Days in the History of Silence (9 page)

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I DID NOT
believe, I have never believed that I was cowardly. But what does it mean to be cowardly, it depends on what you are confronted with. If there is something you do not really fear, then you are not a hero. There is always something you are truly afraid of. For most people cowardliness is measured by what you risk losing, weighed against the thought of losing yourself, is that not the way it is?

Marija liked to hear Simon read. He used to read aloud to me from the newspaper. He has always been good at reading aloud. He has a rich, deep voice, expressive. No, I hardly remember it any longer. It is disappearing all the time.

When he was reading she used to come in. Perhaps she had been standing in the kitchen, but when she came in and stood in the doorway in order to listen, the seriousness in her expression, even when he was reading lighthearted subject matter. And corrections. He has always had an obsession about correcting language, he would come in from his workroom just to read out a mistake he had found in the newspaper.

He never corrected her. He knew perfectly well what it was like to try to master a foreign language. It took him far too many years to put aside his own accent, his own minor linguistic errors. She didn’t know that, that he too was not from here, from this city, from this country, that he too had once had an accent. He never told her that.

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ONE MORNING SHE
had arrived early, she had let herself in, I wasn’t even aware she was there. I came out of the shower and was about to walk down the stairs. It was quiet in the house, I don’t remember where Simon was.

It came to light later that she had spilled water on the stairs, she was on her way down with a full bucket. The old linoleum was as slippery as a skating rink, I took one step and felt myself lose my footing. It happened so quickly, just an assortment of movements running into one another, a dance devised by an unorthodox choreographer. I had a feeling of being hurled out in midair and then landing beyond the steps.

She came running up from the basement and knelt down beside me, feeling my feet, my arm joints.

It’s not painful, I said. But she was already trying to help me up, as you do a patient, she supports me, almost lifting me into the bedroom, I hang on to her tall body, as I’m carried off.

I am laid on the bed. It’s all right, I say, to reassure her. I was lucky.

She is talking about phoning for the physician. She lies down beside me. Her feet stretch out beyond the bed, she is so tall. She holds my hand.

I need to hold it, she says. I feel it was my fault.

It’s my own fault, I tell her.

No, she says.

We lay like that. I fell asleep after a short while, I saw her face in a landscape resembling a garden, a confusing collage where she obviously did not belong.

Are you sleeping.

I awoke.

No, I said.

She lay looking at me.

It was lovely to lie there with her.

She began to talk, as usual about her favorite topic, about her daughter and her prospects. Still she held my hand. She did not let it go until I said I wanted to get up. I thought: We are so close.

I can’t explain why. Why it was Marija. But it felt as though we had been waiting for someone or other. From loneliness, or simply boredom. Perhaps she reminded us of the girls. We let her in. It felt as though we had been waiting for her all the time.

I THINK ABOUT
that morning, and it is almost as though I forget everything else, now it all seems strangely unfamiliar, and I am just as astonished as my eldest daughter was when she stood before me that day and asked why, what was it that happened, what meant you could not forgive her.

I wake all of a sudden. I must have dozed off in the chair here, and now I have that heavy feeling I sometimes get when I drop off during the afternoon, as though something existential, fundamental, has risen to the surface and lies
just below, about to reach my consciousness. But the only thing I feel is sadness. And I can’t manage to grasp what was almost so clear to me as I was on the verge of waking, and consequently there is nothing I can do about it, no way to make it disappear again.

H
e found someone. A relative, another survivor. What year was it? The children were almost grown up, I didn’t even know that he had been looking, that he was still searching. Irit, she was called, Irit Meyer. A second cousin about his age. She was a widow and lived in Germany, in Berlin.

We visited her a year after they resumed contact. We traveled to what was then called West Germany, we took the train and stayed with her for a week. The train journeyed through Trelleborg, Sassnitz and the German carriages had a distinctive odor we both noticed as soon as we boarded. Like leather or burned rubber combined with the sickeningly sweet stench I suspected might emanate from the toilets, something that might explain a more synthetic element,
such as liquid disinfectant. After we were halfway through the journey, our hands smelled too, the jacket I placed over my head in an attempt to get some sleep seemed as though it had never smelled of anything else, and I thought that everything was going to be permeated by that odor, our clothes, including our luggage, our hair, our very beings, once we had reached our destination.

For a while we shared a compartment with a young woman I thought spoke no Scandinavian, English or German. She boarded at one of the smaller stations. She placed her suitcase and bag on the rack above the seats and brought out a book, all three of us were reading, we had no need to talk. The silence between us was not uncomfortable. It was more like a gesture. Although we probably would not have managed to make ourselves understood in any case. We nodded to her and she nodded back, as though we already knew one another well and had chatted together for a long time. As though we had reached a stage you normally attain after a lengthy friendship.

Beyond the windows glimpses of various landscapes disappeared, stretches of cultivated fields and villages with clusters of houses. Without dismounting from the train we were transported on board a ferry where truck drivers congregated in the cafeteria. We went there too, Simon and I, we drank our coffee and then dived down again into the bowels of the ship where the railway carriages were situated. The ferry tied up at the quay, and after a longish interval with screeching metal from the steel wheels scraping against the
substructure, booming noises and spasmodic movements, we emerged into the daylight again as the carriages were linked together, and immediately afterward we were on our way.

Toward the end of the journey the train rolled into a station, a voice said something incomprehensible on a crackling loudspeaker. We listened for a while, the voice seemed to die away.

