Book of My Mother

XVIII

SHE NEVER ANSWERS, she who always answered. I try to believe it is a good thing she is dead. One comforting thought is that now she is dead she is no longer Jewish and they can no longer harm her, no longer frighten her. In her graveyard she is no longer a Jewess with eyes on the defensive, carnally denying guilt, a Jewess with her mouth gaping in obscure stupefaction, the legacy of fear and waiting. The eyes of living Jews are always afraid. Misfortune is our specialty of the house. You know, in smart restaurants they have a tart which is the speciality of the house. Our speciality of the house is misfortune: wholesale, trade, and retail. Another comforting thought is that she will not see me die.

Nothing more. Silence. She is silence. “Dead,” I murmur ceaselessly at the window beneath the sky beloved of foolish lovers but which orphans detest because their mother is not there. “Dead,” I murmur with the slight tremor of the insane. “She who thought, hoped, and sang is dead,” I murmur, resisting the dangerous lure of paradise. “Dead,” I repeat idiotically, with a smile which does little to console. All this is not very varied and not very amusing. Nor is it so for me. For pity’s sake, do not laugh. After all, the death of my mother is the only thing in the world which is tragic. You do not agree? Just wait till it is your turn to be the mourner. Or the mourned.

I turn around and see things she saw and touched. They are here beside me: this pen, that suitcase. But she herself is not here. I call her by her name of majesty, and she does not answer. That is horrible, for she always answered and came running. How often I called her in her lifetime, for everything, for nothing, to find mislaid keys or pens or to chat, and always she would come running, and always she would find the keys or the pen, and always she would have tales of ancient times to tell. I went and opened the door of my room automatically, but she was not behind the door.

A little bird came to peck on the windowsill and I shooed it away. She loved to watch fluffy little birds. They serve no purpose now and I want no more of them. Enough of that music. I have turned off the radio because all great music is my mother and her eyes which cherished me, which looked at me sometimes with wild tenderness. Now a brass band is marching down the street. How joyful they are, those living creatures, and how alone am I. I shall go and keep myself company in front of the mirror. That is a pastime, a little trick to play on death. And in the mirror there will be someone who will sympathize.

I stare into the mirror, but it is my mother who is in the mirror. My grief becomes physical and I am pale and clammy. My cheeks are wet not with tears — the privilege of those who suffer little — but with drops trickling down from my forehead. The sweat of the death of my mother is ice cold. And suddenly there comes an indifference to distress, an anesthetic for distress, a little game of distress which makes me automatically press my eyeball as I gaze into the mirror. This creates an optical illusion and I see two orphans in the mirror. And with me that makes three, which is company. Such grief is not very poetic, not very noble. The little game of pressing my eyeballs gives me a dismal interest in life, a semblance of interest in something. Should I eat cake, just for something to do? No, I want the cakes she made. What is left to me is a mirror and the bewilderment which I contemplate in it, which I contemplate with a smile so as to want to simulate living, while I murmur with a slightly mad little laugh that everything in the garden is lovely and that I am sunk. Sunk, sank, sink, sonk. I have made a discovery: being miserable does not mean you can’t have a bit of fun.

Night has fallen. To stop thinking of my mother I went into the garden. My grief and my red robe, swept by the wind into two bat wings revealing living nakedness, made of me a poor mad king in the unbearable night where she was watching out for me. A stray dog looked at me with the eyes of my mother and I came back inside. The dead we have loved are terrifying at midnight, and our terror brings them back to life. In the daytime I am more or less the same, though I am dressed like them and know how to pretend. In the daytime in their offices and drawing rooms I smile and do not know what to say. But a twin me, a brilliant, soulless changeling, immediately stands in for me and evokes their admiration and my own keen contempt. And while he talks and plays the wit and the charmer I think of my dead mother. She rules over me, she is my folly, queen of the meandering of my brain, which leads always to her, enthroned in a weird upright coffin in the middle of my brain. Sometimes for three seconds I believe that she is not dead. And then I know once again that she is dead. “Dead,” I repeat in the drawing rooms where she awaits me, where she looms darkly between me and those who expressed their thin-lipped sympathy with the same false sorrow in their eyes as I have in mine when I express my deepest sympathy.