The Ice-Cream Makers (9 page)

Heiman was already at the restaurant. He always turned up early for appointments. You'd walk in somewhere to find him reading a book of poetry. You'd always see him with a book, even on a barstool. People who didn't know him might think he was uncommunicative. On the contrary. When a conversation ran dry, it was Heiman who got it flowing again. He was a fount of stories: anecdotes about poets, rumoured nominations for a major award. Or else he scattered a few unfathomable stanzas among those present.

He sensed immediately that I was sombre. ‘If you were my son I'd have hugged you right now,' he said.

And when I didn't react, ‘What's the matter?'

I told him I had been helping out at the ice-cream parlour. ‘I feel as though I'm betraying everyone, as if I'm leaving everybody in the lurch.'

I was hoping he would comfort me with a few lines of poetry, an ancient English quatrain I didn't know yet that captured all of my feelings. It could be saccharine for all I cared, dripping with emotions. Moonlight, dead trees, an empty heart — all of that.

‘Oh, dear,' Heiman said instead. ‘We all feel that way sometimes. It's how I used to feel: eighteen and all alone in the world. It's okay. It will pass.'

I couldn't imagine that Heiman had ever felt the way I felt right now. He exuded a certain unassailability. The fact that he never married didn't make him any less complete than others. He didn't need marriage as the be-all and end-all of life. There was the spacious apartment with the many paintings on the walls, some gifted by artist-friends; there were the premières and the exclusive parties. Women admired him — the prettiest interns at the festival had all fallen for him.

‘Only poets stand to gain from melancholy,' he said. ‘We ordinary mortals have a duty to be happy.'

He was happy, and I was keen to be guided by him in life, the way the lighthouse on the island of Pharos had guided seamen into the harbour for centuries. To this day I think of Heiman when I have a difficult decision to make. What would he do? Would he think it was worthwhile?

‘Have you had a look at the menu?' he asked. ‘They've got scallop carpaccio. Have you ever had that?'

I'd never had scallops.

‘They're a kind of oyster,' Heiman said. ‘Or have you never tried oysters either?'

‘No.'

‘Let's order some oysters first then, because knowing how to eat oysters is almost as important as learning to read.'

It's possible that people saw a father and son at the wooden table with the starched linen, and it's possible that my father was not only jealous of me, but also of my bond with Heiman.

We talked about my degree. He actually knew some of my lecturers.

‘Paul Delissen!' he exclaimed. ‘He's the son of a shipping magnate — did you know that? The father was a filthy rich man who commissioned monumental sculptures and paintings from artists, which he then donated to museums. All the nobility went to Paul. His younger brother owns a factory in Hungary that produces spreadable cheese in all kinds of flavours: paprika, tomato, herb. They're disgusting, but they sell like crazy.'

Which brother was the happier one, I wondered? What was the flipside of their lives?

Heiman took a sip of the white wine he had ordered. ‘Paul's wife is called Beppie Blum. What a name! I wonder if they're still together.'

He was always curious about those things, or might point to a couple in the crowd. ‘That man's wife,' he would whisper, ‘is familiar with the colour of many poets' eyes.'

I told him about the writers I was reading, the poets he knew better than his neighbours, and finally also about Laura, the girl with the snub nose.

‘So you're in love?' Heiman asked.

‘No idea.'

‘Would you like to see her again?'

‘Of course!'

He laughed. ‘Have you read her any poetry yet?'

‘We haven't had time for that.'

The waiter served the intermediate course. A small morsel of grey mullet, a brackish fish. It was served with lamb's lettuce and a sauce made with butter, lemon, and tarragon. The waiter listed it all without stumbling. It was, like the dishes to follow, absolutely delicious. This was Richard Heiman's world. Flickering block candles, exquisite dishes, a humidor on wheels, and in the middle of the restaurant a pedestal with an extravagant bouquet of flowers.

At the end of the evening, the waiter helped us into our coats. ‘Good evening, Mr Heiman,' he said.

‘Bye, Marcel.'

We were standing on the footpath. I was in high spirits, but that may have been the wine. Heiman was on foot; I had my bike. I wanted to give him a hug, but I noticed the waiter standing in the doorway and looking at us.

It would be many years before we hugged, and by then it was too late really. It had started with a hoarse voice and a sore throat, but it took another eighteen months for the diagnosis to be made: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS. That's when the cramp and involuntary muscle spasms kicked in. Suddenly Heiman would clutch his calf, his face distorted with pain. He was injected with muscle relaxants, but little else could be done. He was given three years, maximum, minus the time it had taken for the diagnosis to be made.

I can still picture him in his apartment, in front of the large window overlooking the garden and the tall trees. He is sitting in a wheelchair, bemoaning the words he can no longer pronounce properly. Swallowing was becoming more and more difficult.

As soon as he received the diagnosis he stepped down from his post. I was one of the first he told the news. ‘The illness is terminal and its nature progressive.' Perhaps he found the latter harder to come to terms with than the fact that it would kill him.

The winter of his life arrived like a blizzard. His muscles withered, as the signals from his brain could no longer reach them. First his legs became paralysed; then his arms. He became completely dependent. I saw him without a tie for the first time. He was nursed by a Surinamese woman, but perhaps she didn't know how to knot a tie, or she wasn't aware that he had always worn one. He could no longer tell her.

His voice was gone. That beautiful, deep voice with which he had recited the many poems he knew by heart. Memorising poems wasn't just a gift he had, it was also a matter of principle, a conviction. The time when children memorised poems in school was a thing of the past. He thought it was deplorable. All those writers, all their lines — to him they were the bedrock of his life. He could no longer recite the poems now, but his mind hadn't been affected by the illness, so they were likely still in his head. As he looked out, they must have been passing by, one by one: the words of the Lake Poets, John Keats, Emily Dickinson. The unction of their words and those of many, many others. Neruda, Miłosz, Rilke — yes, the ineffable solace of Rilke.
Lord, it is time
.

