Merethe Lindstrom: Days in the History of Silence

I used to phone him when he went out, after a few hours I phoned, and a conversation ensued about what he should bring back, as he usually bought some groceries on the way home. I mentioned what we required, and there was no need for him to write it down, he remembered it by heart.

He has never liked talking on the telephone, I have always been the one who did most of the talking. But a change came about, I did not notice it in the beginning, not for the first weeks or months, it crept in slowly. The pauses, the stillness. He ended the conversations so abruptly that I sometimes phoned back to ask if I had said something wrong.

No, what could it be, he replied. And it was these responses that made me anxious. He always gave the same answer. As though he had a short list of replies he used alternately and held the list up to his eyes, picking out the responses that might suit. And sometimes they did not suit.

He could return home with the groceries, or else he had forgotten them. I said I would make dinner, are you hungry, no, thanks for asking, he might say, or I hadn’t thought about it. He went through and sat down with a book, until I placed the food in front of him and he would maybe take one mouthful and then another a while later, until the food was cold and by then it was late in the evening.

His silence came gradually over the course of a few months, half a year. He might say thanks for the meal or bye. He has become as formal as a hotel guest, seemingly as frosty as a random passenger you bump into on a bus. Only now and again do I see him standing gazing out the window or smiling at something he is reading or watching on television, and I think he is back. As though it really is a journey he has embarked upon. But if I ask what he is watching, what is amusing, he just looks at me uncomprehendingly. The physician, one of his junior colleagues, says he has quite simply become old. The solution, for of course there are solutions to situations like this, why should we consult a physician otherwise, is a center for the elderly, a day care center where Simon spends time twice a week.

I drive him. I always drive him places. He sits in the passenger seat of the car and waits until I arrive. The first time we went there, we were greeted by a manager who escorted us along corridors reminiscent of tunnels with plastic walls, pale institutional gray, decorative graphics of anodyne subjects, doors with wooden hearts, and at the foot of one of the corridors a room with glass doors. Inside this recreation area was a little group of people. No one looked up when we entered. The old people sat at a table, two members of staff were conversing quietly. Simon got a chair at the table with the others. He continued smiling. But just as I was about to leave, his gaze followed me. His eyes, hands on the table, the slumped shoulders in that room, in that place. It is not a place where you belong.

When I come out again now, there are often two young care workers standing smoking at the entrance. I have seen one of them drop a cigarette butt on the ground and tramp on it as I walk past. Such a disheartening motion. Several times I have remained standing in the parking lot, like a mythological figure, filled with doubt, this is the border between the underworld and our own world, I walk across the little stretch of asphalt, with Simon in the corridors inside, if I turn around now, he will disappear forever. I need to tell this to someone, how it feels, how it is so difficult to live with someone who has suddenly become silent. It is not simply the feeling that he is no longer there. It is the feeling that you are not either.

I look around the house, everything has its place here too, part of an order. It is so tidy, like a museum or a church, the objects seem to be on display. Few of them do I still have any use for, or have any practical value. They belong to social rituals that are no longer performed to any extent, or if they are performed, rarely have any meaning. They are reduced to a striking series of memories. The old clock above the table, the tea service in the cabinet behind glass doors. It might even be that the house exists to provide a home for these items, to a greater degree than it exists for us.

It was because of the house and all it contains, these artifacts, that four or five years ago we employed a cleaner. I had never had any help before, I did not want home help. Our daughters suggested that we obtain paid help. It is not unusual in this neighborhood. On a few afternoons a week I have seen a little army of young and middle-aged women walking between the villas, letting themselves into the well-protected houses, turning off alarms, security systems. Inside the empty houses I expect they take out washing buckets and scouring cloths, fill them with water and chemical detergents, waltzing around in a miasma of bleach, washing the muck off toilet seats and bathroom floors, feeding pet animals confined indoors, emptying the contents of the trash cans, tidying away toys from the floor in the children’s rooms. After a few hours they let themselves out and disappear down the road. I did not want to have a stranger in, but there were no arguments I could use to rationalize this opposition. The girls, our daughters, were of the opinion that we needed help . It is a large house, they said.

Simon was not keen either to allow a stranger into our house, into our rooms. He was still the same old Simon at that time. It was before the silence took over. We were agreed that we would do the work ourselves.

But in the end we gave in to the nagging and employed a helper. For the meantime, was the intention. It is strange to use the word employment about our relationship with Marija. Although it was of course a form of employment. After a while it seemed far from being anything to do with the relationship between an employer and an employee. The cleaner was more like someone who had come to visit us, a guest we would like to come again.

Everyone liked her. Marija.

She had been with us for almost three years when we had to let her go. Something happened, something that was impossible to get over. When I think about it now, I know it might perhaps have been overlooked by other people. Despite its gravity. Maybe by us too, perhaps we could have ignored what happened. It was the closeness that made it impossible, we had become too familiar. Precisely that she was more like a friend and guest. I think that was it.

The girls were disappointed and angry all the same, the two older ones still are. Although it was over a year ago.

But it was worse for us. For Simon and me.

Dear Marija . I still sometimes formulate that sentence, composing a letter, finding the sentences for myself. I would never write it to her, and I would not write dear , not now afterward. If I should write a letter, I would begin in a neutral fashion, with the date and year, and I would swiftly come to the point, whatever that now would be. But why then write to her at all, just to say that she continually manifests herself as a word, a sentence. A glimpse of her can even turn up in my thoughts; I see her sitting in the kitchen buttering slices of bread, drinking tea with sugar and milk, extending her long legs underneath the table and smiling at me. I have tried to convince myself it is more like an obsession, that she still occupies her place here with us, even if it is only a mental place, as when you cannot step on lines, and the lines appear everywhere. You try to think about something else, and the same thought continues to whirl around and around in your consciousness.

I do not miss her. I have a lot to do.

But there is something. Something I miss or perhaps I should rather say lack. She must have served a function, something more than I realized, since I notice this lack. Is that what we are for each other, a function others also can fulfill. I do not like that thought.