Passing through the automatic doors of that institution, poetically called Les Eoliades, was like crossing a border between life and an alternate universe. My nostrils were assaulted with a stench that seemed to come from the yellow walls – of vegetable soup, industrial-strength detergent and dirty mattress protectors. Parked in the hall to greet me as they waited to be nudged into the dining room, were a hundred dazed and confused old folk, waggling their heads as if saying no to death.
The manager called them ‘the residents’ as though they were living in some luxury apartment building; just ordinary old people who happened to be living there, and who could leave whenever they felt like it.
Amidst this defeated humanity, I would find my mother strapped into some sort of a capsule, her blind, staring eyes like saucers, fixed on the ceiling, waiting for the heavens to open like the doors of a store on the first day of the sales.
Once inside, I would take her up to her room. There, with palpable impatience, I would administer her special easy-to-swallow gruel for dysphagia sufferers. Then I would pull on her adult-sized onesie – we don’t say onesie, Madame, it’s infantilising, we prefer nightwear – purchased in ten packs on the internet. It’s to stop the bedridden from rummaging in their nappies – we don’t say nappies either, Madame, we prefer protectors; nappies are for babies… Then I would wait for the aides to move her from the capsule to her bed, as I listened to her rant.
When she had been scooped out of that white plastic thing with a winch and deposited on her sheets, she looked so vulnerable, all curled up in her flanelette outfit, it was frankly distressing.
The woman who had once been so elegant in her lilac, chiffon dresses now had dirty teeth, a pasty mouth from her medications, a completely grey head of hair, and a face sprouting with unsightly whiskers.
I had never had a straightforward relationship with my mother. As a child I had never, for example, depicted her in my drawings with a triangle skirt, big smiling eyes and a banana-shaped smile. No, no, I always drew her as a big hairy spider with two legs bigger than the rest. Mothers with banana-smiles are what I used to call milly-mummies. Milly-mummies knew how to do everything: make crepe-paper flowers, costumes for the school play, cakes with pink icing in convoluted shapes. They would come on school excursions, and would carry a mountain of coats while waiting in line without a word of complaint. Whenever anything fancy caught your eye – a crib made out of egg cartons, a treasure hunt, a chandelier made out of yoghurt containers – the response was invariably the same: Milly’s mummy did that.
A very far cry from the ghastly yellow, shop-bought pound cake I used to bring sheepishly to every party.
No… With her gift for fiddle-faddling about, while always looking as though she was completely overwhelmed with things to do, my mother was in no way a milly-mummy. She didn’t know how to cook an egg, the house was a pig sty, and as for school, well, doesn’t it just bore you to tears? Luckily for me the Anschluss happened, or my parents would have ended up figuring out that I hadn’t lifted a finger for six months.
She’d never concealed the fact that she had conceived me for the sole purpose of providing my father with a son. If he’d left her after the disappointment, I think she would have had me adopted there and then.
For all that, she was neither crazy nor completely blasé, and since she expected absolutely nothing from life, none of her hopes had ever been dashed. As a young woman, her one hope had been that she wouldn’t be killed. Once a week, people from her camp were rounded up onto a train, and she would stand with her mother in a circle marked with the first letter of her last name, Z. By the time the guards made it to O, P, sometimes as far as U, there would be no more room in the carriages, and after a few hours waiting amidst the terrified screams, the families being torn apart and the summary executions, the two women would return to their barracks. Having survived that test, she had decided that the world could get along fine without her… The world, the household, her husband, her child… all of it! Everything would just pass by her forever more. Like a little roving satellite, she would approach life’s significant events, circle around them, then head off again as quickly as possible, until in the end she no longer worried about anything at all.
