Days in the History of Silence

by Merethe Lindstrom

  Simon was preoccupied by the suitcase. During the years he was searching for his cousin and aunt, trying to find traces of them, he continually returned to the suitcase, his aunt’s suitcase that he remembered from the apartment before they had to leave for the hiding place. He wondered whether others might be able to help, whether it might be possible to track it down. His aunt’s suitcase that she had packed because she was waiting for her husband to fetch her, they would go into hiding together. He had seen it with his own eyes, it was a suitcase of the type that was common at that time, with mountings at the corners, canvas and leather material, straps to stretch over the clothes to keep them in place. He cannot remember his cousin’s face, but he remembers the suitcase clearly. It sat in the hallway, a suitcase like the ones belonging to his parents that later, after the war were always placed in an attic, and never taken out again because they do not travel, the two elderly people have become unschooled in everything to do with transport, they shut themselves increasingly inside the apartment. The suitcases were purchased in the same place, both those of his parents and his aunt’s. He has seen her opening it, taking things out and snapping the locks closed again, he imagines that it contained clothes, towels, toothbrushes and washcloths. His parents were also fed up with his aunt’s suitcase, they thought it was in the way, it was both optimism and obstinacy, they said, that made her refuse to unpack. Nevertheless they accepted it, bore with it, and with her plans. She was sorry she was unable to go into hiding with them, but insisted that her husband would collect her. She was young, they said when they talked about it, young and afraid.

  He believes that on the day they were taken away, she had the suitcase with her, although it is not likely, a suitcase is overstating things, it has no place in all this. All the same, he imagines the suitcase. That she somehow or other manages to take it with her, that it accompanies her. She and her son, they sleep beside it, perhaps they even sit on it if there is room to do that. (Actually he knows that there is no room either to sleep or for a suitcase), they stay close beside it all the time, it would be a simple matter for someone to steal it or its contents, they must only hope. She always used to talk about what she had packed, his aunt, because it was important. Something materializes through the suitcase and its contents, a kind of tidiness and security. The suitcase and its contents bear witness to a possible destination for the journey, where things will be unpacked and put in their place. The clothes will be worn, the bedclothes will be slept in. The suitcase is a guarantee that this is actually a journey like other journeys, with the definition of such transportation always incorporating the possibility of traveling back to where you started. But at the terminus, where they are expelled, wrenched from the train together with all the others, it is taken from her. The suitcase is flung onto a pile of other people’s luggage. Then she stands there, Simon says. Without the suitcase. Is her son standing by her side? At that moment it dawns on her that they are not going to travel any farther.

  HE HAS RECOUNTED this, and I have visualized it. It is easy to envisage those two. In a crowd of people, I think. In a herd being thrust backward and forward in a confined space, the two of them also jolted to and fro, caught among the others, dragged in one direction and then another, and at one moment during this scene, I imagine that they are separated, mother and son. Lose sight of each other. Those two who have been so close during these months alone in the apartment.

  In everything that happens, in this movement of people who are shouting, falling, remnants of luggage, bundles being trampled, coats and winter jackets, infants and old people, his cousin is left standing on his own. He turns around, but sees no faces, only vague impressions, shapes, apparitions, hears complaints, shouts, sobbing from children like himself. Around him grows this mountain of people in motion, like a wall, a terrible, unstable wall from which parts are ripped away while new ones are added. Is he wearing something, something that gives him sufficient weight to remain standing on exactly that spot without being jostled along or knocked over? Perhaps a narrow rucksack or some other possession he is carrying, something he is now probably holding with both hands, clutching it to his chest. As though he is embracing it, keeping it safe and clinging to it at the same time. While the human wall continues to be shoved backward and forward once more, and simultaneously increases, like an organism through mitosis, a cell division before his very eyes. The boy’s mother is still part of this formation, and is carried forward like a light object being propelled onward by the current in a river. But the boy, the cousin, remains standing on the same spot. While he waits, he cannot do anything else of course, for her to be carried back to him.

