Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

Simon was preoccupied by the suitcase. During the years he was searching for his cousin and aunt, trying to find traces of them, he continually returned to the suitcase, his aunt’s suitcase that he remembered from the apartment before they had to leave for the hiding place. He wondered whether others might be able to help, whether it might be possible to track it down. His aunt’s suitcase that she had packed because she was waiting for her husband to fetch her, they would go into hiding together. He had seen it with his own eyes, it was a suitcase of the type that was common at that time, with mountings at the corners, canvas and leather material, straps to stretch over the clothes to keep them in place. He cannot remember his cousin’s face, but he remembers the suitcase clearly. It sat in the hallway, a suitcase like the ones belonging to his parents that later, after the war were always placed in an attic, and never taken out again because they do not travel, the two elderly people have become unschooled in everything to do with transport, they shut themselves increasingly inside the apartment. The suitcases were purchased in the same place, both those of his parents and his aunt’s. He has seen her opening it, taking things out and snapping the locks closed again, he imagines that it contained clothes, towels, toothbrushes and washcloths. His parents were also fed up with his aunt’s suitcase, they thought it was in the way, it was both optimism and obstinacy, they said, that made her refuse to unpack. Nevertheless they accepted it, bore with it, and with her plans. She was sorry she was unable to go into hiding with them, but insisted that her husband would collect her. She was young, they said when they talked about it, young and afraid.

He believes that on the day they were taken away, she had the suitcase with her, although it is not likely, a suitcase is overstating things, it has no place in all this. All the same, he imagines the suitcase. That she somehow or other manages to take it with her, that it accompanies her. She and her son, they sleep beside it, perhaps they even sit on it if there is room to do that. (Actually he knows that there is no room either to sleep or for a suitcase), they stay close beside it all the time, it would be a simple matter for someone to steal it or its contents, they must only hope. She always used to talk about what she had packed, his aunt, because it was important. Something materializes through the suitcase and its contents, a kind of tidiness and security. The suitcase and its contents bear witness to a possible destination for the journey, where things will be unpacked and put in their place. The clothes will be worn, the bedclothes will be slept in. The suitcase is a guarantee that this is actually a journey like other journeys, with the definition of such transportation always incorporating the possibility of traveling back to where you started. But at the terminus, where they are expelled, wrenched from the train together with all the others, it is taken from her. The suitcase is flung onto a pile of other people’s luggage. Then she stands there, Simon says. Without the suitcase. Is her son standing by her side? At that moment it dawns on her that they are not going to travel any farther.

HE HAS RECOUNTED this, and I have visualized it. It is easy to envisage those two. In a crowd of people, I think. In a herd being thrust backward and forward in a confined space, the two of them also jolted to and fro, caught among the others, dragged in one direction and then another, and at one moment during this scene, I imagine that they are separated, mother and son. Lose sight of each other. Those two who have been so close during these months alone in the apartment.

In everything that happens, in this movement of people who are shouting, falling, remnants of luggage, bundles being trampled, coats and winter jackets, infants and old people, his cousin is left standing on his own. He turns around, but sees no faces, only vague impressions, shapes, apparitions, hears complaints, shouts, sobbing from children like himself. Around him grows this mountain of people in motion, like a wall, a terrible, unstable wall from which parts are ripped away while new ones are added. Is he wearing something, something that gives him sufficient weight to remain standing on exactly that spot without being jostled along or knocked over? Perhaps a narrow rucksack or some other possession he is carrying, something he is now probably holding with both hands, clutching it to his chest. As though he is embracing it, keeping it safe and clinging to it at the same time. While the human wall continues to be shoved backward and forward once more, and simultaneously increases, like an organism through mitosis, a cell division before his very eyes. The boy’s mother is still part of this formation, and is carried forward like a light object being propelled onward by the current in a river. But the boy, the cousin, remains standing on the same spot. While he waits, he cannot do anything else of course, for her to be carried back to him.

In the evening we watch TV. Simon sits in his chair. I am uncertain whether he follows the action, although sometimes he too switches on the set, perhaps one of the things he does automatically, from old habit. There is something paradoxical about his benevolence toward this screen, with all its pestering, jabbering that never ends, even when there is the occasional break, it demands attention. He stares at the screen regardless of what is being shown, as though it is exactly that and nothing else he has been waiting for. I ask if it’s a bit cold, whether I should fetch a jacket. In the wardrobe I catch sight of the snail shell still lying there, I hold it in my hand for a moment. It is solid, but when I hold it up to the lamp, the light shines through the delicate edges. I wonder when the snail disappeared, why it abandoned such a perfect place, the exquisite curved corridor. I stroke the surface, a golden veneer, brittle and yet durable, before replacing it and closing the door.

I put the jacket over Simon’s shoulders, he nods as though I have asked him something. Perhaps it is a delayed reply. The TV continues droning. I open the book that Helena has left on the coffee table, the book about the First World War, I look quickly through it. Here is the old Europe. Lost platoons of soldiers, trench warfare on the western front. Attempts to break through. The Battle of the Somme. For days, months the slaughter continues, from July to November, the young boys fall through the paper pages. Names such as Tannenberg, Somme, Verdun. Between the dust jacket and the first page there is a folded sheet of paper. To my girls it says on this folded sheet. He has written it in his slightly shaky handwriting. Of course I don’t know how long it has lain there, but it is Simon’s handwriting, it must have been written more than a year ago, while he was still able to write.

I feel helpless at the sight of this letter that I had not asked to see. As with the application form, I don’t know what I should do with it. I stand there hesitating, before opening it and reading.

Not so long ago, when I was looking through some of our old papers, the papers belonging to Simon and me, I found another letter, or a rough draft of something that was probably intended to be a letter. I recognized the handwriting, it was inside a blank envelope, but I was unsure whether it was of any significance, it took some time for me to realize what it contained. When Simon was a relatively newly qualified physician, he made a friend. A friendship he later maintained through all these years. They went out and had dinner with other colleagues, and I think they talked about their work since they were in the same profession. It was a formal friendship, I don’t imagine that they ever confided much, a conventional relationship, deriving from and dependent on the codes that applied to friendship at that time. Naturally it came about that we invited this friend and his wife to various social events. We used to send them Christmas cards, in fact it was often me who wrote them. The couple responded with postcards to us every Christmas, formally decorated cards with the obligatory greetings.