While the Gods Were Sleeping (4 page)

I don’t listen. I am a crazy recluse in Sinai. I imagine I can hear the stones humming; their voice resonates as a deep buzzing at the bottom of the word aeons, which my father taught me. Every year he joins us in the hottest weeks of August, when our town is virtually deserted and his shops can do without his supervision.

According to him the slabs of stone, with their dark sheen that absorbs all heat, are nothing less than polished slivers of the bed of a long-vanished sea. He shows me the traces of molluscs in their surface. The calcified elegance of ammonites and sponges, the branches of coral loom bright white against the blue, like the dark on a photographic negative.

I am filled with pity for those creatures. At that time I follow an intuitive animism, of which my mother has her own opinion, which she doesn’t exactly keep to herself. I regard everything as animate, even the fossils of those uninhabited skeletons,
congealed in the depths of their stone ocean. In those years I also hope that one night my mother’s people’s house will continue its stalled transformation and will afford me the pleasure of waking up one morning in a real palace. At the same time I have enough of my mother’s earthy nature in me to find the true reason for the ambiguous appearance of her birthplace at least as exciting. One of my ancestors, a farmer with money, had once cherished plans that turned out to extend far beyond his purse. He had wanted to build a sumptuous country house, scrape the smell of earth and dung from under his nails and start living the life of a grand seigneur.

My mother and her brothers still had a very cool attitude to his memory, which surprised me. My ancestor had been dead for almost 150 years, and, moreover, had been considerate enough to give up the ghost before all the money had been squandered on expensive stone and craftsmen. Yet I was never able to view his likeness, painted without much talent, anywhere except on the wall in the corridor between the dining room and the kitchen in our summer residence, in the tall, narrow servants’ passage, his place of exile. The portrait caught the steam from the ovens. The changing temperatures of the fires, stoked up in the mornings and dying down in the course of the day, warped the frame and with the frame the canvas. Varnish had been struck blind; the palette had faded, so that the man literally had a green laugh beneath his
craquelé
moustache. He regarded all who passed by in front of his eyes, with tureens of hot soup, dishes of roast meat, bowls of boiled vegetables and me too, empty-handed and curious, with a lofty stoicism that even then I thought ridiculous. He looked like statesman in the wings of power, in full regalia, tailcoat or gala costume,
without suspecting a foreground role was no longer to be his. I found it easy to pity in those days.

What struck me about the world back then, but perhaps I should say: what strikes me about it only now is its unprecedented particularity, its details, its multiplicity of forms. I’m astonished by the little lead pellets in the linen cupboards that kept the ribbons of dresses or skirts or blouses free of creases through their weight, and by the door handles, solid brass in the best rooms but elsewhere, in the kitchens and in all places intended for those serving, good old iron—even doors seem to know their place.

Perhaps I used to be more observant, I don’t know, but I’m amazed by the fact that, now I close my eyes and wander through those vanished rooms, there were such things as button-backed boxes, just big enough to accommodate the velvety vulnerability of a peach, picked at the right moment, without bruising, and to deliver it unscathed via an unbelievably fine mesh of postal services and rail connections, if necessary within twenty-four hours, at the tradesman’s entrance of the residence of a nephew or niece in Paris. Or the fact that there was a cool room in the cellar, where water flowed down the whole length of the
white-tiled
walls, apart from the doorway, into a marble basin, channelled from a spring near the courtyard, which at the basin end came out of a zinc pipe and at the other end disappeared into a drain, together with the heat it had absorbed en route. And on the wide edges of the basin stood earthenware jugs for the milk, with high necks in which the cream could float to the top. And the cream was skimmed off with special scoops and kept in other, smaller, rounder jugs. And there were small baskets
in which strawberries and other berries stayed fresh longer, and only up by the ceiling were there two narrow windows, sufficient to admit a bluish light. It reflected glacially on the smooth surface of the white stone cool block in the centre, on which butter was rolled into shape with spatulas and porridge, cakes or soft cheese were protected from going off too quickly.

