Days in the History of Silence

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He found someone. A relative, another survivor. What year was it? The children were almost grown up, I didn’t even know that he had been looking, that he was still searching. Irit, she was called, Irit Meyer. A second cousin about his age. She was a widow and lived in Germany, in Berlin.

We visited her a year after they resumed contact. We traveled to what was then called West Germany, we took the train and stayed with her for a week. The train journeyed through Trelleborg, Sassnitz and the German carriages had a distinctive odor we both noticed as soon as we boarded. Like leather or burned rubber combined with the sickeningly sweet stench I suspected might emanate from the toilets, something that might explain a more synthetic element, such as liquid disinfectant. After we were halfway through the journey, our hands smelled too, the jacket I placed over my head in an attempt to get some sleep seemed as though it had never smelled of anything else, and I thought that everything was going to be permeated by that odor, our clothes, including our luggage, our hair, our very beings, once we had reached our destination.

For a while we shared a compartment with a young woman I thought spoke no Scandinavian, English or German. She boarded at one of the smaller stations. She placed her suitcase and bag on the rack above the seats and brought out a book, all three of us were reading, we had no need to talk. The silence between us was not uncomfortable. It was more like a gesture. Although we probably would not have managed to make ourselves understood in any case. We nodded to her and she nodded back, as though we already knew one another well and had chatted together for a long time. As though we had reached a stage you normally attain after a lengthy friendship.

Beyond the windows glimpses of various landscapes disappeared, stretches of cultivated fields and villages with clusters of houses. Without dismounting from the train we were transported on board a ferry where truck drivers congregated in the cafeteria. We went there too, Simon and I, we drank our coffee and then dived down again into the bowels of the ship where the railway carriages were situated. The ferry tied up at the quay, and after a longish interval with screeching metal from the steel wheels scraping against the substructure, booming noises and spasmodic movements, we emerged into the daylight again as the carriages were linked together, and immediately afterward we were on our way.

Toward the end of the journey the train rolled into a station, a voice said something incomprehensible on a crackling loudspeaker. We listened for a while, the voice seemed to die away.

A couple of minutes later the door to the compartment was pushed aside by an East German border guard, one of the young men we had already seen on the platform. On his head he was wearing an idiotic uniform cap, far too big, pulled well down his forehead, the brim hiding his eyes, while the crown sat proud as if it were padded out with a flat sheet of cardboard and covered with material I remember as green or was it beige. His gun was undoubtedly somewhere near at hand, though I don’t recall seeing it there in the compartment. I noticed his high boots that on his skinny legs seemed as overstated as his uniform hat and contributed to the impression of a rented theatrical costume.

He looked at Simon and me with an expression suggesting we were his main priority, that we were the ones who had made it necessary to visit the compartment. I was sure he would ask for our papers that I was already holding in my hand, and at the same time suspected this would not be sufficient to satisfy his demands. But it was the other woman he directed himself toward, the one who had shared our compartment and the silent friendship. He lifted a magazine she had left lying on the little folding table below the window. She had been sitting bent over the same book for most of the journey, now she resembled someone who has been wakened and does not understand what is going on. She glanced at us, at him.

He started to talk, no, shout at her with an almost unintelligible accent, or perhaps it was the volume that made it almost impossible to understand anything of what he was saying. She withdrew into her seat, she was obviously scared and probably did not understand either what he was trying to say. He held up the magazine and continued to scold her for what he clearly regarded as a filthy, undermining glossy rag. We just sat there and watched him shine his flashlight up at our luggage in the already fully illuminated compartment, he made the woman move, we thought he wanted to look through the rest of the luggage. We saw how she had to turn around several times, an absurd four-step ballet under this man’s gaze. I was afraid for Simon, that he would get himself involved, that we would be thrown off the train on the wrong side of the border and forced to find some way of crossing over to the West. But just as quickly as he had started, the man in uniform ended his reprimand, closing the door again behind him, controlled and completely calm now, showing no sign of his outburst of rage. Through the window in the compartment door I saw him talking to a colleague, just as quiet and levelheaded as if everything had been playacting. The woman sitting with us was holding her hand over her eyes. Simon tried to say something to her, something comforting, but she simply acted as though she did not understand and took out her book again. Her hands were shaking, our hands were shaking. We resumed our attempt at reading. The silence that had been so reassuring was difficult to endure now. It began to grow dark outside, and I saw the reflection of our faces reproduced on the glass, in the train window. Pale in the harsh light of the compartment.

