Days in the History of Silence

by Merethe Lindstrom

  The trees beside the church fascinate me every time I see them. I interpret it as a kind of fortitude that they stand there as always with heavy crowns, despite the road beneath them, and the enormous changes in the landscape over the course of a couple of centuries. These tall trees cast their shadow over the church building, as in the avenue close by. They cause it to appear slightly Gothic as though it were genuinely old. The tower at the front is not very high, but parts of the graveyard directly below remain in the shadow of the actual building in the mornings, it is dark, fertile down there, the green leafy trees seeming to conceal the entrance to another house, one that it is never quite possible to catch sight of. I have also sat on the bench there a few times, occasionally reading the names on the gravestones, or glancing at other people walking around in the vicinity.

  The young man. No one knows who he is. Perhaps that is why I have continued to tend the grave. I bring flowers there with me, removing the weeds since no one else does so. At the beginning it felt strange, now it feels almost like a duty.

  At odd times I think about what happened to him. Whether it was an accident, whether he himself was careless. His story is secret, somewhere perhaps there is somebody who knows, I muse, or at least used to know. But time has hidden it, like the invisible house among the leaves. The entrance may exist, but you only occasionally seem to glimpse it between the trees, with their outspread branches.

  I HAD A child when I was far too young, seventeen or eighteen years old, the baby’s father was someone I hardly knew or even remember, actually he is just as unimportant to me now as he was then. I did not want to have the child, but had it all the same, for a few months after it was born. A boy, healthy and certainly handsome, everything a newborn infant should be.

  I am young. I become old when I hold the baby and photographs are taken and the child is sitting on my lap and it feels as though many years go by every night, every day. Before I make up my mind to give it away. For there is nothing about this that makes sense, or that I understand. I am not practical and have always sought refuge in books, in dreams, but this has nothing at all to do with dreams. In retrospect nevertheless it has taken on precisely that character. The birth, the adoption. The months we spent together, when he was still living with me. Now that so many years have gone by, I no longer feel the same responsibility for what with the passage of time has become shrouded in vagueness and ambiguity. I have often thought that I was a different person then. Is it possible to be a different person. It was several years before I married Simon. I gave him away, I had him for a while and then I gave him away. I do not miss him, I would not call it missing him, I do not know what I should miss, the idea of a child. I did not know him. But I think about him. I see him in different places, there are people I catch sight of on a bus or in some gathering or other, men of the age he must be now, individual features I notice, convincing me that it must be him. Long after he probably would have been grown up, I could watch children coming out of a school and identify boys who resembled his image, the notion I had of him.

  I did not miss having him close to me, nor did I regret what I had done by giving him away. But perhaps I was curious.

  You love your child so much, you look after it and pamper it, watch out for it, keep hold of it, go for walks in the city, celebrate birthdays, Christmas. Mother. And child. I was not kind to that infant. I was only a child myself and did not think he was kind to me. It was a misfortune that we were together.

  BUT THIS BUSINESS of the baby made a powerful impression when I told Simon about it a few years after we had married. He was furious because I had not told him earlier, because it was important, he said, it was something you did not neglect to talk about.

  I didn’t regard it as important, I said.

  How can you say that it’s not important, he responded. He was a part of you.

  But I do not think so. That this was what he meant to say. I believe he meant to say that it was the other part that was important, that I had given him away.

  It was as though he had spotted some deficiency in me. One that he would not accept, as though he had dissected a part of my personality and seen that something important was missing. He thought it unnatural. He used a word like that. Unnatural. A woman did not simply give up her child, and if she did so, she would always feel a sense of loss, and that loss would be expressed in regret and attempts to retrieve her child.

  But he has grown up with other people, I said. He belongs there.

  He would not discuss it. It was as though everything I said emphasized what was wrong.

  Simon tried to explain it to himself. He possessed theories, but nevertheless did not understand it, nothing at all about it. He thought we should attempt to find the boy. He could not understand why I did not want to.

  We were at our summer cottage, the girls were little, and we sat watching while they played in the dismal playground beside the nearby campsite. There was a boy there, slightly older than Greta was then, and the two of them began to play side by side. Gradually they drew closer together, and after a little while longer they took part in the same game. I saw Simon watching them intently, watching the boy. When the lad was called over by a woman standing at some distance, who did not even once step foot on the grass dividing the playground from the remainder of the campsite, but almost intoned the boy’s name with a certain threatening edge, I saw that Simon took on an expression resembling disappointment, as though he had hoped no one would appear, that the boy would turn out to be abandoned and would perhaps be persuaded to come along with us. He remained silent for most of the afternoon.

  In the evening, after the girls had gone to bed, we started to argue. One of the few arguments we have had over the years. I remember I said:

  He wasn’t even yours. It was before I met you.

  He looked at me.

