One of Us Is Sleeping

by Josefine Klougart

  SHE WAKES UP with the feeling of needing to go home. She tries to slither out from underneath, to rise from the bed without him noticing. She moves his left arm, which lies draped across her. Again, she has ended up here, a shifting tide backward in time. So they are trying again, once more there is hope of some kind. And yet it is a sorry hope, for each of them knows there will never be anything more than this. His arm: like opening the heavy wooden door of a stable in order to emerge into sunlight. He does not wake. It feels like he has borrowed his apartment from someone, there is something temporary about it.

  And his face.

  This is your face now. The way it changes all the time. I think I liked it better once. Always, liking better what once was. She puts on her clothes, open-mouthed, her body drawing in air without sound. She shuts the door behind her, knowing that she has no key. I will never be back, she thinks. She: the way she shakes her head when he holds up a spare set of keys in front of her one afternoon they meet at a café. Take these, he says. He, saying: take these, dangling them in front of her, the keys dancing like awkward adolescents held up by the scruff of the neck, legs like that. And her face, the feeling of not wanting them, of their belonging to someone else now. The feeling that everything has changed. And this pain of absence; how easy it is to miss someone, and how strongly. That desire to keep and conserve.

  We can be friends.

  But then maybe you can’t stay friends without castrating each other. That’s what she senses. He makes her incapable of loving others, and she does the same to him. She shakes her head.

  Give them to someone else.

  Has your new girlfriend got her own keys. She, asking him.

  He shakes his head. He looks at the ground.

  Give them to her. Then.

  She gets up and leaves, walks out through the room; she thinks of her own apartment. The spare keys to her own place.

  Where they are now. Berlin. In the pocket of her new man, who already has been buried, alive. In the arms of his own past, buried there in the woman he left in order to be with her.

  She will ask him to return them. Perhaps they can be sent.

  Only then she cannot bring herself to write to him. The fear of him actually sending them back. She goes down the stairs, her legs are pistons, she descends through the stairwell, taking all the air with her outside. She is assailed by the sun. She bends down and unlocks her bike. The particular chill of Frederiksberg in the mornings. She wheels the bike along Gammel Kongevej; changes her mind and walks back. She buys some bread at the bakery on the corner, where the light of the sun and the light of the city lakes collide like heavy girders, disrupting every face.

  Again, she stands there outside his entrance. With bread inside a paper bag. The bag feels heavy, the bread rolls it contains feel like warm kidneys or hearts pumping. The body shares its rhythmic composure with everything that is dead. With bread. He looks glum as they sit there facing each other in the kitchen. Threadbare. She begins to regret coming back. Or coming back in order to leave in order to come back. She doesn’t really know what she regrets. She doesn’t really know what has worn her down. She has all sorts of thoughts about it, only they go off in different directions, first this way, then the other. She doesn’t trust her own emotions. They come to her and leave her again in all their dictatorial arbitrariness. A person can tire of never understanding how things happen. Or you can become fatigued from knowing all too well what it takes. Knowing, and yet at the same time knowing it will not happen. That the option isn’t available. His mind is a conglomerate of basements, she sees that now. Literally. Inside are corridors, rumbling echoes as the watchmen run through them at night, high on morphine. Maybe he doesn’t know, but he hopes I will come back. This is what she thinks. A victory march.

  So she thinks.

  That he misses her. He gets up and goes over to the fridge, fetches something, or nothing at all, then sits down opposite her again. He places his hand on top of hers on the table and they look into each other’s eyes. Or else they look down at the table.

  IT’S STRANGE, HE lies, I never miss you when you’re not here. I get so scared I might forget you, he tells her. He has talked her into meeting. I’m beginning to forget you, he says. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, malicious voices tell her, only these are her own thoughts, they carry her signature. And presumably it is what he wants, or what a person dreams about at night; dreams about during the day, not wishing it upon one’s worst enemy. They walk there together, in the park by the National Gallery. It is summer and they are constantly on the run from someone. Both of them seeing someone else now, and one of them always wanting to try again. But only one.

  He tries to explain to her that they are standing at a crossroads. He extends his fingers and turns his hands into stiff tools, crosses them on top of each other. An intersection, he says. They both look at his hands, and he lowers them again. They walk around the city for hours, drifting like a plow through endless fields of America, following the highway or cutting cross-country. Drawing a trail of moist soil behind them like snails, through shaded gardens, cultivated landscapes gouged open to the flesh.

