Days in the History of Silence

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I found a snail shell. I found it not so long ago in the closet in our room. I do not understand how it came to be there. I opened the door of the wardrobe, and there it lay.

I looked at it for a while. It was one of the big snail shells we see now and again in the garden, a reddish-brown color, beautiful markings, and of course there was no longer a snail inside it, it was empty. The texture was brittle and at the same time somewhat distasteful in such an unexpected place. It was lying there as though it had been placed there deliberately, I thought. As if it were the intention to collect something there, in between the clothes.

I stepped into the living room to Simon, saying: Did you put it there? The snail shell in the closet.

But of course he did not reply. He looked at me seriously, as though he was the one who was worried about me.

I walked back to the wardrobe with the idea of throwing away the snail shell or at least removing it. However, I then thought it had a kind of meaning. Whatever the reason for it lying there, it had a significance. It might be a joke, perhaps he had placed it there as a kind of joke. Would he play a joke?

I do not understand it. And the first thing I thought when I discovered the snail shell was that it might be a statement. It seemed so obvious it was meant to be there, that it had been placed there, like an exclamation mark, placed there for some reason that I did not immediately understand.

Simon had placed it there, I had no doubt about that. I tried to understand. I have continually returned to the wardrobe, peering at it, but I am no nearer any kind of explanation. Now I have decided to let the snail shell be, I disregard it, I have not opened the door for a while. Perhaps I shall simply get rid of it.

The changes in the brain when a person becomes old, the obvious ones, and then all the others. Incomprehensible. It is not made clear precisely what is meaningful when behavior changes. One of his colleagues explained it to me. It is really Simon’s profession, Simon used to talk all the time about his profession, lecture me. And there he sat, not so long ago, at a physician’s office in the city, while his young colleague examined him. The things they do, efficient and convincing. Things are connected to and fro, cannulas gliding underneath the tissue of skin, machines humming. I watch everything, the rituals, the nuances are as incomprehensible to me as what takes place in a church. It must be because I am lacking in faith.

Once they also took him in for tests. Simon alone in his room, allocated a bed, everything white beneath the intense light, his head seeming too small up near the headboard. I sat beside him and waited. Increasingly more uncertain about what we were there for.

They found nothing. Nothing other than what is to be expected at his age, his young colleague said. He said no more.

It is up to me now to draw the boundaries between the expected and something else.

Something else — a kind of wasteland where one’s personality is deleted. This cannot be calculated. I have to interpret him like a recalcitrant poem.

I know I ought to consider the application form. Helena has reminded me about it, but I am postponing it. I look at the envelope, its grave, anonymous exterior.

I attempted to speak to the manager at the day care center, she seems experienced, an older nurse. I have liked her since the very first time we arrived there and she greeted us.

But I cannot make the decision, she said, when I asked her opinion. Whether it was irresponsible to let him stay at home.

I wondered whether I should tell her about the snail shell.

Perhaps it is not classic dementia, she said. And you are the only person who can decide who he has become, whether this is him.

For you are the one who knows him best and who knows, she said. Who he really is.

I WANT SOMEONE to give me permission to do it. To pretend it is not there, this eccentricity. That it can simply be ignored. Even the silence. Then I may be able to tell myself it is not alarming.

But how can I know which characteristics are him. There may of course be something genuine in that, the way he takes off, this stubborn silence. What if it is not that, but the rest of it that was a role he played, that he has now laid aside. And he has emerged at last. Like the girls who appeared from behind the bedsheet they hung up in the living room as children, after dressing up in a variety of roles, in order finally to receive the applause as themselves.

How should I recognize him, my recognition is based on memories, on all those little sequences as different parts of him have become visible down through the years.

Who he really is, she said, the manager.

What you mean, I should actually have said, is who I want him to be.

IN THE FIRST few days after we had engaged her, Marija confined herself to the floors and stairs. She washed the long corridor upstairs, worked on the staircase, audibly discussed with herself what kind of cleaning product would be most suitable for the old linoleum on the stairway leading to the basement, discarded several bottles before asking dejectedly if she could buy a different brand. After only two days I saw her perched on a ladder outside the windows while rivers of soapy water covered the surface of the glass, like a heavy downpour of rain. Her face came gradually into view through vertical lines in the water, she lifted the squeegee and drew it down to the sill, the determined expression she wore when she was working. In the rooms there was an aroma of lemon that I immediately began to associate with her, it became her scent. Surfactant and soap. Pine needles.

