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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
'My mother, a house that is slowly collapsing, a bridge dancing to a tremor.' It started when she could no longer remember the word for 'book'. Then her mind, her language and her identity began to slip away. This is Erwin Mortier's moving, exquisitely observed memoir of his mother's descent into dementia, as a once-flamboyant woman who loved life and pleasure becomes a shuffling, ghostlike figure wandering through the house. Piecing together the fragments of her lost life, and his own childhood, Mortier asks: what do we become when we lose the repertoire of habits and words that make us who we are? How well do we really know our families? How do you say goodbye to someone who is still there and yet not, suspended between life and death? Stammered Songbook is a heartbreaking and poetic expression of a son's love; an extraordinary hymn to language; a meditation on time, mortality and how, eventually, we all unravel into memories.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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ERWIN MORTIER
STAMMERED SONGBOOK
A Mother’s Book of Hours
Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent
Contents
STAMMERED SONGBOOK
Today my mother gave me a thorough dusting, thinking I was a piece of furniture. Perhaps a chest of drawers or an old cooker. She ran a bright yellow duster over my shirt buttons towards my neck, waved it about around my ears and dusted my chin. Then she motioned for me to open my mouth—stuffed the duster in and forgot us.
She’s lying on the sofa, on the rug, slumped back oddly against the cushion. My father says: it’s not getting any better. I lean across her face and ask: do you know who I am? She smiles, a faint crease of her mouth, which has become virtually lipless.
She nods. Yes, she says, I know.
And her smile broadens, and seems to pump the lips full of blood, cover her jaws with flesh. Her eyes, which are like tin coins, impenetrably hazy, brighten between eyelids that lose their texture of flaky skin and inflammation and have eyelashes once again. The sunken cheeks become rounded, as if her smile travels through all her limbs, smoothing every wrinkle in her body that is old before its time, and making the happiness of a very young girl come tumbling out through her tissues.
She gets up, claps her hands. She wants to dance.
She waves her arms; I hear her sigh, and in her eyes is the rapture of a child that has only just learned to walk and strolls proudly down garden paths. Then her legs slip out from under her, she scrambles upright—and once more she slides over, and again.
Sometimes she falls into my father’s arms, giggling as if slightly tipsy, sometimes backwards against me. I pull her up with my arms under her armpits. Her legs thrash, her soles try to gain a grip on the floor, the back of her head tips from side to side across my ribcage like the disproportionate head of an infant on wobbly vertebrae. Her muscles, those lame strings attached to her bones, tremble, tighten, relax, her breath whines through her body, and her hands with their swollen fingers clutch the back of my hand. My father smiles faintly and looks for a chair to set her down on.
I wake up and realize that I must have cried in that dream.
Death that sits at table here is called Mum. It sits at the head of the table, cloaking both her and us in sorrow, the familiar place that it has claimed for itself for months with her shuffling tread from the front door to the dining room. My mother, the crow with a cold with that one teardrop always on her beak. Our nest, once so fleshy, is a buckled cage with a mechanical songbird rusting away inside.
This is the mouth I gazed at for heaven knows how long in the cradle. This is the mouth whose gymnastics of caressing, whisper and lullaby must have pulled me upright on the slippery surface of words. This is the mouth that is now shedding its language, stripping the words vowel by vowel into puffs of breath, gnashing of the teeth, smacking of the lips. Sometimes she mumbles out mouthfuls of porridge, and it’s me who listens and with a handkerchief wipes the mess of words off her chin.
It begins—but when does something like that begin, what signs are the first? It begins with the word “book”, the word she just can’t think of as she stands looking at my library one afternoon and asks when I’ll next be …ing, you know, one of those things, will I soon be …ing another—and she brings her hands side by side, fingers outstretched, and opens and shuts them. Was I going to do it again, that writing what do you call it, one of those things. She gives my father a nudge with her elbow: you say, you know.
I think: I must sit right opposite her, where my father usually sits, and then she’ll see there’s someone there. Only when I bring my face close to hers, I think, does that stubborn fog in her eyes lift.
I say—I’ve said it so often recently—do you recognize me? You know who I am, don’t you?
And she nods and she laughs, and I ask: did Marc drop in? And she nods again. Yes, she says—the first word for a month and a half. And why did he come by, Marc, on Friday?
She shrugs her shoulders. Don’t know, don’t know, she says, and her face contorts and she cries.
I take her hand in mine. Why are you crying? You mustn’t be sad; we’re here, aren’t we? And then my father comes in. She follows him with her eyes from the cupboard to the table; she doesn’t lose sight of him for a moment.
