MESSIAH AND HER PEOPLE

One day in the middle of January I packed before sunrise to drive to my mother's house. I took a set of keys she had given me in the summer, but unsure if they would work, I also took pliers and a crowbar with me. I had been calling mother for a while and dismissed a vision of her and her little dog turn into icicles amidst the clutter of her living room. When in the end she picked up the phone on Monday, she didn't sound good at all.
"I wish I could just go to the hospital and lay down there," she said.
For my mother, fiercely independent at 83, this was surely the sign of something going wrong.
"Then let's," I said.
But when prompted, she declined to give it more thought. She couldn't leave. "Who's going to look after the house and the dog?"
By the evening, she was ready to give in. "Take me away from here. Take me away," she repeated, "as soon as you can."
But it snowed heavily throughout Monday, and reports of cars driving off roads and trains stuck on their tracks abounded. On Tuesday morning the status of intercity roads was uncertain, and I still had to teach. I went to retrieve her on Wednesday morning.
Before leaving, I called my mother's preferred cab driver and reserved him around noon. The drive was sunny, smooth, and uneventful; snowploughs having done their work, men in orange vests took their turn to shovel icy gruel off the paid highway. Once in Gniew, my mother's crummy town, I left my car in the parking lot and moved to the friendly cabdriver's car. I felt safer not having to deal with this alone. Surely no snowploughs ever cleaned the dirt road to mother's house.
The keys fitted the locks, and once we located the balcony door, our entrance was smooth. I was relieved to see mother standing upright to greet us, even if she looked like a shipwrecked mariner. I couldn't tell the exact temperature in the house, but I preferred not to take my coat off. When I went to the main entrance, I saw foodstuffs -- eggs, butter, bread, and mushroom croquettes, all frozen-solid on the staircase. We quickly packed mother's coats and sweaters, and the driver took her down the stairs. Her dog, a fluffy unruly mutt joined us. Once back at the parking lot, I took on the whole circus: my shell-shocked mother, the Ikea bags full of her stuff, and the dog with a bad eye infection. As neither passengers nor cargo had any recent experience of washing, we drove down the highway in a stupefying stench.
Once home, by the evening I managed to talk mother into changing her clothes; four days later I washed her hair over the kitchen sink, to the accompaniment of her cries, and within days she regained her retired queen's looks. The little dog never made inside; I took it to the dogs' shelter. Whatever was wrong with my mother, I had no doubt it would be as much as I could handle. For the first day or two she seemed fine, and I requested a home visit from the local clinic only to be on a safe side. The doctor ordered blood tests first, and the nurse visited the following Tuesday. In the meantime, we enjoyed being together.
Mother instantly liked Lilly-Marie, and the sentiment was reciprocated. "She is so beautiful, so gentle," mother would sing the praises of my girlfriend each time we entered the living room turned mother's bedroom. "She's so cool," Lilly-Marie chimed. "Krolewna, little princess, little queen," mother chanted. "You are the krolowa, the big queen," Lilly-Marie would respond. She was delighted to learn that mother's name, Jadwiga, really came from a medieval Polish queen, the only independent female ruler in a dull chain of kings. They crossed over the language barrier with my help as a translator; in time, mother recalled a few English words and Lilly-Marie gladly threw in a few Polish ones. At last, they created some kind of parlance.
"Ona rozumie everything," Lilly-Marie would praise my mother's intuition.
"I understand," my mother would confirm in English.
At other times they would succumb to silence, holding hands and gazing at each other in pleasure and wonder.
"So you are going to live together," mother asked and waited for me to confirm. I nodded. "You have the beauty and talent. And you are going to write books."
The latter was said mostly to me, but so far mother knew only the "beautiful" aspect of Lilly-Marie. We all exuded happiness, and mother relaxed into her new role of my private agent.
I recall having a childhood fantasy of rescuing my mother from dangers; now at last it had come true and mother acknowledged me as her savior. Each time I entered the room, she thanked her lucky stars. "You are a Messiah," she'd tell me, "who led his people over the Red Sea." At other times she mixed Old and New Testament and made me into both Mosses and Christ, crossing religious divisions. Lilly-Marie had her place in this new theodicy, too.
"You are a Messiah, and she is young," mother informed us.
"Since your mother's arrival," Lilly-Marie observed, "we've become one Iza-centric household."
But I answered this would never happen without mother becoming first enchanted with Lilly-Marie's grace and refinement.
"Iza is going to take care of us both," mother told my girlfriend who eagerly nodded. "She is going to keep us safe through the winter."

