He says nothing for a while.
Maybe she thinks, now that his father’s dead and his mother moved away, and his brother moved away—maybe I think he doesn’t have that kind of dream inside him anymore. He holds up his hand when they come to serve the food. She feels she has to do likewise.
For his sake.
Maybe at some point tell him she thinks she might stay.
An experiment using iron filings on a sheet of paper. She remembers moving the magnet underneath the paper, the patterns it made.
Adults fall asleep when they come home to visit their parents. Not because they relax, but because so much time must pass through their minds.
The very soul of France, don’t you agree, he says. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about, it could be a musician, a dish, or a cookbook.
When she came up to the house her hair was almost dry, or at least it hung down in strips, dark marrow encased in a dull, yet lighter crust of frazzled strands. She had no clothes on, only a towel wrapped around her.
She hadn’t seen him.
He’d left the car up at the road and walked.
The winter crop upholsters the fields from below, a dusting of green velvet or cotton, growing and encasing the soil; a mantle made visible by the storm, the wind’s shawl of snow, gusts blowing open the coat, wrenching away the shawl; the snow as it drifts and piles, and then these islands of green. This green that wants to witness. This merciful green. Whatever mercy could be—a hand held out beneath you, perhaps, or a whole body protecting another. A colour. Sun. To describe an image to someone may be a kind of love. The green beneath the snow bears some semblance, but is not. It’s nature, that’s all. Nothing to depend on, and as such there is some coincidence yet. Points of similarity. The distance between things and us. That which survives another day, and that which is lost.
Other women say we look like each other; our boyfriends say we’re night and day. I’m night, I think to myself, though I can see the opposite could easily be said—I’m the one with fair hair.
I’m sitting on the floor in the living room, it’s my mother’s birthday. We’ve all come home. We’re going skating, only no one’s got skates. Or rather, we think there might be a moving box with skates in it in the loft, but they must have been there ten years, more than likely they’re right at the back now and can’t be got at. It would be too much trouble. Only later, on the ferry back to Sjælland, does the thought occur to me that they would have been too small, children’s skates.
I find it odd no one thought of it, or said anything.
My boyfriend is sitting on the floor too, we’re watching a film from what my mother calls the old days. Our cheeks are red from being out in the cold on the pond. They sweep the snow away with a machine that looks like the kind of cultivator we use to dig up the vegetable garden in the spring. It’s got brushes instead. They start at the edge, moving along the shore, tracing the oval of the pond, this dark rink of frozen water. The water, darker than the snow. Two separate rectangles have been cleared, on one of which they’re skating and playing ice hockey now. Some of the kids from Egens Havhuse. Between the two rectangles is a snaking path. My boyfriend goes over and studies the work—the man is clearing a circle but has started from the outside, the machine keeps throwing the snow back inside the circle. He’s going to end up with a pile in the middle. It won’t take much wind for all his work to be in vain. Do they always do it like this. He stands with his gloved hands in his pockets.
There are so many layers in the landscape, the solemn trees closest to us cut up the picture like the cracks of an oil painting, a fracture in the wall in the corner of the bedroom. Is it worsening. It’s hard to tell from day to day. A translation—then, now. The past, continually collapsing like buildings behind us, becoming something else.
They have driven through the woods to the beach so they can watch the bonfire. There is no other way to get it said than this, the hard way. They have come to see the bonfire, so no one says anything until they reach the car park outside the beach hotel.
Her mother turns off the ignition and they sit for a moment in their coats, a dampness in the interior and under their clothes. They’re wearing lightweight summer coats, their skin is tanned and their hair bleached by the sun: it is the height of summer. She and her sisters, her mother, her father. They can see the bonfire from the car, but no people. It feels odd, the bonfire piled up like a peak on the empty beach in the rain—the summer of 2004 is a summer of rain. Up at the hotel the grey flagline slaps against the pole, beating out a weary rhythm familiar from the harbour almost any day in spring when boats are made ready.
Curtains of rain across the sea.
A man trudges past, a dogged angle in the wind. The car ticks. The air is not cold, more close and blustery at the same time. Her younger sister unclicks her seat belt. They are startled by the sound as the belt retracts, the metal clasp striking the window.
The unobtrusive sea, its waves are an unsettled band of greyish brown. The light is not the summer’s. Her sister shuts the car door behind her, they all get out and stand for a moment gazing in their different directions: their mother looks towards the woods, her sisters consider opposite ends of the sea; she stares blankly at the sand. There are candles in all the windows—it’s too dark for Midsummer’s Eve. There’s something unnatural that doesn’t fit in with the season, the time of day. At the water’s edge she veers off and follows the shore like a sphere rolling through the groove of a wooden board. Seen from above it looks like the shore and all its sand empty out into the sea; the undulation of waves, repeated extensions of green and white, fanning out as they break; the effervescent rush before retreat. The sound of—a sphere in wood, a very simple sound against the murmur of the sea, always the same—whether heard or not, it exists. The bonfire won’t be lit, her mother says definitively.
