I walk to the mailbox, and find the newspaper damp. The newspaper and two letters. Before we moved in here as newlyweds, we had been living for a short time on the other side of the city, down beside the harbors and the massive bridge. During our first days here, we simply walked about from room to room, and wondered where we should place our furniture. All these rooms, all these things. Like the nearby church the house is built of stone, it dates from around 1930. Both buildings are almost empty most of the time, it strikes me, apart from the few fleeting moments on feast days and special occasions when they rapidly fill up with other people. Holy days. Christmas Eve. Wedding days.
Our name is on the far too shiny mailbox, it was a gift. A present from her, from Marija. The first time I saw her, she was standing right there, with her back turned, beside the old mailbox. I saw from the window that she put something into the box, before walking off. The postman, who was on his way to us, must also have seen what she did, because after she left, he remained standing there and waited for me with the mail in his hand. I think he was pleased. Perhaps at the opportunity to say something he had long wanted to say. He didn’t smile, but he could have smiled. He had the expression of someone who wanted to smile.
I asked her, the postman said to me, what she was doing here.
Oh yes, I replied.
She didn’t answer, he went on. Perhaps she doesn’t speak Norwegian. She might be one of those East European girls who do cleaning. I think so. They’re always putting notes into the mailboxes, filling them up with trash.
He peered at the yellow note I was raking out of the box. You should phone the police, maybe she’s one of those who shouldn’t be here. What do you mean, I said, although I knew what he was getting at. It was an attempt on my part to create a kind of distance from him, what he was, that kind of person. I wanted him to understand we had nothing in common. I have seen him speaking to other neighbors once or twice, he is obviously well liked, although he delivers the mail at his own pace, it never seems to be an urgent task. Sometimes he leaves the lid of the mailbox open, with no regard for whether it is raining.
He shook his head. Now he was staring into space as though a clearer, more meaningful picture was taking shape there. Asylum seekers, he said, without legal permission to stay.
I don’t know, I said, turning away and saying thanks for his help. Thanks for helping.
Perhaps, he said, checking me with his voice just as I was about to go back inside. Perhaps you should be careful.
It sounded more like a vague threat than concerned advice.
I read her note the next day, coming across it in the kitchen where I had slipped it underneath the microwave. A short printed message. I can help you with washing and housework, looking after children. Good references. Phone me.
A couple of weeks went by before I called.
THE NEXT TIME I saw her, she was standing in front of the bookshelves in the part of the living room we like to call the library, even though that formal name is an exaggerated description of our book collection, which is undeniably large, but arranged in a completely chaotic way, with books in both rows and stacks. She was tall, unusually tall, I remember thinking she was a woman who could lift any man without a problem. She wanted to tell me about herself, she spoke good Norwegian.
She shook my hand. Marija, she announced clearly and with stress on each syllable, as though I would need help to remember it. Her short hair, the side parting and the fringe I remember used to fall over her face anytime she turned to look at me, she wheeled around or glanced upward and her hair would drop like that. A face of the type that people would certainly have called attractive, not too much makeup, aged around fifty or a couple of years younger, I never asked her about her age. Her handshake, a soft hand that did not release its grip immediately. She did not want coffee, but when Simon said he was going to make some anyway, she said yes please all the same. Just a little cup. Always just a little cup. She had a kind of rational modesty that did not seem to be an affectation. This is my husband, I said. Simon.
We agreed she should clean the house once a week, and probably wash some clothes. She seemed pleased, she said she was happy to get as much work as possible. I’m not afraid of working, she commented, speaking in all seriousness.
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.
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.
Days in the History of Silence Page 3