Book of My Mother

IV

SHE SPEAKS no more, she who spoke so sweetly. Her life ended piteously. She was snatched from my arms as in a dream. She died in Occupied France during the war, while I was in London. She had cherished such hopes of spending her old age with me, only to come to that end: the fear of the Germans, the yellow Star of David, my harmless lamb, shame walking the street, poverty perhaps, and her son far away. Did they manage to keep it from her that she was dying and would never see me again? She had so often written in her letters of the joy of seeing me again. Seems we must praise God and thank Him for His blessings.

They took her up, mute, and she did not resist, she who had been so busy in her kitchen. They took her from the bed where she had so often thought of her son, where she had so often waited for letters from her son, where she had had so many nightmares in which her son was in mortal danger. They took her up, stiff, they put her in a box, and then they screwed down the lid. Locked up in a box like a thing, a thing which two horses bore away, and the people in the street went on with their shopping.

They lowered her into a hole, and she did not protest, she who had talked so vivaciously, little hands never still. And now she is silent under the earth, locked up in the earthen jail which she may not leave, imprisoned and mute in her solitude of earth, with stifling earth oppressive and inexorable above her, and her little hands will move no more, nevermore. A Salvation Army poster informed me yesterday that God loves me.

All alone down there, poor useless creature dumped in the earth, all alone, and they were kind enough to slap a heavy marble slab, a corpse-press, on top of her to make sure she would not run away.

Deep down in earth, my darling, while my hand which she fashioned, my hand which she kissed, still moves. Deep down in earth, she, one alive, laid out now in eternal idleness, forever still, she who in her virginal youth danced chaste and gay mazurkas. All is ended, all is ended, no more Maman, nevermore. We are both so alone; you in your earth, I in my room. I am part dead among the living, you are part alive among the dead. Just now you may be smiling just a little because my headache is a touch better.