You walk oddly, like your legs have become loose, like your feet have been put on wrong. At the same time, you are serious. You smooth your hair away from your face all the time. Your hair is longer, that must be it. But I know it’s for my sake. As if what you do with your hand, your hand passing through your hair, is for me.
It’s part of a new and better you.
Maybe that’s it. It doesn’t need to be complicated, we’re not that sophisticated.
I stood preparing a fish, chopping leeks and carrots, the kitchen looked like a vegetable garden. You had been working on your thesis while I was at the allotment. I’d handed in my final assignment to the university, you were behind, the way you linger. The slimy trace of a snail on the asphalt, a morning in summer, later, the slime glistens in the early light; then we’re back with you, being able to share such an image. The sun, scintillating in the slime. You come into the kitchen, step up behind me and start kissing my neck, my throat, I remember laughing: I’m busy, my hands are full—
Of fish, you said, cutting me off.
I mean it, I said, later. Only it never was later, only words snipping something into pieces, negotiation, in a country with no real currency. Everything is silent negotiation, in a language you don’t understand. You talked too much, my sister says one evening. I wipe my nose on my sleeve. I shrugged, but the gesture could not be seen for body, a slightly shuddering body, sobbing intermittently. No, I said eventually, I don’t think so.
Now I’m no longer so sure, it might be true, who knows. That, too. Language is never innocent. Conversation isn’t always a good thing, time and again shared understanding is revealed to be some joint decision to let go and let the mind be lazy. Not much reaching for the sky in that.
I THINK WE’RE supposed to think back on the years we had together, and I think it’s meant to be sentimental. The fields want that, the shiny dishes of windswept snow polished silver; it’s like I’m thinking too clearly. I have a vivid sense of the movement that has taken place. A displacement: from love to dependence, to an expensive loan and a reward, dead or alive; and at the end of it all we walk here amid a landscape of winter: disenchanted, big ideas fallen apart. All is conclusion. Spent fireworks in the snow on New Year’s Day are a conclusion. The Stone-Age dolmens scattered across the landscape are conclusions. The birds, surviving in spite. The folded sky above Aarhus Bay is a conclusion. Icicles on the fencing, conclusion. Bleeding hearts, bleeding abrasions, bleeding regret: all of it, conclusion. Blood itself, the gray-red lining inside everything living here; the people with their bodies, indoors, wild horses couldn’t drag me out into that—a conclusion.
But the fact that we are walking here anyway is another matter; madness.
I SLEEP ALL through the night, a sleep that is a wading through deep snow. Knees lifted high when the mantle of ice cannot support you. Snow is new only once, then never more. You can’t smooth it out and start again from the beginning. It’s winter now. According to the calendar this is no crime, and yet that is exactly what it is, a crime. My joints creak, as if wrung from frozen, crystal dust about my knees. I lean out of the window and see the way the trees thrust from the ground like cold, blackened hands. The garden looks abandoned. The birds are busy stealing from one other. I think about the remarkable things that can occur. One morning you wake up without that feeling in your stomach, that sense of emptied, something collapsing. Perhaps you then get up, drink a cup of tea, realize it smells of something other than back then. And the day is no longer—insurmountable. You are no longer, not only, a half. You perhaps realize that you have grown. The days that had seemed so without nourishment, a frozen, sandy soil out west, empty ground; you’re no longer the same, and it strikes you: you are someone else, and bigger. It’s like your person, the person residing inside your body, has grown older and younger at the same time. More fragile and yet stronger. Certainly more attentive to the world that is.
I think I am beginning to love something that was.
I KEEP THINKING about the red apples that nuzzle the sky.
I have an idea I might write about them. The clash of bright red apples and a broken sky. The fact that they remain on their tree, stubbornly, deep into winter, a time to which they do not belong, an irregularity in the composure of the seasons. An anomaly, in every respect.
I HAVE COME to Jutland, and you have come after me. It is Christmas, or sometime in January, you are on your way to visit family, your excuse for stopping by.
I came on the train and arrived late. The whole house smelled of soapsuds, of celebration, and something like hysterical expectation. The way it smelled on the morning of a birthday.
My mother is exhausted, but alive.
This is the kind of assessment we make these days. My father is more exhausted than alive, though fleetingly lit with joy on seeing me. He is so proud I can only give in. The problem with families arises immediately: a sense of annoyance, punctuated by guilt on the same account. The emotions you feel not being the same as the ones you had anticipated feeling. Anger at not simply being able to love. How hard does that have to be. To love those who are there for you, those who once more will tell you: we’ll always be here for you.
The frightening suspicions you can get. The thought of having been mixed up at birth, of not properly belonging here, where I so obviously belong, the place I come running to whenever the world tightens its grip around my throat. The span between the feeling of being loved without condition and being loved on condition of all manner of things. The intangibility of that.
Just because someone is willing to die for you doesn’t mean the grave lies gaping and in wait of its first opportunity. To bury one’s parents is an impossibility, they are pillars before your eyes, they speak out of your mouth, and no matter how far away you remove yourself you will always be able to find your way home. Whatever that may be. A place in the world, or perhaps completely outside of it.
