Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

I have a photograph of Marija. In the photo she is on an outing with us. She is so cheerful, we are having a picnic on a sloping bank in the forest, we are laughing at the picture being taken. It strikes me when I look at it now. Marija in the photograph: She has not said anything yet. She is as she was, before. The picture seems so innocent, she is sitting there. Cheerful, waving, with a lunch box and a thermos flask on her lap.

It feels as though I could have stopped her, intervened on this day that looks so flawless and simple in the picture, held her there, said something or made a move to ward off the action that causes her to leave, to be gone. That she is soon out of our lives.

As though that would have helped anything.

THE PERSON I have been closest to, apart from my children, is Simon. I miss a voice, that is what I miss. Sometimes I miss the time Marija was here so strongly that I cannot comprehend that she has left. I wake and Simon is still by my side. Simon’s body, the same long fingers, the same familiar movements when he turns around, sits up in the bed. But he has traveled into himself. The territory we shared is closed off, locked in the same way that I am shut off from Marija. I tell myself that they both exist somewhere. I just have to accept the distance. As it applies to her we are talking about tens of miles, about hours, a day’s journey. Perhaps I could have done that someday, journeyed.

I am not going to do it. There is something paradoxical about it, if she had been silent, she would still have been here. But he is the one who is silent, who has gone, without words he becomes almost invisible.

At the beginning, a few letters arrived. Her handwriting, postmarked Latvia on a pale stamp. A pretty little bundle of three or four letters, I don’t know what they contain, and I don’t know whether more will come, I won’t open them anyway. It is done now, I cannot undo it. I saw on television that there was a news report about Latvia, I tried to turn up the volume on the TV. The remote control is faulty and before I managed to do anything, they had changed the topic.

Her words, her voice that day, how she comes into sight, most of the time I am able to shut it out, there is something about the clock, that harsh ticking. When I first hear it, it is more strident than anything else. That is all I hear.

IT WAS SEVERAL months after the concert. We were sitting in the kitchen. Marija was looking through the mail. That morning our neighbor had begun to tidy the lawn with edging shears, the neighbor who sometimes irritates me, the guy who employs the young women. Now he was standing beside the fence busy with this machine, as though he were testing the motor. What is he up to, Marija said, she started to talk about this neighbor. She had mentioned him several times before, or perhaps we had talked together about him. Maybe I was the origin of her displeasure, she may have adopted my antipathy.

We watched him through the kitchen window. Walking along the outer edge of the lawn, holding the machine, stopping it, bending over and clearing something away before starting it up again.

She said it in Latvian. And nevertheless I understood what she said. The tone of voice. The word.

He must be a Jew.

What did you say? I asked.

And she repeated it. So that I should understand.

She stood in the middle of the kitchen, between the table and the window, she was still clutching the bundle of mail, and repeated what she had said. Repeated it calmly in my own language, that he was probably one of them. She said that. Them . To be sure that I caught her meaning, she probably wanted to explain.

And then it started. She went on and on, talked and talked. I kept my eyes on the water faucet, the sink, the floor, the window ledge. In the background was the noise of those snarling shears, on and off, on and off. What she said was so banal, like a child retelling a fairy story and rattling off the words of others, stylized and concise, it became an overstated soliloquy in which each word leads on to the next, everything has to be memorized in the right order, because that order is the only logic to be found in the story. It is found only within its own compulsory neurotic framework, its own tautology. Spiteful and simple. The simplicity of the cliché, overused words, the language of tired phrases. About them .

I thought she would never finish. When she stopped, it was because of a detail. She had discovered something when she looked at the stack of mail and lifted the letter sitting on top, she asked if this wasn’t a letter I had been waiting for. Simon had also come in, I did not know how much of the tirade he had caught, but I could see on his face, the astonishment, that he had heard enough to understand.

She stood with this letter in her hand, as though it really meant something, I must have asked her to open it, for she started to talk about its contents. She was preoccupied by the letter now, she had shifted her focus and was indignant about something she read there.

I sat down on the chair because I had just stood up as though to stop what was going on, as though it could be warded off by such a movement, but of course it couldn’t, and when I realized that, at the same time as I realized what it was that had happened, I let myself drop, without resistance down on the chair and it felt like a blow when the seat hit my bottom.

Like a punishment.

WE LOOKED AT each other, Simon and I, that day in the kitchen. He in the doorway, immediately afterward he excused himself and went out. He was going on an errand and was away for several hours, Marija washed the floors upstairs and sorted through some old towels that she was going to throw out. She left early. When he returned, we prepared dinner, he and I, in silence, or a stillness that seemed to contain an enduring intensity, with a low-frequency sound, like a repetition, an echo of the neighbor’s machine, the machine that had been on the go all afternoon. We both attempted to ignore it, the alarm, dreadful, low, but just as urgent, insistent. In the evening we read, in our individual chairs in the living room. We postponed it. When we began to talk again, it was only a possibility. By conversing we would reach into that room, I thought, where everything existed, who we were. Who we could not be. What we had tried to avoid.

What we must do. We postponed it, we spent a few days in that condition.

But it turned out exactly like that. That was exactly what happened.

One afternoon he had sat in the chair where he likes to sit. His voice was softer than usual, he was probably trying to keep calm.

We must, he began. It seemed as though he was searching, for an opening in something that was shut tight. I said: We ought perhaps to try to.

No, he said.

No, I suppose not, I said.

I can’t see that it will change anything.

We ought to say, I said, we ought to say something to her.

But what do you think we should say.

We let her go, as Simon put it. She ought to have a reference, I thought. I know how some people treat cleaners. I said that we ought perhaps to give her a reference. But how would that reference look, he said. We arrived at the decision that it would be difficult to write anything supplementary.

Neither of us said anything. To her. And we never told them about it. I did not tell my daughters about what happened, her opinions, her hatred. About Marija. I did not let them in.

I must say something. It can’t be kept quiet any longer. But what can I say.

Now it is silent when the cleaner has gone. Silent in the morning and in the evening. We each sit in our individual chairs, he pretends to read, and closes his eyes. I pretend not to notice.

THE MORE I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was unsuccessful, even that was unsuccessful. The retreat into silence. I should have said something. How could I trust the words so little. Trust my words so little that I had to make her silent. We who talked together, she and I.