Days in the History of Silence

Copyright © 2011, H. Aschehoug & Co. (W. Nygaard) AS

Originally published as
Dager i stillhetens historie
in Oslo, Norway.

Translation copyright © 2012 Anne Bruce

This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA.

“Michelle” lyrics on
this page
written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, published by Sony/ATV Tunes, LLC (BMI) and EMI Blackwood Music, Inc (BMI). Copyright © 1965, 2006 Apple Corps Ltd, under exclusive license to Capitol Records, Inc.

Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
Text Designer: Chris Welch

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site:
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Lindstrøm, Merethe, author.
    [Dager i stillhetens historie. English]
    Days in the history of silence / by Merethe Lindstrøm; translated from the Norwegian by Anne Bruce.
     pages cm
    eISBN: 978-1-59051-597-6
1. Holocaust survivors—Fiction.   2. Norway—21st century—Fiction.   3. Domestic fiction.   I. Bruce, Anne, 1952 April 22—translator.   II. Title.
    PT8951.22.I55D3413 2013
    839.82′374—dc23

2012048598

Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

First Page

About the Author

I
was the one who let him in.

Later I called him the intruder, but he did not break in. He rang the doorbell as anyone at all might have done, and I opened the door. It unsettles me still when I think about it. Really that could be what bothers me most. He rang the doorbell, and I opened the door.

So mundane.

Perhaps I had caught a glimpse of him that very morning at the bottom of the garden when Simon went to work. Standing down there between the trees. A young man, nineteen or twenty years old.

When I opened the door, he stood on the stairs just waiting to be let in. Anyone at all, he could have been anyone at all.

Good day, he said. I’d like to use the telephone.

There was something about
good day
. Nowadays there are not so many people who say that, it was more common at that time, in the middle of the nineteen sixties. But all the same he did not say it as if he meant it, as if there were something good about the day, or he wished me that. I felt it seemed like something he simply said, meant for everyone and no one.

We don’t have a telephone, I wanted to answer. But that was clearly a lie.

I heard the children from inside the living room. Helena was just a baby at that time, she was lying in a sleeping bag while the other two were playing on the floor beside her. I heard the time signal on the radio, behind him lay the garden, at that early hour the air is motionless, the rain from the previous evening only a slight dampness on the leaves, the green grass, newly wakened, dazed, something quivering in the transition from shadow to the sudden touch of sunlight. I don’t know what I was on the lookout for, perhaps an excuse to shut the door.

The connection’s not very good, I remarked.

That’s all right, he replied. I wondered whether it was up to him to say. Was it not me who should have said that?

We had already been standing there for a few minutes, and the feeling of being impolite eventually made me open the door and stand aside. When I let him in, as he walked past me, I noticed there was an odor about him. It was the smell of a different person, someone who has come too close, and
the impression was heightened by my unease. Inside the hallway he looked around, for the telephone or something else. I nodded toward the hall table, but he only lifted the receiver, the sound of the dial tone as he held it above the dial, and the click when he replaced it on the instrument.

He had not intended to use the phone. It was obvious now he had no intention of phoning. What he was looking for, it could have been anything at all.

Nice house, he said.

Yes, I replied.

I had spotted the case attached to his belt, a little container that might hold something, a tool, a folding pocketknife? He must have caught sight of the children then. Greta on her stomach with a large sheet of paper in front of her, concentrating on the drawing, beside her coloring crayons she had emptied out onto the rug. Kirsten’s dress had slid up and the diaper she still wore, was visible, she was building a tower with bricks, stacking each one on top of the other. He must have watched them, standing like that looking for a little while before they noticed him, as I felt the unease increasing. I thought I should open the door and ask him to leave, but it was impossible to do so.

A quiet voice on the radio like a whisper, the long branches on the tree swaying in the wind outside, and giving the impression that something was approaching and pulling back again. I have often lain awake thinking about it, the children looking up, glancing inquiringly at him, at me. Helena’s arms waving conspicuously above the edge of the sleeping bag. She
had been awake for a while, and I knew she would soon start to cry, from boredom or because she was hungry.

I walk past him through the living room door, a reflex making me lift the sleeping bag farther along the broad dining table, away from him, placing it there. At the far end of the room.

He has taken a couple of steps inside, standing focusing his eyes on the girls, the lines Greta is drawing become a big house, a girl with a triangular frock, the sun in the right-hand corner. She is still toiling over a flower.

Why are they sitting on the floor, he asked.

They are playing, I responded.

That wasn’t what I asked, he said. The irritation in his voice. I heard it. We are approaching something, I thought, perhaps whatever he has come for. Maybe he intends us to be here, it is here he has wanted to be all along, on this very spot.

Would you like some coffee, I asked in an attempt to avoid it, take a step back to something this might have been, this visit of his.

He shook his head. I don’t want anything.

It was not true that he did not want anything, I had understood that.

Helena’s waving arms, she was trying to grasp her fingers. Greta who had stood up, who was standing looking at us.

It was a chance I took.

I have some money, I said. And felt how something contracted in my abdomen, it seemed at first he had not heard, or was not bothered, as though money did not clarify
anything either. I considered: if he only wanted money. He approached the windows overlooking the garden. The house was the same then, we have not rebuilt it much. Only the garden was smaller, there were several trees, more of the forest extended into the actual garden area, trees we later cut down.

