Haunted by the past

Merethe Lindstrøm’s psychological thriller about long-held family secrets is a masterclass in philosophical dilemma, writes Lucy Scholes

Merethe Lindstrøm’s Days in the History of Silence explores the psychological landscape created when a secret that once bound together a married couple begins to drive them apart. Vetta / Getty ImageShow more

Lucy Scholes

The prize-winning Norwegian novelist Merethe Lindstrøm's Days in the History of Silence is an elegant meditation on the destructive power of family secrets and hidden pasts that, however deeply buried, still find some way of worming their way to the surface, shattering the present.

Eva and Simon’s marriage has been a long one. They are now both retired, before which she was a teacher, he a doctor; and own a beautiful, comfortable home where they brought up their three daughters – now grown up with children of their own. Their life together, however, is full of ghosts from their respective pasts. Beneath this seemingly enviable exterior, they each harbour a dark secret – admitted to each other, but no one else.

Simon is a Jewish Holocaust survivor: he, his brother and his parents spent the war hiding from the Nazis Anne Frank-style, while the rest of their family and friends were rounded up and sent to extermination camps. Eva, meanwhile, gave up the illegitimate son she bore at the tender age of 17, and hasn't had any contact with him since. "All family secrets isolate those who share them," writes Carolyn Steedman in her autobiographical class analysis Landscape for a Good Woman. "Secrets which derive from the play of fantasy, from rivalry, hatred and desire may be unconsciously transmitted across time and generation, achieving the status of a myth. Real secrets, real events that are concealed by some members of a family, may be matters of legal impropriety and thus connected with the social world outside the household; but such secrets can also produce myths of origin that serve both to reveal and conceal what is actually hidden from view.

“The myth may at the same time, and seemingly as part of the mechanism of concealment, interpret the world beyond the house walls in a way that reveals something of the social meaning of the hidden event.”

Days in the History of Silence explores this exact psychological landscape – the secrets they're concealing both bind together and isolate Eva and Simon, and, without even the whisper of a revelation, they've transmitted them, with their attendant demons, to their oblivious but suspicious children, especially their youngest, "glassy, brittle" Helena who suffers from a "fear she has inherited without actually knowing what she is scared of, could not know".

No longer feeling “the same responsibility for what with the passage of time has become shrouded in vagueness and ambiguity”, Eva’s reaction is one of what’s done is done, there’s no point in dwelling on or in the past. Beset by survivor’s guilt, Simon’s story, however, lies heavier on his shoulders and in his heart, but his attempts to bring it to light, to explain the violence in their family’s history to his own children, is a seemingly impossible task. “Don’t drag all that darkness in here,” Eva begs him while their daughters are still young, and by the time they’ve grown up, Simon can’t seem to find the words to tell them his story, so long has it been buried – beginning unfinished letters to them he never sends. Eva is the only one who bears witness to his story, and she doesn’t want to hear it. The couple continue with their lives, the everyday highs and lows of domesticity marking time passing, their children grow up and leave home, and Marija, the Latvian cleaning lady they initially suspiciously employ but then welcome into their lives, their home and their hearts with open arms, eventually takes their place in the couple’s affections. “I can’t explain why,” Eva recalls. “Why Marija. But it felt as though we had been waiting for someone or other. From loneliness, or simply boredom. Perhaps she is reminded of the girls. We let her in. It felt as though we had been waiting for her all the time.”

But then something happens – something that can't be ignored or hidden, the result of which necessitates Marija's instant dismissal, and in the aftermath of this traumatic event, Simon steadily retreats into a world of silence. Slowly closing off from everyone around him, he sinks into "a kind of wasteland where one's personality is deleted", refusing to speak, forcing Eva to "interpret him like a recalcitrant poem". As the silence in their lives becomes unbearable, the taciturn Eva is forced to a crisis of confession – longing to break the silence, but unable to form the words that matter. Days in the History of Silence is her story.

Whether Simon’s silence is a form of refuge – a regression to the safety it provided him and his family during the war of his childhood, the soundless years they spent tiptoeing around the attic where they were hidden for fear of being discovered, learning to read subtle changes in the expressions on each other’s faces instead of conversation, a handkerchief stuffed in his or his brother’s mouth if they cried, unceremoniously smothering the sound – or a protest, is not something that is ever clearly resolved.

Silence is mercurial in its many manifestations in this novel – it appears as a source of refuge and salvation, protest and punishment, lies and resolution. One person’s privacy is interpreted as another’s secrecy, and for every soul set free by the truth, another is imprisoned by it. Eva neglects to tell Simon about her firstborn son until a few years into their marriage, and when she finally confesses, he’s furious she’s waited so long to tell him, “because it was important, he said, it was something you did not neglect to talk about”. The point being that Eva doesn’t want to talk about it – for her, the past is indeed another country, and she patrols its borders vigilantly. “I’m always trying to guess what you’re thinking, Mom,” Helena says, berating her for her evasions. “Are you? I say. You know I talk all the time,” Eva defends herself. “No, she says. You don’t.” Eva knows her years of silence have been tantamount to lying, her conscience pricks with guilt about “everything we have not said, about what they do not know,” but still this doesn’t loosen her tongue.

There is no neat conclusion to Lindstrøm's tale – the moral compass of the story keeps spinning, and we're caught in a no-man's land of inconclusive greys. This, however, does nothing to detract from the power of the novel; Days in the History of Silence is a masterclass in philosophical dilemma, with the razor-sharp edge of a taut psychological thriller.

The story opens with a spine-tinglingly chilling episode from Eva’s past; a day long ago (while her daughters were still toddlers and babies), when a “confused” young man made his way into their home. This, and the incident involving Marija, are both genuinely shocking moments in an already gloriously unsettling narrative – the build up to the latter a textbook example of the slow gathering of suspense, aided by her sparing prose – eloquently translated from the original Norwegian by Anne Bruce.

Indeed, Lindstrøm deftly builds her narrative layer upon delicate layer, just as seemingly unconnected and meaningless events in Eva’s past, when collated, begin to take on a collective, meaningful life of their own: “as though their shapes are superimposed on one another, and again I think about a photograph, a photograph that is overexposed and shows two subjects, melding together in an accidental combination. As your memories always do in your consciousness.”

London-based Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist.