I had never had a straightforward relationship with my mother. As a child I had never, for example, depicted her in my drawings with a triangle skirt, big smiling eyes and a banana-shaped smile. No, no, I always drew her as a big hairy spider with two legs bigger than the rest. Mothers with banana-smiles are what I used to call milly-mummies. Milly-mummies knew how to do everything: make crêpe-paper flowers, costumes for the school play, cakes with pink icing in convoluted shapes. They would come on school excursions, and would carry a mountain of coats while waiting in line without a word of complaint. Whenever anything fancy caught your eye — a crib made out of egg cartons, a treasure hunt, a chandelier made out of yoghurt containers — the response was invariably the same: Milly’s mummy did that.
A very far cry from the ghastly yellow, shop-bought pound cake I used to bring sheepishly to every party.
No . . . With her gift for fiddle-faddling about, while always looking as though she was completely overwhelmed with things to do, my mother was in no way a milly-mummy. She didn’t know how to cook an egg, the house was a pig sty, and as for school, well, doesn’t it just bore you to tears? Luckily for me the Anschluss happened, or my parents would have ended up figuring out that I hadn’t lifted a finger for six months.
She’d never concealed the fact that she had conceived me for the sole purpose of providing my father with a son. If he’d left her after the disappointment, I think she would have had me adopted there and then.
For all that, she was neither crazy nor completely blasé, and since she expected absolutely nothing from life, none of her hopes had ever been dashed. As a young woman, her one hope had been that she wouldn’t be killed. Once a week, people from her camp were rounded up onto a train, and she would stand with her mother in a circle marked with the first letter of her last name, Z. By the time the guards made it to O, P, sometimes as far as U, there would be no more room in the carriages, and after a few hours waiting amidst the terrified screams, the families being torn apart and the summary executions, the two women would return to their barracks. Having survived that test, she had decided that the world could get along fine without her . . . The world, the household, her husband, her child . . . all of it! Everything would just pass by her forever more. Like a little roving satellite, she would approach life’s significant events, circle around them, then head off again as quickly as possible, until in the end she no longer worried about anything at all.