Book of My Mother

by Albert Cohen

  When we crossed the street in Geneva, she would simper a little. Since she was aware of her inborn clumsiness and had difficulty in walking, weakhearted mother of mine, she was terribly afraid of cars, terribly afraid of being run over, and she would cross under my guidance, concentrate hard on what she was doing, and bravely confront her terror. I would take a fatherly grip on her arm, and she would lunge, head down, with never a glance at the cars, eyes closed the better to follow my lead, completely given up to my steering, slightly ridiculous in her excessive haste and alarm, so anxious not to be run over and to go on living. Intent on her duty to remain alive, she would press on bravely, petrified but trusting utterly to my skill and power and sure that her protector would preserve her from harm. So awkward, poor darling. And what a mountaineering adventure it was when she boarded a tram. I used to laugh at her a little. She liked me to laugh at her. Now she lies stretched out in her sullen earthen sleep, she who was afraid of being run over, stretched out in plantlike lethargy.

  On the tram in Geneva she liked to watch the knots of dear humans bent on survival who clambered on at each stop, to see the new arrivals sit down with satisfaction, like those two breathless girls who were smiling at each other, blissfully self-absorbed, as if congratulating each other because they had triumphed – that is to say, they had not missed the tram. To dear humans, those queer fish, everything that affects them is so important. My mother liked to watch them. It was the only form of social contact to which she had access. She had all-embracing insight. She even knew why that little office girl was looking so intently at the expensive soap she had just bought. “Poor thing,” she said, “that high-class soap is a comfort to her. It makes up for the grand life she can’t lead. It makes her feel she’s succeeded in life.” She speaks no more now. Sullen she lies in earthen melancholy.

  All finished now, the long loitering strolls in Geneva with my mother, who walked with difficulty, and I was happy to respect her slow pace and I forced myself to walk even more slowly than she did in order to spare her fatigue and humiliation. She admired everything about her beloved Geneva and Switzerland. She was enthusiastic about that little country, sober and sound. Naïvely, she would conjure up for Switzerland dreams of world rule, plan a Swiss world empire. She said they ought to put good, sensible, highly conscientious, rather stern Swiss in charge of the government of every country. Then everything would be all right. Policemen and postmen would be clean shaven and their shoes well shined. Post offices would be spotless, houses flower-decked, customs officials pleasant, railway stations polished and repainted, and there would be no more wars. She admired the cleanness of the lake in Geneva. “Even their water is honest,” she would say. I can see her now, her mouth gaping as she read respectfully the inscription engraved on the façade of the university: “In dedicating this building to advanced study, the people of Geneva pay tribute to the virtues of education, the ultimate guarantor of their freedoms.” “How beautiful that is,” she murmured. “Just look at the fine words they managed to find.”

  All done now, our aimless meandering past the shop windows of Geneva. To put her at ease, I would become quite Balkan when I was with her. We may even have eaten salted pistachio nuts surreptitiously in the street, like a couple of cronies from the Mediterranean whose affection did not need high-minded talk and elegant posturing and who could just let their hair down and loiter. How quickly walking tired her! That slow walk was already a funeral march, the beginning of her death.

  We would walk slowly, and she would suddenly confide to me, her best friend, a thought which she considered important. “You see, my son, men are animals. Just look at them – they have paws and sharp-pointed teeth. But one day in ancient times, Moses, our master, came along and decided in his head to turn those beasts into men, into children of God, through the Holy Commandments, you see. He told them, ‘You must not do this, you must not do that – it’s wicked. Animals kill, but you must not kill.’ In fact, I believe it was Moses who invented the Ten Commandments while strolling on the top of Mount Sinai to think more clearly. But he told them it was God, to impress them, you see. You know what our Jews are like – they must always have what is most expensive. When they’re ill, they send straightaway for the most celebrated professor of medicine. So Moses, who knew them well, said to himself, ‘If I tell them the Commandments come from the Lord, they’ll pay more attention to them, they’ll have more respect for them.’”