The fear of squandering it all and returning to nothing, an empty pit. A site of something that was. Because you turned into another, behind your family’s back, behind your own.
Who is it who finds their way home in the dark, who is it I embrace in the night. Myself as a mother, later, my mother as a child I must care for, and now try to rouse as I wander through the rooms, through the city with the stroller, in early morning—wanting only sleep.
You love my family, and they’ve missed you. You are more at home with them than with your own parents, I think to myself. I consider leaving you my family. Dubious donations, purchased origins, if that’s even possible, if anyone can it would be you.
THE SUN CRAWLS up the walls, spring in mid-winter. Trees clamber toward a blue sky. I force the months out of my writing. They are nothing but decor and pretense.
Who knows what October will say, when it all boils down.
Who knows what November is. Tired light, tired darkness, seeping in, or not. The wetness of wet wool, I can endure. October, November, December take me nowhere.
WE GO FOR a walk, though you are not made to walk. It’s not just a question of your body. It’s more basic than that, a general lack of endurance. As soon as we come to the fields all you want is to turn back and go home, kick off your shoes; as soon as we see the hill of Agri Bavnehøj, that’s where it starts; I sense the way your movements angle left. That veering away in you. Homeward, always in the direction of the settled that will not present itself. I realize there is a forbidding feeling of impaired recognition at work. We are familiar to the point of sickness. We are strangers. In love with something that was.
The houses weep in winter.
Horses cry.
The foundations are ravaged by frost, water pipes burst like blood vessels. A trickling of life, and of spring, but the damage is there, inside the mind, behind the walls.
I’ve forgotten my gloves. I hold my hands up in front of my mouth and blow some warmth into them; you take off your own gloves and offer them to me. You say nothing, not a word, in fact. I ac
cept only one, putting your bare hand in mine and burying both inside the pocket of your coat. Not a word. We are like one of those watercolors folded up wet, two figures joined in the middle, drawing color from each other as we walk. We have pulse. We are. We awake in the mornings, both of us, with something on our lips, the feeling of something important that needs to be said. You and I. I try to say it, perhaps not to you. But at least, to do something.
You. I no longer know if you’re even trying. If you tried. Ever.
When evening comes I am emptied, while you are more than filled, and kick off your shoes in all your fullness.
Where have you been, you’ll suddenly ask.
Or else you say: You’re always going somewhere, or coming back. Look at me. What’s the hurry with you, what’s so important it can’t wait. And I’ll shrug.
What is the hurry. But it’s evening and I don’t know. It has been uttered, only not to the right person, not to you, anyway.
There is a smell of something burnt, oil drums in gardens, the widower burning off cardboard and plastic. It is that time of year, that time of day. We have been out for hours. Fathers in the mudroom. The concept of mudrooms. A day in winter, an exhalation, then an inhalation, no longer than that. The day is like drinking water, there is nothing left in the mouth besides a natural order.
No thirst, simply order.
I’m tired, I say. You nod. We haven’t slept enough, you add. Only my fatigue has nothing to do with sleep or no sleep. But then it’s you who says: I’m tired.
THERE WAS A winter, nearly three years ago now. Three years, you say, your whole body shaking, not just your head. Such realizations come to you these days; realizations that threaten to whisk you away. You are a web—each of your corners is fastened to reality, though quite invisible. There is no reality left in your body. It’s as if your conceptions of the world have taken over. Floating freely in your own web, until encountering a seam, the harsh impact of reality, the bow of a ship against the quay, vessels splitting down the middle, conceptions taking in water. This is you these days.
I still want to save you, but I know you would hate me for it, and so I refrain. I wander about myself, collecting for your charity; I will rattle if someone picks me up. But no one does; I am not the kind of a person others want to pick up. I am too heavy.
A FUNERAL
WHEN HE LEFT her it was winter. They lay on the bed in her new apartment. Amid the city, half sleeping, winter, the kind of listless calm in which you can suddenly say anything at all without it coming as a shock.
Don’t chew your lip like that, he told her. She went on reading. Stop it, he said, and slapped her hand, and then she couldn’t help but look up.
Okay, she said.
There was a hum from the kitchen, the washing machine spinning sheets and dish towels and facecloths, the vibrations in their teeth. They had lived in Copenhagen six months in their separate apartments. In order not to miss out on that. They had left everything behind in Aarhus, that was how it felt: Copenhagen being temporary. They would be going back. They had finished university, and were ready—but for what. To fail, to be canceled.
Two of his friends helped her move. Only what you need, he said, and kissed her on the cheek, though only to make up for there being so much, that was the feeling she got. But then maybe it was a reproach. That comment, that kiss, placed on her skin like a cold mollusk, his fingers, and yet something in his eyes that genuinely relished seeing her like that: leaving something behind.
I’ll take it, she had said to the landlord, and a blind fell down in the window at that very moment. She could hardly stop laughing, or else she began to cry, it’s hard to say, both, probably. Things can start like that, too. When reality seems staged, that sort of timing: or when what’s staged turns out to be reality. You should be careful what you write, it might turn out true. It will never be anything but.
