Of Darkness

by Josefine Klougart

  Can I come in, he says without waiting for an answer.

  A bit like colliding with a brick wall in the dead of night when you can’t see a thing but think you know the road exactly and can find your way home no problem.

  Not even the greatest revolutions change the future as much as they change the past.

  A garden of ghost trees, skeleton leaves with the tissue carefully extracted by means of two fingers; the frame of the leaf is soft and moves like hair in water, undulating gently, yielding to the gaze; the figures as they run through the garden, and the wind is a hundred glancing eyes, dusting the scene with a solicitude accumulated from all that the eyes have abandoned, all that has departed them. Tears are the eyes talking about loss. And the eye becomes our only access; the garden itself is an eye, and the stories we tell are all about the eye, what the eye saw and what from it departed. The way the lips move up and down, shaped by our words, and your facial expression when you talk, miming the eyelid’s sweep over the orb, again and again. Any kind of movement is a rhythm when considered from a sufficiently distant place. An hour, a day, a life, a millenium. The aspen leaves, tossing like horses’ heads in the sun; the sun, reflecting in the eyes, the metal of the bit; the leaves, minuscule mirrors of green throwing back the light, the eyes of the tree. We linger in the garden, longing more than seeing, fidgeting with the past, blinding ourselves, patching thoughts on to everything that is, or was. Turning back again, once more into stone. The milky glaze of the cataract, untreated disease, the years of horses, the march of days, falling into patterns, the way the waves again make patterns, herringbone, or perhaps merely repeating a shoreline over and over again, the outline of a human, over and over again, a hope that he might come and look for me, a hiding place constructed so that you might be found, like in the garden before, when everything was transparent, made so by you, and you were surprised that what I was looking through was you. And therefore I could walk simply past and carry on through the garden, because that’s the way many of us are inside.

  The fact of never being able to deliver what’s asked of you, but always something else instead. The surprise, the unpredictability.

  A feeble attempt to move on according to one’s own designs, and yet: going through motions mapped out for us from the start.

  Who is it, you ask. Who is it you miss.

  I have come to you beneath the oak tree. The day is darker and cooler here. Tears run down your cheeks. And thus we remain in what was, allowing ourselves no release to enter tomorrow, or even today, in any guise of life. I gaze up into the crown, leaning my head back, opening my eyes.

  My father phones and tells me he’s wearing a headset. He’s in bouyant mood, driving across Fyn. He says he’s happy about the weather. I was trying to count all my various texts and had the feeling most would have to be deleted again. I’ve been thinking I need a system, only then I think I need the system that’s already there. My father tells me the students all passed. It’s spring, he says. There’s no bringing him down. It can be like that a lot—things falling out of synch, an awkward collision of waves, or a boat battered by a rough sea.

  I miss the ways of the fields, or the rules that exist. The attention paid every morning on the way to school, my father talking about the fields, the work of harrowing and sowing, the harvest, and what would happen next. The frost, if frost had fallen in the night. The patterns left by the various machinery. The brittle white hoar, the key in which the body is tuned; the mood dispensed. I push the blue bead bracelet up my arm and examine the burn. I’m no good at secrets, they seep out of me.

  The budgie flies from its perch in the open cage and settles on her head. She has given the bird a name. It belongs to her, a gift. It’s a young bird, six months or a year old, blue in colour. It sits on her shoulder when she walks through the village.

  She hears her mother pass through the beaded curtain on her way out into the garden.

  The bottle with the pear in it, the bird on top of her head, the clack of her mother’s wooden shoes; the swish of the beaded curtain as it parts. Straight-backed, she measures across the room to the birdcage and kneels. A gentle nudge and the bird flutters back to its perch. She closes the cage again with a curl of her hand.

  She wipes the streaks from her face and follows her mother through the beaded curtain, her mother who is already up the slope and past the apple trees and the woodshed, the heavy washing on her hip in the red plastic laundry basket, her arm angled out to clutch its rim, her torso a tilted counterweight. It’s almost midday, and the sun is high in the sky. She starts to run, and the labour of breathing interrupts her sobs. She becomes aware of the fact. The way her body works to find oxygen. Running seems little more than that, using more and more energy in order to breathe, the act of breathing becoming a means of thought, something at once complex and automatic, a state for which one might silently yearn, the motion of the body releasing something inside, something you never knew was stuck.

