Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

ANOTHER DAY WE were walking past the church, Simon and I, and saw a little funeral party emerging from the open church door. The rain had changed our plans to go for a long walk, the linden trees stood somber and still as we strolled along the avenue.

I assume they had already placed the coffin in one of the cars, as all I could see were these few people dressed in black and gray and the open church door. A woman, two younger people and an older man. That was all. And the pastor who accompanied them, he was the one who shook them by the hand. They were so few, it seemed as though they were shivering in their thin garments, in the rain.

Simon also looked in their direction. The place where they were standing.

It is nobody we know, I remarked. But even after we had started to walk on, he turned around and peered at the funeral group. It has nothing to do with us, I said.

I discovered the grave on one of my visits on my own. The year and name indicated that it was the grave of a young man. I thought someone would appear to leave flowers there, someone who simply because of my proximity would tell me more about him, a woman perhaps, or children, parents. Nobody came. There was never anyone there. I thought the little patch of earth and grass would vanish and merge into its surroundings, after a number of years there would be only a name, with no indication of anything else. Or anyone. The next time I went there, I removed some of the weeds. Last year I also dug up some flowers from our garden, herbaceous perennials which I planted there.

The trees beside the church fascinate me every time I see them. I interpret it as a kind of fortitude that they stand there as always with heavy crowns, despite the road beneath them, and the enormous changes in the landscape over the course of a couple of centuries. These tall trees cast their shadow over the church building, as in the avenue close by. They cause it to appear slightly Gothic as though it were genuinely old. The tower at the front is not very high, but parts of the graveyard directly below remain in the shadow of the actual building in the mornings, it is dark, fertile down there, the green leafy trees seeming to conceal the entrance to another house, one that it is never quite possible to catch sight of. I have also sat on the bench there a few times, occasionally reading the names on the gravestones, or glancing at other people walking around in the vicinity.

The young man. No one knows who he is. Perhaps that is why I have continued to tend the grave. I bring flowers there with me, removing the weeds since no one else does so. At the beginning it felt strange, now it feels almost like a duty.

At odd times I think about what happened to him. Whether it was an accident, whether he himself was careless. His story is secret, somewhere perhaps there is somebody who knows, I muse, or at least used to know. But time has hidden it, like the invisible house among the leaves. The entrance may exist, but you only occasionally seem to glimpse it between the trees, with their outspread branches.

I HAD A child when I was far too young, seventeen or eighteen years old, the baby’s father was someone I hardly knew or even remember, actually he is just as unimportant to me now as he was then. I did not want to have the child, but had it all the same, for a few months after it was born. A boy, healthy and certainly handsome, everything a newborn infant should be.

I am young. I become old when I hold the baby and photographs are taken and the child is sitting on my lap and it feels as though many years go by every night, every day. Before I make up my mind to give it away. For there is nothing about this that makes sense, or that I understand. I am not practical and have always sought refuge in books, in dreams, but this has nothing at all to do with dreams. In retrospect nevertheless it has taken on precisely that character. The birth, the adoption. The months we spent together, when he was still living with me. Now that so many years have gone by, I no longer feel the same responsibility for what with the passage of time has become shrouded in vagueness and ambiguity. I have often thought that I was a different person then. Is it possible to be a different person. It was several years before I married Simon. I gave him away, I had him for a while and then I gave him away. I do not miss him, I would not call it missing him, I do not know what I should miss, the idea of a child. I did not know him. But I think about him. I see him in different places, there are people I catch sight of on a bus or in some gathering or other, men of the age he must be now, individual features I notice, convincing me that it must be him. Long after he probably would have been grown up, I could watch children coming out of a school and identify boys who resembled his image, the notion I had of him.

I did not miss having him close to me, nor did I regret what I had done by giving him away. But perhaps I was curious.

You love your child so much, you look after it and pamper it, watch out for it, keep hold of it, go for walks in the city, celebrate birthdays, Christmas. Mother. And child. I was not kind to that infant. I was only a child myself and did not think he was kind to me. It was a misfortune that we were together.

BUT THIS BUSINESS of the baby made a powerful impression when I told Simon about it a few years after we had married. He was furious because I had not told him earlier, because it was important, he said, it was something you did not neglect to talk about.

I didn’t regard it as important, I said.

How can you say that it’s not important, he responded. He was a part of you.

But I do not think so. That this was what he meant to say. I believe he meant to say that it was the other part that was important, that I had given him away.

It was as though he had spotted some deficiency in me. One that he would not accept, as though he had dissected a part of my personality and seen that something important was missing. He thought it unnatural. He used a word like that. Unnatural. A woman did not simply give up her child, and if she did so, she would always feel a sense of loss, and that loss would be expressed in regret and attempts to retrieve her child.

But he has grown up with other people, I said. He belongs there.

He would not discuss it. It was as though everything I said emphasized what was wrong.

Simon tried to explain it to himself. He possessed theories, but nevertheless did not understand it, nothing at all about it. He thought we should attempt to find the boy. He could not understand why I did not want to.

We were at our summer cottage, the girls were little, and we sat watching while they played in the dismal playground beside the nearby campsite. There was a boy there, slightly older than Greta was then, and the two of them began to play side by side. Gradually they drew closer together, and after a little while longer they took part in the same game. I saw Simon watching them intently, watching the boy. When the lad was called over by a woman standing at some distance, who did not even once step foot on the grass dividing the playground from the remainder of the campsite, but almost intoned the boy’s name with a certain threatening edge, I saw that Simon took on an expression resembling disappointment, as though he had hoped no one would appear, that the boy would turn out to be abandoned and would perhaps be persuaded to come along with us. He remained silent for most of the afternoon.

In the evening, after the girls had gone to bed, we started to argue. One of the few arguments we have had over the years. I remember I said:

He wasn’t even yours. It was before I met you.

He looked at me.

No, he said eventually, you never gave him the chance to become that. Or were those the words he used? It seems too emphatic. Perhaps I have changed them with the passage of time, but I understood that was what he meant. Nevertheless I felt he was less concerned about the boy than about me, about this deficiency of mine.