One of Us Is Sleeping

by Josefine Klougart

  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 oppos
ite. 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 wi
th.

  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.