Slow motion

BEING THERE. His right hand. There’s not much else my brother can still move. It’s 7 December 2017. I’m sitting at his bedside. Palliative ward, St. Joseph-Stift, Dresden. Robby has a glioblastoma, stage 4. The Herrndorf tumour,1 he says in greeting. The first operation in April, recurrence in the summer, the second operation at the end of November, a blood clot in the head, then three days ago a stroke. Doesn’t look great, he says. No luck. It’s good of you to come.

An afternoon. And Robby, who wants to reminisce. For six hours. Is that a lot? I mean, is that a lot of time? He grasps my hand, pulls it to him, places it on his chest. That’s where he wants it to be.

Can you see me? he asks softly.

Yes, why?

Because I see two of you. The tumour. It’s pushing my eyes apart. Hey, I have to tell you something.

I look at his face: the huge scar on his right temple, the sallow skin, his lips. How words keep emerging between them. Fast, slow, soft, hesitant. I don’t understand anything. As if I had been knocked down by a large animal, as if someone had stuck an ice pick in my brain. Robby, what’s going on? What happened? Why didn’t you call me? Why so late? Why only …? There are so many questions. I don’t ask him anything, just stare at his mouth. At the words coming out of them. Like silverfish, I think to myself. Diving, slipping away, wanting to get away, into the darkness.

We were poppers, he says and looks out of the window. Do you know what that is?

I don’t think so.

I was eighteen and wore a white suit. I had it made specially. Really cool. We would travel around the villages and go to the discos to pick up girls. My pals and I.

What’s a popper? Not a blueser.

So no Jesus boots.

Right. No long hair, no scruffy clothes, no peace signs, but shaved necks, blow-dried hair, blond streaks, you know, all that flashy gear, and our music.

What kind of music?

The Cure, Prince, Michael Jackson.

Prince, in the mid-1980s in East Germany?

Sure, why not? And what do poppers do?

Hang out, listen to music, have fun.

Robby shivers a little. Perhaps he has a fever. There must have been a mistake, I think to myself. Something has gone wrong, it can’t be right, it’s not true. Someone will come along any moment now to fix it. Sorry, they’ll say, it’s nothing, a data flash, wires crossed, we’ll soon put it right. I look towards the door. No one there. What’s going on here? Whose idea was this? What’s my brother doing in this bed? It’s OK, he reassures me and squeezes my hand as if it were a plastic duck. With all the Christmas balls around him, the stars, the hearts, the long string of lights behind his head.

It’s supposed to be a reminder of home, Oberlausitz, he nods. Do you remember the Herrnhuter?2

Hey, I can’t do this just now.

The idea was to comfort children whose parents had gone abroad and sent them to boarding school. The light tells those at home: we’re coming to fetch you. Just a little longer, it’ll be all right.

Has mother been here?

I don’t know. Have you brought any raspberries?

Raspberries?

Yes, fresh ones. They’re good for cancer.

How quiet the afternoon is. How easy the world still was yesterday. How naïve, unsuspecting, completely normal. I lay my head on Robby’s chest. If only it could stay there quietly for a while until the world finds its way again, until everything gets back to normal.

Is that OK? I ask.

Yes, it’s good.

Are you in pain?

No, nothing. I’ve got more chemicals in me than blood.

Hungry?

They’ll be along in a minute. Hey, tell me.

Yes.

What if the journey goes in the other direction? It’ll be pretty terrible.

Yes.

I’m scared.

Yes.

Scared of losing consciousness. Will you be here?

I’m here and I’ll stay here.

I put my head back in the place where everything is still normal. As long as it’s on Robby’s chest, nothing can happen. Do I really believe that? If so, why this feeling? The ice pick in my head is pressing, pushing, it wants to go further. What does it want? Outside it’s getting dark. As if the afternoon were a time capsule: floating, far from everything. Just the two of us. Just a brother and a sister. Just Robby and I. But what’s happening here? That there were so many other scenarios, just not this one, I think to myself. That being here is completely unreal, surreal. And what’s it like for him? Is there a moment of realization? When you have the courage to say to yourself that the journey has begun to go in the other direction? Does it come on a particular day, at a particular hour, at a particular moment? And if so, what next?