  In the evening we watch TV. Simon sits in his chair. I am uncertain whether he follows the action, although sometimes he too switches on the set, perhaps one of the things he does automatically, from old habit. There is something paradoxical about his benevolence toward this screen, with all its pestering, jabbering that never ends, even when there is the occasional break, it demands attention. He stares at the screen regardless of what is being shown, as though it is exactly that and nothing else he has been waiting for. I ask if it’s a bit cold, whether I should fetch a jacket. In the wardrobe I catch sight of the snail shell still lying there, I hold it in my hand for a moment. It is solid, but when I hold it up to the lamp, the light shines through the delicate edges. I wonder when the snail disappeared, why it abandoned such a perfect place, the exquisite curved corridor. I stroke the surface, a golden veneer, brittle and yet durable, before replacing it and closing the door.

  I put the jacket over Simon’s shoulders, he nods as though I have asked him something. Perhaps it is a delayed reply. The TV continues droning. I open the book that Helena has left on the coffee table, the book about the First World War, I look quickly through it. Here is the old Europe. Lost platoons of soldiers, trench warfare on the western front. Attempts to break through. The Battle of the Somme. For days, months the slaughter continues, from July to November, the young boys fall through the paper pages. Names such as Tannenberg, Somme, Verdun. Between the dust jacket and the first page there is a folded sheet of paper. To my girls it says on this folded sheet. He has written it in his slightly shaky handwriting. Of course I don’t know how long it has lain there, but it is Simon’s handwriting, it must have been written more than a year ago, while he was still able to write.

  I feel helpless at the sight of this letter that I had not asked to see. As with the application form, I don’t know what I should do with it. I stand there hesitating, before opening it and reading.

  Not so long ago, when I was looking through some of our old papers, the papers belonging to Simon and me, I found another letter, or a rough draft of something that was probably intended to be a letter. I recognized the handwriting, it was inside a blank envelope, but I was unsure whether it was of any significance, it took some time for me to realize what it contained. When Simon was a relatively newly qualified physician, he made a friend. A friendship he later maintained through all these years. They went out and had dinner with other colleagues, and I think they talked about their work since they were in the same profession. It was a formal friendship, I don’t imagine that they ever confided much, a conventional relationship, deriving from and dependent on the codes that applied to friendship at that time. Naturally it came about that we invited this friend and his wife to various social events. We used to send them Christmas cards, in fact it was often me who wrote them. The couple responded with postcards to us every Christmas, formally decorated cards with the obligatory greetings.

  I had never considered the friendship to be close enough to include letters, on the contrary. A personal letter seemed to conflict with the distance and formality that the limited seasonal contact depended upon. The letter must also have been an attempt to break through the conformity. Simon wrote to this man, his wife had evidently been ill, I couldn’t remember anything about it. He tried to comfort him and say something beyond their well-established politeness.
He had obviously given up the effort since the letter had never been sent. It was so helpless, what was stated on the sheet of paper, there were several forms of words embarked upon, crossed out, as though he had tried to arrive at a sentence or a collection of them that could cover something he perhaps did not even grasp himself. Or perhaps he had some idea, but these sentences and attempts were far too much of a contrast to what their friendship had been up to that point. In order to achieve that, he had to go beyond the boundaries of what was possible, who he himself could and would appear to be, and so he became all the more constrained by his own limits. It seemed so desperate.

  I felt sorry for him, and all the same I was annoyed that I had been kept outside, that he had not mentioned anything to me.

