Читать книгу One of Us Is Sleeping - Josefine Klougart - Страница 10

EVENING WALKS DISCREETLY in and occupies the afternoon without a word; you can hear its breath. The darkness is only aggrieved light. You have driven all the way from your parents’ house in Risskov to meet me out here. You sag at the knee like an uncoiled spring, as if to oblige; your forward lean makes you spill your words. I watch you greet my parents, you bend down to pass under the low-hanging branches that drape across the paths and are lips.

You have missed each other, I see.

Should it make me feel guilty.

I think so.

Being in the way, or something; I feel nothing. Shame, perhaps.

My mother’s hands are gray. I decide to ask you later, when we’re on our own. If you noticed, if you thought about it too.

But she’s alive, you’ll maybe say. Or: why talk of gray hands when she could be dead.

Her gray hands pour the tea. A couple of years ago you were not a guest. That was then. Eight years in a family is enough to become a fixture. Not drawing attention, and yet alien. Having a body in a different way than indigenous family. At times you were here more than me; making yourself tea, hardly anyone noticing. No one offering to help or show you how and where. I, however, have always been a guest here. As you were a guest outside my body, homeless there. The no-man’s land outside. I think you sensed it. You felt nothing else.

I ought to write about my mother.

I think: I ought to be able to write about her; write her into existence without breaking her and changing things. Simply write the book or the poem, the best possible, the most accurate picture. The way she is for me. Left to me. Like someone else, but like her, too. Whoever she may be.

But all my words—they become something else. The portrait of you, of my dead man, only now do I have the courage. I think you always hoped I would. Write about you, the attention. To make another person one’s own, to consume them. There’s something more real about the people you don’t know, the ones you call strangers. The closer you get to someone, the more unreal they become.

A wish to be seen; a desire to vanish completely in someone else’s eyes.

But then that’s not what happens. Maybe even you’re disappointed when you realize you don’t stop inhabiting your own body just because you’re taken over by someone else’s, another’s gaze, movements. To be evoked, brought forth in the eyes of another and in language, to encounter oneself there—and find another. What resembles, and what is: and something in between that appears. Somewhere else entirely. Unsparing. The drawing in the hand; holding up a pencil, one eye shut. Measuring you, measuring one’s mother. Scientifically almost, yet ending up the opposite.

My images mingle unpredictably with life.

I leave nothing untouched, and still there is the constant, alarming sense of something emerging somewhere between reality and what is conceived—something that is not without history, but newborn. Moreover: the world moves, you move as I watch. Without touch, without hands.

And thus I may be compared to natural disasters.

You sit on the edge of the sofa. Run your hands repeatedly through your hair and laugh. You have a beautiful face, I think to myself. I haven’t seen it for some time. I haven’t seen it for a long time, and yet it has changed. It’s hard to say in what way. Or to put a finger on it. But it’s like it’s drawn. The way fatigue accentuates a face, deepening the lines, darkening the lips, the lips beneath the eyes; the jaw and chin in need of a shave. You look up at me: it’s so good to be here, you say.

I nod.

The days now.

An odd passage between something that was and something perhaps, perhaps not, to come. There are days where you think: when love reveals itself to be something else, life too will reveal itself to be the exact opposite. It’s a transition, a time existing between two states: something that was, and something else to come, but a time at present that wants no gender.

I live here with my parents now, I tell myself out loud. He nods. That’s good, he says. But you’ve got the apartment in Copenhagen, when you come back.

I sit quite still, hearing my mother explain it’s just for a bit: why not stay here for the time being, so as not to be alone. Being alone is no good, she lies.

I stare.

There’s no sense in being alone, best to stay here, at home, for a while.

Yes, I say: now that I’ve been deserted and think I’m going to die. They laugh, and I smile. The days are impossible. Not being home, not being away. Trying to live somewhere, a place, to find a way back. The uncertainty that grips him now—so dismal, a reminder that nothing is ever the way you leave it. That time actually messes things about while you’re gone. The purple beech dying, elm sickness, the Eternit roofing; plastic bags lifted up by the wind and settling in the hedgerow by the slope; the electric fencing falling down because the wire broke, and nothing can keep the rotten poles upright anymore; now the snow has come, now everything’s in boots of snow, the trees have drifts at their ankles, houses clutching the land, snow clambering up the houses. Above the clouds is a sky that cannot be seen. A few cracks one afternoon, but then they too are clawed back. An unfamiliar car pulling in, then pulling away around the bend. A longhaired cat from down in Vrinners, however long it might survive, up here.

My father is resting on the sofa opposite. He lifts his foot and wriggles his toes in my mother’s face. She laughs. I wonder where it comes from, her laughter. There would be several possibilities, I think to myself. She shoves his foot away: no thanks, keep your smelly feet to yourself. And you; the laughter inside you can only be from one place, for you have so few chambers, none superfluous: a chamber for what is fatal, another for, what should we call it, the feeling when things can be that simple, that pleasing. It sounds so easy, just two chambers, the fear and the joy, and yet it’s so impossible to deal with. I keep mistaking the two signatures, mixing them up all the time.

