Silence Voiced

What had immediately fascinated me about the island was the almost eerie silence. Wherever my feet carried me – the dense, lush green amidst the ancient trees, or the vast stretches of yellow-gray sand with sometimes a few lonely bird shadows gliding over the surface – no sound reached my ears. There were no twittering birds, no ruffling leaves, no faint shuffling sounds in the shadowy parts of the forest, not even – and this might be hard to believe – the quiet lapping of the waves as they hit the shore.

The next day, as this lack of sound still wore on, a movement in the distance caught my attention. I was sitting on a cold, stone bench, overlooking the beach, and saw a red little figure running around, seemingly moving in my direction. I say seemingly, because this figure constantly changed its course, swaying from left to right, coming to a full stop to then take off again with arms spread out like it was imitating the gulls that were circling above its head.

Suddenly, a sound breached the dense silence that had become slightly irritating. The figure – which I could now identify as a small boy, because he was, albeit indirectly, moving towards me – was making short, shrill noises, which, as I closed my eyes, reminded me of my son, when he was five years old and, literally, finding his voice. My son had always liked to imitate the colourful voices of all sorts of animals, up until the day his pet rabbit died. Then the only reminder of his love for animals consisted of his drawings – of horses, chicks, seagulls, turtles; everything he thought of or had ever seen in the zoo nearby the house where he grew up.

Memories of my son always had to be experienced with closed eyes, for every memory of his existence was too precious to be shared with images of the present that else were inevitably being etched on my retina.

Then, still with my attention focused on the unreachable past, the sound of breathing reached my ears. A poppy red jacket filled my vision as I opened my eyes, and I found a little boy staring at me, with his hands on his knees studying me like I was one of those empty, sun-bleached or weed-covered skeletons you often find along the shoreline.

With my eyes again focused on the jacket, I asked the little boy what he was doing here. He said he liked seagulls and had followed them for a short while, assuring me in an unexpectedly adult tone of voice that I was not to worry, his father was nearby and would come looking for him soon.

I saw clearly the simple, intense pleasure that he must have felt when chasing the gulls, as if the – now slowly setting – sun had left some of her beams in the quiet, calm blackness of his pupils. Days later, when I boarded the ship that would take me back home, his last words were still ringing in my ears: “When I miss my mummy, I always cry like a seagull, because she also likes them very much, and that really helps!” How I wish for my son to have known such simple wisdom, before he died in a room where no animal – in picture or sound – was present.