Deficits

by Michael Ignatieff
It begins the minute Dad leaves the house. “How is George?” “He is out now, but he’ll be back soon.” “That’s wonderful,” she says. About three minutes later, she’ll look puzzled: “But George…” “He’s away at work, but he’ll be back later.” “I see.” “And what are you doing here? I mean it’s nice, but…” “We’ll do things together.” “I see.” Sometimes I try to count the number of times she asks me these questions but I lose track. I remember how it began, five or six years ago. She was 66 then. She would leave a pot to boil on the stove. I would discover it and find her tearing through the house, muttering, “My glasses, my glasses, where the hell are my glasses?” I took her to buy a chain so that she could wear her glasses around her neck. She hated it because her mother used to wear her glasses on a chain. As we drove home, she shook her fist at the windscreen. “I swore I’d never wear one of these damned things.” I date the beginning to the purchase of the chain, to the silence that descended over her as I drove her home from the store. The deficits, as the neurologists call them, are localized. She can tell you what it felt like when the Model T Ford ran over her at the school gates when she was a girl of seven. She can tell you what a good-looking man her grandfather was. She can tell you what her grandmother used to say, “A genteel sufficiency will suffice,” when turning down another helping at dinner. She remembers that Canadian summer nights when her father used to wrap her in a blanket and take her out to the lake’s edge to see the stars. But she can’t dice an onion. She can’t set the table. She can’t play cards.
Her grandson is five, and when they play pairs with his animal cards, he knows where the second penguin will be. She just turns up cards at random. He hits her because she can’t remember anything, because she keeps telling him not to run around quite so much. Then I punish him. I tell him he has to understand. He goes down to the floor, kisses her feet, and promises not to hit her again. She smiles at him, as if for the first time, and says, “Oh, your kiss is so full of sugar.”

After a week with him, she looks puzzled and says, “He’s a nice little boy.
Where does he sleep? I mean, who does he belong to?” “He’s your grandson.” “I see.” She looks away and puts her hand to her face. My brother usually stays with her when Dad is out of town. Once or twice a year, it’s my turn. It put her to bed a night. I hand her the pills−small green ones that are supposed to control her moods−and she swallows them. I help her out of her bra and slip, roll down her tights, and lift the nightie over her head. I get into the bed next to hers. Before she sleeps she picks up a Len
Deighton and reads a few paragraphs, always the same paragraphs, at the place where she has folded down the page. When she falls asleep, I pick the book off her chest and I pull her down in the bed so that her head isn’t leaning against the wall. Otherwise she wakes up with a crick in her neck. Often when I wake in the night, I see her lying next to me, staring into the dark. She stares and then she wanders. I used to try to stop her, but now
I let her go. She is trying to hold on to what is left. There is a method in this.
She goes to the bathroom every time she wakes, no matter if it is five times a night. Up and down the stairs silently, in her bare feet, trying not to wake me.
She turns the lights on and off. Smooths a child’s sock and puts it on the bed.
Sometimes she gets dressed, after a fashion, and sits in the downstairs couch in the dark, clutching her handbag. When we have guests to dinner, she sits beside me at the table, holding my hand, bent forward slightly to catch everything that is sad. Her face lights up when people smile, when there is laughter. She doesn’t say much anymore; she is worried she will forget a name and we won’t be able to help her in time. She doesn’t want anything to show. The guests always say how well she does. Sometimes they say, “You’d never know, really.” When I put her to bed afterward I can see the effect has left her so tired she barely knows her own name. She could make it easier on herself. She could give up asking questions. “Where are we now, is this our house?” “Yes.” “Where is our house?” “In France.” I tell her: “Hold my hand, I’m here. I’m your son.” “I know.” But she keeps asking where she is. The questions are her way of trying to orient herself, of refusing and resisting the future that is being prepared for her. She always loved to swim. When she dived into the water, she never made a splash. I remember her lifting herself out of the pool, as sleek as a seal in a black swimsuit, the water pearling off her back. Now she says the water is too

cold and taking off her clothes too much of a bother. She paces up and down the poolside, watching her grandson swim, stroking his towel with her hand, endlessly smoothing out the wrinkles. I bathe her when she wakes. Her body is white, soft, withered. I remember how, in the changing-huts, she would bend over as she slipped out of her bathing suit. Her body was young. Now I see her skeleton through her skin.
When I wash her hair, I feel her skull. I help her from the bath, dry her legs, swathe her in towels, sit her on the edge of the bath and cut her nails: they are horny and yellow. Her feet are gnarled. She has walked a long way. When I was as old as my son is now I used to sit beside her at the bedroom mirror watching her applying hot depilatory wax to her legs and upper lip. She would pull her skirt up to her knees, stretch her legs out on the dresser, and sip beer from the bottle, while waiting for the wax to dry. “Have a sip,” she would say. It tasted bitter. She used to laugh at the faces I made. When the wax had set, she would begin to peel it off, and curse and wince, and let me collect the strips, with fine black hairs embedded in them. When it was over, her legs were smooth, silky to touch. Now I shave her. I soap her face and legs with my shaving brush. She sits perfectly still; as my razor comes around her chin we are as close as when I was a boy. She never complains. When we walk up the hill behind the house, I feel her going slower and slower, but she does not stop until I do. If you ask her whether she is sad, she shakes her head. But she did say once, “It’s strange. It was supposed to be more fun than this.” I try to imagine what the world is like for her. Memory is what reconciles us to the future. Because she has no past, her future rushes toward her, a bat’s wing brushing against her face in the dark. “I told you. George returns on Monday.” “Could you write that down?” So I do. I write it down in large letters, and she folds it in her white cardigan pocket and pats it and says she feels much less worried. “What do I do about this?” “Nothing. It just tells you what is going to happen.” “But I didn’t know anything of this.” “Now you do,” I say and I take the paper away and tear it up. It makes no sense to get angry at her, but I do. She is afraid Dad will not come back. She is afraid she has been abandoned. She is afraid she will get lost and never be able to find her way home. Beneath the fears that have come with the forgetting, there lie anxieties for which she no longer has any names.

