‘The Pain We Call Love’
My maternity
By Arnon Grunberg
(De Groene Amsterdammer, 13 February 2016)
Almost a year ago, Arnon Grunberg lost his mother. He had been waiting for her since early childhood, and in a way he still is. You are waiting for love and death arrives instead.
MY MOTHER DIED in the evening of 9 February 2015 at the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam. In the seventies she had spent a few weeks in this exact same hospital after a car had hit her on the corner of the Scheldestraat and the Deurloostraat. I was at nursery school then, a Montessori school, where children were told to sit and wait on the steps until a parent or caregiver had materialized to pick them up.
The day my mother had the car incident, I was the last one on the steps, having seen the other children disappear one by one. My mother had never been the first to appear, but it was unusual for her to be this late. After a long while the teacher, Miss Acohen, said: ‘I will take you home.’
I did not yet know what was going on, but it was clear to me that something was not right. This is my first conscious recollection of my mother; all other memories are stories she later told me.
My first memory of her is one in which she does not appear. I remember her absence, waiting for her arrival and the threat of fate preventing her from coming.
My mother has always told me: ‘we waited for you terribly.’ Between my sister, born in 1963, and myself, born in 1971, were eight miscarriages. I am happy to believe that my mother and sister have been waiting for me, and my father too, although he hardly featured in the stories, as if he was not really waiting for me, or at least less so than the other family members. But the reverse is equally true. I have waited for my mother, sitting on the steps of the nursery school in the Albrecht Dürerstraat. And in a way I should say that I am still waiting for her. Now more than ever.
As a toddler I was sent to a child psychiatrist because apparently I had trouble sleeping. I have no recollection of this problem, but this is what I was told later. The child psychiatrist had examined me and apparently said: ‘There is nothing wrong with the kid, but his parents should come and see me.’
So my parents did and before long they befriended the child psychiatrist. Just the thing they would do. Once every few months the child psychiatrist and his family came to have dinner with us and once every few months we would go to the mental hospital in Santpoort, where he lived, to eat with his family. I do not know how my parents pulled this off; I assume it is rather unusual for a psychiatrist and his clients, or patients if you like, to become friends.
According to my mother, another second hand memory, I had trouble sleeping because she frequently threatened to leave me as I was so unmanageable. I do not remember any of those threats. I may well have been difficult in my mother’s eyes, but I do not remember this actual or supposed fractiousness leading to a lack of motherly love, quite the contrary.
Later, I do remember this vividly, she would frequently threaten to abandon her family to live with her aunt in Buenos Aires, but she never did. From quite a young age I knew those threats were idle. Buenos Aires became a mythical place, the place my mother wanted to go to, but never went.
***
WHAT I DO REMEMBER from early childhood is that I liked it when my mother was sleeping in my room and not with my father. She was willing to do this, because like I said, I had trouble sleeping. I could only sleep, and again, these are her words, when I knew my mother would come and lie with me later that night or in the early morning. She did, she came and lay down next to me on the floor on a red camp bed with flowers. I cannot really remember actually seeing my mother sleep on that camp bed, but I vividly remember the camp bed itself; more than anything that camp bed symbolizes my mother, or perhaps I should even say: that camp bed is my mother.
Except for this one time, when I woke up in the middle of the night to wee and saw her lying on the camp bed. In her nightgown. I did not go to the toilet, because I was afraid of the toilet, but I was allowed to pee in a little orange bucket with a white handle. That little bucket was always next to my bed and it came with us on holiday too. I woke up and did a pee in my little bucket as my mother lay there on her camp bed.
When I call to mind a symbol of safety from my earliest childhood, it is the orange bucket with the white handle. I pooped on a white potty in the living room, to rather old age, perhaps until I was nine or ten years old. I toilet-trained when I was very little, but simply refused to use the toilet. My sister teased me with that. You could say I wanted my own toilet, that I did not wish to share the bathroom with the other members of the family and certainly not with strangers.
It strikes me that in my most vivid, earliest memories my mother was present as an absence. I picture the orange bucket, the camp bed, but she is not there, the steps of the nursery school upon which I am sat waiting, but my mother is nowhere to be seen or only vaguely, like a shadow. And yet I am certain that my mother, who was no longer working at the time, was very present in reality; she was taking care of the family full-time, minding the children and particularly the youngest, me. I clearly see the Tupperware cup she brought with her when she picked me up from school, with freshly squeezed orange juice in it. I see the red dish with the pastry for cake; my mother was not a good cook, but she could bake excellent cakes. She herself remains a vision from a dream; her bicycle is more in focus than she is.
***
It strikes me that in my most vivid, earliest memories my mother was present as an absence.
THE EXPRESSION ‘there is nothing wrong with the kid, let his parents come and see me’ became a running gag in the family and both of my parents would proudly repeat it. I do not know what exactly they were proud of. The fact that there was nothing wrong with me or that there was something wrong with them? Perhaps they were thrilled to have produced a child, which experts believed had nothing wrong with it. A tiny miracle.
To me there was something of a threat in that sentence. I was the child who had nothing wrong with him, but did I want to be? And what did it mean that something was possibly wrong with my parents? It could only indicate that I was fundamentally different from them.
It was the word ‘nothing’, which, in hindsight, emanated a threat, a sinister emptiness. When nothing is wrong with you, you must be nothing yourself.
And yet, in time, the expression, used in a positve sense, became my stock phrase: there is nothing wrong with me. If this text intends to show anything — insofar as I am allowed and able to discuss its intentions — it is this: there is nothing wrong with me.
From the child who had nothing wrong with it, I became the man who has nothing wrong with him and in fact I fully intend to be him until the end of my life.