Only then I don’t mistake them at all.

Death and love; death and sickness and the anesthetic in one compartment, love in the other. And then all the time love comes creeping in across the fields, in sentences like: take care.

There’s something heart-wrenching about people when they possess consciousness, at least, their eyes full of it—eyes that grow fat upon the clearness of the thought: that there is nothing else, and guess who comes out on top.

Amputees.

It’s like there’s not enough protection.

Take care, I can whisper.

And you know what it is I need you for, what you must help me postpone. You become distant again, but that’s only natural. There’s nothing odd about a heart without atria not working properly; anything else would be alarming. You are a construction built not to endure, but to demonstrate, without uncertainty, that this is no way to survive.

The fact that you survive nevertheless, another day, another day.

IF I SURVIVE you, I told myself, you will become a monument. If I don’t, the monument will be me.

IN THE VILLAGE where I grew up, the houses weep in the mornings. Smoke that cannot be told apart from fog rises in columns from the rooftops. Sagging structures, lopsided farm buildings long since abandoned, gutters drooping like tired eyelids.

Cycling past the houses one morning in September. Hearing an early apple, a scabby Ingrid Marie, drop onto a heavy lawn, hollow earth. The will to remain standing, a feeling of I want this.

My dead man’s utterly impossible infatuation must be exposed as impossible.

And the houses are upright today, upright tomorrow. The village will not be moved, not for anything.

Farm buildings endure. The farmhouses themselves.

There is a strength inside those who inhabit such dismal places; the need to preserve. In the storm they draught-proof their windows and tie down tarps.

Of the two of us, one is forever in doubt.

I WAKE UP. The room is no longer cold, but the bed is clammy and damp. It keeps hold of its dankness. The room faces out back and is used only when we girls are home, seldom now.

My younger sister is always busy, we all are.

A rush and bustle handed down through generations. Sit down here awhile. Work unfinished. The cold of the sheets and admonishment. I don’t really know what it is to feel welcome. I know what it is to belong. Except then I become unsure.

I feel, though with a delay.

Always ahead.

I meet you and immediately I see everything. A pair of scissors catching just right on a length of cloth, the blade finding its direction through the texture that is the fabric’s skeleton; the cloth opens and is a fruit whose flesh is white. Such moments I live for, though never discover until later. Like when you sit there thinking it’s too late, now, to think of whether to stay a second longer.

What if you stayed too long.

What if you stayed forever and never went farther away than that you could responsibly allow yourself to take a taxi home.

When such things happen, thoughts that arrive too late, they consume you and refuse to let go of your pale body, my pale body—trembling with something like doubt. I know nothing, and yet I have seen everything. The realization that resides in that; that there are eyes that see, and eyes that do not know.

A wish to be recognized as the person you are, to find such eyes, a human gaze.

Cross-eyed days in which you hope. Most days are like that, most eyes.

I am tired and wish to see clearly, a gaze that is knives and scissors, an incision into what really is. That’s how I want to see, and how I want to be seen. It’ll be a mess, a filthy mess. Disorder everywhere, disappointment as far as the eye can see. But you. And me, who sees you. Maybe it’s more than enough, maybe it’s all you can ask for.

THE APPLE TREE stands in a corner of the garden, this winter, and already back when. I have been with my parents a couple of days. The snow rumbled in soundlessly. Upholstered everything in frost, storm brigades of white, consuming landscapes, swallowing everything, augmenting itself, stripping what lay in its path. Winter everywhere, a feeling of all this is mine. I wake up in my old room. I know every knot in the pinewood, my own birthmarks, and yours that I used to know. It’s strange how the body’s memory will and won’t by turn. Gathering blackberries in a bowl, sticky fingers curled around the bunches of fruit, occasional berries punctured, some still green, forgotten by the sun, most simply ripe; dark pearls dropping from their stalks, into a hand that both catches and picks, a hand that can do whatever it wants, and at the same time: I have forgotten the feel of your body. I don’t even know what it looks like anymore. The picture won’t come together. We have become strangers to each other. There are clothes I remember better than you. Perhaps I’ve never known what you looked like. When you’re standing there midstream. The smallest and largest things a blur of movement. Constantly somewhere else, directions and plans, and looking over your shoulder. All the time, transition. Getting there—soon.

The way I always had this noise in my ears, something like: you’ll take care of it. And: I’d really been hoping.

Now I no longer know you. We’ve both forgotten most of it, we all have. That’s what we have left in common, a lot of good forgotten. Something gets lost in the translation from then to now. Something dilutes and becomes flaccid, something else now loudmouthed and staggering—homeward—toward a home that never was, a wandering in search of a bicycle you know you left here, someplace, somewhere around here, only it never existed, it was a horse, perhaps, already waiting in a stable somewhere. The kind of stable where the animals sink to the concrete floor to be extinguished by thirst, and the electric light bulbs, too, go out, one by one. The kind of place that exists in the world, waiting for the getting there you keep putting off with all your searching.

