Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

That night as I lay in the cottage with the rain hammering so hard against the roof that it kept me awake for several hours, I wondered whether it would change. I thought about how he regarded me, with this shortcoming, this part of me that was missing and that he was determined to find again. How can he be so sure, I thought, that it is a valuable part, a worthwhile quality, something worth finding.

I BELIEVE I was pretty for a short while as a young girl. It felt like a distraction. To be looked at, liked by reason of that characteristic, such a debatable characteristic. It never seemed to be something I could make use of for my own sake. It was not worth anything to me, only to others. I knew how I could compel other people to look and regard it as a talent, or something I had earned and about which I ought to be proud. A quality on which far too much importance was placed. In the same way as a disability would have been. Although no one would regard it as a disability. Prettiness and me. We did not get along well together. I did not like the attention it brought me or my own attitude toward it, the significance of it. What it made me.

Simon saw me somewhere, we were young. A look, a dance, we conversed a little that evening. He walked me home, again and again. I sought out the place where we met, a place where young people like us met up, he was there and I remember that we danced a little. We both knew that something was about to happen, but there was a balance, a balance between interest and the trajectory as a result of that, a hand, a glance. A balanced equation. We were trying so hard to be young. He was a dark-haired boy at that time, but older than me, more than ten years older, to me he was a man, his eyes framed by something dark, the lashes, the dark lines I did not appreciate were caused by insomnia, but that made his eyes seem an even brighter blue. In the beginning I could become angry because he had fallen for my prettiness, because it had influenced him, and I was jealous, I wanted him to see me, see who I was, not allow anything so obvious to be a deciding factor. But at the same time I was scared to show him anything else. If there was anything else there. I was not sure, I was young. He said I was difficult, and I finished with him before we had really embarked on anything, I said we should not go out together any longer. He looked at me in surprise. I remember he walked off. Hurt. I thought he would never return. But he did come back. He rang the doorbell. I watched him from the window, he was standing down in the street, and I did not want to let him in. I had heard some people calling him the refugee, but this was long after the war. He came around several evenings, rang the doorbell. At last I opened the door, we sat in my tiny single-room flat. I remember we sat for one entire day in that room, we had never been physical with each other before that. He did not want to go home, because it was about to start raining. That was what he said. And then eventually it was late afternoon and I pulled down the blind, the dark and heavy roller blind that was like a blackout curtain, I undressed, with the sounds from the street outside. I usually undressed by myself in that room, every night, placing my clothes on the chair, getting dressed again in the morning, undressed again at night, the same thing, always the same chair, table, room. There were two of us, we undressed in the dark, in the darkened room. The bed was cold and we were new to each other. We were two shadows, cut out from a different, even greater darkness. His hand traced the curve of my collarbone, across my breastbone, over my breasts as though he was searching for something on my skin, letting his hand glide across. Holding it between my legs, I opened myself up, I can feel it still, that I open myself up, that he is inside me, I miss that, I want him to make me so aroused again, the movement, the excitement, the hot breath between us. As though we were breathing life into each other. A whole new life, into one another. The city and the streets, the old dust behind the window. When I awoke again, I knew that it had started to rain outside.

HE TOLD ME about himself, what city he had been born in, what street, what people had lived there, his family, their names. The background that eventually forced them into their hiding place during the war. He wanted to become a physician, he wanted to be with me. We would have a house, a child. Maybe several children. We won’t look back. Is that my idea or his?

I RECALL THAT I had a camera inherited from a relative. A black box you peered down into to capture the object in the lens, never sure that the apparatus would function at the exact moment you decided to take the photograph. I think it places a black wall across the image, dividing it in two, the photo is taken, and the image is hidden inside the box. I also remember the film as a sort of box, a cassette. I have never liked having my picture taken, but I especially recall one photograph that was taken with this box. I still have it, I see my own face on this photo, the midlength blonde hair I cut myself in peculiar uneven layers with the kitchen scissors. I am drawing myself back to avoid closeness, why am I doing that, there is a combination of terror and at the same time contentment in my expression, reproduced almost perfectly in this photograph. There is one thing about this young girl I notice in the picture of myself, something that always amazes me: it seems as though she does not pay any heed to time. At that moment, in the image, there is no past either, I feel. Not when you are so young, not when you are young like in that photograph. Between everything that has happened and everything that happens, there is a dividing line, distinct and defined, like a wall, and the past stays behind that, shut off, forgotten.

In dreams I am often back inside my body as it was before it grew older, I have the feeling of being younger, without any resistance, there is no resistance in this sleep, hardly any sense of gravity. When I move in my dreams, I sometimes have a feeling that is almost sensual. Not that my dreams are. Not in that way. All the same I often awaken with a feeling of desire. Or a kind of yearning that affords a sense of satisfaction in itself. Yes really, it is so. For the yearning does not make me jittery or restless, it feels just like an acknowledgment of something. Perhaps a feeling of closeness to Simon, but the dreams are vivid. I loved it when we were together, simply lying waiting for him in bed, listening to him padding up the stairs, perhaps I switched off the light and noticed as he came into the room, I miss him. It is not so long ago that we were together in that way, but now that he has shut me out, it is impossible. I still look at young men, something in the way they walk, their voices, reminds me of him. When he was young, I wanted him to be older than he was. And now that he is old, that we are both older, I think of him as a young man. Occasionally I have felt a passionate desire for him as he was at that time. It makes me happy, like that feeling in my dreams. Oh but yes, that is erotic. I think I have never been close to anyone in that way, been so happy with anyone as I was with him. That it was so intense. And when I waken, my life, or that part of it, my youth, is like a dream I dreamed just a few minutes before I woke. It was over so fast.

I THINK I hear him talking. It happens now and again. He is sitting in the living room or has gone into the bedroom.

Eva, he says. My name.

I follow him. He might be sitting in his chair or on the settee facing the blank TV screen.

Did you call, I ask. He looks at me uncomprehendingly.

I thought you called me.

Or else I think I hear him talking to someone. As though he had answered the telephone. But he hardly ever answers the phone, he lets it ring, on only a couple of occasions recently have I seen him lift the receiver, once he held it against his ear, the caller was probably speaking and had begun to wonder whether there was anyone at the other end, before Simon put it down. The other time, he passed it over to me.