10 January 2014

Merethe Lindstrøm [Bok & Bibliotek]

from Merethe Lindstrøm's Days in the History of Silence:

It is easy to envisage these two. In a crowd of people, I think. In a herd being thrust backward and forward in a confined space, the two of them also jolted to and fro, caught among the others, dragged in one direction and then another, and at one moment during the scene, I imagine that they are separated, mother and son. Lose sight of each other. Those two who have been so close during these months alone in the apartment.

In everything that happens, in this movement of people who are shouting, falling, remnants of luggage, bundles being trampled, coats and winter jackets, infants and old people, his cousin is left standing on his own. He turns around, but sees no faces, only vague impressions, shapes, apparitions, hears complaints, shouts, sobbing from children like himself. Around him grows this mountain of people in motion, like a wall, a terrible, unstable wall from which parts are ripped away while new ones are added. Is he wearing something, something that gives him sufficient weight to remain standing on exactly that spot without being jostled along or knocked over? Perhaps a narrow rucksack or some other possession he is carrying, something he is now probably holding with both hands, clutching it to his chest. As though he is embracing it, keeping it safe and clinging to it at the same time. While the human wall continues to be shoved backward and forward once more, and simultaneously increases, like an organism through mitosis, a cell division before his very eyes. The boy's mother is still part of this formation, and is carried forward like a light object being propelled onward by the current in a river. But the boy, the cousin, remains standing on the same spot. While he waits, he cannot do anything else of course, for her to be carried back to him.