Free Book of My Mother by Albert Cohen Page A

her blessings.

XIV
     
    I N 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