A great silence opened up inside her. But that made it sound more dramatic than it was. It happened by degrees, creeping up slyly. And at times, in certain places and situations, it was expected and welcome—on a long walk, or when a person confessed something pitiful, or at a funeral or a party. In all those places, where once she’d had a lot to say—too much, honestly—now there was this silence and she became a far better listener. Not consciously, that was just one of the consequences. It wasn’t a Zen silence or an enlightened silence or anything she’d worked to achieve. It was only a sort of blank. Once, on a mini-break, she’d spotted a sentence graffitied on a bridge in Paris: “The world is everything that is the case.” (It was written in English and stuck in her mind.) The silence felt like that: it spoke for itself. But it could also offend and disappoint others, the same way the world itself never seems enough for some people. It was no use on big family occasions, for example, or when one of her adult daughters called her name from another room, or if someone at work asked for her view on the news of the day. It could make other people feel awkward. But when she was alone with it, whenever it coincided with her own long-standing habit of looking upward into the branches of trees—then it didn’t really bother her at all.
When a person looked at a tree, there was no expectation of speech or thought: the light passed silently through the clusters of leaves; there was nothing to say. This combination (leaves, light, silence), which you can find everywhere, which is so easy to come by, this now had the power to make her cry—“happy tears,” as her girls called them. And so she was often in tears. They rolled down her face unimpeded, because her eyelashes were no longer thick enough to halt them. She’d worn too much mascara back in the day. Someone should warn her daughters about that, she thought. It wouldn’t be her, though, because of this silence.
Like everybody, Sharon felt young inside, essentially unchanged since late adolescence, and often had trouble integrating the person in the mirror with the young soul she felt herself to be. But here the silence was useful—clarifying. Because she was definitely not like those talkative teen-agers on the bus. Comparing her silence with their noise, she understood that she was infinitely old, like a tree. And it wasn’t only that she spoke so much less than they did but also that her inner voice—the ever-present internal narrative, the self-regarding monologue, which she now realized had always been in some sense preparing itself to perform, so that it could become a character for other people out there in the world, in the hope that these others might love and understand her—that was gone, too. It wasn’t like this for the kids on the bus, any fool could see that. They were still talking. To themselves and to anyone who would listen.
Hearing them actually made her retrospectively embarrassed, thinking back thirty years, to how she’d talked up a storm at all those birthdays and barbecues and church fêtes and intimate encounters—she’d gone on and on! Not realizing. Her elders had mostly been kind about it, and these days she aspired to exactly that type of kindness, making a conscious effort to look fondly on the chatter of her own daughters, and promising herself that she would never tell either of them about this silence, which gets planted within you sometime in the middle of your life, without your even noticing, then grows in darkness like a tuber, night after night, until it suddenly breaks the topsoil of your life and takes over.
Until recently, Sharon had worked on a hospital ward for mothers with postpartum psychosis. She was not a doctor or a therapist—she worked in administration—but still her duties included managing and monitoring these troubled young women, the hospital’s mission being to care for the babies and the mothers in their moment of crisis, so that the babies were not taken away and permanently rehomed. It was interesting and satisfying work. For twenty years, she’d felt herself to be in her exact right place, doing a job that only she could do, in this particular corner of London.
Part of this certainty stemmed back to her childhood, to her own brush with what she now knew not to term madness. She was about ten years old at the time. She had stood in front of a mirror in her mother’s flat and had “intrusive thoughts,” and for a few days after that she’d actually heard voices, many of them, very loud in her head. These voices were accompanied by a sense of “seeing” sentences move around her bedroom, liberated from the page, just floating on the ceiling and in front of her eyes, almost all of them from the Bible. Luckily, whatever this was did not last and, after those few days, never happened again. But it sparked a permanent curiosity. As a teen-ager, she watched a lot of films set in mental institutions, and began to feel that she might be the right kind of person to work in the field. Yet she was never mathematical or scientific, did badly in school, and hated the self-regard and imperiousness of doctors, both onscreen and in real life. Even when she went for childhood checkups, she’d felt patronized, and meeting the psychiatric consultants on the ward years later did not do much to change her opinion.
