Days in the History of Silence

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We had a dog at the time Marija was here. An old dog. It had been a long time since it had given up regarding itself as a guard dog with the garden as its territory. Now it mostly lay on its woolen blanket in the living room, by the window, the deep tan coloring of its pelt faded, white hairs on the girdle of black around its back, the terrier ears that had been glued when it was a puppy, to train them into the correct shape, still capturing sounds from outside, sounds that were now more a source of skittishness than curiosity. Simon likes dogs. The girls used to say that. Daddy and his dogs.

He was always approaching dogs, puppies. But he did not want to have a dog. It was the girls who pestered us to get Max. Simon repeatedly said he did not want a dog, they ought to have known that.

They went on and on about wanting a puppy. Every birthday, Christmas. Every time they spotted a dog they liked. He became furious, irritated by all the nagging, it was not until long after they were grown up, the girls came home and had bought it and gave it to us as a present. For company, they said. It was a poor show. Simon did not want Max. He said it was a living creature, that they should have asked him. They had wanted to please us, the girls said and were disappointed. It became my task to persuade him.

I tried to talk to him about it.

It’s only a dog. You can’t blame the dog.

I’ve given my opinion on it, Simon said.

But it’s hard for them to understand, I said, since you like dogs so much.

He did not relent, and I appreciated he had his reasons, the girls would have to look after the dog, they shared that duty for a while. In the end it landed at our house all the same. I went for walks on my own with it in the beginning. He disliked all the responsibility, he said. But after a period of time I noticed him talking to the dog, scratching behind its ears.

I knew that Simon had used to walk a neighbor’s dog for a spell as a child. He told me he took it with him on short strolls to earn a few coins. The dog of his childhood had adored Simon. It used to sit outside the door of Simon’s home and bark until he appeared, the owner told him it simply ran out into the hallway and sat in front of his door, it never showed such loyalty to anyone else. Everybody on that stairway heard the dog barking and whimpering outside the boy’s door. Simon at first did not like the smell of the dog on his hands, the excrement he had to whisk off the sidewalk with a stick. But after a few months of this work as a dog walker — this is how he recounted it to me — he nevertheless looked forward to going on walks with it, he felt more secure, it was far from being a small dog. And later he always connected this dog with his sense of freedom before the hiding place. The walks, the games on the grass. He was certain the dog in some way or other had protected him from danger, such as the neighborhood bullies, the Brown-shirts who turned up, that it led him safely from the street to the nearby playground. Its name was Kaiser. Whether it had been a tribute or a joke he did not know. But he remembered his own voice calling out: Fetch, Kaiser, come, Kaiser.

The dog we acquired had a quiet disposition, but nothing about it reminded him of that first dog; Max slept on his blanket, ate an incredible amount, defecated in the garden. Simon gradually became more enthusiastic about it, he went on the walks Max needed, patted the dog on the back while he himself was sitting in his chair reading in the evening. But it became evident only after the dog passed away, how attached he, we, had become to it. Simon told our grandchildren stories about a dog he had gone for walks with as a child, but I think these stories were set in a different place, a childhood location that did not resemble the city where he had grown up. In these new childhood depictions everything revolved around this tiresome mongrel he at first disliked, and that sank its teeth into the chain when he tried to lead it around, but later became his best friend. Kaiser. There was no war approaching, no problems.

Our dog, Max, lay beside the chair, stretched out on the blanket, begged in the kitchen, dug holes in the neighbor’s garden, disappeared to a place several miles away where a bitch was in heat. When Marija arrived, she complained that it molted, although I never noticed any hairs. The grandchildren called it Horridandstupid, sit, Horridandstupid, fetch, Horridandstupid, who is Horridandstupid. Horridandstupid, it answered delightedly to the name and probably forgot its own.

It grew old, its legs and paws were crippled by arthritis, and one day it suffered an epileptic fit, it was terrifying to witness, and affected Simon most of all. It lay on the floor, head banging and body tensing, foaming at the mouth, thumping against the floor. When it recovered consciousness, it attempted to stand up, but could not manage to, it peed on the floor, looking at us, me and Simon, Marija, as though it had never seen us before. The vet talked about putting it down, but we decided we would wait. It should die naturally at home in the living room, on its blanket, it ought to lie there, not on a bench, a table, a floor, it should not die in another place.