Throughout her life, she didn’t buy a single truly personal item; only clothes, perfume and make-up. In the mornings she would spend hours dolling herself up and examining herself soberly in the mirror; then she would plonk herself down in her flouncy dress, looking badly miscast against the medieval-style decor opted for by my father according to the principle: if its old, it must be tasteful…
There she would smoke her Gallias and read novels that were an infinitely repetitive variation on the same theme: a Jewish woman leaves Austria, Poland or Russia, disembarking, bare foot, at the base of the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island, and thanks to her cunning nature, her ass, her good fortune, becomes a famous publisher, a renowned fashion designer, a feared lawyer… This Jewish female bulldozer crushes everything in her path, men in particular. Her children loathe her. She dies alone, but widely envied and very rich.
And my mother, sitting on a kneeler that had been turned into a chair, illuminated by a helmet that had been turned into a lamp, would anxiously light up her Gallias in rhythm with the peregrinations of her Jewish heroine, interrupting her reading with little untranslatable exclamations.
My father – who incidentally was on first-name terms with every prostitute from around the Church of the Madeleine – would gaze proudly at her, and pronounce her like a work of art: very beautiful, but in terms of her usefulness, absolutely worthless.
Was it for him that she spent so much time preparing herself in the morning? She liked to say so, but it was a lie because he was almost always travelling for work. No, the truth is that she didn’t love anybody.
If my mother was wrapping herself in clothes of coloured silk and the lives of intrepid Jewish women, it was so she could stand every morning on the bridge of an imaginary cruise ship, headed for the paradise to where she would have liked to emigrate after the war – Miami Beach, the city of pastel colours and buildings shaped like Italian cassatas; the city where the Ashkenazys dance day and night to Paul Anka.
Since that never came to pass, she smothered her desire in the uniformity of her days, waiting patiently for the holidays as she read her novels and smoked her Gallia cigarettes.
Towards the end, before she had her stroke, she used to spend her time scrounging money off me to buy clothes at Printemps or Galeries Lafayette and returning them the next day with the good-natured complicity of the sales assistants. Mademoiselle, I’ll just leave it on, she used to say regally, having made the purchase; then she would go down to be sprayed with perfume on the ground floor before finishing her day at the Café de la Paix eating enormous cakes with her serviette spread out over her entire body so as not to spill on herself.
When her extended death throes began with her admission into the aged care facility, I cleared out the last attic room where she had lived. Apart from a few ugly, worthless pieces of furniture, and some chipped crockery, I found a whole box of lipsticks and orange nail polish, and an impressive library of stories about intrepid Jewish women.
All that emerged from what remained of her brain after the stroke were utterly incoherent criticisms directed at me. They related to the millions of euros I was stealing, her very substantial real estate holdings which I was in the process of allowing to go to rack and ruin, and her dear Schnookie, an imaginary fox-terrier, whom I was mistreating.
I had been enduring these rebukes since the day I was born, but it had grown worse over the last decade. One morning, having spent the last centime of the fat sum of money my father had left her – the girls would have been about sixteen, seventeen at the time – she called me and, in the surprised and mildly exasperated voice of a princess who doesn’t think the service is up to scratch, announced: Patience, there’s no more money in the safety deposit box… It was the tone she might hav
e used if she’d turned on a tap: Patience, there’s no more water. And it was true, all that was left in the bank were the objects she considered precious: a sample of her favourite lipstick to remind her of the number of the colour, her certification of Jewish status, my father’s numerous forged papers, a metal coin that-mustn’t-be-lost-because-it’s-very-important but which nobody knew anything about anymore, the collars of each of her dead dogs… but not a trace of the pile of gold coins that her far-sighted husband had left her after his death.
There’s no more money… It was as if she were describing to me a regrettable plumbing phenomenon for which nobody in particular was to blame – especially not her. No particular accusation, no hostility. Just: there’s no more money… Immediately, of course, she started sponging off me, without for a moment imagining that it might cause me any anxiety or that I might have to slave away to earn this money. Worse, it was as if she were secretly cursing me for keeping her from penury because in becoming poor she also became completely infuriating, constantly asking me for sums of money down to the precise cent, along the lines I need 223 euros 90, and if I ever dared provide the exact change, she would get on her high horse and accuse me of being a cheapskate or of treating her like a beggar.
