Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

I knew that Simon had used to walk a neighbor’s dog for a spell as a child. He told me he took it with him on short strolls to earn a few coins. The dog of his childhood had adored Simon. It used to sit outside the door of Simon’s home and bark until he appeared, the owner told him it simply ran out into the hallway and sat in front of his door, it never showed such loyalty to anyone else. Everybody on that stairway heard the dog barking and whimpering outside the boy’s door. Simon at first did not like the smell of the dog on his hands, the excrement he had to whisk off the sidewalk with a stick. But after a few months of this work as a dog walker — this is how he recounted it to me — he nevertheless looked forward to going on walks with it, he felt more secure, it was far from being a small dog. And later he always connected this dog with his sense of freedom before the hiding place. The walks, the games on the grass. He was certain the dog in some way or other had protected him from danger, such as the neighborhood bullies, the Brown-shirts who turned up, that it led him safely from the street to the nearby playground. Its name was Kaiser. Whether it had been a tribute or a joke he did not know. But he remembered his own voice calling out: Fetch, Kaiser, come, Kaiser .

The dog we acquired had a quiet disposition, but nothing about it reminded him of that first dog; Max slept on his blanket, ate an incredible amount, defecated in the garden. Simon gradually became more enthusiastic about it, he went on the walks Max needed, patted the dog on the back while he himself was sitting in his chair reading in the evening. But it became evident only after the dog passed away, how attached he, we, had become to it. Simon told our grandchildren stories about a dog he had gone for walks with as a child, but I think these stories were set in a different place, a childhood location that did not resemble the city where he had grown up. In these new childhood depictions everything revolved around this tiresome mongrel he at first disliked, and that sank its teeth into the chain when he tried to lead it around, but later became his best friend. Kaiser. There was no war approaching, no problems.

Our dog, Max, lay beside the chair, stretched out on the blanket, begged in the kitchen, dug holes in the neighbor’s garden, disappeared to a place several miles away where a bitch was in heat. When Marija arrived, she complained that it molted, although I never noticed any hairs. The grandchildren called it Horridandstupid, sit, Horridandstupid, fetch, Horridandstupid, who is Horridandstupid . Horridandstupid, it answered delightedly to the name and probably forgot its own.

It grew old, its legs and paws were crippled by arthritis, and one day it suffered an epileptic fit, it was terrifying to witness, and affected Simon most of all. It lay on the floor, head banging and body tensing, foaming at the mouth, thumping against the floor. When it recovered consciousness, it attempted to stand up, but could not manage to, it peed on the floor, looking at us, me and Simon, Marija, as though it had never seen us before. The vet talked about putting it down, but we decided we would wait. It should die naturally at home in the living room, on its blanket, it ought to lie there, not on a bench, a table, a floor, it should not die in another place.

Marija used to talk to it in Latvian, she called it by the Latvian word for dog, suns . But she did not like it. She did not like dogs. She called out to it only when it was to be fed. It used to watch her from its place in the living room, or stand on the kitchen threshold right until she asked it to leave. They kept an eye on each other. Perhaps she was afraid of it. Maybe a dog has scared her, I said to Simon. It all seemed more understandable that way. She had been frightened. A dog had probably acted threateningly toward her, and it didn’t help matters when I told her Max would never hurt anyone. I went for walks with the dog too, and sometimes she accompanied us. The dog on one side of me, her on the other. They never walked side by side. She said only that she didn’t like dogs. I thought it was perhaps something she normally said to avoid having a dog prancing about her legs when she was doing the cleaning, I thought she perhaps really did like it. When the dog lay down beside her, I imagined she stroked it. I could envision it, but I never saw it happen. Perhaps I wanted it to be so. When it became clear it ought perhaps to be put to sleep, she asked what we wanted to do.

A dog, she said. You can get a new dog.

I said that wasn’t the problem, we wanted that dog.

But it’s old, it will go soon all the same.

No.