In the kitchen there was sugar in hard cones on the surface of the long work table, held in a contraption with a wheel attached that you had to turn, whereupon a tool scraped sugar loose and it was caught in a dish. And there were mortars for coarse salt or peppercorns, and scores, hundreds, thousands of scoops and scrapers and hooks and clamps and forks and tongs and studs and screws… With an extensive range of instrumentation, from explosives to tweezers as fine as women’s hair, the world could be mined, melted, distilled, reforged, and with each way in which it was attacked, it revealed different facets of itself. Today you have to consult the physicists, or the astronomers with their arcane instruments, in order still to be able to experience the world as elemental; today’s world—a favourite saying of my mother’s—comes to us completely streamlined, while in my youth there were not yet any peaches grown which were able to travel round the world unscathed, even without padded boxes, because they never really ripen.

The house was like a termites’ nest, managed by workers whose queen had long since wasted away in her bridal chamber, but around whose absence a daily life still developed. A stubborn, possibly millennia-old matriarchy ruled over the seasons. In my early childhood this coincided with the stony contours of Moumou, my mother’s mother’s mother, over 100 when she
finally died when I was about eight. I thought she was old enough, almost prehistoric, to bear the whole of humanity. The vast stretch of her existence took my breath away.

During the long autumn of her life the home in which she had borne her offspring contained her like a reliquary shrine. Deep in the heart of the house she lay for most of the day on a thick, eternally rustling mattress in an alcove right next to a chimney breast. When the shutters of her sleeping compartment were closed and she lay behind them snorting in her eternal slumber, I imagined that the alcove hid a basin in which a mysterious marine mammal was being kept alive. I imagined that every so often Moumou had expelled a hunk of slime and blood from her gigantic body which her older daughters had caught and rubbed clean with linen cloths, and in that way, as they rubbed, modelled into the more or less recognizable shape of a human being. At least that was what I saw happen in the stall, when a cow had given birth, and with her tongue piled the lump of membranes and blood into a calf.

On Sunday two of Moumou’s granddaughters put her into a dark-blue or black dress of a cut that had once, long before the Franco-Prussian War, been fashionable, manoeuvred her with some difficulty into a wheelchair with a woven seat and pushed the whole huge contraption into the large drawing room, where every so often I, the youngest, had to greet the matriarch, the oldest of all.

She was virtually deaf. Over one eye, no more than a chink in the geometrical pattern of wrinkles round her eye sockets, lay an alarming blue-grey membrane. The other eye was more like a point of light somewhere far off in the darkness of her
skull. She carried the smell of wet cellar stones with her, the clamminess of crumbling walls.

Because she could hear almost nothing and could see less and less out of that single smouldering eye, I had to put my hands in her lap, after which she grasped my wrists with her hands, felt my palms at length, turned my hands over and rubbed my knuckles repeatedly with her scabby thumbs. Meanwhile the heavy heels of her shoes pressed harder and harder onto the wood of the wheelchair’s footrest, which began to creak ominously.

It was as if she was enjoying my youth. Cracks and splits appeared in her ancient Ice Age body. Fault lines seemed to grate against each other. Masses of earth shifted and threw up constantly changing mountain ridges in the heavy cotton of her dress. A copper necklace with a medallion showing Napoleon III
en profil
meandered from somewhere under her chin down though those newly formed valleys and came to rest on her navy-blue cummerbund. She bent her head forward and with her one eye seemed to be more grazing the light from my surface than examining me.

Finally, in the ravines of flesh on her cheeks, a mouth slowly opened, pink and completely toothless. Membranes of slime sprang open. From her throat something bubbled up that was midway between a laugh and a death rattle. One of her hands let go of me, tapped the fingers of one of her daughters, who was leaning listlessly with her arm on the back of the chair, waiting for the audience to end. From her sleeve, as if by magic, she produced some paper money and pushed it into Moumou’s hand.

