Adorján Johanna - An Exclusive Love

On 13 October 1991 my grandparents killed themselves. It was a Sunday. Not really the ideal day of the week for suicide. On Sundays family members call each other, friends drop in to go walking their dogs with you. Id have thought a Monday, for instance, much more suitable. But there we are, it was a Sunday, it was in October. I picture a clear autumn day, because it all happened in Denmark. My grandparents lived in Charlottenlund, a suburb of Copenhagen where all the houses have gardens and you call your neighbours by their first names. I imagine that my grandmother was the first to wake that morning; I imagine her waking up, and her first thought is that this is the last morning she will ever wake up. She will never wake up again, and she will only go to sleep once more. My grandmother sits up quickly, pushes back the covers and puts on the slippers that she leaves neatly beside the bed every evening. Then she gets to her feet, a slender woman of seventy-one, smooths out her nightdress, and quietly, so as not to wake my grandfather, she walks the few metres to the door.

In the corridor she is welcomed by Mitzi the dog, wagging her tail. Mitzi is an Irish terrier bitch, a nice dog, phlegmatic, not particularly obedient. My grandmother gets on well with her. She speaks Hungarian to Mitzi. J kis kutya, says my grandmother when she has quietly closed the bedroom door, good little dog. She has a low bass voice like a mans, probably as a result of all those cigarettes, shes a chain-smoker. In my imagined picture of that morning, I could go back again and place a lighted cigarette between her fingers directly after she wakes up, Prince Denmark brand, extra strong (advertising slogan: Prince Denmark for Real Men). Yes, shell have lit herself a cigarette once she had her slippers on, at the latest. So as she pats the dogs head in the passage, quietly closing the bedroom door behind her, the air smells of fresh smoke.

A little later the smell of coffee mingles with the cigarette smoke. A keen nose would also pick up a hint of Jicky by Guerlain. My grandmother has her dressing-gown on, a silk kimono that my father once brought her back from Japan; she wears it loosely belted around her waist, and now she is sitting at the kitchen table. She holds a lighted cigarette between the fingers of her left hand. She has long, elegant fingers, and holds the cigarette very close to her fingertips, as if a cigarette were something precious. My grandmother is waiting for the coffee to finish filtering through the machine. A fountain pen and a pad of paper lie on the table in front of her.

Anyone seeing my grandmother now might think she was bored. Her eyebrows arch so far above her eyes that they always look as if she were raising them. Heavy lids lend her features a slightly blas weariness. In photographs from her young days my grandmother looks a little like Liz Taylor. Or Lana Turner. Or some other film star of that period with long dark hair and chiselled cheekbones. She has a short, straight nose and a small mouth with a curving lower lip. Her eyelashes are perhaps a little too short to be perfect, and they are dead straight.

Even on this day, the last day of her life, she is still a beautiful woman. Her skin is tanned a deep, almost dirty brown by the summer sun. Her cheekbones seem to have risen even higher. She wears her hair in a chin-length bob. With the years it has become wiry, and surrounds her face like a thick, dark grey hood. On the morning of 13 October 1991 my grandmother sits at the kitchen table. As she waits for the coffee to run through the machine, she makes notes of things to do on her spiral-bound pad. Cancel the newspaper, she writes. Get the roses ready for winter. She isnt wearing glasses, she doesnt need them even at the age of seventy-one, and she is very proud of the fact. A cigarette glows in the ashtray on the table in front of her. It crackles faintly as the glow eats its way further into the paper. My grandmother writes: Mitzi. When she puts the pen down, a little ink drops off the nib, spreads into a blue mark on the paper and makes the word Mitzi invisible. Never mind. Shes not going to forget about Mitzi. Over the last few days she has gone over her list so often that she can recite the items on it by heart anyway. She switches on the radio, a small, portable plastic set standing beside the toaster. The music is something by Bach. Its Sunday, after all.

On the morning of 13 October 1991, my grandfather emerges from sleep with a stertorous breath, and is instantly wide awake. He reaches for his glasses, which are lying on the bedside table, and glances at the alarm clock. Nine a.m. He knows what day this is. He doesnt have to remember what its about, he knew even in his sleep. Sounds come from the kitchen, the sounds you hear when someone is trying to empty the dishwasher particularly quietly. Also quietly playing is Bachs A minor violin concerto. Is it the Menuhin recording? He lies there for another few bars, then sits up, which is an effort. Every movement tires him, and once sitting he has to rest for a moment. Then, as if giving himself a little shake, he smooths his hair back and down at the sides, where it ought to be. Very slowly, he stands up.

People who visited my grandparents in the last weeks of their lives, who entered their cavernous little house, smoke-filled and cosy, crammed with objects, either did not see my grandfather at all, because he was asleep, or they found him on the living-room sofa, tired and very thin. In the space of a few months his weight had dropped from 70 to 58 kilos, and he looked as if he had shrunk. He sat propped on cushions, and did not rise to his feet even when visitors left. He had heart trouble. His heart muscle was weakened, a phenomenon of old age, or perhaps the long-term result of a typhoid infection he had suffered during the wars. The doctors gave him only a few months to live, and by the end he had an oxygen inhaler by his bed to which he could resort for air.

I knew him only when his hair was white. A man of distinguished appearance, a side parting in his hair, a moustache, a strong, dimpled chin. He always wore good shirts, often with a silk cravat around his neck, and his eyebrows were long and bushy and stood out in so many directions that they seemed to lead a life of their own. I have a photograph of him in a doctors coat and surgical mask, eyebrows bristling above the rims of his glassesyou can recognise him at once. He was an orthopaedic surgeon, specialising in disorders of the legs and feet. When I was a child he diagnosed my flat feet, but he told me so nicely that I thought it was a compliment.

To other people he may have looked like a perfectly ordinary white-haired elderly gentleman with bushy eyebrows. And my grandmother may have looked to others like a perfectly normal elderly lady whose posture, if you stopped to notice the details, was remarkably upright. Their effect on me was something like this:

Enter my grandparents from Copenhagen. An elegant couple looking as if they had just parked their vintage car round the corner. They step out of a cloud of perfume and cigarette smoke. They have the deepest voices ever heard, they speak German with a foreign accent, and they talk to me as if I were a grown-up but on a small scale. Do you like ballet, are you interested in opera, do you think extraterrestrial life is possible? Not in her wildest dreams would my grandmother have considered crawling round the playroom with her grandchildren, searching for a cap lost from a Playmobil character that just had to be somewhere. Instead, she went to the opera with us. And when I was five years old my grandfather let me puff his cigarI had a terrible coughing fit and he was horrified, and quickly bought me an ice-cream. They seemed to me like film stars, attractive and mysterious, and the fact that they were related to me, were my own forebears, made them absolutely irresistible.