Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

I didn’t possess that word.

And there we were, going around in the house, and there were times, I thought, that it appeared he was simply waiting for me to come out with something, an answer. As though the silence was a challenge rather than an absence of words.

SIMON AND HIS closest family were taken to a different place during the night, a new hiding place where they stayed until the war was over, they all survived. But their relatives, their friends, their life outside had vanished. His parents were changed after the war, Simon said. They just became older, they always seemed small when he visited them in the rooms of their new apartment. The transition to his own adult life, when he visited his parents less often, coincided with their transition to these other rooms, in their new apartment, that in comparison with the hiding place seemed gigantic, and made its inhabitants tiny. They were submerged, becoming extinguished by the massive walls, the enormous high-ceilinged rooms of the apartment where they lived, as though by solemnity. Passed away long before our own children were born. He did not manage to maintain contact with the brother who had shared the silence during all the time they spent in their hiding place. Their conversations were always short and hesitant. As though they could not let go of the only thing that had saved them, the silence. Their contact is erased, it takes only a few years.

He still received letters from his second cousin, Irit Meyer. She also forwarded letters from the organization that was searching for further information about those who disappeared during the Holocaust. The little round second cousin, or his “dear cousin” as he liked to call her, who was no longer so plump, but stayed in a nursing home in Schöneberg in Berlin, she sent a picture of herself, and she was surrounded by all the things I remembered from her little apartment, probably all the furniture was simply crammed together in a smaller area, and in the midst of it all she sat with the same exuberant hairstyle as in the prewar photographs. By her side there was a man smiling oddly as though he were pulling down his top lip at the same time as he tried to push up his bottom lip and the corners. Ralph and I, she wrote. But she wrote nothing about who this Ralph was, I assumed that he was another resident. Although she had moved to the nursing home, she wrote her own little letters about her existence down there. Letters that I opened and handed to him right up until they stopped coming sometime last year, and I haven’t had the strength to find out why, in order to avoid telling Simon about yet another person who has gone.

His cousin. His cousin was missing. He was this child nobody found. Simon searched for years for information about him. Where he was killed, precisely what had happened. Only recently something has turned up, it has taken a long time to find out.

Before the silence it was this cousin who preoccupied Simon, this young cousin, perhaps also his aunt. He would not rest, he insisted, not until he knew what had happened to them, a sentence he had from one of Irit’s letters, she had at least written something similar. Previously he replied to all her letters, and she forwarded the odd letter from this organization. Her letters enclosed photographs copied onto glossy, flimsy photo paper. Their kin. People who, when I look at these pictures of them, manifest themselves as illustrations in a book, none of them resembling him. They are vaguely obscure, shuttered and restricted within the photographs like memorial plaques from which no one can any longer tear them.

HE NEVER TOLD them about it, although he planned and practiced all these evenings, nights, days, when he went over the painful aspects of the past with me. Instead he became more and more silent. As though the recollection of the past, of these events, had been only the start of an interior journey, backward, as though the memories he had initially considered so vivid, changed, he said they were no longer so easy to access, complained that he felt as though he were standing outside them looking in, they became untouchable, tableaux on display in glass cases, they were something he could not catch hold of. And therefore could no longer attempt to explain. In the end he chose silence. Was that how it was?

I think I see him standing leaning over the newspaper that is placed on the table, he often looks at the newspaper pages as though he is studying one of his maps, leafing restlessly through, putting it away, taking it up again, as though he has to check once more that the overview he has gained, the impression of changes and movements within this unstable atlas, still holds good. Now he is bent over the newspaper, if I ask him what he wants for dinner, he will shrug his shoulders and smile. It’s up to me.

I look at his hand again. He turns the page of the newspaper. I go across to him, he looks up in surprise, perhaps I place my hand over his on the table. We remain like this for several minutes.

I AWOKE ONE night after the unfortunate wedding anniversary, it was about seven or eight weeks later, and he was not there. He had left the bed and gone into the living room.

When I came in he was sitting in the semidarkness.

Simon, I said, I could hear the uncertainty in my own voice, I am anxious. I do not like him sitting up during the night.

It is two months ago now, he said. He meant Marija. Her dismissal. Two months since she had left us. Yes, I answered.

It will be that.

I believe it was.

He stopped, waited.

I think it was impossible to know.

Yes, I said.

He just sat. He had a glass of cognac in front of him. He seldom drank late in the evening.

We could have loaned her money, he said.

Why should we have done that, I had an urge to say.

Yes, I said. Paid our way out of it, I thought without saying it aloud. As though we had actually done something wrong. As though it had been us.

But it’s not too late, he said. We could perhaps get in touch with her. Tomorrow. Perhaps give her a small loan all the same.

I hesitated with my reply, he nursed his glass carefully.

Yes, we could do that right enough, I said.

He stood up, his movement showed signs of him having sat there for a long time, stiffness in his back. He stepped over to the window, looking out at the garden. I knew he dreamed often, that he still had nightmares.

I too went over to the window. I was thinking about my brother, he said. It’s a long time since I have thought of him.

I nodded. Outside, a bird flew low over the lawn in the darkness. He peered after it too. I saw that he was old, it was quite obvious now, I noticed it in the same way you might notice that someone has become soaked in the rain or has forgotten to fasten some buttons on a shirt. It feels of similarly transitory importance when I note it in him. Although it’s not like that. And I thought: I must appreciate that it isn’t transitory. He is not going to be able to shrug off old age.

We could invite some old colleagues, he said.

Yes, I replied.

It would be nice to meet someone. We ought to go to bed soon, I said. He finished his cognac, placing the empty glass on the windowsill.

What were you thinking about your brother, I said.

He looked at me, said that it was hazy, everything had happened while he was half asleep.

I have forgotten to switch off the light, he added. The light is still on in the garage.

He released his breath, waited, and in the ensuing silence that drew all attention toward itself, he remained standing there with his hand halfway over his mouth. Let’s go to bed, he said.

HE HAS NEVER made any attempt to find his brother in recent years. If he knew where his brother was, I don’t know whether he would look him up. I even mentioned it once, that he hadn’t really taken care of his brother. His brother existed somewhere, in an apartment, in a town, even though a long time had passed. His brother who walked about and remembered and knew, and could have talked about it. In contrast to those who were gone.