Days in the History of Silence

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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.

While they lived in this condition that has to be called imprisonment, Simon told me, they had to remain quiet. Silence was imposed on them, him, his brother, his parents and the two other people who stayed there. Their bodies had already adjusted to a subdued way of moving that never released its grip later, but became part of them, of their body language. They obtained a greater understanding of subtle changes in expression, becoming accustomed to observing others in that way, he noticed how his parents could look at each other as though they were able to transfer thoughts between them, nodding at what the other seemed to be saying; the adults could conduct what appeared to be lengthy conversations in this fashion, simply consisting of facial expressions, fleeting nods or other movements of the head or face, a raised eyebrow, a grimace. It was especially important at certain times of day when there were lots of other people moving around in the building, for example a physician whose office was directly below, who no longer had a large practice actually, but still received the occasional patient. At these times, that eventually stretched out to apply to the entire day, the night, they had really only each other to react to. Simon and his brother. The restrictions, being kept indoors, affected everything they did, everything felt constrained, everything they thought, drew, wrote, and tentatively played. Often these continual irritations degenerated into arguments, insults, quietly and curiously conveyed through gestures, finger spelling, or expressed via furious messages written in chalk on a little blackboard, sometimes with the remains of a pencil, while their parents admonished them in similar silence.

The silence was built in, part of their orbit inside these rooms. At the beginning of course the children posed questions about the curtailed opportunity for movement and expression, while their parents patiently explained. But if one of them, Simon or his brother, was angry and for example began to scream, a handkerchief was held over his mouth, and the feeling of being smothered by this handkerchief, used less as a punishment than through sheer necessity, prevented him from repeating it. Simon recounted that he could still awaken with the feeling of being inside that handkerchief, covering his mouth or being held as a gag. And one day he caused a commotion, by going off on his own. One early evening he had walked through the apartment block of which their hiding place was part, and out onto the stairway, he does not remember how he managed it, but thinks he had escaped by following one of the helpers. It was something he had planned earlier too, without believing it possible. He considered the possibility of running away especially after arguments with his parents and brother. He had planned to go right out, down to the street, but nevertheless came to a halt on the landing. He sat at the window on the staircase and watched people on the sidewalk below, it was a summer evening, people were outside, and everybody had apparently slowed down because of the warmth of the evening sunshine. It looked as though their movements were synchronized in the heat, they resembled waves surging in a peaceful, leisurely rhythm over the paving stones toward the park on the other side of the street. He felt how something of the barrier of anxiety and uncertainty that had seemed to keep him shut off from the street outside, from his friends, school, from recreation activities, the simple ability to walk down a street like this, disappeared. He ran upstairs, opened the door to the drying loft, and heard the pigeons in the pigeon loft close by, the sound was just as reassuring as the sight of the waves of people out on the street, up there he saw the roofs and spires of half the city, and the façades on the other bank of the river, illuminated by a ray of sunshine. A couple of pigeons were treading softly on the ledge. The loft was empty, it smelled of tar, between the bare walls the floor was wide enough that he could have run a few circuits, perhaps he did that too. He kept his eyes on the buildings across the way for a while, the windows on which the sun was still shining, their blinds, their curtains. The people who were probably living inside, balconies with enough space for a family. Simon felt an urge to venture onto the roof, slide down the roof tiles. He opened a narrow window and felt the fresh air outside for the first time in this entire spell he had been kept inside, at least as far as he could later remember. Removing his shirt, he sat down wearing only his thin undershirt and noticed that he was falling asleep. When he woke up, it was to the same feeling of security, not anxiety, he told me. He did not know exactly how much time had passed, but neither had he any desire to know. A car door down between the houses, and yet another. Did he hear it? He still had the same feeling of serenity from his sleep and the heat of the loft when he opened the door to the stairwell. From where he stood on the top step, there was a view out through the stair window down to the street. Two cars, one directly in front of the other, had stopped at the curb on the opposite side. He saw what was happening, that the doors opened, people in uniform, a couple of them police officers, crossed the street, as though one of the waves he had seen earlier was now changing direction and coming toward him. And before the fear, before the dread, he said that he felt eagerness, almost happiness, at the prospect of becoming part of the world down there once again.