Merethe Lindstrom - Days in the History of Silence

I thought you were friends, she said. You and Marija. You don’t really have many friends.

No, I responded.

The two of you can’t manage on your own. No one manages entirely on their own. I just don’t understand why.

WHY. I HAVE placed a blanket across my legs. I have just taken a nap. From the chair I can see the neighbor with his car, his son has come to help him clear out the garage, they are loading boxes and junk onto a trailer. He has lived here since the seventies, his wife moved out more than twenty years ago. He too has home help, a dark, pretty young African girl who arrives in the afternoons. She leaves the house before he returns home, apart from once a month on Sundays, when she undertakes a thorough housecleaning. Sometimes on the weekends he has friends to dinner, and I saw her go shopping with him once. It was only that one time. They were carrying shopping bags out of his car.

But here she is now, talking to the neighbor as he stands leaning against the trailer.

The first time Marija suggested she should come on a Saturday, I was not happy about it. Until then she had mainly come to our house on weekdays. I had confined her tasks to inside the house.

I can drive you into the city, she said, so you can get your glasses organized at the optician’s.

Of course she meant Simon’s car, he was still driving at that time, I wanted to ask her if she had a driver’s license, or if I ought to do the driving, I was unsure whether you could simply and without any fuss take any car and drive when you were a foreigner, even about it being legal or reasonable at all, I was thinking about the third-party insurance. But she had already picked up the car keys.

We drove into the city, we even took an extra turn over the bridge she said reminded her of a bridge in a city she had often visited as a child, she remembered, she said, they used to hang over the railings and fling stones at the seagulls.

Marija related that she had earlier had a small car she often drove to the university. This was the first time I found out that she had attended university. I was a bit surprised. I know why I was surprised, the home help had once studied at a university in a large city in her native country. She had studied medicine, exactly the same as Simon. But she never became a physician. One of the lecturers, she told me, was an oppositionist even during the Soviet period, an unusual, quite peculiar man. He made you think, she said, like a good teacher should. He was a famous neurologist, and he stood there talking to them at the university and explained the specific connections in the nervous system to them, synaptic plasticity and the axon’s growth cone. Had she been a little in love with him? The university was so ancient, she said, that the plaster was falling off the walls, and in an annex they had laid what she suspected were panels made of asbestos cement in the yard outside, the annex was later rebuilt, and parts of the asbestos fell off, but no one bothered about it. I enjoyed it, she said, and so you put up with all that. She said: I liked the smell, you know. The smell of books and the old halls. Sitting for hours and just thinking about one subject. I read. Everything else was completely immaterial . Money problems meant she had to give up after a couple of years. She had married, had a daughter. Her husband became ill, they struggled financially before they separated. She told me all of this on that one drive down to the city. She brought the car to a halt in a side street beside the city park.

When I emerged from the optician’s, she still sat waiting quietly in the car, her head fallen onto her chest, but I wasn’t sure whether she was sleeping, or just listening to the radio.

THE NEIGHBOR SLAMS the trailer tailgate shut and clambers into the vehicle, leaning out to shout an instruction to his son. I look at his home help, the young girl, thinking that she is barely more than sixteen, she lets herself in and hangs his quilt out the bedroom window, busies herself with the housework inside, probably washing his underclothes and tidying his shaving gear. Am I riled, is it the association it brings to mind that provokes me, or is it the displacement of a guilty conscience?

I went into a church. The church is situated nearby, with an avenue of linden trees leading up to an intersection, a field on the left-hand side, and when I turn around and look to the right it is directly in front of me. I have often walked past, as it is one of the places where I most enjoy going for a stroll, and a few times I also stop beside the churchyard. There is something desolate about the way the church is positioned there, and at the same time reassuring. Going inside is not so instinctive, since I doubt whether the edifice has anything to do with me. And all the same I sought it out that Friday morning a year ago. It was late summer then, and the leaves on the ancient linden trees beside the churchyard had the most vibrant hue. The church door was ajar, but it did not seem as though anybody was there. Abroad, in large cities, I have noticed church buildings that are open so people can enter and have a rest, meditate. A place of contemplation. However, this church situated in a quiet spot outside the city center, like other churches is locked unless there are regular services or other special events. Some restoration work was going on at that time. Perhaps that was why the door was lying open. Inside the chilly vestibule I remained standing and peered into the actual body of the church, the nave. There was no one there, only the rows of empty pews and the reredos depicting Christ triumphant on the cross. I have always felt a certain unease at the sight of the interior decoration of churches. The coolness of the walls, the stained-glass windows; everything on the one hand invites respect and yet nonetheless has a somewhat vainglorious quality, intended to provoke admiration. Holiness aspiring to be made manifest through aesthetics. They are also disturbing, these altarpieces. I have always thought so. The faces do not have expressions I can actually recognize, only attributes of humanity, but nevertheless incomprehensible, ethereal. The exalted. But I think more of the anguish that lies beneath. No, I don’t understand it. However the severity in this church was transformed, alleviated by the sunlight streaming through the windows on that particular day.

In the center of the room there was a stepladder with flecks of paint and perhaps plaster, and a green tarpaulin had been flung across the floor. I stepped around it. At the same time I heard what I think was a radio. The noise disappeared almost immediately, a door was opened somewhere farther inside, and the clergyman emerged from the doorway. He was an older man, but younger than me even so. I had seen him several times, and had always considered him rather serious and gloomy.

I once saw a movie, or was it a play, in which a woman confided in a pastor. She concluded it all by saying: It was my fault. Guilt is relative, the pastor answered her. Is it? I remember thinking when I heard him say that. I thought forgiveness was dependent on guilt as a given, constant dimension. That only the degree of the offense varied. But of course that is wrong. And the feeling of guilt does not always match the gravity of the crime. It may have been a similar confession he expected, the pastor, when he encountered me in the church that day.

I did not speak to him. He must have seen me standing there, but before he ventured as far as saying anything, I turned away. The stepladder looked as though it belonged there, providing an extraordinary sense of association because it appeared to be illuminated by the windows, it shone and was of course an all too obvious metaphor. As I crossed the vestibule, onto the church steps, a little group of men approached. Maybe they had finished their work for the day, and had arrived to pack up their belongings, they were four older men and a younger boy. From somewhere in Eastern Europe to judge by their conversation, they stood there chatting on the gravel in front of the church steps, only the boy walked past me, he had blue, splattered trousers, and wore a cap over his close-cropped hair, a solemn expression on his face, and I saw that he went in through the church entrance, walking slightly stooped, the doorway was lofty, and he bowed his head all the same. Inside the vestibule he remained standing for a moment, and when he turned around, perhaps to look for his companions, he met my gaze.