A life without poetry was a life less beautiful.

I visited Heiman nearly every day and told him about my doctoral thesis. After graduating I had specialised in the work of anonymous poets, writers whose name and image had never been passed down, but I was stuck and no longer knew what I was hoping to uncover. I had stopped going to university and hadn't done any work on my thesis for two months.

Heiman looked at me with his watery eyes, the eyes of the old man he would never be. What might he have said had he been able to speak? What might he have advised me? He would have made a brilliant suggestion, no doubt, or a remark that put everything into perspective. Perhaps he would have told me that everything was going to be all right, that the years would work their magic. I had to make do with a wink, a nod of the head, and a tear welling up — spilling over the rim and finally, slowly and haphazardly, finding its way down to his mouth.

There were other visitors, too. Mostly women. They brought flowers, which they arranged in vases. They combed his hair, knotted his tie, and pushed him in his wheelchair around the park or along the quay, where large ships kept their engines idling. They were well-dressed women, some in their forties, others noticeably younger. In many cases, I was unsure of the nature of their relationship with Heiman. I had often been tempted to ask him, in restaurants or cafés late at night, ‘How many?' But he never talked about it, and I doubt he'd have wanted to disclose it.

A couple of months after his death I spotted a woman walking down the street who had combed his hair when he had become completely helpless. She approached a small group of children and opened her hand. It held chestnuts, glossy trinkets. The children chose the biggest one. She offered them to grown-ups too, women she may have thought were lonely, men with an air of mystery about them, like herself. Her tights were an intense blue, ultramarine. Had she been a lover? Had Heiman adored this woman? Her hair was wavy and grey, but her dark complexion exuded warmth and even something youthful. I tried to picture them together, in his house, in his bedroom. He sitting up straight, a pillow against the small of his back, reading to her — the most beautiful poem he had read that day.

I wanted to buy her an espresso but felt it wouldn't be right. It would have violated an unwritten law. We mustn't try to retrieve what has been carried over to the other side. The woman with the blue legs pressed a chestnut into my hands when she saw me watching her. This would have to do.

Heiman's last few days had been the worst of his life. He was emaciated and completely exhausted. He had conceded defeat and yet he was forced to stay in the ring. The hours were beating him about. Those long, quiet hours, the hours in which everything passes before one's eyes. His life had been exceptionally glorious, a charmed string of encounters, of poets and women, of art and endless evenings. All this had shaped him, like a fine wine matured to perfection. But the bottle had fallen, its contents spilled. The end was unlike anything that had gone before, like a chapter from a different book altogether.

I had held his hand, which was limp and likely no longer felt anything. Some women had stroked his head, had run their fingers through his grey hair. The nurse never showed any sign of affection. She washed him and gave him clean clothes. Perhaps, during those last few days, he thought of Edward Arlington Robinson, the American poet who had asked his family to carry his bed outside so he could die underneath the brilliance of the stars. I took him into my arms, finally gave him that hug, and held him tight. I wanted the moment to last forever, but at the same time I wanted it not to be true.

Two days later he had suffered a stroke, and then it was over.
Finis
. An end to both his splendid life and the terrible suffering. His sister, whom I had never met, inherited his house and his effects. My name was also included in his will. Heiman had left me all of his books. I hired a minivan and one dark and dreary Monday I took his most treasured possessions to the attic of the ice-cream parlour.

My father and my brother helped me carry the heavy boxes.

‘Only because it's raining,' my father said.

Luca was silent. He carried the boxes up, two at a time, showing me how strong he was. Or how insubstantial poetry.

I saw the man once more, years later, on his bike. He came towards me and passed me by at great speed, on his way to an appointment or a woman. The resemblance, which I had noticed from a distance, only increased. As we approached one another, the cyclist merged with Richard Heiman, in his late forties, with red cheeks and grey-blond hair, oblivious to the fate that would one day befall him.

How My Father Sang the National Anthem with a Bag of Onions on His Head

‘He's making a hammer.' My mother phones me while I'm queuing for the check-in desk at Dublin Airport. Behind me are the two young Dutch poets who read at the Fermoy International Poetry Festival.

‘A hammer? What kind of hammer?'

‘He's been at it for two days now. He rarely leaves the basement.'

‘Has the doctor been round?'

‘Yes,' my mother says, and bursts into tears. I leave her be for a bit and shuffle up a place with my bag. A new departure time appears on the screen above the desk. The flight has been delayed by an hour. It prompts a chorus of sighs and the odd expletive in the long queue. If I were to add up all the delays in my life, I would be able to read the collected poems of Charles Bukowski, and perhaps even get to the bottom of his horse-betting strategy.

My mother informs me that the doctor came round on Saturday and that she took him aside when he arrived. She had been reluctant to tell him, but did so anyway: ‘I'm worried my husband might have Alzheimer's.' She told the doctor that she had heard Beppi talk to the television, and he went on to hug it. What she didn't say was that he had seen a red-haired woman on the flatscreen whose muscles he wanted to kiss. The doctor would find out soon enough.

‘I'm not sick at all,' my father said. ‘I'm fit as a fiddle, actually.'

The three of them sat at the kitchen table, my father in the long blue coat he wore when he was working down in the basement. His shoulders were dotted with iron shavings. The lasagne was in the oven, filling the room with a pleasant glow.

‘I'm in love with Betty.'