The room is an abandoned corner inside me. That’s the feeling I wake up with. And the sounds of the house are already mine, and the same. The house has a smell; it meets you head-on in the mudroom as soon as you go in; even before you begin to struggle with footwear; the sounds of the house. The rooms, swathing all movement with sounds of their own. All seven or eight rooms, swathing your thoughts.

The fact that you no longer exist for me doesn’t mean that the sound of your boots, that commotion outside the door, on the stairway on Marselis Boulevard, doesn’t exist. Some things remain, in the face, the body that remembers—the body that denies; the body, the least reasonable of all. A wish to barricade the body, to keep his hands away, hands everywhere; a celibacy, that wasn’t about denying myself, a lack of desire for something, as you suggested, a frigidity that was most of all, perhaps, always a simple fidelity toward a man I hadn’t found yet. A person I found—only then to not find at all. Restlessness in the evenings, the assault of love, restlessness in the mornings, sleep as violence. A mockery. And your eyes, the reproach, that waste of—well, what else, but a squandering of love.

I get up and it’s like unfolding a worn-out sheet of paper, long forgotten in the depths of a bag, rediscovered one day by the lake while searching for the apple you know you brought with you. The sun shining coldly, early in the day or late evening. My father potters about the kitchen, making sandwiches, stirring some porridge. The gas stove squeals, the light squeals. The sense of prelude, going out. My mother’s fingers poring through stacks and piles. They do not speak; the radio is on. The porridge bubbles beneath its skin, rising like a swollen lip, a finger jammed in the door, a boil fattening in the dermis; a living membrane, bursting, gasping, wheezing, and whistling. What am I doing here, I wonder, and know the answer at once. I came here for the apple tree, and because I remembered something like: we’re always here for you. And in no time I’ve realized it’s not enough.

I need to leave.

Only the apple tree keeps me behind, its branches turning to hands that clutch and grip, and I plummet: here I am.

HIS NARROW BED jars against the wall, next to the unreasonably large window. He is inside her, thrusting as if there were something there that needed dislodging. As if she and the bed are to be shoved through the window and out onto the balcony she never wanted him to buy anyway. She actually thought she had always been the sensible one; actually thought she had looked out of that window about a hundred times before.

No, she thinks now. I never did.

SHE CLIMBS THE hill, the light is the color of white cabbage; you should see me. She thinks back on a morning in Sweden when they were together there; she was wearing a straw hat. They argued about the cafés they passed, there was always something wrong. She, limping along behind after twisting her ankle one afternoon on the rocks. Shade or sun, prices, the feel of the place: always something not right, and they would go on. The sense of time running out while one is still on one’s way. An abiding state of not getting there, postponing arrival. Moving on, the mystery of destination—lack of completion, forever in motion, on our way there, on our way home, or just: somewhere else.

Direction in everything, movement toward.

Except then their patience ran out, and they sat down at a place called Selma and ordered breakfast. There was something about the way the S was drawn that reminded her of a circus. Too embellished by far, a mess of decoration. She rested her foot, keeping it elevated on a chair on which they placed their backpacks and a cushion. Her injured foot, throbbing in time to the flapping of the flaglines against the poles on the harbor. A woman was opening a little kiosk by the boats, struggling with a sign that wouldn’t stay upright; it was annoying her, her movements grew more abrupt.

He poured milk into the tea, said he loved traveling in that way, without a plan. She nodded and sipped from her cup; I only ever think about living there, she said. What she liked about this place, this trip, was the thought of living, having a life here, studying at the university with all the ivy crawling up its walls. A solid weight of ivy. She nodded toward the buildings. To wake up and go to sleep in this place, relieve the body of all its solemnity and expectation. No more expectation; the curse of it. Joylessness. He went inside again to get some salt. The sign tilted, the woman from the kiosk had disappeared into its octagonal structure and was now making coffee. Six, seven, eight measures of ground coffee. Is she beautiful, she wondered. The sign fell over; the woman didn’t notice, could hear nothing on account of the wind. One thing is what’s going on inside, the work taking place there; another is what happens outside.

THE BARK OF the apple tree is black; alone in the garden, black. It cuts into the winter like calligraphy. The winter paints white dogs yellow and makes the night luminous and in a way unreal, anesthetized sleep blowing through the streets, a flood of quiet, quiet.

The tree is a shadow of another, realer world. That’s what I think.

And the apples are still attached, too red, and certainly too late. Droplets suspended on black branches. They hang there today, they hang all night; not being able to see them in the dark doesn’t mean they don’t shine.

There is a small handful of images to which I keep returning. A hierarchy, belonging to the body and the mind, they are pictures of the emotions; they won’t let go. You go back to them, again and again. Wanting to get closer. Occasionally it happens, in spite of everything, in some way or another you manage to gain access. A moment: to reach them and show them, return them to the world. Then, perhaps, you’re able to recall. Everyone has these images; four, five or six of them. It’s all about coming closer; they are what you write toward, paint toward; they are what you want to say and to share with other eyes. Another’s gaze. You speak, and you point, though perhaps no one is there to see. Look, you say, perhaps. How then to hand the image on, to implant it within another, within you. That’s the issue. Whether you can even carry them alone. Whether I can; I need the eyes of another, another voice to share it with; it’s too much a burden, and I write with the expectation.

