Days in the History of Silence (20 page)

The pastor probably thought I was a believer, or had become so in my old age, out of anxiety or regret.

The feeling of guilt. It belongs with that uneasiness, that transitory uneasiness that can surface when I wake during the night and lie there without falling asleep again. Did I want to seek out the church in order to hold that up against a background of deeper meaning? If I wished to be closer to the church. Can’t it simply have been a desire to be part of something, a context, or at least some kind of contact? But perhaps it is also partly a feeling of guilt. Guilt, that binds us to others just as much as every other emotion. Perhaps more.

HE WOULD HAVE
been so much older now, my son, I have difficulty picturing him in my mind. I kept his clothes, the clothes he did not take with him. They are in the basement. I did not use them for the girls, I must have felt that they were his. Or perhaps it was for my own sake that I did not make use of them for any of the other children.

I went to find him, after all the years and the silent battle between us, Simon and me. Maybe I did it for Simon’s sake, but it may also have been for my own. I wanted to see who he had become, what he would say to me, whether I had caused anything, any harm. It was only a couple of years ago. I found the name Simon had kept safe and looked up an address in a newly renovated area. I stood for a while on that street, looking at the entrance to an apartment block where the residents were coming and going, and at one point I spotted a youngish man and two little girls emerge from the stairway at the front of the building, one of the girls had an umbrella under her arm that she was trying to open, her father tried to help her, and after several attempts the child obviously became impatient and rushed inside the entrance, with her father following after. The door slammed behind them. I thought that it could have been him, for a second I thought that, but I knew it did not add up. It wasn’t him, he was too young. I hesitated slightly before finding the apartment number I had been given, and finally rang the doorbell. I stood on the sidewalk and glanced up at the façade. There was traffic in the street, cars driving past. A woman leaned out from one of the windows above me, supporting herself with her forearms on the windowsill, taking a couple of puffs of her cigarette, peering down at me, before closing the window again. No one opened the door, I rang the doorbell a few more times. There was no one at home, perhaps I was just there at the wrong time of day.

I took the bus home. I let it lie, I was cowardly and did
not tell Simon about it. I was relieved, but perhaps I was also, without quite being able to explain it, disappointed.

They phoned later from an office that had given me assistance, I had asked them to call. The woman I spoke to on the phone asked whether I had found my way, and when I said I was unsure whether I had been given the correct name and address, replied in a subdued voice that it was possible to continue the search, it sometimes took time, families could for example have moved abroad, and as though she guessed something from my response, a doubt, she added that we would certainly be successful if I really wanted to be.

A PHOTOGRAPH WAS
taken of us. Me with the child, my son, before I gave him away. He is leaning back slightly, perhaps he was afraid of the flash, I don’t remember who took it. I am sitting ramrod straight with the baby, the infant balanced on my knee as though he can really sit up on his own, but I am supporting him with both hands, otherwise he would obviously fall over, he is unsteady, but I am holding him with the palms of my hands parallel, as though I were holding a parcel, a bag, if you removed the child from the picture, it would just look as though I were measuring something, demonstrating the thickness, the width, there is no pride in my expression, no happiness. I am looking at the back of his head. As he pulls backward. I have no idea where it comes from, whose idea it was to take this despondent photograph. Perhaps it was taken at the adoption office, or earlier that same day. I
search my facial expression on that day, and think I discern something, is it guilty conscience, shame?

It is a dream now, remote and hazy. I tend this grave belonging to a stranger. It is always silent in the afternoon, I like to be here, around Christmastime I buy a wreath, there are lanterns placed on some of the graves at that time of year, there are other people going around arranging things. No one asks me who I am here for. Actually I don’t know myself either.

I
t can be called a memory trace in the brain. I read it somewhere. When a memory is first laid down, after enough time has elapsed and it has been recalled enough times, the synaptic alterations can become permanent. And parts of the brain used to retain the memory are not necessary to call it forth, it has become like a trace, a photograph, a picture that is maybe always going to be found there.

Simon was preoccupied by the suitcase. During the years he was searching for his cousin and aunt, trying to find traces of them, he continually returned to the suitcase, his aunt’s suitcase that he remembered from the apartment before they had to leave for the hiding place. He wondered
whether others might be able to help, whether it might be possible to track it down. His aunt’s suitcase that she had packed because she was waiting for her husband to fetch her, they would go into hiding together. He had seen it with his own eyes, it was a suitcase of the type that was common at that time, with mountings at the corners, canvas and leather material, straps to stretch over the clothes to keep them in place. He cannot remember his cousin’s face, but he remembers the suitcase clearly. It sat in the hallway, a suitcase like the ones belonging to his parents that later, after the war were always placed in an attic, and never taken out again because they do not travel, the two elderly people have become unschooled in everything to do with transport, they shut themselves increasingly inside the apartment. The suitcases were purchased in the same place, both those of his parents and his aunt’s. He has seen her opening it, taking things out and snapping the locks closed again, he imagines that it contained clothes, towels, toothbrushes and washcloths. His parents were also fed up with his aunt’s suitcase, they thought it was in the way, it was both optimism and obstinacy, they said, that made her refuse to unpack. Nevertheless they accepted it, bore with it, and with her plans. She was sorry she was unable to go into hiding with them, but insisted that her husband would collect her. She was young, they said when they talked about it, young and afraid.

