Simon who used to sit in his chair and sleep for hours, he can in the afternoon. I look at him then and wait for him to awaken. Occasionally he says something in his sleep, but it is nothing I can manage to make out. When our daughters were children, I looked at them sometimes too when they were sleeping, they could fall asleep anywhere at that time, on my lap, on a stair, on the bus home, in the back of the car on the way home from a late party, or as on that August night on the way back from the cottage, it always happened suddenly, they went from being wide awake to fast asleep in an instant, as though they folded themselves up, spinning sleep around themselves like a larva spinning itself into a chrysalis, their eyes slid closed, and it was almost impossible to wake them until several hours had elapsed, and when I looked at them, the thought passed through my head that I actually did not know them. In sleep, during the hours they forgot us, I thought about what harmed them every day, what was shaping them or was in the process of shaping them, what they were afraid of, which I did not know about, had no notion of figuring out, but perhaps was visible to them inside there. I felt so helpless. They seemed, and still seem, so close to me, but nevertheless they live their own lives, I don’t know if I know them so well. I used to think: Whom do they resemble, what family traits are visible in them, features from people long gone. The application form on the coffee table. I have found a pen, the pen has the logo of a hotel chain, a telephone number, the address of a Web page. I have no idea how it has ended up here. Who has left it on the table?
Surname, it states, please use capital letters. I put a dot on the sheet of paper, it is blue. Think I hear Simon breathing out. Previously he often breathed like that when he wanted to say something, like an exhalation to gather strength. But he is not here. It is my own breath I hear. I stare at the pen, and at my hand holding it.
THE BOY I gave birth to, my son. I have thought about how I watched him lying in his own bed and sleeping, waking. Sleeping again.
I rarely lifted him, only when I had to feed him or change his diaper.
Otherwise he lay in the little cot, and most of the time he cried. Variations in crying, from quiet sobbing to a terrified, loud scream, a howl. It went on for hours until the weeping eventually died away and was replaced by silence. In the daylight I could see streaks on the skin of his face, they resembled scars. His hands were often clasped together. He could look at me with what I interpreted as fear, I believe he was afraid of the dark, the sounds from the street, perhaps he was afraid of me.
He drank the milk I gave him from a bottle, always restless, always a movement from his arms or legs. As though there was no place to find respite.
When he was a few months old, he attempted to lift his head and upper body, to rise up, perhaps he was peeking out looking for me, or maybe for a way out, but in the same way as someone at the opposite end of life, an old man fettered to the bed, he was getting nowhere. He let his heavy head fall back against the pillow and mattress.
The crying.
It continued. It was all he had. He became big enough to sit up, looking at me with the same scared expression, his eyes flickering. I can’t recall him smiling, but I never smiled at him, so it was never noticeable.
I wanted to give him away immediately, but someone, I think it was one of my parents, had said that since I had him and had landed myself in this situation, then I must take responsibility. And so I sat there with him. He wanted me, but I did not want him.
There were other moments too, perhaps when he was sleeping, perhaps when he looked at me without wanting something, that I could experience peace, when I did not feel shame and anger, that it was not so bleak. I sat up one night with him when he was sick, the pediatrician had said I had to keep him up, I was forced to sit with him on my lap while he slept, stirred, fell asleep again. When he awoke, he looked at me and I at him. For a second I thought he was about to smile, something at the corner of his mouth.
I lay him down in his cot again, perhaps from anxiety. Scared that he would change something, that he would push his way in, find a place inside me and claim it as his own. That he would stay there without me being able to disregard it, his insistence, his screaming. I let him lie. He screamed and screamed.
The times I took him out with me, I went for a walk in the park, or let him sleep in the baby carriage out in the backyard or down at the foot of the stairs.
He was perhaps five months old, and I went for some walks on my own. He cried when I left, as though he understood that I was going away and wondered whether I would come back. Although of course he was too little to think that, to comprehend.
Once I went out of the house, down the stairs, continued down the street and on to the city center. I found a cinema, bought a ticket and watched the movie that started half an hour later. When I returned the house was silent. I thought that he perhaps was sleeping, but when he fell asleep after crying, his nose was always blocked, and he usually made a noise, a snoring sound. I did not hear anything like that now. It was completely silent. I remember that I stepped across the floor and over to the cot, that it took some time to reach the bed.
When I peered in, he lay looking back at me, blinked, as though he had been lying waiting and had decided to be patient. He followed me with his gaze as I walked around the cot. And then he closed his eyes.
A CHILDREN’S NURSE I spoke to. She helped me to find out where I had to go, what papers I had to sign. She said nothing. She had come across women like me before, I don’t believe I was the only one who gave her son away. He was six months old when I gave him up. He wore a knitted jacket and cap. I sat with him on my knee in a tiny office. Outside there was grass and a garden. I had seen that when I arrived. A little garden outside the house. When I lifted him out of the baby carriage, naturally he started to cry. But inside the office he stopped, he kept his eyes on me when they carried him out. And with that he was gone.
They said I could have an address, but I did not want that. I was so relieved when I got rid of him. Those round cheeks, those arms that clutched at the air. All that crying. Years went by before I thought of him again, or allowed myself to think about him. It was an unfortunate relationship, the only thing I felt was relief.
But later I thought about him, I wondered perhaps where he was, who was looking after him. Whether they were treating him better than I had.
THE APPLICATION FORM has no address, nothing to indicate where it should go, who it is intended for. It can be sent or not sent. I don’t know where I should go with it or hand it in. Helena will probably tell me what to do. The smooth sheet is placed between the papers. I have started to fill it out, I have put it down again. It makes me feel slightly numb, nauseous, I always feel that I need to go to the toilet when I take it out. Nervousness makes me need to go to the toilet.
At night sometimes I awaken with a sense of unease, not fear or anxiety. It is perhaps the episode with the intruder I am thinking about, it is so old now, it is an unease I cannot explain. I pad through the house, check the lights, tidy away a newspaper on the table, a cup left behind in the living room, food Simon has left lying on a plate, things like that. I enter the kitchen and check that the burners are switched off, the coffee percolator, that everything is as it should be, I look around. Sometimes I drink a glass of water, switching off the light and returning to bed where I most often fall into a deep sleep, as you do when you are far too tired. But one night not so long ago I remained standing in the living room looking out the window, out into the garden, as I often do, but not at that time of night, and everything was truly different, it was so early in the morning. The light bluish, as though the darkness was just being diluted, gradually replaced by more and more radiance, only the silhouettes remained without being washed out. I stood looking at the garden that now had such an unfamiliar character. The houses on the other side, several up on the hillside, the regulation distance. We know very few of them, even though we live so close, although we have spent all these years here; the young couple in the neighboring property, another couple just beside us, they have recently retired I believe, the guy with the young cleaner. I wonder what they say about us. While I stood there, I began to think about Simon, whether he missed having someone to confide in. I thought about his wish for me to look for my son. Again that thought pops up, that underneath everything, the house, the children, all the years of movement and unrest, there has been, this silence. That it has simply risen to the surface, pushed up by external changes. Like a splinter of stone is forced up by the innards of the earth, by disturbances in the soil, and gradually comes to light in the spring. And that is what really frightens me. How it reminds me of something else. Is it meaninglessness?