Days in the History of Silence (15 page)

She had brought a gift with her, a vase, she flattened and smoothed out the wrapping paper, folding the corners carefully, layer upon layer. And now it was a square in her hands. They think we are stubborn, Simon said, smiling and stroking Helena on the cheek.

Mom, Helena said, turning to me.

But there is nothing to be said, I replied.

She looked at me, she was so disappointed.

SHE LEFT AFTER
a couple of hours, we ate some of the chicken wings, Helena did most of the talking. Simon did not say so much. We held the wings between our fingers, I had never liked holding on to bones while I was eating. I ate only a few. Helena was telling us something, I can no longer remember what, I don’t even know if I was listening. Afterward she helped me to tidy up. We put the rest of the food into the fridge, I filled the kitchen sink with water, outside the light was tinged with red as though it had really been the day we had hoped for and now it was over, I leaned across the sink.

Helena hugged me before she left. She always does that.

It is unfair, I thought, but also our own fault.

I COULD PHONE
them, say that I thought it was unfair, but in a way they had a right, I thought, to such anger. After all
we had held back from them throughout the years, not only about Marija, but all the other things too. As though we had been lying.

It was never the intention, I would say, we only thought it was for the best. For everyone. He would avoid going through it again, the sadness, the depression. There are things we cannot understand, I felt.

And me? Perhaps I was cowardly.

I have understood that I have been wrong, I would say. But would that help? It was all a mean, contemptible little protest, I thought. We cleared the table while we walked around the house, in the silence.

I so wanted to say something, ease some of the pain. I said that he didn’t need to do it all now, some things could wait till the next day. I know that, he replied. His hands were shaking, he cleared away the dinner service. In order to avoid waking up and finding it there, a confirmation of the disappointment.

I saw him that evening, going around the garden taking down the colorful lanterns one by one. I remember it crossing my mind that now we’ll never see how they shine.

THEY PHONED LATER
and said that there had been a misunderstanding, pleaded an excuse. What did they blame it on? I don’t remember. We knew that they were lying, and of course they knew it too. I believe they regretted it, of course they did, it was a rotten thing to do. We accepted their excuses
and had some kind of celebration a short time afterward, but it was not as we had planned, it was not our big day. We knew, and they knew.

HE WANTED TO
tell them about it. He said it was time the girls got to know. During the following days he prepared himself, made himself ready to talk about what we have not managed to say during all these years, I believe he was searching for the right moment. Will it change anything, I recall thinking. Will they not simply become even angrier, because we haven’t said anything before? He could not stop talking about it. It was as though he were ready to spring, over and over again. I was the one he talked to, I heard about the people who surrounded him when he was a child, women, men, families, names that are forgotten.

One night he woke and told me he could see the apartment he had lived in as a child, before the war, before the Germans occupied his hometown. He was able to go inside it. Even in his thoughts he opened the door gingerly, in case anything was waiting inside for him that he had not anticipated, he stepped inside, he said, evidently after everyone had departed. The long curtains that reach the floor in front of each of the living room windows, he has a glimpse of the kitchen, glasses and plates are washed and sitting on the kitchen counter, with the towel draped over them. In this illusion, this memory, he sees himself open the closet in the hallway, smells the familiar odor of them, but his parents’
clothes are not there. He goes around and catches sight of his brother’s shoes, his own. He continues into the foyer. It feels as though they are present and at the same time he realizes that they are not. In the living room he remains standing in a particular spot where he remembers standing when he was little, a spot that gave him a kind of overview of what the others were doing, his parents who used to walk to and fro through the rooms, occupied with various tasks.

There is sunshine outside the window, he said, but the ocher-colored woven curtains are drawn, rather than the blackout blinds. Except for one window, where the black blind is pulled down as though it is a wall, a fireplace wall.

He also catches sight of something else.

Simon is thinking about his young aunt and cousin, the two who stayed on, waiting for the boy’s father and for the helpers who were to take them to him.

