Book of My Mother

by Albert Cohen

  Why so much commotion, since the earth now lies heavy upon her and she is impassible? Why on the eve of my arrival did she so fervently deck her revered humble washroom with incongruous theatrical curtains, the poor washroom which with all the ardor of her soul she turned into a Palace of Lace? Why so much enthusiasm if it was destined to end in nothingness? Why did she attach importance to so many things, and what was the point of it? Why in expectation of the visit of her Western darling did she so passionately purchase such huge quantities of the tea which for her was a strange medicinal herb inconceivably liked by the Gentiles, proudly proclaiming in a burst of courage in the local shop where it had been growing musty since the time of Napoléon III that she was buying tea for Her Son Who Was About To Arrive, that insipid tea which had lost all taste, which she made so badly and with so much care, and which I would declare perfect, only to tease her about her incompetence the following day. Nevermore will I tease her. Why did she so cherish her piles of linen, which she would inspect and usually pat, delighted and proud and sighing with satisfaction? Why was she so enthusiastic about going to the theater with me – “Quick, hurry up, we’ll be late” – why so much excitement about everything, why did she smile at me so much if she was so completely to disappear?

  All her efforts to please, her guileless titivation, her enthusiasms, her little sparks of pride, her joys, her moments of susceptibility – all that is dead forever, has suddenly never existed, was pointless. Just as the pages I am writing now, the nights I spend writing them, are all so vain, so pointless. I shall die. No more I soon. And after my death someone perhaps will also wonder why I came into the world, why I lived and so absurdly enjoyed writing, and why I was so ridiculously delighted at what seemed to me a written truth, a well-turned phrase, or a flash of inspiration. And even what I have just written about my death and the uselessness of writing gives me some joy of living and some sense of usefulness.

  XXII

  HERE I AM in my room, one of the human nation, scandalized by universal death, asking sterile questions. Here I am, asking constantly for my mother, asking nothingness for my mother. Here I am, a man destitute, abandoned, and aghast, an ashen-faced man seeking to understand; here I am, sweating and breathing hard, for I understand nothing of my human adventure, and my labored breathing is painful but insists sadly on going on, and in the moment between breathing in and breathing out there is always my mother plodding toward me. Each breath I draw is a death striving to live, despair simulating hope. Here I am in front of the mirror, wildly yearning for some happiness in my distress, sadly lacerating myself with grief and yet petrified, dragging my nails across my bare chest, smiling and weak in front of my mirror, where I seek my childhood and my mother, my mirror, which keeps me cold company and in which I know with a smile that I am sunk, completely lost without my mother. Here I am in front of the mirror, a window opening onto death, making knots in a piece of string I have picked up at random which keeps me company, tugging it straight, reknotting it, twisting it mechanically, snapping it in my impatience, sweating and stammering cheerful words in an effort to live. O broken thread of my destiny! In front of the mirror to which I put my questions, I cannot understand why my mother is no more since once she was.

  She came into the world, she understood nothing of it, and she went away. After having been irreplaceably herself, she vanished. Why, oh why? Poor humans that we are, going from the forever which placed us in our cradle to the forever which will come after our grave. And between those two forevers what is this farce which we act out, this brief farce made up of ambitions, hopes, loves, and joys doomed to vanish forever, this farce which Thou makest us perform? Hey, Thou up there, what is this snare? Why did she laugh, why didst Thou give her a desire to laugh and live if from her cradle Thou hadst sentenced her to death, O Judge of the monotonous sentence, Judge devoid of imagination, who knowest only one sentence, always the death sentence, why, and what is this trickery? She loved to breathe the sea air on those Sundays of my childhood. Why is she now beneath a stifling plank, that plank so close to her beautiful face? She loved to breathe, she loved life. I cry out against this fraud, this sinister joke. O God, with the right accorded to me by my death throes soon to come, I tell Thee that Thy joke is not funny, Thy joke of giving us such a terrifying and splendid love of life only then to lay us out one after another, each beside the other, and make of us motionless objects which future motionless objects bury deep in earth like reeking muck, rotting rubbish to be cast out of sight, waxy refuse, we who once were babies dimpling delightedly. Why all that earth on my mother, that cramped space of the box around her, when she so loved to breathe the sea air?

