Days in the History of Silence

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When I walked past the church in late summer last year, I saw that the plastic sheeting placed over the façade was being tugged aloft by the wind, it was standing proud like a flag and then falling back. Until being lifted again a few seconds later. I liked to walk past even when there were no others there. Occasionally I saw the pastor. He might be standing outside on the gravel talking to a couple of the workmen, once he was standing in front of his car.

I stopped to say hello to him, and he was keen to show me how the work was progressing, they were happy with what had been done, he said. He told me a little about the church building. The architect who had designed it in the thirties. We chatted for a while. He asked how Simon was getting on. And before I answered, he said that becoming old isn’t easy, not for any of us. When he said that, he cast his eyes down, as though he were ashamed of complaining. I often walked past the church during the fall months. The air was clear and fresh, it was no longer warm. The improvements had been going on for a while by then, I wondered when it would become visible, whether the change would be something you would notice.

I DID NOT see him again until December. It was cold then. I had intended to walk around the lake, it was a normal weekday, in the morning. I had not expected to meet anyone, but walked there concentrating on keeping my coat closed, as a button had fallen off when I was putting it on, and I had let it be, because I had not wanted to miss the walk. There was something about the cold weather, the frost on the bare trees and ice on the water. I saw at once that it was him, he was wearing a big gray jacket, like a member of an Arctic expedition, perhaps that was what made him look leaner. Or else he had lost weight during the course of the weeks I had not seen him. He stood peering at the water, like the boy I used to see down there. I followed his gaze the short distance to the edge of the lake, where the dirt had solidified and the frost had settled, and toward the white expanse covering the water, surprisingly intact, even though the more fragile layer at the edge indicated that it was not safe.

I said hello as I approached. He looked at me more in confusion than surprise.

Hello, he said.

We walked together for a short distance. Perhaps he had been ill, I thought. He was not so young, he had said himself of course that getting old was not easy. I thought he seemed worn out, but I could not ask if there was anything more. We strolled around to the other side, it seemed as though a line had been drawn across the ice at the southern end of the lake, a trail as if someone had walked there. He stopped to examine his winter shoes, one of the laces was slack, I looked away as he bent down to tie it, glancing out at the expanse of ice, the extremities that lay there, as though they were frozen solid. I regretted talking to him, I wanted to go. But then he stood up again, and we continued, on our way around the lake.

He said that when he was a child, some teenagers almost drowned in the water here. There was a huge rescue operation, and the youngsters were kept back by the adults. He recalled how he himself had raced down to have a look together with a crowd of other children and were held back.

There were people trying to crawl out to the water channel, he said, and they got the teenagers out in the end.

I glanced at him. As he spoke he was staring at the water, the ice.

My brother was one of them, he said.

I nodded.

He said he had always wondered what had caused them to go out onto the unsafe ice. Whether it was a feeling of invincibility or inertia that made some people try that kind of thing.

They were only young, of course, I said. He said yes, that I was right there.

I looked fleetingly at him. I thought he might say that something like that could cause one to doubt, but he did not say that. Besides it had ended well.

I’m so happy to be here, he said. But it gives me a guilty conscience.

I was uncertain whether he meant the place by the lake, where we were standing at that moment, or the church or simply existence in general.

He spoke softly, not like when he was preaching, when he was standing in the church. But it could have been part of a sermon. I waited for the rest of it, but he said nothing more.

He kicked a lump of ice over the hardened dirt, toward the surface of the lake.

Ice on water, he said. Otherwise it always seems to be raining here.

It will start again soon, I said.

Do you think so, he said and laughed. We both laughed.

We went back the same way.

And when I looked at him, I wanted to raise my hand and stroke his temple. I imagined doing that. What he would have said, his astonishment.

ONCE DURING THE course of that winter I went into the church and sat down, the door was open. I looked again at the altarpiece and the baptismal font. The space inside the church seemed brighter. The pews in front of me were empty, it was just as silent as the first time I had seen the pastor there.

After a while someone came and sat down at the far end of the same pew, when I turned around, it was the pastor. We sat there for a while without speaking, like the day he had walked with me and we had stopped for a second and looked at the water. Of course I didn’t know much about him, but when I saw him with people from the congregation, I gained the impression that he was well liked. Perhaps they were the ones he had, they were the ones he was attached to.

I thought now that the works were finished, he would not be there so often, he would not stand outside talking to the workers, following the work, they too would soon be finished with what they were doing. And the church door would be locked as it had always used to be.

LATER I TALKED to him a couple of times. It dawned on me that perhaps I was searching all the same for a listener in a context such as that. A backdrop, a superstructure that offered an opportunity. An opportunity for something I am unable to articulate. I could not walk by, that was what I felt. It was as if I had postponed something, and now I could not walk by, push it away any longer. The actual building located there, that I often stroll past on my walks, is like an assertion I have tried not to respond to, something I have delayed. I envy individual people their piety, their conviction. Those who have not appreciated the need for belief and consolation, they are truly naïve. Naïve enough to go to bed each night and get up again each morning without giving a thought to the despondency that surrounds them. But the need does not make one into a believer. At least it hasn’t done so for me. I would so like to understand. I have been at Sunday school and children’s lessons of course, but it is like different dots on a sheet of paper, suggesting the outlines of something, a certain shape, but there is no line drawn between them.

