Days in the History of Silence (11 page)

In time she became like me, like us, she began to read, withdrawing more into herself. Her sisters are tougher. Helena is the only one who is a teacher, like me. She teaches science, mathematics, nothing as intangible and vague as literature. I think it is an appealing subject. She teaches at junior high school, I like the thought that she stands facing them, explaining something so solid and certain.

I take one of the bags with me into the living room. I still feel uneasy, perhaps I have acquired her uneasiness. The clock is ticking, suddenly I hear it.

She leaves, and I think about the application form. That she forgot to ask me if I had filled it in.

I REMEMBER SOMETHING
that happened once when we were on the way home from a trip to the mountains, just Simon and me, we had been driving for hours, we were on our way down after staying at a little hotel for a few days, it was some occasion or other, and we were driving through a valley that reminded us both of some other place, a place we had been before and enjoyed. We were exhausted. Hungry and thirsty. As we drove over the newly paved highway, I saw a sign saying
BYGDETUN
, a local museum. I recalled something like this from my childhood, a vague memory of a day spent in the sun at some place like that, and there was the same heat outside the windows while we were driving that day. I said that to him, we could stop, I said. We could get something to eat.

Simon wasn’t sure, he drove on, I thought he wanted to pass up the idea. But he pulled onto the side at an exit road and turned the car.

It was later in the day than I had realized, and when we parked the car in the row of other vehicles, I saw that people were already on their way out of the museum, though there was still no sign of anyone dismantling stalls or packing up. Children at one end of a playground were having a good time with a pony, two boys on the stage were trying to grab hold of the microphone, talking into it, splitting their sides with laughter, but the equipment was obviously switched off. There were still families sitting on the wooden benches with thermos flasks and coffee cups. But there weren’t many people all the same, and perhaps it would have been different if it had been more crowded, if there had still been a queue in front of the stalls as I expected there would have been earlier in the day, if people had their eyes focused on the stage, at something going on up there. It didn’t take long until it dawned on me that we had become an attraction, although that is the wrong word. We were being noticed, or more than that. Passersby were looking at us skeptically, I thought it was skeptically, at least there was no feeling of being welcome. What I had been trying to relive, the pleasure I remembered from the encounter with a similar museum as a child, had completely vanished. Instead I was the stranger, we were the two strangers, who had sneaked into a location where we did not belong.

We continued to stroll around for a while, Simon bought a cup of coffee, I looked at a hand-knitted scarf, I felt I was being watched. Even by the children.

When we returned to the car, we did not speak. We had both, I am quite certain, the same realization of not being wanted. It was a feeling of shame, that we might have misunderstood, read the signs of hospitality so wrongly and believed that it embraced us, that we also without any fuss might fit in and be accepted.

S
he enjoyed cleaning, Marija told me. As a rule she simply went into a house or an apartment, let herself in with the key she had been given or a key that was hidden somewhere. She worked her way through the house with a mop, a vacuum cleaner. There was nobody there, no instructions. Few of the houses were really dirty. She cleaned just as thoroughly regardless. She saw little of the inhabitants who must live there, who rarely left behind any traces other than an almost invisible hair on the basin, a towel on the kitchen floor, a pair of sneakers in the hallway. Of course also the money that was left for her on mantelpieces or dining tables, and in some cases, as with us, paid into her bank account. She might discover a coin placed in a
strategic spot or a banana skin that seemed to have slipped out of the trash can. A kind of test, she thought.

In one place lived a married couple. At first Marija had thought they were just living together, that he was a relative, or that they were siblings. Because it seemed as though they lived separate lives and seldom spoke to each other, she said. But they were husband and wife. The man liked to sit and talk while Marija went about her work, he chatted about his wife. He nattered about his wife who was sitting on the other side of the wall and who was walking outside in the hallway, between the bathroom and the kitchen, as though she was someone who had left the house and disappeared long ago. Or he talked about their summer cottage and the grown-up children who were there far too often, he rambled patronizingly about their habits, in-laws he could not abide, about journeys they made to places he could not comprehend anyone having any interest in visiting. Every time she was there, he turned up to talk to her. He could sit for many minutes with his observations, talking continually as time passed and Marija tried to work. She had the impression it was not the floors and the cleaning she was being paid for, but that she was actually being paid for conversing with this man, Marija said to me. And there was some kind of inference. Something was being implied through this arrangement. That social barriers were being expunged, something was being assumed that she struggled to understand.