We did not like our new role, neither Simon nor I. The more determinedly she labored, the greater our discomfort became. This feeling of contributing to a system that is not entirely regulated, of making use of cheap labor, people without rights.

At the same time we were keeping an eye on her during that initial period, listening to her footsteps around the house, we got the idea that perhaps she was not cleaning the house at all, but inspecting our closets or simply standing talking into her cell phone like the previous home help had done. Simon read an article in the newspaper about East European thieves and left the newspaper lying open at the page so I could read it too. He did not say anything, I did not say anything. It was a shameful little scenario. We probably both excused ourselves by saying we have never been used to having other people in such close proximity.

It also took the form of a kind of guessing game. What do you think she’s doing down there in the utility room, she’s been there now for over an hour. I think we used her as the basis of some jokes too. In the beginning. Would it have surprised her if she had known that? Eventually that passed, it vanished, that initial nervousness or uncertainty, we had let someone in, a stranger. We became used to the closeness. It almost felt like cooperation, although it was by no means that. Curiosity became more kindly disposed. After a while. It took awhile.

One evening after she had left, Simon asked if I thought she had done the same kind of work in her native country. She had commented on a book by an author we both admired. Simon had not expected that, I think it startled him.

I don’t know, I said. You ought to ask her.

Shaking his head, he said he could not ask about that, he felt it implied something. That it could be misunderstood.

Imply what you think of her, about this type of work, I said.

No, that’s wrong, he answered. He most decidedly felt I was mistaken. He only wanted to know what she did in her own country, the home help. It was not a denigration of this kind of work, or of her.

That’s not the way I regard her.

He said.

No, I answered.

But we both knew it.

What lies there. Hidden underneath. Beneath all the understanding, the goodwill. We do not disturb it.

THE HOME HELP and her, perhaps I tried to distinguish the two, make them into two different people. She did not suit the notion I had of home help. Nevertheless: Now that is what I recall, that thing about her height, that she could lift a man, what is that, what kind of meaning does that have. And that she had a discussion with herself about what type of cleaning product she ought to use. It was an impression I had, actually quite comical, but it contains nothing of what I associate most with Marija. Now it pops up all the same. She has become an idea of home help, they are both the same person, is that not the way I see her? But that was not the way I saw her, the way we saw her. The person she eventually became once we had become acquainted with her, there is not so much to say about that. It is simpler now just to view her as the home help. That tall Latvian woman. After what happened.

IT WAS SIMON who phoned to tell them, our daughters, that we had terminated Marija’s employment. He used that turn of phrase. He could be slightly clumsy when he wanted to express things, a bit careless. It was an unfortunate way to put it. That in itself must have annoyed them. That he spoke in that way about her, about having to let her go. After we had been so dependent on her, after she had been our Marija for more than three years. They were taken aback, he told me afterward. They wanted him to explain why. Marija who had become almost part of the family.

And then they wanted to come home to us and talk about it. Actually all three of them were intending to come, but it was Greta who did. When I think about it now, I see that she has always had the role of the sensible one, the one who takes the lead in proceedings, who puts forward proposals in both camps. I quickly appreciated that she was angry. I guessed that her sisters were too.

My clumsy attempts to express love for them, it has been so important to make them understand, perhaps because of my guilty conscience. About everything we have not said, about what they do not know. They have always been so independent and strong, especially Greta and Kirsten. We were proud of everything the girls did. On Saturdays they used to present little performances for us, cabarets and plays that always developed into wild dance numbers and improvised stories that could continue for hours. They had secrets, we tried to create boundaries for them, give them a good upbringing. We are sitting there watching, they grow up before our very eyes. They are children. Now they are grown up. The girls have always done what they themselves wanted. Apart from Helena, perhaps. I see us in her. Everything we have been afraid of, our cowardice, it has become visible in her. The evasion, the silence.

It was only Greta and I who talked. Simon went into the kitchen to make some coffee. He is so afraid of conflict with the girls. We sat there, Greta and I, she wanted to know why, they wanted to know why, she said. What rules had not been complied with, what could Marija have done wrong.

Her voice had something, sarcasm perhaps, underlying it while she was speaking. She had brought out a pack of cigarettes, opening and closing the lid, repeating that the entire time we were talking. I could see the white patch with the warning and bold script beneath her fingers.

