The Old People's Pied Piper
Three days after he had disappeared we still believed we would find grandpa. His small apartment in the retirement home became our temporary headquarters. We took shifts, the grandchildren, children, daughters and sons-in-law. Three or four of us each time. I made sure I went there every single day, if only to atone for all those visits with grandpa I had kept putting off. I couldn’t bear that apartment, the one he had moved into after grandma had passed - in that very same retirement home. We had buried her, while he had been relocated – like all fresh widows and widowers – to a smaller apartment. A bedroom that was no more than an ascetic cell, a living room, a porch the width of two paces. A kitchenette used only for preparing coffee, or for arranging Danish butter cookies on old-fashioned glass plates. Not many of those glass plates remained intact, the kind you can no longer find in any store, just two or three out of a set of twenty-four.
They've been getting dropped and smashed for years, marking the limits of his life, but there were still two or three left. And still, here, his one room apartment empty, his scent; the smell of sweet pipe tobacco, of old fashioned quality aftershave, without all that nonsense of fruits and flowers they put in them today, but mainly the smell of the disintegration of a body (a whiff of urine, of old people's perspiration, of breath smelling of gums that were never intended to last so many years) gradually fading every day. On the third day the smell persisted only in his bedroom, which none of us wanted to enter.
The retirement home was in turmoil. All the widows’ and widowers’ apartments had turned into family headquarters bustling with worried young people, constantly busy, speaking, coordinating. There had never been a livelier retirement home.
On the first day, we were able to see which families had been careful to keep in touch with their elders, the dedicated grandchildren and children, the ones who called every single day. They were the ones that reported in at the retirement home on the first day, some even before noon, when they realized that regular contact had been severed, missing that slow beginning of their day. The ones who arrived only on the third day, after being called by the staff at the retirement home, arrived with shame and guilt written all over their faces, as clear as the remains of a chocolate cake eaten in secret.
Downstairs, in the retirement home's tiny grocery store, which was full of countless kinds of dry cookies, perfect for dipping in your tea or coffee, someone finally said what we were all really thinking. Her flowered blouse was thin, fragile, looking as though it would tear at any moment, and I thought – ‘How wisely the English language determined between a shirt and a blouse’. She said that if the nursing assistants had stayed, like before, this would never have happened.
Two days before he disappeared, we had come to celebrate grandpa's eighty seventh birthday. We came in full force and I remember thinking, ‘Here, this will let me off visiting him for at least three months’. But I knew I wouldn't come for at least six, if not more. Grandpa's great grandsons played on the grass. Two of them had just learned to walk and were fully focused on practicing this new skill, dragging their parents by the hand, from corner to corner, in happy, unsteady wobbles. The flies showed more interest in the fruits and cakes than we did, so we merely sat, all of us, on the retirement home's plastic chairs, with perspiring beer bottles, and talked.
We spoke of new cars and remembered a certain summer at grandma and grandpa's when we had tried to dig a tunnel from their garden to the neighbor's house. And we laughed when the little ones sang and danced, and grandpa sat in his chair, with disposable plates at his feet, laden with cakes and fruits he hadn't touched, and he smiled. He hadn’t stopped smiling, but not at us. His head had slanted sideways each time he listened to what the tiny earpiece whispered in his ear, and he spoke in a hushed, quiet voice when he answered into the tiny microphone attached to the collar of his shirt, like a conjurer.
"I don't like this," my mother said. "I want to hear what it's saying to him, that virtual nursing assistant of his. I don't like it at all. What a stupid idea."
"Let me listen for a sec," her brother pretended to ask. He snatched the earpiece from grandfather's ear, but grandpa's virtual caregiver had grown silent. We had handed the tiny ear piece around to each other. It was covered with earwax, as slick as an internal organ. I didn't try to listen. "Try it, you can't hear anything," my uncle commanded. But I didn't.
