Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

He drank the milk I gave him from a bottle, always restless, always a movement from his arms or legs. As though there was no place to find respite.

When he was a few months old, he attempted to lift his head and upper body, to rise up, perhaps he was peeking out looking for me, or maybe for a way out, but in the same way as someone at the opposite end of life, an old man fettered to the bed, he was getting nowhere. He let his heavy head fall back against the pillow and mattress.

The crying.

It continued. It was all he had. He became big enough to sit up, looking at me with the same scared expression, his eyes flickering. I can’t recall him smiling, but I never smiled at him, so it was never noticeable.

I wanted to give him away immediately, but someone, I think it was one of my parents, had said that since I had him and had landed myself in this situation, then I must take responsibility. And so I sat there with him. He wanted me, but I did not want him.

There were other moments too, perhaps when he was sleeping, perhaps when he looked at me without wanting something, that I could experience peace, when I did not feel shame and anger, that it was not so bleak. I sat up one night with him when he was sick, the pediatrician had said I had to keep him up, I was forced to sit with him on my lap while he slept, stirred, fell asleep again. When he awoke, he looked at me and I at him. For a second I thought he was about to smile, something at the corner of his mouth.

I lay him down in his cot again, perhaps from anxiety. Scared that he would change something, that he would push his way in, find a place inside me and claim it as his own. That he would stay there without me being able to disregard it, his insistence, his screaming. I let him lie. He screamed and screamed.

The times I took him out with me, I went for a walk in the park, or let him sleep in the baby carriage out in the backyard or down at the foot of the stairs.

He was perhaps five months old, and I went for some walks on my own. He cried when I left, as though he understood that I was going away and wondered whether I would come back. Although of course he was too little to think that, to comprehend.

Once I went out of the house, down the stairs, continued down the street and on to the city center. I found a cinema, bought a ticket and watched the movie that started half an hour later. When I returned the house was silent. I thought that he perhaps was sleeping, but when he fell asleep after crying, his nose was always blocked, and he usually made a noise, a snoring sound. I did not hear anything like that now. It was completely silent. I remember that I stepped across the floor and over to the cot, that it took some time to reach the bed.

When I peered in, he lay looking back at me, blinked, as though he had been lying waiting and had decided to be patient. He followed me with his gaze as I walked around the cot. And then he closed his eyes.

A CHILDREN’S NURSE I spoke to. She helped me to find out where I had to go, what papers I had to sign. She said nothing. She had come across women like me before, I don’t believe I was the only one who gave her son away. He was six months old when I gave him up. He wore a knitted jacket and cap. I sat with him on my knee in a tiny office. Outside there was grass and a garden. I had seen that when I arrived. A little garden outside the house. When I lifted him out of the baby carriage, naturally he started to cry. But inside the office he stopped, he kept his eyes on me when they carried him out. And with that he was gone.

They said I could have an address, but I did not want that. I was so relieved when I got rid of him. Those round cheeks, those arms that clutched at the air. All that crying. Years went by before I thought of him again, or allowed myself to think about him. It was an unfortunate relationship, the only thing I felt was relief.

But later I thought about him, I wondered perhaps where he was, who was looking after him. Whether they were treating him better than I had.

THE APPLICATION FORM has no address, nothing to indicate where it should go, who it is intended for. It can be sent or not sent. I don’t know where I should go with it or hand it in. Helena will probably tell me what to do. The smooth sheet is placed between the papers. I have started to fill it out, I have put it down again. It makes me feel slightly numb, nauseous, I always feel that I need to go to the toilet when I take it out. Nervousness makes me need to go to the toilet.

At night sometimes I awaken with a sense of unease, not fear or anxiety. It is perhaps the episode with the intruder I am thinking about, it is so old now, it is an unease I cannot explain. I pad through the house, check the lights, tidy away a newspaper on the table, a cup left behind in the living room, food Simon has left lying on a plate, things like that. I enter the kitchen and check that the burners are switched off, the coffee percolator, that everything is as it should be, I look around. Sometimes I drink a glass of water, switching off the light and returning to bed where I most often fall into a deep sleep, as you do when you are far too tired. But one night not so long ago I remained standing in the living room looking out the window, out into the garden, as I often do, but not at that time of night, and everything was truly different, it was so early in the morning. The light bluish, as though the darkness was just being diluted, gradually replaced by more and more radiance, only the silhouettes remained without being washed out. I stood looking at the garden that now had such an unfamiliar character. The houses on the other side, several up on the hillside, the regulation distance. We know very few of them, even though we live so close, although we have spent all these years here; the young couple in the neighboring property, another couple just beside us, they have recently retired I believe, the guy with the young cleaner. I wonder what they say about us. While I stood there, I began to think about Simon, whether he missed having someone to confide in. I thought about his wish for me to look for my son. Again that thought pops up, that underneath everything, the house, the children, all the years of movement and unrest, there has been, this silence. That it has simply risen to the surface, pushed up by external changes. Like a splinter of stone is forced up by the innards of the earth, by disturbances in the soil, and gradually comes to light in the spring. And that is what really frightens me. How it reminds me of something else. Is it meaninglessness?

ANOTHER NIGHT I dreamed that Simon was what he has always been, that he came and sat down on the edge of the bed, in fact I thought I had just awoken from a dream, and he had coffee and newspapers with him and one of those scones Marija sometimes baked and put in the freezer, and that make me believe that she is still here, that she is standing out in the kitchen or some other place in the house busy with something, and I was happy about it and at the same time that Simon was eating again, and Simon was talking incessantly, it was obviously an important conversation, or: What he said was important, but when I tried to understand what it was, the words seemed disconnected, I could not manage to put them together into meaningful sentences.

When I awoke, really awoke, he was lying beside me.

I could take his hand, stroke his freckled hands, his gray hair. But I couldn’t manage to do that. I can’t manage to accept it. I had an urge to say, pull yourself together, say something. This is not you. Be who you are, the person I recognize, now I am tired of this.

But I didn’t do that. I had also become silent. I got up, and when I turned around he was lying there watching me from the bed, and his expression was clear and present, I wondered whether it was lust I saw in his eyes. I was taken aback. I pulled on my dressing gown and left the room.