At the top of my hierarchy is the image of the apple tree with its bright apples.

There is an image of the bedroom window with light streaming in, a morning in summer, the panes in need of cleaning; cobwebs, and some leaves from the purple beech. There is an image of a pair of espadrille sandals on a bathing jetty; the sea that stretches out behind, a sleeping body; it is autumn, and no one in sight. An image of a stable after the animals have been put out to pasture for the summer.

The catastrophes you encounter in life may seem unreal, but they are: real. The alienation that makes you think that some people are more real than others is a construct; people are no more or less alien, no more or less real.

More people, as such.

And always impending: that slap in the face, for not having known; not realizing that particular unreality was just a matter of . . .

Of what. Of eventually swallowing one’s knowledge of the world—swallowing one’s own ideas about knowing anything at all.

We know so very little; so little that what we think to be knowledge is hardly worth reckoning with at all; instead we ought to settle for being pleasantly surprised if, on the edge of all things, against all expectations, our assumption should be disproved.

If it turns out we know just a fragment of the world.

Constant motion, collapsing buildings and meticulous work in stone. The unfamiliar as a wall we must forever scrabble to remove in order to find our humanity there and perhaps even love someone. Pass on one or two images, share them with someone else, a you. That kind of motion into the world. An escapism in reverse, a tower I build to be more able to see what is there.

You, for instance.

A desire to see you.

THE SNOW CAP creaks. the floors beneath me, too, feet remembering. You can trust the body. The body remembers like a hundred horses.

The apple tree is a kind of reconciliation.

I decide to go back home, but then I stay anyway. The days are like those that come after the death of a close friend. I was told the news, only then I forgot, and now I grieve, my grieving body, without any recollection of what caused the grief.

Who.

I stop and put down the wheelbarrow in front of me; who, who is it I miss. My nose is running, a dribble dissecting the oval of my face. Her father draws an oval in the air. That’s your face, he says, an oval.

But her face is streaked with mucus.

The light falls in stripes.

The panes are laced with snow, movements inside her parents’ house framed, embroidered. No one is dead. The wounded are legion.

THEY EAT TOGETHER, it is summer, and she has opened the windows of the apartment wide. She wants to eat in the park, but he doesn’t feel like it; it’s too much hassle, it’s only food, he says, and she says it’s only five minutes by bike. Extinguished in asphalt; the tossing heads of heifers exasperated by flies, shaking loose the brain.

There is not a breath of air inside the apartment, which smells like bottled summer; the sun vanishes behind the building opposite. The apartments are preserving jars, eyes; plums molder, voices, a partial vacuum, merely, keeping everything in place, home. They’ve had new balconies put in, the railings aren’t there yet, children can still fall out. She stands in the afternoon sunlight, imagining catastrophes again.

Soon, dinner is the only coming together. He goes to bed when she gets up. She snuggles up beside him and falls asleep, a couple of hours before he wakes; I miss you, he lies, I miss you, he confides.

I’VE BEEN HERE before, she says.

Impossible, he says.

SHE THINKS: THE summer is nearly gone. She thinks about what she was doing while it was there, she didn’t even see it, didn’t see it happen. He thinks about how hectic it is—has been. They stand there, feet scuffing at the gravel of the parking area in front of her parents’ house. Or: he has woken up and lies, watching her sleep. Her half-open eyes. He reaches out and extends his index and middle fingers. His arm is trembling. It is four o’clock, just before his fingertips reach her eyelids. Don’t wake, don’t wake, quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet.

She has the same effect as streams that ripple over stones, through landscapes with lakes. Fledgling birds. He draws her eyelids down with his fingers, wanting them to reach the moist edge, the horizon above the lash. He wants to shut her down for the night. Tally her up. That’s what death is: unsentimental.

But they aren’t children.

Have never been.

WHEN SHE’S IN that mood, she thinks of it as an insult, this sick urge to translate, in everything, bypassing art and writing. The need to understand. An insult, like asking Jesus to work as a circus hand, seeing him pass the paraphernalia to the magician when it’s time for his bravura piece: water to wine, with the aid of only deception and berries. A circus hand.

Ta-da.

The craft of it.

What’s the point. Gallows humor, greasepaint and flight: pretense, everything. And the hostages you take with you, cage in with your words, images and references, the world’s eternal guessing games and sick urge to translate.

Where something comes from.

As if there were an agenda, as if it wasn’t enough to be delivered to have that power. Delivered to have power over what none of us has any power over. As if, and this is what she may think, as if people even understand what it means. To have power. To possess words and speak about the world, to evoke something that is something else and yet exactly the same: a self-contained life. Whether it means anything, whether there’s a difference.

