Arnon Grunberg

My Mother's Men

On Friday nights, my mother hosts single men. The oldest is ninety-four, the youngest is in his fifties. Some of them only come for the food; others hope for more.
My mother was offered several men after my father had died but she prefers to stick to her Friday-evening routine.
Occasionally, one of them has managed tot get to sleep over. My mother, a cautious woman by nature, would carefully lock her bedroom door. This didn’t always work, however. Once she had a bear of man staying over (this was her description of him) – even though I had told her that she shouldn’t invite anyone who looks like a bear in the first place. In the middle of the night, she heard someone banging on her bedroom door. My mother, who thinks you should always consider the worst-case scenario first, thought there was a fire or a burglar. But it was only the bear in pyjamas standing at her bedroom door and muttering, ‘I want to talk to you about your son.’ ‘Surely not in the middle of the night?’ my mother answered.
That put an end to the sleepover parties.
‘I’m not running a hotel!’ she told me. ‘Besides, he’s always trying to press his dirty mouth onto my lips. And he eats like an animal.’ My mother thinks mouths are dirty in general, and she keeps an accurate account of her visitors’ eating habits. She calls me sometimes and says, ‘Mister X didn’t touch his half chicken,’ or, ‘Mister Y spent an hour on the toilet again. His bowel movements are getting more and more difficult.’ Nothing gets past her, and I am kept fully up to date.
‘Maybe you can use it in your writing,’ she sometimes adds, prompted by her unvanquishable fear of her son ending up as a bagman under a bridge. She considers it her maternal duty to provide me with material. That way, we can join forces and push ourselves further away from the poverty line. ‘People say you get that from me,’ she says.
My mother refers to anyone who isn’t a relative of hers as ‘people.’ ‘Quick,’ she used to say, ‘People are coming. Clean everything up.’ Her own relatives are apparently somewhere on the periphery of the human race and my mother saw herself as a barely disguised subversive entity.
My mother wanted her children to become acquainted with her men, and to that end, she invited us to Amsterdam.
My mother’s men, each in his own way, are also somewhere on the periphery of the human race. That was not the reason, however, for my hesitation in accepting the invitation. I don’t mind seeing the occasional relative, but all of them at once is asking too much.
I arrived in Amsterdam with trepidation. Perhaps it was better not to get acquainted with my mother’s men. There is no need to know everything. It is better if you don’t. Besides, my sister was going to be there.
My sister lives in a settlement on the West Bank, has six children, wears tent dresses and strange hats. Her husband knows a lot about God, his beard is old and his eyes are fierce. My oldest cousins see in me the sinner that I may very well be.
I greeted my relatives and went to great lenghts to become a relative myself. I took a baby in my lap and tossed it into the air a couple of times.
‘Be careful,’ my mother cried, ‘it will fall on the floor.’ But it didn’t fall on the floor.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘she has six of them.’ My mother, too, feels a certain distance towards her grandchildren. ‘I can’t help it,’ she remarked about one of them, ‘but he makes me puke.’ There is no doubt, however, that she loves her grandson. You can love even those who make you puke. Even I have made people puke, and yet I have never been at a loss for love.
‘How is it possible,’ I asked my mother, ‘that you had two such crazy children? One takes God’s word literally, the other takes his own words literally. One treats the world like a ritual bath house, the other like a bazaar filled with flea market junk. One thinks love comes from God, the other that love is a bargaining ship. It may very well be that your children have watered and fertilised the seeds of insanity, but couldn’t it be true that you and Dad planted those seeds?’ My mother wouldn’t hear of the seeds of insanity. ‘There is no such thing in our family.’
And my sister says, ‘There’s nothing wrong with me – you’re the one who’s bananas.’ So we both think the other one’s crazy, and that creates a bond as well.
On Thursday night, my mother began cooking for her men; reservations were made for the senior citizens’ taxi service. Not all of the guests were particulary mobile anymore.
I tried very hard to come up with an excuse for getting out of the Friday night appointment, but my guilt got the better of me. And so I arrived at my parental home well on time. My mother was running back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, my sister was reciting prayers, and I was pacing around the garden. One by one, my mother’s men arrived, some of them on foot, some of them by bicycle, and a few via the senior citizen’s taxi service.
‘Why don’t you go and talk to the guests while I finish the potato salad?’ my mother said.
It’s not being that is unbearable light – it’s despair. Like a balloon, the despair rose and hovered against the ceiling.
I barely managed to keep one conversation going. It was about haemorrhoids. My contribution was: ‘Haemorrhoids are just like tonsils: you take them out with scissors.’ Apparantly my mother liked men with haemorrhoids (everyone looks for his own periphery). I was playing the role of my mother’s son, but I’d had better days.
Dinner was served, and my mother ran like an athlete, for fear her men might leave her home hungry.
‘So,’ one of her men said, ‘now the family is complete?’ Even if we were a family, it was quite an experimental one.
My mother cut the meat. ‘I bought a new shower head especially for him,’ she called out, ‘he likes a hard spray.’ The men turned their attention to me. Well, well, I could hear them thinking, the writer likes a hard spray. I shrank further and further, but there was no emergency exit here. I had to play family member for a little while longer.
‘I like a hard spray too,’ said the youngest of my mother’s men, ‘but the water pressure in Amsterdam isn’t good enough. There’s no use getting a new shower head.’ ‘This one has three settings,’ my mother answered, serving generous portions of meat. ‘You should all come up and see for yourselves after dinner.’ After dinner, those assembled indeed climbed the stairs to admire my mother’s shower head.
At the bottom of the stairs, my mother whispered to me, ‘Be nice to Mister Z, will you, he’s on death’s doorstep.’ Even the dying expressed an interest in shower heads. Nothing surprised me anymore; all I longed for was to get off the stage and into the dressing room where I could remove my make-up.
And as my mother demonstrated the hard spray of her shower head, I wondered why we dare not choose happiness for ourselves, why, instead, we do everything to run away from it, in order not to risk losing it again.