Please drive carefully, her mother had said when she kissed him on both cheeks. So he drove his lover back along the same easy roads, back to Paris. She had to tell him everything about her mother if she was not going to drive at all.
‘Forget everything you see, start with a clean slate, and just listen. My mother.’ Which part of her mother did he wish to discover? All sides, all parts, every adventure, every lover. You have four hours to fill with your mother’s life. Until they reached Paris the roads were only there to be covered in stories, histories.
My mother, Anna Henriques.
They had houses, they had servants, dogs, cats and a large wealthy family. When Anna was very small they had a carriage and stables for the horses. Her nanny, who she shared with her five brothers and sisters, used to steal her mother’s silk stockings and then beg the children to put them back. This was a routine that went on for a couple of years. Stealing was just a game, so the children thought. Her mother never noticed. Or so Anna believed. She was allowed to try on her mother’s hats and shoes and silk taffeta petticoats and dance with her sisters in front of the mirror singing her mummy’s favourite song: ‘whatever you do, be sure to marry a Jew’. Her mother was a well-known beauty in the capital and she loved to socialize. As soon as a child was out of nappies she would take him or her shopping and drink hot cocoa in one of the richly decorated Jugendstil cafés. And one day Anna realized that her mother was different. It was in just such a beautiful café. It rained small lights from the chandeliers and it was nice and warm with the winter dark outside on the tall windows. She was deeply involved in a piece of sachertorte and did not pay any attention to her mother’s richly dressed and perfumed friends. They were rather loud and the next thing was her mother towering above her – she could count the buttons on her bodice. She was standing on the café table amongst the porcelain and the cakes, talking about women’s rights. Shaking the feathers and plumes on her hat at some people, asking for votes for women and equality for the poor. Anna noticed that she was not wearing a silk petticoat but a simple white lace one. And she felt proud of her.
That night Anna went to her parents’ bedroom and looked at the books on her mother’s bedside table. There were French novels and books on German philosophy. They were bound in leather and the pages were wafer-thin when she flipped through them. Silky like her underwear. She must have been about nine years old, old enough to understand that these were foreign languages. From places they had visited, such as Deauville in France and Vienna to visit Herr Mahler. In France her mother would laugh and drink with people who came from Russia like her ancestors, and her father, who had a beautiful tenor voice, would sing after dinner, just for fun. Her father was always away in countries like China or America. And when he returned he never came alone. The guests would stay for months sometimes. He would bring home lots of presents and china or precious linen. Her father did not read much. He liked music and football.
Once, in Vienna, they had to be very quiet in a big building and sit still for hours while her parent’s friend waved his arms in front of a lot of people with musical instruments. When it was over Herr Mahler came home with them.
On a bad day, when she came home from school, she found that somebody had shot her dog. With her brothers she buried him and then went to sit in the dog’s basket in the kitchen. To cheer her up her mother gave her a book of poems. Her first. It gave her comfort that there seemed to be something outside the language she knew and used every day; another language lived. She started reading obsessively through her mother’s library. A lot of poems were learned by heart and spoken out loud on long walks or when she was bored in the company of friends. They started calling her eccentric.
She grew up, and there was the girl’s gymnasium and the balls and parties and Madame Rausch for her evening gowns and Hirsch for her hats. The parties where the young Louis Armstrong would play with his band – all the way from America – for the jeunesse dorée, and she would flirt with her admirers. The boys in tuxedos. Everybody smoked, of course. Everybody made love, of course. A young baron got her pregnant, but he was an empty-headed beau so far as she was concerned. Her parents suggested marriage. But there was to be no wedding, just a visit to Switzerland to have an abortion.
She continued to read (plays, poetry), until she went to see her father in his study to ask him if she could join the theatre.
He was a mild man, totally devoid of religious feelings, but it so happened that he was glancing at the Torah that day and having a fit of morality. He was happy with his quiet afternoon in his warm house and here was his learned, beautiful daughter who wanted to go on stage. Had she lost her mind? He picked up the telephone and asked to be connected with England. She was to enter society over there and, it was hoped, meet a companion for life.
She went for a walk with her mother along the empty beach. She was docile, she would go, the theatre could wait.
On their way back from the beach they walked through the village. Boys shouted the usual insults at them.
