Ironed sheets

Life took a bad turn when my father-in-law began losing his way in his own apartment. More and more often it happened so that he would stand in the hallway of the flat he had occupied for half of his life and he would cry out loud: “God damn it, where am I?”

It wasn’t dementia. He knew very well he was at home. He just didn’t know where exactly. At the age of seventy-eight, he had gone totally blind.

The apartment wasn’t that big, by the way. Two small rooms, a narrow hallway, and a tiny kitchen. All in all, less than sixty square meters. Our flat was bigger but I still could close my eyes and navigate around it without any difficulties. “What’s his deal?” I was asking myself. Maybe it was dementia.

In movies, they often show you blind people who have no problem making themselves a cup of coffee or even kicking ass when attacked by some street thugs, thanks to the development of some sixth sense — or at least acute hearing. Surprisingly, in real life blind people are much more helpless and desperate. They can’t even wipe their ass and know for sure it’s clean.

All this became an unbearable burden for his wife, my mother-in-law. The daily struggle of caring for a blind person was exacerbated by the fact that she herself was old and sick. Besides, she hated him for ruining her life long before he went blind. They had lived together - same apartment, different rooms - almost their entire adult lives.

When we got tired of hearing her daily rants over the phone, about the hell in which she was living, we took him in.

At the age of forty-four, I was back to sleeping on a couch. There was no spare room in the apartment, so we had to put him in our bedroom and move to the next room where we normally worked, dined, and watched TV. From now on my wife and I had to deal with the fact that he was always just a couple of meters away from us.

In certain moments, it felt as if I had been a student again, living with my parents and having a girl over, doing my best to keep it quiet. The couch we now used as bed wasn’t bought with this possibility in mind. Maybe it was a good thing he hadn’t developed acute hearing.

Also, luckily for us, he would usually fall asleep around seven in the evening. This habit was formed partly because his job required him to wake up early in the morning, partly because this allowed him to avoid meeting his wife, who was often cruel to him. She’d usually sleep till noon. Maybe she was avoiding him as well.

Since the concept of day and night was now totally lost on him, this schedule had become even weirder. He would wake up at two or three in the morning and begin his day in full. He would put on his clothes. He would do some exercises. He would go to the bathroom, of course. Or at least he would try.

During the first weeks after his arrival, my wife or I would often wake up in the middle of the night, disturbed by a subtle sound coming from the hallway, and find him completely lost, helplessly turning his head left and right, pressing his lips, touching the walls here and there, trying to figure out in which odd corner he ended up.

He just couldn’t remember the way to the bathroom, although we would map out everything together time and again: there is the drawer, then the door to the kitchen, then the coat rack, then the turn, then the closet, then the bathroom door… Ten minutes later he would bump into the drawer and shout: “What’s this?” “It’s the drawer in the hallway.” “The drawer? There is a drawer in the hallway?”

It seemed that his brain just refused to process new information, being deprived of visual cues. At the same time, he had no problem recalling every street in his neighborhood, and every bus route that passed it, up to the last stop. I never remembered any street names, besides the one I was living in.

I concluded that a man needed a talent for everything and he just didn’t have any for being blind. When navigating around the apartment, he would do the most bizarre things. Instead of moving his arms left and right to find objects, he would move it up and down. Instead of always keeping at least one hand on the wall when walking so he wouldn’t lose orientation, he would walk in arbitrary directions waving both hands (up and down). Then he would inevitably lose his way… After such episodes, we would often find him weeping in his room and whispering: “I don’t want to live, I don’t want to live anymore.”

So most of the day he didn’t move at all, sitting in his arm-chair instead or just lying in his bed and listening to whatever was on the radio. I had to set up an app with a Russian radio on his old iPhone for him, since he didn’t know any other languages, and in Berlin, one couldn’t find a Russian station on short waves.

I did my best to find something politically neutral, but when he had to open the door to his room, this being the year 2024, my ear would still occasionally catch a report counting casualties among Ukrainians, always numerous. I comforted myself with the thought that nobody in the building could understand it, besides maybe Manfred, our neighbor from upstairs, who studied Russian in a German “uni”.

My father-in-law would show up in the kitchen for breakfast and dinner — these two events were the only real action he would see during the day. Once a week, my wife would take him for a walk. He would also take a shower on a weekly basis, for which he needed assistance. Apart from these activities, he would just stay in his room all day. So, in this sense, his lifestyle hadn’t changed that much since he lost sight.

When he could still see, he would spend his days almost the same way: in his stuffy room watching whatever was on TV. He never expressed any interest in the affairs of his family, including his grandson, our son. He didn’t have any friends to meet or call and discuss life events. There were no life events to discuss to begin with.

His unique ability to do absolutely nothing without being bored to death had always fascinated me. When we had brought him to our country house for summer once, I watched him sitting at the dinner table for a couple hours just waiting and staring in the distance. He didn’t try to find a newspaper to read, a crossword puzzle to solve, a solitaire to play. He didn’t make any attempt to engage in a conversation with a family member who happened to pass by. “Like Buddha, he’s reached nirvana”, I told my wife.

She reminded me that the climax of his existence had always been receiving the payment of his pension which allowed him to go out, buy fast food and booze — and consume all of it early morning while sitting on a bench in the nearby park. Most of the time, he didn’t dare to drink at home and tried to get back to his room before his wife would wake up so he could sleep it off. “I doubt Buddha did something like that”, my wife noted.

Now this man was suddenly dying for some action. And we had a hard time coming up with ideas of what he could do, considering his total inability to adapt to his condition.

Finally, we started giving him bed linen to iron. It took a lot of effort to set up an ironing board for him every time but once it was done, he could do a pretty decent job with the sheets, covers, and pillowcases. Shirts and trousers were beyond him. The feeling of some accomplishment always lifted his spirits after that. On a day like that, he never wept.

And for us it felt posh to make the bed with ironed sheets. If we hadn’t slept on a couch, we could have pretended as if we had been in a nice hotel. In our family, nobody had ironed bed linen before, after all electricity wasn’t cheap in Germany. Besides, we had always felt it was too much work.