She had the feeling that there might even be an expectation by the two of them, both husband and wife, that she would fill a need that the wife no longer had any wish to satisfy.

Generally she worked alone, although she would have preferred to have the company of a colleague, she liked to have a female friend to converse with. It was often too quiet in empty apartments. But there were always certain sounds that were particular to that very house. She remembered one occasion when an animal was locked inside the apartment next door. Was it a dog, a cat? The sound she heard was so low, a light and gentle clinking, that now and again it might sound like a child, as though a child were locked inside that one room in the apartment, and it was terrifying, Marija thought, that there was a possibility a child was alone in there.

The rooms resembled the pages of interior décor catalogs, she had once tried sitting on a settee, having made herself a cup of coffee using an expensive coffee machine and drunk out of one of the cups belonging to a designer set, she was embarrassed when she confided that to me.

One place was filled with exercise equipment, little else, in the kitchen there were enormous drums of protein powder, and in the living room there were two exercise machines that she dusted every time she was there. In another house there were photographs everywhere of the family who lived there. You would think they didn’t have mirrors, she laughed.

In one detached house there had been a spooky cellar, the laundry room was down there, you went down a staircase and along a narrow corridor, and deep inside hung a padlock on the door leading to a dark room, she had peeked in there, and this cellar again ended in a hole, just that hole in the wall. Like a dungeon.

Most of them were ordinary houses, terraced houses, detached houses, individual apartments. I come in, she said, and now I always know where they keep their keys, where they hide them. I know about all the hiding places. Everybody has their own hiding place, but I could open every single door in this city.

SHE MADE FRIENDS
with the postman. It was the same man who had talked to me about asylum seekers. Sometimes she used to stand and wait, in fine weather she would stand and wait for the mail, or else she just peeked outside, she had this idea that she ought to fetch the mail for us on Saturdays. It was always the same guy.

I watched her from the window. Her standing on the garden path, and him approaching, walking with his mailbag on his stomach, after parking the mail van on the road. In the beginning I think he barely replied to her, since I saw that she talked to him while he brought out the mail, and that he ignored her.

But later I noticed that they stood together one Saturday and she was laughing, and it struck me that they were perhaps around the same age, he a few years older. Are they flirting? I wondered. I remembered what he had said about cleaners. But now he was standing there chatting nineteen to the dozen.

She waved when he left. She gathered up the mail, turned around and waved.

Simon mentioned his brother once to Marija, she asked whether he had any siblings, she thought he talked too little
about his family, she said. And so he mentioned his brother. I was surprised. He never talked about his brother.

I looked at Simon. It was the closest he came to telling Marija about his own past. He said that he missed his brother, that they had lost contact, that they had lost contact after events that—

I thought he was about to say: took place during the war. If he had not stopped at that, he would perhaps have mentioned the hiding place.

She might perhaps have said: Why a hiding place?

Perhaps he would have told her about it then.

However, she interrupted him, saying that there was an effective way of finding missing relatives or others you had lost contact with, that she herself had found a relative, that he ought to try the foreign information service. Simon nodded and smiled, and pretended to be surprised, in a somewhat vague way, yes, he said, he said he agreed, he ought to try directory inquiries.

They are so helpful, Marija said. A woman there told me I only needed to give the name, country and preferably town, but I didn’t have the town. And all the same, only a few minutes later I was talking to Milda, and we were both overwhelmed. Milda and I who had not spoken to each other for many years.

EVENTUALLY MARIJA TERMINATED
several of her work arrangements because she was tired out. The last time she was
in the country, she had steady cleaning work for a storekeeper and ourselves. Only sporadically did she take on other work in other places. In places she described to me as attractive apartments, all of them almost empty. It was so easy to work there.

Norwegian houses are clean, she said. Like Norwegians. I laughed. But she was quite serious. It’s true, she said. Norwegians are. Always beautiful. And clean.