But then all of a sudden it makes sense, all of a sudden that’s the only thing there is: difference. That surprising leap, no matter the body, no matter the place, simply a feeling of this being: fatal. A span between breathing and drawing a face in charcoal. Shading the areas where the light doesn’t fall. A vegetable garden, the planning of it, a face, planning that, and watching both grow from out of your hands, outgrowing you. Writing some words down on paper and hoping they keep that tension inside. A gluttony, imperceptibly becoming necessary.

She is not breathing.

So she is no longer in that spiteful mood of emptying. When all you do is get angry and hollow.

So maybe you can keep yourself together after all.

So maybe you can exist a bit longer, or not a second more.

That kind of leap, that kind of balancing on tall, narrow walls between city courtyards, on the dykes facing the sea, she thinks to herself, that kind. And: that’s how it has to be; a real body, writing, everything else an insult, and imagining anything else as purer than is pretense. Thought. Whiter. Purer. More important. Choices like that don’t exist: between one thing and another. She’s not sure what she wants to be; and the worst part is she still hasn’t the slightest doubt that she would be easier to love. That way.

Without her self.

Purer, more pure, more: woman. More person, or just more an actual person. A white, West-European man, maybe even she could be, only as a woman, of course, not quite as valuable on paper, but worth a bit more in the belt. That would be where she could hang. First on her mother’s skirts, later on a man’s belt, a dangling head with empty lips, red eyes; take what you want, here’s person enough.

YOU’RE HOLDING SOMEONE’S hand, she says.

Silence then, on the other end of the phone. It’s as if the room closes in on her, she can feel it, a room whose walls are wool, shrinking as it starts to rain, and the rain is boiling water.

Do you know your voice is different when you’re in Sweden, she asks him.

No, I don’t.

She walked late through the city, along Søndergade, Bruunsgade, past Ingerslevs Boulevard and on up to Marselis Boulevard. Semi-trucks thundering along the roads; she has the feeling she needs to lift her skirt as she crosses Marselis Boulevard. Relentless traffic, a river that can only be crossed in that way. She’s been looking forward to their talk, or has thought about it, pushing it ahead of her like a heavy cart.

I miss you being here, she says, and plugs a charger into the phone. She wishes she was lying. But when she says it, it’s real. And there she is, tethered to the wall, that cable.

Come back.

Come back, I need you, she says, and that too becomes real. That too is real. Like it’s real that she will forget him every day, as she has already forgotten him. He is inside her, no matter how far away he travels on her money, his own; that’s how it is. Can you miss something that’s in the flesh. Maybe you can, she thinks. Or else it’s meaningless to talk about missing or not missing, maybe it’s more a question of wanting home. Whatever it is; the look in his eyes, mostly, his eyes on her, evoked in that way, in his eyes.

That’s how she thinks about it.

Is that a problem, she asks herself. With all that delay, all that displacement. Out of body and back again, the look of an eye, the sewing together of two who are dead. So that the heart may nonetheless pump sufficient blood; and then again the image of a beech tree, drawing water ten meters into the air, upward into a lush green crown that cannot keep itself together and yet defies all guidelines as to what colors actually are, what you can expect for your money, your blue eyes. She is not with him yet; she is alone, walking beneath the lilacs, on the path toward the church. She sits down there and is seven years old, eight perhaps. Toes cold, as toes always are cold in churches, the way you can always find someone to grieve for. The dead, or those who survive them. The dolmen in the field, a plough edging ever closer, ten centimeters a year. Yet still it is there, and snow may fall. You think about all those years, and then that snow rumbles in, leaving the face of the landscape immaculate. A face seen for the first time. This is what snow does. On top of everything living, everything dead.

He sighs, and says: I’m tired.

She nods, and stares out the window. In the building opposite, the lights are turned off in two different apartments simultaneously. It’s like the building is given a face. As if a face can ever be symmetrical. She has a tooth missing on the left side of her jaw; it never came out, all that appeared was an angular gap. Her nostrils, too, are different. A conception of symmetry where there is none; an eye, drooping; your eye, drooping as you drink. Terrible, crooked faces: all there is.

She exhales against the pane, as if the night could be expelled, as if the night could be extinguished.

Are you there.

Yes, she answers. I’m still here.

Do you miss Agri, her mother asks her one day; she is seven years old and they are on holiday. Captured on film. You see the child’s face change: yes, she says, her face a moon of pale bread. On someone’s tongue, a wafer dissolving, someone else’s body, someone else’s notion of homesickness slowly absorbing into the body.

Yes, she said.

What do you miss about Agri, the woman with the camera asks.

The answer never really comes. Everything, she says. By then the camera had been switched off.

THEY ARE SPLITTING the bill at the restaurant when her friend asks her who she grew up with.

No one, she says.

It hangs in the air; they laugh.

That’s why, she thinks. I never grew up with anyone.

Her friend’s eyes gleam with something that looks like sympathy, but is something else instead: recognition. When something alien is no longer alien, because it is voiced, that’s when you understand. The coming home in that, laid bare in the world together.