  I don’t believe in you, she says.

  He looks at her and asks what she means. And then they are silent for a long time, walking through the landscape that Copenhagen sometimes can be.

  It’s a very beautiful day, she thinks.

  Sometimes it can be that simple.

  THE MORNING COMES from below. It is summer, and the air is static, embracing everything, warmth and light. She recalls a morning at Agri when she awoke refreshed from sleep, the feeling of having slept sufficiently. Immediately, she knows they have gone off without her, that she is there alone. The sounds of the house are undisturbed. No one to encounter, no sisters to disturb the life of things, a life that hums and emits noise in its own quiet way, a bit like words whispered under a door, through a keyhole: please open up and come out, so we can talk about it all. She gets up and her blue nightdress falls into place around her body. She pads on heavy feet along the corridor, the doors of the other rooms wide open like graves plundered by robbers; the beds, these empty boxes, the stairs. In the kitchen, a shaft of light picks out half a cucumber left on the table, crystals of ice encircling the seeds. Or perhaps they are crystals of sugar, a staring eye, dissected blandness of water, a shimmer. A tea bag, trapped by the lid of the pot, the table stained by its dripping. She picks up the cloth that is already there, still damp, and wipes the table, wipes away the stain. She goes over to the French doors, the sun strikes her face. At this early hour, the hill delivers its measure of shade to the house. The door is not locked, but the handle is turned upward as if it were. A barrage of sound, she opens the back door, a barrage as she opens the door, like a rush of water, finding its way and consuming a home; the grass is cold as a church, and wet, crying out that it is summer, as though it were a seldom occurrence, as she walks over the lawn in her bare feet. The garden: a detonation of green, white, yellow.

  The lilac bushes are in bloom, at their peak.

  She wonders where they have gone. They have left her behind in a world of her own. A feeling of missing out on something, and at the same time a sense of having won a prize.

  The past does not come creeping in the form of images, it’s there all the time, tugging at your sleeve, trailing along behind you, occasionally wanting to be lifted up and carried.

  A chinking of bottles from carrier bags suspended from handlebars. The street lamps are cupped hands. Ready to be filled with rain again. She lives in Copenhagen now, and is on her way home. A celebration folded up and put away in her mind. She could sleep all through next morning. All she needs is to drape a sheet in the window. Strange nocturnal voices sprout at every corner, their pale, near-transparent roots encroach, offshoots striving upward like hair made electric. A drunken babble on high, bodies plummeting, no time to reach out and break one’s fall, faces hurtling toward the ground, buffeted by doors and windows that o
pen and shut. This entire hall of mirrors, with its outside and in, its being in transit, and where have you all gone. The summer’s parties and homelessness, the coming from below of this morning. Distant days repeat through the cracks. And again this light, this light, again.

  BENEATH MOSS THEY find the False Chanterelle. Here, he says with pride. Yes, she says. They leave fairy rings, their tramping about. Apples fall. And leaves. They still go home together, intentions seemingly still the same. The warmth that consumes you, rising up inside you, when you’re standing in the kitchen and have been outdoors the whole day. The feeling of hunger, absorbed in the steam of mushrooms, butter and cream, a nausea and satiety of a kind that has nothing to do with either food or no food, but with expectation and having walked through woodland, that peculiar kind of concentration so reminiscent of reading: attentiveness, and its exact opposite. To command large areas of forest floor, survey the ground as though it were soup to be skimmed of impurities; to find the mushrooms that are there. Searching for something in particular without knowing exactly what. Proceeding toward a place that exists only as movement and direction.

  IN A CORNER of her garden, the greenhouse, like a dead man, the warmth of life yet to leave the body. She hears him, weeding the path with the hoe. Now and then he pauses, perhaps to remove some more stubborn plant, to pull up the root. Getting rid of. Or else to wipe his brow with his T-shirt. He leans the hoe against his chest, gripping the hem of the garment with both hands, lifting it to his brow, wiping so that the sweat will not run into his eyes. Or else he rummages in the shed, to mend the roof where it leaks. He tidies the raised beds. Or else she is alone and it is later, and the sounds he made hang like voices out of windows. Long after he is gone. Always, this feeling of long after.

