The game is already nearing the end of the second half, the score is tied. The stadium is going nuts. The goalpost shot has yet to happen. Overtimes have yet to happen. Everyone is chanting Kempes’s name. Now here’s the ninetieth minute. A beautiful parabolic shot, everyone at the tables bristles, Holland’s fans get up out of their chairs ready to cheer, the ball flies menacingly toward the Argentinian goal, lands on Rensenbrink’s foot, a shot . . . Ah! Aaaah! . . . The goalpost. The shout that had been prepared for a goal in the end collapses into a drawn-out sigh . . .
I glance at the man next to me. Actually, the whole time I’ve been trying to watch the game through his eyes. When Rensenbrink’s shot comes, he just clenches his right hand into a fist on the table. So he is excited after all. The score is still tied, the tension is mounting, the commentator is hoarse. This is followed by a break of a few minutes, during which time the spectators order more beers. I look at the people’s faces. I wonder whether all of them are watching the game as if for the first time. Or do some of them nevertheless know, do they remember? Their companions surely must. But actually, what does it matter, it makes no difference, everyone’s faces are anxious and lit up. We don’t know how a match that ended forty years ago will end. I, too, try to watch it as if for the first time. Maybe this time a miracle will happen. Everything is possible, everything is once again imminent.
The morning papers will be bought up right away, they’ll have the first analyses, the first photos from the game. The same ones from forty years ago, just reprinted on new paper that still smells like ink. They’ll be talking about that game for a whole month, about Kempes’s goal during overtime. About the Dutchmen’s refusal to appear at the awards ceremony, about Cruyff’s refusal to play on the tulips’ national team, which predetermined the outcome of the World Cup, about the Argentinians’ dirty move in delaying the game due to concerns over a cast on the wrist of one of the Dutch players . . . About all of those details that history is made of.
But right now I’m not interested in history, I’m interested in biography. People don’t hurry to leave, they stay, finishing their beers, commenting, fuming. Those who were rooting for the Argentinians don’t dare celebrate. I sit at the table next to the man. It’s dark, people start getting up and leaving. A cold wind picks up.
I take him by the arm and say in a quiet but clear voice: Look, old man, life is more than a single loss. He turns to me very slowly. He looks at me, and I’m not sure what he’s seeing, what is racing through his drained memory. Forty years have passed since we watched that game together.
If I’m not in his memory, do I exist at all?
A minute passes. His lips move and he repeats voicelessly, only with his lips, but I understand, that is the password, two syllables: Old man . . .
This is our final conversation. He does not recognize me anymore, everything progresses terribly quickly. His brain has surrendered, the provinces of the body rise up in rebellion. I’ve brought him to be here with me in the community that Gaustine just opened.
Of course, before that I checked to see what was available in the country I come from. The clinic I went to—supposedly to “visit a relative” so they would let me in—was horrific. Most patients were tied up so as not to be unruly, they rolled their eyes frantically and howled softly like animals, their voices hoarse from screaming. I think it was the most horrifying thing I have ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen some truly horrifying things. What do you expect? an orderly snapped at me as he passed me in the hallway. I’m alone here with thirty people, I can’t keep them in line, but at least they don’t suffer for too long . . . I raced outside and shut the front door, where I saw an ad for a funeral home with several telephone numbers printed on a normal sheet of paper. I remembered its name: Memento Mori.
I snatched up my father and against his will brought him to Gaustine’s clinic in Switzerland. A human being has the right to die like a human being. For the last three years, when he was still in his right mind, he constantly wanted to “leave.” “Leaving” in his language means that we should help him die. He wrote this on all sorts of scraps of paper, even on the wallpaper in his room. While he could still write.
Ten months later I give in and decide to check out the possibilities for euthanasia. Just to look into it.
34.
A Guidebook for the End
We have never before suspected that memory loss could be fatal. Or at least I never suspected it. I’ve always taken it as more of a metaphor. A person suddenly realizes how much memory they are carrying around in their body, wittingly and unwittingly, on all levels. The way that cells reproduce is also memory. A kind of bodily, cellular, tissue memory.
What happens when memory begins to withdraw? First you forget individual words, then faces, rooms. You search for the bathroom in your own home. You forget what you’ve learned in this life. It’s not much anyway and will run out soon. And then, in the dark phase, as Gaustine calls it, comes the forgetting of that which accumulated before you even existed, that which the body knows by nature, without even suspecting it. Now, that’s what will turn out to be fatal.
In the end the mind will forget how to speak, the mouth will forget how to chew, the throat will forget how to swallow.
Legs will forget how to walk, How does this work again? Goddamn it . . . Someone has remembered for us how to lift one foot, to bend the knee, make a half circle and then set it in front of the other foot, then to lift the other one that is now the back foot, again a half circle, then set it down in front of the other one. First the heel, then the whole sole, and finally the toes. And again you lift the other leg which is now lagging behind, you bend the knee . . .
Somebody has cut the power to the rooms of your own body.
The last phase of the illness did not exactly fall within the scope of our clinic, although people did die here, too. Most went to hospices and spent a bit more time on life-support systems, despite signs that the body was now refusing to support life. It kills itself piecemeal, organ by organ, cell by cell. Bodies get fed up, too, they get tired, they want a rest.
Only in a few places around the world can this desire of the body be heard. Besides being a paradise for the living, Switzerland is also a paradise for the dying. For several years in a row, Zurich has invariably been the best city for living in the world. It probably is the number one best city for dying, but the shocking thing is that they don’t actually make such rankings, at least not officially. The best cities for dying. Of course, the best for those who can afford it. Dying has gotten to be quite expensive. But was death ever free? Perhaps with pills it is slightly pricier, it’s harder with a gun, at least until you get your hands on one, but there are far simpler and perfectly free methods—drowning, jumping from a height, hanging. One woman I know told me: I feel like jumping off the roof, but when I think how messed up my hair will get as I’m falling, and who knows how wrinkled my skirt will get, full of stains and everything, and I start to feel ashamed and give up on the idea. After all, they still take pictures of you in those cases, right, people watch . . .
Now, those are the signs of a healthy body—it feels ashamed, it foresees what might happen, it thinks about the future, and even after its death, it is vain. The body that truly desires death no longer experiences vanity.
In short, if you manage to kill yourself, it’s a freebie of sorts. But what happens when you no longer have the strength to kill yourself, and not just strength but you no longer even remember how to do it? How do you leave this life, goddamn it, where have they hidden the door? You’ve never had firsthand experience of it, or maybe you have once or twice, but they were unsuccessful attempts. (Actually, it is precisely the unsuccessful suicide attempt that is a real tragedy, the successful one is merely a procedure.) How, for the love of God, does a person kill himself, the fading brain wonders, how did they do it in books? There was something about the throat, something happens with the throat, air, you stop the air or water gets in and fills you up like a bottle . . . or the sharp edge cuts, I think there was a rope involved, but what do I do with that rope . . . ?