Marija used to talk to it in Latvian, she called it by the Latvian word for dog, suns. But she did not like it. She did not like dogs. She called out to it only when it was to be fed. It used to watch her from its place in the living room, or stand on the kitchen threshold right until she asked it to leave. They kept an eye on each other. Perhaps she was afraid of it. Maybe a dog has scared her, I said to Simon. It all seemed more understandable that way. She had been frightened. A dog had probably acted threateningly toward her, and it didn’t help matters when I told her Max would never hurt anyone. I went for walks with the dog too, and sometimes she accompanied us. The dog on one side of me, her on the other. They never walked side by side. She said only that she didn’t like dogs. I thought it was perhaps something she normally said to avoid having a dog prancing about her legs when she was doing the cleaning, I thought she perhaps really did like it. When the dog lay down beside her, I imagined she stroked it. I could envision it, but I never saw it happen. Perhaps I wanted it to be so. When it became clear it ought perhaps to be put to sleep, she asked what we wanted to do.

A dog, she said. You can get a new dog.

I said that wasn’t the problem, we wanted that dog.

But it’s old, it will go soon all the same.

No.

She said it was different where she came from. Keeping dogs. But I’m not so sure it was anything more than an excuse. Regardless of what the reason was. She did not like dogs.

•

MARIJA SAID SHE thought a great deal about her daughter, her grown-up daughter. She would have liked to have her closer, she missed her all the time. Once Marija was ill and away for a couple of weeks. The house shone following her earlier stint of cleaning, so spotless it might have been sterilized. She always did more than necessary. She had even unearthed some curtains from a closet, old curtains I had long forgotten. Now they were hanging in the living room and gave me a strange sensation of being conveyed ten years back in time, but I liked it.

Eventually the aversion to having help in the house almost disappeared, everything was so well ordered. The wardrobe was filled, the bedclothes hung out to air. The lawn was mown, the hedges trimmed. The floors sparkled. It was no longer so insistent, the distaste about having employed a servant. It had now become essential. This was a wise choice. They all thought so. My daughters. The girls liked her, the atmosphere in the house became brighter with Marija there, they said. We too began to like her, Simon and I. Convinced that it was due to our own efforts, we really thought we were the ones who should be given the credit for it since we had devised the best arrangement, we required assistance, and everyone did the same, our neighbors, everybody in our neighborhood. But we did not compare ourselves with them. We wanted to be gentry of the most pleasant type, making up for all the injustices, the imbalances, we hadn’t employed an African teenager.

I don’t actually believe we wanted to get to know her. It was not something we chose, but we did come to know Marija. I don’t even know why, what it was about her.

You should take better care of your belongings, Marija said. And of yourself. Like a stern inspector, a police officer, she told us what we ought to do. She insisted we acquire a security system. It was installed several weeks later. An electrician showed us how it operated. The security system did not have a complicated program to be followed, you simply needed to make sure you were situated in certain places at the right time, switch on and off, otherwise it would set off an alarm at headquarters. It was not to be fooled around with. Marija said we had to be realistic. Criminals had to be kept out. I think I had told her about the episode. It’s possible she misunderstood and thought it was something that had happened recently, that the intruder had forced his way into the house rather than that I had let him in.

She could not appreciate that we had managed without a burglar alarm, and Simon, who had always been against such devices, did not protest, he voiced the opinion that it would be sensible. We wanted to be cooperative, we liked her. Perhaps it was her solicitude.