WE SPENT A week in Berlin, I had soon begun to feel homesick. These were a few days during which I just felt superfluous despite the second cousin trying to do all she could to make me feel at home. The city and its air seemed almost damp in the heat, especially the asphalt, the wide sidewalks down beside Kurfürstendamm, the dampness mixed with the warm smell of the asphalt, as though it were about to evaporate and become incorporated into the clogged, dusty city air. In the Zoologischer Garten a male lion was wandering restlessly around in a depressing cage behind glass, forced to live out his life as an exhibit while hordes of schoolchildren walked by. I stood observing it for a while, the roars that were intensified by the acoustics and did not sound as though they came from an animal at all, but were more reminiscent of the noise from a building site I had noticed several blocks farther up, where the machines appeared to be shifting boulders backward and forward before dropping them in a seemingly arbitrary location, this snarling of the machinery and occasional rumblings, a terrible almost supernatural sound. Or even the growling racket from the underground train we had taken a number of times, the so-called U-Bahn, that when it passed through a tunnel beneath the earth, made me think more of a monster who in the unbearable heat and afflicted by insomnia was trying to hide himself in the darkness.

THEY DID NOT talk together only about the war. They talked about the time before that, when they had both been children and spent several weeks together at a holiday resort. It was memories from that time, and about being children they talked about with greatest pleasure, they liberated themselves from all the years and found their way back to something different they must once have been, she related that she had gone through a little childhood crush on him. She remembered Simon as the irascible second cousin, she said, and she had wanted to marry him, but someone had warned her that you didn’t marry members of your own family. For a short time this information had bothered her more than the approach of war. She described the holiday resort he had almost forgotten, relatives he barely remembered now, names she could help him with. She was involved in some work, an organization that searched for the identities of so-called displaced persons who filled Europe after the war, and that attempted to chart the precise fate of those who were victims of the Holocaust, and what had happened not only to them, but also to their traces, their property, what was left behind. His second cousin, or “dear cousin” as I heard him call her, as though he was trying to bring her closer than she actually was. Perhaps this is what is difficult to understand. I am jealous. During the visit I sit in her living room as she tells stories, she serves coffee, she dishes up some tiny round cakes that look like cookies with a sweet filling, and she puts her arms around me, cradles me as though she is comforting me, as though I am the one who needs comfort, as though we are old friends. She does the same with him, and he is so delighted, he can’t get enough of her and her anecdotes about the family and the past and everything that has vanished; he has got his name back, Shimon, she says, his face is transformed while we are there, he slips into the old language and the stories of his upbringing, it feels as though I cannot breathe in that little apartment, so close to the past. I go for a stroll in the little park beside Viktoria-Luise-Platz. I sit there for several hours. But I have to return, although I don’t want to. On the stairway I fumble in the total darkness until I find the little light switch that has to be pressed, and as I do so I feel an excitement, an anticipation immediately before it happens: For a fleeting moment the entrance is illuminated, I see that the entire wall is covered in tiny square mirrors, paintings, decorations, a manifestation of art nouveau. I walk slowly up the steps watching a mosaic of my own face, what appears as a never-ending series of versions, all of the same stairway, of reflected images and an extension of the staircase that apparently reaches as far as the roof. Immediately afterward and just before I stand in front of a new door, and as the light is extinguished behind me, I open it and wend my way back to all the other things. The darkness in the hallway, the clothes hangers, the photographs in the apartment. The past.

•

AFTER THAT SHE phoned now and again, Irit Meyer, but it was her letters that arrived most regularly. I didn’t like them writing to each other, I never liked the letters and the conversations about the time in their homeland and the holiday resort and the past. Why didn’t I like this? When she rang, she always talked German to me, I tried to reply with the little I could muster of the language, that Simon had taught me. German is a language where it seems you can speak a whole chapter to the conclusion, sentence by sentence, without inserting periods or indicating who and what is being spoken about, until the very final syllables. The actual contents are elegantly packaged, like the yolk inside an egg, you crack it carefully on an edge and the contents run out, self-assured, sticky, but beautiful and rich, down into the bowl. One says that one has seen, one has had some thoughts about. Man hat sich Sorgen gemacht.

In the conversations with Irit they came to life again, he said they came to life for him. His parents of course, but also other relatives. The younger aunt who had lived with them for a longish period together with her little son. One of his father’s sisters. When he thought back, he was less concerned with her, she was part of the adult world. The adults he knew as snatches of conversation, good and bad weather; the grown-ups gathered around the table in the living room with cherry wine or anxiously huddled around a newspaper, heads close together as they sit looking at an article, reading about new regulations, about war brewing. But then the aunt had a son aged five or six. His cousin was more indistinct. Irit Meyer remembered some things. Fragments. The boy’s family had come to visit on some of the vacations, he liked to spend time on the beach, liked the sand, the waves, but he was shy, she thought she remembered that he collected things in his pockets, she thought it was him, but he had lived for too short a time to leave any deep impression. There were a few sketches remaining, some children’s books, she thought there might be some photographs. Simon recalled that his aunt spoke very little, that during the time they were living together, she was preoccupied with her husband who had gone under cover because of the work he had been involved in, he stayed away permanently, although the intention had been that he would come and live together with them. She altered clothes, Simon had a clear memory of that, she fixed the clothes when you were growing, he recollected the strange feeling when she measured him, the length of his legs, his arms, he stood with his arms exactly as she had instructed him, perhaps he liked her firm and at the same time careful hands. His aunt recorded the measurements in a little book, she always had a suitcase sitting there, she never unpacked properly. He remembered that suitcase. And also the contents that he glimpsed on the occasions when she opened it to fetch something or place something inside. The suitcase was important, it was always ready. Like a warning, an imperative long before anything took place. Several times he had wanted to sprint out into the street with it, put it down in some random place and leave it there.