That is what he sees; sometimes when he believes he is in this apartment, he notices something lying on a counter, he picks it up and it is a pair of glasses, the frame is strengthened around the thick lenses, but the glasses themselves are not large. One of the little screws is slightly loose, he lifts them up, the gentle curve at the end of the leg, the hoop that attaches behind the ear, beneath the hair. He clutches the glasses, they smell of something he recognizes, earwax. There is in fact a certain smell of earwax, he notices it, he imagines he smells it, now there is no difference between the two things. He thinks he remembers his cousin used to put them down when he washed himself, that he has seen them there before. He discovers the
washing water sitting undisturbed in a bowl, a bluish film on top, the remains of the soap. And he understands that they were picked up suddenly, forced out, his cousin who can’t see properly, who has this visual impairment, everything is just a fog without his glasses, they would not have left without his glasses if there was time, and that’s the way he knows, he tells me, knows that they were chased out, and his cousin who probably can’t distinguish anything other than hazy colors and light, figures merging together and dividing up again. And perhaps, he says, it is just as well.

SIMON RELATED THAT
he had heard his parents talking just before they all went into hiding. They were standing in the hallway in the old apartment and holding a conversation. They were talking about their father having contacted his former employer in an attempt to obtain assistance. He had worked in an office for as long as it was possible for people like him to do so. The old boss had said to Simon’s father that he had nothing against helping them, he just could not understand how it could be done. Whether it would really make any difference to their situation. Simon’s father had explained to him that it might perhaps postpone things. But, his boss had said as he looked at him with a worried face, do you not consider that the police have a reason for doing what they are doing. I didn’t know what to say, Simon’s father said to his wife as they stood in the hallway with Simon listening from the children’s bedroom. He was my boss.

His boss had also pointed out that it would not be good for the reputation of the business. It would undoubtedly place them all in a negative light if it came out that they had tried to do something against the wishes of the authorities. Everything he said had been sensible in the circumstances, there were of course several ways to look at it. And his father had said he agreed, he had nodded. Because he did not dare to do anything else, because he was used to refraining from contradicting his boss. He had said that he understood.

While we stood there talking, Simon’s father said to his wife out there in the hallway, the weather had cleared up. Outside the building in which the office was situated, the sky had come into view. We could see toward the city, and it was a fine day.

He took my hand and wished me good luck, his father said. I know you will make the best of the situation, he said. And what did you say, Simon’s mother asked. I said yes and returned his handshake, Simon heard his father say.

She took my father’s hat, said Simon, opened the closet in the hallway and hung his overcoat inside next to our clothes. I can still smell the scent of that closet, of old shoes, worn-out soles, the shoe polish she had hidden. His coat. Our clothes beside it. They waited in the hallway for a moment after that. I don’t know what they were doing. Perhaps they just stood still. In their apartment, outside the clothes closet. She who had just hung up his coat, he by her side. Just stood there, before they came in to us children.

•

HE ALSO RECALLED
another event immediately before they went into hiding. He had been with his mother to one of the places where it was still possible for his family to shop, and she had not had enough money to pay, perhaps because the prices, the cost of the commodities, appeared to vary and increase every time they were there, she had acted as though it were a common occurrence, and asked him to run home to fetch another purse. And he had sprinted, and when he returned, his mother was standing in a line among several people about to be arrested.

He approached her, perhaps to associate himself with her or at least to give her the money. She had not met his eye, but let her gaze slide as indifferently over him as she let it slide over the other spectators, he halted and moved backward. Simon remained standing among the spectators while she was forced up onto a truck, and not once did she look at him as though they knew each other.

