The same day the letter came, I walked past the church again, and stopped beside the wall, perhaps because those few sentences in the letter had affected me, what they described as well as everything they did not say, and I needed a place to go with that emotion I did not even comprehend, so I also remained standing looking at the grave and the plants from the garden that had rooted so well, it even seemed that they were thriving better in their new setting. I stood there for a while before starting out on the journey home. But it was not the boy, the cousin who had probably been five or six years old, whom I saw in my mind’s eye. It was my son, six months old, in the office that afternoon I gave him away. I don’t know what I feel when I think about it. I picture his face immediately before he is carried off, when I was encouraged to say goodbye and give him a hug, that is the way I remember it at least, and he looked at me, the only person he knew in the room. He was wearing a tiny blue and white cap that was first taken off and then put back on again. He looked at me, with a gaze I now recall as older, wiser, with some idea of what was waiting. It is terrifying, it unsettles me. But there is no longer anything I can do. And finally someone came and lifted him up and out of my arms. He glanced back at me one more time. Before they carried him off.
It was only that one moment.
I did not see him again after that.
About the Author and the Translator
MERETHE LINDSTRØM has published several collections of short stories, novels, and a children’s book. She was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize and the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for her short-story collection The Guests. In 2008 she received the Dobloug Prize for her entire literary work. Days in the History of Silence is her most recent novel, winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize and the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature, and nominated for the P2 Listeners’ Novel Prize and the Youth Critics’ Prize. She lives in Oslo, Norway.
ANNE BRUCE graduated from Glasgow University with degrees in Norwegian and English and has traveled extensively throughout Scandinavia on lecture and study visits. She has translated Wencke Mühleisen’s I Should Have Lifted You Carefully Over, Jørn Lier Horst’s Dregs, and Anne Holt’s Blessed Are Those Who Thirst.