  I THINK ABOUT this letter to his colleague now that I am reading what he has attempted to write to his daughters. For the letter is to them. I can see that he has tried, he has really tried to formulate something, and if they had opened it, they would have seen his handwriting and these attempts to describe, impart, pass something on, to them. To Helena and her sisters. But he cannot. He has to give up, it is a long time since he was clever at that. It is only a rough draft, a sheet of paper he has left there all the same. Dear Helena, Greta and Kirsten, he writes, I have something I— He gives up. A fresh attempt. He is sorry that it has taken so long, he is sorry about it all. He writes that he first bought paper for a letter, that the storekeeper misunderstood, he got the wrong kind. Today the first signs of summer are here, he writes, the summer is going to be fine, I do think so. And I hope that you all manage to have a vacation. Mother and I both consider that you work too hard. But I have always worked too hard myself, so it is obviously hereditary, that kind of thing. Now I have decided to tell you something I have neglected to say for far too—

  I can’t manage to interpret the continuation of the sentence, it is nearly rubbed out because of a faulty pen. But I believe the final word is long. Far too long. My girls, he continues, you have become so big. So grown up. He starts over again, trying to find an introduction.

  I become angry, I become angry because he has decided to tell them on his own, without having talked to me about it first.

  He is still sitting with his gaze directed at the screen. I don’t feel sorry for you, I want to say. You sit there and are immune. No matter what I say, you are going to stare into space and smile. I want to face him. Listen, Simon, don’t turn away. I don’t feel sorry for you. You let me down, I want to say.

  How could he let me down like this, leave me behind in silence with this letter? I want to tell him.

  He just sits there.

  What can I say?

  There he sits. In his chair, and there is nothing to say.

  I sit on the settee beside the chair, placing my fingers on his lips. I love you, I think. Have I said it, I can’t recall whether I have said it, but I really must have. I remember that I tried to purge the word from my pupils’ vocabulary, because they loved everything and nothing, eradicating all meaning. It is a word that doesn’t say anything, I told them.

  Simon looks at me. In the background a woman is waving from the TV screen, she is standing on the deck of a boat gliding across the water. His name, I think. Simon. It means someone who listens.

  DARKNESS HAS FALLEN by the time I fetch the telephone and dial the number. It rings for a long time. The sleepy voice. I have awakened her.

  Mom, Helena’s voice says, why are you phoning now?

  Was it you who placed the letter in the book, I think. I am about to say it. But I don’t say it. I know she hasn’t read it, none of them has read it.

  I have a lot of old photographs, I say. Perhaps you could help me to sort them out? They take up too much space, old trash. Photographs and letters.

  Letters? She says. Is everything all right, with you and Dad?

  I see my reflection in the glass door, outside there is the dark garden, the garden furniture that I have put out on the terrace, the chairs leaning forward on the table. The waxed tablecloth folded up. Soon we’ll put them in the shed, when the summer is over.

  Her voice again. Are you there? she asks.

  Yes, I say.

  She waits, we both wait.

  Mom, says Helena, was there something else you wanted to say?

  One time in winter I found him at the bus stop right over here. Everywhere was completely white, there were several days with an unusual amount of snow for Western Norway. He must have put on his overcoat, the boots that I ought to have hidden, but that I didn’t dare put away because I was scared he would go out all the same, in his socks. Those continual outings of his. I noticed after an hour that he was gone, I looked in all the places I always do when I can’t find him, in the garage, in the grove of trees, I thought about driving up to the church. I took the car that had become covered in snow overnight, I had to shovel the snow and scrape the frost from the windshield. When I was driving along the road, I spotted him, he was sitting on a bench and I think he had closed his eyes, I became so furious, I thought how can he shut his eyes now, how can he just sit there with his eyes closed. I steered the car in to the curb and stopped slightly too abruptly, perhaps he was surprised at someone stopping, I got out of the car, sat down beside him, I said that he could try for my sake, to stay in one place. That sad expression of his. He opened his mouth first of all, but then closed it, and I did not even know whether he intended to say something or was only yawning. I clearly recall the next thing that happened: As I am about to say that we must go home now, I see that he has leaned forward, he raises his hand, I don’t know whether he is pointing or simply holding it aloft. In front of us on the asphalt the snow from the snowdrifts along the road is whipped up by the wind, forming waves that are wiped away and then reshaped, downward and downward, fresh waves all the time, the movement seems so gentle, accidental, but nevertheless creating the same pattern all the time, and I look at him, and I feel a powerful desire for him to look back at me, but he stares straight ahead, captivated by the movement, what the wind is doing with the snow, and this is his choice, I think, to come here and sit in this place, and there is nothing I can question. I remain sitting there with him, watching the same movements, over and over again, of the wind and the snow.