  No, he said eventually, you never gave him the chance to become that. Or were those the words he used? It seems too emphatic. Perhaps I have changed them with the passage of time, but I understood that was what he meant. Nevertheless I felt he was less concerned about the boy than about me, about this deficiency of mine.

  That night as I lay in the cottage with the rain hammering so hard against the roof that it kept me awake for several hours, I wondered whether it would change. I thought about how he regarded me, with this shortcoming, this part of me that was missing and that he was determined to find again. How can he be so sure, I thought, that it is a valuable part, a worthwhile quality, something worth finding.

  I BELIEVE I was pretty for a short while as a young girl. It felt like a distraction. To be looked at, liked by reason of that characteristic, such a debatable characteristic. It never seemed to be something I could make use of for my own sake. It was not worth anything to me, only to others. I knew how I could compel other people to look and regard it as a talent, or something I had earned and about which I ought to be proud. A quality on which far too much importance was placed. In the same way as a disability would have been. Although no one would regard it as a disability. Prettiness and me. We did not get along well together. I did not like the attention it brought me or my own attitude toward it, the significance of it. What it made me.

  Simon saw me somewhere, we were young. A look, a dance, we conversed a little that evening. He walked me home, again and again. I sought out the place where we met, a place where young people like us met up, he was there and I remember that we danced a little. We both knew that something was about to happen, but there was a balance, a balance between interest and the trajectory as a result of that, a hand, a glance. A balanced equation. We were trying so hard to be young. He was a dark-haired boy at that time, but older than me, more than ten years older, to me he was a man, his eyes framed by something dark, the lashes, the dark lines I did not appreciate were caused by insomnia, but that made his eyes seem an even brighter blue. In the beginning I could become angry because he had fallen for my prettiness, because it had influenced him, and I was jealou
s, I wanted him to see me, see who I was, not allow anything so obvious to be a deciding factor. But at the same time I was scared to show him anything else. If there was anything else there. I was not sure, I was young. He said I was difficult, and I finished with him before we had really embarked on anything, I said we should not go out together any longer. He looked at me in surprise. I remember he walked off. Hurt. I thought he would never return. But he did come back. He rang the doorbell. I watched him from the window, he was standing down in the street, and I did not want to let him in. I had heard some people calling him the refugee, but this was long after the war. He came around several evenings, rang the doorbell. At last I opened the door, we sat in my tiny single-room flat. I remember we sat for one entire day in that room, we had never been physical with each other before that. He did not want to go home, because it was about to start raining. That was what he said. And then eventually it was late afternoon and I pulled down the blind, the dark and heavy roller blind that was like a blackout curtain, I undressed, with the sounds from the street outside. I usually undressed by myself in that room, every night, placing my clothes on the chair, getting dressed again in the morning, undressed again at night, the same thing, always the same chair, table, room. There were two of us, we undressed in the dark, in the darkened room. The bed was cold and we were new to each other. We were two shadows, cut out from a different, even greater darkness. His hand traced the curve of my collarbone, across my breastbone, over my breasts as though he was searching for something on my skin, letting his hand glide across. Holding it between my legs, I opened myself up, I can feel it still, that I open myself up, that he is inside me, I miss that, I want him to make me so aroused again, the movement, the excitement, the hot breath between us. As though we were breathing life into each other. A whole new life, into one another. The city and the streets, the old dust behind the window. When I awoke again, I knew that it had started to rain outside.

  HE TOLD ME about himself, what city he had been born in, what street, what people had lived there, his family, their names. The background that eventually forced them into their hiding place during the war. He wanted to become a physician, he wanted to be with me. We would have a house, a child. Maybe several children. We won’t look back. Is that my idea or his?

  I RECALL THAT I had a camera inherited from a relative. A black box you peered down into to capture the object in the lens, never sure that the apparatus would function at the exact moment you decided to take the photograph. I think it places a black wall across the image, dividing it in two, the photo is taken, and the image is hidden inside the box. I also remember the film as a sort of box, a cassette. I have never liked having my picture taken, but I especially recall one photograph that was taken with this box. I still have it, I see my own face on this photo, the midlength blonde hair I cut myself in peculiar uneven layers with the kitchen scissors. I am drawing myself back to avoid closeness, why am I doing that, there is a combination of terror and at the same time contentment in my expression, reproduced almost perfectly in this photograph. There is one thing about this young girl I notice in the picture of myself, something that always amazes me: it seems as though she does not pay any heed to time. At that moment, in the image, there is no past either, I feel. Not when you are so young, not when you are young like in that photograph. Between everything that has happened and everything that happens, there is a dividing line, distinct and defined, like a wall, and the past stays behind that, shut off, forgotten.

