Excerpts from
Silence in October
By Jens Christian Grøndahl
Our first years are a luminous mist of fatigue and happiness, of days and months that lost their firm contours in the speed, dissolved in the dizzy spinning rush in which everything happened. I don´t recall them as fixed stationary moments, I recall them as a movement on the spot, the same spot. Our first years are a glade in time, and I remember the feeling of having arrived, as if I had been lost among the trunks of a dense forest, on blind, overgrown paths, until I finally came out into the light and caught sight of the sky again. I really came to believe I´d been waiting to meet Astrid without realising she was the one. I believed I had arrived at the place where I was meant to be. The days flowed together as if the same day, the same evening were turning softly around each other, and I no longer felt impatient at the slowness of time, I no longer dreamed that it would lead me on to another place. The days resembled each other, and I had masses of time, and when another year had passed I marvelled once again over the changes that were fruits of repetition, of the repeated daily cycle. We did the same things every day, and meanwhile Rosa and Simon grew between us with faces whose developing features emerged from their soft skin year by year. We exchanged the same words and caresses, whose register of tones and nuances went on growing, until a swift glance, a fleeting touch or a half-expressed sentence according to the context took on a special meaning we alone knew how to interpret. Each time we again sat at table with the children, each time we made love again, our words and smiles and movements in their repetition held all preceding evenings and nights, in the cancellation of time´s flight effected by repetition. The days did not obliterate each other, they no longer devoured each other, but were united in the same peaceful rhythm of parting and reunion, of bustle and sleep, as if we had pitched camp in the midst of time itself. Sometimes I was bored, but the boredom was not as before the pain of repetition that eroded my sight and my thoughts. When I felt bored it was rather a kind of meditation on the unnoticed physiology of trivial details, the pale reflection of winter sunshine on the fire wall in front of the kitchen window, the dry, crisp, ribbed skin that crackled when I picked up an onion, the drop of water slowly swelling up under the tap, that gathered the light until it let go and fell like a silvery comet into the grey steel of the sink. When I was bored it wasn´t really boredom, rather a long moment of unthinking repose at that pivotal point I passed again and again in the course of the day, and from which every fluctuation, every movement, took its energy. I could completely forget myself for hours at a time, whether I was changing Rosa´s nappy or reading aloud to Simon, whether I sat at my desk and watched the words appear on the paper, or lay with Astrid feeling her desire awaken under my hands. All the time there was something around me that seized me and drew me with it out of solitude, out of myself and into the throng of events. Even when I was alone in my study I was merely a pair of eyes and a pen, one with what I saw and what I tried to say. During those years I couldn´t distinguish between duties and freedom, to me it had come as a deliverance that on every day, at every hour of the day there was something I had to do, and I worked all the more concentratedly because I knew I didn´t have the whole day to myself.
Translated by Anne Born
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