Still, her work brought her joy. She took special pride in the fact that hers was a job that could not be advertised or passed on to another person in any simple way: the role had developed around her and her particular skills, like a dress cut for her body alone. She was a secretary and an administrator, yes, but she also knew exactly how to speak to the shell-shocked fathers suddenly confronted with the ravings and violence of their partners, knew how to comfort or entertain bewildered children in the family room as their mothers screamed on the other side of the wall. She dealt with government inspectors, private insurers, police, social workers, the cleaners, orderlies, midwives, nurses, and doulas (to her initial surprise, rich women could also lose their minds). People said things like “Sharon is the beating heart of this operation,” and when they spoke in this way she did not act fake humble or correct them: it was true. She could talk to anyone, and she didn’t judge. These, her two main skills, were valued on the ward. She was able to keep her cool while all about her swirled this mysterious, fascinating miasma of what she’d once called madness, swallowing the women whole, creating a cloud of misunderstanding between them and the world. It was not her job to correct this misunderstanding. Her job was to make the experience of the ward tolerable for both sides, for the “sane” and the “insane.” (These were not terms she used on the ward. She applied them only when talking to herself.) Though she never did fully comprehend the science of the women’s condition, she had made her own amateur observations, through the years, watching as patients confronted the intrusive thoughts and devilish voices, the hallucinations, the paranoia, the signs and symbols, the interconnectedness of everything.
She noticed how often those connections seemed to pass through figures familiar to her—Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, Satan, angels, demons—and she was comforted by the persistence of them, the way they turned up even here, on the other side of sanity. Once, she made the mistake of trying to express this to one of the consultants. She got told off. She had expressed herself awkwardly, clumsily, O.K.—but was it necessary to speak to her like that? And in front of a nurse? In Morocco, they talk of Allah, the consultant explained, speaking to her as if she were a child, and in New York everybody thinks they’re in “The Truman Show.” On your island they’d probably speak of the spirits. The context changes, but the patient’s broken mode of processing reality remains the same. She nodded at this consultant, privately resolving never to speak to him again. This was around the time that the silence began to take root within her. It was irrational, she knew, but she blamed the consultant. He was like the man who spits an apple seed on the ground, not imagining the tree that will grow from it.
As valued as she had always felt on the ward, she was aware that she’d come into her own during COVID. The obligatory P.P.E. arrived, she put it on, and in this way she discovered that she had the gift of speaking to people using only her eyes. Turned out not everybody had this gift. The women on the ward were terrified by the sudden invasion of masked people. But, even when deep in their delusions, not a one of them mistook masked Sharon for a duppy or a djinn or a zombie, as they so often did with the consultant psychiatrists. She truly became an essential worker. Behind her mask, though, the silence bloomed. Not speaking to a consultant was no loss, but she was meant to speak to the nurses and the families and the two women who worked in the office with her, and all of that became increasingly difficult. She struggled for a year, telling no one, until the silence took on such a dimension that it became an impediment to her work, even a danger to the patients.
A well-meaning female consultant took her aside, lecturing Sharon about a series of drugs she had taken, which were a “godsend”—they had “saved her,” apparently. She hadn’t got them from the N.H.S., but she believed you probably could, with a bit of effort, although whatever the N.H.S. prescribed would most likely not be “hormone identical.” Sharon listened patiently to all this nonsense, returned to her cubicle, and got on with her day. A few weeks later, one of the cleaners, Iphigenia, spotted Sharon, pearled with sweat and deep in silence, staring into space. Iphigenia explained that in Guinea the women eat yams. That same day, Sharon went to the African food shop on Kilburn High Road and bought many more yams than usual, boiled them, mashed them, and ate them with everything for months. Her daughters thought she was crazy. Her husband had always had a soft spot for yams and was glad for the sudden bounty. The silence grew anyway.
