from Issue 2 (2023)

EATING MY MOTHER

by Claire-Lise Kieffer

Artwork: Megan Luddy O’Leary,
Self-portrait

I knew it was my duty to eat what was left of my mother.

Not her body, no. That had been taken care of in the usual way. But the thing at the cemetery did nothing for me, as if the body she had inhabited was not important. My mother’s body, to me, was the house where she had lived. For many weeks after the funeral, I felt dissatisfied with the assumption that grieving had begun.

How could I grieve with the house still there, lying in the farmyard like a dead elephant? Often in those weeks I drove up from my city apartment and ghosted through its veins, feeling it grow cold. The smells of cooking and bathing were sinking into clammy carpets or dying on stone tiles. The spot where my sisters and I had stood, welcoming an American cousin 30 years before, was the same only in appearance. My mother’s soul had gone from it, no question.

But there remained the problem of the kitchen. The kitchen had stopped beating, had stopped pumping in ingredients and pumping out my mother’s cooking, but it was not empty. It had stopped mid-pump.

Like a heart, the kitchen has several chambers. There is the narrow, corridor-like kitchen for cooking: on the right-hand side, cupboards full of dry goods, cups and plates, pots and pans; on the left-hand side, the old-fashioned trolley with which my mother used to transport food from the kitchen to the living room. Its wonky wheels shuddered on thresholds. At the end of the kitchen-corridor, a window looks out onto the vegetable garden. Mutter could assess what was ripe for the picking while doing the washing up. To the right of the sink, the wall-mounted spice cabinet with its many round metal drawers. Some are mislabelled: we knew that in the drawer marked ‘Cardamom’ – of which we never had any – we would find the thin wafers, like altar bread, that my mother used for making almond meringues. A dictionary of smells; each handle, when pulled, liberates a cloud of its own dusty spice.

The second chamber, called the wash-kitchen, is very large and metallic. It smells like a clean stone would taste. The floor here is made of slabs of uneven tiles, the flat sink in the corner is as large as a bathtub. I remember seeing half-plucked geese resting in here upside down. Their obscene nakedness both attracted and repulsed me. I had refused to learn poultry plucking from my mother, like my daughters had refused to continue the disgusting tradition of plucking hairs from my father’s ears, a duty that continued to belong to my sisters and me. There is a large table, not for eating but for processing the things that will go into the industrial-sized freezer or into jars lining the shelves all around the room. Because of the farm and the large vegetable garden, and perhaps as a remnant of even older customs, summer and autumn were busy times for conservation. In winter, we subsisted almost entirely on Mutter’s foresight, pretending to ignore the fact that a supermarket had opened ten minutes away.

My mother, in the last years and months of her life, had frontotemporal dementia, an illness that made it difficult for her to walk and caused her to forget almost everything, including us, her daughters. It was strange to experience her remote politeness. She asked about the town I lived in and my work. The doctor had told us it was unnecessary to upset her by correcting her, so a lot of the time it felt like role-play. She had always resisted our attempts to lure her into our faux-shops when we were children playing with a discarded till. We wanted nothing more than for her, a real adult, to buy the plastic vegetables we were selling. When she became ill, I sometimes invented another life for myself, pretended that I lived in Paris or London and worked for a fashion brand. My mother’s cool politeness never wavered. She was not easily impressed. Thinking back on this deception, I am ashamed. But I was going through a difficult time of my own, having just separated from my husband after 21 years of marriage.

*

Now, wandering through the house, these twin sadnesses beset me. I try to stop myself from comparing the two losses, telling myself that my ex-husband is alive and well, still there to help me raise our daughters, who do not seem to need raising anymore. I should be more pained about my mother, but my husband’s departure is an amputation, rather than a wilting. He had repeated that he would be there for the girls so many times that he had me utterly convinced he didn’t mean it. Something had died: it wasn’t my husband, it was the being of light and dark we had brought into the world when we had decided to tie ourselves to each other. It was still itchy like a phantom limb.