AND HER VOICE. She had started to shout out “hello” when she came in through the door. I always thought it a comforting shout. Later when we conversed more, she told me about what worried her, about her daughter and her daughter’s partner. She did not like him, he was too controlling, she said, subjecting her daughter to long nights of conversations dragging on and on like downright inquisitions. A child was involved. The grandchild worried Marija. A girl, she explained. She showed me photographs of some people around a festive table, a young girl on her first day at school. A wedding, a Latvian day of celebration. None of the people seemed at all worried. But photographs lie, I know that. On Sundays she wrote letters to her daughter. She consistently ignored all possibilities other than paper, even though I had offered her the use of the computer in Simon’s old office, she could obtain an e-mail address. No. But she would like to sit at the writing desk in the living room. She sat there with flowery writing paper in front of her (I’m almost certain it really was flowery), in a pose similar to that of a young girl corresponding with her first pen pals, writing and writing. The letters. The white envelopes. The anachronism of the whole situation was emphasized by her subsequently starting to translate and read aloud parts of these letters to me. Also the replies from her daughter. Dear Mother, I hope you’re none the worse for the harsh winter. Everything here is just the same, there’s a lot I can’t manage. But soon I’ll have saved up a few holidays, I need a break from the whole shebang. There’s slush in the streets, you’d think it would have been cleared away by now and that we’d soon have a glimpse of spring, but I think we’ll probably need to travel somewhere to find some good weather. And Marija’s response: Thanks, you mustn’t believe that I don’t think about you, I do that all the time you know, and as far as slush is concerned, Riga is not the only place needing some dry weather.

I participated in this communication as though I enjoyed it. Perhaps I did enjoy it too. The details were prosaic, monotonous. Names I did not know, places that were mentioned, people who lived there and their business. Marija tried to explain the connections to me, in one way it was gratifying to stand on the outside and at the same time take part in it all, through these short letter pages, everything described and related.

The infatuation comes slowly but surely. We are so often at home; we sit and wait to hear her insert her key into the lock. Her shouted greeting. Hello, is there anybody here. She often brought something with her. I bought a bag of buns, or I picked up a pack of little cakes on my way over. Her love of economizing led to a lot of cakes and pastries, everything with an almost rubbery consistency, purchased cheaply in a store where they had already been sitting for ages before being reduced in price. She also bought cheese on special offer, and eggs that were about to go out of date. She was aware it was a habit, she said, and begged us to overlook it as a weakness, even though we assured her it wasn’t a problem.

Sometimes she baked or prepared some other food, and that was something quite different. Marija was an accomplished and meticulous cook, I think she carried all the recipes inside her head. But she didn’t actually like preparing food, she said, she liked to read, she liked to talk about medical studies.

She wanted to hear about Simon’s profession.

Marija asked Simon to tell her about the university. She would not have made a good physician, she said, but the orderliness, the scientific building blocks were things she had an aptitude for. This enormous respect for medicine, that Simon and I believed was linked to some kind of practical-idealistic notion from her upbringing in her homeland. At the same time a form of respect for Simon. They enjoyed talking together. I could come into the living room in the evening, and they would be sitting together on the settee while he showed her something, explained.

We talked about books, she told me about Latvian authors, talking with a pleasure that seemed genuine, with an enthusiasm I thought typical of her, perhaps I am overemphasizing it now in retrospect, like everything I consider to be characteristic of her. Marija liked to make entire stories out of something that could be expressed in a couple of sentences, preferably illustrated by photographs taken with the little camera she carried with her everywhere. To take it from the beginning, she said. That monastery was not here then — but to take it from the beginning.

Simon and I listened to her, listened to the stories that were filled with detail, the tiny details that we pieced together to form a picture of her.

She admitted she was preoccupied by the thought of perhaps returning to university one day. Further studies. But I’m too old, she said. Don’t you think?

I said no, of course you’re not too old. We laughed at my lie, or what she obviously considered to be a lie, but I meant what I said. Simon and I talked about her having so much vitality, knowledge, despite a somewhat romantic view of art, literature, a peculiar tendency to speak about medicine as though it were a gift of the gods. She ought to study. We were agreed upon that. For a while we actually discussed the possibility of helping Marija. Perhaps she might study at a Norwegian university or we could lend her money to continue her studies in Latvia. But the one time we broached the subject with her, she became alarmed, saying it was only that one period of time, she did not want to study anymore. All the same we didn’t give up the idea. I wanted to help her. As though academia were the springboard we would use to save her from the quagmire of humiliation, it can be simpler to be the helper than the one who is being helped, as Simon commented later. I don’t remember why he said that. Perhaps we needed an excuse because we never helped her in any way at all. But it was an outrageous remark. We must have seemed so patronizing, we were convinced we were different from the other people she worked for. As though our attitude, what we actually wished to be, made all the conditions of her employment so much better.

