Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

She is sitting on a tree stump, it looks as though she is paying attention to something. At that moment she is sitting so motionless that I become frightened, I speak her name. She turns around, looking at me before pointing in between the bushes. Perhaps she has followed him, perhaps he brought her here.

But she seems unharmed. She is sitting on the broad stump and pointing into the forest. As though he has abandoned her and gone on ahead, vanishing in there among the dense branches.

LATER, I CALLED it the episode. When I talked about it with other people, Simon, our children after they had grown up. As though it comes from a place that is unfamiliar, like the intruder himself, a different place. The Greek word is constructed of several parts, of which one part means beginning, like the beginning of a story, a life, but also suggesting something is inserted, in tragedies it is the dialogue that is inserted between the choruses. The episode is the anticipation of something more. But there was nothing more, he rang the doorbell that day, and after that he disappeared.

I know nothing about the intruder. Later I saw a notice in the newspaper, the description of a young man who had entered several houses in the neighborhood, the description expressing the suspicion that he was confused. In a way it was as though nothing had happened. Kirsten was unharmed. But I did not stop thinking about him. Who he was. Sometimes I wake up and it feels as though he is standing in the doorway at that very moment, that I have let him in again. Then it is as if he will never leave, but instead stay here with us. He has just become more indistinct with the years. I must have swapped his face for others. While the incident in itself has become clearer, sharper, seeming to draw closer to me all the time.

The episode that has a hard and inevitable quality when I reflect on it. It is as though it is scored into or through something. A gash, like a tear in thick canvas, in the perfectly normal day, and through that hole something has emerged that should not surface, not become visible.

I OFTEN THOUGHT about it later when I began teaching. He was the same age as my pupils, the intruder. I worked at a senior high school in the city center, an old school. One of those schools with a long-established name and a building that has become rooted in its own convictions, just as unshakably encircled by them as by paving stones and asphalt. The years passed, and I knew that one day it would force me out. The school was sufficient unto itself. I walked around in the corridors, I think I moved around with the suspicion that it was so, that the building considered me superfluous.

I taught Norwegian and for a while literature too, an optional subject that was popular among the pupils. Myself, I was more uncertain. I used to look around the classroom at the pupils, I could hear my own footsteps in the corridors and think that time was passing, and my own excuse for staying there seemed less and less rational. All the same I clung tenaciously to that identity. I was a teacher, a high school teacher. That was how I dressed, how I moved, the role determined my vocabulary, my limitations. As though I could not simply be replaced. And eventually as the years went by the ranks of those of my own age diminished, while younger and better-qualified colleagues continually streamed in. We used to meet at lunchtime, Simon and I, if the weather was good, his physician’s office was not far from the school. I walked along Nygaten Street, past all the stores, Allehelgensgate, past Markesmauet Alley, down Peter Motzfeldtsgate to the city park, the Lille Lungegårdsvann Lake, where we sat on a bench overlooking the fountain. We gulped down our food and chatted a little before going back to work. He to his patients, I to my pupils. He often picked me up after the workday. In the car we listened to classical music, conversed about the day that had passed.

If I had a free period and he had cancellations, we could meet at the tearoom in the telegraph building, and when it was closed down after many years, we met at a café neither of us really liked.

I do not know if I miss the work, but I wish to be part of something, I always have the feeling of being left out, standing on the outside. Now that the children are no longer children, but grown women we see only now and again. Occasionally we have been in contact with a few colleagues, from time to time, sometimes a vacation with acquaintances. That was long ago.

For years I stood in the classroom and my eyes scanned what seemed to be the same pupils, all cast in the same brilliant mold after a few years in the building, ready for university. I made out as though I were taking part in it, that is how it feels now. Some pupils distinguished themselves, and every other year there may have been a pupil who was particularly interested, one who did not consider reading Olav Duun to be a personal affront. Perhaps they also became more mature after those three years, I exaggerated the impression of how alike they all became. I regarded them as an expression of the place, everything I personally could not tear myself away from, instead continuing year after year. The work I suspected I was not suited for, was not what I really wanted to do. Without knowing what I ought to do about it. I always said to myself that I was lucky to be able to be there, work there. I used to say I enjoyed it.

And one day I received flowers, and the pupils had bought a special edition of Duun’s novel, Fellow Man . There were a few words from the principal and lunch with coffee and cake. The days that suddenly altered when I finished. In the beginning it was good being just Simon and me. His gradual change started a couple of years ago. But perhaps his restlessness was present long before that, maybe it is an expression of something he has wanted for a long time. To go his own way.

I CAN AWAKEN in the belief that I hear Simon’s voice, the one I am in the process of forgetting little by little as it is replaced by silence. I wake and realize I must have heard it in a dream. It is so rare for him to say anything.

Old age looks out over a gloomy landscape. Helena, our youngest daughter, telephoned a few weeks ago to say she had picked her father up at a bus stop where he seemed to be studying the timetable.

Dad, she had called out to him. Where are you thinking of going?

Where would he go? she asked me after driving him back home.

I could not answer her. I don’t know, I said. It’s worrying, she whispered so that Simon would not hear. He could have just gone off.

Several days later she dropped by with the envelope and application form. She placed it on the hall table.

I’ll put it here, Mom, she said. I saw she was standing in the hallway, in the semidarkness. Helena who was only a baby when the episode occurred. I had forgotten to turn on the light. I found the light switch.

There are homes for the elderly where he would be comfortable. He needs to go somewhere, she insisted and pointed at the envelope as though underlining her words.

A place where people will look after him, she continued. I can’t let you take all the responsibility on your own. Now that he’s always going off, now that he’s so silent.

She spoke for a long time, there was an echo of her voice in the hallway. She doesn’t have such a strong voice, but it seemed she had thought about what she wanted to say. And she gave me a hug when she left. She always does that.

A home for the elderly.

I saw that it was lying there. I have left it lying there ever since.

The application form. It is going to occupy my thoughts, no matter what I do.

•

SOME DAYS I cannot remember the distinctive character his voice had, whether it was as deep as I believe, I cannot imagine it. His silence. The words become gradually fewer, as though something is drying up for want of nourishment. After he retired, he liked to go walking on his own, taking the bus into the city and walking up to the university at the top of the hill. Sitting in the old garden beside the Natural History Museum, with the voices of the students from the streets, plants, bushes and trees with their names and species displayed on little signs. Undisturbed, enclosed. Here he sits while the day rushes on across the city and comes to an end with the light sinking behind the trees, behind one of these mountains, perhaps he is reading or just staring at his fingers clutching the book, at the students walking past and giving an impression of sliced movements behind the high, green fence.