I have left my apartment for an indeterminate amount of time and dug myself in here. The medical centre where I worked has closed its doors and let me go with a redundancy check. My sisters, who now pity me, have allowed me to live here. Eli, my eldest sister, who runs the farm harshly and efficiently from her modern house down the other side of the yard, has given in begrudgingly. She thinks I am wallowing and wants to make apartments out of our parents’ house. She has given me three months to eat my pain in my mother’s house, then the contractors are coming. Apartments! Out of my parents’ house! It was built in the 1600s by our ancestor, Theodor Buchmeier. Its walls are thick as an elevator shaft. At night, swaddled in childhood blankets still holding the smell of sleepless long-ago nights, I picture myself lying in the dung-strewn farmyard like a Tiananmen Square protester, bulldozers slowing down at the sight of my supine body. I feel a cold tear of self-pity roll down my cheek at the thought.

*

A strange thing happened during my mother’s illness. Although she forgot everyone she knew, and even how to look after her most basic needs – she had a live-in nurse whose wages, Eli reminded us every week, would come out of our inheritance – she never stopped harvesting, pickling, freezing and brining food. ‘Muscle memory,’ the doctor said, not very impressed. He said it was best to let her get on with it. Her body seemed to find itself in the garden at a given time and did what it had always done. We were lucky that Natalya, the nurse from Belarus, herself the daughter of farmers, obediently carried baskets for my mother to throw in apples, cucumbers, potatoes or whatever else was ripe. ‘Too much salt,’ my mother, who had to wear a diaper, would hiss at Natalya when she was preparing the brine.

Who was she conserving all this food for? For my father, long gone? For us children? Most likely, she didn’t have anyone in mind. Still, I can’t let it go to waste. It’s a funeral rite, one last dignity.

*

Naturally, I start with the fridge, which contains things liable to go off first. I am surprised to find plastic jars of pickled herring from the store. As far as I know, only my father used to eat pickled herring, on his breakfast toast with the crust cut off. When had Mutter started indulging in the odd, creamy treat? I feel a pang of guilt at having missed this sign of her own grief. It has died with her, if it ever existed; too late now to do anything about it.

Armed with a slice of toasted bread, the jar of herring in the other hand, I potter down the corridor disconsolately. I like to sit in the front veranda with my snacks, watching the comings and goings on the farm from behind old-fashioned lace curtains. The curtains, made by my great-grandmother, are woven to the exact thickness that enables one to look outside without being seen. Is this the skill my mother had asked us to notice, holding the curtains up for us to admire, perhaps thinking that we too would one day peer out at the farm courtyard, collecting information to discuss over lunch? The art of gossip.

Most of the time, the yard is deserted, the workers are out in the fields, but today they manoeuvre the machines into the garage for their winter sleep. Soon, their work will be over for the year. I dip my bread into the herring cream, digging with the crust to get at the vinegary flesh. The sweetness, creaminess and acidity of the fish come together in a silent storm. My father used to cut small, perfect squares off his breakfast toast and fed us from his fork. I watch the men outside, my mouth slightly open. I find their strong, precise gestures and the hardness of their faces attractive. The thought swishes through me like a summer breeze. When I am in my mother’s house, I become restored to an earlier stage of life and my mind is wide open, like a room with opposing windows left ajar. Any thought can enter at will. I imagine one of the men knocking at the door, asking for water, maybe. Just like when I was a child, I start daydreaming my loneliness away. Back then, I desperately wanted to leave. I remember seeing my husband as the vessel that would take me away from this house. And now? Now I wish things wouldn’t change so much. Here I am, back where I started. A penance? For not being able to keep a man down, Mutter would have said, had she understood. Although I told her a thousand times about my separation, she had only ever pinched her lips in silent and polite disapproval. I was just a foolish stranger to her. Her daughters, she probably thought, would know better.

I picture myself as I am now, sitting on the dainty settee with herring cream dripping from my chin, and can’t help but let out a laugh.

*

Every morning, I wake up young and draughty, but as the day wears on, my years come back. When I first open my eyes in my childhood bedroom, the familiar cracks in the ceiling and my sense of impatience towards life, the wish for something to happen, anything, make me feel like a teenager. Then my body wakes up and remembers its age.