She had come back again, amazingly enough she had not been held for long. But for several days he regarded her in a different light, as though they actually were unknown to each other. He thought about who she really was. He remembered the stories she had told him and that he had only sometimes listened to, about when she met his father, about when they were young. He suddenly understood that she was an individual separate from him. He looked at her clothes in the wardrobe, he observed how she put her hair up, holding the hairpins in her mouth while she attached them, put on her
coat and hat to go out, stroked her hand over her ankle when she came home, because the shoes she had acquired were too tight, he tried to discover who she was, view her from outside. When he looked at her name enough times in succession, it seemed strange, disconcerting. He saw her as she had always been, but it seemed as though that was not enough. It was like looking at a picture sketched so that the contours showed a figure, but if you looked at it for long enough, it also formed the outline of a different figure. He saw that now, with her. And it was a more fundamental change than everything that was happening around them, in the midst of the upheavals he caught sight of her. It both terrified and delighted him.

WHEN THEY WENT
into hiding, there were several people involved in concealing them, he especially remembered a woman from a religious community. Her strictness. Simon thought he recalled that she was the sister of the woman who had taken him along to church. The mood of these people would be changeable, their motives varied, there could be days they doubted, it was not so easy to understand why they all became helpers, perhaps it was by chance, perhaps they had a guilty conscience, perhaps their religion or some other conviction decreed it, regardless: Their approach varied. His parents always spoke carefully in low voices to these men and women, and gradually it dawned on him how dependent they were on them, how none of them would have been alive without the helpers who could also be called guards, and that
they could anytime at all change their minds and disappear. It was the food the helpers brought that kept them alive, him and his family, their dependency made the captives helpless, Simon understood that, and how it was reflected in his parents’ expressions, how they talked to that woman who was frequently impatient and bad tempered, and whom they nevertheless never dared to contradict or confront despite her occasional unreasonableness. He recalled that his mother had broken down one evening after the woman had left, sobbing and saying that she could not stand it any longer.

Even power, the need to control that perhaps first came to light through this new influence over others, or perhaps it had always been there. That was part of the reason why the woman, and maybe several of the others as well, had gone along with helping them in the first place. None of us knew their genuine motives, Simon said.

HE TOLD ME
again about his upbringing, the hiding place, eventually repeating many of the details, as though by repeating them, he held them tight. He described how everything in their hiding place had a stale taste of dust, even the air tasted of dust, the limited food they ate, the lukewarm water they drank, it is dust he thinks of first and foremost when he is trying to describe it.

He told me things he had never mentioned before, perhaps he had not remembered them earlier. It was exactly as if he had gained access to another room, he went inside, came out again,
went in and out between the past and the present. But finally it seemed as though he could not get through, something was closed, the openness gradually passed, he shut himself inside. I had thought he wanted to tell the girls, but now he no longer wanted to talk about it. And one morning when I came into the living room, he was sitting in his chair with a blanket covering him, he must have risen during the night. He was sitting still with the blanket over his shoulders, with an expression, a grimace that I found disturbing. I became afraid, I shook him gently. He opened his eyes and looked at me. But he said nothing.

It did not pass. When the children were little, they played a game in which they made a pact not to speak, it was all about who could hold out the longest. Only the one magic word from any of them could break the pact.

I didn’t possess that word.

And there we were, going around in the house, and there were times, I thought, that it appeared he was simply waiting for me to come out with something, an answer. As though the silence was a challenge rather than an absence of words.

SIMON AND HIS
closest family were taken to a different place during the night, a new hiding place where they stayed until the war was over, they all survived. But their relatives, their friends, their life outside had vanished. His parents were changed after the war, Simon said. They just became older, they always seemed small when he visited them in the rooms of their new apartment. The transition to his own adult life,
when he visited his parents less often, coincided with their transition to these other rooms, in their new apartment, that in comparison with the hiding place seemed gigantic, and made its inhabitants tiny. They were submerged, becoming extinguished by the massive walls, the enormous high-ceilinged rooms of the apartment where they lived, as though by solemnity. Passed away long before our own children were born. He did not manage to maintain contact with the brother who had shared the silence during all the time they spent in their hiding place. Their conversations were always short and hesitant. As though they could not let go of the only thing that had saved them, the silence. Their contact is erased, it takes only a few years.