  XXIII

  I WANT HER not to be dead. I want hope, I demand hope. Who will give me a belief in a wondrous life where I shall see my mother again? Brothers, O my brother humans, force me to believe in an everlasting life, but give me good reasons – not all that bunkum which sickens me while, ashamed of the conviction in your eyes, I amiably reply yes, yes. That heaven where I want to see my mother again must be real, not an invention of my distress.

  It is to Thee that I appeal, God of my mother, my God whom I love despite my blasphemy born of despair. I appeal to Thee for help. Take pity on this beggar stranded at the edge of the world. I no longer have a mother, I no longer have a Maman, I am all alone and destitute and I appeal to Thee to whom she prayed so much. Give me faith in Thee; give me a belief in an everlasting life. I would pay a billion years in hell for that belief. For after the billion years in that hell where they deny Thy existence I shall be able to see my mother again, and she will welcome me with her little hand shyly at the corner of her lip.

  XXIV

  YOU, HER THOUGHTS, her high hopes, her joys, have you vanished too, and is it possible? “The dead live,” I cry out sometimes, suddenly awakened in the night and sweating with the certainty of it. “My mother’s thoughts,” I stammer, “have fled to the land where time does not exist, and they await me there. Yes, there is God, and God will not do that to me. He will not take away my mother. He will give her back to me alive in the land where time does not exist, the land where she awaits me.” Feeble childish folly. There is no paradise. Your mother’s gestures, her laughter, all her lives of all her hours endure only in your faithful eyes. And when you die there will be a few remnants of them on these pages, and these pages too will be swept away by the wind that blows down the centuries, and she will never have been.

  How enviable is the lot of those who believe what is good for them to believe. Not the barren truth, which is neither joyous nor beautiful and whose only virtue is that it is pitifully true amid the magnificent and senseless teeming of the innumerable forms of life which spring up at random and without reason under the gloomy eye of nothingness. You whom I used to call Maman have entered the valley of lethargy and you do not await me there. You are alone and I am alone. We are both terribly alone. You are dead forever, I know. And yet I know that when I suffer in my body, destined by the goodness of God for sickness and the humiliation of old age, or in my soul, when they harm your child and I can no longer feign to be made of steel, it is your name alone, Maman, that I shall call, not those of living loved ones nor that of God – your sacred name alone, Maman, when my body is weary of living or when they are too cruel to the child you defended so well. Can it be that you are alive in some wondrous place?

  XXV

  NO, SHE IS SILENT under the earth, locked up in the earthen jail which she may not leave, imprisoned in the solitude of earth, with silent, stifling earth oppressive and inexorable above her, ferociously on her right, stolidly on her left, and extending infinitely beneath her as she lies abandoned and of interest to nothing, not even her somber thick earth, while living beings walk above her. Deep down in earth she is inaction, languor, prostration. God, how absurd it all is!

  Stretched out and unutterably alone, quite dead, she who once was active, she who cared ceaselessly for her husband and son, the holy Maman who tirel
essly offered cupping glasses and compresses and useless comforting herb teas, stretched out, stiff, she who carried so many trays to her two men on their beds of sickness, stretched out, unseeing, she who once was naïve and quick eyed and believed the advertisements for patent medicines, stretched out, idle, she who constantly reassured. All at once I recall what she said one day when someone had gratuitously hurt me. Instead of consoling me with abstract and allegedly wise words, she had merely said, “Give a little tilt to your hat, my son, and go out and enjoy yourself, for you are young. Off you go now, enemy of yourself.” Thus spake my wise Maman.

