Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

He started to talk, no, shout at her with an almost unintelligible accent, or perhaps it was the volume that made it almost impossible to understand anything of what he was saying. She withdrew into her seat, she was obviously scared and probably did not understand either what he was trying to say. He held up the magazine and continued to scold her for what he clearly regarded as a filthy, undermining glossy rag. We just sat there and watched him shine his flashlight up at our luggage in the already fully illuminated compartment, he made the woman move, we thought he wanted to look through the rest of the luggage. We saw how she had to turn around several times, an absurd four-step ballet under this man’s gaze. I was afraid for Simon, that he would get himself involved, that we would be thrown off the train on the wrong side of the border and forced to find some way of crossing over to the West. But just as quickly as he had started, the man in uniform ended his reprimand, closing the door again behind him, controlled and completely calm now, showing no sign of his outburst of rage. Through the window in the compartment door I saw him talking to a colleague, just as quiet and levelheaded as if everything had been playacting. The woman sitting with us was holding her hand over her eyes. Simon tried to say something to her, something comforting, but she simply acted as though she did not understand and took out her book again. Her hands were shaking, our hands were shaking. We resumed our attempt at reading. The silence that had been so reassuring was difficult to endure now. It began to grow dark outside, and I saw the reflection of our faces reproduced on the glass, in the train window. Pale in the harsh light of the compartment.

WE SPENT A week in Berlin, I had soon begun to feel homesick. These were a few days during which I just felt superfluous despite the second cousin trying to do all she could to make me feel at home. The city and its air seemed almost damp in the heat, especially the asphalt, the wide sidewalks down beside Kurfürstendamm, the dampness mixed with the warm smell of the asphalt, as though it were about to evaporate and become incorporated into the clogged, dusty city air. In the Zoologischer Garten a male lion was wandering restlessly around in a depressing cage behind glass, forced to live out his life as an exhibit while hordes of schoolchildren walked by. I stood observing it for a while, the roars that were intensified by the acoustics and did not sound as though they came from an animal at all, but were more reminiscent of the noise from a building site I had noticed several blocks farther up, where the machines appeared to be shifting boulders backward and forward before dropping them in a seemingly arbitrary location, this snarling of the machinery and occasional rumblings, a terrible almost supernatural sound. Or even the growling racket from the underground train we had taken a number of times, the so-called U-Bahn, that when it passed through a tunnel beneath the earth, made me think more of a monster who in the unbearable heat and afflicted by insomnia was trying to hide himself in the darkness.

THEY DID NOT talk together only about the war. They talked about the time before that, when they had both been children and spent several weeks together at a holiday resort. It was memories from that time, and about being children they talked about with greatest pleasure, they liberated themselves from all the years and found their way back to something different they must once have been, she related that she had gone through a little childhood crush on him. She remembered Simon as the irascible second cousin, she said, and she had wanted to marry him, but someone had warned her that you didn’t marry members of your own family. For a short time this information had bothered her more than the approach of war. She described the holiday resort he had almost forgotten, relatives he barely remembered now, names she could help him with. She was involved in some work, an organization that searched for the identities of so-called displaced persons who filled Europe after the war, and that attempted to chart the precise fate of those who were victims of the Holocaust, and what had happened not only to them, but also to their traces, their property, what was left behind. His second cousin, or “dear cousin” as I heard him call her, as though he was trying to bring her closer than she actually was. Perhaps this is what is difficult to understand. I am jealous. During the visit I sit in her living room as she tells stories, she serves coffee, she dishes up some tiny round cakes that look like cookies with a sweet filling, and she puts her arms around me, cradles me as though she is comforting me, as though I am the one who needs comfort, as though we are old friends. She does the same with him, and he is so delighted, he can’t get enough of her and her anecdotes about the family and the past and everything that has vanished; he has got his name back, Shimon, she says, his face is transformed while we are there, he slips into the old language and the stories of his upbringing, it feels as though I cannot breathe in that little apartment, so close to the past. I go for a stroll in the little park beside Viktoria-Luise-Platz. I sit there for several hours. But I have to return, although I don’t want to. On the stairway I fumble in the total darkness until I find the little light switch that has to be pressed, and as I do so I feel an excitement, an anticipation immediately before it happens: For a fleeting moment the entrance is illuminated, I see that the entire wall is covered in tiny square mirrors, paintings, decorations, a manifestation of art nouveau. I walk slowly up the steps watching a mosaic of my own face, what appears as a never-ending series of versions, all of the same stairway, of reflected images and an extension of the staircase that apparently reaches as far as the roof. Immediately afterward and just before I stand in front of a new door, and as the light is extinguished behind me, I open it and wend my way back to all the other things. The darkness in the hallway, the clothes hangers, the photographs in the apartment. The past.

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AFTER THAT SHE phoned now and again, Irit Meyer, but it was her letters that arrived most regularly. I didn’t like them writing to each other, I never liked the letters and the conversations about the time in their homeland and the holiday resort and the past. Why didn’t I like this? When she rang, she always talked German to me, I tried to reply with the little I could muster of the language, that Simon had taught me. German is a language where it seems you can speak a whole chapter to the conclusion, sentence by sentence, without inserting periods or indicating who and what is being spoken about, until the very final syllables. The actual contents are elegantly packaged, like the yolk inside an egg, you crack it carefully on an edge and the contents run out, self-assured, sticky, but beautiful and rich, down into the bowl. One says that one has seen, one has had some thoughts about. Man hat sich Sorgen gemacht .

In the conversations with Irit they came to life again, he said they came to life for him. His parents of course, but also other relatives. The younger aunt who had lived with them for a longish period together with her little son. One of his father’s sisters. When he thought back, he was less concerned with her, she was part of the adult world. The adults he knew as snatches of conversation, good and bad weather; the grown-ups gathered around the table in the living room with cherry wine or anxiously huddled around a newspaper, heads close together as they sit looking at an article, reading about new regulations, about war brewing. But then the aunt had a son aged five or six. His cousin was more indistinct. Irit Meyer remembered some things. Fragments. The boy’s family had come to visit on some of the vacations, he liked to spend time on the beach, liked the sand, the waves, but he was shy, she thought she remembered that he collected things in his pockets, she thought it was him, but he had lived for too short a time to leave any deep impression. There were a few sketches remaining, some children’s books, she thought there might be some photographs. Simon recalled that his aunt spoke very little, that during the time they were living together, she was preoccupied with her husband who had gone under cover because of the work he had been involved in, he stayed away permanently, although the intention had been that he would come and live together with them. She altered clothes, Simon had a clear memory of that, she fixed the clothes when you were growing, he recollected the strange feeling when she measured him, the length of his legs, his arms, he stood with his arms exactly as she had instructed him, perhaps he liked her firm and at the same time careful hands. His aunt recorded the measurements in a little book, she always had a suitcase sitting there, she never unpacked properly. He remembered that suitcase. And also the contents that he glimpsed on the occasions when she opened it to fetch something or place something inside. The suitcase was important, it was always ready. Like a warning, an imperative long before anything took place. Several times he had wanted to sprint out into the street with it, put it down in some random place and leave it there.