Days in the History of Silence (18 page)

She was absorbed by the musicians, the conductor, we had bought the program, and Marija peeked inside it on the way out to the lobby. While we were standing there, a couple of Simon’s old colleagues walked by, they stopped and expressed surprise at seeing us, and I introduced them to Marija. My friend, I said. They said hello to her.

When we returned to our seats, there were still a few minutes left of the intermission.

She was reading the program, it said something about the conductor.

He is Jewish, she said. She said something further. Something I did not catch, just a single sentence as she turned her head away. No, he isn’t, or: Really he can’t be. It was trivial. It was a triviality. I thought it over, and let it go.

For the remainder of the concert I forgot everything except the music. It is one of the best concerts I’ve ever attended, Simon commented afterward. All three of us agreed.

On the way home in the taxi she tried to persuade us that we should hear them again on another occasion. She took my hand again in the backseat, squeezing it tight. I remember that. Thanks, she said. Thanks again.

I PEER OVER
at the neighboring garden, the curtains are closed in what I believe has been turned into a utility room. The neighbor has allowed a hedge to grow, he seems preoccupied by his garden. The hedge is not so tall yet, but tall enough, he bought large bushes that he planted and so changed the landscape overnight. Why does that upset me? I must have become fond of continuity, but what does that mean. When there is something you cannot do without, there is a need, it is often called love. I wonder whether he ever invites the girl for a coffee or a mineral water, the young girl who cleans for him, whether they converse.

I have a photograph of Marija. In the photo she is on an outing with us. She is so cheerful, we are having a picnic on a sloping bank in the forest, we are laughing at the picture being taken. It strikes me when I look at it now. Marija in the photograph: She has not said anything yet. She is as she was, before. The picture seems so innocent, she is sitting there. Cheerful, waving, with a lunch box and a thermos flask on her lap.

It feels as though I could have stopped her, intervened on this day that looks so flawless and simple in the picture, held
her there, said something or made a move to ward off the action that causes her to leave, to be gone. That she is soon out of our lives.

As though that would have helped anything.

THE PERSON I
have been closest to, apart from my children, is Simon. I miss a voice, that is what I miss. Sometimes I miss the time Marija was here so strongly that I cannot comprehend that she has left. I wake and Simon is still by my side. Simon’s body, the same long fingers, the same familiar movements when he turns around, sits up in the bed. But he has traveled into himself. The territory we shared is closed off, locked in the same way that I am shut off from Marija. I tell myself that they both exist somewhere. I just have to accept the distance. As it applies to her we are talking about tens of miles, about hours, a day’s journey. Perhaps I could have done that someday, journeyed.

I am not going to do it. There is something paradoxical about it, if she had been silent, she would still have been here. But he is the one who is silent, who has gone, without words he becomes almost invisible.

At the beginning, a few letters arrived. Her handwriting, postmarked Latvia on a pale stamp. A pretty little bundle of three or four letters, I don’t know what they contain, and I don’t know whether more will come, I won’t open them anyway. It is done now, I cannot undo it. I saw on television that
there was a news report about Latvia, I tried to turn up the volume on the TV. The remote control is faulty and before I managed to do anything, they had changed the topic.

Her words, her voice that day, how she comes into sight, most of the time I am able to shut it out, there is something about the clock, that harsh ticking. When I first hear it, it is more strident than anything else. That is all I hear.

IT WAS SEVERAL
months after the concert. We were sitting in the kitchen. Marija was looking through the mail. That morning our neighbor had begun to tidy the lawn with edging shears, the neighbor who sometimes irritates me, the guy who employs the young women. Now he was standing beside the fence busy with this machine, as though he were testing the motor. What is he up to, Marija said, she started to talk about this neighbor. She had mentioned him several times before, or perhaps we had talked together about him. Maybe I was the origin of her displeasure, she may have adopted my antipathy.

We watched him through the kitchen window. Walking along the outer edge of the lawn, holding the machine, stopping it, bending over and clearing something away before starting it up again.

She said it in Latvian. And nevertheless I understood what she said. The tone of voice. The word.

He must be a Jew.

What did you say? I asked.

And she repeated it. So that I should understand.

She stood in the middle of the kitchen, between the table and the window, she was still clutching the bundle of mail, and repeated what she had said. Repeated it calmly in my own language, that he was probably one of them. She said that.
Them
. To be sure that I caught her meaning, she probably wanted to explain.

And then it started. She went on and on, talked and talked. I kept my eyes on the water faucet, the sink, the floor, the window ledge. In the background was the noise of those snarling shears, on and off, on and off. What she said was so banal, like a child retelling a fairy story and rattling off the words of others, stylized and concise, it became an overstated soliloquy in which each word leads on to the next, everything has to be memorized in the right order, because that order is the only logic to be found in the story. It is found only within its own compulsory neurotic framework, its own tautology. Spiteful and simple. The simplicity of the cliché, overused words, the language of tired phrases. About
them
.

I thought she would never finish. When she stopped, it was because of a detail. She had discovered something when she looked at the stack of mail and lifted the letter sitting on top, she asked if this wasn’t a letter I had been waiting for. Simon had also come in, I did not know how much of the tirade he had caught, but I could see on his face, the astonishment, that he had heard enough to understand.

She stood with this letter in her hand, as though it really meant something, I must have asked her to open it, for she started to talk about its contents. She was preoccupied by the
letter now, she had shifted her focus and was indignant about something she read there.

I sat down on the chair because I had just stood up as though to stop what was going on, as though it could be warded off by such a movement, but of course it couldn’t, and when I realized that, at the same time as I realized what it was that had happened, I let myself drop, without resistance down on the chair and it felt like a blow when the seat hit my bottom.