  Suddenly she took my arm, savored the joy of resting on it and of having another three weeks to spend with me. “Tell me, eyes of mine, those fables you write (that is what she called a novel I had just published), how do you find them in your head? In the newspaper they describe an accident: that isn’t difficult – it’s something that actually happened and they have only to put the right words down. But you write inventions, hundreds of pages straight out of your brain. It’s a wonder of the world!” In my honor she repudiated her former deities. “Writing a book is difficult, but being a doctor is nothing. They just repeat what they’ve learned in books, and they put on such airs with their waiting rooms, where they always keep a dying bronze lioness. Hundreds of pages,’ she repeated dreamily. “Poor me, I can’t even write a letter of sympathy. Once I’ve said, ‘I send you my condolences,’ I don’t know what else to say. You ought to write me a model for sympathy letters – but don’t use big words, because that would show them that I hadn’t written it myself.” All at once she sighed happily: “It’s so nice to go for a walk with you. You at least listen to me. With you I can have a conversation.”

  That day I bought her a pair of soft suede shoes, ignoring her protests. (“Keep your money, my son – old women don’t need suede shoes.”) I remember how eager she was to get home ‘to look at them – I can’t wait.” I can see her now, opening the parcel in the lift, then walking triumphantly round my flat with her news shoes in her hand, gazing at them, holding them away from her, closing one eye the better to see them, explaining their visible and invisible charms. She had the intense, excessive emotional reactions of genius. Before going to bed, she put the shoes by her bedside – “So that I can see them as soon as I wake in the morning.” She fell asleep proud of having a good son. Content with so little, my dear mother. At breakfast the next day she put her treasured shoes on the table beside the coffeepot. “My little guests.” She smiled. There was a ring at the door, and she trembled. A telegram from Marseilles? But it was only my tailor delivering a suit. Excitement of Maman, festive atmosphere. She felt the material and declared with an air of great experience (she knew nothing about it) that it was Scotch wool. “May you wear it in joy and in health,” she said sententiously. Placing her hand on my head, she also expressed the hope that I would wear it for a hundred years, which depressed me slightly. When, yielding to her entreaties, I tried on the new suit, she surveyed me ecstatically, hands clasped. “A real sultan’s son!” she proclaimed. And she could not refrain from mentioning what she so much desired: “There, all you need now is a fiancée.” I remember, it was that morning she made me swear never to travel in an “Angel of Death.” That was what she called airplanes. She is dead.

  X

  IN MY SOLITUDE I sing to myself the gentle, so very gentle, lullaby which my mother used to sing me – my mother on whom death has laid its icy touch – and there is a dry, strangled sob in my throat when I think that her little hands are warm no more and that nevermore will I hold them, soft and soothing, to my brow. Nevermore will I feel the featherlight touch of her awkward kisses. Nevermore will I see her, never will I be able to wipe away my moments of indifference or anger.

  I was spiteful to her once, and she did not deserve it. Oh, the cruelty of sons! Oh, the cruelty of the absurd scene which I made! And for what reason? Because at four in the morning, worried that I had not yet come home and never able to sleep until her son had come home, she had phoned the smart set who had invited me and who were certainly her inferiors. She had phoned to be reassured, to be sure I had come to
no harm. On my return I made an abominable scene. That scene is tattooed on my heart. I can see her now, so humble, my saintly mother, in the face of my stupid scolding, so heartrendingly humble, so conscious of her offense, of what she was sure was an offense. So convinced of her guilt, poor soul who had done no wrong. She was sobbing – my poor little child was sobbing. Oh, her tears that I will never be able not to have caused! Oh, her little hands in despair, on which blue marks had appeared! You see, darling, I am trying to atone by confessing. What deep suffering we can inflict on those who love us, and how awful is our power to hurt them. And what advantage we take of that power. And why was I so shamefully angry? Perhaps because her foreign accent and her incorrect French when she phoned those cultured cretins had embarrassed me. Nevermore will I hear her incorrect French and her foreign accent.

