Our mother’s last words were “LCI.” The last words of her life. After we’d placed that horrible medical bed in front of the TV, my brother said, “Maman, do you want to watch some TV?” My mother said “LCI.” The bed had been delivered and she’d been put in it. She died that very night without another word. She wouldn’t discuss it. That medical bed haunted her. All and sundry had been singing its praises, purportedly because she’d be more comfortable, but actually everyone had been leaning over her usual far-too-low bed, the big double bed in which our father had died, and it was breaking their backs. She didn’t get up anymore. All the bodily functions that cancer had thrown out of whack were now carried out in the bed. Someone had to convince us of the advantages of a medical bed. We’d ordered it unbeknownst to her. It had been delivered at dawn by two men who’d taken their sweet time putting it together. The room was overrun by such a bewildering arsenal of medical and electronic devices that Serge and I now had no place to stand. She didn’t put up the least protest at being effused from one place to the next. They tried out several buttons. She was up high, half-dazed, helpless, suffering the ludicrous tilting up and down. They’d set the head of the bed against a sidewall on which a calendar with Putin petting a cheetah had been pinned. She couldn’t see out the window anymore, her small and beloved square of garden, and she wearily stared straight ahead. In her own bedroom, she was practically adrift. The calendar was a gift from a Russian home health nurse. My mother had a weakness for Putin, she thought he had sad eyes. Once the men were gone, we decided to put her in her usual position, namely, facing the window and in front of the TV. We had to move the big bed. The mattress first, a mattress from time immemorial that proved to be unbelievably heavy, flabby, and seemingly filled with sand. Serge and I dragged it as best we could into the hallway, falling over several times. We left the base of the bed in her room, upright against a wall. We wheeled in Maman and the medical bed to face the window and the TV again. Serge said, “Do you want to see the TV?” We sat on each side of the bed in folding chairs from the kitchen. It was four days after the attack at the Vivange-sur-Sarre Christmas market; LCI was broadcasting the memorial ceremony for the victims. The only word the correspondent had on her lips was “remembrance,” a word drained of meaning. The same girl said after several shots of candy stores and painted boxes, “Life may go on, but nothing will be the same.”
“You’re wrong,” Serge said, “everything will be exactly the same. In twenty-four hours.”
Not one word out of our mother ever again. Nana and her husband Ramos came in the afternoon. My sister shrieked, her head buried in her husband’s shoulder, “Oh, that bed is a nightmare!” Maman died that very night, without getting to make use of the new equipment’s features. So long as things stayed as they always had, she could weather this illness’s innumerable vicissitudes. But the medical bed had sealed her lips. No, the medical bed, that monstrosity smack-dab in the middle of her bedroom, had sealed her fate.
*
Once she was dead, things went off the rails.
“Mamie, you were the one holding this mishmash of a family together,” my niece Margot said at the cemetery.
Our mother had been a stickler for our family lunches every Sunday. Even after she’d moved to her ground-floor place in the banlieues. Even in our Paris years, our Papa years, those Sunday lunches barely did anything for the general atmosphere of panic and hypertension. Nana and Ramos came with heaps of out-of-the-world victuals—Levallois chicken, the best chicken in the world (handpicked on the farm by the butcher), or a leg of Levallois lamb that was every bit as incomparable. The rest—French fries, green peas, ice cream—was straight from the ice chests at Picard. My brother and my sister came with their family, I always came solo. Joséphine, Serge’s daughter, came to the doorstep every other week already exasperated. Victor, Nana and Ramos’s son, was training at the École Émile Poillot, the “Harvard of gastronomy,” according to Ramos, who pronounces it “Harward.” At our table was a future grand chef. We had him carve the leg of lamb and applauded his great skill, and my mother apologized for the incorrect utensils and the frozen vegetables (she’d never enjoyed cooking; the advent of frozen food had changed her whole life).
We rushed to sit down and eat as if we were in a rented room with just twenty minutes until we had to clear out for a Japanese wedding. There was no making headway on any particular topic, no following any story to its end. A surreal soundscape with my brother-in-law filling in its lower frequencies. Ramos Ochoa is a man who rather relishes never hurrying and makes sure you know it. We would hear him say, belatedly, in a sepulchral and ostentatiously modulated voice, “Could you pass the wine please, thank you so much, Valentina.” Valentina being Serge’s latest significant other. Ramos may have been born in France, but his family is Spanish. They’re all Podemos. He and my sister live in poverty, not without some pride.
At one of those lunches, just as the galette des rois came, my mother said, “Isn’t anyone going to ask me how my routine checkup went?” (She’d had breast cancer nine years earlier.)
Back in the day, she would crow about snagging two crowns when the bakers were only putting one in each cake. The galette must have gone into the oven at the start of the meal. She wouldn’t hear of Valentina, our Italian darling, biting into a cold galette! Nana had set the half-charred thing on the table but, thank God, the little trinket hadn’t been sighted yet. Each year we would bicker over it, my mother would cheat and slip it to a kid, and the kids would bicker over it. One year when she didn’t get it, Margot, Victor’s little sister, flung her plate with her portion of galette out the window. Now there were only teenagers and old folks, apart from Valentina’s ten-year-old son. He slipped under the table, Nana cut the slices, and little Marzio handed out the plates.
“How did your routine checkup go?”
“Oh, I’ve got a blotch on my liver.”
*
Sitting on the edge of the big double bed in the dark room a few months later, Serge said, “Maman, where do you want to be buried?”
“Nowhere. I don’t really care.”
“Do you want to be with Papa?”
“No! Not with the Jews!”
“Where do you want to be?”
“Not at Bagneux.”
“Do you want to be cremated?”
“Cremated. And that’s my final word on the topic.”
We had her cremated and we took her to Bagneux to the Popper family plot. Where else? She didn’t like the sea or the countryside. Or any place where her dust might be one with the land.
__________________________________
From Serge by Yasmina Reza. Used with permission of the publisher, Restless Books. Copyright © 2025 by Yasmina Reza.
