Days in the History of Silence

by Merethe Lindstrom

  YESTERDAY I FOUND Simon sitting outside the retail center on a bench. A young girl was sitting by his side. She had a Chinese jump rope in her hands, one of the kind I remember from my childhood, it was evidently broken, and she was trying to join the ends together while she chatted, she dropped the rope on the ground, bent down and picked it up, all the time looking in his direction. It looked as though they were conversing. She was talking, showing him something with her hands, holding them up, trying to tie the ropes, straying from the point of what she was saying. He was clearly listening the entire time, turned toward her. I remained standing. Just standing watching. I had been searching for him for over an hour, I had encountered a neighbor, someone who tapped on the car window and pointed toward the retail center.

  He was listening to the girl, it might seem that he was absorbed in what she was telling him. I waited for a while before approaching them. The girl did not look up immediately, she was so preoccupied by what she was saying, it was Simon who turned around and noticed me. He smiled. His hair was tousled, glinting in the sunlight, he was wearing the overcoat he is so fond of, that thin coat. The girl followed his gaze, and when it rested on me, she stopped talking. Waited before asking who I was.

  I was about to give my name, but I realized it was not my name she meant. She wanted to know what I was doing there, why I was interrupting them, their conversation. What gave me the right to stand there.

  He is my, I commenced in an attempt to explain, and before I got to say husband, she said: He is nobody’s.

  I looked at her as she gathered her ropes in a bundle in her fist.

  He can’t be anybody’s. He isn’t a thing.

  She stood up, she looked at him in disappointment. At me. She walked across the parking lot and on past a car, behind a sign at the exit somewhere she disappeared.

  He was left there, smiling. I was looking for you, I said.

  I said that he must not leave me. You mustn’t leave me, I said.

  Simon smiled. I had an urge to slap him. I had an urge to slap something or someone.

  I’m so tired, I said.

  He placed his hand on the back of mine, stroking it so rapidly it may be that he simply brushed against it. I looked at my hand, at him.

  He smiled, but he looked at me.

  WHAT AN IMPRESSIVE church, Marija said one time we went there for a walk, she, Simon and I. She wanted to go inside. It’s probably not open, I said. It is beautiful, she said. Look at the doors. We stepped down between the trees, she read the gravestones, read the names aloud, and we sat down on a bench, she had brought coffee, we sat there and drank coffee. She said that every time she saw a church, it cheered her up, she thought about the people inside, that it was one of the few places a person could go and feel something significant. There is so little that is as significant. Did she say that? I don’t remember what reply we made. She felt so secure, she said, when she saw a church.

  I have considered why I went into the church, it may have been a desire to speak to the pastor. It is possible I had some idea that his faith, or at least his conviction in that context, would reveal itself to me too. Reveal. It was a word I often thought about. But when I walked past the church last year, it was the mundane that came to light more than ever before. I observed the church building, the plaster, a broken toilet that was being removed, windowpanes being replaced. I saw that the repair work on the façade had been completed, there was no more to be done, and the pastor came over and spoke, we were both preoccupied by the building work, the changes. Improvements, as he called them. But I saw it in his eyes, the tiredness after the weeks he had been away. I continued to go to the graveside in the spring. I often thought about asking for a consultation, but why would I go there, why seek him out. Did I believe that something or other would come to light if I talked to him, and that we would discover whether I was really guilty of something. How could he decide that. I wanted him to tell me. Tell me who is buried outside, the young man. What he perhaps said in his eulogy, there must have been something to say, something that was recounted to him or to others. Perhaps about a girlfriend, his mother, there has to be an explanation for why she is not there, why the grave is not tended, perhaps she is old, she hasn’t got the energy. He is not alone. The pastor could perhaps have told me about it. I pictured in my mind’s eye that I arrived there and sat with him, while we waited for me to find my way to the words for what was causing such pain.

  IT WAS BY chance, and certainly not planned, that we talked to each other in the spring, that we had a lengthy conversation in the sacristy.

  While I spoke about things that are hazy for me now afterward, he had not moved his position, but kept his arm on the armrest, with his hand supporting his chin and head. His clerical robes were probably hanging in the closet behind him. He sat just as still, concentrating, the sunlight was the only thing in the room that had stirred, it struck the windowsill and slid tentatively toward the table where it was captured in a smallish rectangle.

  I attempted to explain something, but I understood that it did not allow itself to be spoken so easily, and I felt rather like Simon probably had when he tried to formulate a letter to his colleague. I said that there are things I haven’t told anyone, not even my daughters.