She decided to take early retirement. On her final day, she got a box and went to clear out her cubicle, unpinning the postcards and photographs that had long decorated the space, every one of them, she now realized, the portrait of a silent person, although the silence in each case was different. The Ife head from Nigeria was a proud silence. The pride of a self-sufficient empire. The old photograph of her husband was silent because that young man no longer existed, having been superseded by eight or nine different versions of the same man. She couldn’t remember what on earth this long-ago handsome boy was smiling about or what—his mouth slightly open, as if about to speak—he was on the verge of saying. But there he sat, smiling, in a café, in Bath, with sun-drenched oolitic limestone behind his head, a healthy young man, with no idea that he would ever be otherwise. They had both asked a lot of questions about the architecture that weekend—it was their first time out of London, ever—and that was how they’d learned that the stone in Bath was called oolitic limestone. Not that it mattered anymore what it was called. Her husband was now a chronically ill man, and the responsibility for the family rested entirely on her shoulders. The world is everything that is the case.
Next to her boy-husband was a little photo of her best friend, smiling and silent, but, in her case, it was the silence of the grave. On the back of the photo, the funeral home had printed her name, the dates of her birth and death, and the sentence “What is written upon thy forehead, thou wilt come to it.” Which sounded Biblical, but her friend had been an Algerian Muslim. When Sharon Googled it, an A.I. overview explained that it came from Hindu and somehow also Islamic tradition and meant basically that you get what’s coming to you. She frowned, reading this. Predestination did not appeal to her, not in those traditions or in her own. It was too much story, somehow, too much knowing. Not enough silence. She didn’t even like it when her daughters said, “Everything happens for a reason,” for if that were true and everyone got what was coming to them, well, then that would have to include the young man pushed in front of the train, the children bombed from above, the women raped during a coup, and, of course, the aggressive cancer that had struck down her dear Algerian friend when she was only thirty-seven. No.
The final postcard was the one with the lovely Harlem Renaissance girl in her pretty pink dress. Her silence was pensive. Dark-skinned, beautiful, with a marcel wave, she looked a little like Sharon’s grandmother. The Harlem girl was anxious, you could tell. It was 1927 and she was wondering what America’s future might hold for her. There were certainly a lot of things that Sharon could have told the girl about that future, revelations concerning what was coming for her people, during the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. But, if you talk to postcards on a ward for psychotic mothers, people will think you’re crazy. Silently, she peeled the Harlem girl off the side of her computer monitor. Scraped away the Blu Tack on her reverse side and put her with the rest of the silent people, back in their box.
Fifty-six was young to retire, and everybody was worried. It was not obvious to anyone how a woman of her age and background and skill set would ever get another job in this economy. Her husband and daughters had a lot to say on the topic. Too much. Who did she think she was, retiring? And how were they going to live? (Both her daughters were still at home. Neither had a job. Her husband was on benefits.) These were all good questions but they required answers that she could no longer voice. Instead she went online, found a flight for eighty-nine pounds, if you only took hand luggage, and flew to Kraków. She had gone to Kraków once before, when she was young and Kraków was cheaper than Rome or Paris and seemed far less intimidating: there wasn’t so much you were supposed to know about it in advance. But the city had not seen many women like her, and as she’d walked down a cobblestone road a man had stared at her and shouted something unintelligible. This made her young husband lose his temper and bump chests with the man—although she’d begged him not to—and after that they’d spent a fair portion of their first-ever European mini-break arguing in the street. These days the city seemed full of new arrivals, from every corner of the globe, and perhaps as a consequence of this no one paid Sharon any mind. It was truly as if she didn’t exist. She no longer had to approach a foreign city like a test, one she was destined to fail. And there were no children, young or old, for her to negotiate with or find a toilet for, and no husband to argue with about restaurants or local prices, and no one was shouting at her in Polish. No planned visits to museums or facts to read up on. No itinerary at all. It was August, and the weather was beautiful. She sat in a public square under a beech tree. The light came filtering through the leaves.
