Days in the History of Silence (2 page)

If I had a free period and he had cancellations, we could meet at the tearoom in the telegraph building, and when it was closed down after many years, we met at a café neither of us really liked.

I do not know if I miss the work, but I wish to be part of something, I always have the feeling of being left out, standing on the outside. Now that the children are no longer children, but grown women we see only now and again. Occasionally we have been in contact with a few colleagues, from time to time, sometimes a vacation with acquaintances. That was long ago.

For years I stood in the classroom and my eyes scanned what seemed to be the same pupils, all cast in the same brilliant mold after a few years in the building, ready for university. I made out as though I were taking part in it, that is how it feels now. Some pupils distinguished themselves, and every other year there may have been a pupil who was particularly
interested, one who did not consider reading Olav Duun to be a personal affront. Perhaps they also became more mature after those three years, I exaggerated the impression of how alike they all became. I regarded them as an expression of the place, everything I personally could not tear myself away from, instead continuing year after year. The work I suspected I was not suited for, was not what I really wanted to do. Without knowing what I ought to do about it. I always said to myself that I was lucky to be able to be there, work there. I used to say I enjoyed it.

And one day I received flowers, and the pupils had bought a special edition of Duun’s novel,
Fellow Man
. There were a few words from the principal and lunch with coffee and cake. The days that suddenly altered when I finished. In the beginning it was good being just Simon and me. His gradual change started a couple of years ago. But perhaps his restlessness was present long before that, maybe it is an expression of something he has wanted for a long time. To go his own way.

I CAN AWAKEN
in the belief that I hear Simon’s voice, the one I am in the process of forgetting little by little as it is replaced by silence. I wake and realize I must have heard it in a dream. It is so rare for him to say anything.

Old age looks out over a gloomy landscape. Helena, our youngest daughter, telephoned a few weeks ago to say she had picked her father up at a bus stop where he seemed to be studying the timetable.

Dad, she had called out to him. Where are you thinking of going?

Where would he go? she asked me after driving him back home.

I could not answer her. I don’t know, I said. It’s worrying, she whispered so that Simon would not hear. He could have just gone off.

Several days later she dropped by with the envelope and application form. She placed it on the hall table.

I’ll put it here, Mom, she said. I saw she was standing in the hallway, in the semidarkness. Helena who was only a baby when the episode occurred. I had forgotten to turn on the light. I found the light switch.

There are homes for the elderly where he would be comfortable. He needs to go somewhere, she insisted and pointed at the envelope as though underlining her words.

A place where people will look after him, she continued. I can’t let you take all the responsibility on your own. Now that he’s always going off, now that he’s so silent.

She spoke for a long time, there was an echo of her voice in the hallway. She doesn’t have such a strong voice, but it seemed she had thought about what she wanted to say. And she gave me a hug when she left. She always does that.

A home for the elderly.

I saw that it was lying there. I have left it lying there ever since.

The application form. It is going to occupy my thoughts, no matter what I do.

•

SOME DAYS I
cannot remember the distinctive character his voice had, whether it was as deep as I believe, I cannot imagine it. His silence. The words become gradually fewer, as though something is drying up for want of nourishment. After he retired, he liked to go walking on his own, taking the bus into the city and walking up to the university at the top of the hill. Sitting in the old garden beside the Natural History Museum, with the voices of the students from the streets, plants, bushes and trees with their names and species displayed on little signs. Undisturbed, enclosed. Here he sits while the day rushes on across the city and comes to an end with the light sinking behind the trees, behind one of these mountains, perhaps he is reading or just staring at his fingers clutching the book, at the students walking past and giving an impression of sliced movements behind the high, green fence.

I used to phone him when he went out, after a few hours I phoned, and a conversation ensued about what he should bring back, as he usually bought some groceries on the way home. I mentioned what we required, and there was no need for him to write it down, he remembered it by heart.

He has never liked talking on the telephone, I have always been the one who did most of the talking. But a change came about, I did not notice it in the beginning, not for the first weeks or months, it crept in slowly. The pauses, the stillness. He ended the conversations so abruptly that I sometimes phoned back to ask if I had said something wrong.

No, what could it be, he replied. And it was these responses that made me anxious. He always gave the same answer. As though he had a short list of replies he used alternately and held the list up to his eyes, picking out the responses that might suit. And sometimes they did not suit.

He could return home with the groceries, or else he had forgotten them. I said I would make dinner, are you hungry, no, thanks for asking, he might say, or I hadn’t thought about it. He went through and sat down with a book, until I placed the food in front of him and he would maybe take one mouthful and then another a while later, until the food was cold and by then it was late in the evening.

His silence came gradually over the course of a few months, half a year. He might say thanks for the meal or bye. He has become as formal as a hotel guest, seemingly as frosty as a random passenger you bump into on a bus. Only now and again do I see him standing gazing out the window or smiling at something he is reading or watching on television, and I think he is back. As though it really is a journey he has embarked upon. But if I ask what he is watching, what is amusing, he just looks at me uncomprehendingly. The physician, one of his junior colleagues, says he has quite simply become old. The solution, for of course there are solutions to situations like this, why should we consult a physician otherwise, is a center for the elderly, a day care center where Simon spends time twice a week.

I drive him. I always drive him places. He sits in the passenger seat of the car and waits until I arrive. The first time
we went there, we were greeted by a manager who escorted us along corridors reminiscent of tunnels with plastic walls, pale institutional gray, decorative graphics of anodyne subjects, doors with wooden hearts, and at the foot of one of the corridors a room with glass doors. Inside this recreation area was a little group of people. No one looked up when we entered. The old people sat at a table, two members of staff were conversing quietly. Simon got a chair at the table with the others. He continued smiling. But just as I was about to leave, his gaze followed me. His eyes, hands on the table, the slumped shoulders in that room, in that place. It is not a place where you belong.