  Avenged on myself, I feel it is right and proper that I should suffer, for that night I caused suffering to a blundering saint – a true saint who was unaware that she was a saint. Brother humans, brothers in wretchedness and in superficiality, what a mockery is our filial love! I stormed at her because she loved me too much, because her heart was too ardent, because she was easily alarmed and overanxious about her son. I can hear her reassuring me. You are right, Maman, I was cruel to you but once, and I asked your forgiveness, which you granted so joyfully. You know, do you not, that I loved you with all my heart. How happy we were together, what chattering accomplices we were – such garrulous good friends, talking interminably. But I could have loved you yet more and written to you each day and given you each day a sense of your importance, which I alone was able to give you and which made you so proud, you who were humble and unacknowledged, my little genius, Maman, my dearest girl.

  I did not write her often enough. I did not have enough love in me to picture her opening her mailbox in Marseilles several times a day and finding it empty. (Now, whenever I open my mailbox and do not find my daughter’s letter – that letter I have been expecting for weeks – there is a faint smile on my face. My mother is avenged.) Worst of all, I was sometimes annoyed by her telegrams. Poor telegrams from Marseilles, always with the same wording: “Worried no news wire health.” I hate myself for having once wired in reply, with the perfume of a nymph still on my face, “I am absolutely fine letter follows.” The letter did not follow very soon. Darling, this book is my last letter.

  I cling to the thought that when I had grown up (it took quite a time) I used to give her money in secret, and with it the disinterested joy of knowing she was being looked after by her son. I should have bought her a vacuum cleaner. It would have given her poetic pleasure. She would have paid it a little visit from time to time, cherished it, and examined it from all angles, taking an artistic little step backward and sighing with satisfaction. Those things mattered to her, gave color to her life. I also clutch at the thought that I so often listened to her and took part hypocritically in the family feuds which she found so absorbing and which bored me rather. I agreed with her, told her she was right to criticize a particular relative who was in her bad books – the very same relative whom she praised to the skies two days later if she received a nice letter from him. I cling to the poor consolation of recalling how well I adapted my pace to the needs of her poor weak heart. “You’re not like the others, my son – you at least walk at a normal speed. It’s a pleasure to go for a walk with you.” I should just think so. We were doing about three hundred meters an hour.

  I also find comfort in remembering that I was good at flattering her. When she wore a new dress, which was never in fact new but invariably made over and which did not suit her very well, I would say, “You’re smart as a young girl.” She would glow with shy happiness, blush, and believe me. At each of my whopping compliments she would make her special dainty gesture of putting her little hand to her lips. She was then absolutely radiant, for her self-esteem was restored. What did it matter that she was alone and disdained? She drank in my praise, she had a son. But my only true comfort is that she cannot see how miserable her death has made me. Rubbing my hands in an effort to raise my spirits, I have just confided that thought to my cat, who purred politely.

  I reproach myself too for having found it perfectly natural to have a mother who was alive. I did not fully realize how precious and fleeting were her comings and goings in my flat. I was not sufficiently aware that she was alive. I did not long enough for her visits to Geneva. Is it possible? There was actually a wondrous time when I had only to send a ten-word telegram and two days later she would alight on the station platform with her formal smile of the shy, her bags, which were falling apart, and her hat, which was too small. I had only to write ten words and there she would be, as if by magic. I held the key to that magic and I made so little use of it, for I was idiotically taken up with nymphs. You balked at writing ten words. Write forty thousand now.

