Days in the History of Silence (6 page)

I once saw a movie, or was it a play, in which a woman confided in a pastor. She concluded it all by saying: It was my fault. Guilt is relative, the pastor answered her. Is it? I remember thinking when I heard him say that. I thought forgiveness was dependent on guilt as a given, constant dimension. That only the degree of the offense varied. But of course that is wrong. And the feeling of guilt does not always match the gravity of the crime. It may have been a similar confession he expected, the pastor, when he encountered me in the church that day.

I did not speak to him. He must have seen me standing there, but before he ventured as far as saying anything, I turned away. The stepladder looked as though it belonged there, providing an extraordinary sense of association because it appeared to be illuminated by the windows, it shone and was of course an all too obvious metaphor. As I crossed the vestibule, onto the church steps, a little group of men approached. Maybe they had finished their work for the day, and had arrived to pack up their belongings, they were four older men and a younger boy. From somewhere in Eastern Europe to judge by their conversation, they stood there chatting on the gravel in front of the church steps, only the boy walked past me, he had blue, splattered trousers, and wore a cap over his close-cropped hair, a solemn expression on his face, and I saw that he went in through the church entrance, walking
slightly stooped, the doorway was lofty, and he bowed his head all the same. Inside the vestibule he remained standing for a moment, and when he turned around, perhaps to look for his companions, he met my gaze.

ANOTHER DAY WE
were walking past the church, Simon and I, and saw a little funeral party emerging from the open church door. The rain had changed our plans to go for a long walk, the linden trees stood somber and still as we strolled along the avenue.

I assume they had already placed the coffin in one of the cars, as all I could see were these few people dressed in black and gray and the open church door. A woman, two younger people and an older man. That was all. And the pastor who accompanied them, he was the one who shook them by the hand. They were so few, it seemed as though they were shivering in their thin garments, in the rain.

Simon also looked in their direction. The place where they were standing.

It is nobody we know, I remarked. But even after we had started to walk on, he turned around and peered at the funeral group. It has nothing to do with us, I said.

I discovered the grave on one of my visits on my own. The year and name indicated that it was the grave of a young man. I thought someone would appear to leave flowers there, someone who simply because of my proximity would tell me more about him, a woman perhaps, or children, parents.
Nobody came. There was never anyone there. I thought the little patch of earth and grass would vanish and merge into its surroundings, after a number of years there would be only a name, with no indication of anything else. Or anyone. The next time I went there, I removed some of the weeds. Last year I also dug up some flowers from our garden, herbaceous perennials which I planted there.

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 jealous, 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.