She is envious of him; his strength, if only she had his strength, dogged to the point of trembling, and always tired.
At the same time, it frightens the life out of her.
That kind of strength. Arbitrary. It’s there, and then it isn’t. She thinks: it’s like his strength isn’t his own. It comes, and may leave him, without predictability, without any rhythm besides: utterly rampant. His strength comes with anger, it assails and consumes him. Besides that—the X-rays show nothing. Strength as a tumor, a shadow, with arteries and veins, issuing out into the body and leaving again, leaving him behind. Looked at in any other way, it has nothing to do with strength at all. She just wants the same option of staying. Remaining in one place.
You always had to smoke.
I don’t know.
There is a pause, and in that pause she and her two sisters are seen moving about the parking lot in front of the hospital, mechanically, in the pull of magnets stroked beneath the asphalt. They are without arms. There is a trace of cigarette smoke in the air. There is a trace of sound, drawn as waves in the air. Green and red waves, rising and falling. Her older sister, stifling her anger at seeing her sister smoke.
They share far too much history, it reaches too far back. Together and apart. He gets out of the car and takes her hand. The two other sisters keep wandering, while she has ground to a halt there, with her dead man, ground to a halt in front of the car.
It’s kind of you to take us here. It’s kind of you to . . . be here.
He looks at her, the way you look at something broken.
A broken face.
We share no history, I don’t know you. That is what he thinks. That is what he says.
She says she doesn’t understand what he means.
She wants that cohesion, the cohesion of language and what is.
But there is none. The agreement isn’t there.
An abandoned house collapses, an abandoned tree topples in the woods, without a sound.
A broken landscape, lifeless expanses, the dead themselves, stone walls under snow. Maybe that’s how it is. I’m not sure I understand what you mean, she repeats.
THE RAM LIES twitching, a pounding heart in the grass. It forced its way through the electric fencing because she forgot to give them water. The chain-link fence of before is gone, no longer cutting up the world in its steely rectangles. They sit in the tall grass at the hedgerow, and stare across the field. The sheep, the way they used to poke their heads through the metal eyes, ear tags or horns contriving to get them stuck, a head wrenching back, ear tag in the wire, the image of an ear torn in two. Now the fencing is electric, a current directed through four taut wires, a regular current, the tautness of the wires, a staff for musical notation running through the landscape here. And still the sheep strive for the grass on the other side, and still they may get stuck, become entangled.
Frightened animal eyes; the tremble of the beast, blue-tongued, mouth agape. I can hardly look.
Does she know what harm she has caused. Do you know what you’ve done. Can’t you see.
All is silent. As yet no one has spoiled the stillness of the scene with questions. And it will never be the same. She is not breathing. It is Sunday and they are all dressed up as themselves. Their mother whips cream for the cake, there is a sense of expectation, the house has been dusted. The piano—dusted. The heaps in the living room, the piles of letters from the bank, the catalogues and receipts, the empty envelopes ripped open at the seams, all shuffled and patted together, corners aligned.
Seen through her mother’s eyes: proud, upright towers of documents.
On the sideboard.
On the telephone table.
Order. Order, that is about opportunity, and a joy at what is to come. What is to come and what might come. A dizzying privilege, a naïve expectation as to what is about to happen.
But then perhaps it is anything but naïve. Perhaps it’s never getting any better than this. Not so much about the joy of expectation as having trust in the world, that feeling of excitement in the stomach, leaps ahead in the mind, physically going on into the future. When the body goes on.
And then the damper on it all, that all of a sudden everything is in spite; a celebration held in spite. Harvest festival—when everyone knows it’s not just bringing hard work to a pleasant conclusion, but also the start of a winter’s slog. The cold. Shoulders grinding. Thoughts grinding, pulverizing more important thoughts, the disintegration of it all, feathers and dust descending like snow, or in November as rain. Descending to the feet of nature, descending upon life.
Perhaps she will not come here ever again, if she is forced to choose then I don’t want to be here. They can come to my book launch, read the reviews and settle for that; or they can avoid the launch, not bother to read the book, and settle for that. Buy a postcard, or nothing. Send it, or not.
Not.
Never read even a page, but conjure it up in the imagination, unreading, unseeing.
I sit at the table, and the tall jug of hot chocolate is passed around for the second time; or else I stand out in the stable with the sheep wedged between my knees, holding a cloth to its ear. The ear has become infected and weeps. The flies can’t be kept away. I bend down without loosening my grip on the animal, dip the cloth in the bucket of soapsuds. The bleating of a sheep can be this loud, an alarm that could almost dislodge the swallow’s nest below the roof. Crumbling flakes of mud fall gently on my head, the image of a heart in the grass, the ram at my hand, the heart in the field. I write a letter to my mother, a last will and testament in reverse, all that is not mine, and all that is my own, something that is hers. A body I cannot possess any longer. I miss you, I write at the bottom, then cross it out again. And yet that is what I do, miss someone. It could be her, someone I know.
HE IS OUTSIDE himself the whole time. Standing now among the black-currant bushes, eating until he can eat no more. Until his eyes resemble the dark berries. She is transparent, he is a recurring dream of solidity. Someone has to touch her and think: here is a body. Here is proper flesh.