Today, for lunch, I unfreeze a box of garden peas and it is clear that I have to make Mutter’s pea and semolina dumpling soup. I open the drawer by the sink and there it is my mother’s leather-bound recipe book. With reverence, I turn its sauce-stained pages. It is full of Mutter, her diligent, efficient handwriting. I wish for annotations that could feel like a message from beyond the grave, but there are none: it’s purely factual. No smileys or exclamation marks. I make the soup, mixing semolina while the water boils, timing the chicken broth so that not a second is wasted, although I have nothing else planned all day. Only a mother could be so efficient, I think. Always on the clock. I never realised how often, when cooking for my own family, I’ve wished for my mother to stand behind me and praise my precise, well-practised process. Never breaking a sweat, bringing the ingredients together at just the right moment. Of course, I couldn’t reasonably expect my children to appreciate the subtle art. And my husband? Well, my husband made roast chicken on Sundays. ‘See how crispy it is?’ he would say, red-faced, apron-clad. Behind him, the kitchen resembled a bomb site. ‘Duck fat, that’s the secret.’ I congratulated him like a little boy. It was easier to clean up the mess than to get into an argument. And all that for what?

The soup is warm and filling. Under eyes of fat, in the broth, the semolina dumplings float like icebergs. Each is a soft question, little parcels of the thing that sticks in the throat before crying. Loosened by my tongue, they slide down my gullet easily, now digestible.

After dinner, my second glass of wine in hand, I make my rounds through the house. I walk through the parents’ rooms: bathroom, bedroom, dressing room. My parents had all these. I touch everything, open boxes and jars. Only the bed I don’t go near. A thing that never dies is the repulsion one feels about one’s parents’ bed. I stare at it for a long time, sipping my pinot. In the end, it’s just a bed. Traces of my parents’ bodies, exchanging touch and heat, have long disappeared. Even their bones are cold now. The bed has moved on and become a piece of furniture again.

In the dressing room, I sit at my mother’s vanity and run her silver brush through my hair. In the mirror, I see that my face has aged nearly a lifetime since this morning. I don’t know what compels me to spray on my mother’s perfume. Floury, doughy as the smell of a new baby’s head, it nestles against my neck. For the rest of the evening, I walk around feeling like she is just beside me, before realising that I am her. When I go to bed, pulling on one of my mother’s old-fashioned cotton nightgowns – much more comfortable than my own pyjamas – I see my mother’s knobbly hands and arms pushing out of the sleeves. I turn off the light, looking forward to waking up young again.

*

Instead, I wake up thinking of my ex-husband’s mother. She hadn’t liked me at first. I had sensed it and asked my husband about it in the way of someone newly in love, who is certain that their insecurities will be safe with the other. ‘She thinks you’re too pretty,’ he had admitted, laughing. I laughed with him but I had felt his appraising gaze on me, his mother’s gaze. She wanted a solid woman for him, preferably a bit chubby, a good cook without too many ambitions and as little imagination as possible. I was sprightly then, and naive, but dangerously well-read. I entertained notions of sending my own stories to magazines, though I never did. And I was what they called difficult: my husband, who told his mother everything, also told her of my sudden mood swings, tantrums and manic highs. His mother was of the generation that still whispered the word hysteria. She recommended having children as an antidote. Her daughters, who had plenty, were all too tired at the end of the day for moods of any kind. Well, we did have children. It worked, in a sense. My focus became our family. My body, the flat belly I hadn’t had to work for, gone. When I saw myself in the mirror now, I couldn’t help but compare my shape to that of a ketchup bottle. As I morphed into the image my husband’s mother had of the perfect daughter-in-law, we became friends. She sometimes talked about my young self with kind mockery, implicitly taking some credit for having brought about the later, more useful version of me. I think that my husband was disappointed by this turn of events. He had never had to see me as a rival for his mother’s affections, as he did his five sisters. His choice to marry me had been his one act of defiance against her, and I had taken that away from him.