HE IS STRONG, and she wishes they were more like each other. Something other than always the opposite—the reverse. But then: that’s not how I see it at all. They’re waiting for word, her mother is sick. There’s been a long break, and she can hardly remember him. Always these breaks, crushed pearls in between, well, other crushed pearls, broken teeth. My dead man, she whispers. That’s what she calls him now. That’s what he is, even though he’s standing right there. Picking his clothes up off the floor; they are exactly as he left them, as if the trousers still contained his legs, as if putting on clothes becomes more difficult by the day, having to share the space inside them with himself, yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Clothes too tight, so much body having gone before.

He doesn’t hear.

She is envious of him; his strength, if only she had his strength, dogged to the point of trembling, and always tired.

At the same time, it frightens the life out of her.

That kind of strength. Arbitrary. It’s there, and then it isn’t. She thinks: it’s like his strength isn’t his own. It comes, and may leave him, without predictability, without any rhythm besides: utterly rampant. His strength comes with anger, it assails and consumes him. Besides that—the X-rays show nothing. Strength as a tumor, a shadow, with arteries and veins, issuing out into the body and leaving again, leaving him behind. Looked at in any other way, it has nothing to do with strength at all. She just wants the same option of staying. Remaining in one place.

You always had to smoke.

I don’t know.

There is a pause, and in that pause she and her two sisters are seen moving about the parking lot in front of the hospital, mechanically, in the pull of magnets stroked beneath the asphalt. They are without arms. There is a trace of cigarette smoke in the air. There is a trace of sound, drawn as waves in the air. Green and red waves, rising and falling. Her older sister, stifling her anger at seeing her sister smoke.

They share far too much history, it reaches too far back. Together and apart. He gets out of the car and takes her hand. The two other sisters keep wandering, while she has ground to a halt there, with her dead man, ground to a halt in front of the car.

It’s kind of you to take us here. It’s kind of you to . . . be here.

He looks at her, the way you look at something broken.

A broken face.

We share no history, I don’t know you. That is what he thinks. That is what he says.

She says she doesn’t understand what he means.

She wants that cohesion, the cohesion of language and what is.

But there is none. The agreement isn’t there.

An abandoned house collapses, an abandoned tree topples in the woods, without a sound.

A broken landscape, lifeless expanses, the dead themselves, stone walls under snow. Maybe that’s how it is. I’m not sure I understand what you mean, she repeats.

THE RAM LIES twitching, a pounding heart in the grass. It forced its way through the electric fencing because she forgot to give them water. The chain-link fence of before is gone, no longer cutting up the world in its steely rectangles. They sit in the tall grass at the hedgerow, and stare across the field. The sheep, the way they used to poke their heads through the metal eyes, ear tags or horns contriving to get them stuck, a head wrenching back, ear tag in the wire, the image of an ear torn in two. Now the fencing is electric, a current directed through four taut wires, a regular current, the tautness of the wires, a staff for musical notation running through the landscape here. And still the sheep strive for the grass on the other side, and still they may get stuck, become entangled.

Frightened animal eyes; the tremble of the beast, blue-tongued, mouth agape. I can hardly look.

Does she know what harm she has caused. Do you know what you’ve done. Can’t you see.

All is silent. As yet no one has spoiled the stillness of the scene with questions. And it will never be the same. She is not breathing. It is Sunday and they are all dressed up as themselves. Their mother whips cream for the cake, there is a sense of expectation, the house has been dusted. The piano—dusted. The heaps in the living room, the piles of letters from the bank, the catalogues and receipts, the empty envelopes ripped open at the seams, all shuffled and patted together, corners aligned.

Seen through her mother’s eyes: proud, upright towers of documents.

On the sideboard.

On the telephone table.

Order. Order, that is about opportunity, and a joy at what is to come. What is to come and what might come. A dizzying privilege, a naïve expectation as to what is about to happen.

But then perhaps it is anything but naïve. Perhaps it’s never getting any better than this. Not so much about the joy of expectation as having trust in the world, that feeling of excitement in the stomach, leaps ahead in the mind, physically going on into the future. When the body goes on.

And then the damper on it all, that all of a sudden everything is in spite; a celebration held in spite. Harvest festival—when everyone knows it’s not just bringing hard work to a pleasant conclusion, but also the start of a winter’s slog. The cold. Shoulders grinding. Thoughts grinding, pulverizing more important thoughts, the disintegration of it all, feathers and dust descending like snow, or in November as rain. Descending to the feet of nature, descending upon life.

Perhaps she will not come here ever again, if she is forced to choose then I don’t want to be here. They can come to my book launch, read the reviews and settle for that; or they can avoid the launch, not bother to read the book, and settle for that. Buy a postcard, or nothing. Send it, or not.

Not.

Never read even a page, but conjure it up in the imagination, unreading, unseeing.