Only when I managed to improve her looks over the weekend, mother grew anxious.
"I'm going to the hospital for tests soon, and what will happen then?" she reproached me, leaning on the living room table. "Who's this woman, the doctors will ask. They'll all be after me."
Unsure of how serious she was, I pointed out that there will be mostly women doctors there. But mother didn't seem to care.
"They always wanted to rape me," she said.
Sunbeams, reflected in the snow outside, kept leaping at us from the window. I was stunned by how lucid she seemed. "Who did?"
"The men were always after me. Once I worked in this clinic in the countryside. I hitchhiked from one village to another. A man stopped, took me into his car, took me into the woods, and had his way with me. Another time I was on a cruise and this man dragged me into his cabin."
"But that must have happened much later, in the eighties." I noticed, and she nodded.
"We were drinking that night with another doctor and my sister was there, too," mother continued. "I hoped she'd wonder where I was. But she didn't notice anything."
"Did you know this man?" I asked.
Mother used to go on cruises to Sankt Petersburg not to visit, but bring home Russian gold. Gold rings could be bought at the price of the angora sweaters she carried in her suitcase. She was then just over fifty. Her passion for cruises stopped suddenly; thus ending her brief career as a smuggler.
"I didn't know him at all." Her voice grew soft. "These were not hostile, big drama rapes. I was not beaten up. These were friendly rapes. Men liked me and wanted to have a piece of me. It was in their nature."
I shot her my I-doubt-it look. If anyone was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, it was my mother. She was good-looking, with a statuesque figure and the kind of beauty which was supposed to command respect; in addition, she had brains and was fun to be with. Why couldn't they admire her at a distance?
She shrugged, exasperated. "There was always someone on my back."

Over the weekend, instead of gaining strength, mother appeared to be losing it; when the doctor visited on Thursday, she could barely sit up. The doctor, a serious lady in plain, square glasses, prescribed further hospital tests. She pointed to the growth on my mother's back the size of a tennis ball.
I noticed it too while giving mother a sponge bath at the sink but didn't think much of it. Old people tend to have strange buildups on their bodies. But I worried about the return of her cancer from 2002 and noticed she was barely able to eat.
More concerning, however, was the strange development in her legs. Within the next day or to, she was no longer to sit up or even turn in her bed. I called the dispatchers early on Sunday and insisted she'd be taken to the hospital at once. The paramedics were doubtful.
"On Sunday we come only for emergencies," one of them said, "and this doesn't look like one."
The scariest part of becoming an old person is that at some point people may assume your ailments are just "part of aging." When I told the paramedic that only a month earlier mother was
fully independent, he said, "I have no reason not to believe you" in a tone signifying disbelief.
In the end, the disgruntled paramedics had no choice but to drive us as requested. The immediate blood tests proved my anxiety to be well founded; mother had developed a serious kidney inflammation. She was instantly hooked up to IV-drips, and all her other tests took place in the following days.
Still, if had lost the power to move my lower body, I hope someone would notice. I'm still of an age when people become concerned if something suddenly goes wrong. But when on the forth day of mother's stay at the hospital I asked the young doctor why mother's legs were numb, she gave me a shocked look.
All dots connected once mother's more extensive tests arrived. The tumor had spread like a belt and leaked into her spinal cord. The paralysis must have begun a week or two before she arrived at our house, and, if anything, had its origins in my mother's scorn of any medical intrusion in her life. Her past chemotherapy having ended in full recovery, mother never visited a doctor since. She dismissed the idea of check-ups and regular tests. About to reproach myself that I didn't press her any harder, I spoke to her best friend, pani Stasia, who lived in Gniew and whom mother visited for dinner at least every other week.
"I tried to reason with her many times," pani Stasia said. "But in the end, I had to hide from her that I was seeing a doctor myself lest your mother try to talk me out of it. Why do you need a doctor? she'd say. What will he do for you?"

