Of Darkness

by Josefine Klougart

  The man and the woman are present in the apartment. They have breakfast. He is going back to the place they met, he says it’s a year ago now.

  She turns the empty eggshell in the egg cup, as she does every morning.

  That we should meet there.

  One always expects some sort of payment in return from the world, signs perhaps—coherence, or some kind of solicitude.

  Outside, and behind her, a pigeon pecks at a scrap of tin foil on the decking. We see it from the man’s viewpoint. The tin foil flashes light into the room, a window of light that disturbs his vision. His eyes moisten and run. He blinks, though without turning away.

  The sound of the pigeon is foregrounded, while the camera focuses on the woman—her fingers as they turn the egg, the way she positions the egg cup at the centre of her empty plate, as one might place a tower on a town square.

  She finds churches tiresome. The exceptions are bombed churches, those derelict or being restored.

  The sound of the egg cup against the plate, the sounds of a kitchen. There’s something human about the apartment. The way it breathes in the background. It doesn’t feel like a whole year, he says.

  She wonders if this is what it’s like to be old, not really understanding that so much time has passed. She picks at the egg, the shell white as the white of an eye, faintly speckled, or tarnished—that’s the word that occurs to her: tarnished.

  Her parents always bring a dozen eggs with them when they come over from Jutland. And a jar of preserves and an orchid. They are fine gifts, she thinks. Simple, yet fine. The thought she had before about old age is too obvious, she thinks now, banal. She would never utter it out loud. But then he does instead, as if to spare her the embarrassment.

  I can see she’s unhappy about having to leave. She doesn’t want to go back.

  But it’s not the going back she’s unhappy about—it’s the opposite.

  Leaving, never to return. And you think I’m scared of flying, which is touching in a way. You put off going to work, because I’m flying that far—across the Atlantic.

  The engines quieten abruptly, and for a moment she thinks: they had a year together.

  What does she feel at the thought.

  We see her lips, the way the lower lip is curled back into her mouth, the way she bites tiny flakes of skin from its surface. First one side, then the other. It might be understood as concern, but it could be anything.

  The house by the sea is hers. It’s a thing she owns. It looks like something that found its way onto the land, washed up like wreckage tossed on the surf, that critical point where the waves are as tall as the water is deep and break at the crest, break and break and break.

  She connects waves with a variety of things: Virginia Woolf, death, summer, loneliness, conquest. She thinks it’s the most pathetic list she can imagine, but there is nothing to be done about it. Dedications, epitaphs.

  There are different kinds of recollection, but she is not interested in making any kind of division. It interests her less and less. The opposite makes more sense, finding a common denominator that brings things together.

  If there isn’t enough light in a room, the picture will be blurred or non-existent.

  The available light is not inexhaustible.

  If there isn’t enough darkness in a room, outlines will be erased, faces extinguished.

  The available darkness is not inexhaustible.

  The house comes into sight and vanishes with the shifting of day and night.

  She’s thinking of learning a foreign language, to connect up some more regions of the world.

  The house is built on top of a slope. Its tall wooden panelling is painted white. We see a man’s hand, fingers held flat, a sparse dusting of dark hairs over the wrist. Tendons beneath the skin. The fingers travel over the painted panelling, pausing near-imperceptibly at every join in the wood. We study the nail of the index finger. The cuticle is the same colour as the panelling—this is what we recall, or else the body recollects, though as a dream retained inside, the reappearance of something, like a person you’ve seen somewhere before but can’t quite place, a thought encountered in a book, something you felt, only not in any language that was able to absorb and retain, a language open at both ends, through which things merely pass, a language unable to save. One can always see what’s in a person’s eyes, if only one’s own reflection. Shiny surfaces can do that, reflect the self, whereby they are the truest nightmare. The constant reminder, the casting back, all those ideas and fantasies.

  Many of the trees have been cut down, the trunks already sawn up, ready to be loaded and driven away.