I sit at the table, and the tall jug of hot chocolate is passed around for the second time; or else I stand out in the stable with the sheep wedged between my knees, holding a cloth to its ear. The ear has become infected and weeps. The flies can’t be kept away. I bend down without loosening my grip on the animal, dip the cloth in the bucket of soapsuds. The bleating of a sheep can be this loud, an alarm that could almost dislodge the swallow’s nest below the roof. Crumbling flakes of mud fall gently on my head, the image of a heart in the grass, the ram at my hand, the heart in the field. I write a letter to my mother, a last will and testament in reverse, all that is not mine, and all that is my own, something that is hers. A body I cannot possess any longer. I miss you, I write at the bottom, then cross it out again. And yet that is what I do, miss someone. It could be her, someone I know.

HE IS OUTSIDE himself the whole time. Standing now among the black-currant bushes, eating until he can eat no more. Until his eyes resemble the dark berries. She is transparent, he is a recurring dream of solidity. Someone has to touch her and think: here is a body. Here is proper flesh.

But all she does is drift.

She is the dust drifting in the stable, in every shaft of light, she is the trace of some insects in the dust that has settled, or she is out of sight upon worm-eaten rafters, the bark of weathered fence-posts, in the frost that covers the benches by the lake. She wants to be vulnerable:

give me wounds.

And then the cat’s cracked paw pads, everything there is, bleeding. That, hand me that.

WE WALK THROUGH the city on our way home from the restaurant, looking in at the cafés, where the light is soft as upon the lakes. People, appearing in light, extinguished in darkness, in the depths of the rooms, up front. A thin man’s cigarette dissects the darkness in two. He loiters there on the street corner, the way that can only be done on a street corner. The roads run on ahead and are home before us. I feel younger than ever before, as if I’ve seen everything and forgotten it all again, now finally having reached a place from which to start. Why have I never been here before, I wonder. You say the city is full of life tonight, I was thinking the exact opposite, at the moment you spoke—that the city was full of death tonight. A kind of beauty in that, in our meeting there, back to back; when you can’t get any farther away from each other, you encounter each other again. I am a wall that goes right through you, and your body is distressed by how heavy it’s getting.

HER MOTHER FILLS the room with her humming. She waters the plants, her hands pass over all things, invoking them—as things. It’s like she wants to make herself heard above everything her daughter has done, to make sure all is not ruined. By the sadness of her being so. I am indebted; this is what she sees, the eyes of her older sister, she understands that she is indebted now and must repay what is owed, forever. And she must care for their mother when she gets old. Old and bedridden. When she no longer can feed herself.

She is malevolent decoration, that’s what it feels like. Saddled with a love so mad, inhuman almost, that she can only disappoint. It’s a matter of time, and then it will be so—only disappointment remaining, and a sense of having loved a child that never existed. And the reproaches will return, there will be a list:

The ram.

The cancellation, that trip to Copenhagen with her mother’s sister. That never was.

The necklace.

Various items of porcelain.

The book.

How could you do such a thing.

The illness.

The illness of disappointment.

THE AFTERNOONS, SO late and always in that color, gray-red. Heat, and it was summer. Again she forgets how beautiful it is here, the stretch between Løgten and Rønde, here, where the bay is a blue belt folded into a bowl, a hand underneath the season.

A hand.

The asphalt, unsettled by the heat.

Her mother, who collects her in Aarhus or Risskov; they drive to Mols together. She picks at the fingernails of one hand with the fingernails of the other, eyes glued to the road. She is a martyr, uncertain of what she is fighting for.

So this is what she is fighting for.

They always talk on the drive home, but she has not a single recollection of any specific conversation. Nothing, but their talking. She recalls so little, almost nothing. A heart in the grass. A sky in the south of France, a pink sky, and in front of it a landscape in four layers: mountains behind mountains behind mountains. He in, you in, a bed one morning I return home from a long walk in the woods, you are asleep, and I stand there and am eyes, three thousand eyes.

The road is worn thin, she doesn’t see it anymore. The beauty by which a person is surrounded has its own discreet ways. Only when a tree-cutting schedule or an autumn storm disturbs that order; only then can you see anything at all. When she can see the old man in the man she thought would give her, well—life. Life, the exact opposite of: left alone. When she can see, when I see, that the person is no good, and the life you were supposed to have together was no good—when we split up, the life that begins there: life after you begins here. You write to me and say the downturn ends here, but both of us know this is where what is left begins. The child inside its mother, the turnaround that takes place; a conversation postponing a farewell: what else. A silence, postponing what needs to be said. I am worn thin, a tree-cutting schedule, my body an autumn storm. I am old, I steal my mother’s years, one after another, I steal age from the language, all the books I read make me unnaturally old, those I love make me unnaturally old; it’s like we take on each other’s lives, sharing it all, all the life that has been lived; and the dividing up of the estate is a mad gesture, we clutch and tear, pull the rings from the fingers of loved ones now dead, though their bodies may still be warm. We think we own, in fact, but what we own are memories, and they change all the time, are constantly getting lost. What do we want a ring for. What are we supposed to do with a finger.