Today, I am making rabbit with prunes. My ex-husband’s mother would like that. The frozen rabbit is a present from the hunting club my father once belonged to. A solid slab on the freezer, caught mid-stride, the rabbit looks at me out of milky-white eyes. Its flesh and muscle cling close to its bones like wet clothing. Its pitiful, furless body reminds me of my mother. I try to swat away the undignified thought. Even while she relentlessly made food, my mother ate less and less. When I commented on this, alarmed by her thinness, Natalya only shook her head sadly and said, ‘The body is eating itself,’ as if this was an acceptable conclusion. As my mother’s body depleted, the shelves and freezer filled with plump foodstuffs, like the locus of her hunger had become external.

I dine on the rabbit with candles blazing, an inside joke with myself: this dish was reserved for when we had guests. The smell of meat juices brings up a spectre of the giddy excitement I used to feel when my mother set the platter on the table. I squeeze each mouthful of flesh up against my palate gingerly, in case of buckshot. An uncle cracked a tooth once and never let my mother live it down. On my tongue, the mushy sweetness of prunes squeezes into the spreading filaments of meat. Each twinge of sweetness calls for more rabbit, each salty bite for more prunes. In this way I devour much of the dish, until I am full as a queen.

*

This morning, when I wake up to a thin layer of snow on the garden, I feel some measure of peace. Like – what? – my inner season coincides with the outer season. The lawn is a freshly pressed sheet, the flower beds running along its sides have bits of green and brown sticking out, and the two centenarian trees of life, taller than the house, are like giants’ Christmas trees guarding their brown needle hearts. They are so high one can stand upright under their lowest branches.

Is this calm that has come over me now Mutter’s famous stoicism? My sister Sanne and I used to dissect her idiosyncrasies in our small university rooms, one sitting on the bed, the other on the floor, nursing glasses of acidic red wine. We were early followers of pop psychology and read Man and His Symbols. Analysing Mutter was a way for us to reclaim a childhood that had been lived under her dictatorial thumb. We made a joke out of her impassivity, teasing each other when we remained calm in the face of great danger or humiliation. Our friends joined in. ‘That’s so Mutter of you,’ they said, rolling their eyes, when someone described how they had kept their head at another’s covert insult. There was something reassuring about it. It must be nice to have certainties, even if they are the wrong ones, I felt. But now that I inhabit her nightgowns, I am no longer so sure we had Mutter all squared up. I think of the time I was stuck in an elevator with my girls. ‘It’s fine, the repair man is coming,’ I had said brightly, as though this was a situation adults encountered every day. Inside, though, I was melting. I think about my meals for the day as I shiver through the house. I have been here four weeks, turning a deaf ear to Eli ringing the doorbell, hoping to dislodge me. I am nearly done eating my mother’s food. From the bottom of the freezer, I haul up the catch of the day, green beans, to be slathered in my great-aunt’s home-churned butter and abundantly salted. For dessert, as always, I head to the apple room, a dry chamber with slits for windows at the back of the garage. Autumn’s apples are stored here, spaced on wooden shelves. They never go off, only turn wrinkly and sweet like my mother’s hands. The fragrance they exude as they age recreates another season. Their faces look somewhat stricken at still being around so long past their time.

*

A few mornings later, I wake up feeling that something is wrong. I think at first that the insistent whirr outside is from my father mowing the lawn. Seconds later, I realise this isn’t possible. Bleary-eyed, I open my curtains just in time to see the head of one of the trees of life angle unnaturally and fall down. Its descent, winged by its many branches, is slow and majestic. Only now do I see a small man in an orange vest tethered to the tree like an angry fire ant. He slings the chainsaw onto his back. Petrified, I watch him start to climb down. What is left of the amputated tree is now short enough to fall within the lawn, I realise, as the whirr begins again from a hidden spot at the tree’s foot. In a sudden gush of adrenaline, I pick up my phone and dial the emergency number. What will I say? Hello police, someone’s harming my trees? I hang up and dial my sister Tini instead. She picks up after ten rings.

‘What’s going on?’ she asks in the falsely cheerful tone of someone who knows exactly what is going on.

