Albert Cohen: Book of My Mother

Hours have passed and it is morning, another morning without her. There was a ring at the door. I got up in haste and looked through the spyhole. But it was only a frightful old woman from a charity with a notebook in her hand. To punish her, I did not open the door. I came back to my table and took up my pen. It leaked, and I have blue marks on my hand. She was crying, she was asking forgiveness. “I’ll never do it again,” she was sobbing. Oh, those blue marks on her little hands. It is dreadful to see an old woman, such a good woman, crying like a little girl, her whole body racked with sobs. For a few seconds I imagine that I did not make that scene, that just before I began to storm at her I took pity on the fright in her eyes and there were no blue marks. Alas! And yet I loved her. But I was a son. Sons do not know that their mothers are mortal.

SONS OF MOTHERS who are still alive, never again forget that your mothers are mortal. I shall not have written in vain if one of you, after reading my song of death, is one evening gentler with his mother because of me and my mother. Be gentle with your mother each day. Show her more love than I showed my mother. Give your mother some happiness each day, that is what I say to you with the right accorded to me by regret; that is the grave message of a mourner. These words addressed to you, sons of mothers who are still alive, are the only condolences I can offer myself. While there is yet time, sons, while she is yet there, make haste, for stillness soon will be upon her face set in a faint virginal smile. But I know what you are like. Nothing will stir you from your crazy indifference as long as your mothers are alive. No son really knows that his mother will die, and all sons grow angry and impatient with their mothers, madmen that they are, but so swiftly punished.

PRAISE BE TO you, mothers of all lands, praise be to you in your sister my mother, in the majesty of my dead mother. Mothers of the world, mothers, Our Ladies, hail, sweet angels, you who taught us to tie our shoelaces, you who taught us to blow our noses, yes, you who showed us how to go ppff ppff in the hanky, as you used to say, you, mothers of all lands, you who patiently stuffed down us spoonful by spoonful the semolina we babies made such a to-do about eating, you who coaxed us into swallowing stewed prunes by explaining that they were little old men who wanted to go back home, and then the little pea-brain, delighted and suddenly a poet, would open the door of the house, you who taught us to gargle and went rrrr rrrr to encourage us and show us how, you who were forever arranging our curly locks and our ties to make us look nice before visitors came or before we went to school, you who never stopped grooming and dolling up your nasty foolish little ponies of sons, heart-stirringly caring for your most treasured possessions, you who cleaned up all our messes and our grubby, gritty, grazed knees and our dirty little snotty-brat noses, you who were never sickened by us, you who were so weak and indulgent with us and later so easily got round and taken in by your adolescent sons to whom you gave all your savings, hail, majesty of our mothers. Hail, mothers full of grace, holy sentinels, courage and kindness, warmth and loving gaze, you whose eyes see all, you who know at once if the spiteful have hurt us, you, the only humans in whom we can trust and who never, never will betray us, hail, mothers who think of us constantly, even in your sleep, mothers who always forgive and stroke our brows with your toil-worn hands, mothers who never tire of serving us and covering us and tucking us up in bed even if we are forty, mothers who do not love us less if we are ugly, failures, degraded, weak, or cowardly, mothers who sometimes make me believe in God.

BUT NOTHING WILL bring back my mother, nothing will bring back the one who answered to the name of Maman, who always answered and came running so quickly at the sweet name of Maman. My mother is dead, dead, dead. My dead mother is dead, dead. Thus goes the beating scansion of my grief, thus monotonously beats the puffing train of my grief, thus beat and jolt the axles of the train of my grief, the interminable train of my grief that runs every night and every day, while I smile at those from outside with just one idea in my head and a death in my heart. Thus beat the axles of the long train, ever beating, that train, my grief, that funeral train ever bearing away my dead mother with her hair disheveled at the carriage door, and I trail after the moving train, panting as I trail, all pale and sweating and obsequious, in the wake of the moving train which is bearing away my dead mother and her blessings.

YEARS HAVE PASSED since I wrote this song of death. I have gone on living and loving. I have lived, I have loved, I have known hours of happiness while she lay abandoned in her awesome abode. Like others, I in turn have committed the sin of living. I have laughed, and I shall laugh yet again. Thank God, they who sin by living soon become the dead whom the living offend.