  Stretched out in the great dormitory, indifferent, piteously alone, she who was so delighted at her luck in getting that good seat on the train, delighted and beaming all over her broad face. Stretched out, insensible, she who so childishly rejoiced in the fine dress I had bought her. Where is it now, that cursed dress which lives on somewhere with the scent of my mother? Stretched out, apathetic, the bustling enthusiast who adored working out detailed schemes and artless plans for our happiness, stretched out, she who conjured up poetic visions of all the wonderful things she would do when she won the jackpot in the lottery, and she was already planning to annoy certain nasty people by flaunting her opulence, but afterward, she said, she would forgive them and even give them a nice present. Stretched out in her sullen earthen sleep, in her mineral indifference, she thinks no more of jackpots, is no longer delighted, no longer concerned. She is no longer concerned even about me. Yet she loved me.

  You, her lowered eyelids, are you still intact? And you, Mother, so paled and yellowed, whom with a blink of the mind’s eye I dare to imagine in your rotted box, wasted and abandoned, you who moved and always toward me came, now so surly and laconic in your earthen melancholy, recumbent in the black silence of the grave, tell me, you who loved me, do you think sometimes of your son in your grave where live only roots, joyless rootlets, and mournful creatures of darkness moving in incomprehensible ways and always silent though terrifyingly active? Perhaps in her sickly suffocation she now dreams impassively of me, though when she lived she always feared for me in her dreams. Under her stifling plank she wonders perhaps whether I remember to have a hot drink in the morning before going to work. “He does not dress warmly enough,” perhaps murmurs my dead mother. “He is so delicate, he worries about everything, and I am not there,” faintly she murmurs, my dead mother.

  Not true: she does not dream of me, she never thinks. She is joyless in her mold, and above her there is life and the light headiness of the morning and the huge risen sun. She is paralyzed and withered in her rich mold, parchment-like and green-tinged here and there, the once pretty Maman of her boy of ten, half skeleton, insensible despite my slow tears, deaf, impassive, while above her little scraps of creation wake and joyously busy themselves with living, begetting and murdering under the benevolent eye of God. On a tree above her grave an early squirrel is rubbing its front paws together: what luck, there are lots of walnuts this year! Above her grave in the early morn the sky is immensely and powerfully blue and the little birds are setting up their joyous trills and their innocent babble in the flowering dawn, their angelic waking and fluttering prattle, their penny poems, their sweet, sharp, icy calls and all their rippling repertoire, and, except for a cuckoo idiotically obsessed with playing hide-and-seek, all those birdies bid a thousand good mornings in filial homage to the sun, and, “Oh, how grand it is to live in the fresh air!” chirp those little darlings, snooty, tiny, tufted troubadours, drunk on the new day, who come flocking now, in a flurry of gracious polkas, to peck in the grass upon her grave.

  XXVI

  WHEN ALL IS SAID and done we settle down into unhappiness, and sometimes we think we are not so bad off after all. So let’s smoke a cigarette while the idiot on the radio talks about an important statement of an important head of state. The idiot relishes that statement, revels in it, and rolls it around his tongue. What do I care about their important statements? Those incredibly dynamic future corpses are ludicrous.

  When my cat, a feebleminded creature, looks at me avidly in fixed astonishment, seeking to understand and very attentive, yes, it is my mother who is looking at me. Is my mind becoming deranged by that death which ceaselessly I acknowledge, my eyes upturned toward the night sky, where a pale round dead presence is shining, benign and motherly? Since her death I like to live alone sometimes for days on end, far from the absurdly busy living, alone as she was alone in her flat in Marseilles, alone with the phone off the hook so that the world outside does not enter my home as it did not enter hers, alone in this dwelling which has the perfection of death and where I constantly tidy up to convince myself that all is well, alone in my deliciously locked room, too neat and too clean, obsessively symmetrical, with pencils laid out in order of size on the glossy little graveyard of the table.

