fill up and then I’ll drown. That’s what happens, you know, when you get pneumonia, it’s like drowning. I’m afraid of drowning alone, she said. The Xanax was meant to stop all that anxiety. She said it makes you more like yourself, back to the way you were before, the real yourself. Because she was worried, naturally, and she found it difficult to concentrate. Apart from a few articles in the newspapers, I think she had trouble absorbing too much news. She was more interested in seeing things first-hand now, listening to people. She couldn’t write. She didn’t see the point in putting things down any more. She had no time for things that were made up, she couldn’t read a novel or watch a movie, for example, there was no time for anything invented.
Only Don Carlo, because it was so personal to her.
She offers me a Xanax in the car, as if I need it. She starts laughing and shaking her see-through plastic bag around. Like she’s offering around mints or chocolate. Here, would anybody like a Xanax? Manfred ignores her. He’s in his own world and remains focused on the driving. Anyway it’s not something that should be given to a person operating machinery. I don’t need one either, but she says it will do me no harm, why not? So I take one for a laugh, see if it does anything for me.
I tell her that my daughter, Maeve, is getting married.
That’s great news, Liam.
She thinks I’m obsessed with my daughter. She doesn’t like me going on too much about Maeve all the time, I can understand that, because she has no children herself and this whole father and daughter thing gets to her a bit. I think it makes her feel excluded. She usually tells me to shut up. So I give her the details in brief, the wedding is planned for August.
That’s very soon, she says.
You’ll be getting an invitation, I tell her.
Thanks, she says.
And then I realize what I’ve just said. There’s not a hope in hell of her being able to attend the wedding. Maybe it’s the Xanax. It must be making me feel more like myself.
I’m coming, she says.
But it’s three months away.
I’ll be there, Liam. Whether I’m dead or alive. Where are they having it?
It seems like the future has abandoned her, all these things carrying on in her absence.
The wedding, Liam? Where are they having it?
On the farm, I tell her, his farm, Shane. It’s his mother and father, they’re very keen to have a wedding on the farm. They have these great barns and the ruins of an old church on their land. They want to have the wedding in the old ruins and then I suppose they’re intending to get a marquee, just in case of the weather. It’s a fully working farm, with live cattle and so forth. But knowing Shane, he will get that all fixed up, taking into account the wedding guests and their clothes and shoes, I would imagine. At least, that is what they’re talking about.
A farm wedding, she says. I would love to be there.
She once showed me a photograph of herself when she was the same age as Maeve. No more than twenty-four years old, twenty-five at the most. With lots of curls. It was taken before she went to London, before she worked as a chambermaid, when she was getting out, leaving her family and her country behind. With no fear and no idea what was coming. I wish I had met her then, the life in her. She must have been great fun in that photograph, full of danger and up for anything, all kinds of things not even thought up yet. The look in her eyes. Staring right at you. I think it was the eyebrows you noticed most. Striking, you would have to say, drawn by a child. Her eyes look like they had great questions to ask.
She has the same eyes in Berlin. They are the eyes of a twenty-four-year-old girl, with the eyebrows left intact, even though all her hair is gone from radiation and her lungs are working very hard and she can’t get enough air to say all the things she still wants to tell me.
She talks about a place she once went to which was great for the lungs. The salt mine she went to visit in Romania, in Transylvania. It was an active salt mine, fully operational, but all the people with bad lungs came there because the salt dried the air for them. That’s when she was travelling with Noleen. Herself and Noleen, they travelled all the way down from the Ukrainian border, right down to Tirana and back around the coast to Italy.