And then.
Where did you go.
She, who still sits on the floor under the sink, unlocks the door and lets him come in, and he falls around her like a loose dress whose shoulder straps someone sliced with a knife.
SHE REMEMBERS SHE was drinking that night. After she asked him to go. Are you sure you don’t want me to stay. I’m sure, just go. She remembers knocking back one glass after another. As alone as could be, but nothing was the way one could imagine it to be: right. Nothing real. Or—too real by half. She wasn’t quite grieving, but pretending. She was drinking, that’s all. Because a person can do that. And because sorrow kept being postponed. By what. Canceled. By this feeling of nothing being real.
I’m not going to leave you, he’d said, more than once.
He was that ignorant, so it seems.
That young.
I’m just telling you like it is, that’s all, he said, and then ran that eternal hand through his eternal hair. He kept revealing himself to be unhappy. Completely unsuited for life.
You leave people all the time.
You leave reality all the time.
She was angry, as if because of some unjust sentence, a match unfairly refereed, unfair weather and unfair fatigue.
The sun dangling from a thread.
Reality, riddled with sentences like:
I won’t leave you.
It’s not too late.
You never know what can happen. And yet we know all too well. We’ve known all along.
Can you remember when we met, he asked her later.
No, I can’t. Can you.
Yes, he replied.
I don’t think so. I think you can remember when we split up. It happened at the same time.
There is a sense of an approach in reverse. A body running backward. A mouth eating a piece of white bread into existence on an empty plate, drinking red wine until the glass is filled, raking chestnuts back across the floor, pearls, an inverse explosion; stripes on a candy stick appearing under the tongue. Collapsing, like a cake in the oven, one’s thoughts, scaffolders falling like rain outside windows. That kind of disaster. That isn’t insurmountable, as you always say. It all happened so quickly, we buried him. And the car, you should have seen the car afterward.
Unreal.
But it’s not lack of reality that this is all about. It’s just the world, when it gets too real. Like me, she thinks; maybe I was just too real for you.
You’ve been chewing your lip. Stop it.
Only he’s the one who chewed his lip. That kind of mix-up.
It’s spring already, summer already, autumn already, and winter has just begun. He has just begun; you have. She goes home and thinks about a child that never was. Herself, perhaps.
She is displaced in time, always.
HE SEES HER to the train and tells her about a film he saw. She thinks to herself his time will soon be short, she counts on the fingers of her hand, how many years, six years older than she, and for a moment she has no idea how old she is herself, but he is twenty-eight, that must be right. You think about children, you dream about children in the night and dream about them in the day. She knows he is thinking the plan is falling apart. And then he tells her about this Bergman film in which a young woman discovers that for a time in her childhood she hated her mother.
Autumn Sonata.
Only there was no place for that kind of emotion, he says. She looks at him, the lines around his eyes.
He throws up his hand. There just wasn’t room, not at that time. And later, he goes on with enthusiasm, the young woman kind of works it out. Realizes that the fear she feels all the time stems from this kind of—pent-up hatred.
She smiles. So now, she says, you think I should let myself hate my mother.
Yes.
She smiles. He smiles.
But that’s not what I’m saying, he says. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.
I think it’s the same for all of us. All Bergman’s films are made for us all.
Maybe you’re right, he says. Are you looking forward to going home to Mols.
She thinks for a moment. I’m looking forward to seeing if I can. If I can be there. I can’t really be anywhere else.
I think it’ll be a release for you, he says then. To get away from the city for a while. From that man of yours.
She nods. Perhaps. She kisses him suddenly on the mouth. Just so you won’t forget me, she thinks. Hey, he says, and smiles. Hey, she says. I didn’t mean it, she lies.
But then it was him kissing her, holding her tight. And then her turn to say hey, and he who lied himself to a kind of repentance.
Nothing is more or less real.
A particular kind of light she remembers from her childhood. A realer light, that makes everything look more real while it’s there, and then afterward, when you think back: more unreal.
Are you coming with me, she asks him.
No, he says without hesitation.
Only she’s the one saying no, and he asking if he can come with her. There’s no answer.
No, is the question. No, are you coming with me. Are you coming with me, no.
She is a hunger artist, and only a single ticket sold. Her audience of one has fallen asleep. A balloon tethered to his wrist by a string, floating three meters in the air above. Inside a tent of busy stripes.
There is no solution to the riddle.
Look at me, he says, taking her hand. A month is nothing, you’ll finally have peace to write. Or maybe he doesn’t take her hand at all.
Peace and quiet.
Peace and quiet.