THE DOG HAD started to deteriorate at this time, it suffered a number of fits, and in the end it would no longer lie down, or sleep, or rest. Its sight was already affected, and its balance. It was unable to sleep for several nights, we gave it a sedative that worked for a short while until, unsteady from the medication, it resumed its restless wandering from its blanket through the house from room to room, bumping into things, swaying, losing its balance and staggering onto its feet again, walking right into the glass door leading to the terrace, as if it were attempting to walk through without paying any attention to the glass. I thought it was wandering about because it was afraid to lie down, afraid to drop down into the darkness during the fits. It was easy to imagine its helplessness, and in an effort to escape the dog paced to and fro, to and fro, peeing on the floor beside the bookcase, tottering into the closet, into the table, thrusting its head against the cold glass of the door, becoming entangled in the curtains that draped themselves over its back like a shroud. It moved backward in an attempt to release itself from something it could not identify, sat down to gather its legs, struggled to stand up again, set off on the same round-trip. The blanket, the bookcase, the closet, the hall, the kitchen, back to the living room, the glass. Over and over again. Never lying down, never taking a break. It did not recognize us. It stared at us, the eyes, or the expression in the eyes, seemed human, it was the gaze of an old man, a woman. A child who has just had a ghastly nightmare. Who awakens, who are you, why are you doing this to me.

In the end we had to tie it up outside the house, low moaning that after a while turned into loud barking. The barking that used to indicate pleasure. In the early hours I watched him stand or try to stand, with his neck turning ecstatically from side to side, looking in the direction of the road as though he had spotted something, perhaps hallucinating, half blind. Seeing someone coming. But no one appeared.

At six o’clock the dog had been standing like this for two hours, it had started to rain, and I had been outside and tried to drag it underneath the shelter of the eaves, clapping the wet coat, drawing the dog’s body close to mine, but it was reluctant, it did not take long until the dog was out in the rain once more. I put on my slippers, went outside and talked to him. Now he seemed more disappointed, it must have dawned on him that no one was coming, his barking had become quiet and complaining. I unleashed him. He immediately resumed his wandering, the same stiff, mechanical gait with his neck thrust down between his legs and his coat saturated with rain, straight ahead now, across the terrace, over the driveway, along the road. I lay down to sleep, I was exhausted by the hours between being half asleep and wakefulness, the howling, the barking, I fell asleep and did not wake until nine o’clock, with the feeling I had overslept. Simon, who was first up, asked if I had seen the dog.

I told him I had let it go.

He looked at me. Waited in the doorway, looking at me without accusation, as though this was something I had to discover for myself. I couldn’t let it in, and it couldn’t stay like that any longer, I said.

He nodded. But there was no agreement in his gaze. We knew that I had killed it, it had not happened yet, but we knew it. By eleven o’clock it had still not returned.

We searched, Marija as well, and when we spotted Max standing by the side of the road down beside the highway two hundred yards from our house, I was certain it sensed we were there, and that was why it attempted to cross the road. There was not much traffic, it was a Sunday. It wanted to cross, its fur plastered to its skin, to its body, it was skinnier than I remembered it had been at any time before, it started to walk, and I don’t think either of us noticed the car approaching. The vehicle was driving slowly. Perhaps that was why we thought the dog had plenty of time, that it would make it, perhaps the driver also thought it would have reached the other side long before, but then the dog changed its mind, and the driver was not fast enough. It moved backward, but was hit all the same. The dog withdrew toward the side of the road again, looking down at its leg that seemed to snap, its head following its eyes downward, it fell, slumped, collapsing onto the gravel. Max lay motionless before we managed to cross over, he looked at me, I recall, with an expression of surprise, I placed my jacket over the dog’s body, though I don’t think the gesture meant much to him. Marija took my hand and Simon’s hand, held them both, we formed a circle, a little circle around the dog. She talked to the driver of the car who was repeating over and over how sorry she was, that she hadn’t seen it, that it hadn’t been easy to spot. Her children inside the vehicle, she must have forbidden them to come out, because they were staring at us through the rear window. The dog’s death had been so distressing, so dramatic, Marija made coffee and sat with us for the entire afternoon, evening, listening patiently to stories about a dog that probably had little to do with the real dog, the one that was now gone. She did not once say we could get a new dog, she said nothing. She listened, and I think Simon wept.

