Days in the History of Silence Read Online Free PDF Page A

release its grip immediately. She did not want coffee, but when Simon said he was going to make some anyway, she said yes please all the same. Just a little cup. Always just a little cup. She had a kind of rational modesty that did not seem to be an affectation. This is my husband, I said. Simon.
    We agreed she should clean the house once a week, and probably wash some clothes. She seemed pleased, she said she was happy to get as much work as possible. I’m not afraid of working, she commented, speaking in all seriousness.
    All the same we were content with the meeting, with ourselves, Simon and I.
    I am standing in the garden and feeling the heat. One or two of the windows are slightly ajar. Helena phoned early today, asking if there was anything I needed. I stand there looking at the wide lawn and the two trees at the end beside the low wall, the entrance to the little grove of trees where the intruder may have disappeared.
    No, I said to her. I don’t need anything in particular.
    But now I’m wondering if I should perhaps have asked her to come over, maybe she wanted me to ask her, she has always been circumspect, there was something she wanted to say to me. Her expression is cautious, unassuming, she has been like that ever since she was small, the complete opposite of her two older sisters. She resembles her father, she resembles Simon. There can be so much I miss out on, that I do not understand. The application form she gave me is still lying on the hall table. The application about residential care for Simon. Somewhere he can stay. A so-called home for the elderly. She no longer wants him to stay here with me. If only he would keep calm, she says. And if you had talked together like before. Yes indeed, I miss Marija. It is a lie that I don’t, I would have asked her what she thought. The conversations we would have had about Helena, about the recent silence, Simon’s silence. All the same it seems as though his silence and her absence are connected. If Marija had never left, everything would have continued as before. I sit down on one of the garden chairs on the terrace. I eat a candy, it seems strangely insubstantial, it does not remind me of anything I have ever tasted before.
    Mom, Helena said on the phone. I’m so worried about you, you and Dad.
    SHE HAS NO idea that I nearly gave him away once before, many years earlier. How would she have remembered that time, his depression, she was so little then.
    It began with some letters arriving, several letters. He found out more about what had happened to his relatives during the war. Almost all his relations apart from his mother, father and brother were sent to extermination camps in the course of the war years. It was only thanks to the hiding place he hated so much that they were saved, he and his parents, his brother. The others are crossed out of history. Friends he played with, girls he liked, neighbors, the man in the store, teachers, classmates, every single member of his mother’s and father’s family, they are all gone. He felt guilty, I think he felt guilty to be alive, as perhaps everyone would have felt guilty. One day you awaken, and it is like an eclipse of the sun, one of those rare ones when the surface of the full moon covers the sun completely and it becomes dark at midday. You go out with your sandwiches at lunchtime and sit down in the park, beside the lake, looking at the trees, at the texture of the leaves, at the people walking past, now and again someone you know, who perhaps says hello, recognizing you, everything is so indisputably alive, you do not go home, you do not go anywhere. You wish for nothing more than to sit there. For hours. Before someone catches sight of you, becomes concerned and phones somewhere.
    And then the dreams. Performances just as clear and transparent as daylight, reproductions of events. They come more and more often when you are awake. The hiding place, the mustiness, the listening silence. The stairway.
    He