But all she does is drift.
She is the dust drifting in the stable, in every shaft of light, she is the trace of some insects in the dust that has settled, or she is out of sight upon worm-eaten rafters, the bark of weathered fence-posts, in the frost that covers the benches by the lake. She wants to be vulnerable:
give me wounds.
And then the cat’s cracked paw pads, everything there is, bleeding. That, hand me that.
WE WALK THROUGH the city on our way home from the restaurant, looking in at the cafés, where the light is soft as upon the lakes. People, appearing in light, extinguished in darkness, in the depths of the rooms, up front. A thin man’s cigarette dissects the darkness in two. He loiters there on the street corner, the way that can only be done on a street corner. The roads run on ahead and are home before us. I feel younger than ever before, as if I’ve seen everything and forgotten it all again, now finally having reached a place from which to start. Why have I never been here before, I wonder. You say the city is full of life tonight, I was thinking the exact opposite, at the moment you spoke—that the city was full of death tonight. A kind of beauty in that, in our meeting there, back to back; when you can’t get any farther away from each other, you encounter each other again. I am a wall that goes right through you, and your body is distressed by how heavy it’s getting.
HER MOTHER FILLS the room with her humming. She waters the plants, her hands pass over all things, invoking them—as things. It’s like she wants to make herself heard above everything her daughter has done, to make sure all is not ruined. By the sadness of her being so. I am indebted; this is what she sees, the eyes of her older sister, she understands that she is indebted now and must repay what is owed, forever. And she must care for their mother when she gets old. Old and bedridden. When she no longer can feed herself.
She is malevolent decoration, that’s what it feels like. Saddled with a
love so mad, inhuman almost, that she can only disappoint. It’s a matter of time, and then it will be so—only disappointment remaining, and a sense of having loved a child that never existed. And the reproaches will return, there will be a list:
The ram.
The cancellation, that trip to Copenhagen with her mother’s sister. That never was.
The necklace.
Various items of porcelain.
The book.
How could you do such a thing.
The illness.
The illness of disappointment.
THE AFTERNOONS, SO late and always in that color, gray-red. Heat, and it was summer. Again she forgets how beautiful it is here, the stretch between Løgten and Rønde, here, where the bay is a blue belt folded into a bowl, a hand underneath the season.
A hand.
The asphalt, unsettled by the heat.
Her mother, who collects her in Aarhus or Risskov; they drive to Mols together. She picks at the fingernails of one hand with the fingernails of the other, eyes glued to the road. She is a martyr, uncertain of what she is fighting for.
So this is what she is fighting for.
They always talk on the drive home, but she has not a single recollection of any specific conversation. Nothing, but their talking. She recalls so little, almost nothing. A heart in the grass. A sky in the south of France, a pink sky, and in front of it a landscape in four layers: mountains behind mountains behind mountains. He in, you in, a bed one morning I return home from a long walk in the woods, you are asleep, and I stand there and am eyes, three thousand eyes.
The road is worn thin, she doesn’t see it anymore. The beauty by which a person is surrounded has its own discreet ways. Only when a tree-cutting schedule or an autumn storm disturbs that order; only then can you see anything at all. When she can see the old man in the man she thought would give her, well—life. Life, the exact opposite of: left alone. When she can see, when I see, that the person is no good, and the life you were supposed to have together was no good—when we split up, the life that begins there: life after you begins here. You write to me and say the downturn ends here, but both of us know this is where what is left begins. The child inside its mother, the turnaround that takes place; a conversation postponing a farewell: what else. A silence, postponing what needs to be said. I am worn thin, a tree-cutting schedule, my body an autumn storm. I am old, I steal my mother’s years, one after another, I steal age from the language, all the books I read make me unnaturally old, those I love make me unnaturally old; it’s like we take on each other’s lives, sharing it all, all the life that has been lived; and the dividing up of the estate is a mad gesture, we clutch and tear, pull the rings from the fingers of loved ones now dead, though their bodies may still be warm. We think we own, in fact, but what we own are memories, and they change all the time, are constantly getting lost. What do we want a ring for. What are we supposed to do with a finger.
We pass the lake—we go that way when possible. Through the plantation. The bends in the road that make you think you’re nearly there. The light ahead, always so full of promise: here is the lake, enticing. A seduction that has nothing to do with a lie. The woods, that have nothing to do with seduction, besides this optical illusion. Expectations of things to come.
An Italian garden in spring: the rainwater channels that run through the town; a band of drought and skinny dogs, the occasional beginnings of plants that nonetheless are but dust in the sun—dry, and human.
The woods are unsettled, the asphalt likewise; in a way the heat makes no difference.
My mother starts to sing. Tentatively at first, then with gusto. There is an endeavor to make the song fit in, to be a pathway alongside the road. A sudden displacement inside me, as I sit there on the seat next to her, leaning my head against the window; a dislocation that runs from fatigue through annoyance to a sadness that mostly is about grief at not being a big enough person.
The trees and the asphalted roads.
