Mom, Helena’s voice says, why are you phoning now?
Was it you who placed the letter in the book, I think. I am about to say it. But I don’t say it. I know she hasn’t read it, none of them has read it.
I have a lot of old photographs, I say. Perhaps you could help me to sort them out? They take up too much space, old trash. Photographs and letters.
Letters? She says. Is everything all right, with you and Dad?
I see my reflection in the glass door, outside there is the dark garden, the garden furniture that I have put out on the terrace, the chairs leaning forward on the table. The waxed tablecloth folded up. Soon we’ll put them in the shed, when the summer is over.
Her voice again. Are you there? she asks.
Yes, I say.
She waits, we both wait.
Mom, says Helena, was there something else you wanted to say?
~ ~ ~
One time in winter I found him at the bus stop right over here. Everywhere was completely white, there were several days with an unusual amount of snow for Western Norway. He must have put on his overcoat, the boots that I ought to have hidden, but that I didn’t dare put away because I was scared he would go out all the same, in his socks. Those continual outings of his. I noticed after an hour that he was gone, I looked in all the places I always do when I can’t find him, in the garage, in the grove of trees, I thought about driving up to the church. I took the car that had become covered in snow overnight, I had to shovel the snow and scrape the frost from the windshield. When I was driving along the road, I spotted him, he was sitting on a bench and I think he had closed his eyes, I became so furious, I thought how can he shut his eyes now, how can he just sit there with his eyes closed. I steered the car in to the curb and stopped slightly too abruptly, perhaps he was surprised at someone stopping, I got out of the car, sat down beside him, I said that he could try for my sake, to stay in one place. That sad expression of his. He opened his mouth first of all, but then closed it, and I did not even know whether he intended to say something or was only yawning. I clearly recall the next thing that happened: As I am about to say that we must go home now, I see that he has leaned forward, he raises his hand, I don’t know whether he is pointing or simply holding it aloft. In front of us on the asphalt the snow from the snowdrifts along the road is whipped up by the wind, forming waves that are wiped away and then reshaped, downward and downward, fresh waves all the time, the movement seems so gentle, accidental, but nevertheless creating the same pattern all the time, and I look at him, and I feel a powerful desire for him to look back at me, but he stares straight ahead, captivated by the movement, what the wind is doing with the snow, and this is his choice, I think, to come here and sit in this place, and there is nothing I can question. I remain sitting there with him, watching the same movements, over and over again, of the wind and the snow.
IT IS SO late in the summer now. He still goes off on his own at times. He wakes in the morning and goes out the door. He finds the shoes I have hidden, opens the door I have locked. Perhaps I ought to hide the shoes so well that he cannot find them, or put a new lock on the door. I let him go. He is old, but I think he walks down the road quickly, only at the bottom of the hill does he hesitate. I wonder whether his restlessness makes him walk on or whether he just stands there waiting for me or someone else to find him. If he chooses to take the bus into the city, he is probably alone this early in the morning, perhaps he greets the driver before finding a seat. While the bus drives on, Simon sits at the window and looks out. Sees that the city seems desolate and new, the streets resembling wide, empty canals.
Now I have problems thinking about the rest. When does he alight, does he stay on until the terminus? In any case he once took Fløibanen, the funicular railway, a mechanical hand that hoisted him up along the mountainside, up above the city. Here he is among the tourists and strangers. When he reaches the top, he walks to the viewpoint, where we used to go when the children, our girls, were younger. He surveys down below, observing houses and buildings, the fish market under the mist, under the rain. To people watching him, it might look as though he is searching for something.
Once he ends up at a family’s house in the Nøstet area. He knocks on the door. They come out, the people who live there. It is a small, old white house, they are an astonished group who peer out. They have just risen from their beds, and here is a strange man on the stairs, an elderly man. Can they help him with anything? Has he lost his way?
He has a cell phone with my number clearly visible. When I arrive to collect him, they say that he is sitting in the living room. Shamefaced I enter this house, through the hallway in the abode of strangers. He is seated as if at a party, a pleasant visit, but at this impromptu gathering, this party, there is nobody who knows him. They follow us with their eyes, mother, father and two children, the youngsters are still in their pajamas. He sits on the settee with a cat on his lap. He strokes its back and nods to me as though this is something we often do. As though we too belong here.
I TAKE OUT the letter from Simon to Helena, and find the photographs I have made up my mind to show her. Relatives, my own family, and his. The pictures are from before the war, Simon as a child, there is even a class photograph there. His family is standing outside the apartment where he lived when he was growing up. There are several family photographs, special occasions with other relatives assembled, and while I look, I catch sight of someone I have not noticed before. At the foot of one of the old photographs is a boy, a young boy. He is wearing a long shirt that may cause him to be taken for a girl. But it is a boy, I look at the haircut, the stiff kneesocks that cover his legs. He is sitting slightly crouched, and his expression is eradicated by the movement or by what seems to be an erosion, disintegration of the photograph, it is in the process of falling to pieces. I recall photographs I have seen of various missing persons, people who have been lost for some reason or other, who are depicted in newspapers and magazines. And there is only the photograph left, it seems like the most important thing they have left behind. When you look at it, you think that it will explain something in some way or other. But it is only a photograph. I put it together with all the other items I have brought out, some papers, the application form that I have decided not to fill in. We are going to sit here at the table tomorrow, Helena and I, and set out the photographs. I see it in my mind’s eye already. The past, all these lives, they make up a mosaic. Like the colored panes of glass in the church when the light shines through and makes the motifs clearer. I think about what we are going to say, what I must say, recount. Whether I find the words for it. Now they lie there, the old photographs and pictures, the detailed letters from Irit Meyer, the letters that stopped arriving long ago.
YESTERDAY I FOUND Simon sitting outside the retail center on a bench. A young girl was sitting by his side. She had a Chinese jump rope in her hands, one of the kind I remember from my childhood, it was evidently broken, and she was trying to join the ends together while she chatted, she dropped the rope on the ground, bent down and picked it up, all the time looking in his direction. It looked as though they were conversing. She was talking, showing him something with her hands, holding them up, trying to tie the ropes, straying from the point of what she was saying. He was clearly listening the entire time, turned toward her. I remained standing. Just standing watching. I had been searching for him for over an hour, I had encountered a neighbor, someone who tapped on the car window and pointed toward the retail center.