The Japanese Lover(67)

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Irina received the text message on her cell phone while she was in Hans Voigt’s office with Catherine Hope, Lupita Farias, and the heads of health aides and nursing. They were discussing the right to elective death, a euphemism that had replaced the term suicide, which the director had prohibited. A fateful package from Thailand had been intercepted at reception, and it now lay on Voigt’s desk as evidence. It was addressed to Helen Dempsey, a third-level resident without family, aged eighty-nine, who had cancer that had spread and could not bring herself to undergo another bout of chemotherapy. According to the instructions, the contents were to be taken with alcohol, and the end would arrive peacefully in the person’s sleep.

“They must be barbiturates,” said Cathy.

“Or rat poison,” added Lupita.

The director wanted to know how on earth Helen Dempsey had ordered this without anybody’s finding out. The staff were supposed to be on the lookout, since it wouldn’t do for word to get around that people committed suicide at Lark House; it would be disastrous for its reputation. In the case of suspicious deaths such as Jacques Devine’s they were careful not to carry out too thorough an investigation; it was better not to know the details. The staff blamed the ghosts of Emily and her son: they took the most desperate clients away with them, because whenever someone died, from natural or illegal causes, the Haitian aide Jean Daniel swore he saw the young woman in her pink veils and her unfortunate son. The sight made his hair stand on end. He had asked them to hire a compatriot of his, a woman who was a hairdresser out of necessity but by vocation a voodoo priestess, so that she could dispatch them to the kingdom of the other world, but Hans -Voigt’s budget did not stretch to that kind of thing; he had to juggle enough as it was to keep the community afloat.

The topic was particularly difficult for Irina, who was still upset because a few days earlier she had held Neko in her arms while he was given a merciful injection that put an end to the ailments of old age. Alma and Seth had not been with the cat for the event, the former because she was too sad, the latter out of cowardice. They left Irina on her own in the apartment to receive the vet. This was not Dr. Kallet, who at the last moment had a family problem, but a nearsighted and nervous young woman with the air of a recent graduate. However, she turned out to be competent and sympathetic; the cat passed away purring, unaware of what was happening. Seth was meant to take the body to the animal crematorium, but for the moment Neko was in a plastic bag in Alma’s freezer. Lupita knew a Mexican taxidermist who could leave him looking alive, stuffed with burlap and adorned with glass eyes, or who could clean and polish his skull and mount it on a small pedestal for use as an ornament. She suggested to Irina and Seth that they give Alma this surprise, but they thought the gesture might not be appreciated.

“At Lark House we have to discourage any attempt at elective death, is that clear?” Hans Voigt stressed for the third or fourth time, glaring at Catherine Hope in particular, because it was to her that the most vulnerable patients, the ones in chronic pain, turned. He suspected quite rightly that these women knew more than they were prepared to tell him.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Voigt, it’s an emergency,” Irina interrupted him when she saw Seth’s message on her phone.

That gave all five of them the chance to escape, leaving the director in midsentence.

She found Alma sitting with her shawl across her legs on her bed, where her grandson had installed her after seeing her trembling so badly. Pale and wearing no lipstick, she looked like a shrunken old woman.

“Open the window. This thin Bolivian air is killing me,” she pleaded. Irina explained to Seth that his grandmother wasn’t delirious, but was referring to the feeling of breathlessness, the buzzing in the ears and weakness in the body that was similar to the altitude sickness she had experienced many years earlier in La Paz at some thirteen thousand feet above sea level. Seth suspected the symptoms were not due to any Bolivian air but to the cat in the freezer.

Alma began by making the two of them promise they would keep her secrets until after her death and repeating what she had already told them, because she decided it was better to weave the tapestry of her life from the very beginning. She recalled saying farewell to her parents on the quayside at Danzig, her arrival at San Francisco and how she had clutched Nathaniel’s hand, intuiting perhaps that she would never let it go; she went on to tell them about the precise moment she met Ichimei Fukuda, the most persistent of all the images stored in her memory, and then advanced along the path of her past with such clarity that it was as though she were reading aloud. Seth’s worries about his grandmother’s mental state evaporated. Over the previous three years when he had wormed material out of her for his novel, Alma had demonstrated her great skill as a narrator, her sense of rhythm and ability to keep up suspense, her way of contrasting luminous events with the most tragic ones, light and shade as in -Nathaniel’s photographs, but it wasn’t until that afternoon that he had the chance to admire her in such a marathon of sustained effort. With a few pauses for tea and to nibble at some cookies, Alma talked for hours. Night fell without any of them realizing, as Seth’s grandmother told them all about her life and they listened attentively. She told them about how she met Ichimei again at the age of twenty-two after twelve years without seeing him, and how the dormant love they had felt in childhood now knocked them both out with irresistible force, even though they knew it was doomed and it did in fact last less than a year.