At the time of that long-ago mini-break, there had been some debate about whether the Polish man in question had shouted a slur or made some kind of sexual comment, the latter being considered more likely because of the thin yellow summer dress she had been wearing at the time, and her breasts and her legs and her backside, and all the things about her that were the case back then, before children, before her husband sickened, before she had attended the funerals of friends—before everything. Back then, she carried her body like a precious commodity. Beautiful girls were passing by her right now, as she sat on this bench, and she thought that she’d been totally right all those years ago: she had been precious, and so were these girls. Everyone talks about the beauty of nature, but people are far more beautiful. So Sharon felt, even if she no longer had the words to express it. Nature is only a backdrop, like scenery at the theatre, and all the man-made objects only props. People are the beauty and the light and the point and the purpose.
This had always been clear to her on the ward, where everything was either white plastic or that industrial British-hospital gray, and by contrast each young woman was like an astonishing flare sent up into a dark sky. Mesmerizing. She herself had been mesmerizing. Still was, but now nobody noticed. She could sit on a bench in Europe completely unmolested, without a single human being saying a word to her, until the sun fell out of the sky. Silence within, silence without. But, even if her own beauty was now lost on the world, gobbled up by it, the same way the stone in Bath eats up a sunbeam, and the leaves eat light and become translucent, revealing their fragile skeletons like the bones in a bat’s wing—she still noticed the beauty in others, and she celebrated it, silently. The beautiful girls, yes, of course, but everybody else, too. She certainly appreciated the beech tree above her head, and the light passing through its leaves, and the sudden sweep of bats that flew low through the square, right over her—but never, ever would she mistake all that natural beauty for the true glory that was people. Even if she didn’t speak to another person for the rest of her life, she felt she could never be confused on that point.
Suddenly, the sun had gone and the street lamps were lit. They were Victorian-looking, with curlicues of iron, but they were electric. No one seemed at all startled at the way they instantly illuminated the square, revealing lovers and drinkers and darting squirrels and a strange dark woman sitting alone on a bench staring at a beech tree. But to Sharon this warm August day had seemed, until just a moment ago, as long and as broad as the silence. It was a surprise that it could end, that this moment of sitting on a bench in the Polish sunlight wasn’t going to last forever. The notifications buzzing in her back pocket were becoming more frantic, arriving every few minutes now. There were far too many to scroll through. Prying the phone out of her pocket, she laid it on her thigh, and glanced at the most recent:
Pls Mum dad’s frantic
Who do u even no in Poland???
Do you have a hotel? Somewhere to stay????
The truth was she was waiting for someone to take her to bed. She stared meaningfully at the people who passed her, their waists at her eye level, and knew that they could have no idea how little it would take for her to stand up and follow any one of them home. It would take nothing at all. How could they imagine such a thing? She was silent. Didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to be rejected or even accepted—no. She wanted to make herself clear using only her eyes, without resorting to any of her daughters’ careful, sensible conversations about consent—she didn’t even want an introduction. To be taken in silence and delivered in silence and returned to silence. Anyone! Whoever passed or momentarily sat by her on the bench, or could be spied drinking European beers at outdoor tables with those stunning yellow umbrellas the color of daffodils, every one of these strangers was more than welcome to come over and penetrate or otherwise envelop her in some way—sucking fucking spitting rutting kissing stripping tying holding dominating submitting. There were no boundaries anymore. From dust you have come and to dust you shall return, and somewhere in the middle of that process her boundaries had become fluid, and now it appeared that Sharon might literally do anything. What would her pastor say if he saw her? Perhaps that she had been invaded by demons, which was what he thought about the women on the ward. But it turned out pastors knew some things and not others. Daughters, too: they knew some things and not others. Husbands and consultants, also.