She paces the floor, waiting for lunch. When it is set before her, she downs it before anyone else, and then gets up to clear the plates. “What’s the hurry?” I ask her. She is puzzled. “I don’t know,” she says. She is in a hurry, and she does not know why. She drinks whatever I put before her. The wine goes quickly. “You’ll enjoy it more if you sip it gently.” “What a good idea,” she says and then empties the glass with a gulp. I wish I knew the history of this anxiety. But I don’t. All she will tell me is about being sprawled in the middle of Regent Street amid the blood and shop glass during an air raid, watching a mother sheltering a child, and thinking: I am alone. In the middle of all of us, she remained alone. We didn’t see it. She was the youngest girl in her family, the straggler in the pack, born cross-eyed till they straightened her eyes out with an operation. Her father was a teacher and she was dyslexic, the one left behind. In her wedding photo, she is wearing her white dress and holding her bouquet. They are side by side. Dad looks excited. Her eyes are wide open with alarm. Fear gleams from its hiding place. It was her secret and she kept it well hidden. When I was a child, I thought she was faultless, amusing, regal. My mother. She thinks of it as a happy family, and it was. I remember them sitting on the couch together, singing along to Fats Waller records. She still remembers the crazy lyrics they used to sing: There’s no disputin’ That’s Rasputin The high-falutin loving man.
I don’t know how she became so dependent on him, how she lost so many of the wishes she once had for herself, and how all her wishes came to be wishes for him. She is afraid of his moods, his silences, his departures, and his returns.
He has become the weather of her life. But he never lets her down. He is the one who sits with her in the upstairs room, watching television, night after night, holding her hand. People say: it’s worse for you, she doesn’t know what is happening. She used to say the same thing herself. Five years ago, when she began to forget little things, she knew what was in store, and she said to be once, “Don’t worry.
I’ll make a cheerful old nut. It’s you who’ll have the hard time.” But that is not true. She feels everything. She has had time to count up every loss. Every night, when she lies awake, she stares at desolation. What is a person? That is what she makes you wonder. What kind of a person are you if you only have your habits left? She can’t remember her

grandson’s name, but she does remember to shake out her tights at night and she never lets a dish pass her by without trying to clean it, wipe it, clear it up, or put it away. The house is littered with dishes she is putting away in every conceivable cupboard. What kind of a person is this? It runs in the family. Her mother had it. I remember going to see her in the house with old carpets and dark furniture on Prince Arthur Avenue. The windows were covered with the tendrils of plants growing in enormous Atlas battery jars, and the parquet floors shone with wax. She took down the giraffe, the water buffalo, and the leopard−carved in wood−that her father had brought back from Africa in the 1880s. She sat in a chair by the fire and silently watched me play with them. Then−and it seems only a week later−I came to have Sunday lunch with her and she was old and diminished and vacant, and when she looked at me she had no idea who I was. I am afraid of getting it myself. I do ridiculous things: I stand on my head every morning so the blood will irrigate my brain; I compose suicide notes, always some variant of Captain Oates’s: “I may be gone for some time.” I never stop thinking about what it would be like for this thing to steal over me. She has taught me something. There are moments when her pacing ceases, when her hunted look is conjured away by the stillness of dusk, when she sits in the garden, watching the sunlight stream through all the trees they planted together over 25 years in this place, and I see something pass over her face which might be serenity. And then she gets up and comes toward me looking for a glass to wash, a napkin to pick up, a child’s toy to rearrange. I know how the story has to end. One day I return home to see her and she puts on her hand and says: “How nice to meet you.” She’s always charming to strangers. People say I’m already beginning to say my farewells. No, she is still here.
I am not ready yet. Nor is she. She paces the floor, she still searches for what has been lost and can never be found again. She wakes up in the night and lies in the dark by my side. Her face, in profile, against the pillow has become like her mother’s, the eye sockets deep in shadow, the cheeks furrowed and draw, the gaze ancient and disabused.
Everything she once knew is still inside her, trapped in the ruined circuits−how
I was when I was little, how she was when I was a baby. But it is too late to ask her now. She turns and notices I am awake too. We lie side by side. The darkness is still. I want to say her name. She turns away from me and stares into the night. Her nightie is buttoned at the neck like a little girl’s.