No
machines in the house; everything was still done by hand. Objects out of a past
century, now generally transfigured with nostalgia: not only the coffee mill,
which you had actually come to love as a toy—also the GOOD OLD ironing-board,
the COSY hearth, the often-mended cooking pots, the DANGEROUS poker, the STURDY
wheelbarrow, the ENTERPRISING weed cutter, the SHINING BRIGHT knives, which
over the years had been ground to a vanishing narrowness by BURLY
scissor-grinders, the FIENDISH thimble, the STUPID darning egg, the CLUMSY OLD
flat-iron, which provided variety by having to be put back on the stove every
so often, and finally the PRIZE PIECE, the foot- and hand-operated Singer
sewing-machine. But the golden haze is all in the manner of listing. Another
way of listing would be equally idyllic: your aching back; your hands scalded
in the wash boiler, then frozen red while hanging up the clothes (how the
frozen washing crackled as you folded it up!); an occasional nosebleed when you
straightened up after hours of bending over; being in such a hurry to get
through with the day’s work that you went marketing with that tell-tale blood
spot on the back of your skirt; the eternal moaning about little aches and
pains, because after all you were only a woman. Women among themselves: not
“How are you feeling?” but “Are you feeling better?” All that is known. It
proves nothing; its demonstrative value is destroyed by the habit of thinking
in terms of advantages and disadvantages, the most evil of all ways of looking
at life. “Everything has its advantages and disadvantages.” Once that is said,
the unbearable becomes bearable—a mere disadvantage, and what after all is a
disadvantage but a necessary adjunct of every advantage?
*
The morning before the funeral I was alone in
the room with the body for a long while. At first my feelings were at one with
the custom of the wake. Even her dead body seemed cruelly forsaken and in need
of love. Then I began to be bored and looked at the clock. I had decided to
spend at least an hour with her. The skin under her eyes was shrivelled, and
here and there on her face there were still drops of holy water. Her belly was
somewhat bloated from the effect of the pills. I compared the hands on her bosom
with a fixed point at the end of the room to make sure she was not breathing
after all. The furrow between her nose and upper lip was gone. Sometimes, after
looking at her for a while, I didn’t know what to think. At such moments my boredom was at its height and I could only stand distraught beside the corpse.
When the hour was over, I didn’t want to leave; I stayed in the room beyond the
time I had set myself. Then she was photographed. From which side did she look
best? “The sugar-side of the dead.” The burial ritual depersonalised her once
and for all, and relieved everyone. It was snowing hard as we followed her
mortal remains. Only her name had to be inserted in the religious formulas.
“Our beloved sister.” On our coats candle wax, which was later ironed out. It
was snowing so hard that you couldn’t get used to it; you kept looking at the
sky to see if it was letting up. One by one, the candles went out and were not
lit again. How often, it passed through my mind, I had read of someone catching
a fatal illness while attending a funeral. The woods began right outside the
graveyard wall. Fir woods on a rather steep hill. The trees were so close
together that you could see only the tops of even the second row, and from
then on treetops after treetops. The people left the grave quickly. Standing
beside it, I looked up at the motionless trees: for the first time it seemed to
me that nature was really merciless. So these were the facts! The forest spoke
for itself. Apart from these countless treetops nothing counted; in the
foreground, an episodic jumble of shapes, which gradually receded from the
picture. I felt mocked and helpless. All at once, in my impotent rage, I felt
the need of writing something about my mother.
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