Of Darkness

by Josefine Klougart

  Whatever can be said about reading poems can also be said about living or being in a relationship. A number of requirements, or instructions given.

  Your toes inside your sandals, nails colored black.

  It’s all like looking at a 3D image—to make it work you’ve got to concentrate on a point beyond the screen.

  I’ve noticed I feel happiest owing you something. Having something to return, being one favour behind.

  During our first months together you got rid of various items of sentimental value, things that concerned your relationships with other women before me—letters, handcuffs, jewellery, lotion. We too have accumulated stuff, I see, and now I wonder if I could become a collection of remnants in the same way.

  We are back at the clearing where we started. Our towels lie brightly at the bench. Beyond the trees, the burnt-off fields moved like an ocean, a gentle swell of smoke, ever sinking, never retreating. No higher bid.

  My cousin is drinking himself to death. That’s what we do in my family. Some of us, anyway. It’s a slow way to die and belongs to the indecisive, those who can actually see there might be something worth living for: the beauty that exists in the world, and love—the chance of fondness, still. My other cousin writes to me on Facebook and says it looks like he’s on his way out, that it’s a battle now. I write back and tell her I thought he was getting better the last time I saw him. The time we visited. I even thought he’d come to some realisations. Or one, at least. She tells me his condition has not deteriorated, but that he’s been more dead than alive for a long time, that his internal organs have been steeping for years.

  My family has lost several in that war. My cousin tells me she’s developed her own strategy. It’s a question of being unsentimental, she writes. Let them drink themselves into the grave if that’s what they want, as long as they accept it’s their own choice—and if they happen to decide something else one day, then all well and good. Let them know you’re there for them if needed; but you can’t spend your life urging and appealing, begging and pleading, and always getting let down.

  My mother is cut up about something I wrote. She feels like she’s being held up to ridicule all the time. I suppose it’s the surrendering of power. The child claiming the right to her own story. Sharing it with others, if that’s what she wants. A miniscule fragment of the self that can be handed out to whoever; like a garden in autumn, with always a leaf releasing; or a body soaking in a tub, beginning to dissolve, tiny cells of skin, or flakes, floating like a film on the surface of the water. She says she finds it hard that I always make her a victim. It’s an odd thing to say, as if it short-circuits the brain or leaves it in a state of self-fuelling oscillation. Who makes who a victim. When I was fourteen I put a newspaper clipping up on the fridge with a round, red magnet. There was a picture of a woman writer who wrote about the conflict in the Middle East. It had to do with the role of victim, the way it made the bloodshed possible. Because the victim can always do as he likes. The same applies to kindergarten. Who makes who a victim, who is comforted. The greatest revenge is perhaps simply not to be there any more. But when you’re waging war a hundred kilometres apart and are there no longer, you have never been closer. Maybe that’s how it is too. The more you fight, the closer you become; the more space you take up being missed, as an imprint, the closer you are.

  Dear cousin,

  A brief word from me here in Nørrebro, Copenhagen. It’s a cold day, the fourteenth of February. I’m sitting here trying to work on my new book and happened to think about you. As I’ve done often of late—hearing how you are from your sister and my dad and wishing the very best for you. Hoping you’re getting better. Are you able to eat? Is the hospital food any good? For someone who knows as much about food as you do it must be a trial sometimes to find the appetite to eat and get well, that must be hard enough on its own.

  It’s been a while now since we spoke. I live here on Fælledvej in Nørrebro with my boyfriend. You haven’t met him yet. Who is it now, I hear you ask, and I can understand why. There’s been quite a few the last couple of years. A coming and going of men. I can’t manage being on my own. Still, this time I think it’s going to work out. Nine months already, which is something.

  I think about how many ways I can tell a lie and that I’m good at it.

  I’m rewriting my essay. Revising and making amendments to keep my family happy. I’m manipulating. The story about that letter to my maternal grandmother, the way it got photocopied and put away. A simple matter of retaining something, now an issue about having the right to tell. They say history belongs to the victorious; but I am no victor. I have violated something in which I truly believe. And acquiesce so as not to be shunned.

  I walked around the city lakes yesterday so I could talk to her. After a week it could no longer be postponed.

  The energy my sisters get out of it.

  It was nearly dark as I went. Darkness falls early on this land in winter. It surprises me still, how early. It creeps up and assails you. We talked about my father, how impossible he is on vacations. There’s so much resistance in him—fear, I think to myself, that maybe has to do with alcohol in some way. His childhood, with a father who drank, drank and wrote the whole time. I think his own take would be that it was down to some other stuff—his mother, no doubt.

  In a way, the whole thing is a tragedy no matter which way you look at it, whatever the truth of it. The way something can be handed down. My mother and I—it’s not hard to see we’re in it together when it comes to him. Enemies, loved ones, frost, winter. Nothing binds together like that.

  The seeming potential of alcohol with regard to cementing kinship. Or maybe just that exactly—kinship. The frailty of family, the darkness of it.