I like the actual story. The writer who is wise and reasonable, intelligible dramatic art, a plain and simple, but not stupid narrative, the narrator has his hidden intentions that will be revealed along the way, the protagonist falls into various traps, but first and foremost in order to learn from it, never so serious that he cannot be saved, and all the threads are drawn together in an inalterable conclusion.

When I recall clergymen from my youth, I remember best the distance, the respect. I have carried two of my daughters before men like them, I assume they really believe that they have had a call from God. As far as the baptism was concerned I did not go through with it because anyone insisted, it was just what one did. Then I held the tiny bare heads above the baptismal font and doubted as the sign of the cross was made from their forehead to their chest and from side to side, and just as much afterward. One of them screaming and sweaty and bundled up in a handed-down scrap of material one uses on that kind of occasion, the other silent and staring at me as if I were about to immerse her in the sea and let her drift down to its sandy bed. Solemn, resigned. The youngest is not baptized.

The interior, the sacristy. A place to go with a feeling of guilt. Perhaps you hand over the feeling of guilt in a church because you do not know what else to do with it. In order to find a place where significance is assigned to it, with no objections raised. There are so few places to go that you can attach significance to, as Marija once said.

The pastor probably thought I was a believer, or had become so in my old age, out of anxiety or regret.

The feeling of guilt. It belongs with that uneasiness, that transitory uneasiness that can surface when I wake during the night and lie there without falling asleep again. Did I want to seek out the church in order to hold that up against a background of deeper meaning? If I wished to be closer to the church. Can’t it simply have been a desire to be part of something, a context, or at least some kind of contact? But perhaps it is also partly a feeling of guilt. Guilt, that binds us to others just as much as every other emotion. Perhaps more.

HE WOULD HAVE been so much older now, my son, I have difficulty picturing him in my mind. I kept his clothes, the clothes he did not take with him. They are in the basement. I did not use them for the girls, I must have felt that they were his. Or perhaps it was for my own sake that I did not make use of them for any of the other children.

I went to find him, after all the years and the silent battle between us, Simon and me. Maybe I did it for Simon’s sake, but it may also have been for my own. I wanted to see who he had become, what he would say to me, whether I had caused anything, any harm. It was only a couple of years ago. I found the name Simon had kept safe and looked up an address in a newly renovated area. I stood for a while on that street, looking at the entrance to an apartment block where the residents were coming and going, and at one point I spotted a youngish man and two little girls emerge from the stairway at the front of the building, one of the girls had an umbrella under her arm that she was trying to open, her father tried to help her, and after several attempts the child obviously became impatient and rushed inside the entrance, with her father following after. The door slammed behind them. I thought that it could have been him, for a second I thought that, but I knew it did not add up. It wasn’t him, he was too young. I hesitated slightly before finding the apartment number I had been given, and finally rang the doorbell. I stood on the sidewalk and glanced up at the façade. There was traffic in the street, cars driving past. A woman leaned out from one of the windows above me, supporting herself with her forearms on the windowsill, taking a couple of puffs of her cigarette, peering down at me, before closing the window again. No one opened the door, I rang the doorbell a few more times. There was no one at home, perhaps I was just there at the wrong time of day.

I took the bus home. I let it lie, I was cowardly and did not tell Simon about it. I was relieved, but perhaps I was also, without quite being able to explain it, disappointed.

They phoned later from an office that had given me assistance, I had asked them to call. The woman I spoke to on the phone asked whether I had found my way, and when I said I was unsure whether I had been given the correct name and address, replied in a subdued voice that it was possible to continue the search, it sometimes took time, families could for example have moved abroad, and as though she guessed something from my response, a doubt, she added that we would certainly be successful if I really wanted to be.

A PHOTOGRAPH WAS taken of us. Me with the child, my son, before I gave him away. He is leaning back slightly, perhaps he was afraid of the flash, I don’t remember who took it. I am sitting ramrod straight with the baby, the infant balanced on my knee as though he can really sit up on his own, but I am supporting him with both hands, otherwise he would obviously fall over, he is unsteady, but I am holding him with the palms of my hands parallel, as though I were holding a parcel, a bag, if you removed the child from the picture, it would just look as though I were measuring something, demonstrating the thickness, the width, there is no pride in my expression, no happiness. I am looking at the back of his head. As he pulls backward. I have no idea where it comes from, whose idea it was to take this despondent photograph. Perhaps it was taken at the adoption office, or earlier that same day. I search my facial expression on that day, and think I discern something, is it guilty conscience, shame?

It is a dream now, remote and hazy. I tend this grave belonging to a stranger. It is always silent in the afternoon, I like to be here, around Christmastime I buy a wreath, there are lanterns placed on some of the graves at that time of year, there are other people going around arranging things. No one asks me who I am here for. Actually I don’t know myself either.