He believes that on the day they were taken away, she had the suitcase with her, although it is not likely, a suitcase
is overstating things, it has no place in all this. All the same, he imagines the suitcase. That she somehow or other manages to take it with her, that it accompanies her. She and her son, they sleep beside it, perhaps they even sit on it if there is room to do that. (Actually he knows that there is no room either to sleep or for a suitcase), they stay close beside it all the time, it would be a simple matter for someone to steal it or its contents, they must only hope. She always used to talk about what she had packed, his aunt, because it was important. Something materializes through the suitcase and its contents, a kind of tidiness and security. The suitcase and its contents bear witness to a possible destination for the journey, where things will be unpacked and put in their place. The clothes will be worn, the bedclothes will be slept in. The suitcase is a guarantee that this is actually a journey like other journeys, with the definition of such transportation always incorporating the possibility of traveling back to where you started. But at the terminus, where they are expelled, wrenched from the train together with all the others, it is taken from her. The suitcase is flung onto a pile of other people’s luggage. Then she stands there, Simon says. Without the suitcase. Is her son standing by her side? At that moment it dawns on her that they are not going to travel any farther.

HE HAS RECOUNTED
this, and I have visualized it. It is easy to envisage those two. In a crowd of people, I think. In a herd
being thrust backward and forward in a confined space, the two of them also jolted to and fro, caught among the others, dragged in one direction and then another, and at one moment during this scene, I imagine that they are separated, mother and son. Lose sight of each other. Those two who have been so close during these months alone in the apartment.

In everything that happens, in this movement of people who are shouting, falling, remnants of luggage, bundles being trampled, coats and winter jackets, infants and old people, his cousin is left standing on his own. He turns around, but sees no faces, only vague impressions, shapes, apparitions, hears complaints, shouts, sobbing from children like himself. Around him grows this mountain of people in motion, like a wall, a terrible, unstable wall from which parts are ripped away while new ones are added. Is he wearing something, something that gives him sufficient weight to remain standing on exactly that spot without being jostled along or knocked over? Perhaps a narrow rucksack or some other possession he is carrying, something he is now probably holding with both hands, clutching it to his chest. As though he is embracing it, keeping it safe and clinging to it at the same time. While the human wall continues to be shoved backward and forward once more, and simultaneously increases, like an organism through mitosis, a cell division before his very eyes. The boy’s mother is still part of this formation, and is
carried forward like a light object being propelled onward by the current in a river. But the boy, the cousin, remains standing on the same spot. While he waits, he cannot do anything else of course, for her to be carried back to him.

I
n the evening we watch TV. Simon sits in his chair. I am uncertain whether he follows the action, although sometimes he too switches on the set, perhaps one of the things he does automatically, from old habit. There is something paradoxical about his benevolence toward this screen, with all its pestering, jabbering that never ends, even when there is the occasional break, it demands attention. He stares at the screen regardless of what is being shown, as though it is exactly that and nothing else he has been waiting for. I ask if it’s a bit cold, whether I should fetch a jacket. In the wardrobe I catch sight of the snail shell still lying there, I hold it in my hand for a moment. It is solid, but when I hold it up to the lamp, the light shines through the delicate edges. I wonder
when the snail disappeared, why it abandoned such a perfect place, the exquisite curved corridor. I stroke the surface, a golden veneer, brittle and yet durable, before replacing it and closing the door.

I put the jacket over Simon’s shoulders, he nods as though I have asked him something. Perhaps it is a delayed reply. The TV continues droning. I open the book that Helena has left on the coffee table, the book about the First World War, I look quickly through it. Here is the old Europe. Lost platoons of soldiers, trench warfare on the western front. Attempts to break through. The Battle of the Somme. For days, months the slaughter continues, from July to November, the young boys fall through the paper pages. Names such as Tannenberg, Somme, Verdun. Between the dust jacket and the first page there is a folded sheet of paper.
To my girls
it says on this folded sheet. He has written it in his slightly shaky handwriting. Of course I don’t know how long it has lain there, but it is Simon’s handwriting, it must have been written more than a year ago, while he was still able to write.

I feel helpless at the sight of this letter that I had not asked to see. As with the application form, I don’t know what I should do with it. I stand there hesitating, before opening it and reading.

Not so long ago, when I was looking through some of our old papers, the papers belonging to Simon and me, I found another letter, or a rough draft of something that
was probably intended to be a letter. I recognized the handwriting, it was inside a blank envelope, but I was unsure whether it was of any significance, it took some time for me to realize what it contained. When Simon was a relatively newly qualified physician, he made a friend. A friendship he later maintained through all these years. They went out and had dinner with other colleagues, and I think they talked about their work since they were in the same profession. It was a formal friendship, I don’t imagine that they ever confided much, a conventional relationship, deriving from and dependent on the codes that applied to friendship at that time. Naturally it came about that we invited this friend and his wife to various social events. We used to send them Christmas cards, in fact it was often me who wrote them. The couple responded with postcards to us every Christmas, formally decorated cards with the obligatory greetings.

I had never considered the friendship to be close enough to include letters, on the contrary. A personal letter seemed to conflict with the distance and formality that the limited seasonal contact depended upon. The letter must also have been an attempt to break through the conformity. Simon wrote to this man, his wife had evidently been ill, I couldn’t remember anything about it. He tried to comfort him and say something beyond their well-established politeness. He had obviously given up the effort since the letter had never been sent. It was so helpless, what was stated on the sheet
of paper, there were several forms of words embarked upon, crossed out, as though he had tried to arrive at a sentence or a collection of them that could cover something he perhaps did not even grasp himself. Or perhaps he had some idea, but these sentences and attempts were far too much of a contrast to what their friendship had been up to that point. In order to achieve that, he had to go beyond the boundaries of what was possible, who he himself could and would appear to be, and so he became all the more constrained by his own limits. It seemed so desperate.

I felt sorry for him, and all the same I was annoyed that I had been kept outside, that he had not mentioned anything to me.