  A few days later I’m on the phone to my best friend. We talk about my mother and the essay. He says it’s the crux of the piece—that it’s extremely important to retain, my reflections on wanting to preserve memories and who owns the past. He thinks I’ve brought it out well in the writing. I tell him about the feeling I get having those talks with her. Like being put in your parents’ car and made to visit some aunt and uncle you don’t like. We laugh about that. I go back to the office, balancing my tea.

  I read somewhere that men don’t want to hear about their partner’s previous erotic experiences. That it just ruins everything. In a way, it makes sense. In a way, it might be the most honest thing that’s been said on the matter. A shunning of history one can’t help but love. Maybe it’s not about purity in that sense—maybe it’s because a person can’t live with that much time, that much past to skirt around.

  Discovering the video a few weeks later he snatches the camera out of her hand and fends her off with an outstretched elbow. Give me that. He studies the film, his eyes soften like a wound. He becomes hospitable. His body, oblivious to being observed. He asks about that scene—it’s evening and they’re seated in the kitchen having spaghetti. What scene.

  The one she told him about, the one with the breast.

  What about it.

  Is that what it was like, he wants to know. He’s talking about Duras, that film with the very lengthy shot of a naked woman in it, the breast of a woman asleep. You think you’re looking up into the crown of a tree, only to discover that what you’re seeing aren’t branches at all, but the photographed capillaries of a heart. A wrist, a body transilluminated. The way things fall together, a pulse turned into something you can see.

  Who was she out with.

  No one.

  Limping, hobbling home, the fir trees parting like scarlet lips; a leg dragging behind, the way a cat might drag itself home, hind leg trailing like a broken cart. The horse was down by the meadow, tossing its head, the reins tangled up in the branches, only then it wrenched itself loose and set off at a trot, bridle dangling from the headstall, following the perimeter of the colts’ enclosure. The green of confusion, the vegetation, the last hours of afternoon. A group of girls stopped what they were doing
and dropped their currycombs, or else simply stood and stared; a couple of them came running towards her, clambering over the fence, and as they reached the wood and the girl, she fell down in front of them, like a heavy sinker when the line is released, plummeting to the bottom, an anchor descending through current, all the softer strata, motion in the direction of the horizon. The wind picked up and passed over them like waves rolling in from the open fields, a rotten stench of sea borne upon the air, slabs of mingling perception, rising up in a murmur, lapping this far or that, issuing its sighs and sinking to the ground, to whisper in the gravel, in the sand, and the wounds. Her freckled skin was gashed apart, arms blotched with blood, blood trickling from her nose, and an eyebrow glistened red. In the far field they attended her, tearing open her long-sleeved T-shirt, its weary fabric relenting at once. Her arm was at an angle, the bone stuck out from the middle of her forearm, the lower part with the hand dangling like a decoration. There was a lot less blood than one would have thought. Her leg, her leg, the girls cried out in unison, then busy whispers exchanged, endeavours to make her comfortable, to arrange her in some way that resembled a natural position of the body. And all the time thwarted by some issue, knees that refused to bend, and the sight of her eyes as they flickered in shock.

  Her face was the worst, but no one saw.

  And the internal organs: a lung slowly filled with blood, patches of deepening shadow, fluid seeping darkly from the body.

  Help is on its way, they assured her.

  Someone had phoned.

  The horse had stepped on her face, the left side, a loose tack in the shoe had gashed her open from just above the eye, a fleshy flap hung from the socket, her apple cheek parted like the tall grass of the meadow through which they rode.

  Who was she out with.

  The horse lowered its head, came to a halt, snorted into the soil, turned, lowered its head again, and nibbled absently at the couch grass. The flap, flap of horse lips smacking together, the moist rending of pasture detached by the teeth.

  She gazed up at the tops of the fir trees, they pointed up like mountain peaks that strove towards the sky, and all movement was suddenly directed upwards, she felt; the fall had lasted an age, but when first she let go and allowed herself to tumble she thought fleetingly of the speed at which everything hurtled towards the clouds, the whistling rush of the air; she hit the ground at the edge of the bridle path hollowed out over time by the tramp of hooves, twisting round in mid-flight as she was hurled under the horse’s hind legs. Now she tried to move her arm, but couldn’t, and found the other to be likewise unresponsive. Blades slashed at her like darting swallows beneath the ridge of a roof; she wanted to know about her face, but not a sound would leave her mouth. She’s trying to say something, one of the girls realised, commanding her friends to shush; they could see only the right side of her face, the left was seen by no one.

  The body, opening itself.

  They stood and listened, watching her lips. Face, the girl whispered, face, repeating the word several times, and everyone understood, yet no one spoke.

  They saw the ambulance—and three weeks later her face. It looked like a field, skin sewn together in a patchwork of boundaries and trampled-down tracks. Part of the jaw was saved, three teeth, the cheek rebuilt from bone grafted from the radius. For a long time following she was blue, and they shot the horse, it was too wild to ride, too afflicted to be kept in any place. Castrated too late, it was like it never realised it wasn’t a stallion anymore, they said. The girls understood that to a point, but everyone agreed that shooting it was best, on account of that face. Its eyes darted in their sockets as it was led out into the farmyard so they wouldn’t have to move it as far once it was dead. The gunshot was a whirle in the air—dust, grass seed, sand.