I THINK I am a person who sees everything that almost exists. It’s a way of remaining unhappy, incapable in every respect. To see, not what is, but what could be. That which is coming, but which never comes, that chronic postponement, things imminent, likely soon, just around the corner, etc. Only sometimes it turns out that what lies ahead does not exist, there was nothing there, and I am someone else. Almost is the same as not, at worst never. Non-births, undesires, the impossibility of something like circumstances. In any other circumstance—it doesn’t bear thinking about. I am a guest on her way home, reeling away from a party that never was. How come this intoxication, this hangover, these pangs of regret, when there wasn’t even a party. Non-places. Whatever they are. It all starts and ends in an idea you eventually have to swallow. All your ideas and good intentions, that patience, that ability to convince the eye to see: invisible. And to be, fundamentally, seen—an invisible person in the world. To another, who cannot see you, cannot see me. Because he keeps disappearing anyway. Because he can’t find the right distance: close. Because maybe he can’t.
There are people who cannot love you. And it has nothing to do with wanting. It has nothing to do with desire. It becomes a matter of economics—negotiation. Columns, lists of one thing and another. A contract of service. Salary. Or no salary, voluntary work, driven by expectation and pictures of things to come. Like negatives, I see everything as though in negative, everything dark is light, and what’s light vanishes into black. But you think you see a person. A resemblance. I see the outline.
But then it’s not a person I see at all, not a person I expect. Who am I coming home to, who will be in my bed. A person in reverse, a person who cannot. Incapable. Incapable in love. And it has nothing to do with justice or ill will or the best of intentions. Love can be an economic specter, riding you through a series of images that never develop. Into anything. Other than images, an exquisite dream by which to sleep; from which to awaken bruised; what are you complaining about; you’re almost there, at the finish line. And the excuses you’re given along the way. Bait fed to you by corrupt animal keepers.
I forgive you everything; my body remembers it all. Going on is impossible; so, seemingly, is escape. It’s already too late: when we met we died in each other’s arms, in that very place; we died by that very look.
We drank each other like semi-poisonous drinks.
Unthirsty. That is, I kept you until later. A later that never came; there was always something fatal about it. The truth is: perhaps there was something else too, though who can keep such things apart. That which is fatal, and, well, how to put it, love, perhaps. Serenity, perhaps, a home. It all short-circuits, thick belts crackling across the landscape: love, and something that can hardly be called love at all.
The fatality of that.
What you saw never being what you will ever see, those tiny disappointments, a thirst in need of a throat, following after us like a pack of stray dogs. And all the time the idea of what might have been: begging dogs, whenever you move to get up from a table, or leave through a garden gate, the past is waiting there. Undead, and not even past.
How naïve I’ve been, I think to myself. Or rather: how lonely. How closely I scrutinized, how clearly I saw it all in my mind—all that nearly was. The person who could love, almost; this almost-love, forever postponed, something else in its place. What, exactly. Reality. Whatever that is. Yours, I suppose.
THE LANDSCAPE
WINTER. THE SNOW rumbling in still, without sound. Sometime after Christmas, I’m not sure.
The snow. That has laid itself upon it all, all that dares to remain exposed for more than a few seconds at a time, upon everything dead and everything living; the living and the dead; the violet stalks of the Brussels sprouts stand askew, keeping their balance in the broken rows of the vegetable garden, packed in by snow, as old wine bottles are encapsulated by melting, then stiffening candle wax, and the snow falls with the drowsy resolve of that image.
Obstinacy all around. We can’t go anywhere. We are inside a house, and the house is a giant corpse. We lie here and wait, beneath the skin. Movements are agitated and take place indoors. Outside only when something compells one of us: to fetch wood for the fire, feed the birds, clear a path. Outside there is only snow and the flies. True, the fattest of the flies are survivors.
The roasting trays are by turn hot and cold. We girls stand and stare, crane our necks beneath the ceilings. Fledgling birds. Our mother, nearly burning the bread. It can still be done, in the old oven. Her lips tighten and she winces at the sizzle of wet cloth, the only thing she has time to put between her fingers and the hot tray. She burns herself, the skin blisters: the things I do for you, she says, a wry smile. The water runs from the tap, I am horrified. The two sisters each understand more or less than me, who understands exactly what is required to see the fatality of it, in that sentence. Blisters.
Nothing to be worried about, she says, comforting me, in that way. She means it, and yet her words are a weight to haul back into the boat, the clothes of the men are heavy with water, and we must sail on. Once more an about-turn; we always comforted each other in reverse; when I need comfort, when she does.
I think I looked utterly distraught.
The warm filling runs out of the sweet Shrovetide buns. The recipe book lies open on the table, Karolines Køkken. The filling of the buns, vanilla, and these rich yolks. I spell out the words on the title page, the Dairy Association’s recipe series, the oddness of the subtitle, Oh, Freedom—someone must have been thinking of heaven, or something quite like it.
Sunday mornings at the Thorup Dairy. My eyes watering at the muslin cheesecloths, the dairymen slicing the blocks with wires. You can work in the dairy when you grow up, my father says to me. Perhaps that’s where it comes from: the idea of your parents, for all that, not knowing you better. The disappointment of them not seeing the gravity of it. He hands me a slice of cheese, draped over his fingers, and I remember thinking of dog ears, the same feeling of body about it.
