Days in the History of Silence (7 page)

In dreams I am often back inside my body as it was before it grew older, I have the feeling of being younger, without any resistance, there is no resistance in this sleep, hardly any sense of gravity. When I move in my dreams, I sometimes have a feeling that is almost sensual. Not that my dreams are. Not in that way. All the same I often awaken with a feeling of desire. Or a kind of yearning that affords a sense of satisfaction in itself. Yes really, it is so. For the yearning does not make me jittery or restless, it feels just like an acknowledgment of something. Perhaps a feeling of closeness to Simon, but the dreams are vivid. I loved it when we were together, simply lying waiting for him in bed, listening to him padding up the stairs, perhaps I switched off the light and noticed as he came into the room, I miss him. It is not so long ago that we were together in that way, but now that he has shut me
out, it is impossible. I still look at young men, something in the way they walk, their voices, reminds me of him. When he was young, I wanted him to be older than he was. And now that he is old, that we are both older, I think of him as a young man. Occasionally I have felt a passionate desire for him as he was at that time. It makes me happy, like that feeling in my dreams. Oh but yes, that is erotic. I think I have never been close to anyone in that way, been so happy with anyone as I was with him. That it was so intense. And when I waken, my life, or that part of it, my youth, is like a dream I dreamed just a few minutes before I woke. It was over so fast.

I THINK I
hear him talking. It happens now and again. He is sitting in the living room or has gone into the bedroom.

Eva, he says. My name.

I follow him. He might be sitting in his chair or on the settee facing the blank TV screen.

Did you call, I ask. He looks at me uncomprehendingly.

I thought you called me.

Or else I think I hear him talking to someone. As though he had answered the telephone. But he hardly ever answers the phone, he lets it ring, on only a couple of occasions recently have I seen him lift the receiver, once he held it against his ear, the caller was probably speaking and had begun to wonder whether there was anyone at the other end, before Simon put it down. The other time, he passed it over to me.

But these conversations I hear. I think I hear his voice, the words are difficult to understand clearly. Once I thought he spoke her name, Marija. I hurried in to him, I think his lips were moving.

Eva.

Perhaps I hear him from the living room, and I go in, and he is sitting with his eyes closed.

I hear his voice, because I want to hear it, a hallucination of sound, like an echo of music or noise that lingers when you have been to a party or concert and return home, as though the brain continues to transmit the sound, as though the inner ear continues to repeat the oscillations, in the place where sound is converted and interpreted as something meaningful.

Eva.

I listen to the clock. It is situated in the living room despite its insistent sound reminiscent of the old grandfather clocks. It seems as though it forces out every single stroke, second, sharp as a hammer blow against hard material, like the workers who were busy outside the church that morning I was there, who were busy knocking something together, or perhaps they were pulling something apart. But the point is that I do not hear it, most of the day as I am pottering about in the house, or sitting in the living room, I do not hear the clock. Apart from a few times in the course of the day, when I suddenly notice it, and when that happens it is difficult to fathom how I can disregard it the rest of the time. Of course I know why, I understand how the brain shuts out impressions
that are there all the time, everything that is repeated over and over again, it would be impossible to take in everything at once, always sensing every single smell, hearing every sound, thinking every thought; if the mind did not do so, life would be intolerable. We can concentrate on only a small fraction at a time. Does that apply to your conscience as well?

