was a Jew, and repeated to himself that if he had been alive then, he would have stopped being alive a long time ago.
Since coming to the city of Dresden, the doctor flourished and even if he had no love there, he didn’t see it as a tragedy. Here and there he had a fling with a married nurse, and he was satisfied with this.
HE FINISHED MAKING ROOM for the new shoulder blades. According to the concept of the state-of-the-art operation, there was no need to remove the old shoulder blades, since they were so worn out anyway, and they could even serve as a bed for thenew ones.
The new ones would hide the old ones as long as she lived.
The two prosthetic shoulder blades were brought on a tray, boiling with sterilization. They were made of tough plastic material, in a shade of very pale light green. Their size and sharpness had been decided by Mandy weeks before the operation, according to examples he had sent her on the Internet.
Dr. Yagoda was about to put them in place, join them to the muscles, and the muscles to the bones and tendons, as required—and then to close up Mrs. Gruber, one of many who could not, on any account, face the effects of the passing of time.
IT WAS NOT LONG since Mandy had buried her mother Audrey, who was eighty-two when she died. With her own eyes she had observed the process of her decline, and if she so wished, she could also have documented it in a special notebook. She had noticed how Audrey grew shorter and shorter, and how the little hump on her back made it increasingly bent, although it never reached the terrible angle of ninety degrees. She saw the hair on her head dwindling to a tuft that no hairdresser in the world could set into a hairdo that lasted more than ten minutes.
Even though she saw her mother almost every day, and everybody knows that if you see someone so frequently, you don’t notice changes, Mandy noted to herself that her mother’s face was shrinking further and further toward some unknown point. Her neck too, once the most magnificent neck in Rhodesia, and then in the Levant, was shrinking fast, while at the same time the handsome contours of the south of her face melted into the skin of a wobbly double chin.
All this was accompanied by the retreat of the mind of a woman who until the age of sixty-something could multiply seven hundred and forty-eight by nine-point-nine in a matter of seconds in her head. She herself reported on a fog that was gradually coveringher lucidity, and said that she had to rely on “ever-diminishing areas” in order to communicate her thoughts.
In the last two years of her life, Audrey Greenholtz agreed to leave the apartment at 18 Arlozorov Street and move into a renovated old-age home on Einstein Street. But once she was there she never stopped complaining about how miserable she was, and how she suffered from the mere presence of the other old people, who made her feel depressed and hopeless. She claimed that their appearance alone was enough to age her and even to kill her, and rebuked her daughter for removing her from her home.
Mandy reminded her that she had offered to get her “someone” to help her day and night, and that she was the one who refused and preferred the retirement home. But Audrey ignored her.
“There are some people who, even when they grow old, nobody throws them out of their homes,” she said to her daughter and made her feel guilty. And she also said that she had wandered the world enough, and the proof of how far she had traveled was that she came from a country that only existed on old maps.
After a short time, as if to close ranks with the other Einstein residents, she deteriorated greatly, until in the last year of her life it happened—not often, but it happened—that she forgot the nature of her relationship to her daughter. Were they sisters? Was she her neighbor from 18 Arlozorov, who had come to visit her yesterday, the one whose husband was a compulsive key-holder collector?
Audrey’s
Since coming to the city of Dresden, the doctor flourished and even if he had no love there, he didn’t see it as a tragedy. Here and there he had a fling with a married nurse, and he was satisfied with this.
HE FINISHED MAKING ROOM for the new shoulder blades. According to the concept of the state-of-the-art operation, there was no need to remove the old shoulder blades, since they were so worn out anyway, and they could even serve as a bed for thenew ones.
The new ones would hide the old ones as long as she lived.
The two prosthetic shoulder blades were brought on a tray, boiling with sterilization. They were made of tough plastic material, in a shade of very pale light green. Their size and sharpness had been decided by Mandy weeks before the operation, according to examples he had sent her on the Internet.
Dr. Yagoda was about to put them in place, join them to the muscles, and the muscles to the bones and tendons, as required—and then to close up Mrs. Gruber, one of many who could not, on any account, face the effects of the passing of time.
IT WAS NOT LONG since Mandy had buried her mother Audrey, who was eighty-two when she died. With her own eyes she had observed the process of her decline, and if she so wished, she could also have documented it in a special notebook. She had noticed how Audrey grew shorter and shorter, and how the little hump on her back made it increasingly bent, although it never reached the terrible angle of ninety degrees. She saw the hair on her head dwindling to a tuft that no hairdresser in the world could set into a hairdo that lasted more than ten minutes.
Even though she saw her mother almost every day, and everybody knows that if you see someone so frequently, you don’t notice changes, Mandy noted to herself that her mother’s face was shrinking further and further toward some unknown point. Her neck too, once the most magnificent neck in Rhodesia, and then in the Levant, was shrinking fast, while at the same time the handsome contours of the south of her face melted into the skin of a wobbly double chin.
All this was accompanied by the retreat of the mind of a woman who until the age of sixty-something could multiply seven hundred and forty-eight by nine-point-nine in a matter of seconds in her head. She herself reported on a fog that was gradually coveringher lucidity, and said that she had to rely on “ever-diminishing areas” in order to communicate her thoughts.
In the last two years of her life, Audrey Greenholtz agreed to leave the apartment at 18 Arlozorov Street and move into a renovated old-age home on Einstein Street. But once she was there she never stopped complaining about how miserable she was, and how she suffered from the mere presence of the other old people, who made her feel depressed and hopeless. She claimed that their appearance alone was enough to age her and even to kill her, and rebuked her daughter for removing her from her home.
Mandy reminded her that she had offered to get her “someone” to help her day and night, and that she was the one who refused and preferred the retirement home. But Audrey ignored her.
“There are some people who, even when they grow old, nobody throws them out of their homes,” she said to her daughter and made her feel guilty. And she also said that she had wandered the world enough, and the proof of how far she had traveled was that she came from a country that only existed on old maps.
After a short time, as if to close ranks with the other Einstein residents, she deteriorated greatly, until in the last year of her life it happened—not often, but it happened—that she forgot the nature of her relationship to her daughter. Were they sisters? Was she her neighbor from 18 Arlozorov, who had come to visit her yesterday, the one whose husband was a compulsive key-holder collector?
Audrey’s
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