Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

Perhaps it is a morning, or perhaps an evening, there are the enormous windows, the pictures above the altar, the anticipation, the church organ. The organ music slams against the walls, Simon is sensitive to noise after several ear infections, but he tolerates it, is not tempted to stick his fingers in his ear canals in order to muffle the sound, there are other children there like him, maybe they believe he is her son, he believes himself that he is her son. Perhaps he stands up with the others, folds his hands like they do, imitates their gestures, what is it they are articulating. No one folds his hands or prays in his own home.

Had she asked him not to say anything, invented some reason so that the grown-ups in his home would not know about it? It had to be a secret between them, and therefore he saw it as their story. The angel, the Christmas Gospel, Golgotha, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection. The church building from outside looks like all churches, molded and massive, like concrete, although it might be older, ancient, even beautiful, but she sits beside him and holds his hand, and once during this period of time there she stands up and accompanies a little flock of people up to the arch in front of the altar, she has signaled with her hand that he should wait, and he does so and notices that the other children do the same. While the children’s parents walk forward in a disorderly line along the floor, they kneel, lean forward and kneel as they receive something into their mouths. He thinks it is something good and is slightly disappointed not to get any, it is seldom that anything good is handed out.

But afterward, when they leave, she explains to him that it is not as he thinks. He walks along and holds her hand, she is almost solemn as though she has made a conquest, he imagines, as it now strikes him as an adult. He thinks they stop at a café and he has something to drink. Lemonade, tea. He is contented, she continues to tell him about the Testament, but when they approach the house where he lives, she asks him not to say anything to his brother, he might be jealous. Perhaps not to your parents either. Has he intended to tell them? No, he hasn’t.

The visits, for there were several, were discovered. The book he had kept hidden under his mattress too. The New Testament that he had read and regarded as a fable with magicians and wizards. The New Testament that I hadn’t exactly swallowed and digested, Simon said, but that had at least made an impression, especially the story about the Resurrection, about the women at Jesus’s empty tomb, I liked the parts that seemed like magic, although I am uncertain why I associated it with something so cheerful. The Crucifixion, how it shaped itself into some idea of an exciting fairy tale. It must have been the way it was told, how Mother’s friend told it to me. It devastated them. My parents. The visits and everything it must have led to (what it had led to, he did not know) enraged them, not because they were religious, on the contrary, but because in their opinion she, their friend, was trying to give me something fraudulent, something that did not belong to us, Simon said. It was not the religion, but the lack of respect, neither of them being particularly religious, but it had to do with identity, his father said. Who they were. Who are we, he had wanted to ask. Mother who was angry, Father’s face, sad, old even though he was still young. He did not believe in anything. Simon has never believed in any testament either, but he told me about this memory with pleasure, he had been taken to a place, it was secret, like a secret show, a performance. He walked past the church several years later, the church building was dark and closed then, there was nobody there. He still remembered that the doors had opened, the candles, the organ, the theater stage. The whole sparkling story. Brilliant.

In the stores and on the streets down in the city there is movement that I miss otherwise. I have become one of those women who view the world from bus seats, out through windows. From park benches and waiting rooms. I disturb no one and am not disturbed. I can go wherever I want without being obtrusive, my body is hardly visible within a group of people, I am neither fat nor thin, neither quiet-spoken nor loudmouthed. Should I make more of myself? After a few hours in the city, it’s like being inside a churning, whining machine, and when I return home, I am grateful for the silence as an insomniac would be for sleep.

I think up different tasks to do in the hours until I have to collect him. Sometimes I go around the house without finding anything to do. I can stand for ages staring at the clock and without noticing it lift my hands to my mouth and then feel the contours of my face, just standing there like that as I stroke my face with a repeated motion until I become conscious once more of what I am doing. I look at my body and it dawns on me that I should be satisfied now that it does not express anything other than what I am, that I no longer need to relate to a beauty I cannot stand for, a type of femininity I have never felt entirely comfortable with. But my body gives me more validity, the physiology, the machinery, is more conspicuous than ever before. Everything that was hidden and displaced to the background is taking its revenge and has moved into the foreground, the malfunctioning lubrication of the joints, even peristalsis, the bowel movements that mark the times of day more clearly than any other events, there is a certain comedy in that. It is genuine. At the very least you cannot claim it lacks authenticity.

The clock that strikes so loudly, but right now the sound is not insistent. I open the door to the living room. Directly behind it is the chair where he usually sits.

Some days I almost forget his silence. Then it feels only like a momentary stillness, and that we are going to talk together soon. He is going to say something, and I am going to answer. How I miss it. I want to tell him to stop doing this to me. It feels as though it is something he has made up his mind to do, something he has chosen of his own free will. That he has shut me out, all of us out.

When we had just met, it kept crossing my mind that he was going to disappear. That one day he would sit in a train, or perhaps on an airplane, and find another place far away from me, from us.

He would leave a note, a letter. I would open it and read what he had written. It would not explain anything.

Later he told me he had thought the same about me.

I have come to realize how the voice, the words, are the way into him. But also to us. It feels as though he has withdrawn, he has closed himself off. In the same way that traffic is blocked off in the old street where we used to live when we were newlyweds, the traffic was diverted and the street deserted. It feels as though he is in a different house, a place I cannot enter, I see that he walks around in there, something he smiles at, he is busy with various things, I notice all of it, and he looks out at me through the windows, he stands in the doorway. At a distance.

A FEW YEARS before the episode occurred, when we had just moved to this part of the city, and Greta, our eldest daughter was a baby, I used to go for walks. On these walks I began to notice a boy in the neighborhood. He did not live close by, but on the other side of the field, not far from the church. He always walked on his own to and from school, without any friends. I was often out with the baby carriage at the time school finished for the day, and then I saw him walk along by the lake. He took his time. Stopping and peering at whatever there was to look at, there were several older boys there at that time, who were constantly flying kites. He kept an eye on them down by the water’s edge. I think that he was the same age as my son, the boy I gave away. It is like a game, in which you know all the time that you are creating the idea as you go along, you realize it is not real, but that has nothing to say for the illusion. I liked the notion that he could have been my son. It gave me a kind of reassurance. It was a comfortable thought, that he had done so well for himself, I must of course assume what I saw of him now meant that he must have done well for himself. I could envisage an upbringing for him, just nearby. A family of three, I saw the house where he lived, a house with a garden, in winter he probably skated on the lake, and in summer they went on visits to their cottage.