Let Me Go (3 page)

"Just one more minute," I say quickly. Panic has me by the throat.

"Is there anything else you want to ask me?" Fräulein Inge says. Her diplomatic tone is disarming: She has registered my desperate ploy to gain some time.

"How is she?" I ask. "I mean, physically."

"Your mother is reasonably well. Admittedly she's not getting any younger. She has her ailments, but nothing at all serious."

"And . . . mentally?"

"It varies from day to day. But she's undergoing treatment. They're trying to improve her memory and encouraging her to socialize."

"Does she have problems socializing?"

"Well . . . your mother can be a little difficult."

"In what sense?"

Fraulein Inge ushers us over to a window: We're blocking the corridor.

"Sometimes she's cheerful," she continues, "and she talks and jokes with the others and with the staff. She talks about her past, and often about the years she has spent with her friend Frau Freihorst. She also talks about her time in prison and . . . yes, sometimes she feels the need to remember those times. I mean . . . the camps. In fact, when she addresses that subject, she becomes extraordinarily lucid, although the following day she can't remember a single word she said."

There's a pause. The air in the corridor is hot and a little stuffy.

"May I open the window for a moment?" I ask with a gasp.

"Of course," she says. "Aren't you feeling well?"

"Just a little tense."

She opens the window, a heavy, high nineteenth-century window, and for a moment I lean out with my elbows on the broad sill.

The air is moist but not cold, and the scent of the damp vegetation brings me a feeling of relief. A blackbird perches on the branch of a young larch, watched closely by a sparrow with ruffled feathers.

I pull myself together, draw myself back inside, and close the window.

"I'm ready," I announce. But I'm not entirely sure.

We go up to the top floor and emerge into a wide corridor full of moving people: nurses, doctors, visiting relations, serving staff. Groups of armchairs and coffee tables are arranged along a wall enlivened by colored prints. Two ladies are involved in an animated discussion; others are reading the paper or knitting; some are talking on cellular phones.

Fraulein Inge stops a colleague and asks her about my mother. Her colleague—a big, chubby, baby-faced girl— opens her eyes wide, looks around, and exclaims, puzzled, "But I saw her not more than a second ago! Perhaps she's gone to the bathroom."

"Excuse me one moment," says Fräulein Inge, popping her head into first one bathroom, then another. It's at that moment that I see her in a corridor off to the side.

Rather than recognizing her,
I feel
that it's my mother.

That woman is my mother.

I'm aware of a kind of shiver running down my back, and my heart skips a beat.

I stare at her from a distance. How she's changed.

"What is it?" Eva whispers to me.

"I've seen her," I answer hoarsely.

"Where is she?"

I gesture with my chin.

"That lady sitting by the window?"

At that moment Fräulein Inge comes back.

"I don't understand," she announces, confused. "I can't find her anywhere. Oh, yes, there she is." And she brushes my arm sympathetically.

"I need to catch my breath," I say, grasping for an excuse.

"I understand," she replies. "There's no rush. I understand what you're going through."

I'm short of breath, and my forehead is covered with sweat. Eva grips my arm.

"Come on . . . I'm here."

I raise my eyes and summon up the strength to look at my mother again.

She's sitting in an armchair, absorbed in her thoughts, her arms resting on the armrests in an attitude of abandonment that touches my heart. The abandonment of a person who has disappeared, who is lost in a soundless and colorless void. She is immobile, as though afraid that the slightest movement might suck her into a black and bottomless abyss. I feel disturbed, moved, powerless.

She stares at a row of plane trees outside the window, but her expression is vacant. She is looking but seeing nothing.

"Go on, go over to her, talk to her," my cousin urges me affectionately.

But I feel as if I'm paralyzed; my heart is pounding and my knees are shaking. I'm panting. My eyes are misty.

I wasn't expecting this. I wasn't expecting that the mere sight of my mother would unsettle me like this. Will I ever be able to describe the sensations that were alternating within me at that moment, the feelings that I couldn't hold back?

I take a deep breath and try to regain control of my nerves.