If pressed, Sharon thought, she would admit to believing that there is a gigantic mystery at the center of the world, a many-faceted jewel, and that no person glimpses more than a facet of it. She didn’t know the science behind it, or, rather, the theology, but she knew that much. One day soon, she would be dead and buried and daffodils would grow out of what once was Sharon. Her husband would mourn her—theirs had been a great love—and some facet of Sharon would continue to be visible, no doubt, through her girls. But to everybody else she would become a mere aspect of the world, to be noticed or ignored. Just another one of those things that are, or were, the case, like everything else. But surely one of these Polish people had a room? Somewhere she could stay as the temperature dropped? If only she could formulate the question! She’d never spoken during sex, come to think of it, and maybe the silence that had originated in that part of her life was now spreading over all her human activities, even mini-breaks. What is a mini-break? She looked up and saw that it was moonlight filtering through the leaves of the beech, silvery, delicate. Happy tears ran down her face, with nothing to stop them. She worried that she might look, to these Polish people, like someone who had crossed an ocean in a small boat and now lived on the streets of Kraków, specifically on this bench.
Then suddenly she understood why she was there. It appeared as words in front of her, luminous and yellow and crackling, as if written in the night air with a sparkler. THE KRAKóW CHAKRA. A holy, silent place. Years ago, a guidebook had led Sharon-the-newlywed to seek out a place called Wawel Castle and put her hand against the spot where a magical stone had landed, supposedly thrown by a Hindu god, all the way from India to Poland. According to this guidebook, the stone had buried itself in Kraków, in a corner of a courtyard, inside a castle, and tourists came from all over the world just to be in its presence. To feel the vibrations from this mystical stone. Or, in Sharon’s case, to take a picture of her husband standing stiffly on the spot, and then to change places with him and submit to a photo herself, and then later to put these photos above the electric fire in their first flat, as evidence that they, too, could be tourists. Could look at things and not only be looked at.
Yes, she had come to Poland to stand in that mystical courtyard again! In that special corner. To feel the cosmic energy. But really feel it this time. Because she would be standing there not as a pretty, skeptical, well-defended young woman with a lot to say, in a yellow dress, on top of the world, but as a silent being who had travelled to this place from a point lower down, far lower, fully humbled by the world, an infinitely old person who was half tree and knew only a shardlike facet of the everything that is the case. Who finally—finally—knew all the things she didn’t know. Silent. Unlike on her first visit, she had nothing to say about the seven chakras of the world, their reality, or otherwise. No view as to whether these world chakras could possibly correspond to the ones in the body, given that neither exists. A middle-aged woman with no opinions on ancient superstition, on what her husband called “urban legends,” or even on the legitimacy of faiths other than her own, practiced in faraway lands, by brown people who, though brown, looked nothing like her.
And, as if on cue, she spotted one such person approaching. An angel messenger. A young brown woman, with wonderful jet-black hair, wearing the same North Face jacket that everybody in Poland and perhaps on earth now wore, except Sharon, a jacket that had slowed her progress through Kraków, because every time she saw those three white words—The North Face—she felt compelled to stop and face north. At least now she knew why. She stood up. She faced north. There it was, on the hill—the castle! She followed the sacred brown girl northward, all the way to the castle, at the entrance of which the girl turned left and disappeared, having fulfilled her role, having delivered Sharon to the very gates. Maybe that was what happened in the middle of a woman’s life: she got delivered to the gates.
How lovely, this castle. A Renaissance courtyard surrounded by a classical arcade in white—arc after arc after arc—like the old town in Kingston, Jamaica. Everywhere reminded her of everywhere else these days, as if the beginning of her life and its forthcoming end were meeting. She looked up into the recesses of each alcove, the way the stone ate light and cast shadows. And then there was the ivy on the walls, lifting and falling in the slight breeze, as if the courtyard itself were breathing. Sharon followed the ivy as it stretched itself from wall to wall, a clutch of desperate tendrils, curling from one corner to the next, like a young mother feeling her way down a dark corridor, looking for her child. A bell rang. People seemed in a terrible hurry to get to the famous mystic corner. There was nothing special-looking about the particular patch of wall—it was just a corner. But everybody wanted to stand there, and the castle’s gates would soon close, time was running out. It was clear to Sharon that there were all kinds of ways to approach the situation, many of which were unfolding right in front of her, and for a while she stood back and silently observed.
