Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

SIMON RELATED THAT he had heard his parents talking just before they all went into hiding. They were standing in the hallway in the old apartment and holding a conversation. They were talking about their father having contacted his former employer in an attempt to obtain assistance. He had worked in an office for as long as it was possible for people like him to do so. The old boss had said to Simon’s father that he had nothing against helping them, he just could not understand how it could be done. Whether it would really make any difference to their situation. Simon’s father had explained to him that it might perhaps postpone things. But, his boss had said as he looked at him with a worried face, do you not consider that the police have a reason for doing what they are doing. I didn’t know what to say, Simon’s father said to his wife as they stood in the hallway with Simon listening from the children’s bedroom. He was my boss.

His boss had also pointed out that it would not be good for the reputation of the business. It would undoubtedly place them all in a negative light if it came out that they had tried to do something against the wishes of the authorities. Everything he said had been sensible in the circumstances, there were of course several ways to look at it. And his father had said he agreed, he had nodded. Because he did not dare to do anything else, because he was used to refraining from contradicting his boss. He had said that he understood.

While we stood there talking, Simon’s father said to his wife out there in the hallway, the weather had cleared up. Outside the building in which the office was situated, the sky had come into view. We could see toward the city, and it was a fine day.

He took my hand and wished me good luck, his father said. I know you will make the best of the situation, he said. And what did you say, Simon’s mother asked. I said yes and returned his handshake, Simon heard his father say.

She took my father’s hat, said Simon, opened the closet in the hallway and hung his overcoat inside next to our clothes. I can still smell the scent of that closet, of old shoes, worn-out soles, the shoe polish she had hidden. His coat. Our clothes beside it. They waited in the hallway for a moment after that. I don’t know what they were doing. Perhaps they just stood still. In their apartment, outside the clothes closet. She who had just hung up his coat, he by her side. Just stood there, before they came in to us children.

•

HE ALSO RECALLED another event immediately before they went into hiding. He had been with his mother to one of the places where it was still possible for his family to shop, and she had not had enough money to pay, perhaps because the prices, the cost of the commodities, appeared to vary and increase every time they were there, she had acted as though it were a common occurrence, and asked him to run home to fetch another purse. And he had sprinted, and when he returned, his mother was standing in a line among several people about to be arrested.

He approached her, perhaps to associate himself with her or at least to give her the money. She had not met his eye, but let her gaze slide as indifferently over him as she let it slide over the other spectators, he halted and moved backward. Simon remained standing among the spectators while she was forced up onto a truck, and not once did she look at him as though they knew each other.

She had come back again, amazingly enough she had not been held for long. But for several days he regarded her in a different light, as though they actually were unknown to each other. He thought about who she really was. He remembered the stories she had told him and that he had only sometimes listened to, about when she met his father, about when they were young. He suddenly understood that she was an individual separate from him. He looked at her clothes in the wardrobe, he observed how she put her hair up, holding the hairpins in her mouth while she attached them, put on her coat and hat to go out, stroked her hand over her ankle when she came home, because the shoes she had acquired were too tight, he tried to discover who she was, view her from outside. When he looked at her name enough times in succession, it seemed strange, disconcerting. He saw her as she had always been, but it seemed as though that was not enough. It was like looking at a picture sketched so that the contours showed a figure, but if you looked at it for long enough, it also formed the outline of a different figure. He saw that now, with her. And it was a more fundamental change than everything that was happening around them, in the midst of the upheavals he caught sight of her. It both terrified and delighted him.

WHEN THEY WENT into hiding, there were several people involved in concealing them, he especially remembered a woman from a religious community. Her strictness. Simon thought he recalled that she was the sister of the woman who had taken him along to church. The mood of these people would be changeable, their motives varied, there could be days they doubted, it was not so easy to understand why they all became helpers, perhaps it was by chance, perhaps they had a guilty conscience, perhaps their religion or some other conviction decreed it, regardless: Their approach varied. His parents always spoke carefully in low voices to these men and women, and gradually it dawned on him how dependent they were on them, how none of them would have been alive without the helpers who could also be called guards, and that they could anytime at all change their minds and disappear. It was the food the helpers brought that kept them alive, him and his family, their dependency made the captives helpless, Simon understood that, and how it was reflected in his parents’ expressions, how they talked to that woman who was frequently impatient and bad tempered, and whom they nevertheless never dared to contradict or confront despite her occasional unreasonableness. He recalled that his mother had broken down one evening after the woman had left, sobbing and saying that she could not stand it any longer.

Even power, the need to control that perhaps first came to light through this new influence over others, or perhaps it had always been there. That was part of the reason why the woman, and maybe several of the others as well, had gone along with helping them in the first place. None of us knew their genuine motives, Simon said.

HE TOLD ME again about his upbringing, the hiding place, eventually repeating many of the details, as though by repeating them, he held them tight. He described how everything in their hiding place had a stale taste of dust, even the air tasted of dust, the limited food they ate, the lukewarm water they drank, it is dust he thinks of first and foremost when he is trying to describe it.

He told me things he had never mentioned before, perhaps he had not remembered them earlier. It was exactly as if he had gained access to another room, he went inside, came out again, went in and out between the past and the present. But finally it seemed as though he could not get through, something was closed, the openness gradually passed, he shut himself inside. I had thought he wanted to tell the girls, but now he no longer wanted to talk about it. And one morning when I came into the living room, he was sitting in his chair with a blanket covering him, he must have risen during the night. He was sitting still with the blanket over his shoulders, with an expression, a grimace that I found disturbing. I became afraid, I shook him gently. He opened his eyes and looked at me. But he said nothing.

It did not pass. When the children were little, they played a game in which they made a pact not to speak, it was all about who could hold out the longest. Only the one magic word from any of them could break the pact.