They are quiet.
They stand with their backs against the car, then walk past the boathouse, where the lifeboats are stabled, and down through the dunes. Her sister picks up a branch blown from the bonfire to lie like a bone in the sand. She tosses it back onto the pile, that reacts with a groan, the slightest of landslides, a few smaller elements rattling down a level or two, like a body turning in sleep when touched by a hand.
They walk around the bonfire, considering it from various angles, though all the time from below and all the time with distrust or a feeling that something is wrong with it. Once they’ve been all the way round, they stop.
He’s got things in jeopardy: money, and his face.
The garden is an eye, the lawn swathed in rippling green; and in the middle are the perennials, older than us all. You amble around them, casually, as if you were a planet fastened to its orbit around the sun, older than us all; or else you are a cone of light in search of something, a pencil beam penetrating the eye in order to find some weakness, or perhaps even disease. The light has no age. Light is no older or younger than the eye on which it falls. You stop and jab a finger at a plant. They’re strangling each other, you tell me softly. A bed like this is war; the minute you look away, it’s war.
You nod as you speak. I can see the way your neck bends and extends, the silhouette of your head, your fair hair that in the light of afternoon looks like a cluster of aquatic plants. It’s a shame, you say softly.
I have always thought you to be a child, but now I see that you are not. You have all ages in you, while I stand here bare, a tableau like the perennials. No age or time will ever latch on to me, and thus I am already someone you miss.
I am barefoot in the grass, walking backwards now out of the garden. I hear you speak to me. I see your girlfriend at the kitchen window, preparing pigeons and curly kale with a face that seems new every day. Unlike us, your girlfriend masters the art of living. She lives the same way as fledgling birds—they hatch out in a nest, oblivious to all that exists outside, and die if they fall from the nest too soon. I have dreamt about being like her—of being her—but today I a
m no longer sure what kind of dream that is, or whose. Some of us draw the strangest of straws—within us collect all the stray dreams that exist in the world, those left over. It becomes impossible to tell the difference, which are one’s own and which come from without and belong to another. The lawn is alive with caterpillars, it makes me itch, and you let me off the hook. Gone, I feel the same as I do in the garden and when I am with you—completely alone. And thus we squeeze the juices onto our brows, until we no longer can remain inside the body, until we are beasts that cause the stomach to turn, or perhaps until the human being within surrenders with a wince. You think I am still close by, but you could turn around at any time and see something else. I slam shut my eyes as I leave—the metallic clatter of the gate, before everything once more is still.
A length of knitting relieved of its needles on account of alcohol. A number of stitches waiting to be unravelled. A kind of vulnerability that is almost nauseating to watch—fingernails on a blackboard, that kind of nausea, that instead of rising up inside engulfs a person from below, the kind that cuts one’s consciousness into very thin slices and serves them to a father who leans forward across the table and holds forth on the matter like a schoolteacher explaining something about which he has only the slightest knowledge, or a businessman on the verge of closing a profitable deal, with the utmost stringency, a recipe or a set of rules a person can pass on or teach, exercises to strengthen the small of the back, studies indicate, etc. Stains on a shirt. Various substances.
Maybe the problem isn’t so much hoping for something else.
He lights a cigarette and the palm of his hand is illuminated like
the inside of a cave.
A drop of moisture released from a branch. Autumn: leaves
descending like tired faces in the streets.
Steam drawn out of the window. Rising.
You’re paranoid. She reaches for the red wine and empties the
bottle into her lap, leaning back against the counter.
What are you doing, he asks calmly.
Having a miscarriage.
Okay, he says with a nod.
He drinks from his glass. That’s all we’ve got, he says, pointing
with it.
The light of summer draws the colours from the world.
Green and blue. No matter.
The dismal belly of the hedge, the leaves of the birch though
brightest green, waving in the breeze, whenever there is one; limp
as droplets when there is none.
Clustered weary on the branches, those thin arms.
The birch.
Birch trees, wandering, as if troubled.
Troubled by e.g. war, or the promise of death.
Was it so bad you thought you’d die.
So bad the only thing you want is to die.
The next image is from Normandy, the coast there. No people,
just an empty beach. Waves. Nothing but waves and the sound of
waves. The sound of the garden and the sea.
Presumably, he wants to see you happy.
He knows I won’t be. He knows I never will. He’s not that stupid.
He knows me.
I got this idea about you and that lump of amber, like it was the
amber that picked you up. From the beach.
Thus march the trees in a flicked-out fan from the garden, now from the sea: like soldiers to the land, over the beaches, slowly to the house as if risen up from the ocean itself, kelp about their ankles, seaweed for hair, barnacles beneath their soles, calves encrusted, occasional mussels embedded in algae, entwined around the thighs.
