Albert Cohen: Book of My Mother

IN MY SLEEP, which is the music of tombs, I have just now seen her again, beautiful as in her youth, mortally beautiful and weary, so placid and mute. She was about to leave my bedroom, but I called her back in a hysterical voice of which I was ashamed in my dream. She told me she had urgent things to do, a tallow star of David to sew on the teddy bear she had bought for her little boy soon after we arrived in Marseilles. But she agreed to stay a little longer, despite the order of the Gestapo. “Poor orphan,” she said. She explained that it was not her fault that she was dead, and that she would try to come see me sometimes. Then she assured me she would never again phone the countess, “I’ll never do it again. Please forgive me,” she said, looking at her little hands, on which blue marks had appeared. I woke and read books all night so that she would not come back. But I find her in all the books. Go away, you are not alive. Go away, you are too alive.

In another dream I meet her in an unreal street like a film-set street, in France during the Occupation. But she does not see me, and my heart aches with pity as I watch that little bent and almost beggarly old woman picking up cabbage stumps after the market closes and putting them in a suitcase where there is a yellow Star of David. She looks rather like the wicked fairy in stories, and she is dressed like an Orthodox priest, with a queer cylindrical black hat, but I am in no mood to laugh. I kiss her in the slippery street, and a carriage passes by, inside which there is someone who is Pétain. Then she opens the suitcase, which is held together with string, and takes out a teddy bear and some almond paste she has kept for me, and despite the hunger in France she has never touched it. How proud I am to carry her suitcase. She is afraid it will tire me, and I am cross with her because she wants to carry the suitcase herself. But I can see she is glad I am cross, because it shows I am in good health. All at once she tells me that she would rather I had been a doctor, with a fine waiting room and a bronze lioness, and that I would have been happier that way. “Now that I am dead there is no harm in telling you.” Then she asks me if I remember our walk on the day of the suede shoes. “We were happy then,” she says. Why did I take a huge cardboard false nose from my pocket? Why did I clap it proudly on my face, and why are Maman and I now walking royally along the street buzzing with mistrust? Maman’s queer hat is now a crown, but of cardboard too, and a sick horse is following us and coughing and falling in a flash of sparks in the dank night. An ancient coach with the gilt peeling off, all encrusted with tiny mirrors, is wobbling and pitching behind a gently consumptive horse, which falls then picks itself up and draws the royal coach, nodding wisely, and its silken eyes are sad but intelligent. I know that this is the coach of the moral Law, eternal and splendid. Maman and I are now in the coach, and we gravely greet a crowd which laughs and mocks because the coach is not a sixty-ton tank, and the crowd throws rotten eggs at us while my mother shows them the sacred scrolls of the Ten Commandments. Then we weep, my mother and I. “Jerusalem,” she says to me suddenly, and the old sick horse gives a great solemn nod then turns to look at us and its eyes are so kind, and I repeat “Jerusalem” and I know that its meaning is also “Maman” and I awake and I am appalled at my solitude.

What is so terrible about the dead is that they are so alive, so beautiful and so remote. So beautiful is she, my dead mother, that I could write for nights on end so that I might have that presence near me, that majestic form of death, that form moving slowly beside me, regally moving, protective yet indifferent and frighteningly calm, a sad shadow, a loving and distant shadow, more calm than sad, more detached than calm. Take off your shoes, for this is a sacred place where I tell of death.

In my sleep she is alive and she explains that she is hiding in a far-off hamlet under a false name, in a hamlet tucked away beneath a mountain, where she remains hidden for love of me in a farmer’s house. She explains that she is obliged to stay there, that she has come to see me in secret, but that if certain authorities knew she was not dead, there would be dire consequences. She is loving in these dreams, but perhaps less so than in life — gentle but a little detached, tender but not passionate, affectionate but with an evasive affability and a slowness of speech I had never perceived in her lifetime. They have changed her among the dead. In these dreams she never really looks at me and her gaze always seems to be turned elsewhere, as if toward secret important things now more grave than her son. The dead always look elsewhere, and that is terrible. And in these dreams I face the fact that if she still loves me, it is because she once loved me so dearly that she cannot not love me still, albeit less. Then, with that same incomprehensible calm which seems to denote a lessening in her love, she says that she must now return to the village where she is hiding. And in these dreams I contract her fear that it will become known that she is alive. For in these dreams she is alive illegally and she is guilty of not being dead. But all this is folly. It is not in a village but in earth reeking of earth that she is hidden. And the truth is that nevermore will she speak to me, nevermore will she worry about me. Oh, the terrifying selfish solitude of the outstretched dead! How completely you have ceased to love us, beloved dead, dear faithless dead. You leave us alone, alone and ignorant.

I DO NOT WANT her in dreams. I want her in life, here with me, well dressed, by her son and proud of being looked after by her son. She bore me for nine months and she is no longer here. I am a fruit without a tree, a chick without a hen, a lion cub all alone in the desert, and I am cold. If she were here, she would say, “Cry, my child, you’ll feel better after for it.” She is not here and I do not want to cry. I only want to cry by her side. I want to go for a walk with her and listen to her as no one else ever listened to her. I want to flatter her. I want to wheedle her into wasting time keeping me company while I shave or while I dress. I want — if Thou art God, prove it — I want to be ill and have her bring me her own remedies, roasted linseed ground and mixed with powdered sugar — “It’s good for coughs, my son.” I want her to brush my suits. I want her to tell me stories. I was put on earth to listen to my mother’s interminable stories. I want her partiality — I want her to be cross with those who do not like me. I want to show her my diplomatic passport, to see her delight, because she is convinced, my naïve darling, that it is important to have a diplomatic passport. I shall not disillusion her, because I want her to be pleased and to bless me. But I also want to be her little boy as I used to be. I want her to draw me her naïve flowers, which I shall try to copy. I want her to knot my tie and then give me a little pat on the cheek. I want to be Maman’s little boy — a very nice little boy who likes to hold the hem of his Maman’s skirt as she sits at his bedside when he is ill. When I am holding the hem of her skirt, no one can harm me. You think it is ridiculous to talk like this at my age? Then allow me to be ridiculous.

The little bird whose mother they have killed is ridiculous. Perched on its branch, it twitters a dirge, a monotonous and ineffectual tweet-tweet. That lamb is ridiculous too. It is bleating in the desert because it has lost its mother ewe. Trembling in the sand, it will soon die of thirst, but it is looking for its mother in the desert.

I want to hear her superstitiously advising me not to say certain dangerous words for three days after being vaccinated. I want to see her starched awkwardness when I introduce one of my friends to her. I want her to be here and to tell me, as she used to tell me, not to write too much, “because thinking like that all the time is bad for the head, and there are scholars, you know, my son, who have gone mad through thinking, and my mind is at rest when you’re asleep, because at least you’re not thinking when you’re asleep.” I say that I want, I ask, but I get nothing, and God loves me so little that I feel ashamed for Him.