I have my reasons, I said. Dad and I.

But what, she said. What could it be?

She has opinions, I answered, principles that I don’t agree with.

Don’t agree with, she said. What do you mean by that?

I did not know what to say, I was searching for an excuse, a suitable motive, I asked if she knew for example that Marija was against abortion, that she opposed divorce, that she was more fundamentally conservative than I had at first thought. I was vague, it did not make sense. Why should she believe that explanation, believe what I said.

Good God, she’s a Catholic, Mom, Orthodox, what did you expect. The house is falling down. You can’t manage without that help.

Other people manage fine with what they get, I said. I do not even remember what I meant by that.

Greta looked at me. You’ve always been like this, she said. Done whatever you wanted.

She thought it was unseemly, she said. Unseemly.

She fell silent. When she started speaking once more, she seemed only sad, disappointed. As mothers can be when they are talking to their children, as I may have spoken to her when she was younger. She had lit a cigarette and opened the veranda door.

I thought you were friends, she said. You and Marija. You don’t really have many friends.

No, I responded.

The two of you can’t manage on your own. No one manages entirely on their own. I just don’t understand why.

WHY. I HAVE placed a blanket across my legs. I have just taken a nap. From the chair I can see the neighbor with his car, his son has come to help him clear out the garage, they are loading boxes and junk onto a trailer. He has lived here since the seventies, his wife moved out more than twenty years ago. He too has home help, a dark, pretty young African girl who arrives in the afternoons. She leaves the house before he returns home, apart from once a month on Sundays, when she undertakes a thorough housecleaning. Sometimes on the weekends he has friends to dinner, and I saw her go shopping with him once. It was only that one time. They were carrying shopping bags out of his car.

But here she is now, talking to the neighbor as he stands leaning against the trailer.

The first time Marija suggested she should come on a Saturday, I was not happy about it. Until then she had mainly come to our house on weekdays. I had confined her tasks to inside the house.

I can drive you into the city, she said, so you can get your glasses organized at the optician’s.

Of course she meant Simon’s car, he was still driving at that time, I wanted to ask her if she had a driver’s license, or if I ought to do the driving, I was unsure whether you could simply and without any fuss take any car and drive when you were a foreigner, even about it being legal or reasonable at all, I was thinking about the third-party insurance. But she had already picked up the car keys.

We drove into the city, we even took an extra turn over the bridge she said reminded her of a bridge in a city she had often visited as a child, she remembered, she said, they used to hang over the railings and fling stones at the seagulls.

Marija related that she had earlier had a small car she often drove to the university. This was the first time I found out that she had attended university. I was a bit surprised. I know why I was surprised, the home help had once studied at a university in a large city in her native country. She had studied medicine, exactly the same as Simon. But she never became a physician. One of the lecturers, she told me, was an oppositionist even during the Soviet period, an unusual, quite peculiar man. He made you think, she said, like a good teacher should. He was a famous neurologist, and he stood there talking to them at the university and explained the specific connections in the nervous system to them, synaptic plasticity and the axon’s growth cone. Had she been a little in love with him? The university was so ancient, she said, that the plaster was falling off the walls, and in an annex they had laid what she suspected were panels made of asbestos cement in the yard outside, the annex was later rebuilt, and parts of the asbestos fell off, but no one bothered about it. I enjoyed it, she said, and so you put up with all that. She said: I liked the smell, you know. The smell of books and the old halls. Sitting for hours and just thinking about one subject. I read. Everything else was completely immaterial. Money problems meant she had to give up after a couple of years. She had married, had a daughter. Her husband became ill, they struggled financially before they separated. She told me all of this on that one drive down to the city. She brought the car to a halt in a side street beside the city park.

When I emerged from the optician’s, she still sat waiting quietly in the car, her head fallen onto her chest, but I wasn’t sure whether she was sleeping, or just listening to the radio.

THE NEIGHBOR SLAMS the trailer tailgate shut and clambers into the vehicle, leaning out to shout an instruction to his son. I look at his home help, the young girl, thinking that she is barely more than sixteen, she lets herself in and hangs his quilt out the bedroom window, busies herself with the housework inside, probably washing his underclothes and tidying his shaving gear. Am I riled, is it the association it brings to mind that provokes me, or is it the displacement of a guilty conscience?