Days in the History of Silence by Merethe Lindstrom

exist, but you only occasionally seem to glimpse it between the trees, with their outspread branches.
    I HAD A child when I was far too young, seventeen or eighteen years old, the baby’s father was someone I hardly knew or even remember, actually he is just as unimportant to me now as he was then. I did not want to have the child, but had it all the same, for a few months after it was born. A boy, healthy and certainly handsome, everything a newborn infant should be.
    I am young. I become old when I hold the baby and photographs are taken and the child is sitting on my lap and it feels as though many years go by every night, every day. Before I make up my mind to give it away. For there is nothing about this that makes sense, or that I understand. I am not practical and have always sought refuge in books, in dreams, but this has nothing at all to do with dreams. In retrospect nevertheless it has taken on precisely that character. The birth, the adoption. The months we spent together, when he was still living with me. Now that so many years have gone by, I no longer feel the same responsibility for what with the passage of time has become shrouded in vagueness and ambiguity. I have often thought that I was a different person then. Is it possible to be a different person.It was several years before I married Simon. I gave him away, I had him for a while and then I gave him away. I do not miss him, I would not call it missing him, I do not know what I should miss, the idea of a child. I did not know him. But I think about him. I see him in different places, there are people I catch sight of on a bus or in some gathering or other, men of the age he must be now, individual features I notice, convincing me that it must be him. Long after he probably would have been grown up, I could watch children coming out of a school and identify boys who resembled his image, the notion I had of him.
    I did not miss having him close to me, nor did I regret what I had done by giving him away. But perhaps I was curious.
    You love your child so much, you look after it and pamper it, watch out for it, keep hold of it, go for walks in the city, celebrate birthdays, Christmas. Mother. And child. I was not kind to that infant. I was only a child myself and did not think he was kind to me. It was a misfortune that we were together.
    BUT THIS BUSINESS of the baby made a powerful impression when I told Simon about it a few years after we had married. He was furious because I had not told him earlier, because it was important, he said, it was something you did not neglect to talk about.
    I didn’t regard it as important, I said.
    How can you say that it’s not important, he responded. He was a part of you.
    But I do not think so. That this was what he meant to say. I believe he meant to say that it was the other part that was important, that I had given him away.
    It was as though he had spotted some deficiency in me. One that he would not accept, as though he had dissected a part of my personality and seen that something important was missing. He thought it unnatural. He used a word like that. Unnatural. A woman did not simply give up her child, and if she did so, she would always feel a sense of loss, and that loss would be expressed in regret and attempts to retrieve her child.
    But he has grown up with other people, I said. He belongs there.
    He would not discuss it. It was as though everything I said emphasized what was wrong.
    Simon tried to explain it to himself. He possessed theories, but nevertheless did not understand it, nothing at all about it. He thought we should attempt to find the boy. He could not understand why I did not want to.
    We were at our summer cottage, the girls were little, and we sat watching while they played in the dismal playground beside the nearby campsite. There was a boy there, slightly older than Greta was then, and the two of them began to play side by side. Gradually they drew closer together, and after a little