THE VISIT OCCURRED awhile later. I went there with a female friend of my mother’s, Simon said, someone who subsequently also helped us to find the hiding place during the war. He said his mother had to overcome her pride in order to accept assistance, there was a conflict between her and one of the helpers, a conflict that had arisen because of him and this visit of his to the church. I remember her vaguely, he said. The female friend. Perhaps her hair was brown, perhaps she wore it long, to her shoulders, perhaps her upper teeth were slightly protruding, slightly crooked, perhaps she smiled with her crooked teeth and dark red lipstick, and her long hair lay on her shoulders and swept over them when she turned her head, the people from that time are so evasive, he complained, the simplest characteristics elude memory, although individual traits stand out distinctly, almost overexposed in one’s memory. Such as that she was carrying handkerchiefs and continually picked at my clothes, he said, hairs, tiny specks, particles of dust that were lodged there. It was this church she liked to frequent, she was probably Protestant, he remembered there being a Protestant atmosphere inside the church. She is a woman or girl in her late twenties, a friend of my parents’, he said, it is easy to forget they were quite young themselves, they became old so quickly after the war. Although I don’t have any reason for knowing it, he continued, I am convinced she did not have any intention of converting me. She was just sharing a story that engrossed her, and the church was the place where the story would best be told. Through her knowledge and understanding both the Old and the New Testaments became a multicolored parade, and her low voice a cast-iron bridge over which the entire story proceeded into his more than appreciative child’s brain. She retold the Bible stories with intensity in that voice, sad, beautiful, grotesque, loud, what else. Simon used words like that when he talked about it. And then there was the actual visit to the church.
Perhaps it is a morning, or perhaps an evening, there are the enormous windows, the pictures above the altar, the anticipation, the church organ. The organ music slams against the walls, Simon is sensitive to noise after several ear infections, but he tolerates it, is not tempted to stick his fingers in his ear canals in order to muffle the sound, there are other children there like him, maybe they believe he is her son, he believes himself that he is her son. Perhaps he stands up with the others, folds his hands like they do, imitates their gestures, what is it they are articulating. No one folds his hands or prays in his own home.
Had she asked him not to say anything, invented some reason so that the grown-ups in his home would not know about it? It had to be a secret between them, and therefore he saw it as their story. The angel, the Christmas Gospel, Golgotha, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection. The church building from outside looks like all churches, molded and massive, like concrete, although it might be older, ancient, even beautiful, but she sits beside him and holds his hand, and once during this period of time there she stands up and accompanies a little flock of people up to the arch in front of the altar, she has signaled with her hand that he should wait, and he does so and notices that the other children do the same. While the children’s parents walk forward in a disorderly line along the floor, they kneel, lean forward and kneel as they receive something into their mouths. He thinks it is something good and is slightly disappointed not to get any, it is seldom that anything good is handed out.
But afterward, when they leave, she explains to him that it is not as he thinks. He walks along and holds her hand, she is almost solemn as though she has made a conquest, he imagines, as it now strikes him as an adult. He thinks they stop at a café and he has something to drink. Lemonade, tea. He is contented, she continues to tell him about the Testament, but when they approach the house where he lives, she asks him not to say anything to his brother, he might be jealous. Perhaps not to your parents either. Has he intended to tell them? No, he hasn’t.
The visits, for there were several, were discovered. The book he had kept hidden under his mattress too. The New Testament that he had read and regarded as a fable with magicians and wizards. The New Testament that I hadn’t exactly swallowed and digested, Simon said, but that had at least made an impression, especially the story about the Resurrection, about the women at Jesus’s empty tomb, I liked the parts that seemed like magic, although I am uncertain why I associated it with something so cheerful. The Crucifixion, how it shaped itself into some idea of an exciting fairy tale. It must have been the way it was told, how Mother’s friend told it to me. It devastated them. My parents. The visits and everything it must have led to (what it had led to, he did not know) enraged them, not because they were religious, on the contrary, but because in their opinion she, their friend, was trying to give me something fraudulent, something that did not belong to us, Simon said. It was not the religion, but the lack of respect, neither of them being particularly religious, but it had to do with identity, his father said. Who they were. Who are we, he had wanted to ask. Mother who was angry, Father’s face, sad, old even though he was still young. He did not believe in anything. Simon has never believed in any testament either, but he told me about this memory with pleasure, he had been taken to a place, it was secret, like a secret show, a performance. He walked past the church several years later, the church building was dark and closed then, there was nobody there. He still remembered that the doors had opened, the candles, the organ, the theater stage. The whole sparkling story. Brilliant.
~ ~ ~
In the stores and on the streets down in the city there is movement that I miss otherwise. I have become one of those women who view the world from bus seats, out through windows. From park benches and waiting rooms. I disturb no one and am not disturbed. I can go wherever I want without being obtrusive, my body is hardly visible within a group of people, I am neither fat nor thin, neither quiet-spoken nor loudmouthed. Should I make more of myself? After a few hours in the city, it’s like being inside a churning, whining machine, and when I return home, I am grateful for the silence as an insomniac would be for sleep.
I think up different tasks to do in the hours until I have to collect him. Sometimes I go around the house without finding anything to do. I can stand for ages staring at the clock and without noticing it lift my hands to my mouth and then feel the contours of my face, just standing there like that as I stroke my face with a repeated motion until I become conscious once more of what I am doing. I look at my body and it dawns on me that I should be satisfied now that it does not express anything other than what I am, that I no longer need to relate to a beauty I cannot stand for, a type of femininity I have never felt entirely comfortable with. But my body gives me more validity, the physiology, the machinery, is more conspicuous than ever before. Everything that was hidden and displaced to the background is taking its revenge and has moved into the foreground, the malfunctioning lubrication of the joints, even peristalsis, the bowel movements that mark the times of day more clearly than any other events, there is a certain comedy in that. It is genuine. At the very least you cannot claim it lacks authenticity.
The clock that strikes so loudly, but right now the sound is not insistent. I open the door to the living room. Directly behind it is the chair where he usually sits.
Some days I almost forget his silence. Then it feels only like a momentary stillness, and that we are going to talk together soon. He is going to say something, and I am going to answer. How I miss it. I want to tell him to stop doing this to me. It feels as though it is something he has made up his mind to do, something he has chosen of his own free will. That he has shut me out, all of us out.