Days in the History of Silence (21 page)

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?

O
ne 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
room. 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.

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.