  The estate owner is quiet on the phone. I tell him how much it would mean to us—me and my boyfriend.

  He yields and concedes that he has been out looking for the tree too, or at least his daughter has, after I sent him my description of where it stood. The pale pink stones you collected on the beach and placed at its foot. We arrange for me to stop by and show him the spot next time I go to Fyn.

  I wonder if you will think of it as the gift I want it to be. Or as me trying to write myself into a story in which I don’t belong. Picking at the bark. I wonder what kind of instinct is at work inside me. Whether I’m nostalgic on behalf of others, or a parasite on their suffering, dependent on the yearning for things lost, recalling the past to such an extent I recall even those of whom I have no recollection and whose histories with me I gradually invent, remembering in advance. There’s a thing called false memory syndrome. I don’t know what to make of it. I know a lot about wanting to be a part of something. I know everything about standing on the outside, misting up windows with my breath.

  The sea is gathered at the bottom of the picture and one could think of the picture as a container—it could look like that; the sea flooded into it, from some leak in the sky, an expanding basin inking in a horizon, reminding us of something we knew but couldn’t pin down and still can’t find words for.

  The two people, the man and the woman, perched on wooden uprights at the jetty, waves lapping beneath them. We see them against the light. In the sunset they’re just a pair of silhouettes, feet dangling like the heads of wilted flowers, cumbersome weights.

  The sea has promised nothing, and as such it is uncapricious. It swells without will, witholding nothing, revealing nothing, devoid of any narrative, simple or complex, that could cause confusion.

  We see an arm reach out—there is a gap between them and they must tip their bodies towards each other like jugs in order to join.

  The sun torches her forearm in two just above the wrist, like some accessory come apart, a rope giving way at its weakest point having chafed against an iron mounting, the snap of webbing in the upholstery of a chair, the resultant disintegration that spreads like a creaking, crackling fire. If you put your ear to it you can hear each and every thread, succumbing. If you retreat from someone you love, eventually you will hear only the tiny popping of blisters as they burst. If you put your head under water, you will hear only air rising in small and insignificant pockets, invisible to the human eye. Whatever it is. The microorganisms, the flies. Everything contains the possibility of seeing things in new ways. Thus the revolution—the potential of all things resides in ourselves. The way we see, or maybe the viewpoint from which we see. What heights may be scaled, what graves dug for the self.

  We see them from the quay, perhaps from the vantage point of a tall stool—a barstool, say.

  His breathing is unsettled. We hear that.

  The stutter of his chest as it rises and falls, and yet at the same time the exactness of it. We see an unbuttoned shirt, a spray of dark hairs on a chest. We see him from the front, he shadows our skin. It takes a moment for the eyes to adjust—at first everything is black, the particular blackness of backlight, that contains all colours. He taps a finger against the ridge of another; unlike his breathing the sound is without rhythm, exploratory, human in its tone, an amalgam of wood and teeth. The sea is charcoal g
rey, silver, and orange, speckled as a heavy fish whose scales parry the sun and send it ricocheting in all directions, causing structures to shimmer. She does not sigh. We hear only the sound of her breathing now. She lowers her hand and places it in her lap.

  A close-up of the hand, the thumb folded in the palm, like a jewel or a bone picked clean. The skin against the blue fabric, the structure of the skin, a topographic map, tiny dashes of purple and grey, the pink tinge of the knuckles, some veins. Lines of the skin, lines of a map, contours marked with elevations.

  Waves break against the uprights.

  Sea spits at the woman’s toes, the man’s leather soles. The city is a backdrop, a shawl at the moment before it is drawn around the shoulders. The city’s heart-rending solicitude, the disconcerting rumble of the metro, an anxiety of nature, that in all other respects knows no such symptoms of chaos. That patent love of simplicity.

  The silhouettes. The two figures on the wooden uprights of the jetty.

