Days in the History of Silence (16 page)

He still received letters from his second cousin, Irit Meyer. She also forwarded letters from the organization that was searching for further information about those who disappeared during the Holocaust. The little round second cousin, or his “dear cousin” as he liked to call her, who was no longer so plump, but stayed in a nursing home in Schöneberg in Berlin, she sent a picture of herself, and she was surrounded by all the things I remembered from her little apartment, probably all the furniture was simply crammed together in a smaller area, and in the midst of it all she sat with the same exuberant hairstyle as in the prewar photographs. By her side there was a man smiling oddly as though he were pulling down his top lip at the same time as he tried to push up his bottom lip and the corners. Ralph and I, she wrote. But she wrote nothing about who this Ralph was, I assumed that he
was another resident. Although she had moved to the nursing home, she wrote her own little letters about her existence down there. Letters that I opened and handed to him right up until they stopped coming sometime last year, and I haven’t had the strength to find out why, in order to avoid telling Simon about yet another person who has gone.

His cousin. His cousin was missing. He was this child nobody found. Simon searched for years for information about him. Where he was killed, precisely what had happened. Only recently something has turned up, it has taken a long time to find out.

Before the silence it was this cousin who preoccupied Simon, this young cousin, perhaps also his aunt. He would not rest, he insisted, not until he knew what had happened to them, a sentence he had from one of Irit’s letters, she had at least written something similar. Previously he replied to all her letters, and she forwarded the odd letter from this organization. Her letters enclosed photographs copied onto glossy, flimsy photo paper. Their kin. People who, when I look at these pictures of them, manifest themselves as illustrations in a book, none of them resembling him. They are vaguely obscure, shuttered and restricted within the photographs like memorial plaques from which no one can any longer tear them.

HE NEVER TOLD
them about it, although he planned and practiced all these evenings, nights, days, when he went over the painful aspects of the past with me. Instead he became
more and more silent. As though the recollection of the past, of these events, had been only the start of an interior journey, backward, as though the memories he had initially considered so vivid, changed, he said they were no longer so easy to access, complained that he felt as though he were standing outside them looking in, they became untouchable, tableaux on display in glass cases, they were something he could not catch hold of. And therefore could no longer attempt to explain. In the end he chose silence. Was that how it was?

I think I see him standing leaning over the newspaper that is placed on the table, he often looks at the newspaper pages as though he is studying one of his maps, leafing restlessly through, putting it away, taking it up again, as though he has to check once more that the overview he has gained, the impression of changes and movements within this unstable atlas, still holds good. Now he is bent over the newspaper, if I ask him what he wants for dinner, he will shrug his shoulders and smile. It’s up to me.

I look at his hand again. He turns the page of the newspaper. I go across to him, he looks up in surprise, perhaps I place my hand over his on the table. We remain like this for several minutes.

I AWOKE ONE
night after the unfortunate wedding anniversary, it was about seven or eight weeks later, and he was not there. He had left the bed and gone into the living room.

When I came in he was sitting in the semidarkness.

Simon, I said, I could hear the uncertainty in my own voice, I am anxious. I do not like him sitting up during the night.

It is two months ago now, he said. He meant Marija. Her dismissal. Two months since she had left us. Yes, I answered.

It will be that.

I believe it was.

He stopped, waited.

I think it was impossible to know.

Yes, I said.

He just sat. He had a glass of cognac in front of him. He seldom drank late in the evening.

We could have loaned her money, he said.

Why should we have done that, I had an urge to say.

Yes, I said. Paid our way out of it, I thought without saying it aloud. As though we had actually done something wrong. As though it had been us.

But it’s not too late, he said. We could perhaps get in touch with her. Tomorrow. Perhaps give her a small loan all the same.

I hesitated with my reply, he nursed his glass carefully.

Yes, we could do that right enough, I said.

He stood up, his movement showed signs of him having sat there for a long time, stiffness in his back. He stepped over to the window, looking out at the garden. I knew he dreamed often, that he still had nightmares.

I too went over to the window. I was thinking about my brother, he said. It’s a long time since I have thought of him.

I nodded. Outside, a bird flew low over the lawn in the darkness. He peered after it too. I saw that he was old, it was quite obvious now, I noticed it in the same way you might notice that someone has become soaked in the rain or has forgotten to fasten some buttons on a shirt. It feels of similarly transitory importance when I note it in him. Although it’s not like that. And I thought: I must appreciate that it isn’t transitory. He is not going to be able to shrug off old age.

We could invite some old colleagues, he said.

Yes, I replied.

It would be nice to meet someone. We ought to go to bed soon, I said. He finished his cognac, placing the empty glass on the windowsill.

What were you thinking about your brother, I said.

He looked at me, said that it was hazy, everything had happened while he was half asleep.

I have forgotten to switch off the light, he added. The light is still on in the garage.

He released his breath, waited, and in the ensuing silence that drew all attention toward itself, he remained standing there with his hand halfway over his mouth. Let’s go to bed, he said.

HE HAS NEVER
made any attempt to find his brother in recent years. If he knew where his brother was, I don’t know whether he would look him up. I even mentioned it once,
that he hadn’t really taken care of his brother. His brother existed somewhere, in an apartment, in a town, even though a long time had passed. His brother who walked about and remembered and knew, and could have talked about it. In contrast to those who were gone.

He came here once. The brother. One single time, while the girls were so small that they don’t remember him. A slightly built, serious man, he did not look like Simon, he smoked a great deal, drank rather excessively, they conversed in the language that Simon never used at other times, something that made Greta laugh, she was only a few years old, but she laughed whenever that man opened his mouth. At first I believe it confused him, but then he permitted her to approach him, allowed her to take his hand and sit on his knee. Greta continued to laugh every time someone spoke in this foreign language. She touched his mouth, made him open it wide, he was patient, she touched his lips, his teeth, as though she wanted to look and see if the strange words were inside there, if that was where they came from or if they were somewhere else altogether.