August, and then soon after: autumn, winter; the wind gusting, her skirt a sail on the sea, the rumble of a blaze. So cold you’re not sure if it’s actually hot.
There were two rooms, besides the kitchen and the bathroom, which was down in the courtyard. Two rooms. She dumped a blue IKEA bag in the corner, could hear them coming up the stairs. With packing boxes. The bed. She stood still in the corner with her mouth open and her hands at her sides: so this is happening now. The kind of thought that occurs when suddenly you find yourself waking up somewhere else instead of where you went to sleep.
She sat in the window, got up again. Felt happy, filled with excitement. Another of those moments where you sense everything that is to come, and everything that has gone before: an unmistakable feeling of something ceasing to exist, with a beginning.
Not everything survives. Or rather, nothing does.
And then that window, stiff and vertical, hysterically opened onto the courtyard. Linden trees. In the autumn, when they are pruned back: crowns docked like tails, half-seeing eyes that blink at a sky forever turning gray. Winter, a stunted squall that will pass. The clouds shift without pause in autumn, and she gets up from the table, sits down at the table, gets up, writes and does not write, in one seamless movement, puts the kettle on, drinks from a cup with brown concentric rings at the bottom, cuts some sprigs in the yard, they weep, the sky likewise; she forgets the water as it boils, she writes some pages, all in one seamless movement, a movement that does not belong to her.
Her feeling of guilt is a constant storm that brews inside her; a sickness waiting for a cause. A moment’s fatigue, weakness, resentment. And the fever is upon her. Then she must run, she must convince her body that everything is all right, at rest, at work. Writing: she is continually in doubt as to its validity.
When what feels necessary isn’t necessarily valid. Where, then, to deposit oneself but in a body deceitful.
She slept badly. It was like that.
That feeling that made her laugh when the blind fell down, when she took on the apartment; that same feeling came back to her when again she could not sleep.
The fatality of time and again believing the world is determined by something. Something outside of itself. Or just determined, in whatever way at all. Timing. Believing you can see patterns in the world is the same as imagining you can reach out of a window, hold out your hand, and wait a couple of seconds until a leaf, a feeble, tattered leaf, settles there gently, surely in your palm. The same as expecting you can fall asleep, in such a world.
And yet it happens all the time: people fall asleep. You see connections. Or you think you see connections; and for a moment you might feel you belong.
That something like a home exists.
Only it’s not as simple as that; there are moments of collapse, life consists of little else.
A face brought down, revealed to be one’s own.
Sensing how the sand on the beach in front of the hotel at Svinkløv is retrieved by the sea as each wave retreats. The current they warn you against, and which the body recognizes before the mind; an urge to succumb.
And that would be it.
What such an urge might mean.
She misses having a home, it’s a condition.
Eventually she falls asleep and dreams about a man who says in English: My hands are dirty, you don’t want to meet me.
The world laughing in your face like that. The writing laughs with it, that line of dialogue. It all gets entangled in the writing. What was, and what is, or perhaps may come. Sentences and lines of dialogue.
A desire to be older, revealing itself to be a desire not to lose one’s childhood. Not to lose anything, whatever it might be, to maintain a hold in the flow of all things, to stand firm there and preserve. In some form, to keep hold of it all, and not leave anything behind in that burning house. Wherever you go, you leave behind you a trail of disaster, no matter what the circumstance, that’s how it is. A trail of collapse, something falling outside of all recollection, all that is not remembered by anyone and is forgotten by the world. She is not quite sure, but
the feeling grows stronger, she sees it in him: a kind of reverse will to live; a nostalgic reluctance toward surrendering oneself to the world that exists. That kind of panic in the tissue, a fear of forgetting. She writes so as not to forget things, or else she writes in order to forget things and invent other things more worthy of remembrance. Perhaps that’s what writing is: you start moving about in the world like a sleepwalker in the night, looking for something more real, a truth there; and then all of a sudden it’s sleep that you sacrifice, then suddenly the family, then everything that is valuable and means something. Dreams while awake, ideas, pulling everything with them like waves returning, returning to the sea, faces washed away, washed clean of all humanity. Or the opposite: invoking a humanity all too exaggerated: too much human in too small a space, that pealing reality when your entire being wants that someone else.
She thought the right thing to do was perhaps to find a life first, and only then look for a way of working that fit in with that life. That it should happen in that order, instead of carrying on the way things were; searching for a way of living that fit in with her work.
IT DOESN’T LOOK like him at all, and yet: it’s him, she knows it is. As full of life as a bonfire in spring, at the beginning of March, the same look on his face, no less: confident. They visit her parents, they are still going out, they walk in the hills and she cannot forget that he tells her about a girl he used to know. Every month she ran short of money. And then, he says, when the money ran out she collected her last coins, searching coat pockets and rummaging at the bottom of bags, and then she would go to the florist’s on Bruunsgade and buy flowers. Cut flowers. With the very last of her funds. How many lilies can I get for this, she would ask. How many daffodils for forty-two kroner.
One of Us Is Sleeping Page 5