Supplied
- Title: Ten Clear Days
- Author: Eric Beck Rubin
- Genre: Non-Fiction
- Publisher: Turtle Point Press
- Pages: 192
It seems right that the title of Eric Beck Rubin’s extraordinary novel is drawn from a piece of legislation, an orphan poetic phrase hiding in a hulking legal text – beauty where there should be none. “Ten clear days” was the necessary prelude to a medically assisted death in Canada as set out in the landmark 2016 law (the condition was later dropped). Every day for 10 days – a distressingly short period for loved ones, interminable for the chooser – the patient must reaffirm to a doctor, with faculties intact, the wish to go.
Ten Clear Days takes place in a private room in Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital in 2018, where the protagonist, M.B., recovers reluctantly from heart failure and waits to die.
This spare and haunting book contains more light than that premise might suggest. The official notes of a hospital functionary, referred to as Author (or Au.), make up much of the slim volume, but medical and family narratives, and reality and art, are hopelessly entwined. As M.B. turns away meals and endures physician check-ins, her children and sons-in-law and grandchildren flit in and out, bringing consolations (or temptations) from the outside world: jam-filled doughnuts, a recording of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, New York Times editions with stories about Michael Cohen’s deposition and Kofi Annan’s life. “Do you remember that?” M.B.’s son-in-law says after reading a line from Annan’s obit; M.B. has met the UN Secretary-General.
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Though it is framed around a protocol surrounding death, Beck Rubin’s book is really a beautiful and profound reflection on life – and a remarkable life. The reader learns early on that the woman dubbed M.B. or simply “Patient” throughout the book is Mary Beck, the author’s grandmother; it doesn’t take long to see that the fictionalized death and life in question are that of a well-known Toronto philanthropist. The real Mary Beck will be familiar to anyone who has attended Toronto Symphony Orchestra concerts in recent memory; she and her husband, Tom, made transformational donations to the orchestra they attended for seven decades, and are still thanked at performances, though he died in 2016 and she in 2018.
The Becks are also embedded in a more ordinary Canadian ritual. Anyone who has put up Christmas lights has likely encountered the modest company, Noma, that they bought in 1963 as Hungarian immigrants and grew into a major business. (It’s somewhat surprising this book is published by an American indie, given the high-profile Canadian subject, the MAID hook and the fact Beck Rubin’s first book, School of Velocity, was published internationally and well reviewed.)
None of this makes it into Ten Clear Days, which passes over the public story to lay bare a family’s most tense and tender negotiations around a loved one’s end of life. Between Au.’s fictionalized hospital record – the medical measure of a life, dotted with time stamps and other units – and the author’s interviews, meticulously sourced research notes and exchanges with his grandmother over years (Eric appears as a character, and his PhD thesis in the novel, Then Cover The Abyss With Trance, is also Beck Rubin’s actual dissertation), Mary Beck’s personal history, and her family’s, comes to light. Some names are changed, but not its protagonist’s, and one can imagine family conversations have unfolded since.
The book begins with an error; the matriarch, outspoken and larger than life, speaking only Hungarian in her hospital bed (the past asserts itself on us), is a year older than her official documents say. “They took it from me, so I took it back,” M.B. shrugs. The year she has dropped is a year disappeared from her childhood, when her family was forced from a gracious apartment in Nazi-occupied Budapest into ever more cramped and overcrowded quarters in the Jewish Ghetto, before fleeing for a convent in Pest, then a safehouse.
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Marianne Manoville (her original name) survives physically through courage or desperation, and spiritually through beauty. The pre-Patient’s life was shaped by art: young Marika makes paintings by the river and pictures with a Brownie camera. A girlfriend recalls her arriving at the convent, a grim, grey place where hundreds of Jews hide: “And showing up all of a sudden in this world is our little Marika–colour.”
In hospital, as M.B. lies back, eyes closed, mind adrift, her grandson describes the sky at sunset; she’ll want to know. “The full room is like a still life,” Beck Rubin writes at one point. “All of those present are in a state of suspension.” The book devastates with its restraint, the story unspooling through a series of stills: picture hangers filling the walls of a Budapest apartment with paintings; people floating down the Danube one frigid day in 1944, with echoes years later in a backyard swimming pool in Toronto.
“MAID is novel territory,” a doctor warns the family, and indeed it is, though this book is, as far as I know, the first to take up the challenge. Why does a woman who pursued life against great odds now choose death? Her family is stricken; one daughter rails against her mother’s wish. A doctor friend says she won’t go through with it; she’s a survivor. Neither author takes sides. Beck Rubin is interested here in metaphysical questions. This is a book about freedom, memory, why and how we live and how we see the world and are seen by it.
Perhaps all we can know is that Mary Beck, a woman who exerted enormous will to shape her own story, chose to apply the same to its end. Is this is what she wants, her doctor asks. “Patient looks at the doctor, smiles. Inscrutable. Layered. Contradictory.”