Albert Cohen: Book of My Mother

She came into the world, she understood nothing of it, and she went away. After having been irreplaceably herself, she vanished. Why, oh why? Poor humans that we are, going from the forever which placed us in our cradle to the forever which will come after our grave. And between those two forevers what is this farce which we act out, this brief farce made up of ambitions, hopes, loves, and joys doomed to vanish forever, this farce which Thou makest us perform? Hey, Thou up there, what is this snare? Why did she laugh, why didst Thou give her a desire to laugh and live if from her cradle Thou hadst sentenced her to death, O Judge of the monotonous sentence, Judge devoid of imagination, who knowest only one sentence, always the death sentence, why, and what is this trickery? She loved to breathe the sea air on those Sundays of my childhood. Why is she now beneath a stifling plank, that plank so close to her beautiful face? She loved to breathe, she loved life. I cry out against this fraud, this sinister joke. O God, with the right accorded to me by my death throes soon to come, I tell Thee that Thy joke is not funny, Thy joke of giving us such a terrifying and splendid love of life only then to lay us out one after another, each beside the other, and make of us motionless objects which future motionless objects bury deep in earth like reeking muck, rotting rubbish to be cast out of sight, waxy refuse, we who once were babies dimpling delightedly. Why all that earth on my mother, that cramped space of the box around her, when she so loved to breathe the sea air?

I WANT HER not to be dead. I want hope, I demand hope. Who will give me a belief in a wondrous life where I shall see my mother again? Brothers, O my brother humans, force me to believe in an everlasting life, but give me good reasons — not all that bunkum which sickens me while, ashamed of the conviction in your eyes, I amiably reply yes, yes. That heaven where I want to see my mother again must be real, not an invention of my distress.

It is to Thee that I appeal, God of my mother, my God whom I love despite my blasphemy born of despair. I appeal to Thee for help. Take pity on this beggar stranded at the edge of the world. I no longer have a mother, I no longer have a Maman, I am all alone and destitute and I appeal to Thee to whom she prayed so much. Give me faith in Thee; give me a belief in an everlasting life. I would pay a billion years in hell for that belief. For after the billion years in that hell where they deny Thy existence I shall be able to see my mother again, and she will welcome me with her little hand shyly at the corner of her lip.

YOU, HER THOUGHTS, her high hopes, her joys, have you vanished too, and is it possible? “The dead live,” I cry out sometimes, suddenly awakened in the night and sweating with the certainty of it. “My mother’s thoughts,” I stammer, “have fled to the land where time does not exist, and they await me there. Yes, there is God, and God will not do that to me. He will not take away my mother. He will give her back to me alive in the land where time does not exist, the land where she awaits me.” Feeble childish folly. There is no paradise. Your mother’s gestures, her laughter, all her lives of all her hours endure only in your faithful eyes. And when you die there will be a few remnants of them on these pages, and these pages too will be swept away by the wind that blows down the centuries, and she will never have been.

How enviable is the lot of those who believe what is good for them to believe. Not the barren truth, which is neither joyous nor beautiful and whose only virtue is that it is pitifully true amid the magnificent and senseless teeming of the innumerable forms of life which spring up at random and without reason under the gloomy eye of nothingness. You whom I used to call Maman have entered the valley of lethargy and you do not await me there. You are alone and I am alone. We are both terribly alone. You are dead forever, I know. And yet I know that when I suffer in my body, destined by the goodness of God for sickness and the humiliation of old age, or in my soul, when they harm your child and I can no longer feign to be made of steel, it is your name alone, Maman, that I shall call, not those of living loved ones nor that of God — your sacred name alone, Maman, when my body is weary of living or when they are too cruel to the child you defended so well. Can it be that you are alive in some wondrous place?

NO, SHE IS SILENT under the earth, locked up in the earthen jail which she may not leave, imprisoned in the solitude of earth, with silent, stifling earth oppressive and inexorable above her, ferociously on her right, stolidly on her left, and extending infinitely beneath her as she lies abandoned and of interest to nothing, not even her somber thick earth, while living beings walk above her. Deep down in earth she is inaction, languor, prostration. God, how absurd it all is!

Stretched out and unutterably alone, quite dead, she who once was active, she who cared ceaselessly for her husband and son, the holy Maman who tirelessly offered cupping glasses and compresses and useless comforting herb teas, stretched out, stiff, she who carried so many trays to her two men on their beds of sickness, stretched out, unseeing, she who once was naïve and quick eyed and believed the advertisements for patent medicines, stretched out, idle, she who constantly reassured. All at once I recall what she said one day when someone had gratuitously hurt me. Instead of consoling me with abstract and allegedly wise words, she had merely said, “Give a little tilt to your hat, my son, and go out and enjoy yourself, for you are young. Off you go now, enemy of yourself.” Thus spake my wise Maman.

Stretched out in the great dormitory, indifferent, piteously alone, she who was so delighted at her luck in getting that good seat on the train, delighted and beaming all over her broad face. Stretched out, insensible, she who so childishly rejoiced in the fine dress I had bought her. Where is it now, that cursed dress which lives on somewhere with the scent of my mother? Stretched out, apathetic, the bustling enthusiast who adored working out detailed schemes and artless plans for our happiness, stretched out, she who conjured up poetic visions of all the wonderful things she would do when she won the jackpot in the lottery, and she was already planning to annoy certain nasty people by flaunting her opulence, but afterward, she said, she would forgive them and even give them a nice present. Stretched out in her sullen earthen sleep, in her mineral indifference, she thinks no more of jackpots, is no longer delighted, no longer concerned. She is no longer concerned even about me. Yet she loved me.

You, her lowered eyelids, are you still intact? And you, Mother, so paled and yellowed, whom with a blink of the mind’s eye I dare to imagine in your rotted box, wasted and abandoned, you who moved and always toward me came, now so surly and laconic in your earthen melancholy, recumbent in the black silence of the grave, tell me, you who loved me, do you think sometimes of your son in your grave where live only roots, joyless rootlets, and mournful creatures of darkness moving in incomprehensible ways and always silent though terrifyingly active? Perhaps in her sickly suffocation she now dreams impassively of me, though when she lived she always feared for me in her dreams. Under her stifling plank she wonders perhaps whether I remember to have a hot drink in the morning before going to work. “He does not dress warmly enough,” perhaps murmurs my dead mother. “He is so delicate, he worries about everything, and I am not there,” faintly she murmurs, my dead mother.