Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

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I DID NOT believe, I have never believed that I was cowardly. But what does it mean to be cowardly, it depends on what you are confronted with. If there is something you do not really fear, then you are not a hero. There is always something you are truly afraid of. For most people cowardliness is measured by what you risk losing, weighed against the thought of losing yourself, is that not the way it is?

Marija liked to hear Simon read. He used to read aloud to me from the newspaper. He has always been good at reading aloud. He has a rich, deep voice, expressive. No, I hardly remember it any longer. It is disappearing all the time.

When he was reading she used to come in. Perhaps she had been standing in the kitchen, but when she came in and stood in the doorway in order to listen, the seriousness in her expression, even when he was reading lighthearted subject matter. And corrections. He has always had an obsession about correcting language, he would come in from his workroom just to read out a mistake he had found in the newspaper.

He never corrected her. He knew perfectly well what it was like to try to master a foreign language. It took him far too many years to put aside his own accent, his own minor linguistic errors. She didn’t know that, that he too was not from here, from this city, from this country, that he too had once had an accent. He never told her that.

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ONE MORNING SHE had arrived early, she had let herself in, I wasn’t even aware she was there. I came out of the shower and was about to walk down the stairs. It was quiet in the house, I don’t remember where Simon was.

It came to light later that she had spilled water on the stairs, she was on her way down with a full bucket. The old linoleum was as slippery as a skating rink, I took one step and felt myself lose my footing. It happened so quickly, just an assortment of movements running into one another, a dance devised by an unorthodox choreographer. I had a feeling of being hurled out in midair and then landing beyond the steps.

She came running up from the basement and knelt down beside me, feeling my feet, my arm joints.

It’s not painful, I said. But she was already trying to help me up, as you do a patient, she supports me, almost lifting me into the bedroom, I hang on to her tall body, as I’m carried off.

I am laid on the bed. It’s all right, I say, to reassure her. I was lucky.

She is talking about phoning for the physician. She lies down beside me. Her feet stretch out beyond the bed, she is so tall. She holds my hand.

I need to hold it, she says. I feel it was my fault.

It’s my own fault, I tell her.

No, she says.

We lay like that. I fell asleep after a short while, I saw her face in a landscape resembling a garden, a confusing collage where she obviously did not belong.

Are you sleeping.

I awoke.

No, I said.

She lay looking at me.

It was lovely to lie there with her.

She began to talk, as usual about her favorite topic, about her daughter and her prospects. Still she held my hand. She did not let it go until I said I wanted to get up. I thought: We are so close.

I can’t explain why. Why it was Marija. But it felt as though we had been waiting for someone or other. From loneliness, or simply boredom. Perhaps she reminded us of the girls. We let her in. It felt as though we had been waiting for her all the time.

I THINK ABOUT that morning, and it is almost as though I forget everything else, now it all seems strangely unfamiliar, and I am just as astonished as my eldest daughter was when she stood before me that day and asked why, what was it that happened, what meant you could not forgive her.

I wake all of a sudden. I must have dozed off in the chair here, and now I have that heavy feeling I sometimes get when I drop off during the afternoon, as though something existential, fundamental, has risen to the surface and lies just below, about to reach my consciousness. But the only thing I feel is sadness. And I can’t manage to grasp what was almost so clear to me as I was on the verge of waking, and consequently there is nothing I can do about it, no way to make it disappear again.

He found someone. A relative, another survivor. What year was it? The children were almost grown up, I didn’t even know that he had been looking, that he was still searching. Irit, she was called, Irit Meyer. A second cousin about his age. She was a widow and lived in Germany, in Berlin.

We visited her a year after they resumed contact. We traveled to what was then called West Germany, we took the train and stayed with her for a week. The train journeyed through Trelleborg, Sassnitz and the German carriages had a distinctive odor we both noticed as soon as we boarded. Like leather or burned rubber combined with the sickeningly sweet stench I suspected might emanate from the toilets, something that might explain a more synthetic element, such as liquid disinfectant. After we were halfway through the journey, our hands smelled too, the jacket I placed over my head in an attempt to get some sleep seemed as though it had never smelled of anything else, and I thought that everything was going to be permeated by that odor, our clothes, including our luggage, our hair, our very beings, once we had reached our destination.

For a while we shared a compartment with a young woman I thought spoke no Scandinavian, English or German. She boarded at one of the smaller stations. She placed her suitcase and bag on the rack above the seats and brought out a book, all three of us were reading, we had no need to talk. The silence between us was not uncomfortable. It was more like a gesture. Although we probably would not have managed to make ourselves understood in any case. We nodded to her and she nodded back, as though we already knew one another well and had chatted together for a long time. As though we had reached a stage you normally attain after a lengthy friendship.

Beyond the windows glimpses of various landscapes disappeared, stretches of cultivated fields and villages with clusters of houses. Without dismounting from the train we were transported on board a ferry where truck drivers congregated in the cafeteria. We went there too, Simon and I, we drank our coffee and then dived down again into the bowels of the ship where the railway carriages were situated. The ferry tied up at the quay, and after a longish interval with screeching metal from the steel wheels scraping against the substructure, booming noises and spasmodic movements, we emerged into the daylight again as the carriages were linked together, and immediately afterward we were on our way.

Toward the end of the journey the train rolled into a station, a voice said something incomprehensible on a crackling loudspeaker. We listened for a while, the voice seemed to die away.

A couple of minutes later the door to the compartment was pushed aside by an East German border guard, one of the young men we had already seen on the platform. On his head he was wearing an idiotic uniform cap, far too big, pulled well down his forehead, the brim hiding his eyes, while the crown sat proud as if it were padded out with a flat sheet of cardboard and covered with material I remember as green or was it beige. His gun was undoubtedly somewhere near at hand, though I don’t recall seeing it there in the compartment. I noticed his high boots that on his skinny legs seemed as overstated as his uniform hat and contributed to the impression of a rented theatrical costume.

He looked at Simon and me with an expression suggesting we were his main priority, that we were the ones who had made it necessary to visit the compartment. I was sure he would ask for our papers that I was already holding in my hand, and at the same time suspected this would not be sufficient to satisfy his demands. But it was the other woman he directed himself toward, the one who had shared our compartment and the silent friendship. He lifted a magazine she had left lying on the little folding table below the window. She had been sitting bent over the same book for most of the journey, now she resembled someone who has been wakened and does not understand what is going on. She glanced at us, at him.