"Go on, go over to her," Eva insists.

I take a few steps with difficulty. Then I purse my lips and finally walk resolutely toward my mother. I stop in front of her, forcing her to raise her eyes to look at me.

There, we're facing each other. She's old, thin, unbelievably fragile. She can't weigh more than ninety-eight pounds. A woman who, twenty-seven years ago, was still a healthy, vigorous, robust woman. I can't suppress a feeling of infinite pity.

I'm immediately struck by the very clear blue of her eyes. I didn't remember that they were so blue. They study me glassily—icy and empty.

Her face is thin and pointed, her skin grayish and transparent, her nose slender and sharp. And her body, even though she is sitting down, looks like an empty husk that might crumble at any moment. Her shoulders are graceful, her chest concave. All of a sudden I feel a visceral, biological anxiety at the sight of this simulacrum of my own future senility.

I lean forward slightly; I want to shatter that void in her eyes. I stay there with my eyes looking deep into hers.

A few minutes pass.

Finally, in the depths of those pupils, something awakens— an imperceptible flicker, an uncertain flame.

"I've seen you before," she says all of a sudden, in a voice that I don't remember, a senile voice, dry and porous.

My heart thumps in my throat.

"Are you my sister?" she asks, more to herself than to me. But she immediately dismisses the idea.

"No, she's dead," she announces darkly with a gesture that seems to want to chase away such an uncomfortable thought.

"I'm your daughter."

"Who?" And she leans her head to one side, holding her ear as though trying to catch a distant echo. Then she shakes her head adamantly and announces in a cold voice, "My daughter's dead too."

Then she tilts her head, bends her shoulders, and begins to stare at her fingers with exaggerated attention, as though she had never seen them before.

She has long white hands, bony and ancient. I find them rather repellent. For a fraction of a second I'm ashamed of them, but there's nothing I can do about it: I didn't learn to love them as they withered.

"I'm your daughter," I repeat, tearing my eyes away from her hands.

"No!"
she insists. "My daughter died long ago."

Then I lift her chin and say firmly and clearly, "Look At Me—I Am Your Daughter!"

Without giving her time to deny it, I take my teddy bear from my bag and hold it in front of her eyes.

THAT MOTH-EATEN teddy bear, a sad relic of early childhood, had been given to me the previous day by Frau Freihorst, my mother's friend.

Frau Freihorst was small and plump, with a serious, slightly prim expression, some years younger than my mother, and she smelled of cinnamon and Marseilles soap. She had given my cousin and me an embarrassingly warm welcome in her old Viennese house full of trinkets and crocheted doilies.

She had known Traudi, she said—using the affectionate diminutive by which she always referred to her friend—for more than forty years, and she had never condemned her for her past, because she didn't consider it her place to judge. But she had observed with distress her slow mental deterioration, and it was the inexorable advance of her illness that had prompted her to write to me.

She showed us, not without a certain degree of mischief, lots of photographs of my mother and herself that had been taken during the years when they had still consorted with a group of men friends—widowers, divorcées, or even inveterate bachelors who were identifiable by the way they winked at the camera.

Her friendship with Traudi was one of those that you often come across between people of very dissimilar, not to say opposite, temperaments: Frau Freihorst described my mother as "terrible," "barking mad," but before old age had dulled them, she had loved her vitality and resourcefulness.

Their lives had taken very different courses, too: In contrast to my mother's fanaticism, Frau Freihorst had never been anything other than a dutiful citizen. She had lost a husband and two sons to Hitler's war. Otherwise, she was resigned to the events that had affected her and her country. "We wanted it," she admitted frankly. "I was one of those who voted for the annexation of Austria, and when Hitler crossed Vienna in his open-topped Mercedes, I threw him a bouquet of flowers."

She repeatedly asked my forgiveness for writing to me. But she had written out of affection, she said. Perhaps she had been poking her nose into matters that were none of her concern, and anyway . . .