•

I DID NOT believe, I have never believed that I was cowardly. But what does it mean to be cowardly, it depends on what you are confronted with. If there is something you do not really fear, then you are not a hero. There is always something you are truly afraid of. For most people cowardliness is measured by what you risk losing, weighed against the thought of losing yourself, is that not the way it is?

Marija liked to hear Simon read. He used to read aloud to me from the newspaper. He has always been good at reading aloud. He has a rich, deep voice, expressive. No, I hardly remember it any longer. It is disappearing all the time.

When he was reading she used to come in. Perhaps she had been standing in the kitchen, but when she came in and stood in the doorway in order to listen, the seriousness in her expression, even when he was reading lighthearted subject matter. And corrections. He has always had an obsession about correcting language, he would come in from his workroom just to read out a mistake he had found in the newspaper.

He never corrected her. He knew perfectly well what it was like to try to master a foreign language. It took him far too many years to put aside his own accent, his own minor linguistic errors. She didn’t know that, that he too was not from here, from this city, from this country, that he too had once had an accent. He never told her that.

•

ONE MORNING SHE had arrived early, she had let herself in, I wasn’t even aware she was there. I came out of the shower and was about to walk down the stairs. It was quiet in the house, I don’t remember where Simon was.

It came to light later that she had spilled water on the stairs, she was on her way down with a full bucket. The old linoleum was as slippery as a skating rink, I took one step and felt myself lose my footing. It happened so quickly, just an assortment of movements running into one another, a dance devised by an unorthodox choreographer. I had a feeling of being hurled out in midair and then landing beyond the steps.

She came running up from the basement and knelt down beside me, feeling my feet, my arm joints.

It’s not painful, I said. But she was already trying to help me up, as you do a patient, she supports me, almost lifting me into the bedroom, I hang on to her tall body, as I’m carried off.

I am laid on the bed. It’s all right, I say, to reassure her. I was lucky.

She is talking about phoning for the physician. She lies down beside me. Her feet stretch out beyond the bed, she is so tall. She holds my hand.

I need to hold it, she says. I feel it was my fault.

It’s my own fault, I tell her.

No, she says.

We lay like that. I fell asleep after a short while, I saw her face in a landscape resembling a garden, a confusing collage where she obviously did not belong.

Are you sleeping.

I awoke.

No, I said.

She lay looking at me.

It was lovely to lie there with her.

She began to talk, as usual about her favorite topic, about her daughter and her prospects. Still she held my hand. She did not let it go until I said I wanted to get up. I thought: We are so close.

I can’t explain why. Why it was Marija. But it felt as though we had been waiting for someone or other. From loneliness, or simply boredom. Perhaps she reminded us of the girls. We let her in. It felt as though we had been waiting for her all the time.

I THINK ABOUT that morning, and it is almost as though I forget everything else, now it all seems strangely unfamiliar, and I am just as astonished as my eldest daughter was when she stood before me that day and asked why, what was it that happened, what meant you could not forgive her.

I wake all of a sudden. I must have dozed off in the chair here, and now I have that heavy feeling I sometimes get when I drop off during the afternoon, as though something existential, fundamental, has risen to the surface and lies just below, about to reach my consciousness. But the only thing I feel is sadness. And I can’t manage to grasp what was almost so clear to me as I was on the verge of waking, and consequently there is nothing I can do about it, no way to make it disappear again.