Moumou lowered her hand again, with the other turned over my right hand, pressed the note, folded four or five times, into my palm and closed my fingers over it, as if she were entrusting me with her whole fortune.

In her one deep-brown iris I now read the same sadness, that apparently all-comprehending melancholy, which one day struck me to the core when my father sat me on his arm at a cage in the zoo. From a cliff of grey skin, grooved like a relief map, that glides past us apparently endlessly, an eye suddenly looks at me, for minutes on end, it seems, until it closes in a half-moon of lashes.

I hear my father say: “That is an elephant.”

But it wasn’t.

It was the Countenance of God.

“
H
ELENA, CHILD
,” my mother would moan if she could hear me. “Where is this leading to? You’re shooting off in all directions. There’s no line in what you’re saying. I can’t make head or tail of it, I’ve lost the thread.” Some things she couldn’t understand. Even if she’d lived to be 150, she didn’t want to, and there’s not much point in having her nod in agreement or making her angry here.

She constantly wanted to know why I said something in one way and not in another, why I didn’t use normal words or sentences, or didn’t simply get straight to the point. It was a habit she presumed to adopt when she not only was my mother but for a while wanted to play tutor, a role which gradually dissolved in that of her motherhood. I was never able to explain to her that you sometimes achieve much more by deliberately talking beside the point than by speaking with a precision that in any case will never be anything but illusory.

She was in the habit of giving me extra lessons during the holidays using the books in the house where she was born, but I had read them all, even the ones she thought unsuitable for me. For a change, to maintain my grammar, she would make me write letters, never to be sent, to relations deeper in France. I thought the whole business was unnatural, but not the imaginative side of things, I liked that. My mother was too sober to give me subjects for essays; she never liked novels or poetry, so she opted for the letter form, which I in turn found dreary. Eventually I started making up relations and I enjoyed
it so much that I also wrote to real relations about incidents that had never taken place.

Writing for me has always been something paternal. At home it was my father who had me write letters, who commented on the legibility of my handwriting and laughed and chuckled at the jokes I made. He had a fine sense of the gradations of irony and for the moments when humour can tip over into something else, into sarcasm or devastating sadness, for example. That is why I cannot possibly imagine that a woman ever invented writing. Up to now no one has been able to talk me out of that stubborn prejudice.

Women talk, ceaselessly, and they always talk to themselves, including my mother, despite her pride in her unshakeable common sense. Day in, day out, like a music box whose cogs are worn out, she rattled off short commands, strictures or questions, which invariably carried an undertone of reproach or accusation. She went on pursuing me until her death, a shadow that kept tugging my sleeve or tapping me on the shoulder, and I only stopped getting annoyed when I realized that it was herself first and foremost whom she kept under her thumb—a remnant, not to say an enduring trauma, from the war years, when she was left to her own devices for almost all decisions—but by then she was no longer alive. It is terrible that I can only turn to welcome her ghost into the realm of the fallible, and with that same gesture grant myself absolution for the fact that I am a human being, now that she has been in her grave for years.

I can still picture the sarcastic frown when she asked for my “homework” and started reading. And my own scandalized
reaction, not only because she was nosing in my “letters”, however imaginary, and obviously didn’t think much of them, but mainly because she was entering a domain that in my eyes was not hers. I couldn’t stand the fact that with her well-intentioned attempts at education she was essentially appropriating my father, to whom I had to write letters during the war, even though they would never reach him. She wormed her way into the shell of his absence. She who impressed on me that the dead must be silent, gave her own husband the character of someone deceased when she savoured my “little trifles”, as she called them.

For her letters were collecting basins for communications, objective reports. Feelings were noted briefly in passing, like the state of the weather, births and deaths. Her expressions of condolence sounded formal, her congratulations on engagements and christenings artificial.

For me letters, including this one, have always been a playing field where anything could happen and where I did not simply reveal myself to another person; writing forces me to delay and shows me myself as more or less a stranger. My father understood that, but my mother had little patience for subtleties like double meanings, winks or a bon mot.