Days in the History of Silence

~ ~ ~

We were to celebrate our wedding anniversary. It was only a few weeks after the dismissal, and after Marija had left. A red-letter day. Simon and I did not say anything about the fact that she had been looking forward to it, that we had discussed and planned the celebration with her as well. We talked about a family party, perhaps a trip, we had invited the girls, we wanted to mark the day with a gathering. We spent the days picturing the party in our minds, it gave us something to do, to look forward to.

I had risen early on the day and set the long table in the living room, we were planning to have much of the party outside in the garden, but the weather looked uncertain. Nevertheless Simon labored at hanging up lanterns in the trees. We had not attempted that before. He had an idea that the lanterns would give a lovely illumination when darkness fell.

I had received a phone call from Helena, she was not feeling too well, I told her to take it easy, she sounded so unhappy, I thought there was perhaps something more to it, something at work, or with her boyfriend. But she brushed it aside. She was exhausted, she said. I should have asked her why she was exhausted, perhaps she would have told me then, warned me. Would it have spared Simon, us. Would it have made things any different?

I see us going around in the house that morning, we take out the beautiful brass candlesticks, hold the tablecloth above the table, him at one end, me at the other, it hovers like a sail and lands on the tabletop. He fetches plates and cutlery, polishes the candlesticks one more time as well as the little dessert spoons.

They are expected around four o’clock, we have plenty of time, we do everything slowly, carefully so as not to use up the tasks too quickly, there is still a while before they are to arrive. Besides, these very tasks hold a particular pleasure that should not be denied, this sense of anticipation because we are already familiar with these occasions, we know all about the good, gratifying pattern they normally follow.

The girls and their husbands. The children running in and out of the veranda door, between the table with soft drinks and goodies and back to the garden, red in the face and perspiring, absorbed in the game outdoors. The teenagers meeting up on the little raised platform, gawky in their stiff clothes, envious of the children for a while before hitting upon their own version or perversion of the game with the children as lowly servants. The husbands, uncomfortable until they have had a beer, gather under the eaves on the terrace, their trouser legs pulled up, their jackets over the chair arms now that there is heat in the air, it will probably be a warm afternoon and evening. Simon is talking to them, he likes that sense of contact, although none of them has an occupation similar to his. They are IT professionals, and one is a teacher.

It has happened so many times. That’s the way it usually goes. Later I think about it, I know how it should have progressed, how the party should have been.

They were to arrive about four o’clock. And so the tablecloth lands on the table, the candlesticks are shining much too brightly, Simon calls out to me twice, I think they’re coming now, he means he can hear the cars parking up in the street. The living room is transformed, or reemerges as the living room in which similar parties have been held previously, the living room that can be viewed in photographs we have taken during festivities like this, but that disappears between family parties and is handed over to the daily round once more. It is so obvious that the children used to ask about it even when they were small, then it was their birthdays we were celebrating, an odd time we had a visit from couples, friends of ours: There is another living room inside the living room. The little ones wondered where it went when we were alone.

We think we hear cars continually, we stop and listen. But the voices, the footsteps on the driveway remain outside.

THE DOORBELL RANG. We looked at each other, and he stood up in his newly purchased suit. I saw what he was thinking: at last.

Now they are here, I said. I stepped quietly toward the door, I did not want to do anything different from how it usually went. Even the act of opening the door was part of the joy of the whole thing.

A neighbor was standing outside. I could have seen her face through the glass of the narrow alcove window at the side of the door if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with opening the door quickly, I was so sure that I already had them on my retina, the girls, their husbands, their families. She explained something about a community project among several neighbors. And as she stood before me, without excusing herself or asking if she was disturbing us, my only thought was why don’t you go away. I was not listening. I was so taken aback. Simon still stood on the same spot when I returned to the living room.

No, was all I said. As though to a question that had not been asked.

Oh well, he said.

I went into the kitchen and placed plastic wrap over the sandwiches. I pulled out the plug from the percolator, it seemed as though the action was important, logical and right. I remained standing looking at the calendar. I closed my eyes.

I may have stood there for a while. What are you doing? he said. I turned around, and he was standing in the doorway. Do you think they’re coming? he said. Of course they’re coming, I said to him. Yes, he said.

We sat down in the living room, outside the light was fading, as it does on summer evenings when darkness does not fall abruptly, but gradually. I put on a CD, the music drifted through the rooms. It enveloped us. But at some point, he walked over and turned it down, even though the volume was already so low that it could not possibly have drowned out the doorbell.