When I was about fifteen and refused to finish high school, my teachers and parents called in assistance again. First I was sent to a psychologist. I told him entirely fictional stories about a girl who had committed suicide. The girl did not exist, so neither did her suicide, but I was very impressed by my own tales. If the psychologist was too, I do not know: he said little or nothing. What I particularly remember is a box of tissues standing on a small table between the psychologist and me. I had the feeling I was expected to start crying, that it was part of the role-play we were both performing. But the crying was too much, even a role-play has its limits.
Because the psychologist did not have the desired effect, better school results, I was sent to a psychiatrist who said more than the psychologist and was a little stricter too. He made sure I did not have to enter military service and after having spoken to me five or six times, he urged me to leave my parents. He seemed to confirm in so many words what the child psychiatrist had already said when I was three: there was nothing wrong with me.
At a certain moment I did not show up for an appointment. I never said goodbye to him properly, something I kept feeling guilty about. When I ran into the psychiatrist a few years ago, it seemed wise to say goodbye to him, even if it was late. I arranged to meet him for a cup of coffee. He was no longer a psychiatrist but a coach — I did not know what the difference between the two was, but had the impression a coach made better money — and when finally, after more than twenty years, my treatment officially finished, he said ‘I was not surprised that someone who cannot say goodbye to his mother could not say goodbye to me either.’
I could not quite agree with this analysis. To me it felt as if I most definitely had let go of my mother. I had fought with her, I had moved to New York, I had not realized the plans — to become a scientist and marry a Jewish woman — my parents had made for me; no, saying goodbye had been a successful operation. Not without trouble, but the hardest operations are often the best.
***
THAT EVENING, on 9 February 2015, I was having dinner in a Japanese restaurant on the Maasstraat in Amsterdam, close to the Dintelstraat, where I grew up, with a cyber security expert because I would write an article on cyber security. During the first course, I got a phone call from my sister, who has been living in Israel for over thirty years but was visiting with her eldest daughter and two grandchildren; everything was fine with my mother in hospital, the oxygen level in my mother’s blood was going up. During the main course, my sister called again. We had to come to the hospital immediately; my mother was not doing well.
I knew then that she was dead.
I remembered a Sunday evening in the early nineties. I was working for a publisher of theatre books, the ITFB, and had gone to the office to do some work, I could let myself in. Because I was waiting to hear from a woman — I was always waiting to hear from women — I called my answering machine, this was before mobile phones, to check the messages. No woman declaring her love for me, just my mother calmly saying: ‘your father is dead. You must come to the hospital.’
You are waiting for love and death arrives instead. Life in just a few words; its demented beauty, the absurd hope, the unfathomable passion that often goes with the waiting.
If my mother has taught me anything it is to get attached super-fast and to detach super-fast again as well
My sister ran up the stairs of the VU hospital on 9 February 2015 and I thought: how silly, there is no need. I had already distanced myself from the situation. When my sister started crying terribly next to my dead mother, in my mind I composed the column about my mother’s death that I would write for de Volkskrant the next day. This may sound emotionless, but emotionless would not do justice to the complexity of my feelings. If my mother has taught me anything it is to get attached super-fast and to detach super-fast again as well. I can get attached within five minutes, but in thirty seconds I will have detached too.
Only in exceptional cases do I not manage to or will it take years. If I had to describe my relationship with my mother and with other women, I would say: a constant, sometimes playful process of extreme attachment and extreme detachment, until the extremity of detachment makes it impossible to reattach again.
***
DEATH IS PROBABLY the most extreme form of detachment possible, yet I have not registered any grieving process. For how can you grieve for someone you are waiting for?
Christians do not so much mourn for Jesus, they wait for him to return. The Jews do not mourn for the Messiah, they wait for him to arrive.
On the night of 9 February I wrote on my blog that I had to become a mother myself now. What it would mean, this maternity, is a question I have asked myself from time to time these past few months. Now seems like a good moment to answer it.
You could say that I, a 44 year old man by now, have never left those steps of the nursery school in the Albrecht Dürerstraat, that I am still sitting there, waiting for my mother. Every so often, a Miss appeared who said she would take me home, but I always returned to the steps of the nursery school with a tenacity that perhaps is impossible to distinguish from dignity. One could argue that time has come to leave those steps, but I do not think I am prepared to. It has proven to be a fertile place, I have written several books there, I have traveled there, I have lived there. It has become my home.
Only now that I have become my mother I can no longer say I am waiting for her. I am waiting for myself.
It cannot be left unsaid that both my parents have survived the war. My mother in various camps, my father at various hiding places.
I do not want to reduce my mother to the camp, at the same time I cannot dissociate her from the camp. And perhaps the three most important lessons my parents have taught me cannot be entirely separated from it either. Pain is communication. Pain is intimacy. Pain is love.
I have been loved and I have loved always implies: I have been hurt and I have hurt. Does this make a lover a psychopath? Should we perhaps say: the psychopath has nothing wrong with him?
I shall leave these questions unanswered.
My mother kept emphasizing, until just before she died, how seductive she was as a girl, and how this seductiveness has to a large extent helped her survive. ‘The murderers smiled at me,’ she said. In her final years she would repeat this sentence sometimes on a weekly, sometimes on a daily basis. As if she still could not believe that the murderers smiled at her. As if she thought only murderers could smile at her. As if the murderers just kept on smiling at her.
Becoming a mother yourself also means to become a seducer yourself. And whom else but the reader should the writer seduce?
I am the writer whispering in the reader’s ear: ‘If it hurts, it is love.’
For more information about Arnon Grunberg and his latest novel BIRTHMARKS, please visit the Lebowski Agency website or arnongrunberg.com.
