Merethe Lindstrom: Days in the History of Silence

All the same we were content with the meeting, with ourselves, Simon and I.

I am standing in the garden and feeling the heat. One or two of the windows are slightly ajar. Helena phoned early today, asking if there was anything I needed. I stand there looking at the wide lawn and the two trees at the end beside the low wall, the entrance to the little grove of trees where the intruder may have disappeared.

No, I said to her. I don’t need anything in particular.

But now I’m wondering if I should perhaps have asked her to come over, maybe she wanted me to ask her, she has always been circumspect, there was something she wanted to say to me. Her expression is cautious, unassuming, she has been like that ever since she was small, the complete opposite of her two older sisters. She resembles her father, she resembles Simon. There can be so much I miss out on, that I do not understand. The application form she gave me is still lying on the hall table. The application about residential care for Simon. Somewhere he can stay. A so-called home for the elderly. She no longer wants him to stay here with me. If only he would keep calm, she says. And if you had talked together like before. Yes indeed, I miss Marija. It is a lie that I don’t, I would have asked her what she thought. The conversations we would have had about Helena, about the recent silence, Simon’s silence. All the same it seems as though his silence and her absence are connected. If Marija had never left, everything would have continued as before. I sit down on one of the garden chairs on the terrace. I eat a candy, it seems strangely insubstantial, it does not remind me of anything I have ever tasted before.

Mom, Helena said on the phone. I’m so worried about you, you and Dad.

SHE HAS NO idea that I nearly gave him away once before, many years earlier. How would she have remembered that time, his depression, she was so little then.

It began with some letters arriving, several letters. He found out more about what had happened to his relatives during the war. Almost all his relations apart from his mother, father and brother were sent to extermination camps in the course of the war years. It was only thanks to the hiding place he hated so much that they were saved, he and his parents, his brother. The others are crossed out of history. Friends he played with, girls he liked, neighbors, the man in the store, teachers, classmates, every single member of his mother’s and father’s family, they are all gone. He felt guilty, I think he felt guilty to be alive, as perhaps everyone would have felt guilty. One day you awaken, and it is like an eclipse of the sun, one of those rare ones when the surface of the full moon covers the sun completely and it becomes dark at midday. You go out with your sandwiches at lunchtime and sit down in the park, beside the lake, looking at the trees, at the texture of the leaves, at the people walking past, now and again someone you know, who perhaps says hello, recognizing you, everything is so indisputably alive, you do not go home, you do not go anywhere. You wish for nothing more than to sit there. For hours. Before someone catches sight of you, becomes concerned and phones somewhere.

And then the dreams. Performances just as clear and transparent as daylight, reproductions of events. They come more and more often when you are awake. The hiding place, the mustiness, the listening silence. The stairway.

He could still feel it in his body, Simon said, the moment on the stairs, as though he were still standing on the stair outside the hiding place that afternoon, looking at the men in uniforms down in the street. Heard their shouts, heard them running up the stairs, at that time when he thought they were surely about to spot him. He is sitting on the same step, not knowing what he should do now that everything is over. The moment lasts, he hears them distinctly, thinks he notices them standing above him with their weapons trained on his head. He looks up, there is no one there. He still hears them, but they are not here, they are in the entry next door, running up the stairs, shouting, knocking, he thinks they smash down a door. He can still see a glimpse of the street through the window. From the corner where he has curled up, he sees a family being led out. An elderly couple, three younger women, a middle-aged man carrying a baby on his arm. One of them drops something, a scarf, a blanket, or a jacket, he sees anyhow one of them dropping something on the cobblestones, and being shoved forward. Simon does not know who they are. He has been shut inside all the time he has been living here in this street. He cannot manage to feel sorry for them. He is relieved of course, although that word is a simplification compared to what he is feeling. In his thoughts this is not only something he observes, he wonders if there is not some kind of connection, a causality between his forbidden interlude on the stairway outside the hiding place and these people, the old couple, a family being picked up by the police. Perhaps he is one of the last to see them together.

•

IT WAS NOT possible to explain. He could not explain it to anyone, it happened so suddenly. The depression. In those difficult periods he could continue for several weeks without being present, without noticing the days pass. I was the only one who knew. Not the children. I haven’t told them about it, about the eclipse of the sun. About their relatives, all the people from his past who are gone.

Our conversations about it later, when he had changed his mind and felt that we should talk, tell them. I recall it as a clear picture, an imprint on my retina. I remember he was young, that he was still a young man, and we two were sitting beside each other, he in the driver’s seat, I beside him, we were driving along a stretch of straight road with summer cottages and cabins, extensive fields, small gardens, huge farms with barns and farmhouses.

We had been at our summer cottage that day. The cottage was new, and we were so proud of it. An ordinary little cottage by the sea. It had been hard work to pack everything into the car when it was time to drive home. The children, tired out after swimming, falling asleep in the rear seat.

Simon’s hand on the steering wheel. I remember it having a pale synthetic leather cover. That bright afternoon. And what he was talking about, the thoughts he was struggling with, that continued to bother him. It was like driving into a tunnel, shutting out the light.

I don’t think we should talk about it now, I said.

But when will we talk about it, he whispered.

Once I turned away. I glanced at the girls sleeping on the backseat. They were lying in a heap, their skinny arms, breastbones, knees, brown from the sun. Only Helena was moving in her sleep, her tummy had been a bit sore before she dropped off, like the others she had hauled off her T-shirt and was lying with her top bare, it was before seat belts were compulsory, they were just lying there, as though we had flung them down, almost naked, they liked to snooze like that. The warm August sunlight was shining all around us. Simon by my side. He was wearing rectangular, black sunglasses, a severe style I thought emphasized his gravity when he talked. I did not want that seriousness. I have a memory of turning around and stretching my arms behind me, covering the girls with a sheet because of the open window.

What he talked about. The children sleeping. I wanted to keep it separate, keep them outside that dark tunnel. They are going to want it themselves, he said, to get to know something about it.

I looked around at the stores we were driving past, the tiny houses and gardens. I wanted to be a part of all that outside, that was what I wanted.

They are so little, I said.

Yes, but later, he replied.

He asked if I wanted them to grow up without knowing who he was, his background, the Jewish family. He turned to face me.