Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

I do not remember if I returned his gaze, he had taken off the sunglasses, the deep impression on his nose left by the plastic, or whether I turned away, toward the window. I was scared. I visualized him on the bench in the city park when the darkness descended. I thought of the young women he had told me about, being led across the street toward the waiting vehicle. The baby.

He had already spoken a few times about the possibility of finding out more about his own family, there had been several relatives, a young aunt, a cousin too. He knew nothing about them, no one knew anything about them, what had happened after they had been discovered. They were gone, they were sent off in the same way as the family he had seen on the street that day. Probably for extermination, the atrocities in the camps.

Why now, what good will it do, I think I said. There’s nobody left, why should you keep looking?

Once he had shown me photographs of children on their way to a gas chamber, they could have been pupils in single file on a school outing, eight or nine years old and carrying what I recall as bags or small bundles in their hands, dressed in warm coats, but with bare, skinny legs above their shoes. Youngsters glancing at the photographer as they walked past. He had asked me what I thought, how anyone could kill a child. Do you practice in advance, he asked, do you calculate how long it will take? And what do you do afterward. Do you just make your way home?

He was talking about it again as we drove. I thought there was something tactless about it, as though he were being indiscreet, coarse, as though he were relating something inappropriate. It was not suitable.

The movement of the car. Our daughters sleeping.

I shushed him.

Don’t drag all that darkness in here, I said.

I don’t understand, he said. How it’s possible to stop thinking about it.

And when he said that, it felt like a complaint, I felt insulted. He continued to talk for a while longer there in the car, until perhaps I asked him to stop, or perhaps he stopped by himself.

I looked nervously behind me at the children, at him with his suntanned hand on the steering wheel. The August sunlight through the car window. At any rate that is how I picture it now, afterward.

Later, when the girls were teenagers, they wanted to know things about us, they wondered why we never visited any of his relatives. It is surprisingly easy not to say anything, not to tell, to remain silent. I did not want to be part of it. For the girls to become part of it. We told them it had been a small family, we said nothing about the brother Simon had lost contact with, we stated that his parents had been old, they were gone now. Which of course was also true. His parents were already old immediately after the war.

We waited so long to tell them about it. I think we waited too long. By a certain point it had become too late.

I look at Simon and it strikes me that the worry caused his face to age many years before its time, his frontal bone marked with a fine horizontal line I have always assumed to be a scar from his childhood, a little wound that has healed. The kind of scar children get easily when they are playing. But it could also be an expression he often has, a way of wrinkling his brow, that has left its mark.

I found a snail shell. I found it not so long ago in the closet in our room. I do not understand how it came to be there. I opened the door of the wardrobe, and there it lay.

I looked at it for a while. It was one of the big snail shells we see now and again in the garden, a reddish-brown color, beautiful markings, and of course there was no longer a snail inside it, it was empty. The texture was brittle and at the same time somewhat distasteful in such an unexpected place. It was lying there as though it had been placed there deliberately, I thought. As if it were the intention to collect something there, in between the clothes.

I stepped into the living room to Simon, saying: Did you put it there? The snail shell in the closet.

But of course he did not reply. He looked at me seriously, as though he was the one who was worried about me.

I walked back to the wardrobe with the idea of throwing away the snail shell or at least removing it. However, I then thought it had a kind of meaning. Whatever the reason for it lying there, it had a significance. It might be a joke, perhaps he had placed it there as a kind of joke. Would he play a joke?

I do not understand it. And the first thing I thought when I discovered the snail shell was that it might be a statement. It seemed so obvious it was meant to be there, that it had been placed there, like an exclamation mark, placed there for some reason that I did not immediately understand.

Simon had placed it there, I had no doubt about that. I tried to understand. I have continually returned to the wardrobe, peering at it, but I am no nearer any kind of explanation. Now I have decided to let the snail shell be, I disregard it, I have not opened the door for a while. Perhaps I shall simply get rid of it.

The changes in the brain when a person becomes old, the obvious ones, and then all the others. Incomprehensible. It is not made clear precisely what is meaningful when behavior changes. One of his colleagues explained it to me. It is really Simon’s profession, Simon used to talk all the time about his profession, lecture me. And there he sat, not so long ago, at a physician’s office in the city, while his young colleague examined him. The things they do, efficient and convincing. Things are connected to and fro, cannulas gliding underneath the tissue of skin, machines humming. I watch everything, the rituals, the nuances are as incomprehensible to me as what takes place in a church. It must be because I am lacking in faith.

Once they also took him in for tests. Simon alone in his room, allocated a bed, everything white beneath the intense light, his head seeming too small up near the headboard. I sat beside him and waited. Increasingly more uncertain about what we were there for.

They found nothing. Nothing other than what is to be expected at his age, his young colleague said. He said no more.

It is up to me now to draw the boundaries between the expected and something else.

Something else — a kind of wasteland where one’s personality is deleted. This cannot be calculated. I have to interpret him like a recalcitrant poem.

I know I ought to consider the application form. Helena has reminded me about it, but I am postponing it. I look at the envelope, its grave, anonymous exterior.

I attempted to speak to the manager at the day care center, she seems experienced, an older nurse. I have liked her since the very first time we arrived there and she greeted us.

But I cannot make the decision, she said, when I asked her opinion. Whether it was irresponsible to let him stay at home.

I wondered whether I should tell her about the snail shell.

Perhaps it is not classic dementia, she said. And you are the only person who can decide who he has become, whether this is him.

For you are the one who knows him best and who knows, she said. Who he really is.

I WANT SOMEONE to give me permission to do it. To pretend it is not there, this eccentricity. That it can simply be ignored. Even the silence. Then I may be able to tell myself it is not alarming.

But how can I know which characteristics are him. There may of course be something genuine in that, the way he takes off, this stubborn silence. What if it is not that, but the rest of it that was a role he played, that he has now laid aside. And he has emerged at last. Like the girls who appeared from behind the bedsheet they hung up in the living room as children, after dressing up in a variety of roles, in order finally to receive the applause as themselves.