Mother spent two weeks at the general ward, with four other patients in the room. She submitted to often strenuous tests without disputing them; a good soldier, she understood that medical procedures don't have to be pleasant. She praised the nurses, whenever she had a chance, and to the doctors she told the stories from the time when she roamed the countryside a member of a Medical Transport Unit and then worked as a doctor in this same hospital.
"I'm changing gender," she declared every time I proceeded shave her, which made the patient in the opposite bed rock with laughter.
Being afraid of changes, she feared her transfer to the oncology department; once there, she relaxed and again seemed to enjoy her stay.
Now she had only one roommate, a kind dressmaker thirty years her junior. Mother took pains to remind her to not walk or eat too fast. When we visited together, mother was pleased to see Lilly-Marie wearing a butterfly brooch. It was the brooch Lilly-Marie wore on the day they first met, encrusted with zirconias. Girlfriend and mother share the same sense of fashion.
"We should have Iza buy you a red hat," mother informed Lilly-Marie, and remembered to advice me before we left, "Watch out for her, so she wouldn't trip in the snow."
The more comfortable she felt, the more she inquired about her little dog. I also told her that he was doing great and that his eye had completely healed, which please her to no end and could even be true. The shelter worker told me the little dog was going to visit a veterinarian the following day.

There is something about this particular cancer that makes me hear the echo of my mother's words. Now indeed there is always someone on her back, as if the cancer could serve as a metaphor for a rapist. In my mother's life story, these two seem interchangeable. Could it be that this was why she refused to see a doctor? She wouldn't submit her body to strangers; she resisted unwelcome intrusions. Now that she had a choice, she could say no.
But it could also be her belief that she was immortal which prompted her to dismiss such mundane chores as medical tests and preventive care.
Or else, she trusted her the good luck that protected her against all odds. After all, she didn't end up an anonymous victim in the forest. Her pursuer, after the fact, kindly drove her to the desired location.
I may also be seeing things, but I can't help noticing a connection between my mother's twenty year stay in a more and more dilapidated country house and her lifelong flight from potential suitors. Her foul surroundings and never changed clothes kept them at a safe distance.
As to the men with more honorable intentions, she turned down a few marriage proposals still in her seventies.
My charming, companionable mother was so good at setting up her protective boundaries she managed to shut out people like me who wished nothing but to appreciate her. But now she is defenseless at last.

When she visited in the summer, she enjoyed going out for cappuccino and pastries in town. She seemed to appreciate sleeping in a clean bed. In fact, this is where she spent most of the first three days of her stay. On the forth day she got up and started cleaning my windows. I came to helped her, and we washed the whole row. On the fifth day she put an end to her visit. It was nice, but she had nothing to do.
"I'm not sick to spend all day in bed," she said and demanded that I drive her back to Gniew.
I tell this story to Lilly-Marie and she asks sanely, "What was your mother doing there all day?"
"I don't know," I say, and then I notice I do. She struggled.
Still, obstacles always seem to kick start my mother. When I tell her about the extend of her cancer and that it cannot be surgically removed, she isn't dismayed in the least.
"I just spoke to the doctor," I say. "Do you know that two vertebrae in your spine are completely destroyed?"
I assume she welcomes such information having once been a doctor herself.
She looks serious for a moment and then smiles with a gusto of a roulette player. "There are enough bones in my body left."
"Do you know they are giving you morphine for pain?"
"Ah, a morphinist." She looks pleased.