Some people touched the wall with a flat palm, waited a moment, walked away. A few pressed their backs against the wall and half crouched, eyes closed, as if sitting in imaginary chairs. One bold young woman lay on the ground and put her feet up, wide apart. The chakra was her gynecologist. The chakra was a midwife, come to deliver the woman’s baby Jesus and keep him safe, until she understood that he was not really Jesus. A young man in a North Face thrust his groin at the corner, as if he wanted to fuck the Kraków Chakra or imagined it would bring him some advantage, down there. He looked back over his shoulder at his friends as he did this, laughing, and they all laughed with him. Young men, in Sharon’s narrow experience, seemed to be afforded only the tiniest glimpse of the many-faceted mystery, to the point that most of them appeared entirely blind to it. (Sharon had no sons, but she’d met the young men who came in and out of her daughters’ bedrooms.) The facets of the world, Sharon suspected, revealed themselves to people at different times. There had to be a reason that all the fairy tales speak of wise old women, that it was usually the oldest woman in the village who got the better of sly Anansi.
Sharon approached the wall. To her left, not a foot away, stood an old white woman. Her right hand looked like the hands most people have, but her other hand was very flat, tinged purple and green, mottled like a fish’s belly, and hanging like a dead fish. The woman seemed to have no control over it. It didn’t move or spasm, it only flopped, lifeless—an appendage. Never had Sharon seen anything like it. For a moment, she forgot all about the Kraków Chakra. Though she had always hated to be stared at, and had fiercely admonished her daughters, as children, never to stare, she now found that she could not help herself. The world is everything that is the case. It is the fish in Jamaica trawled in from Treasure Beach, who lie thunderstruck on the sand, mouths open, amazed to be so dead, so out of their element. It is also the fish that sit in the melting ice in the Irish fish shop, stinking up the Kilburn High Road in the summer, horseflies squatting in their eyeballs. And it is all the hands. Reaching for the Christ child, batting away evil spirits, grasping after floating words. Hands that work and don’t work. Minds that work and don’t work—or not in the way the consultants wish they would. Fish at home in the sea. Fish out of their element. From the North Face to the South Face, from the sunlight to the moonlight, from a seed to a tree! What a world!
The woman was about twenty years older than Sharon. She wore a padded gilet with little primroses all over it, navy Capri pants, and a pair of Birkenstocks. She was not tall. She had let her very curly hair go white, and the little corkscrews sprang up all over like the crinkly shredded paper in which you might wrap something precious. So precious. The old woman put her feet together and leaned forward at an angle and placed her forehead squarely on the Kraków Chakra, where the mystic energy of the world was thought to be both most intense and most accessible to human beings. As the old woman’s wrinkled skin touched the white stone, Sharon saw her smile. Some wisdom had been transmitted. A secret text meant for this old woman alone, as her dead-fish hand hung by her side, unconnected to anything. Such a woman, Sharon guessed, was far beyond wondering or caring about what she looked like to these Polish people. She was in a different place than Sharon—beyond Sharon. And Sharon could just about see that place. One day, she hoped to reach it. That silent clearing under the trees on the other side of the middle of life. What would it be like to be at home there, as this woman seemed at home? Where the light filters through the leaves and there is no longer anything at all to say. Assuming the same position as this wise old woman, Sharon put her feet together. She leaned forward, letting the tears roll, and placed the only part of her face that was dry—her forehead—silently against the stone. ♦
This story was inspired by Grace Paley’s “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age,” which was published in the magazine in 2002.
