“And now, my son, mark my words, because old women give good advice. In that Division of the Diplomats you have a chief, I suppose? Well, if he sometimes gets a bit cross, don’t lose your temper, try to put up with it, because if you answer him back, his bile will rush up to his brain and he’ll hate you and God only knows what viper’s tongue he has and what dagger he’ll prepare for your back! Our people have to put up with things — that’s how it is. That hat does suit you.” Seeing my smile, she added with a sigh, “How could the pretty little creatures possibly resist that smile?” Ever partial, she gave me a fond, searching look, imagined my love life, and shuddered to think that I might stop a bullet from the revolver of one of those daughters of the Gentiles who were glamorous and clever but jealous and bold and when they got carried away by passion were in the habit of killing off a mother’s son in a couple of seconds on the slightest pretext. Absolutely deadly, those daughters of Baal, who did not shrink — so she had been told — from stripping naked in front of a man who was not their husband. Stark naked and smoking a cigarette! They were tigresses! “Tell me, my son, would it not be a good idea to pay a little call on the Chief Rabbi? He knows some nice, quiet girls who are wonderful housekeepers. You’ll be under no obligation. Just have a look, and if they don’t take your fancy, you can put on your hat and walk out. But who knows, perhaps God has destined one for you? You know it’s not good for a man to live by himself. I could die in peace if I knew you had a good woman to look after you.” Faced with my silence, she sighed, strove to repel the vision of a revolver flashing out of the handbag of a half-naked tigress, and decided to trust in the Lord, the Almighty God of Jacob, who had saved the prophet Daniel from the lions’ den. Surely He would save me from the tigresses. She vowed to go to synagogue more often.
She was old by then, short and rather stout. But her eyes were magnificent and her hands were dainty and I loved to kiss those hands. I would like to reread the letter her little hand wrote from Marseilles, but I cannot. I am afraid of those signs which still live. When I come upon her letters I put them away again with my eyes shut. And I dare not look at her photographs, for I know that in them she is thinking of me.
“My son. I haven’t studied like you, but I can tell you that the love they write of in books is nothing but the goings-on of heathens. I say they’re playacting. They only see each other when their hair is nicely done and they’re smartly dressed like in the theater. They adore each other, they cry, they kiss each other on the mouth — it’s sickening — and a year later they get a divorce! So what happened to their love? When marriages start with love it’s a bad sign. Those great lovers in the stories you read, I wonder whether they would go on loving their poetess if she was very ill, always in bed, and if he — the man that is — had to care for her like you care for a baby — well, you see what I mean: if he had to do everything for her. Well, I believe he would stop loving her. Do you want me to tell you what true love is? It’s being used to each other and growing old together. Would you like peas or tomatoes with your meatballs?
“My son, tell me what pleasure you find in going to the mountains. What pleasure is there in watching all those cows with their sharpened horns and great big staring eyes? What pleasure do you see in all those rocks? You might fall, so where’s the pleasure? Are you a mule to go climbing up those rocky places which make you giddy? Isn’t it better to go to Nice, where there are gardens and music and taxis and shops? Men are meant to live like men and not among rocks and snakes. Those mountains are like a bandit’s lair. Are you an Albanian? And how can you like all that snow? What pleasure is there in walking through bicarbonate of soda which wets your boots? My heart trembles like a little bird when I see the skis in your room. Those skis are the devil’s horns. Putting yataghans on your feet is madness! Don’t you know that all your skiing devils break their legs? They like it, they’re heathen and thoughtless. Let them break their legs if they like, but you are a Cohen, a descendant of Aaron, the brother of Moses, our master.” At that point I reminded her that Moses had gone to the top of Mount Sinai. She was taken aback. That was obviously no mean precedent. She thought for a while, after which she explained that Mount Sinai wasn’t a very big mountain, that Moses had only been there once, and, what was more, he had gone there not for pleasure but to see God.
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.
V
TO WEEP for one’s mother is to weep for one’s childhood. Man wants his childhood, wants it back again, and if he loves his mother more as he grows older, it is because his mother is his childhood. I was a child, I am a child no more, and I cannot accept it. Suddenly I recall our arrival in Marseilles. I was five. When I came off the ship, clutching the skirt of Maman, who was wearing a cherry-trimmed straw hat, I was frightened by the trams, for those vehicles moved by themselves. I sought comfort in the thought that there must be a horse hidden inside.
We knew no one in Marseilles, where we had come from our Greek island of Corfu. We landed as in a dream, my father, my mother, and I — as in some absurd, slightly clownish dream. Why Marseilles? The leader of our expedition himself did not know why. He had heard that Marseilles was a big city. My poor father’s first exploit, a few days after we arrived, was to let himself be robbed blind by a businessman whose hair was fair and whose nose was not hooked. I can still see my parents crying in their cheap hotel room, as they sat on the edge of the bed. Maman’s tears dropped onto the cherry-trimmed hat in her lap. I was crying too, though I did not understand what had happened.