I couldn’t say a word. I looked at him, he smiled. A troubled smile that was insistent and said they’ll probably be here soon.

We tried to phone them, but no one answered. We continued this performance. I think neither of us knew how to conclude it. Restless actors who have reached a point in the play and there are no instructions or possibilities for further improvisation, and all that remains is to decide how to bring it to a close. He straightened a plate, placed a fresh candle in one of the candlesticks, it struck me that we had forgotten to set out napkins.

We circled around the conspicuous emptiness. I picked up a book, pretending to read. I knew I had to say something, I didn’t have the strength.

He walked across the floor, turned and again came to a halt.

Eva, he said, I don’t think—

Before he reached the end of his sentence, we heard the doorbell. We looked at each other.

HE WAS THE one who went to open the door.

They came in together. He and Helena. She was wearing a flimsy dress with long sleeves. She came over to me and gave me a hug.

We sat inside, although it was a warm evening, the lanterns outside the window, the ones he had placed at the bottom of the garden and planned to light at dusk.

I want to say something, she said.

But she didn’t say anything immediately. The music was still playing, softly and floating on the brink of being inaudible.

We ate and perhaps tried to find a reason to avoid saying anything. We all knew what it was about. The irritation that had built up, the girls were in a way punishing us, for something they could not fathom.

Helena put it into words, although we already knew by then. That their anger was connected with their irritation over Marija’s dismissal, and it had led to other annoyances coming to the surface. Now they had decided, all of them, to stay at home. Punish us. She did not say that, but I suspected it was so. I don’t understand it, she said after a while, none of us understands it, but I accept it. If you could only give a better explanation. Especially for Kirsten and Greta. Explain to them what it’s all about.

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.

He still received letters from his second cousin, Irit Meyer. She also forwarded letters from the organization that was searching for further information about those who disappeared during the Holocaust. The little round second cousin, or his “dear cousin” as he liked to call her, who was no longer so plump, but stayed in a nursing home in Schöneberg in Berlin, she sent a picture of herself, and she was surrounded by all the things I remembered from her little apartment, probably all the furniture was simply crammed together in a smaller area, and in the midst of it all she sat with the same exuberant hairstyle as in the prewar photographs. By her side there was a man smiling oddly as though he were pulling down his top lip at the same time as he tried to push up his bottom lip and the corners. Ralph and I, she wrote. But she wrote nothing about who this Ralph was, I assumed that he was another resident. Although she had moved to the nursing home, she wrote her own little letters about her existence down there. Letters that I opened and handed to him right up until they stopped coming sometime last year, and I haven’t had the strength to find out why, in order to avoid telling Simon about yet another person who has gone.

His cousin. His cousin was missing. He was this child nobody found. Simon searched for years for information about him. Where he was killed, precisely what had happened. Only recently something has turned up, it has taken a long time to find out.

Before the silence it was this cousin who preoccupied Simon, this young cousin, perhaps also his aunt. He would not rest, he insisted, not until he knew what had happened to them, a sentence he had from one of Irit’s letters, she had at least written something similar. Previously he replied to all her letters, and she forwarded the odd letter from this organization. Her letters enclosed photographs copied onto glossy, flimsy photo paper. Their kin. People who, when I look at these pictures of them, manifest themselves as illustrations in a book, none of them resembling him. They are vaguely obscure, shuttered and restricted within the photographs like memorial plaques from which no one can any longer tear them.

HE NEVER TOLD them about it, although he planned and practiced all these evenings, nights, days, when he went over the painful aspects of the past with me. Instead he became more and more silent. As though the recollection of the past, of these events, had been only the start of an interior journey, backward, as though the memories he had initially considered so vivid, changed, he said they were no longer so easy to access, complained that he felt as though he were standing outside them looking in, they became untouchable, tableaux on display in glass cases, they were something he could not catch hold of. And therefore could no longer attempt to explain. In the end he chose silence. Was that how it was?

I think I see him standing leaning over the newspaper that is placed on the table, he often looks at the newspaper pages as though he is studying one of his maps, leafing restlessly through, putting it away, taking it up again, as though he has to check once more that the overview he has gained, the impression of changes and movements within this unstable atlas, still holds good. Now he is bent over the newspaper, if I ask him what he wants for dinner, he will shrug his shoulders and smile. It’s up to me.

I look at his hand again. He turns the page of the newspaper. I go across to him, he looks up in surprise, perhaps I place my hand over his on the table. We remain like this for several minutes.