"Traudi isn't in good physical health," she observed, with tears in her eyes, "but you never know. At her age she could go to sleep one evening and never wake up again. And if you hadn't seen each other at least one last time—"

"I'm grateful to you, believe me," I said, trying to reassure her in the most convincing tone I could manage.

Encouraged, Frau Freihorst began to tell me what had happened after my 1971 visit. My mother had begun to feel a sense of guilt—something that she had previously been unaware of—about myself, my brother, and our father. At first her feelings merely irritated her, and she tried to shake them off; then, gradually, as though a tumor were growing in her body, she started behaving in a very strange way.

"What I mean," the woman continued in a sad voice, "is that she developed an impulse to rid her apartment of everything that had anything to do with her ex-husband and her two children. Photographs, documents, things."

"How did she get rid of them?" I asked.

"She threw them all out into the trash, along with some things she'd just bought."

"Just bought?" I asked, bemused.

"Yes, it was all part of the ritual. She had to throw away your things along with things that she'd just acquired. She bought all kinds of things: shoes and books, pajamas and sets of plates, clothes and carpets. One day she came home with an enormous indoor cactus, which went the same way as everything else. Oh, and then there was a camera as well, you know, one of those cameras that take instant pictures. That ended up in the trash as well, and you can imagine the fuss there was in the neighborhood. The rumor went around that your mother was throwing away new things, and there was this dreadful competition to see who could retrieve the most interesting and valuable objects from the bins. Two old ladies came to blows over that cactus, and one of them ended up on the ground with a terrible gash on her head. The footpath was covered with blood; it was a disgraceful performance. The ambulance turned up, and a crowd of people came to gawk. All for the sake of a stupid cactus."

Frau Freihorst ignored my bewilderment.

"I don't know what you would call Traudi's behavior in psychiatric terms, but in my view it was a funeral rite. In short, to rid herself of her sense of guilt, your mother was giving you, your brother, and your father symbolic funerals. The dead make no demands on you, you know?"

"None of us ever planned to ask her for anything," I objected.

"But she didn't know that. Who knows what kind of mess there was in that poor head of hers."

"But then she calmed down?" I asked.

"Yes, but she needed treatment. I went along with her. She had to report to our district mental health service three times a week. It was at around this time that she also developed an obsession with cleaning."

"What did she do?"

"She cleaned from morning until night. Her apartment, I mean. She cleaned and cleaned, tipping up whole buckets of water over the floor, so that the water flooded the landing. She cleaned furiously, and there was nothing her social workers could do."

"And what was the meaning of it all?"

Frau Freihorst shrugged her shoulders.

"Who knows? . . . Perhaps she wanted to cleanse her past, sweep away—let's call them the nasty things. That phase lasted for about a year, and then it stopped one day. She went through a period of relative calm, and the Traudi that I knew seemed to come back. But then she started having problems with her short-term memory. At first, there was the question of sugar."

"Sugar?"

"Yes. She would buy it one day, and then she would buy it again the next day, and the day after that. She could accumulate up to ten pounds. The same thing happened with bread. One day I discovered an enormous quantity of it in a cupboard; she must have been buying loaves of bread every day for at least a week. But then things got even worse. She would often leave her house and get lost. In her purse she always carried a piece of paper with a message to phone me in case of an emergency. Have you any idea how many times I went to fetch her from the most unlikely places? One day, for example, she went into an undertaker's. She'd ordered a white coffin for a little girl, with all the trimmings you would have for a funeral. But then she wouldn't leave; she just sat there on a chair, silent and sulking. After a while they decided to call the police. Then she took out the piece of paper with my phone number on it. That time, as usual, I went and collected her in a taxi." And she added with benevolent indulgence, "Which she never paid me for."

She thought for a moment.

"But I prefer to remember the times before her problems became quite so serious. Every now and again she would make me laugh. After the funeral rites, for example, she started talking about her children and about Stefan, her ex-husband, in the past tense. She said: Perhaps it's a good thing that my daughter died prematurely. I wouldn't have been able to bear being the mother of . . ." She broke off with an embarrassed smile. "No, I can't say it."