  All language is a translation of something.

  The leaves of the chestnut tree, the way they unfold from the bud in the space of a few days in early May, are a translation.

  A man stands in the middle of the road and two dark-coloured cars sweep past him very closely, one on each side, moving in their opposite directions. He has to turn sideways so as not to be hit. His body mirrors in the paintwork and the windows, the rush of wind as they pass causes the hairs on his arms to tremble. The particular hang of a dress. The minutest of movements in the region of an eye—industry. A translation.

  Roots in poor soil, sandy soil, meagre.

  You appear on the path beneath the chestnuts and have lost weight from all your worries. It suits you. The compactness of your body, the fact of being able to see what’s under the skin. Your hands are in the high pockets of your short-cut coat, so your arms stick out like wings, two triangles in your wake. You greet me, and later you say something about selling at a loss. I can’t remember what it was you meant, only that it seemed plausible that it should be so.

  I put my hand out and thought how fleshy it looked.

  Everything is a translation.

  You shook my hand and it felt like a reconciliation. You held a cigarette between your fingers while it disintegrated into ash. We walked in the direction of your nod. I imagined how he would look sitting in my kitchen.

  I’m going to Fyn, you say. Your eyes have different colours from the trauma. You want to go the limit, you say. You say you’re not sure if I understand you when you say you’re tired, I’m tired. You’d rather crash out in style than not give it a go. I think you’re right about me not understanding. I want comfort—but right now it seems like it’s not going to happen.

  You look at your watch and the sky. It’s our own fault, you point out. We sit down on the slope and watch the swans. They put their cheeks to the wind in turn, first one then the other, like sails. We’re both speechless—the choreography of it is like a symbol. The lake changes colour from blue-violet to deep blue, shifting in a matter of seconds—three, four, a mere blink of the eye. Eight swans, now in a circle on the lake. The lake is not an eye. We tramp out a path on our wanderings around it, deeper and deeper.

  What is the relationship of the body to the voice. Prayer, declaration, oath, song, elegy, ode, allegory, novel. How can a voice be retained, how much can be altered without the voice becoming another. Nothing is ever the same. Therefore, there is no comfort nor any argument in favour of us being together at this moment; no reason we should be together.

  Tone is determined by distance.

  Keep talking to me.

  The dying fruits hang and wither, folding themselves up into a wind harp of origami skulls. Fungus spores spread on the wind, are scattered by wind, rain, insects; flies carry the microscopic spores from fruit to fruit. The bruised fruits are the ones assailed. The biting, sucking insects, the grubs that bore, the wasps that gnaw, the birds that peck, and the hail that beats and batters—all opening up their points of entry. And the untended apple trees whose apples have been left to flourish cheek by cheek, so bountiful the fruits hang almost in bunches—these are the trees to be attacked. The spores wander from last year’s hollow fruits to the new of summer. And we see it happen. We see our woman sit down in the grass, and we see the man remain standing with that rake.

  The straw hat—where did the straw hat come from—casts a shadow across my eye. A sandbank where amber and flatfish absorb the sun in shallows of warmth.

  We see her look down at her hands. She sees herself with his eyes. In his eyes she is not herself.

  A pear, a stricken bird dropping to the ground.

  By mistake a woman washes a woolen jumper in the washing machine, causing it to shrink—and commits suicide that same afternoon. A man takes his own life after seeing an unfamiliar cat get run over a few hundred metres down the street. Another breaks down crying during dinner, his partner having mentioned Dublin and the holiday they spent there, when they couldn’t get a taxi and had to walk four kilometres in the rain. A girl lies sleepless in her room, in tears over having lost a ballpen that was special to her. A woman swallows fifty paracetamols after being handed a speedin
g ticket.

  I have a preference for plainness. Plain make-up. Plain plants—the weeping fig, for instance. The idea of regular. When things don’t draw attention to themselves and try to be better than they are, or more out of the ordinary, like that. There’s enough pageant in the world as it is. Enough showing off.

  PROLOGUE

  The first thing we see is grey, near-black earth. A warm glow in the blackness, a moistness of colour.

  The wind is the only thing to reveal time. Or the gentle arc of the plant in its lean towards the ground is the only thing to reveal time.

  The green with the black.

  The green against the black.

  The image is the softest shudder.

  The movement becomes a state. Again, we lose the sense of time into which we had settled.

  SCENE 1

  A bed inside a bedroom. Night. Darkness. On a desk at the back of the room stands a lamp with a lampshade of green glass. The lampshade refracts the light, making it fall like heavy rain. The table is sodden with light, like a forest floor. The light fans out around the lampshade and makes a halo.

  Another lamp stands on a heavy foot at the bedside, arching its neck. Its light is harsher. It falls coldly upon the two people in the bed. It is a dusty light that does not enshroud the body but seems instead to peel away a layer of the skin.

  Occasional hairs tremble, detached from one another, and every strand seemingly wreathed with light, individually and collectively, halo-like about her face. Illuminated.

  The man’s face in profile.