The edgelands of all the places anyone is from. The woods, the borderland. Like the way she can think she is always on the periphery of her life, on her way to something better, something else, at least. The insects swarm, and even if you say a poppy or a daisy can break through asphalt: the trees surrender whereas the roads do not, exactly, surrender.
I ask my mother to be quiet, please. And we exchange glances, my mother turning her head, the car moving on through the woods at an even pace. The speed of the woods and the speed of the car and of the silence, a single movement. And her face turns into that dreadful face, transparent: a single sheet of paper, set on fire, but now extinguished. Her document face. I am not breathing.
Her head is so exhausted. Or just: I’m so exhausted.
It’s like we keep on looking at each other the rest of the way, her mouth is open, her body breathing on her behalf, one last favor, gifts of that nature.
The woods have so many layers, you penetrate and press on ahead, trees ever darker; like when I was alone in France with the rubble, the remains of something that was no more, attempting to do something; and the layered mountains, one behind the other, so almost-infinite and increasingly bright, going against everything you ever learned. So few lights this evening, I think to myself back in time, later. Or I lock the door, am alone and will remain so, switch off my phone, for there is something I must finish. My eyes flick their way through the mountains, and I weep. The view here is nothing to write about. But it is the view here, the orange of the mountains, the various blues of the mountains, the blue-black of the mountains, letter-blue, blued letters, blueing mountains; behind the eyes behind the mountains, pitch black, pale red morning, pale red mountains, blood and blood-red and bread, the redly blueing leaves of blue mountains.
The lake, now abruptly the lake. My mother pulls in and parks. The light falls more directly here, descends; the lake is an eye in the woods. The car ticks. We sit for a while, then step out into the heat.
We swim, and our bodies decide to save us, again today. The lake is deep, its ceiling opaque; it is like the grand railway stations that were built at the end of the nineteenth century: glass and iron and light. Grass. Light. Foliage. The lake as a hall, an arrival—a feeling of here begins something else.
GRAYNESS, POURING FROM the sky.
The woods sigh, the remaining trees.
A lot has been cleared here, I tell you. And the barn over by the rectory is gone, they pulled it down.
You are quiet at the other end of the line. How sad, you say after a moment, understanding so little of what you say. I bite my lower lip to make it stop trembling like that.
You have to reconcile yourself with the thought that everything happens at a pace you cannot control. Failed love needs three months, so you’ve been told.
I find myself thinking you don’t know what you’re talking about.
But you do. You’re talking about me. And dreaming I’ll take three months. We both know that as it stands I’ve taken somewhere between eight and ten years.
You borrow something, everything you need you just borrow.
Childhood, a lover, a loan, merely; it’s all a wicked party you clear up the next day, without hardly recognizing each other. Is that you. That girl you found, or the one you had found already; ten years, it cost you. Now you can feel guilty about mentioning, even thinking about me. Because she can’t handle hearing about it. Forgetting on demand, maybe I’m eighteen again, and you’re twenty-three. Subtract an entire life, and the years are gone, forgotten.
You comfort me, a pale hand smoothed over my hair, my mother’s hand, smoothed along my back. She moves down into the living room to read, that night. My grief disrupts her sleep. You were breathing so erratically, she says, closing her eyes to the light of day, of evening, of night, always someone stealing her sleep.
But I am still alone in the room with your voice. We talk about antidepressants, about how they parcel up your senses and allow you not to take in the world as intensely as before
.
That’s just what I need, I say.
There is moisture in the air, the landscape proudly upright behind the curtains of moist air that extinguish everything. I long to return to Copenhagen, and I do not long at all. Nature is a fire blanket, it puts out something inside me. What, exactly, I can’t tell. It bubbles constantly to the surface, a weeping about to erupt, a flame that is smothered beneath something heavy and tight and yet not extinguished, an ember rising in the throat, searing, burning. There are tall snow drifts on the left side of the road, on the right you can see the grass, scattered patches of green. The sheep stand with empty eyes in their railway wagon.
SHE REMEMBERS CHANGING her mind. The image was too arresting, maybe he would be frightened by her, and imagine her without skin.
She puts the phone down and feels like a traveler in shoes. In a land where shoes are unknown.
I STAND, RELUCTANT, beneath a feverish sky. Between the mountains: blood and fire, the evening sun melting onto every surface. The lake and your forehead, and my weary leather boots on the newspaper at the side of the house. Afternoon was just before, now a plunge into evening, then night. Waves, breaking. A darkness here, like a white sheet thrown into the air and straightened into place on top of furniture in the seaside hotel of autumn; absence (perhaps you already feel the absence); the way it runs amok; a sheet draped over a sculpture that is now finished, about to be unveiled. A sheet drawn out across the world; a bag pulled down over the head of circumstances.
I have fallen into doubt as to whether I can ever let you go. Leave you. Maybe I can.
Again, you look like you’ve locked yourself out and have just remembered the key on the kitchen table.
We say nothing, but walk together. Which isn’t really like us at all; to simply walk and not speak. People who knew us when we were together, that summer we kept on leaving each other, would say: you talk, talked, your entire relationship into the ground. My sister said that.
One of Us Is Sleeping Page 4