How much do you have, he said as he turned around, standing like a silhouette with his back to the light, his face in darkness.

When I went toward my purse in the hallway, he followed me.

Twenty kroner, I said. That’s all.

I placed them in his hand. A pale hand, I remember the hand, I think I will always remember that. He held it out as though he had not thought to take them, just accept them, as though there were a great difference. I noticed it. It was not much, but neither was it a small amount at that time. He thrust the coins into his pocket, and I looked at him, and for the first time had the sense of making eye contact. As though I had not reached his eyes earlier. I felt my heart, it must have missed a beat, thumping against the wall of my chest, faster and faster, unable to calm down again.

I think we both turned around at the same time as it happened. Greta is climbing up on one of the dining chairs, perhaps in an effort to comfort the baby who has started to cry. She tugs the light sleeping bag toward her, the chair tips over, and she just misses dragging the bag with her in the fall. Greta howls, gets to her feet and screams. The baby becomes
scared and screams even louder. I console Greta, holding her close to me, rubbing the angry red mark that has appeared on her shin. I lift the sleeping bag. I forget him, forget he is standing there right behind me.

And when I turn around, he is not. He is not there, and neither is Kirsten. For a moment all is silent. The children have stopped crying, the voice on the radio pauses, and only the branch outside the window stirs.

I want to cry out, but Greta is right beside me. I say it carefully. Kirsten, I say, Kirsten. I begin to search, peering around me as though only my own confusion is preventing me from seeing her. Just as I am about to run down the basement steps, I discover that the terrace doors are open.

There is a faint breeze in the garden, I don’t know what I am wearing, a thin sweater and trousers, or a dress, perhaps with an apron on top, I used to wear one at that time. The garden is brightening up, I feel the moisture on the grass. At the bottom is the entrance to a little grove of trees. In the years to come we chop down the trees all around, but we leave some standing because we have a notion that the children should see trees, that it is something they need. I walk in between the bushes, into the grove.

She is sitting on a tree stump, it looks as though she is paying attention to something. At that moment she is sitting so motionless that I become frightened, I speak her name. She turns around, looking at me before pointing in between the bushes. Perhaps she has followed him, perhaps he brought her here.

But she seems unharmed. She is sitting on the broad stump and pointing into the forest. As though he has abandoned her and gone on ahead, vanishing in there among the dense branches.

LATER, I CALLED
it the episode. When I talked about it with other people, Simon, our children after they had grown up. As though it comes from a place that is unfamiliar, like the intruder himself, a different place. The Greek word is constructed of several parts, of which one part means beginning, like the beginning of a story, a life, but also suggesting something is inserted, in tragedies it is the dialogue that is inserted between the choruses. The episode is the anticipation of something more. But there was nothing more, he rang the doorbell that day, and after that he disappeared.

I know nothing about the intruder. Later I saw a notice in the newspaper, the description of a young man who had entered several houses in the neighborhood, the description expressing the suspicion that he was confused. In a way it was as though nothing had happened. Kirsten was unharmed. But I did not stop thinking about him. Who he was. Sometimes I wake up and it feels as though he is standing in the doorway at that very moment, that I have let him in again. Then it is as if he will never leave, but instead stay here with us. He has just become more indistinct with the years. I must have swapped his face for others. While the incident in itself has become clearer, sharper, seeming to draw closer to me all the time.

The episode that has a hard and inevitable quality when I reflect on it. It is as though it is scored into or through something. A gash, like a tear in thick canvas, in the perfectly normal day, and through that hole something has emerged that should not surface, not become visible.

I OFTEN THOUGHT
about it later when I began teaching. He was the same age as my pupils, the intruder. I worked at a senior high school in the city center, an old school. One of those schools with a long-established name and a building that has become rooted in its own convictions, just as unshakably encircled by them as by paving stones and asphalt. The years passed, and I knew that one day it would force me out. The school was sufficient unto itself. I walked around in the corridors, I think I moved around with the suspicion that it was so, that the building considered me superfluous.

I taught Norwegian and for a while literature too, an optional subject that was popular among the pupils. Myself, I was more uncertain. I used to look around the classroom at the pupils, I could hear my own footsteps in the corridors and think that time was passing, and my own excuse for staying there seemed less and less rational. All the same I clung tenaciously to that identity. I was a teacher, a high school teacher. That was how I dressed, how I moved, the role determined my vocabulary, my limitations. As though I could not simply be replaced. And eventually as the years went by the ranks of those of my own age diminished, while younger
and better-qualified colleagues continually streamed in. We used to meet at lunchtime, Simon and I, if the weather was good, his physician’s office was not far from the school. I walked along Nygaten Street, past all the stores, Allehelgensgate, past Markesmauet Alley, down Peter Motzfeldtsgate to the city park, the Lille Lungegårdsvann Lake, where we sat on a bench overlooking the fountain. We gulped down our food and chatted a little before going back to work. He to his patients, I to my pupils. He often picked me up after the workday. In the car we listened to classical music, conversed about the day that had passed.