  She catches up with her mother, who holds out her hand. They walk together to the end of the garden, the part that borders the fields.

  It will soon be harvest.

  They look forward to the smell of harvest, to the mowing of grass and the making of hay; the grass, turned and turned again to be dried, baled, gathered in, stored away for winter. The skin of her legs is like a landscape to anyone close enough to see. Her legs, never fine, forever a patchwork of bruises. Once she counted a hundred. So they say.

  You have to adjust to the sound of trees falling.

  He takes her hand as though picking something up off the street, something valuable, the claiming of which nonetheless feels embarrassing, but lost is lost, and there it was just lying there. Again she thinks about the way her body always seems to precede her, like a light that can’t be caught.

  They return to the place where the shards of his father’s urn were interred, at the foot of the tree. Each year brings some minor discussion as to which tree exactly. But she knows it’s protected now in a way and is glad she could make that happen, at least. The fact that she did something.

  How many times a helping hand, how often a shield.

  There are no prizes to come back for. That’s how it is with spring, there’s only so much to go round. The rest is: stumbling. Then winter comes, or just the autumn, as if things weren’t bad enough already.

  You offer no resistance, and change by the day.

  The low dry-stone wall here behind the rectory, the many fruit trees, whose web of roots must be so old and so expansive the cherry trees, the cherries, grow upon the dead.

  All is but passage. A new organisation of matter.

  In a way, such roots are like the gaze of an eye, looking forward, looking back. Like the two of us, in the midst of these years. It’s the oddest age—one feels oneself to be standing on the brink of something, even if that’s always true. It’s as if something is taking shape, accumulating inside. This dawning conviction. Almost having hold of something. Untreated yearning skins over, and sores heal best in the night, when the body is at rest.

  Is it a problem, that I’m not sleeping well. Hardly at all, or having these nightmares no one cares to hear about.

  We see her standing in the woods, holding his hand. They speak to each other, we see them from a distance. Further and further away. There is a rhythm to everything—considered from afar, that’s how it is. The footage from her childhood is characterised by her father’s hectic panning shots. His wanting to get as much in as possible. The chatter of the two girls can still be heard, the camera panning across the lawn, sweeping by the new chicken coop to the trees at the boundary, the washing line. Almost having hold of something.

  Her face twitches almost imperceptibly, as if someone were pulling on a thread fixed to the belly of the sun, a direct line to death or eternity, or some other such thing.

  They sleep together in the bed his father died in.

  Mushrooms in the field, pasty lips in the fallow, greying grass of w
inter. A child, a snail’s shell lifted to her ear. The leaving of someone, from within to without. The way warmth leaves the body. But you’re used to being abandoned, you can sleep anywhere, all you have to do is close your eyes and put something in your ears. Crossing the Atlantic. You’re used to it. From within to without.

  Sometimes he feels a warmth trickle down his hand. Like a wound opening, the blood coming out. He looks down at his fingers. Turns his hand.

  Nothing.

  Might pain be a way of exploring the world. Can we look at it like that. We have different ways of feeling things, the way flowers are different depending on whether they belong to someone sick or dead, or to a garden.

  His long legs.

  Like the gardener, he works nearly all the time.

  There’s always something, he says, people wanting hold, asking him things. And no one ever comes back if he passes their questions on.

  Questions, that’s what we’re left with.

  In a way, the past is the only thing we have. Who can say they feel more now than they did then. If you turn and look back for someone, we all know what happens.

  The fact that we do so anyway.

  Through Aprils we proceed, forever looking back, idling in this fossil state you find me in tonight. Thin is the darkness, spilled between the birches. You say the first eider fowl have laid their eggs at the fjord. You point in the direction, with a wave of binoculars. It’s too dark to see, but we can go there tomorrow. I find myself thinking your fingers must get cold. The air has no warmth.

  In the night we hear the sound of birds unfamiliar to us. Migrating waders, you say. We hear them more clearly at night. When the wind is spent and the air is a mist. We are calm as far as it goes, and lie here accordingly.

  My body precedes me like the beam of a flashlight I carry through these empty buildings, the only light there is.

  The snow descends regardless, uncaring of whether we stroll the boulevard or the shore, the snow descends indifferently. It can be shifted and cleared, or squeezed into a sphere in the palm of a hand. But from sky the snow merely descends. Snowfall in April, the month of my birth nearly thirty years ago. It’s easier to part with something that is than something that was. Everything we lose remains inside us, while everything we have remains invisible.