  Seated at the table, I converse with her. I ask her whether I should put on my coat to go out. “Yes, darling, it’s better to be on the safe side.” But it is only me rambling on, imitating her accent. I would like to have her sitting here beside me, embalmed in her black silk dress. If I were to talk to her for a long time, patiently, looking at her intently, perhaps her eyes would suddenly come to life a little, out of pity, out of motherly love. I know very well that this is not true, and yet the idea haunts me.

  XXVII

  THERE, I HAVE finished this book and it is a pity. While I was writing it I was with her. But Her Majesty my dead mother will not read these lines written for her and traced by a filial hand in morbid slowness. I do not know what to do now. Should I read this modern poet who racks his brains to be incomprehensible? Should I return to the world outside and see again those monkeys dressed like men who are all conditioned by social life and play bridge and do not like me and talk of their political intrigues, which will be out of date ten years hence?

  Sometimes at night, after checking once more the dear little lock on my door, I sit with my hands flat on my knees and, with the lamp switched off, I stare into the mirror. Surrounded by certain minotaurs of melancholy, I wait in front of the mirror while scurrying across the floor like rats flit the shadows of those who were unkind to me in my life among men, and while intermittently piercing the gloom there shines the light of a noble gaze, that of my other love, Yvonne. I wait in front of the mirror, sitting with my hands flat Pharaoh-wise; I wait in the hope that my mother will appear beneath the moon which is her message. But only memories come. Memories – that terrible life which is not life and which gives such pain.

  While a dog howls in the night, a wretched dog, my brother who whines and tells of my grief, tirelessly I call to mind memories of the past. I am a baby and she powders me with talc and then, for a joke, puts me in a little house made of three pillows, and the young mother and her baby laugh and laugh. She is dead. Now I am ten, I am ill and she watches over me all night by the glow of the nightlight, above which a little teapot keeps the herb tea warm – glow of the night-light; glow of Maman dozing beside me with her feet on a foot warmer – and I moan because I want her to kiss me. Now it is a few days later, I am convalescing, and she has brought me a licorice whip, which I asked her to go and buy – and how quickly she ran: docile, ever ready! She is sitting by my bed sewing, and her breathing is calm and measured. I am perfectly happy. I crack the licorice whip and then I eat a cookie with tiny little bites, starting with the frilly edges, which are browner and taste nicer, and then I play with her wedding ring, which she has lent me, spinning it on a plate. Kind smiles of my comforting Maman, indulgence of Maman. She is dead. Now I am better, and with leftover bits of dough she makes little men which she is going to fry for me. She is dead. Now we are at the fair. She gives me ten centimes, which I put on the belly of the cardboard bear and – goody! – a cream bun comes out of the belly. “Maman, watch me eat it. It tastes better when you are looking.” She is dead. Now I am twenty and she is waiting for me in the university square, holy patience. She sees me and her face lights up shyly wi
th happiness. She is dead. Now she is welcoming us on the eve of the Sabbath. Before we had time to knock, the door opened as if by magic, her gift of love. She is dead. Now she is proud of having found my pen. “You see, my son, I can find anything.” She is dead. Now I ask her to tidy my room. She does so with a good grace, but she has a little laugh at me. “It would take an army of soldiers to serve you, my son, and you would wear them all out.” What a kindly smile. She is dead. Now she is delighted to be settling her weight into the taxi. Walking tires her so quickly, my sick darling. I feel a sudden pride as I write at the thought that I too am often sick. I am so much like you; I am so much your son. Now she is at the carriage door at the station in Geneva and the train is about to leave. Her hair disheveled and her hat piteously askew, her mouth aghast with distress, her eyes glistening with distress, she is gazing at me intently to take in as much of me as possible before the train pulls out. She blesses me and advises me no to smoke more than twenty cigarettes a day and to dress warmly in winter. Her eyes are crazed with tenderness, divinely crazed. That is motherhood. That is the majesty of love, the sublime law, the gaze of God. Suddenly I see in her the proof that God exists.