SOME DAYS HE
simply goes to the car after breakfast, installing himself in the passenger’s seat and waiting until it’s time to drive to the day care center. If I haven’t followed him after about ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, he presses the horn. It varies how long he waits, once when I came out he had fallen asleep. He presses only once. If I don’t arrive, he sits for a while longer, and if I still do not come, he opens the door and struggles to stand upright again. Gives the door a little push. He walks disappointedly back to the house. At least he appears disappointed, his expression is grave and reflective. He never asks why I haven’t come.

He goes out to the car. Waits. I let him wait.

He will not speak, I will not drive. He sits in the car for almost half an hour. I see the back of his head from the window, it strikes me that he is sitting too quietly, in a moment I will make a move to run outside, but then he moves.

He comes in again, sitting down on the chair in the hallway without removing his overcoat, he looks through the hall window, staring out at the car. I say nothing.

I look at him. I think about what he would have said.

Usually I come before he sounds the horn. I sit down beside him. Sometimes he gives a satisfied little snort, and camouflages it by lifting his pocket handkerchief, he wipes himself continually with the handkerchief now, it might be a habit from his childhood he has resurrected, as though someone or other, perhaps his mother, might be standing over him telling him to remember his handkerchief. When I leave him in the corridors of the day care center, it still feels as though I have abandoned him for good, as though the entire car journey here has had the aim of placing him and leaving him there while I make my way as quickly as possible to the exit, and escape.

Before I leave, I always kiss him on the cheek, his soft skin, and feel his cheekbone beneath my lips.

ON THE DAYS
he is not at the center, he wants us to drive. He does not say where he wants to go, but I know that he wants us to seek out places we have visited before. He seems contented then.

I drive him.

There’s a pleasant smell of leather in the car, no matter the time of year it is always snug and secure, I have the feeling of
being in a house, a movable house that has been built around us. Most often we go nowhere.

The drives started many years ago, but they had a more fixed purpose at that time. We were on our way to the cottage, or to visit my relatives, one of the children who was studying in a different city, or some of his colleagues. We still sometimes go on extended journeys. We drive out of the city, perhaps the sun is striking the roofs of the passing cars, a stream of cars. Soon, up in the mountains, they disperse and disappear, only one or two will follow us farther up, but then they too are gone. It is spring, almost summer or fall, early fall. He often sits with his head sideways, resting on his shoulder, he is sleeping or just leaning his head there. His gray hair against the seat fabric, the heat of the car. Previously he was often the one who drove. We would talk about things we saw, sometimes it was a river coming up on one side, meandering its way down the valley. The water and the earth beneath appear green, a turquoise color, and in one particular spot it is like a whirlpool, churning, an agitated movement, as though trying to run the other way, against its own power that draws it downward. Other rivers are clear and slow, melted glass running over stones, perhaps the valley stretches itself out in front of you, no people, only grass, a derelict, transparent house, the walls disappearing, soon only a framework remains under the roof that disintegrates stone by stone. A pile of glass, an accumulation of materials, a defective angle, a distortion of the surrounding landscape. The loneliness that exists in some places. It is impossible not to
be moved by it. It happens so abruptly. Maybe we have been there before, maybe he says that, maybe we talk about it, an everyday conversation, music on the car radio, voices coming and going. I remember we liked to sit and listen to the radio. But that is the past. The trips we take now are without purpose, we do not talk, we don’t really go anywhere, and it is just the trip for its own sake. But recently I have had a feeling that we are nevertheless bound for or at least looking for something. We drove through the forest a few days ago, and while we were still inside a canopy of leaves, it struck me that this, that the forest I saw, was an inherited visual impression, that it had always been there. Of course not seen through a car windshield, but the same picture in any case. In contrast to the asphalt road, the road signs, the exit roads to picnic areas. While I drove he sat beside me sleeping, I wanted to wake him, I wanted us to see this together, that we should talk about it, as I think we used to do. Or did we only talk about the children, about work and the house and finances. I don’t remember. But I felt it so strongly, it was something quite special. I began to consider what it was that was going on inside him, when he sat like that with his eyes closed, once sleep had taken a grip on him.