  The thought occurs to me that the loss I feel can be seen in my eyes, these index cards, place names; all you see are the titles, the rest is in the archive, lining the corridors. In storage. Waiting to be thrown back like the sun as it strikes the pane, across the square, the pond at Agri, a childhood home. The only thing I note at this late stage is that words spoken in love resemble the mutterings of drunks insofar as they are uttered under cover of darkness and therefore vanish with the coming of day, a morning in April, late Easter. Fortunately, some infatuations never pass. Prove me the opposite.

  Clasp your hands together. Clasp your hands like this into a stirrup.

  He prods her with his foot. You can’t sleep now.

  My mother says everything was fine until we moved out.

  We all have our failings.

  All the rooms are filled to the brim.

  She talks of going on a walking trip, a few weeks. Spain, maybe.

  Forward motion. Making the effort to propel the body forward through the snow, though everything feels like you’re stuck. The drifts of snow. A black bird on a blue sky. Branches entangled in sky.

  Who am I to cause such disturbance.

  Twice or more she sees a blackbird pecking at the roof window above the bed, is woken by its shadow on her face, the cooling of her cheek. She is warm when she sleeps.

  Others besides her have moved out.

  Basically there are two kinds of people. Me and everyone else.

  Inside the me is us, we, he, she, sometimes a more general one.

  And then there is you. She doesn’t know quite what to do with you.

  An unstoppable return of summer.

  He smiles, glancing at the sea and at her by turn. His gaze is a cot in which to rest. Seeing things without being seen. Therein lies the exercise.

  I have nightmares, nearly every night.

  Incomparable entities do not exist. Everything contains elements of something else. Threads, drawn through the world by the needles of our eyes.

  Everything is bleeding.

  And everything is still, like soldiers ordered to attention. The language of soldiers is blunt, their words halt like horses at a precipice.

  The colours of the birch. This near-violet in the transition from black to white. The colours of marrow.

  The children leave animal corpses to steep in a bowl of hydrogen peroxide: mice, a squirrel, a wood pigeon.

  They return a week later, coats unbuttoned to the spring. One day I tell you I can’t sleep. These days. Bones and skulls, the same pale white as the sky. You nod and strain off the liquid. You suggest coffee.

  I nod.

  The sound of skeletons in a plastic bag.

  Little by little I acquiesce, like winter.

  And now it’s April.

  It’s hard to put a finger on what it is that keeps me awake. Thoughts go on in my mind, a variety of interests. My body keeps score in the night, jotting things down on the covers in invisible writing. I get the feeling you could be gone one morning. You’ve listened to my dreams this long, and to be honest what could be more fatiguing.

  Hushful, hushful song of old.

  The square, the sight of you lying there on a bench under the linden trees. You were convinced it would all make sense to us at some point. The idea of having to go through certain phases to get there. But woods don’t always work like that. They come to an end without warning, you stand there teetering on the brink. A feeling of only being joined to the world by virtue of the heel. Sudden clearings; space, air.

  The body’s exhalation, like a leaf released by autumn. The surrender of the mature.

  A thickness of movement.

  The letting go of all things at once, like a bundle of pick-up sticks dropped from a hand.

  Seedheads opening in the sun.

  Something ruptures, and dark-centred serenity spreads inside you.

  Pale pink sky. Dark in the centre.

  The city, opening.

  You suggest something or other.

  The sound of seedheads opening in the sun.

  The sound of a sapling birch, solitary at the edge of the field, with no history known to us.

  The near-violet of the transitions, the days once unfolding, dark and damp in the centre.

  The art of the possible—or, as you say, the human circumstance.

  To give up the warmth of movement. Something dark and damp, opening with a pop.

  The comedy of grief.

  Have you given up already.

  At very short intervals I feel more together than alone.

  Darkness lets go of morning; a sliding hand, fingers, fingertips ravaged by gravel, releasing the rock; bone-coloured slats of light from a point on the horizon, beyond the sea, projecting into cloud. The light is a body plunging, a flailing in every direction, fingers splayed from a hand, new shoots on the near-dead pear tree at the bottom of the garden, arteries of the heart, glacial streams etching through snow and in the night; the machines at work, light cast electric in snow-spangled beams. High above, on the mountain, the machines trawl back and forth, dragging the inaccessible heights, the snowstorm’s impossible, and then: the insane tumult of avalanche. The animals of the peaks toss their heads to the sky amid the yell of all things.