When I come out again now, there are often two young care workers standing smoking at the entrance. I have seen one of them drop a cigarette butt on the ground and tramp on it as I walk past. Such a disheartening motion. Several times I have remained standing in the parking lot, like a mythological figure, filled with doubt, this is the border between the underworld and our own world, I walk across the little stretch of asphalt, with Simon in the corridors inside, if I turn around now, he will disappear forever. I need to tell this to someone, how it feels, how it is so difficult to live with someone who has suddenly become silent. It is not simply the feeling that he is no longer there. It is the feeling that you are not either.

I
look around the house, everything has its place here too, part of an order. It is so tidy, like a museum or a church, the objects seem to be on display. Few of them do I still have any use for, or have any practical value. They belong to social rituals that are no longer performed to any extent, or if they are performed, rarely have any meaning. They are reduced to a striking series of memories. The old clock above the table, the tea service in the cabinet behind glass doors. It might even be that the house exists to provide a home for these items, to a greater degree than it exists for us.

It was because of the house and all it contains, these artifacts, that four or five years ago we employed a cleaner. I had never had any help before, I did not want home help. Our daughters suggested that we obtain paid help. It is not unusual
in this neighborhood. On a few afternoons a week I have seen a little army of young and middle-aged women walking between the villas, letting themselves into the well-protected houses, turning off alarms, security systems. Inside the empty houses I expect they take out washing buckets and scouring cloths, fill them with water and chemical detergents, waltzing around in a miasma of bleach, washing the muck off toilet seats and bathroom floors, feeding pet animals confined indoors, emptying the contents of the trash cans, tidying away toys from the floor in the children’s rooms. After a few hours they let themselves out and disappear down the road. I did not want to have a stranger in, but there were no arguments I could use to rationalize this opposition. The girls, our daughters, were of the opinion that we
needed help
. It is a large house, they said.

Simon was not keen either to allow a stranger into our house, into our rooms. He was still the same old Simon at that time. It was before the silence took over. We were agreed that we would do the work ourselves.

But in the end we gave in to the nagging and employed a helper. For the meantime, was the intention. It is strange to use the word
employment
about our relationship with Marija. Although it was of course a form of employment. After a while it seemed far from being anything to do with the relationship between an employer and an employee. The cleaner was more like someone who had come to visit us, a guest we would like to come again.

Everyone liked her. Marija.

She had been with us for almost three years when we had to let her go. Something happened, something that was impossible to get over. When I think about it now, I know it might perhaps have been overlooked by other people. Despite its gravity. Maybe by us too, perhaps we could have ignored what happened. It was the closeness that made it impossible, we had become too familiar. Precisely that she was more like a friend and guest. I think that was it.

The girls were disappointed and angry all the same, the two older ones still are. Although it was over a year ago.

But it was worse for us. For Simon and me.

Dear Marija
. I still sometimes formulate that sentence, composing a letter, finding the sentences for myself. I would never write it to her, and I would not write
dear
, not now afterward. If I should write a letter, I would begin in a neutral fashion, with the date and year, and I would swiftly come to the point, whatever that now would be. But why then write to her at all, just to say that she continually manifests herself as a word, a sentence. A glimpse of her can even turn up in my thoughts; I see her sitting in the kitchen buttering slices of bread, drinking tea with sugar and milk, extending her long legs underneath the table and smiling at me. I have tried to convince myself it is more like an obsession, that she still occupies her place here with us, even if it is only a mental place, as when you cannot step on lines, and the lines appear everywhere. You try to think about something else, and the same thought continues to whirl around and around in your consciousness.

I do not miss her. I have a lot to do.

But there is something. Something I miss or perhaps I should rather say lack. She must have served a function, something more than I realized, since I notice this lack. Is that what we are for each other, a function others also can fulfill. I do not like that thought.

I CATCH SIGHT
of the empty chair where Simon usually sits and sleeps. As recently as yesterday I watched him. His face, with sleep smoothing out all his facial features, I looked at the shoulders that seem shrunken, and the one leg he always stretches out a little, the hand with the wedding ring. When I left him this morning at the day care center, I felt an impulse to take his hand and feel it, I had the idea that if I held it exactly like that, it would be like an unbreakable bond, not skin and bone, but a different contact, that other contact, the one that has always been there. Before the silence. But I had problems holding his hand, I could not manage it because I was afraid of being seen or of seeing myself in that way. Perhaps it is only me who feels that gaze upon us.

It makes you feel naked, seeking out others and asking for help. Suddenly you are walking along unfamiliar corridors and opening doors. A group of people sits just waiting for you, but no one thinks there is anything wrong, at least anything unexpected. Only this silence.

I recall something Simon told me before he became old, before this irritating silence, that one of the earliest impressions
he remembered clearly, was the worn timber floor in the apartment where his family lay in hiding during the Second World War, how the rooms were tiny like boxes with doors, a playhouse where it was rarely possible to play. The walls of brown wood, the roof where he could lie looking up, with a feeling that everything was sinking or being sunk, toward them, inside them, through them, and everything linked to a feeling of guilt the origin of which he did not know, but that probably had a connection with his impatience at that time. The hiding place in a middle-sized city in Central Europe, a place where they stayed week after week, month after month. A place of safekeeping he could not endure and had begun to regard as a threat, since he seldom noticed anything of the actual danger. He quarreled with his parents, his younger brother, he was ten years old and hated being cooped up inside the tiny rooms. It felt as though the world had shriveled, as though it had contracted and would never contain or comprise anything other than these three small chambers, of a size hardly bigger than closets and the few people who lived in them, in addition to the helpers or wardens who came and went.