SOMETIMES WE GO
to the cinema. Matinees. The movies vary in genre, comedy, teen movie, romantic drama. I would prefer something different, something historical, but it seems as though these are the only movies shown so early in the day. Simon does not fall asleep, he watches the screen, I think he does that the entire time. The auditorium is almost empty, there are often some teenagers sitting farther back. Several times I have noticed a man who usually goes to the same movies together with his son. He enters immediately after the lights are dimmed, accompanied by a young boy. The youngster is just as tall as his father, I see their silhouettes in the pliant, colored light from the projector as it is reflected back at the audience. Their profiles are similar, he must be the father. But in addition the son has a double chin and his head is too large. The father indicates where his son should sit, they sit down side by side, always near the front, always beside the exit. Just before the end of the movie, as the music signifies an obvious conclusion, the father lifts his son’s jacket and makes him bend forward, guiding his arms into the sleeves, as you do only with children, the boy’s face is still fixed on the
screen and as the first credits roll into view, the father takes the grown-up boy by the hand and leads him out. It happens every time. The young man keeps pace with his father on the way out, but turns around to the screen one more time. The father who is escorting him to the exit before the lights go up. There is a hideous thoughtfulness in his action.

WE DID NOT
manage to accept it. This lacking ability to accept an essential aspect of each other. My absent ability to acknowledge his sorrow, and his inability to accept my deficiency of sorrow, regret. He wanted me to recount the story of the child, my love for the boy I gave away. It is not my story, I said. He continued to insist that we ought to search for him. That it would be easier for him as a physician to do so. Eventually he discovered something, via contacts as he put it. A name, a totally ordinary surname, an address not far from us.

Simon thought he had found him, my son. He wanted me to go and look. Meet him. He lives here, he said. He has lived here in this city the whole time, not far away from us. It isn’t him, I said. It’s a common name. I did not want to go there.

After a while he stopped begging me, gave up talking about it. But I don’t believe he forgot it.

An address, a name.

He felt there had to be a common factor between my love for him, for our girls and this story about the adoption. He could not understand that it was not like that. He said that I was fond of the girls of course. I said it was not the same. He
could not go along with that. He wanted something more, something else. There had to be something else.

He came out with theories.

When we were sitting up at night, he might start to talk about the boy. He thought it was possible that I had been suffering from depression, women could get a postpartum type. A depression that prevented me from bonding with the child. There was no selfishness involved in that. If I had suffered from depression, it was not uncommon.

Another time, he said something about the boy while Marija was there. A comment, an isolated remark I don’t recall. But I do remember I was afraid Marija would get to know that about me, that she would find out about the boy. Perhaps because there would then be two people who knew. Or perhaps because she with her Orthodox Catholic background, or what I persuaded myself at least was such, would consider this an unacceptable thing to do, the adoption. It seems paradoxical when I think about it now. In fact she once found the photograph of my son and me, I had put it together with photos of the girls as children. She initially thought it was one of them.

No, I said.

Who is it then, she asked and looked at the photograph and then at me. And then I convinced myself she perhaps realized who he was. But how on earth could she have done that. It’s a boy, I said.

She put the photograph away. I always wanted a son, she said.

W
e had a dog at the time Marija was here. An old dog. It had been a long time since it had given up regarding itself as a guard dog with the garden as its territory. Now it mostly lay on its woolen blanket in the living room, by the window, the deep tan coloring of its pelt faded, white hairs on the girdle of black around its back, the terrier ears that had been glued when it was a puppy, to train them into the correct shape, still capturing sounds from outside, sounds that were now more a source of skittishness than curiosity. Simon likes dogs. The girls used to say that. Daddy and his dogs.

He was always approaching dogs, puppies. But he did not want to have a dog. It was the girls who pestered us to
get Max. Simon repeatedly said he did not want a dog, they ought to have known that.

They went on and on about wanting a puppy. Every birthday, Christmas. Every time they spotted a dog they liked. He became furious, irritated by all the nagging, it was not until long after they were grown up, the girls came home and had bought it and gave it to us as a present. For company, they said. It was a poor show. Simon did not want Max. He said it was a living creature, that they should have asked him. They had wanted to please us, the girls said and were disappointed. It became my task to persuade him.

I tried to talk to him about it.

It’s only a dog. You can’t blame the dog.

I’ve given my opinion on it, Simon said.

But it’s hard for them to understand, I said, since you like dogs so much.