  I spoke to that girl again, you know the one. I helped her boyfriend once. I don’t know why I’m telling you, you’re not supposed to know.

  She turns her head and lowers her eyes, perhaps as a sign for him to continue, it’s hard to tell from a distance, but whatever it is he goes on:

  I helped him win her back. All I did was state the obvious in writing. He couldn’t find the words himself.

  No.

  What he meant.

  A pair of heavy waves roll in from a passing ferry. They draw their feet up, the way you draw children to your chest at a busy road, the way you hitch up a long dress to cross over puddles.

  What do you want me to say.

  His eyes turn hard, like horn or bone. He looks up at the sky, throws out his arms in an angular gesture. Bird-like, the way he sometimes is.

  The horse lowered its head and trotted flat-backed off into the ruffled landscape, disappearing from sight behind the barn. They could hear the hollow thud of its hooves against the ground, their familiar, graceless rhythm. She looked down at his hands and he followed the arc of her gaze through the air, attentively, the way you might watch a bead travel across a floor before bending down to pick it up. After their fight she feels like her love for him is burning a hole in her pocket.

  She doesn’t quite know what he expects of her.

  There’s a fatigue, too, that evades capture. I will always think of her as something I failed to let go in time, a burning coal in the hand, a watering eye dripping between fingers, a leak within the world that implants itself in the body, the telephone wires that slice through the poplar, the various patterns of the sky, Lille Strandgade, Skt. Annæ Plads.

  He let slip that he used to see a woman who lived somewhere around here.

  In that building there.

  He pointed up, and naturally she was unable to stop herself from looking, even if she told herself not to, that it was the last thing in the world she needed to do—and the feeling it left them with afterwards as they sat on the edge of the Gefion Fountain was mostly one of no longer having access to each other.

  It churned away inside.

  What can be gained from overturning a table, dashing a vase. She was beside herself with rage; the scene played out in front of her, and she was her own audience. You’ve broken our things. He gripped her tight, her wrist. They fought, and for the first time she felt his anger in that way. He wanted to hit her.

  Things. For him.

  They fell asleep in the afternoon, wrapped up in the duvet, pupated. The cover left marks on their skin. They woke up and made dinner, the day turned on its head. The day unhinged. His things. His annoyance at her not treating his things properly. Their fight was more about that than anything else. Cutting away the clutter, that’s basically what they can’t agree on: things, the distribution of things, and how to treat them. A battle to behold, own and use.

  The horse was out of sight. It stood at the pond, lifted its head, listened.

  The horse’s eye, with the deformed pupil, not round and smooth like a pebble, but spongy, moss-like, misshapen. He noticed as it stood tethered to the hayrack, the sun angled down and he called for her to come, she was pruning the brambles. She went over, the shears in her hand, heavy like a pistol at her side. Look, he said. And she looked, tilting her head as she did so, pressing her face close to see. Shh, they said, to reassure the horse.

  The bike’s wheel buckles when in the night we cycle to the sea, unable to sleep. I remember you came home and sat down pale at the table like a theory you suddenly see through but have yet to abandon.

  Speaking a foreign language in your own country.

  You say you never felt as healthy in all your life, and now you understand your parents.

  You’re shaken by the attack, though you hardly remember it.

  In a way we are all under suspicion. An awning unfolding over a sidewalk.

  Deprived areas of the mind, deprived areas of the city.

  The rim of the cup is an echo of the moist rim of the eyelid.

  She holds the cup cautiously to her eye, lower eyelash resting on the rim of porcelain. Her eyelash, fifty or sixty jointless fingers gripping the cup. The cup, hanging from the flesh like a droplet collected and poised to release.

  He calls out and says it’s only him.