  Down in the town: an abrupt awakening in the hotel room, a bare foot pressed into the carpet’s pile, a curtain drawn aside, come back to bed. The smallest fluctuation, a shift of the wind, a single degree warmer prompts the snow to release, crystals melting and merging, arms lashed into embrace, we clutch at what we believe to be each other. Curtains of rain travel the sky; vast, overlapping drapes, graphic divisions of light, the repetition of mountains.

  The
white mountainside, breaking apart, collapsing. Melting ice, dissolving limbs of crystal, or crystal like a cramp-stricken hand folding in on itself in a stagger of spasms. The cloaks of descending snow; a person, two people engulfed by sound, the raucous barrage, arms and legs twisting, snapping like wings wrenched from the carcass, white bone, whiter snow—and then the silence. Hypothermia, and the lungs no longer finding air. One minute, two.

  The snow is a firm hand that shields the living.

  Sounds veer away and depart. After the avalanche all is still, as still as lime.

  Later in the night the machines return to work, smoothing the slopes, clearing the snow among the fir; and up above the treeline, between the red markers, the mountains unfleeced as shorn sheep—another of nature’s patterns. The flat ribbons of the pistes, like mesh drawn tight around a tree, an intricacy of scattered tones woven into music: the music of the mountain, to which we listen.

  Continuing rumbles of snow.

  The bodies are still and buried in snow. A silent, chilly death, crushed beneath a tonnage of weightless crystals, a sky dropped suddenly at the release of a spring, an atmosphere penetrated by stars and planets, descending as dust upon the earth; the life that was changes form, the life to which we are left, again and again. And everything we lost speaks in the stillness of snow.

  After the avalanches: this is where we are.

  Every footprint is something longed for, hoped for. The town is quiet, a headlamped skier arriving home, a heavy trudge of awkward boots, skis balanced on his shoulder like a stiff wing poking back into the air behind him. He pauses and turns, peers up at the mountain, the lights of the machines that scratch the cornea, etching the contours of the mountain into his eye. His eyes water, and we see his lips, the dryness of days on the mountain, cracked, moistureless surfaces of skin, the creviced flesh of earthquakes and volcanoes, the crust of the earth breaking apart, or the still waters between one wave and the next. As he breathes, a loose flake of skin on his lip flutters in the air, the rustle of a plastic bag snagged in a hedgerow in the wind; his eyes water, rivulets of slime run from his nostrils, descending into his mouth. He turns back towards the road and carries on, the way you carry on the day after a preposterous bankruptcy, the way you sit in the apartment, bent forward, head in hands between your knees, glancing up now and then at the bailiffs as they collect the last of your furniture, and then, finally: the way you have to stand up and let them take the chair from under you; this is how you carry on, boiling water in a saucepan that like you was not worth taking, too insignificant to be of use anywhere else. He sprinkles instant coffee into the saucepan and stares at the patterns it makes, a cream-coloured sky mottled with darker, tarlike clouds. The circular motion of the liquid stirred with a spoon. He turns off the heat and sits down on the floor with the saucepan, leaving it to cool; the distant hum of machinery at work; he picks up the saucepan and puts it to his lips, elbow angled out to the side; he blows into the coffee, watches the rings as they spread, rings of tiny waves, dissipating concentrically into oblivion. His trembling hand, like some pang of jealousy, a cluster of crystals melting together on the mountain, curtains tossed by a wind, bands of snow beneath the clouds, snow on the repeating peaks, mountain upon mountain, patterns of catastrophe. He sips the coffee and it feels as if his insides are montainsides covered in snow, melting, and then abruptly he is collapsed on the floor, the curtains are folded away and collected in boxes, the room punctured, the man, holding all the stars, all the planets in place, ceiling caving in; the walls inside the body, subsiding, a devastation perhaps expected, though not yet, not like this. Machines plummet, light smothered by snow, the dry flakes of skin on the man’s lower lip rejoin the flesh, pressed together like commuters packed on a train and starved of oxygen; a belt of everything implodes and combusts, the way grief can bring two people together.