He did not relent, and I appreciated he had his reasons, the girls would have to look after the dog, they shared that duty for a while. In the end it landed at our house all the same. I went for walks on my own with it in the beginning. He disliked all the responsibility, he said. But after a period of time I noticed him talking to the dog, scratching behind its ears.

I knew that Simon had used to walk a neighbor’s dog for a spell as a child. He told me he took it with him on short strolls to earn a few coins. The dog of his childhood had adored Simon. It used to sit outside the door of Simon’s
home and bark until he appeared, the owner told him it simply ran out into the hallway and sat in front of his door, it never showed such loyalty to anyone else. Everybody on that stairway heard the dog barking and whimpering outside the boy’s door. Simon at first did not like the smell of the dog on his hands, the excrement he had to whisk off the sidewalk with a stick. But after a few months of this work as a dog walker—this is how he recounted it to me—he nevertheless looked forward to going on walks with it, he felt more secure, it was far from being a small dog. And later he always connected this dog with his sense of freedom before the hiding place. The walks, the games on the grass. He was certain the dog in some way or other had protected him from danger, such as the neighborhood bullies, the Brown-shirts who turned up, that it led him safely from the street to the nearby playground. Its name was Kaiser. Whether it had been a tribute or a joke he did not know. But he remembered his own voice calling out:
Fetch, Kaiser, come, Kaiser
.

The dog we acquired had a quiet disposition, but nothing about it reminded him of that first dog; Max slept on his blanket, ate an incredible amount, defecated in the garden. Simon gradually became more enthusiastic about it, he went on the walks Max needed, patted the dog on the back while he himself was sitting in his chair reading in the evening. But it became evident only after the dog passed away, how attached he, we, had become to it. Simon told our grandchildren stories about a dog he had gone for walks with as a child, but I think these stories were set in a different place, a
childhood location that did not resemble the city where he had grown up. In these new childhood depictions everything revolved around this tiresome mongrel he at first disliked, and that sank its teeth into the chain when he tried to lead it around, but later became his best friend. Kaiser. There was no war approaching, no problems.

Our dog, Max, lay beside the chair, stretched out on the blanket, begged in the kitchen, dug holes in the neighbor’s garden, disappeared to a place several miles away where a bitch was in heat. When Marija arrived, she complained that it molted, although I never noticed any hairs. The grandchildren called it
Horridandstupid, sit, Horridandstupid, fetch, Horridandstupid, who is Horridandstupid
. Horridandstupid, it answered delightedly to the name and probably forgot its own.

It grew old, its legs and paws were crippled by arthritis, and one day it suffered an epileptic fit, it was terrifying to witness, and affected Simon most of all. It lay on the floor, head banging and body tensing, foaming at the mouth, thumping against the floor. When it recovered consciousness, it attempted to stand up, but could not manage to, it peed on the floor, looking at us, me and Simon, Marija, as though it had never seen us before. The vet talked about putting it down, but we decided we would wait. It should die naturally at home in the living room, on its blanket, it ought to lie there, not on a bench, a table, a floor, it should not die in another place.

Marija used to talk to it in Latvian, she called it by the Latvian word for dog,
suns
. But she did not like it. She did
not like dogs. She called out to it only when it was to be fed. It used to watch her from its place in the living room, or stand on the kitchen threshold right until she asked it to leave. They kept an eye on each other. Perhaps she was afraid of it. Maybe a dog has scared her, I said to Simon. It all seemed more understandable that way. She had been frightened. A dog had probably acted threateningly toward her, and it didn’t help matters when I told her Max would never hurt anyone. I went for walks with the dog too, and sometimes she accompanied us. The dog on one side of me, her on the other. They never walked side by side. She said only that she didn’t like dogs. I thought it was perhaps something she normally said to avoid having a dog prancing about her legs when she was doing the cleaning, I thought she perhaps really did like it. When the dog lay down beside her, I imagined she stroked it. I could envision it, but I never saw it happen. Perhaps I wanted it to be so. When it became clear it ought perhaps to be put to sleep, she asked what we wanted to do.