I AWOKE ONE night after the unfortunate wedding anniversary, it was about seven or eight weeks later, and he was not there. He had left the bed and gone into the living room.

When I came in he was sitting in the semidarkness.

Simon, I said, I could hear the uncertainty in my own voice, I am anxious. I do not like him sitting up during the night.

It is two months ago now, he said. He meant Marija. Her dismissal. Two months since she had left us. Yes, I answered.

It will be that.

I believe it was.

He stopped, waited.

I think it was impossible to know.

Yes, I said.

He just sat. He had a glass of cognac in front of him. He seldom drank late in the evening.

We could have loaned her money, he said.

Why should we have done that, I had an urge to say.

Yes, I said. Paid our way out of it, I thought without saying it aloud. As though we had actually done something wrong. As though it had been us.

But it’s not too late, he said. We could perhaps get in touch with her. Tomorrow. Perhaps give her a small loan all the same.

I hesitated with my reply, he nursed his glass carefully.

Yes, we could do that right enough, I said.

He stood up, his movement showed signs of him having sat there for a long time, stiffness in his back. He stepped over to the window, looking out at the garden. I knew he dreamed often, that he still had nightmares.

I too went over to the window. I was thinking about my brother, he said. It’s a long time since I have thought of him.

I nodded. Outside, a bird flew low over the lawn in the darkness. He peered after it too. I saw that he was old, it was quite obvious now, I noticed it in the same way you might notice that someone has become soaked in the rain or has forgotten to fasten some buttons on a shirt. It feels of similarly transitory importance when I note it in him. Although it’s not like that. And I thought: I must appreciate that it isn’t transitory. He is not going to be able to shrug off old age.

We could invite some old colleagues, he said.

Yes, I replied.

It would be nice to meet someone. We ought to go to bed soon, I said. He finished his cognac, placing the empty glass on the windowsill.

What were you thinking about your brother, I said.

He looked at me, said that it was hazy, everything had happened while he was half asleep.

I have forgotten to switch off the light, he added. The light is still on in the garage.

He released his breath, waited, and in the ensuing silence that drew all attention toward itself, he remained standing there with his hand halfway over his mouth. Let’s go to bed, he said.

HE HAS NEVER made any attempt to find his brother in recent years. If he knew where his brother was, I don’t know whether he would look him up. I even mentioned it once, that he hadn’t really taken care of his brother. His brother existed somewhere, in an apartment, in a town, even though a long time had passed. His brother who walked about and remembered and knew, and could have talked about it. In contrast to those who were gone.

He came here once. The brother. One single time, while the girls were so small that they don’t remember him. A slightly built, serious man, he did not look like Simon, he smoked a great deal, drank rather excessively, they conversed in the language that Simon never used at other times, something that made Greta laugh, she was only a few years old, but she laughed whenever that man opened his mouth. At first I believe it confused him, but then he permitted her to approach him, allowed her to take his hand and sit on his knee. Greta continued to laugh every time someone spoke in this foreign language. She touched his mouth, made him open it wide, he was patient, she touched his lips, his teeth, as though she wanted to look and see if the strange words were inside there, if that was where they came from or if they were somewhere else altogether.

He was a nervous, slightly drunken man. He stayed with us for a few days, he was to stay for a whole week, but I believe they ran out of things to talk about, he and Simon. And he had to return home. There was something he had to go home for, something vague. I saw that they sat in their own chairs without talking to each other. They could perhaps cope with their own silence, but not the other’s, and they never sat or stood close to each other. I thought that they could no longer be close, that the physical closeness that was forced upon them during the war meant that they could not bear to be too close to each other, just the smell, the voice, the body and the feeling of the other person there must be enough to remind them, perhaps even give them the feeling of being back, shut inside. They sat in their individual chairs, their separation by mutual agreement, I thought, as if they both agreed to keep their distance, now that they had finally acquired the personal space they must have dreamed of when they shared a bed and kept themselves occupied in the hiding place, now that they were at last set free from closeness, that closed in, desperate symbiosis.

Not until the airport. After Simon’s brother had taken out his ticket for the journey home, after we had said bon voyage and he was about to board, they both took a step forward, suddenly hugged each other, embracing with a tight grip, and not unlike the beginning of a fight, held each other fiercely as I imagined two wrestlers might perhaps do, only closer, really inseparable, they merged into one, two wrestlers checking out each other’s strength before throwing themselves onto the ground and one of them gains the upper hand. They let go again. Neither of them wept, neither of them looked as upset or moved as that moment of intimacy would suggest. The brother walked toward the airplane, and Simon was left behind. Only Greta took a few steps after him, as though she wanted to accompany the uncle she had come to know slightly, unwilling to give him up just like that. She looked questioningly at us and at the exit to the runway. But Simon simply said: Now we’ll go home.