  IT IS SO late in the summer now. He still goes off on his own at times. He wakes in the morning and goes out the door. He finds the shoes I have hidden, opens the door I have locked. Perhaps I ought to hide the shoes so well that he cannot find them, or put a new lock on the door. I let him go. He is old, but I think he walks down the road quickly, only at the bottom of the hill does he hesitate. I wonder whether his restlessness makes him walk on or whether he just stands there waiting for me or someone else to find him. If he chooses to take the bus into the city, he is probably alone this early in the morning, perhaps he greets the driver before finding a seat. While the bus drives on, Simon sits at the window and looks out. Sees that the city seems desolate and new, the streets resembling wide, empty canals.

  Now I have problems thinking about the rest. When does he alight, does he stay on until the terminus? In any case he once took Fløibanen, the funicular railway, a mechanical hand that hoisted him up along the mountainside, up above the city. Here he is among the tourists and strangers. When he reaches the top, he walks to the viewpoint, where we used to go when the children, our girls, were younger. He surveys down below, observing houses and buildings, the fish market under the mist, under the rain. To people watching him, it might look as though he is searching for something.

  Once he ends up at a family’s house in the Nøstet area. He knocks on the door. They come out, the people who live there. It is a small, old white house, they are an astonished group who peer out. They have just risen from their beds, and here is a strange man on the stairs, an elderly man. Can they help him with anything? Has he lost his way?

  He has a cell phone with my number clearly visible. When I arrive to collect him, they say that he is sitting in the living ro
om. Shamefaced I enter this house, through the hallway in the abode of strangers. He is seated as if at a party, a pleasant visit, but at this impromptu gathering, this party, there is nobody who knows him. They follow us with their eyes, mother, father and two children, the youngsters are still in their pajamas. He sits on the settee with a cat on his lap. He strokes its back and nods to me as though this is something we often do. As though we too belong here.

  I TAKE OUT the letter from Simon to Helena, and find the photographs I have made up my mind to show her. Relatives, my own family, and his. The pictures are from before the war, Simon as a child, there is even a class photograph there. His family is standing outside the apartment where he lived when he was growing up. There are several family photographs, special occasions with other relatives assembled, and while I look, I catch sight of someone I have not noticed before. At the foot of one of the old photographs is a boy, a young boy. He is wearing a long shirt that may cause him to be taken for a girl. But it is a boy, I look at the haircut, the stiff kneesocks that cover his legs. He is sitting slightly crouched, and his expression is eradicated by the movement or by what seems to be an erosion, disintegration of the photograph, it is in the process of falling to pieces. I recall photographs I have seen of various missing persons, people who have been lost for some reason or other, who are depicted in newspapers and magazines. And there is only the photograph left, it seems like the most important thing they have left behind. When you look at it, you think that it will explain something in some way or other. But it is only a photograph. I put it together with all the other items I have brought out, some papers, the application form that I have decided not to fill in. We are going to sit here at the table tomorrow, Helena and I, and set out the photographs. I see it in my mind’s eye already. The past, all these lives, they make up a mosaic. Like the colored panes of glass in the church when the light shines through and makes the motifs clearer. I think about what we are going to say, what I must say, recount. Whether I find the words for it. Now they lie there, the old photographs and pictures, the detailed letters from Irit Meyer, the letters that stopped arriving long ago.