  I shifted my gaze out the window, the enormous linden trees out there providing a kind of peace.

  No one knows who we are. No one except for me.

  He did not reply. It was silent in the room, I missed the banging, the sounds from the workmen outside.

  He said something inconsequential, that I mustn’t see it like that, that it isn’t too late to have a conversation with the people close to you. But I think he understood that it was meaningless, because his voice tailed off. And I thought of what he had told me about the teenagers who were drowning, about the adults who held the children back on the shore while others tried to crawl out, the open channel, the teenagers being dragged under the ice-cold water. His task, I thought as I sat there looking at the pastor, is to give comfort. And, I suppose, to find the goodness in all humanity.

  As though goodness is something always waiting to be found.

  •

  THERE IS ONLY a younger clergyman there now. He says hello when I meet him.

  When I walk past the church it does not seem so unfamiliar. The scaffolding that was there for several months is long gone. The building is the same, I still feel the distance when I look at it. Nothing has revealed itself, none of what I had perhaps hoped for, but I liked talking to him, the older pastor. I do not know what kind of meaning it had. Perhaps it was simply our conversation, the little clumsy words. Doubt. The last time I was there we sat in the little room again, he had told me that he was going to leave, that he had obtained employment elsewhere. He was looking forward to going, he said.

  He accompanied me out. I still remember that afternoon. Our footsteps were muffled by the floor covering. It felt as though we had taken part in a ceremony. This is the way you walk back to your seat after Holy Communion, down between the pews; outside in the vestibule the door is heavy, like a prison door that opens, and we emerge into the light, it is a warm spring evening with the sun dappling the foliage, and on the other side of the lake I know that people are walking, but there is no one else here, only the two of us. His cell phone emits an angry buzzing noise, but he does not look at it. He takes my hand, we say a couple of things to each other. Have a good journey home, he says as though I have a long trip ahead of me, as I step across the gravel, glancing at all the stones and statues and patches of earth where people have planted in the hope of something more than ashes and bone, something that can give peace to the survivors.

  I come to a halt beside the gate and wheel around, he is walking slowly up the stairs, I peer across the field to the road, the entrance to the avenue where the linden trees have cast shadows in the lethargic spring light. I look back at him one more time, but the door is closed and the little church seems empty and forsaken.

 
; A LETTER ARRIVED recently, a brown envelope, a precisely folded sheet of paper, the letter heading with the name of the organization Simon had long kept in contact with. It was a brief letter giving the names of two relatives. K. Mendelburg and A. Mendelburg. Date of birth and date of death in Theresienstadt. I understood that one was the cousin he had been searching for. The letter explained what had happened in short, informative turns of phrase. Nothing to hold on to, no details providing a picture or impression of the events being described, now more than seventy years later.

  The same day the letter came, I walked past the church again, and stopped beside the wall, perhaps because those few sentences in the letter had affected me, what they described as well as everything they did not say, and I needed a place to go with that emotion I did not even comprehend, so I also remained standing looking at the grave and the plants from the garden that had rooted so well, it even seemed that they were thriving better in their new setting. I stood there for a while before starting out on the journey home. But it was not the boy, the cousin who had probably been five or six years old, whom I saw in my mind’s eye. It was my son, six months old, in the office that afternoon I gave him away. I don’t know what I feel when I think about it. I picture his face immediately before he is carried off, when I was encouraged to say goodbye and give him a hug, that is the way I remember it at least, and he looked at me, the only person he knew in the room. He was wearing a tiny blue and white cap that was first taken off and then put back on again. He looked at me, with a gaze I now recall as older, wiser, with some idea of what was waiting. It is terrifying, it unsettles me. But there is no longer anything I can do. And finally someone came and lifted him up and out of my arms. He glanced back at me one more time. Before they carried him off.

  It was only that one moment.

  I did not see him again after that.

  MERETHE LINDSTRØM has published several collections of short stories, novels, and a children’s book. She was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize and the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for her short-story collection The Guests. In 2008 she received the Dobloug Prize for her entire literary work. Days in the History of Silence is her most recent novel, winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize and the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature, and nominated for the P2 Listeners’ Novel Prize and the Youth Critics’ Prize. She lives in Oslo, Norway.

  ANNE BRUCE graduated from Glasgow University with degrees in Norwegian and English and has traveled extensively throughout Scandinavia on lecture and study visits. She has translated Wencke Mühleisen’s I Should Have Lifted You Carefully Over, Jørn Lier Horst’s Dregs, and Anne Holt’s Blessed Are Those Who Thirst.