He remembers two things: The cousin has a visual impairment, he has strong glasses it is forbidden to touch, without them he would just stumble around helplessly, and if he gets milk, something there is very little of anyway, he becomes ill. He vomits on the kitchen floor, the smell permeating the entire apartment. Simon comes into the kitchen, and there is vomit on the tablecloth and across the floor, his cousin has been taken behind a curtain to be washed. It is a curtain made of hand towels. Behind that curtain is a tub of water, and there are voices there, probably his aunt, the young mother, talking to her son. He remembers it like that. He remembers everything else so perfectly well, but not his cousin. Only these two commands. Don’t touch his glasses, don’t give him milk. That his cousin’s glasses should not be touched is something Simon has been told by his mother, probably also that he is helpless without them, for he has no memory of that, no picture in his memory of his cousin at all. He is hidden behind the curtain of towels, he only pops up in his mother’s admonitory voice about his glasses, the sight and smell of vomit, the open windows in the tiny kitchen. Simon is confused, he can’t recall anything about this boy, he searches in the photographs his second cousin sent, rummages through the words he believes he has heard.

It was as though he avoided being seen, he told me. His cousin was small, he sometimes sat by the window, his face directed out toward the street. No, that was himself. Simon sat looking out the window and down into the street, he loved to look out the window. He thinks he waited while his cousin was on the toilet, heard him in there. Does he ever come out? He goes past him in the dark passageway, the cousin looking away, they take a photograph, the cousin stoops down. But in one or two of the photographs he is visible all the same, a newborn in a blanket, a tiny speck bundled up in another lighter speck.

HE HAS MORE dreams about his cousin later. A shadow he knows must be him. He almost always dreams the same thing, Simon says. He is in the old street where he lived as a child, he has been inside the old apartment, his cousin is waiting outside. Sometimes the cousin is a child, sometimes he is grown up. When he is a child, he is sitting in the enormous tree in the yard, a tree that is much larger and sturdier in the dream than Simon remembers in reality. Simon walks by, his cousin shouts, he calls out something, but Simon does not look at him. He thinks it is a dreadful thing to do, but he will not stop. It is even worse those times when the cousin is grown up. Then he is standing in the courtyard outside, they meet and take each other by the hand, say hello, sometimes the dream starts when he is going down the stairs, Simon says, and he knows there is something he wants to avoid, he searches for opportunities to leave, but there is no opportunity, he has to go out the same door, out into the same courtyard where his cousin is standing, good day, they greet each other, his cousin takes him by the hand, walks by his side, but the cousin isn’t going anywhere. He asks Simon where he is going. And Simon is going to work, that is what he says. His cousin asks if he can accompany him. If he can come with Simon. Yes, Simon answers, because the question is like the narrow passageway, there is no other response, no other possibility, but nevertheless he knows that his cousin cannot tag along, and therefore he has to come up with a lie, and in his dream he is sweating, he is wriggling away, he has to run from his cousin, but can’t manage to do so. He awakens, lies there feeling as though his cousin has taken up residence within him. He never actually sees his cousin’s face now either, it reminds him of others, it is complex, it can’t be brought out of the dream. But then the dream or dreams change at some point in time. Now the cousin as child and adult are interchangeable, he stands there like a beggar, child, adult, old. And he always wants the same thing and Simon knows that it’s not possible, he can’t keep company with this creature, ghost, Gespenst, that is what he is. He says that. You can’t come with me. No, he says. Why not, his cousin asks. Because you are dead, Simon answers. The cousin looks at him, and appears to be just as alive as everything else Simon senses exists in this dream. You died as a child. How? his cousin asks and is so young, old enough to understand the words, but not to comprehend. He is eight or nine years old, older than he was when he disappeared. Simon cannot answer. I don’t know, he says. His cousin asks if that is why he cannot come with him, if that is how it is. Yes, Simon says. He wakes. He falls asleep again, he dreams the same thing, with only small variations, with only small changes. He has this recurrent dream for several years. It constantly torments him. Sometimes Simon thinks he sees his cousin when he is awake too, he says, sees him someplace or other, in the background, in a corner of his own field of vision, but when he tries to turn around, he is erased. This ghost, this intruder.