We pass the lake—we go that way when possible. Through the plantation. The bends in the road that make you think you’re nearly there. The light ahead, always so full of promise: here is the lake, enticing. A seduction that has nothing to do with a lie. The woods, that have nothing to do with seduction, besides this optical illusion. Expectations of things to come.

An Italian garden in spring: the rainwater channels that run through the town; a band of drought and skinny dogs, the occasional beginnings of plants that nonetheless are but dust in the sun—dry, and human.

The woods are unsettled, the asphalt likewise; in a way the heat makes no difference.

My mother starts to sing. Tentatively at first, then with gusto. There is an endeavor to make the song fit in, to be a pathway alongside the road. A sudden displacement inside me, as I sit there on the seat next to her, leaning my head against the window; a dislocation that runs from fatigue through annoyance to a sadness that mostly is about grief at not being a big enough person.

The trees and the asphalted roads.

The edgelands of all the places anyone is from. The woods, the borderland. Like the way she can think she is always on the periphery of her life, on her way to something better, something else, at least. The insects swarm, and even if you say a poppy or a daisy can break through asphalt: the trees surrender whereas the roads do not, exactly, surrender.

I ask my mother to be quiet, please. And we exchange glances, my mother turning her head, the car moving on through the woods at an even pace. The speed of the woods and the speed of the car and of the silence, a single movement. And her face turns into that dreadful face, transparent: a single sheet of paper, set on fire, but now extinguished. Her document face. I am not breathing.

Her head is so exhausted. Or just: I’m so exhausted.

It’s like we keep on looking at each other the rest of the way, her mouth is open, her body breathing on her behalf, one last favor, gifts of that nature.

The woods have so many layers, you penetrate and press on ahead, trees ever darker; like when I was alone in France with the rubble, the remains of something that was no more, attempting to do something; and the layered mountains, one behind the other, so almost-infinite and increasingly bright, going against everything you ever learned. So few lights this evening, I think to myself back in time, later. Or I lock the door, am alone and will remain so, switch off my phone, for there is something I must finish. My eyes flick their way through the mountains, and I weep. The view here is nothing to write about. But it is the view here, the orange of the mountains, the various blues of the mountains, the blue-black of the mountains, letter-blue, blued letters, blueing mountains; behind the eyes behind the mountains, pitch black, pale red morning, pale red mountains, blood and blood-red and bread, the redly blueing leaves of blue mountains.

The lake, now abruptly the lake. My mother pulls in and parks. The light falls more directly here, descends; the lake is an eye in the woods. The car ticks. We sit for a while, then step out into the heat.

We swim, and our bodies decide to save us, again today. The lake is deep, its ceiling opaque; it is like the grand railway stations that were built at the end of the nineteenth century: glass and iron and light. Grass. Light. Foliage. The lake as a hall, an arrival—a feeling of here begins something else.

GRAYNESS, POURING FROM the sky.

The woods sigh, the remaining trees.

A lot has been cleared here, I tell you. And the barn over by the rectory is gone, they pulled it down.

You are quiet at the other end of the line. How sad, you say after a moment, understanding so little of what you say. I bite my lower lip to make it stop trembling like that.

You have to reconcile yourself with the thought that everything happens at a pace you cannot control. Failed love needs three months, so you’ve been told.

I find myself thinking you don’t know what you’re talking about.

But you do. You’re talking about me. And dreaming I’ll take three months. We both know that as it stands I’ve taken somewhere between eight and ten years.

You borrow something, everything you need you just borrow.

Childhood, a lover, a loan, merely; it’s all a wicked party you clear up the next day, without hardly recognizing each other. Is that you. That girl you found, or the one you had found already; ten years, it cost you. Now you can feel guilty about mentioning, even thinking about me. Because she can’t handle hearing about it. Forgetting on demand, maybe I’m eighteen again, and you’re twenty-three. Subtract an entire life, and the years are gone, forgotten.

You comfort me, a pale hand smoothed over my hair, my mother’s hand, smoothed along my back. She moves down into the living room to read, that night. My grief disrupts her sleep. You were breathing so erratically, she says, closing her eyes to the light of day, of evening, of night, always someone stealing her sleep.

But I am still alone in the room with your voice. We talk about antidepressants, about how they parcel up your senses and allow you not to take in the world as intensely as before.

That’s just what I need, I say.

There is moisture in the air, the landscape proudly upright behind the curtains of moist air that extinguish everything. I long to return to Copenhagen, and I do not long at all. Nature is a fire blanket, it puts out something inside me. What, exactly, I can’t tell. It bubbles constantly to the surface, a weeping about to erupt, a flame that is smothered beneath something heavy and tight and yet not extinguished, an ember rising in the throat, searing, burning. There are tall snow drifts on the left side of the road, on the right you can see the grass, scattered patches of green. The sheep stand with empty eyes in their railway wagon.

SHE REMEMBERS CHANGING her mind. The image was too arresting, maybe he would be frightened by her, and imagine her without skin.

She puts the phone down and feels like a traveler in shoes. In a land where shoes are unknown.