Book of My Mother Read Free Page A

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
     
    S HE 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
     
    T O 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