I hated the smell of sour milk, the swarming cheese. An army of holes. And I wanted to go in and yet not for anything in the world, to go in. The wind from the sea across the road sweeps across the parking spaces and me, a mad dog thrashing in its chains, I shake my hair and drag a comb of fingers across its ribs before clambering into the rear seat.
The bread has risen immensely, its back split open like a wound. The bread, the comb of its broken spine.
An old friend she has forgotten and suddenly recalls. My mother. She misses him, repeatedly. I’m not sure.
My lips are cracked. My thoughts.
My mother ties our hands behind our backs with her eyes, goes from the oven without closing it first; the oven issuing its heat into the kitchen. We try not to look each other in the eye. We glance about the room, our eyes are darts whizzing about the bread and the leaking filling of the Shrovetide buns as it sizzles on the tongue of metal.
The mother returns to her young in the kitchen again, interrupting them with her example: look, my wounded hands, she says. Holding them out in front of her. So that her offspring may inspect. The fledglings gather on the finger branches. They nod.
The tips of her fingers are swathed in band-aids. Ten little brown boxes on skin-covered bones. Their mother’s hands, at least one joint in excess, as with each of her arms, each of her legs, shins, lower arms. And her bottom lip is twice as big, she has doubled in size.
Her hair is thick and glossy, wet slabs of molded blue clay. Her beaded bracelets rattle as her young once more look away. She is melancholy for three days, then busy for three, but her love is the same every day, quite insane and far more durable than anything ever before seen in this world. Her remaining. Something rare in that, that choice: remaining until—
Until what, exactly. Until the end. Until it no longer makes sense, until she is abandoned by us or by our father or by the feeling that in spite of everything there is meaning in the madness, the victims.
She puts bread and sweet buns in the freezer for the birthdays in spring. Her children were born in March, April, and May. If she’s to be believed.
Sometimes I’m not sure, she can be so absorbed.
There is a fundamental lack of credibility about busy people, the way they insist on besieging dates and days and half-nights, annexing the world like that, colonially, with their own bodies. Come home for Christmas. Come home in good time.
Later, I’m like that myself, it’s what all of us grow up to be, all three of us, in part, at least. At best there’s something naïvely mendacious about that kind of vigor. At worst it’s calculation, thinly veiled. So many important dates. So many children and even more mouths to feed and navels from which to pick the fluff. Giddyap, giddyap, all my horses!
Always this wish to be just as busy. As decent as our mother; we are watermarked. Maybe one day just like her, without these grubby, rural fingernails.
But our cuticles resist. My nails collect dirt. Earth is what they want.
I bring in some wood, a bustle of activity. A few seconds is all, and then a pillar of salt.
THE GOLD-THREADED bristles of a carcass poke up windswept, to be tumbled over the cloak of snow. So coarse, encapsulated each by frost, and the ice cap’s desolate.
A slothful movement in the snow. Most things have given up and lie still. A slightness of motion every ten seconds. The world is giving a ball, and at each round an animal is selected, or a tree, or a person, who must leave the stage and retire to the wings with ears blushing. The ones who didn’t move. Wrapped in hide of bison. The birds are in panic. No leaves remain to return the sound of their beating wings. No socks hung out to dry on the line, the metal hearts of the clothespins are glazed with pristine ice, frost blooms by turn on blue and red plastic. Posing arms of crystal. There is nothing like the echo of a world such as this.
I wake up with a snap abrupt as a wall, its beginnings a hesitation some hours after midnight. The wind switching to the east. The movement is an exact reflection of the slip of continental plates during an earthquake. Blankets of snow avalanching by turn. A shroud of matted marrow for the outer layer of the snow-cloak.
The sigh of the curly kale, its shelves of leafage.
Blankets that drop from plant cots.
An audible crashing-down. The smell of something giving way. Something else sinking slightly.
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nbsp; Crystal arms colluding with panes of glass, and something contracts and gathers in a droplet. A droplet plunges from the eaves to land upon the sunken head of a withered rose. The nod of the bush. My pillow has grown into my brain. She who is used to stained and lumpy pillows will fall asleep with her head in most any bony lap.
This infernal sound of droplets impacting and disintegrating. I wake up more fatigued than when I lay down to sleep.
ON THE LAST day of the year, my mother claps her hands in front of her chest, her eyes become tender mussels, orbs wedged tightly between lips of calcium. She enthuses—a rush of sibilants—about the grapes, Léon Millot, the ones she cuts in bunches from the vine in the greenhouse.
Being able to do such a thing. In December.
Winter all around. If this is not a miracle; if this is a miracle.
THAT WAS HOW I imagined it. That was what I wanted, to return here and to have a family of my own, in the village where we lived. The kind of face you see as you turn your head quickly inside an old house at evening, houses with such sounds.
One of Us Is Sleeping Page 7