A couple of minutes later the door to the compartment was pushed aside by an East German border guard, one of the young men we had already seen on the platform. On his head he was wearing an idiotic uniform cap, far too big, pulled well down his forehead, the brim hiding his eyes, while the crown sat proud as if it were padded out with a flat sheet of cardboard and covered with material I remember as green or was it beige. His gun was undoubtedly somewhere near at hand, though I don’t recall seeing it there in the compartment. I noticed his high boots that on his skinny legs seemed as overstated as his uniform hat and contributed to the impression of a rented theatrical costume.

He looked at Simon and me with an expression suggesting we were his main priority, that we were the ones who had made it necessary to visit the compartment. I was sure he would ask for our papers that I was already holding in my hand, and at the same time suspected this would not be sufficient to satisfy his demands. But it was the other woman he directed himself toward, the one who had shared our compartment and the silent friendship. He lifted a magazine she had left lying on the little folding table below the window.
She had been sitting bent over the same book for most of the journey, now she resembled someone who has been wakened and does not understand what is going on. She glanced at us, at him.

He started to talk, no, shout at her with an almost unintelligible accent, or perhaps it was the volume that made it almost impossible to understand anything of what he was saying. She withdrew into her seat, she was obviously scared and probably did not understand either what he was trying to say. He held up the magazine and continued to scold her for what he clearly regarded as a filthy, undermining glossy rag. We just sat there and watched him shine his flashlight up at our luggage in the already fully illuminated compartment, he made the woman move, we thought he wanted to look through the rest of the luggage. We saw how she had to turn around several times, an absurd four-step ballet under this man’s gaze. I was afraid for Simon, that he would get himself involved, that we would be thrown off the train on the wrong side of the border and forced to find some way of crossing over to the West. But just as quickly as he had started, the man in uniform ended his reprimand, closing the door again behind him, controlled and completely calm now, showing no sign of his outburst of rage. Through the window in the compartment door I saw him talking to a colleague, just as quiet and levelheaded as if everything had been playacting. The woman sitting with us was holding her hand over her eyes. Simon tried to say something to her, something comforting, but she simply acted as though she did not understand and
took out her book again. Her hands were shaking, our hands were shaking. We resumed our attempt at reading. The silence that had been so reassuring was difficult to endure now. It began to grow dark outside, and I saw the reflection of our faces reproduced on the glass, in the train window. Pale in the harsh light of the compartment.

WE SPENT A
week in Berlin, I had soon begun to feel homesick. These were a few days during which I just felt superfluous despite the second cousin trying to do all she could to make me feel at home. The city and its air seemed almost damp in the heat, especially the asphalt, the wide sidewalks down beside Kurfürstendamm, the dampness mixed with the warm smell of the asphalt, as though it were about to evaporate and become incorporated into the clogged, dusty city air. In the Zoologischer Garten a male lion was wandering restlessly around in a depressing cage behind glass, forced to live out his life as an exhibit while hordes of schoolchildren walked by. I stood observing it for a while, the roars that were intensified by the acoustics and did not sound as though they came from an animal at all, but were more reminiscent of the noise from a building site I had noticed several blocks farther up, where the machines appeared to be shifting boulders backward and forward before dropping them in a seemingly arbitrary location, this snarling of the machinery and occasional rumblings, a terrible almost supernatural sound. Or even the growling racket from the underground train we had
taken a number of times, the so-called U-Bahn, that when it passed through a tunnel beneath the earth, made me think more of a monster who in the unbearable heat and afflicted by insomnia was trying to hide himself in the darkness.

THEY DID NOT
talk together only about the war. They talked about the time before that, when they had both been children and spent several weeks together at a holiday resort. It was memories from that time, and about being children they talked about with greatest pleasure, they liberated themselves from all the years and found their way back to something different they must once have been, she related that she had gone through a little childhood crush on him. She remembered Simon as the irascible second cousin, she said, and she had wanted to marry him, but someone had warned her that you didn’t marry members of your own family. For a short time this information had bothered her more than the approach of war. She described the holiday resort he had almost forgotten, relatives he barely remembered now, names she could help him with. She was involved in some work, an organization that searched for the identities of so-called displaced persons who filled Europe after the war, and that attempted to chart the precise fate of those who were victims of the Holocaust, and what had happened not only to them, but also to their traces, their property, what was left behind. His second cousin, or “dear cousin” as I heard him call her, as though he was trying to bring her closer than she actually was. Perhaps this is
what is difficult to understand. I am jealous. During the visit I sit in her living room as she tells stories, she serves coffee, she dishes up some tiny round cakes that look like cookies with a sweet filling, and she puts her arms around me, cradles me as though she is comforting me, as though I am the one who needs comfort, as though we are old friends. She does the same with him, and he is so delighted, he can’t get enough of her and her anecdotes about the family and the past and everything that has vanished; he has got his name back, Shimon, she says, his face is transformed while we are there, he slips into the old language and the stories of his upbringing, it feels as though I cannot breathe in that little apartment, so close to the past. I go for a stroll in the little park beside Viktoria-Luise-Platz. I sit there for several hours. But I have to return, although I don’t want to. On the stairway I fumble in the total darkness until I find the little light switch that has to be pressed, and as I do so I feel an excitement, an anticipation immediately before it happens: For a fleeting moment the entrance is illuminated, I see that the entire wall is covered in tiny square mirrors, paintings, decorations, a manifestation of art nouveau. I walk slowly up the steps watching a mosaic of my own face, what appears as a never-ending series of versions, all of the same stairway, of reflected images and an extension of the staircase that apparently reaches as far as the roof. Immediately afterward and just before I stand in front of a new door, and as the light is extinguished behind me, I open it and wend my way back to all the other things. The darkness in the hallway, the clothes hangers, the photographs in the apartment. The past.