England suited her for a while. Being the well-bred yet glamorously rebellious one. Poking fun at little ladies in hideous hats during endless tea parties and picnics. There is a photograph of her in a short fur coat, radiant, having a picnic with her friends in the hilly fields. And there is a man sitting in the photograph, at a bit of a distance. It was their chauffeur. He also had to have lunch. Having the chauffeur in the photograph was a solecism, of course. But Anna had insisted.
She became engaged to a well-behaved young man. He liked to read and was planning to turn the rest of their lives together into a comfortable journey. But she had to wear trousers and sing with jazzmen after hours. They wrote songs for her that we still hear. She perfected her English, fine-tuned her accent. The young man was too virginal to marry.
There were a few years back at home, auditioning for the theatre after all, moving away from her safe society into bohemian circles. Pictures of her with a cigarette. Her slim body dressed in low-waisted silks, long necklaces. Attractive artists laughing at her side. Always laughing. Until her father was shot in Berlin on a business trip. He had been drinking with friends in a nightclub and had started singing a Yiddish version of the Song of Songs. Somebody in a brown shirt got up and shot him.
Her mother died six months later, of grief it was said. They were the lucky ones.
Let’s skip those years. Just to relate that her brothers were killed and her one remaining sister went insane.
After that she was moved to a sanatorium in Switzerland. Too ill to live outside its walls, but well enough to read and start translating literature, and acquire a wide knowledge of modern art.
When she was back on her own two feet and moving around her home city as elegantly as possible in her rags, she took to visiting galleries with those of her friends who were left. They were still wealthy. She had lost everything, her parents’ wealth confiscated by the Nazis, and she survived in her friends’ mansions, working as a translator.
She left with the painter who became her husband, at the opening of his first postwar exhibition.
Impressed by his talent, she recognized him as the young man who had helped his father out in a deli shop she used to visit with some friends after dances, after hours. While they sipped champagne she would joke with the old man, who turned out to be strangely erudite for a shopkeeper. She had hardly looked at the thin young man beside him.
That was her as well: opinions about shopkeepers, shoes with wooden heels, people eating without napkins, wearing clothes that were not made to last, not made out of natural materials.
Her children were brought up with strict codes of etiquette in their modest house. But it was impressed upon them with so much charm that the silks and Egyptian linens were acquired naturally, as naturally as the way their mother liked to mix several languages. Her stories about the diamonds that she swapped for food sounded like fairytales. They could not imagine the woman in the kitchen, singing and making a mess of the cooking, wearing a ball gown and a diamond necklace.
Some of her friends were like that, though. Ladies in pearls who seemed to admire the work of her sadly not very well-to-do husband.
She took the children to her friends’ houses and taught them to feel comfortable around them. Money was never mentioned, but bitterly missed. They met with royalty and Russian princes, ate piroshkis, stuffed cabbage sandwiches, and cried and partied with refugees from the Revolution. Much kissing and sobbing, loud talk and arguments were the lines along which their lives were mapped out. She was seldom sad. Her past was void, but at a mature age her future had been filled with two children and a husband who fascinated her. She never knew how to handle a household. Her family had shopped in the best places. She tried to do the same. The house overflowed with paintings and books. And then there would be the gaps, which could last a few months, when there was nothing left to live on. But she did not complain, though her mouth would tighten, her smile seem less generous.
Her children were deprived of nothing: they had food, music lessons, clothes, and were driven around in the oldest of two CVs, enduring their parents’ endless songs. It was she who suffered deprivations at times. She loved to give, to present people with what they most wanted. These people were always articulate, of course. A foreign language had to be spoken perfectly. German writers were her favourite. She shared her husband’s views on Germany: a divided country with a lot to offer.
Their sorrow was personal and seldom mentioned. When her children wanted to know where their grandparents, aunts or uncles were, she told them the truth: that they had all died.
There was no room for death around her house. Active learning, music, joy. A stream of energy that made her regularly collapse into old war illnesses. Her husband had no patience with illness, and her children quarrelled with the housekeeper, coming to complain at her bedside, at home or in hospital. She always recovered, and turned into a healthy grande dame.
That was the older woman she was now. The woman he would certainly meet again. They had reached Paris.
When he parked the car she turned to him. Did he understand that she did question her parent’s life and possible lack of pragmatism? That she realised she had picked up the superficial joys of an acquired taste for material things? They lived with a pain they couldn’t share with her. She had arrived when the smashed pieces of their existence had been glued together to begin again. She could only try to help them reach the finishing line.