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Extract from Annemie, published in Death of a Mother, Daughters' Stories, Pandora 1994

1985

Overseas. As I had been led to expect, so it was. The highs very high and the lows dramatically, galvanisingly low. I wrote to myself: 'Oh Paris. Swish down streets in the rain. The markets opening, closing, opening; 'Australienne? Kangourou!' The African man selling me the pimentos—laughing at me. Suddenly seeing the sweep of buildings uphill and downhill, their blueness against the slate sky. No more speaking French. Those small conversations—you measure your words, leave spaces between sentences, relish and register the person behind the eyes. I'm different in French.'

1986

Just the same in Australia though. The anti-climax of being home in Melbourne. No proper job. From time to time I'd feel moved to tell the story of my visit to the Maison St Pierre convent in Ghent. 'The most amazing experience', I'd say and explain how I'd been shown into the same anteroom my mother had entered as a boarder. I felt I never did justice to the story, which always ended with 'I couldn't stop myself from crying.' Hoping that my listener would show me where to go from there. No one did.

1988 Axe dream

	My mother is having a go at chopping wood.
	Her handbag is slipping down from her shoulder
	Over her arm her chopping arm
	I go to tell her this is happening
	She doesn't listen
		

Early 1990

Until this year Mum's memoir with the photo of her on the top that Dad put on has sat in the bookcase, unread for years. If people asked about my mother I'd say that in a way I was relieved. Since she'd died I'd made a lot of changes, things had got better for me. I'd tell them how glad I was that I'd been there when she died, that it had helped me to acknowledge that she was gone. How I'd worn her ring continuously since she gave it to me; that I felt something positive came from her to me through the gift of the ring. I kep reciting these stories and the one about the visit to the Maison St Pierre convent when I'd cried. They'd become a sort of 'memory of Mum' rosary—a way of not looking.

No one can make you remember.

Visiting the Maison St Pierre

I'm standing in the front parlour in the Maison St Pierre showing a photograph to a nun. She's looking at me searchingly but not unsympathetically. I tell her in French that my mother has died since this photo was taken in 1973. Here. Mum and Mother Selina. It's a plea for her to understand me, who I am. I don't explain, Annemarie Meyer, from Germany, boarder pupil here in the thirties—just stupidly show the photo. I'm surprised and embarrassed by little sobs forming with the words and tears forming as I am asking her: is this nun in the photo with my mother still here? Can I see her? What was the phrase she used in reply, the equivalent of 'passed away' in French?

'I'm sorry, Mother Selina is no longer with us.....?'

The furniture in the room is old and formal and elegant. I stumble over the words:

'It's the same room as in the 1930s?'—feeling ridiculous.

Of course it is. I'm thinking about the scene in my mother's book where she and her mother are received into a little parlour at the front of the convent, in 1934.

'I'm afraid this is not a good time for us, many of us have influenza—or it would be possible for you to be shown around the convent—if you had telephoned us you could have come at a better time. It's a pity!'

It had never occurred to me to phone, I don't think I could have. I explain that I'm staying in Brussels, this is my only day in Ghent. I'm still trying to get the better of my little sobs.

'You've come from Australia? Are you married?'

'No, I'm not.' My voice is still choked.

'If you would like to come into the other room—would you take some coffee?'

There's a kind of distant pity in her bearing; she won't let me leave in tears.

I'm left sitting in the other front room across the hall. Sniffling. It's a big building. The nun comes back with strong coffee and a plate with two large and expensive elegant cakes. They go down with that lumpy salty taste food has if eaten when you are upset. She doesn 't have anything to eat or drink. Of course, they don't eat with the non-religious. She keeps me busy with talk.

She's going to show me just a little of the convent before I have to go. We go past a glassed-off section in the hall. There's a woman sitting inside it. Some explanation of my presence goes on. I'm still clutching my photo, which I show her. She's quite effusive towards me.

'Ah—I remember—yes that one who was—'(some word I didn't understand).

I'm confused. Does she really remember my mother? She doesn't seem to react to the 1973 photo. I can't begin to describe my mother at sixteen. My host nun has already continued up the corridor.

'Elle est polonaise,' she says, as if to cast some doubt on the authority of a Pole.

She gestures out in to the courtyard. I try to imagine it without the additions but can't. A door opens and then shuts but in time for me to see a teenage boy. In this convent! In my mum's day the nuns never went outside the convent and the only man allowed inside was the priest.

'Oh yes, everything is changed. Flemish is spoken now in the convent, not French.

As she's showing me another corridor I tell her I have a message from my father. Did the convent receive the copy of the chapter from my mother's memoir about the Maison St Pierre which he sent them after his visit here in 1983?

'Oh, there are many books in the archives....'

The tour has finished. We re-enter the hall.

'If you telephone us from Brussels, you will be very welcome to come back when there is not so much influenza. Then you will be able to be shown around....'

© Margaret Jacobs 2004