Like a punishment.

WE LOOKED AT
each other, Simon and I, that day in the kitchen. He in the doorway, immediately afterward he excused himself and went out. He was going on an errand and was away for several hours, Marija washed the floors upstairs and sorted through some old towels that she was going to throw out. She left early. When he returned, we prepared dinner, he and I, in silence, or a stillness that seemed to contain an enduring intensity, with a low-frequency sound, like a repetition, an echo of the neighbor’s machine, the machine that had been on the go all afternoon. We both attempted to ignore it, the alarm, dreadful, low, but just as urgent, insistent. In the evening we read, in our individual chairs in the living room. We postponed it. When we began to talk again, it was only a possibility. By conversing we would reach into that room, I thought, where everything existed, who we were. Who we could not be. What we had tried to avoid.

What we must do. We postponed it, we spent a few days in that condition.

But it turned out exactly like that. That was exactly what happened.

One afternoon he had sat in the chair where he likes to sit. His voice was softer than usual, he was probably trying to keep calm.

We must, he began. It seemed as though he was searching, for an opening in something that was shut tight. I said: We ought perhaps to try to.

No, he said.

No, I suppose not, I said.

I can’t see that it will change anything.

We ought to say, I said, we ought to say something to her.

But what do you think we should say.

We let her go, as Simon put it. She ought to have a reference, I thought. I know how some people treat cleaners. I said that we ought perhaps to give her a reference. But how would that reference look, he said. We arrived at the decision that it would be difficult to write anything supplementary.

Neither of us said anything. To her. And we never told them about it. I did not tell my daughters about what happened, her opinions, her hatred. About Marija. I did not let them in.

I must say something. It can’t be kept quiet any longer. But what can I say.

Now it is silent when the cleaner has gone. Silent in the morning and in the evening. We each sit in our individual
chairs, he pretends to read, and closes his eyes. I pretend not to notice.

THE MORE I
thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was unsuccessful, even that was unsuccessful. The retreat into silence. I should have said something. How could I trust the words so little. Trust my words so little that I had to make her silent. We who talked together, she and I.

But now, when I think about her litany on the kitchen floor, her rendition of the fairy tale. How she makes a speech, she mustn’t be interrupted, because then it is possible it will all fall apart. And when she is finished, she will not listen to protests, as there are no arguments that can be used outside this context, it is similar to a religion, it is a system built up in order to nourish itself.

There is no doubt in it.

Her confident speech. And my own voice in the following days, my own and Simon’s voice, the search for the words. It is beautiful, I think, doubt.

I REMEMBER ONE
more thing about her. I remember that she came, as she had come that first day, that she stood beside the bookcase in the living room, I tried to pretend that everything was as normal, that it was not unpleasant to stand there together. She prattled again, this time about details, practical details, as though she wanted to talk her way through a brick
wall, using her speech as a battering ram. I felt everything she said, felt it as though it were me she was trying to penetrate, her explanations about everyday matters, as though she was only taking a vacation and wanted to warn us about practical things we needed to remember while she was gone. Things we must take care of. She said that we must remember to turn the alarm on when we went out, and at night. It is important, she said.

She was really going to travel. She talked about wanting to go back now, that she would go home for a while. To Latvia.

I did not reply. Or I said: That’s fine. Have a good trip.

Can I give you a hug? she said. She was gripping the shoulder strap of her bag, a worn strap, she always used that old bag. Her hand clutching the leather strap tightly, stroking it.

Before I managed to say anything, the doorbell rang. A friend came to collect her, they were going on a job together. Once she had stepped through the door, across to the car, she turned and looked back at us. Simon had gone inside, but I was still standing there. The friend said something to Marija. Perhaps that she should sit inside, that they had to drive off. We looked at each other. Did I hesitate just then? I believe I hesitated. But I did not know what I should do, I could not think of a single word that would help. I shut the door.

M
arija. I think about it being her birthday, she had her birthday around this time. I have tried to imagine where she is living now, what it looks like there, an apartment in the capital city, her uncle, her daughter, other relatives who have arrived to celebrate her special day. The girl who grinds her teeth and clenches her fists. I cannot write to her.

In the bathroom I see my face in the mirror, the corners of my mouth turned down. Have they always done that, or have they become like that with the passing of time, I think it was something that happened gradually. The mentolabial furrow is the name of the groove that marks the beginning of the chin, it has become deeper while the chin itself seems diminished. I have never liked using makeup. I take out a mascara
brush. The sticky consistency on the eyelashes. Lipstick tastes of stearin. A magpie is busy in the garden.

I remember calling out to him. Awhile ago I arrived home after being out shopping. He did not answer. Simon, I called as I walked into the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen. I searched the entire house first, that was when I started to become afraid. It comes creeping, not abruptly, that fear. I went down into the basement, what would he be doing there. I searched the garden.

In the end I rang our neighbor’s doorbell, but he was not at home.

I walked across the road, down by the lake. The anxiety growing, I ran home again, I had forgotten the garage, I switched on the light and thought I might perhaps find him there among the skis, the old chairs. I don’t know why I thought that, perhaps it was simply the fear. It was empty. When I returned I remained standing by the telephone, before thinking of something. I had seen him go down the garden earlier that day. I shouted again as I ran, and when I pulled back the branches at the foot of the grove of trees, he was sitting on the stump of a blasted tree. Where I found Kirsten sitting many years ago. The stump we had never removed because the children used to balance on it. I never liked them playing down there, hidden behind the trees.

I was scared, I said as I sat down beside him. I was searching for you.