  We see her closed eyes. The daylight is revealing and at the same time anything else but revealing. As if there is a filter on all things, making everything look like something else. Her feet are on the kitchen counter. The room weaves like an old riding-school horse, it scrapes at the sand and tosses its head. The sound of a bridle, the sound of worn leather on worn leather, such heat at two o’clock, such heat at three; the first bell from the church; we see her eyes, startled by the sound, the twitch of the skin around the eye; or the eyelid’s collapse at the hammer’s strike. The splits and cracks of the epidermis, the contraction of minuscule muscles, like fabric pulled together in little spasms by impatient hands at a drawstring, a thread severed by angry teeth; to disturb such order is a crime; and his body is a gathering storm, a wind yelling down the avenue, collecting up the leaves, collecting up the newspapers with their hideous headlines, collecting up soil and dead insects, sloughed skins, pupae, a gently cupped hand that is the upper section of an empty beehive. Her chest, rising and falling, a wave on the sea running in from two sides, two waves joining together some twenty or thirty metres from shore, like two cold hands pulling off gloves, reaching out and grabbing hold, the white foam at the crest of one and then the other, a mane of colliding momentum, and for a few short seconds the surging rush of union, the way they seemed almost to travel inside each other, like they too once travelled inside each other, a fire seizing hold and galloping across the fields; their two directions becoming one, striving for the shore, that kind of wave; and a chest, rising and falling, trembling, dismaying, its rhythm being the rhythm of the waves; up through the avenue, across the flat expanse, across the beach where the pebbles roll and shift, her eyes, we see them beneath the skin; her eyes, rolling back, a horse taking the bit, tossing back its head, running.

  There is such a thing as directionless movement towards each other, and there is such a thing as the opposite: directionless movement away. Outwards, and so on. Grief is without direction, grief seeking out the hollows in this world; so in what forests, in what rooms; nothing to regret, nothing can be endured. Colonies, wastelands of history, a remembered image of avenues of trees in concentration camps without buildings, only trees remaining. The meticulousness of memory as to the items of pain—objects that collect pain and preserve it.

  A spoon, for instance, that can’t be forgotten.

  The thought occurs that memory cannot withstand things, that somewhere there’s a saturation point, a collapse relating to concrete entities—they become unbearable. The childhood home’s presentation of things forgotten, that the conscious mind lacks the strength to carry around on its own, objects bearing witness to our demise, slow and disconcerting, the body becomi
ng brittle and unsound, cells dividing insanely, the blood cleansed no more, hair lost by the tuft or little by little, the nausea, the convulsions of the stomach, the bitter swill of bile that gnaws at the tooth’s enamel and eats into the oral cavity, the eyes that cry when they no longer can see the body in which they were set. Homeless eyes, for the body is another; the eyes are the only things whose form remains unchanged when the body becomes—deformed. They can yellow, and be bloodshot.

  Two waves we see, that meet and mingle, and surge against the land, a heavy stage curtain drawn up onto the beach, a cool, abundant quilt to cover those who doze, the shells and the creatures, the sand fleas as they spin, thrust here and there on the lather of the sea; blanks blighting our thoughts as we bask in the sun, and soon we are unable to think at all, the mind’s every formation shrivelled and forsaken in the bowls of the grief-stricken; implosions of universes, of days that might have been, but never were.

  And as she stood there looking out on the sea, it was as if a change in the weather coincided with a voice, and the light transformed, outside and in, becoming colder in the same way.

  Admiring the view, he said.

  It was like an icy hand gripped her foot as she lay dreaming and snatched her onto the floor. She turned, and there he was. She knew he would be standing there like that, his hand still on the door handle, as if to make his intrusion seem fleeting or coincidental; as if it were natural. Yet it was anything but, she thought to herself, and that atrocious comment, too. She decided never to forgive him, the way feelings have to be decided to make them last. It’s like what there is on the beach—time engulfs it all, washes it all away; a lump of wood fades and deteriorates, and one day it no longer exists. It’s the same with feelings. Whereas decisions endure; they are how countries are governed, and how we govern our lives. The decision takes an emotion hostage and endures, perhaps fading and deteriorating to a certain extent, but still remaining.