She said it was different where she came from. Keeping dogs. But I’m not so sure it was anything more than an excuse. Regardless of what the reason was. She did not like dogs.

•

MARIJA SAID SHE thought a great deal about her daughter, her grown-up daughter. She would have liked to have her closer, she missed her all the time. Once Marija was ill and away for a couple of weeks. The house shone following her earlier stint of cleaning, so spotless it might have been sterilized. She always did more than necessary. She had even unearthed some curtains from a closet, old curtains I had long forgotten. Now they were hanging in the living room and gave me a strange sensation of being conveyed ten years back in time, but I liked it.

Eventually the aversion to having help in the house almost disappeared, everything was so well ordered. The wardrobe was filled, the bedclothes hung out to air. The lawn was mown, the hedges trimmed. The floors sparkled. It was no longer so insistent, the distaste about having employed a servant. It had now become essential. This was a wise choice. They all thought so. My daughters. The girls liked her, the atmosphere in the house became brighter with Marija there, they said. We too began to like her, Simon and I. Convinced that it was due to our own efforts, we really thought we were the ones who should be given the credit for it since we had devised the best arrangement, we required assistance, and everyone did the same, our neighbors, everybody in our neighborhood. But we did not compare ourselves with them. We wanted to be gentry of the most pleasant type, making up for all the injustices, the imbalances, we hadn’t employed an African teenager.

I don’t actually believe we wanted to get to know her. It was not something we chose, but we did come to know Marija. I don’t even know why, what it was about her.

You should take better care of your belongings, Marija said. And of yourself. Like a stern inspector, a police officer, she told us what we ought to do. She insisted we acquire a security system. It was installed several weeks later. An electrician showed us how it operated. The security system did not have a complicated program to be followed, you simply needed to make sure you were situated in certain places at the right time, switch on and off, otherwise it would set off an alarm at headquarters. It was not to be fooled around with. Marija said we had to be realistic. Criminals had to be kept out. I think I had told her about the episode. It’s possible she misunderstood and thought it was something that had happened recently, that the intruder had forced his way into the house rather than that I had let him in.

She could not appreciate that we had managed without a burglar alarm, and Simon, who had always been against such devices, did not protest, he voiced the opinion that it would be sensible. We wanted to be cooperative, we liked her. Perhaps it was her solicitude.

AND HER VOICE. She had started to shout out “hello” when she came in through the door. I always thought it a comforting shout. Later when we conversed more, she told me about what worried her, about her daughter and her daughter’s partner. She did not like him, he was too controlling, she said, subjecting her daughter to long nights of conversations dragging on and on like downright inquisitions. A child was involved. The grandchild worried Marija. A girl, she explained. She showed me photographs of some people around a festive table, a young girl on her first day at school. A wedding, a Latvian day of celebration. None of the people seemed at all worried. But photographs lie, I know that. On Sundays she wrote letters to her daughter. She consistently ignored all possibilities other than paper, even though I had offered her the use of the computer in Simon’s old office, she could obtain an e-mail address. No. But she would like to sit at the writing desk in the living room. She sat there with flowery writing paper in front of her (I’m almost certain it really was flowery), in a pose similar to that of a young girl corresponding with her first pen pals, writing and writing. The letters. The white envelopes. The anachronism of the whole situation was emphasized by her subsequently starting to translate and read aloud parts of these letters to me. Also the replies from her daughter. Dear Mother, I hope you’re none the worse for the harsh winter. Everything here is just the same, there’s a lot I can’t manage. But soon I’ll have saved up a few holidays, I need a break from the whole shebang. There’s slush in the streets, you’d think it would have been cleared away by now and that we’d soon have a glimpse of spring, but I think we’ll probably need to travel somewhere to find some good weather . And Marija’s response: Thanks, you mustn’t believe that I don’t think about you, I do that all the time you know, and as far as slush is concerned, Riga is not the only place needing some dry weather .