Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

I thought now that the works were finished, he would not be there so often, he would not stand outside talking to the workers, following the work, they too would soon be finished with what they were doing. And the church door would be locked as it had always used to be.

LATER I TALKED to him a couple of times. It dawned on me that perhaps I was searching all the same for a listener in a context such as that. A backdrop, a superstructure that offered an opportunity. An opportunity for something I am unable to articulate. I could not walk by, that was what I felt. It was as if I had postponed something, and now I could not walk by, push it away any longer. The actual building located there, that I often stroll past on my walks, is like an assertion I have tried not to respond to, something I have delayed. I envy individual people their piety, their conviction. Those who have not appreciated the need for belief and consolation, they are truly naïve. Naïve enough to go to bed each night and get up again each morning without giving a thought to the despondency that surrounds them. But the need does not make one into a believer. At least it hasn’t done so for me. I would so like to understand. I have been at Sunday school and children’s lessons of course, but it is like different dots on a sheet of paper, suggesting the outlines of something, a certain shape, but there is no line drawn between them.

I like the actual story. The writer who is wise and reasonable, intelligible dramatic art, a plain and simple, but not stupid narrative, the narrator has his hidden intentions that will be revealed along the way, the protagonist falls into various traps, but first and foremost in order to learn from it, never so serious that he cannot be saved, and all the threads are drawn together in an inalterable conclusion.

When I recall clergymen from my youth, I remember best the distance, the respect. I have carried two of my daughters before men like them, I assume they really believe that they have had a call from God. As far as the baptism was concerned I did not go through with it because anyone insisted, it was just what one did. Then I held the tiny bare heads above the baptismal font and doubted as the sign of the cross was made from their forehead to their chest and from side to side, and just as much afterward. One of them screaming and sweaty and bundled up in a handed-down scrap of material one uses on that kind of occasion, the other silent and staring at me as if I were about to immerse her in the sea and let her drift down to its sandy bed. Solemn, resigned. The youngest is not baptized.

The interior, the sacristy. A place to go with a feeling of guilt. Perhaps you hand over the feeling of guilt in a church because you do not know what else to do with it. In order to find a place where significance is assigned to it, with no objections raised. There are so few places to go that you can attach significance to, as Marija once said.

The pastor probably thought I was a believer, or had become so in my old age, out of anxiety or regret.

The feeling of guilt. It belongs with that uneasiness, that transitory uneasiness that can surface when I wake during the night and lie there without falling asleep again. Did I want to seek out the church in order to hold that up against a background of deeper meaning? If I wished to be closer to the church. Can’t it simply have been a desire to be part of something, a context, or at least some kind of contact? But perhaps it is also partly a feeling of guilt. Guilt, that binds us to others just as much as every other emotion. Perhaps more.

HE WOULD HAVE been so much older now, my son, I have difficulty picturing him in my mind. I kept his clothes, the clothes he did not take with him. They are in the basement. I did not use them for the girls, I must have felt that they were his. Or perhaps it was for my own sake that I did not make use of them for any of the other children.

I went to find him, after all the years and the silent battle between us, Simon and me. Maybe I did it for Simon’s sake, but it may also have been for my own. I wanted to see who he had become, what he would say to me, whether I had caused anything, any harm. It was only a couple of years ago. I found the name Simon had kept safe and looked up an address in a newly renovated area. I stood for a while on that street, looking at the entrance to an apartment block where the residents were coming and going, and at one point I spotted a youngish man and two little girls emerge from the stairway at the front of the building, one of the girls had an umbrella under her arm that she was trying to open, her father tried to help her, and after several attempts the child obviously became impatient and rushed inside the entrance, with her father following after. The door slammed behind them. I thought that it could have been him, for a second I thought that, but I knew it did not add up. It wasn’t him, he was too young. I hesitated slightly before finding the apartment number I had been given, and finally rang the doorbell. I stood on the sidewalk and glanced up at the façade. There was traffic in the street, cars driving past. A woman leaned out from one of the windows above me, supporting herself with her forearms on the windowsill, taking a couple of puffs of her cigarette, peering down at me, before closing the window again. No one opened the door, I rang the doorbell a few more times. There was no one at home, perhaps I was just there at the wrong time of day.

I took the bus home. I let it lie, I was cowardly and did not tell Simon about it. I was relieved, but perhaps I was also, without quite being able to explain it, disappointed.

They phoned later from an office that had given me assistance, I had asked them to call. The woman I spoke to on the phone asked whether I had found my way, and when I said I was unsure whether I had been given the correct name and address, replied in a subdued voice that it was possible to continue the search, it sometimes took time, families could for example have moved abroad, and as though she guessed something from my response, a doubt, she added that we would certainly be successful if I really wanted to be.

A PHOTOGRAPH WAS taken of us. Me with the child, my son, before I gave him away. He is leaning back slightly, perhaps he was afraid of the flash, I don’t remember who took it. I am sitting ramrod straight with the baby, the infant balanced on my knee as though he can really sit up on his own, but I am supporting him with both hands, otherwise he would obviously fall over, he is unsteady, but I am holding him with the palms of my hands parallel, as though I were holding a parcel, a bag, if you removed the child from the picture, it would just look as though I were measuring something, demonstrating the thickness, the width, there is no pride in my expression, no happiness. I am looking at the back of his head. As he pulls backward. I have no idea where it comes from, whose idea it was to take this despondent photograph. Perhaps it was taken at the adoption office, or earlier that same day. I search my facial expression on that day, and think I discern something, is it guilty conscience, shame?

It is a dream now, remote and hazy. I tend this grave belonging to a stranger. It is always silent in the afternoon, I like to be here, around Christmastime I buy a wreath, there are lanterns placed on some of the graves at that time of year, there are other people going around arranging things. No one asks me who I am here for. Actually I don’t know myself either.

It can be called a memory trace in the brain. I read it somewhere. When a memory is first laid down, after enough time has elapsed and it has been recalled enough times, the synaptic alterations can become permanent. And parts of the brain used to retain the memory are not necessary to call it forth, it has become like a trace, a photograph, a picture that is maybe always going to be found there.