He was a nervous, slightly drunken man. He stayed with us for a few days, he was to stay for a whole week, but I believe they ran out of things to talk about, he and Simon. And he had to return home. There was something he had to go home for, something vague. I saw that they sat in their own chairs without talking to each other. They could perhaps cope with their own silence, but not the other’s, and they never sat or
stood close to each other. I thought that they
could
no longer be close, that the physical closeness that was forced upon them during the war meant that they could not bear to be too close to each other, just the smell, the voice, the body and the feeling of the other person there must be enough to remind them, perhaps even give them the feeling of being back, shut inside. They sat in their individual chairs, their separation by mutual agreement, I thought, as if they both agreed to keep their distance, now that they had finally acquired the personal space they must have dreamed of when they shared a bed and kept themselves occupied in the hiding place, now that they were at last set free from closeness, that closed in, desperate symbiosis.

Not until the airport. After Simon’s brother had taken out his ticket for the journey home, after we had said bon voyage and he was about to board, they both took a step forward, suddenly hugged each other, embracing with a tight grip, and not unlike the beginning of a fight, held each other fiercely as I imagined two wrestlers might perhaps do, only closer, really inseparable, they merged into one, two wrestlers checking out each other’s strength before throwing themselves onto the ground and one of them gains the upper hand. They let go again. Neither of them wept, neither of them looked as upset or moved as that moment of intimacy would suggest. The brother walked toward the airplane, and Simon was left behind. Only Greta took a few steps after him, as though she wanted to accompany the uncle she had come
to know slightly, unwilling to give him up just like that. She looked questioningly at us and at the exit to the runway. But Simon simply said: Now we’ll go home.

HIS BROTHER TOLD
us something while he was here. It seemed as though he was putting down a heavy burden and then journeyed on. He had heard their parents talk about it, he said. Before they left their apartment during the war, they said nothing to their neighbors on that stairway. Nothing about where they were going or why. There was no one who could be trusted, or else it was impossible to know whom you might be able to trust. Every day the neighbors walked past the locked door, and there was little cause for curiosity. The family had left, the door was locked, the windows in darkness. One of the neighbors had a dog, what was it called, oh yes, Kaiser. And that dog usually stopped outside the door, barking, sat down and barked as if it were waiting for something. Waiting for someone to open up, a stupid dog. The owner of course tried to drag it off with him, it protested loudly, as was stated later. The neighbor scolded, threatened. But the dog was insistent. It would not desist. As though it had caught the scent of something inside.

The same performance was repeated every day. The dog sat down. Barked. Pawed as though it were possible to burrow underneath the doormat, under the threshold, the doorframe. But the apartment is definitely empty, people said. The occupants left ages ago, the boy who knew the dog and took it
for walks has left with his family. He won’t be coming out no matter how much the dog barks. The neighbor speaks sternly to the animal, he almost has to deliver a kick, to the dog, in order to get it to come with him. The next day the same procedure. The day after. Until the dog owner and another neighbor have a chat. It is the other one who has become suspicious. Has someone broken in, entered the empty rooms, inside the apartment? It is possible of course. It is dark, it is silent there, but it is possible all the same. He notifies the police.

HE NOTIFIED THE
police, Simon’s brother told Simon. The police arrive, they knock on the door, shout. It is silent inside. The apartment is empty, a neighbor says, thrusting his head out from another doorway on the same landing. The family has left. It’s only that daft dog. The boy who lived there before has spoiled it, taught it to receive a reward when it sits outside there and barks. That’s why it does it. Barks as if it’s calling for him. Disturbs the whole block. But the boy is long gone, like the family, no one knows what’s become of them. Another one gets involved, but it is obvious the dog has got wind of something, he says. Look at it. As if it is sitting there waiting for its master. You would think it was the boy’s dog. The police shout a warning again, eventually breaking down the locked door. The neighbors crowd around their windows. And after only a few minutes they emerge. The dog was right. The apartment is not empty. There is a woman there, a child.
They are picked up that morning, taken away. The neighbors watch them drive off in a car. A woman and a child aged five or six. The hound was not stupid.

It never ends, all this about the dog.

Simon exonerates the dog, but not himself.

He sat up more often in the evenings talking about the events of the war. It made me uneasy. And so, after all the repetitions, the ruminations put into words, the interpretations of everything that had happened, the time in the hiding place and prior to that, it was as though he started to run empty, as though he exhausted himself. He spoke less and more rarely. And eventually he spoke more rarely about other things as well, to me, to others.

Until he stopped saying more than what was routine. Good day. Hello.

Now that I am not admitted, I simply long for him to talk, anything at all, I would listen.

We are alone together when it is quiet.

He said that he liked the silence so much after we had moved here, out of the center, that he liked how still and bright it was. That is a long time ago now.

I often lie awake listening to the susurration of the trees, the rain in summertime, falling on the planks of the terrace floor, the garage roof. Soundlessness in the rooms and outside.

Not so long ago I saw an advertisement, animals for sale. Puppies at a kennel. There were pictures of them, they were lying curled together on newspaper with large heads and
ruffled pelts. I studied the picture, I liked the tiniest one that had clearly ended up slightly outside the rest of the litter, so I cut out the phone number, it is still hanging on the refrigerator. I have seen dogs when I walk about in the neighborhood here. I have thought a little about getting a new dog. We could have gone for walks, the dog and I. It could probably make contact with Simon, perhaps it would have done him good. There are dogs that can be trained to communicate with their owners, they understand. He would not need to speak to it. Dogs are intuitive, where have I heard that. Loyal to their master.