Like the sun.
Returning to a lodger who will turn out to be gone. Washed away.
Nothing here, whatever happened to …
And in reply, a pair of shoes, or perhaps only a single shoe. Left
behind before a house taken by the swell, laces rotting.
He bent down and picked up a lump of amber, tapped it cautiously
against his teeth and held it up to the light.
Come closer, he said. Look, he said. And as the trees withdrew,
they shone through all things with their white bark, and beams
of light were their gaze.
We look into the woman’s glassy eyes, but instead of seeing our-
selves we see only the man.
The fact of our not seeing ourselves in the woman’s gaze.
The exchangeable nature of love, and always: promises of the
opposite.
Approximately eighty per cent of what may be said about me may also be said about you.
To circle a building by allowing the index finger to follow a mortar joint in the brickwork. Freedom is something one used to have, found only subsequently and in hindsight, and thereby such a nostalgic idea, and exactly that—an idea.
The darkness of the woods, regardless.
Like your face during that time. Some favours I do for you, without you really noticing.
Look what you’ve done.
The sun adds and subtracts indefinitely, like an abacus in the play area on board the ferry, first one side, then the other; you get up early and say you want to get something done today. When later we walk around the lake we must clamber over fallen trees. Or rather, you bypass them, holding down thin branches from the top of the crown with your hand. The oak trees had just come into leaf before being cut down, the way a person might think of something they should remember to say. Summer, and a conversation that could have been.
I keep thinking about the way I banish the sickness to a place outside of me by calling it some particular name. This or that. I don’t know if you could call it a breakthrough, I don’t really believe in stuff like that. Maybe the speed can be adjusted, but the crash is always going to be inevitable. Maybe the rate at which a person disintegrates can be slowed down—maybe that’s what these fleeting realisations can do. I survive by the language. The language as an additional body part, a substitute heart for when the other one stops, an extra pair of lungs. Salvation, to possess a voice. Two kidneys.
And what if it is not dreams and the night that disrupt everything, but the day that makes everything contract and shrink. Like when the moon looks bigger when you’re close to the horizon. What are the proportions, what perspective is right.
You marched through the city, dressed in black, red flowers in women’s hands, and hooded. As if hoods or colour could ever keep something so fluid together, knots and ties. A dog tags along. The boat waits at the headland, at the jetty, engine chugging. You step on board one by one, like a necklace of beads stretched between two hands, the gap of elastic thereby exposed, one bead at a time allowed to pass. One sees a foot, and then another, the footwear, stockings. Nylon, leather, stripes. Bright-coloured shoes are comical, in a heart-rending kind of way.
Unexpected guests in the middle of another of our arguments.
You know how it is. If anyone came through the door now you could force a smile. Gerbera, I think they were. I think they were gerbera, the flower heads they scattered on the sea, bobbing on the swell.
Strong colours.
The stars seen from Earth are more numerous than all the grains of sand in the world. The photograph’s distortion of the subject, the ends of the horizon curving like the corners of a mouth. To make the aperture big enough to let in all light; to pluck the flesh from the pigeons; to part a crown of the darkest hair.
Where do you imagine the money’s going to come from.
They have reached all the way around, emerging now into the clearing and walking the final stretch towards us. We can hear them talking, they have been hidden from us by trees and the boathouse on the other side. The denser the foliage, the less intimate became their talk. Whatever a person endures, it leaves a mark in their language, the way the sky determines the colours of the sea, children always being the children of their parents. My mother is unhappy about the little blue tattoos they made on her breast
s before commencing the radiation therapy. They look like dots made with a ballpen—they’ll fade in time, she says to comfort me. A pile of timber darkens at the shore; shreds of fibre torn loose like hair floating in water, hair blowing in the wind. A softness in the language, and in her face.
Is it possible to reflect and be happy at the same time.
She stoops and draws an arm of the beech away from her face. The sunlight cleaves the trunks, the trees subside into the forest floor. He stumbles and nearly falls. The path is studded with rocks, like bald heads breaking the surface, a thousand metres from the burial mound. There are paths below the ground and everything is continually in the process of becoming something else. You regain your footing and reappear at my side. I found an A4-size envelope today, on the front of which my mother had written: To be opened in the event of a new winter coat. Love, Mum. I opened it—the adhesive glittered blue—and put the three thousand-kroner notes it contained in my wallet, the envelope in a black box I keep by the DVD player and your records. I had already bought a winter coat. I felt glad I hadn’t opened the envelope before and spent the money on something else, like food, or just frittered it away. In fact, I thought I had.
They burned off the fields, the smoke was purple and settled on the landscape like a dusty cloak. The risks of mistaking loneliness for something other than loneliness are various. When you lie on your back, a shadow makes your nose look squint. I don’t know if I believe in optical illusion. Or if there is anything else.
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