I think she knows a lot, he says.
I realize that I only write to hear sentences dancing without interruption through my head. To make rhythm, acceleration, rallentando, to make pauses sing. Just to be able to hang from dashes—the trapezes of syntax—weightlessly for a moment from the roof beam of a sentence, I let these words loose. What luxury it is to be able to swing through the rainforests of language from creeper to creeper like a performing monkey.
Or did it begin when she stopped going to the choir? Normally she never missed a Thursday. She said she was hoarse, that her voice was going. Perhaps she realized she could no longer read music, the last “language” she had learned. Was she already ill when she became restless if we arrived unannounced, we, my brothers, sisters and their brood? Her silent panic in front of the kitchen unit, because she couldn’t manage to lay the table. The sudden crying fits, usually after she had lashed out at my father. The crying that, I now realize, had to make up for the increasing shortage of words. But at the time we laughed it off. It’ll blow over, we said, isn’t her menopause finished yet?
How must it feel to see the world around you lose its contours, the whole network of language, language memory, which hangs over things so unemphatically that we only notice it when it develops holes? Does everything become hazy, or does it, on the contrary, stand out more sharply as the unsayable gains strength?
He has become her memory. More and more often she comes in uncertainly, a little closer to him. Her senses are starting to stumble. If she can’t get any further than stammering, she looks at him wide-eyed. If the answer doesn’t come quickly, there is a hail of reproach. You really forget everything! She moans. And to me: he can’t remember anything. It’s awful.
What strikes me most about her, what makes me saddest, is the double silence of her being. Language has packed its bags and jumped over the railing of the capsizing ship, but there is also another silence in her or around her. I can no longer hear the music of her soul; the existential aura around her, that whole vibrating fabric of symbols with which she wove herself into the world—or, conversely, the world into her.
I am very sensitive to that whole system, that web, that network, which constitutes our being and which for want of a better designation I still call our soul. It is the subtle poetry, the tragedy, the beauty, the microscopic dread which every concrete life carries with it and in some way is able to emanate wordlessly. People have their own echo; I find it hard to explain. I can sometimes hear the white noise of their existence, the snatches of music—and they sound nice or not and in me too the whole human fanfare reverberates, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes shrilly.
But with her I hear scarcely a thing any more, sometimes the same kind of whoosh that first struck me when I was very young and one night the château was ablaze. I remember looking at the sea of flame and as we got closer was surprised that it did not spread silently. I heard the inferno softly shrieking. Somewhere in those caverns of fire and dense smoke glass burst into smithereens, burning beams whistled, stones cracked, etc. I now hear something similar in her: a faint lament of virtually soundless, all-embracing decay.
He cooks scrambled eggs for her, and lovingly puts the pan on the table. She gives him a look of displeasure and shakes her head, grumbling.
You know I don’t like scrambled eggs, she says. I only eat fried eggs.
Fried eggs used to make her gag. She only liked omelettes.
He puts the pan aside, fries two eggs and eats the scrambled eggs himself.
She’s changing, he says.
She’s becoming more silent every day. More and more tears have to replace the words that have vanished into thin air. Sometimes her lips move, the corners of her mouth tremble, and she produces a short burst of sighing. Then it seems there are still thoughts there, but on different wavelengths, beyond the range of my eardrum. I think of her as if she were an old valve radio, the kind I used to see in elderly relations’ houses. I’m thinking of the interference and the snatches of voices when the tuner moved through the frequencies. Sometimes she seems in despair and for a moment her brain seems to be searching: stammering, stuttering, lots of silence.
Her “I” is becoming lost. That “something” that makes people so recognizably themselves. The whole repertoire of habits, ways of talking, sleeping, walking, standing, it’s all changing. A kind of hybrid person is being created from traits and behaviour that I can remember as hers, and others which are unknown and perplexing, as if a parasitic consciousness is emerging in her flesh.
And then those afternoons when we sit at table and do our best not to lose patience when for the umpteenth time she gets stuck in mid-sentence. I can almost see the sentences stumbling over her lips. Verbal rubble, grammatical ruins lie strewn around her over the tablecloth.
Yes, that’s it, she says each time we finish the sentence for her—as one finishes off a lame horse.
My father looks at me and raises his eyebrows meaningfully.
It’s only the beginning, I say while she is in the bathroom. I have resolved never to give false hope, but it feels as if I am gouging a knife into myself and into him, into his melancholy father’s flesh.
Afternoons full of the pack ice of silence, ice floes of silence, when I think: if only I could hear her say everyday banalities just once more.
Would you like some coffee?
Are you hungry?