  I am obsessed by the thought of that telegram form. I write ten words at the post office and there she is at the compartment door, making signals by pointing me out with her index finger. And now she is clumsily hurrying to alight from the train, with a horrible fear of falling, because gymnastics are not in her line. And now she is coming toward me, dignified and bashful, with her curly hair, her rather large nose, her hat, which is too small, her slightly swollen ankles. She looks a bit ridiculous as she lumbers along with one arm outstretched to steady her walk, but I admire that awkward creature with magnificent eyes – living Jerusalem! She is disguised as a respectable lady of the West, but she hails from Canaan of ancient days and she does not know it. And now her little hand is stroking my cheek. She is so excited. How carefully she has combed her hair and brushed her clothes in the carriage toilet half an hour before arrival. I know her well. She has spent a long time smartening up to honor her son and win his approval. Now she places herself under my protection, certain that I will take care of everything – the porter, the taxi. She follows me meekly. I can sense the slight anxiety of the eternal foreigner as she hands her passport to the Genevan policeman. But she is not really afraid, because I am with her. In the taxi, she takes my hand and gives it a clumsy little kiss. She smells of not-very-expensive eau de cologne. And now we are there. She is overawed by my fine flat. She sucks in a bit of saliva – that is a self-conscious mannerism of hers when she is trying to be refined. And now her presents start coming out of the suitcase. There are homemade cakes, like so many love poems. I thank her, and then she gives me another of her own special kisses, a shy poetic kiss: she takes my cheek lightly between two of her fingers and then she kisses the two fingers. You see, darling, I remember everything. I look at her closely. Yes, I know her well. I know her innocent little secrets. I know she has not given me all her presents. There are others hidden in the suitcase, and they will emerge gradually over the next few days. She wants to draw out her enjoyment, to give me a present each day. I let her think I don’t know. I do not want to spoil her little pleasure. Now it is the following morning. She brings me the breakfast tray. She is in her dressing gown. Her days of elegant modesty are behind her; she is old. I am glad she is in her dressing gown and slippers. Let her relax.

  The only fake happiness left to me is to write about her, unshaven, deaf to the music on the radio, beside my cat, to whom in secret I speak in the Venetian dialect of the Jews of Corfu, which I sometimes used to speak with my mother. My impassive cat, my substitute mother, my piteous little mother with such a limited capacity for loving. Sometimes when I am alone with my cat I lean toward her and call her my little Maman. But my cat merely gives me an uncomprehending stare. And I am left all alone and my ridiculous tenderness remains unemployed.

  I am haunted by the scene which I made. “Please forgive me,” sobbed my angel. She was so appalled by the sin she had committed in daring to phone that countess and ask “if my son, Albert, is still at your house, if you please.” That countess, because of whom I was cruel to my holy mother, was an imbecile with no behind who was actually impressed by the functions and medals of he
r diplomat of a husband and who chattered nonstop, the idiot, like a parrot drunk on white wine. “I’ll never do it again,” sobbed my angel. When I saw blue marks on her hands I broke down, and I fell on my knees and passionately kissed those little hands, and we gazed at each other, son and mother forever. She took me on her lap and consoled me. But the following evening, when I went off to another grand reception, I did not take her with me.

  She was not angry at being left behind. She did not consider it unfair that isolation should be her lot, her lamentable lot of being hidden from my acquaintances, my stupid social connections, the vile tribe of the well-bred. She knew she was ignorant of what she called “fine ways.” Like a good and faithful dog, she accepted her humble fate, which was to wait, alone in my flat and sewing for me – to wait for my return from those smart dinners from which she thought it natural to be debarred. To wait in obscurity, sewing for her son, humbly to await the return of her son, was enough for her. To admire her son on his return, her son in a dinner jacket or tails and in good health, was enough to make her happy. To be told the names of his important fellow guests was enough for her. To be given details of the dishes on the sumptuous menu and the low-necked evening dresses of the ladies, those grand ladies she would never know, was enough for her, enough for that unresentful soul. She savored from afar the paradise from which she was excluded. My darling, I am introducing you to everyone now, proud of you, proud of your accent, proud of your incorrect French, passionately proud of your ignorance of fine ways. It’s a bit late in the day for such pride.

  XI