Companions

A week ago, when the severe disorientation began, I arrived in the late afternoon and for the first time there was little recognition. I went home and tried to resign myself, but when the statement, with such finality, formed itself in my mind: "The conversation is over; he doesn’t even know me anymore…” the tears came.

But the next morning, he had been clear, happy to see us, ready to converse. Later I stood at his balcony window, looking out at the hills, covered with soft dove-colored branches just emerging from winter sleep, and a liquid grey sky hovering above them. What can I say these moments are like? I wondered. They’re not like jewels, not like diamonds, not like gold…all those things seem tawdry compared to the preciousness of what we’re experiencing. No, I thought, these moments are just pure light.

He looked around his room at the pictures there. One is a print of a Van Gogh painting of a bridge in Holland; it's quite calm, even static for a Van Gogh, in shades of blue, green, and yellow. "I always liked his work," he said. "I used to use that painting in class; my point was in getting my students to see the symmetry in it. It’s an odd picture, really. Very emotional."

He turned toward the other wall, above his bed. "But this one is the one I associate with the most," he said. "It's an odd picture, isn't it?" He was lying flat on his back, looking over at it: it's an oil painting, quite naive, of trees in autumn foliage, along a straight canal or river. And down in one corner there is a little white duck with a yellow beak, swimming on the water. "It was a view out our window at the school where I taught," he said - but I don't think that's probably correct; it's the sort of embellishment he's adding to stories now, as his memory wobbles between fact and fantasy. "A young girl painted it, she was one of my students. It was her first painting and she came to me with it one day and said she wanted me to have it. So sweet! And I've always kept it, because of the spirit in which it was given." Then he looked up at me and added, “but I see a lot of weaknesses in it!” He told us that she became a sculptor and lives in Mexico; another day he said she was in Texas; another time he didn't know if she had ever painted again, or what happened to her. But in his disorientation about place, the painting has been a constant. "It's the only thing I recognize consistently," he said, in wonder. "Wherever I am these days, this painting seems to stay with me."

"Is there a kitchen here?" he often asks. "A bathroom? A living room? Where are you sleeping?" None of it seems to make sense; he shakes his head saying he can't orient himself at all - only the "ugly television and these paintings" seem familiar. Once I picked up his carved cane, and gave it to him to hold; I showed him his Moroccan leather slippers; brought him a photograph of the family that he's always had next to his chair. "Yes," he said, both puzzled and amused, "all the details are familiar but they don't add up!" He looked carefully at the photograph and handed it back to me. "I have one just like that," he said.

"When you get up, do you look out the window?" I asked.

"Not usually," he said. "But I know - if I look over there, across the way, I can see the light in Myrle's apartment. And that's familiar. but the rest of it doesn't make sense."

Once, when he seemed the most lucid and alert, I asked him if he'd like to get in a wheelchair. "I could take you around the apartment, and maybe it would help you orient yourself." But he declined. "I'm too tired," he said. "It's all right."

One evening about a week ago, after he was first in bed and before this deeper disorientation began, we were alone in his room.

"My only worry is what will happen to my things after I die," he told me. "If there’s anything in my rooms that you want, anything at all, take it." He paused. "Because afterwards…it might be messy."

"I don’t think they’ll fight," I said.

He gave me a just-slightly-skeptical look. "I mean it," he said.

I hesitated, and then spoke. "Really, the only thing I would like to have someday is Socrates."

He smiled, "Take him!" he said, and then I saw a tiny cloud pass across his face. "I’d miss him," he added.

I immediately regretted speaking at all. "No, I’m absolutely NOT taking him, not now," I said. "I was just telling you what I liked. He's staying right here, with you." I searched for a way to change the focus. "Tell me where you got him. "

"At the British Museum," he said. "We used to stay nearby and whenever I went to the museum I always headed for the antiquities and went straight to look at him. I don’t know why, I just liked that statue. It had been ploughed up in a field, and there's a mark where something struck him in the forehead, even in the reproduction. He’s always been with me…I always took him to class with me because I wanted to infuse my students with... the spirit of the Greeks." He smiled. "I once asked an expert in antiquities about it, asking how anyone could have known that this is what Socrates looked like. And he replied, 'Just look at it! No one could have invented that face!'”

Comments

[Tall Girl]

(o)

[carolee]

this is an amazing story you're allowing us to share. thank you so much.

[leslee]

Heh. That is quite a face. :-)

[language hat]

Amazing. Thank you.

[Lucy]

(o)

[dale]

(o)

[Dave]

His relationship to the painting of a view he used to look at was especially interesting to me: the artlessness being part of the charm, the grounding of memory in real places, his fuzziness about the place where the artist ended up, his fuzziness about the place where he finds himself right now. You get the sense that these tenuous links to the physical world are the only things still keeping him in it.

[elizabeth]

Beth, this week I saw a heartbreaking short film about the Shabander Cafe, a renowned gathering-place for intellectuals in Baghdad,: old moustached men arguing politics and poetry in Arabic beneath the ceiling fans, drinking and smoking nargile. I somehow ended up envisioning your father-in-law as one amongst them.

I hope the days are passing peacefully--thank you again for sharing this story.