  In dreams I am often back inside my body as it was before it grew older, I have the feeling of being younger, without any resistance, there is no resistance in this sleep, hardly any sense of gravity. When I move in my dreams, I sometimes have a feeling that is almost sensual. Not that my dreams are. Not in that way. All the same I often awaken with a feeling of desire. Or a kind of yearning that affords a sense of satisfaction in itself. Yes really, it is so. For the yearning does not make me jittery or restless, it feels just like an acknowledgment of something. Perhaps a feeling of closeness to Simon, but the dreams are vivid. I loved it when we were together, simply lying waiting for him in bed, listening to him padding up the stairs, perhaps I switched off the light and noticed as he came into the room, I miss him. It is not so long ago that we were together in that way, but now that he has shut me out, it is impossible. I still look at young men, something in the way they walk, their voices, reminds me of him. When he was young, I wanted him to be older than he was. And now that he is old, that we are both older, I think of him as a young man. Occasionally I have felt a passionate desire for him as he was at that time. It makes me happy, like that feeling in my dreams. Oh but yes, that is erotic. I think I have never been close to anyone in that way, been so happy with anyone as I was with him. That it was so intense. And when I waken, my life, or that part of it, my youth, is like a dream I dreamed just a few minutes before I woke. It was over so fast.

  I THINK I hear him talking. It happens now and again. He is sitting in the living room or has gone into the bedroom.

  Eva, he says. My name.

  I follow him. He might be sitting in his chair or on the settee facing the blank TV screen.

  Did you call, I ask. He looks at me uncomprehendingly.

  I thought you called me.

  Or else I think I hear him talking to someone. As though he had answered the telephone. But he hardly ever answers the phone, he lets it ring, on only a couple of occasions recently have I seen him lift the receiver, once he held it against his ear, the caller was probably speaking and had begun to wonder whether there was anyone at the other end, before Simon put it down. The other time, he passed it over to me.

  But these conversations I hear. I think I hear his voice, the words are difficult to understand clearly. Once I thought he spoke her name, Marija. I hurried in to him, I think his lips were moving.

  Eva.

  Perhaps I hear him from the living room, and I go in, and he is sitting with his eyes closed.

  I hear his voice, because I want to hear it, a hallucination of sound, like an echo of music or noise that lingers when you have been to a party or concert and return home, as though the brain continues to transmit the sound, as though the inner ear continues to repeat the oscillations, in the place where sound is converted and interpreted as something meaningful.

  Eva.

  I listen to the clock. It is situated in the living room despite its insistent sound reminiscent of the old grandfather clocks. It seems as though it forces out every single stroke, second, sharp as a hammer blow against hard material, like the workers who were busy outside the church that morning I was there, who were busy knocking something together, or perhaps they were pulling something apart. But the point is that I do not hear it, most of the day as I am pottering about in the house, or sitting in the living room, I do not hear the clock. Apart from a few times in the course of the day, when I suddenly notice it, and when that happens it is difficult to fathom how I can disregard it the rest of the time. Of course I know why, I understand how the brain shuts out impressions that are there all the time, everything that is repeated over and over again, it would be impossible to take in everything at once, always sensing every single smell, hearing every sound, thinking every thought; if the mind did not do so, life would be intolerable. We can concentrate on only a small fraction at a time. Does that apply to your conscience as well?

  SOMETIMES WE GO to the cinema. Matinees. The movies vary in genre, comedy, teen movie, romantic drama. I would prefer something different, something historical, but it seems as though these are the only movies shown so early in the day. Simon does not fall asleep, he watches the screen, I think he does that the entire time. The auditorium is almost empty, there are often some teenagers sitting farther back. Several times I have noticed a man who usually goes to the same movies together with his son. He enters immediately after the lights are dimmed, accompanied by a young boy. The youngster is just as tall as his father, I see their silhouettes in the pliant,
colored light from the projector as it is reflected back at the audience. Their profiles are similar, he must be the father. But in addition the son has a double chin and his head is too large. The father indicates where his son should sit, they sit down side by side, always near the front, always beside the exit. Just before the end of the movie, as the music signifies an obvious conclusion, the father lifts his son’s jacket and makes him bend forward, guiding his arms into the sleeves, as you do only with children, the boy’s face is still fixed on the screen and as the first credits roll into view, the father takes the grown-up boy by the hand and leads him out. It happens every time. The young man keeps pace with his father on the way out, but turns around to the screen one more time. The father who is escorting him to the exit before the lights go up. There is a hideous thoughtfulness in his action.

  WE DID NOT manage to accept it. This lacking ability to accept an essential aspect of each other. My absent ability to acknowledge his sorrow, and his inability to accept my deficiency of sorrow, regret. He wanted me to recount the story of the child, my love for the boy I gave away. It is not my story, I said. He continued to insist that we ought to search for him. That it would be easier for him as a physician to do so. Eventually he discovered something, via contacts as he put it. A name, a totally ordinary surname, an address not far from us.