CONTINENTAL DRIFT. How small the words are suddenly. As if they wanted to withdraw, shrink, roll up, a bit like rubber bands. No voices around us, no footsteps, no doors closing.

Do you remember? asks Robby, breaking the silence.

What?

When you called me and arranged to meet the next day at the main railway station in Dresden. Come tomorrow to the night train to Budapest, platform 10, you said and then hung up. The next day was 31 August 1989. I remember the date. I’ll never forget it. We were standing on the platform. You hardly said a word. You wanted to get away.

I had to.

You wanted to get away, and I thought: How can she do that? Why does she of all people have to go to the West? To a place where we won’t exist anymore?

I had to.

You gave me the key to your apartment. The train guard was getting impatient.

The compartment door banged shut. You stood there, alone on the platform, and you didn’t wave. Not once. Take care, sister, you said. And then you followed the train on your moped, through the night. At least that’s what you said.

As far as the border, Bad Schandau. I had to.

Robby looks at the ceiling. We are silent. After a while, he says: it’s like being in the eye of the hurricane.

What do you mean?

All summer I’ve been digitizing photos. Our childhood, the Weisser Hirsch, the zinc bathtubs, the Luisenhof. Every night in my mind I get on the train and travel to another time. University, the trips away, the family, the children.

He has thousands of pictures in his head, I think to myself. He’s gone through them all again. He’s taken his leave.

Don’t you want to know what I discovered on the photos? he insists. We grin at each other. Time for Robby’s favourite stories. My brother has a weakness for losers, or more precisely for himself as a loser. It’s his pet subject. How, shortly after the Wall fell, he and his friends planned to cycle from Dresden to Scotland, and how, on the very first day, he found himself under a motorway bridge in a violent thunderstorm, abandoned by the others, his ID card gone, leaving him no choice but to cycle back. How he returned to the Weisser Hirsch on leave from the army and no longer had a home. Just a note on the door telling him to go to our grandmother’s, who had a sofa. How on the first night on the sofa hundreds of moths fluttered around him, and how he fled headlong the next morning to a squat in Dresden-Neustadt.

Stories I know. Pictures that hide other pictures. Robby laughs out loud. His eyeballs pop out. His right hand starts to paddle, as if it were trying to explain his bulging eyes. I would love to hear what he saw on the photos he spent all summer looking at. But my brother is an expert at talking through images. He doesn’t like speaking directly. Keep the balls in the air, otherwise you get bogged down. Why does he say that so often?

You have to keep the balls in the air, Robby says like a voiceover, otherwise you’ll get trapped.

What do you mean?

It’s OK, he says dismissively, later perhaps. Can you massage my hand? That’s my Nazi hand.

What?

Don’t talk, just massage.

Is that OK?

No, harder. It’s a weird feeling when your body just starts to shut down.

I swallow. As a child I used to be able to force back the tears. Stare at the ground and pretend outwardly that I was somewhere else. It used to work quite well. But here?

The story about the moths, I say.

Hm.

How did it go exactly?

You know how it went. Tell me something nice instead. Raindrops on the windowpane. Fine rivulets disappearing into nothing. Something nice, Robby demands. And if he doesn’t have a right to it, who does? He pulls his right hand back and stretches his arm in the air.

What are you doing?

I have to go.

Where?

Leave me. I have to go. I have to go to war.

DIFFERENCES. My brother’s hand drops down hard onto the blanket. His gaze drifts to the window. The ice pick again, the pressure in my head, the feeling of slipping away. Where to? Into the world before the loss? To where it all lies ahead? Is that what we tell ourselves? And what then? My brother summoned me when he knew that he had nothing left to lose. When he was sure that we could no longer find any answers. The words feel right, but they have no meaning. They disappear before they’re even here.

Don’t think about it, says Robby, without moving. There’s no point, it...