HIS BROTHER TOLD us something while he was here. It seemed as though he was putting down a heavy burden and then journeyed on. He had heard their parents talk about it, he said. Before they left their apartment during the war, they said nothing to their neighbors on that stairway. Nothing about where they were going or why. There was no one who could be trusted, or else it was impossible to know whom you might be able to trust. Every day the neighbors walked past the locked door, and there was little cause for curiosity. The family had left, the door was locked, the windows in darkness. One of the neighbors had a dog, what was it called, oh yes, Kaiser. And that dog usually stopped outside the door, barking, sat down and barked as if it were waiting for something. Waiting for someone to open up, a stupid dog. The owner of course tried to drag it off with him, it protested loudly, as was stated later. The neighbor scolded, threatened. But the dog was insistent. It would not desist. As though it had caught the scent of something inside.

The same performance was repeated every day. The dog sat down. Barked. Pawed as though it were possible to burrow underneath the doormat, under the threshold, the doorframe. But the apartment is definitely empty, people said. The occupants left ages ago, the boy who knew the dog and took it for walks has left with his family. He won’t be coming out no matter how much the dog barks. The neighbor speaks sternly to the animal, he almost has to deliver a kick, to the dog, in order to get it to come with him. The next day the same procedure. The day after. Until the dog owner and another neighbor have a chat. It is the other one who has become suspicious. Has someone broken in, entered the empty rooms, inside the apartment? It is possible of course. It is dark, it is silent there, but it is possible all the same. He notifies the police.

HE NOTIFIED THE police, Simon’s brother told Simon. The police arrive, they knock on the door, shout. It is silent inside. The apartment is empty, a neighbor says, thrusting his head out from another doorway on the same landing. The family has left. It’s only that daft dog. The boy who lived there before has spoiled it, taught it to receive a reward when it sits outside there and barks. That’s why it does it. Barks as if it’s calling for him. Disturbs the whole block. But the boy is long gone, like the family, no one knows what’s become of them. Another one gets involved, but it is obvious the dog has got wind of something, he says. Look at it. As if it is sitting there waiting for its master. You would think it was the boy’s dog. The police shout a warning again, eventually breaking down the locked door. The neighbors crowd around their windows. And after only a few minutes they emerge. The dog was right. The apartment is not empty. There is a woman there, a child. They are picked up that morning, taken away. The neighbors watch them drive off in a car. A woman and a child aged five or six. The hound was not stupid.

It never ends, all this about the dog.

Simon exonerates the dog, but not himself.

He sat up more often in the evenings talking about the events of the war. It made me uneasy. And so, after all the repetitions, the ruminations put into words, the interpretations of everything that had happened, the time in the hiding place and prior to that, it was as though he started to run empty, as though he exhausted himself. He spoke less and more rarely. And eventually he spoke more rarely about other things as well, to me, to others.

Until he stopped saying more than what was routine. Good day. Hello.

Now that I am not admitted, I simply long for him to talk, anything at all, I would listen.

We are alone together when it is quiet.

He said that he liked the silence so much after we had moved here, out of the center, that he liked how still and bright it was. That is a long time ago now.

I often lie awake listening to the susurration of the trees, the rain in summertime, falling on the planks of the terrace floor, the garage roof. Soundlessness in the rooms and outside.

Not so long ago I saw an advertisement, animals for sale. Puppies at a kennel. There were pictures of them, they were lying curled together on newspaper with large heads and ruffled pelts. I studied the picture, I liked the tiniest one that had clearly ended up slightly outside the rest of the litter, so I cut out the phone number, it is still hanging on the refrigerator. I have seen dogs when I walk about in the neighborhood here. I have thought a little about getting a new dog. We could have gone for walks, the dog and I. It could probably make contact with Simon, perhaps it would have done him good. There are dogs that can be trained to communicate with their owners, they understand. He would not need to speak to it. Dogs are intuitive, where have I heard that. Loyal to their master.

A new dog could guard the house as well.

She did not like dogs, Marija, but when I reflect on it, I can’t recall that she ever gave a good reason for why she felt that way, that she ever explained it in a rational fashion, or in a fashion I could understand. It was not true that she was afraid of them.

She just did not like them.