‘The tree of life …’ I falter. ‘Trees of life’ is what we had always called them, but it only now occurs to me that this could not be their scientific name. Something our parents had made up for us.

‘Eli said she was going to warn you. Didn’t she come up?’

I am silent, thinking of the doorbell ringing the day before.

‘Anyways, calm down. It’s all good. The trees need to come down for insurance.’

‘Insurance?’ I croak, my throat dry.

‘Yes,’ Tini says with an exasperated sigh. ‘Eli said she was going to warn you. We were worried you’d get your knickers in a twist. They need the trees gone for the apartments. It’s an insurance thing, they could fall or something, I don’t know.’

‘But,’ I muster up a shred of indignation, ‘the trees have always been here, while people lived in the house, right? So they’re not dangerous.’ A small, desperate part of me thinks if I can convince one person of the righteousness of my cause, I can still save the second tree. Maybe the first tree can heal the wound in its stump, regrow some kind of crooked top we could all laugh at and love.

‘Sorry, doll.’ Tini has put on the condescending tone I have heard her use with her daughters. ‘I gotta run. Late for a meeting. Please try to understand, it’s just trees. Eli needs to make money off the house. Otherwise the farm won’t run.’

‘But Tini …’

‘Talk to Eli, okay? Okay, bye now. Take care.’

I am left cradling the hot, malevolent phone to my ear. The whirr goes on and on. The trunk at the base is so wide, layering on a centimetre or two every year, that it will take them a while to get through it. And yet, eventually, the tree will angle, the many nests, the dead and live branches will come down like a whole world. It irks me that bringing down a giant tree is no longer a dangerous and uncertain endeavour. The body will bounce off the lawn like an immense bird. I turn away from the window and start frantically packing. Halfway through, I draw the curtains so that my last sight of the garden is not without the trees. It’s clear that I’m fleeing. Downstairs, bag over my shoulder, I rush through the kitchen, throwing open all the cupboards to make sure there is no food left. As I turn to leave, I catch sight of a jar on top of the fridge out of the corner of my eye. My hand fastens around the cold glass: the last jar of pickles. I stuff it into my large mother-purse, the ugly and practical type I started using when I first had children. Hurrying out, the door closes behind me; suddenly aware that I won’t see the house again, I stop. But there’s nothing I can do, so I keep going.

*

Back home, my youngest daughter cautiously avoids me on silent cat feet. I hear her boil the kettle and suddenly, a mug of hot tea appears next to me. She has already disappeared again. Where did she learn this self-effacing way of dealing with other people’s sadness? It strikes me that we may not be a very effusive family. I think of the family in the soap opera my daughter is watching. The daughter in the show might have enveloped her mother in a warm and teary hug, they might have nursed cups of tea together and wittily reflected on the subject at hand, before coming to a conclusion that would have made the viewer feel wiser than before.

I bend down and open my large purse. I rummage until I pull up the large jar of pickles. I twist open the lid and eat the tart, crunchy pickles one by one. The vinegar freshly exposed to the air tickles my nose pleasantly. A few months ago, my mother’s hands had gripped the hanging cucumber bodies, her quick, precise pull loosened them from the vine. The smallest ones had been set aside to pickle. The pickle juice comes out of my eyes in briny tears, blurring the outlines of the walls and furniture around me. I think of the trees coming down, new, unknown people plastering their own lives onto my parents’ rooms. Nobody lives like this anymore, old walls and suites of rooms, a relic of a time when land was cheap and people had to claim as much of it as possible to keep the wilderness out. A time when three generations lived under the same roof, had many children and kept each other warm.

My own apartment is a former cinema. The walls around me might have been part of a projection room, where old-fashioned reels whirred, or part of the auditorium. Nowadays, most cinemas must have at least six theatres to be profitable. Sometimes I think about the long-gone red velvet seats, the smell of popcorn and cigarettes that would have wafted up from the comfortable upholstery. What memories, first kisses and blissful forgettings line the walls under the new layer of plaster? Sometimes, old men and women walking past on our street stop for a second and gaze up at the building, which now houses a dozen families, living with the times.