I came away from these visits to the end-of-the-road hotel utterly wrung out, every time.
As I waited for the lift while all the old fogies were being taken back to their rooms, I’d sink onto a narrow couch and wallow in the misery of the situation, of my life, of life in general, a misery that crashed down onto me as if the cable holding it up had snapped.
After every visit, consumed by self-pity at the outrageous hand fate had dealt me, I used to weep, weep with impotence, again and again… And with each outbreak of emotional incontinence, the staff would feel obliged to console me and I would feel embarrassed – even though a sentiment like shame admittedly borders on inappropriate in a nursing home.
There’s a Jewish song that verges on the ridiculous it’s so Jewish, which neatly illustrates my then state of mind:
Wejn nischt, wejn nischt
schpor dir trern chotsch dich kwelt,
wajl dos leben hot nor tsores
oj wi schlecht, wen trern felt.
Don’t cry, don’t cry. Spare your tears, don’t waste them, for life is so dreadful you may not have enough for all you will still have to endure…
It was right there on that couch that my adventure began.
Madame Léger, an Alzheimer sufferer convinced she was on her way to her job as head seamstress at the fashion house of Balmain, was scurrying past me, back and forth. At first, I thought she had come to visit a relative, she was so dolled up to the nines. In fact, this woman who was so elegant, with her handbag over her shoulder and her high heels, was what was known as a roaming resident. A patient perpetually on the move, driven by the obsessive need to be going somewhere. Given the topography of the place – it was essentially a circular corridor – the poor woman went around and around like a goldfish in a bowl, her memory wiped after every circuit.
She must have taken me for one of her seamstresses who was slacking off because every time she went past, convinced she was catching me out for the first time, she made some unpleasant remark before heading off on another round. Dear girl, do stop crying. You have two left hands, you’re just not cut out for couture, that’s all there is to it… Get back to work instead of behaving like a prostitute! Another loop and there she was, back again!… What do you think this is? Do you think you’re being paid to take endless cigarette breaks… Get back to your work… Generally, by the third round, I would have stopped crying, and by the fifth, I was having a good laugh, which then elicited threats of being sacked for insubordination from my demented chief seamstress.
I got along well with her two children who were slogging away, like me, to pay for the costs of that wretched establishment. Poor things, they had not one, but two institutionalised parents. A mother with Alzheimer’s and a bedridden father. The cost of the whole exercise? More than 6,500 euros a month for this 20th-arrondissement institution that really had nothing luxurious about it whatsoever.
The carers, once they had settled everybody else on the floor, would then set about capturing the wanderer so they could undress her and force her into bed. Strapped in, she would cry out, calling for help, railing against her confinement… It was at that particularly ghastly moment that I would choose to clear out.
*
But one day in April, Madame Léger escaped.
I was the first to notice. Having been left to laze around on my couch with complete impunity, I asked one of the cleaning ladies, between sobs, if something had happened to her.
You’re right, yes, where has she got to, that Madame Léger? came the response from the kindly African woman with her Ivory Coast accent you could cut with a knife. She immediately sounded the alert and all the staff set off to look for her. Every room and all the common areas were methodically searched, in vain. No more Madame Léger. She had made a dash for it, ripping off her wander-control device like the raptor in Jurassic Park.
The brain of an Alzheimer sufferer can be likened to an onion that will rot layer by layer, from the outside in. The desire for freedom is hidden deep in the centre, at the core, I said to myself as I made my way through the hubbub provoked by her disappearance.
The next day, while listening to the conversation between Afid’s mother and her son on the halal line, I heard the exact same story coming straight from her mouth.
I already knew she was a carer in an aged care facility in Paris, but not in a million years had I imagined that fate could have landed her at Les Eoliades, at the bedside of my very own mother.