Finally, we returned the earpiece to grandpa and he immediately smiled. One more secret shared between him and the voice whispering in his ear. Perhaps it was grandma's voice. I wanted to believe it was. I let my eyes drift to the other families and old folk in the garden. They were all smiling, relaxed, tilting their heads to better hear the whispers in their ears, walking about the garden with their digital walking sticks, safe in the arms of the whispering, virtual nursing assistant, their confidant. They were happy.
Maybe that was why I had walked out of grandpa's birthday party with such a sense of dread. There was something uncanny about so many old people being so happy.
One last floor was still populated by the elderly after grandpa had vanished. The couples floor. The double, more spacious apartments. On the fourth day, the elevator had accidentally stopped there and I had emerged from it. I saw them peeking at me through the cracks of the doors. ‘There,’ I had thought, ‘this is how old people should act – hesitant, slightly intimidated, enclosed.’ It had been a midweek morning, without visitors. Only the retirement home staff walked the corridors, trying to maintain the routine. There was already a police presence on the other floors, and a few drowsy reporters waited in the lobby. We had agreed, the family circle, not to say a word. To any of them.
Apparently, it was explained to us at the meeting arranged in the lobby by the retirement home security personnel, they had all left together. All the old folks. In the dead of night. The current theory was that something had happened with the virtual nursing assistant software, or so it seemed to them. Perhaps hacking was involved. In any event, they were currently unable to locate the old folks. Not a trace. The woman I had seen at the grocery store, again wearing a thin, soft blouse that carefully concealed her curves, rose and spoke.
"We heard they have been seen near the city of Safed," she said. And I instantly pictured them in my mind, a swarm of old people, their walking sticks stretched forward, like wood and metal feelers, smiling at everyone, moving little by little, like some primal caterpillar, through the ancient stone alleys.
Then we cleared off. We packed the disposable dishes, the pastries, both sweet and salty, and the beverages. And I thought that actually,this was exactly how grandma's mourning period had ended. With that exact practicality, with packing, with thin cardboard boxes and semi-consumed pastries left by the oversized trashcan.
"But what if they never find them? We'll just leave his apartment like that? With all the stuff?" My cousin asked. No one answered. There wasn't that much stuff left anyway. How much of a person’s past could be shoved and squeezed into a room-and-a-half apartment in a retirement home? And so we left, us, and the rest of the families. A muted flow of people unable to precisely determine whether they felt grief or relief.
"We'll find them." The retirement community manager promised. "They couldn't have gotten that far, someone is bound to see them. And, of course, there's the software…"
But we didn't listen to her, and her voice diminished behind us. We walked away, leaving the retirement home silent again.
Surely they'll be found in the end. Surely one of them would get sick, surely they'll need nourishment, and how much good would those virtual caregivers be when it came to physical needs? And where could a few dozen old people have disappeared to anyway? At the same time, I thought they'd probably never be found, and we would be summoned to grandpa's apartment to pick up the few boxes containing his belongings. Some new old people would move in, fresh widows and widowers, with a sweet sound whispering in their ears. Or perhaps they'd relinquish the experiment and bring back the expensive Filipino caregivers, with their language that echoes in the places where the silence of the elderly is so noticeable.
And on the way home, I thought of grandfather in that flock of lost seniors. Smiling, walking slowly, and listening to grandma's voice whispering in his ear with the loving softness she'd always reserved for him alone,
"Soon, Yankel, we'll get there soon."
About the author
Mayan Rogel is an author and screenwriter living in Israel, publishing short stories in Israeli literary magazines since 1997. Her published books are 'We could have left' (2011' winner of the Israeli Ministry of Culture Grant), 'Forest' (2016)' 'Monkeys also fall from trees' (2018)' and 'Whereabouts' (2019).
She teaches writing at the Kibutzim Collage in Tel Aviv. She’s married, and a mother of a 5 year old story-teller. Learn more about her work at mayenrogel.com or follow her on Facebook.
Translated by Yaron Regev