It took me a good week to identify her, given that in all these old people’s homes, like in the hospitals and child-care centres, practically the only people working there are blacks and Arabs. Racists everywhere, know this – the first and last person who will spoon-feed you and wash your intimate parts is a woman you despise!
I recognised her by the fact that at 6.55pm, whatever else was going on, she would shut herself up in the plant room to take her son’s call – a call whose timed and date-stamped file I would receive the following day.
She had to be up to speed with his business affairs. And yet, to listen to their candid chats through my headphones in the evenings, you could truly wonder if anybody in that family knew that drug trafficking was an illegal activity in France, attracting severe penalties.
Though I’d never paid much attention to her, I recognised the woman as one of the nurses who would from time to time offer me a tray of Middle-Eastern sweets as I wept on my couch. Since she worked the day shift and I came mostly in the evenings, I had never spoken to her properly – just the usual hello and goodbye. It must be said that when you find yourself in that sort of place, face to face with your own mortality, you don’t really feel like making conversation. Anyway, what is there to talk about? Apart from wee and poo and death… Unless you’re completely deranged, you enter a nursing home with the single thought of getting out again as quickly as possible.
She was a little older than me, Moroccan background, always smiling, and she wore a headscarf – which, by the way, is perfectly acceptable and tolerated when the activities of the Muslim in question are confined to cleaning and wiping up after the elderly.
Out of curiosity I brought my visiting hours forward a little, and began to observe her more closely.
Khadija – that was her name – came to speak to me of her own accord as I was trying to make my mother swallow some substance the colour of jellyfish. I’d hardly been there five minutes and I already felt like squashing the container into her face.
Gently, she took the spoon out of my hands.
‘If your Mum doesn’t want to eat, it’s because she can feel you’re all tense. You’re going to break your teeth, you’re clenching them so tightly when you bring the spoon towards her. Old people are like animals, they pick up on everyt
hing.’
Just then my mother seemed to confirm this analysis by looking me up and down like a hostile, old tortoise from deep within her capsule-carapace.
‘Look at her, she’s refusing to open her mouth out of sheer stubbornness!’
‘Stroke her as you offer her something to eat… you’ll see, she’ll relax.’
And she did exactly that, stroking her hand over my mother’s sun-spotted, shrivelled arm.
‘I can’t do that!’ I said, petrified with disgust.
‘It’s okay – that’s what we’re here for!’
‘Nobody should have to live like this… Not her and not me. It’s horrible to end up like this!’
‘But you know, when you’re not here, your Mum’s not as annoying as all that. In fact, she’s quite cheerful. What do you say, my princess?’
And she kissed my mother who had already completely forgotten I was there and was crooning in Yiddish, her face half-paralysed:
‘Ikh bin a printsesin!’
‘She tells us lots of stories. She talks about wonderful parties when your father was Ambassador in Miami. The guests, the champagne, the beautiful dresses, the palm trees… all of it… it lets us dream a little… takes us out of ourselves.’
The suffocating irony of the situation made me feel a bit better.
I smiled. ‘We’re not very good at affection in our family.’
‘But I know from what she tells me about your life, about your daughters, all of that, that she has always been there, with you.’
‘Yes, there’s no denying that. She has always been very much there… in her own way, let’s just say.’
‘You’re both angry about what’s happening and that’s normal. Your mother, she can tell she’s slipping away, so she’s grabbing on to anything she can, including you, and it makes her unbearable. She’s scared of her life ending and you’re scared too. It’s a difficult time, always tricky. And it’s why we’re here, so it’s easier for the families and, if you won’t mind me saying, there’s no point you coming here every day. At some point you won’t be able to stand it anymore, and afterwards, you’ll only have bad memories of her. We’re looking after your mother very well, and if there’s a problem, we’ll call you. Go on, go home.’
The Godmother Page 4