  HE WALKS AS if his every step is an item he finds on the ground and decides to pick up. Some movements in the ranks, some of us switch spots and will be next. Washing hangs from the line between the trees at the far end of the garden. It is the first time this year they have been able to dry their clothes outside. She walks with her mother through the garden, up the slope. The light is warm now. She closes her eyes and turns her head, the sun falls upon her face.

  She stands a moment.

  Her woolen sweater prickles at her throat.

  But her face.

  That’s right, she says. Summer has yet to come. That sense of new beginning. You know it won’t last, in fact it is gone the very instant you sense it to be there. Always something catching up with you—always something that is already too late.

  We are taken unaware by the blossom of white, the yellow of the broom, and then the pink, and before we know it we are bathing in the lake, piling into cars with towels wrapped around us, already on our way home from the year’s last swim, the lake freezing over, frozen over, the summer sealed inside, letters sealed with red, and it is Christmas and well into the new year before you even realize Christmas is gone, summer is gone, what happened, and where are we now.

  NOTHING DRIPS. RHYTHM of that sort does not exist. Not below freezing. The sound of frost is the same as the sound of polished boots standing lustrous on an unread newspaper in an empty, white room. Unused shoes without laces. They have agreed to meet on her birthday. Nevertheless. The way they always do. Besides, there are some matters he wants to discuss with her, he says on the phone. She has a strong feeling it would be best not to see him at all. She knocks over a vase of sprigs and lilac. The smell of stagnant pond. The water runs across the shelf and drips onto her books. One of those accidents that make her give in and go along with him, in spite of what she feels. It’s my birthday, after all. She pulls the damp towel from her body and places it on the shelf. She shakes the books one by one, wiping the covers dry with a corner of the towel; flicks the pages and leaves them to dry on the windowsill, opened out like fans. They look like stuffed birds with outstretched wings, about to—well, what, exactly.

  SHE HELPS HIM into the shower. He is feeble and slack, and though her sleeves are meticulously rolled up she is quickly soaked. She talks to him. About the soap, about whether he is able to stand on his own while she washes his hair; she tells him to be careful and not to fall; she says the lather is rinsed away now, and asks if he can dry himself or wants her to help. His eyes flicker, he is angry, but too tired to do anything about it. Sick, and incapacitated by alcohol. She rubs his hair with the towel.

  He gets up, it is well into the afternoon and she isn’t there.

  The apartment is empty.

  He stands in the last rays of sun as they slant weak warmth down between the roofs of the buildings opposite. He imagines Arizona, fields of maize, grasshoppers consuming unscrupulously. She has a feeling inside her, as though she were separating an egg, passing the yolk from hand to hand, the fragile yolk that might break at any moment. She remembers all the objects she has broken. A small vase. A cup he gave her once. A glass that stood out only on account of being green in a particularly detached and dusty kind of way. Stand still, he says. She gathers the shards in her hand. Stand still, he says again, this time with annoyance. You’ll cut yourself. I won’t cut myself. That evening he tells her he thinks her parents scolded her unduly as a child. For breaking things. That had to be why, the reason she gets so upset. But it wasn’t like that at all, quite the opposite, she thinks to herself. She finds it unreasonable not being allowed to be saddened by time passing. By doing things that cannot be undone, by suddenly dying. That is what a person cries over when they break a glass—no more than that, spilled milk, borrowed time.

  He wakes up alone in the apartment, most of the day gone. She is out buying groceries. But how is he to know. He thinks she is angry, but she cannot be angry at all. Disappointment is a greater, more satisfying revenge, one may think, and perhaps it might be true.

  JUST THE FACT of getting away from the city. They stay in a summer house. She reads Tove Ditlevsen and thinks of all the similarities. How alike people can be, across all boundaries. He sits uneasily in the shade of the parasol. The fabric lends his face an oddly blue tinge. A newspaper has blown from the table, some hours ago now, and has disintegrated, its pages draping the shrubs, covering up the dry straw. What remains lurches through the garden, like an army in dissolution, soldiers searching for survivors. Are you thinking about your mother, he asks her. They look at each other. She gives a shrug: not really. She’ll be all right, he says, and looks down at his book again, only then to go on, how remarkable she is. You mustn’t think it’s you, you mustn’t think that at all. But I haven’t done anything wrong, she tells herself; you haven’t done anything wrong, he tells her. She nods.

  There’s no one here, she whispers. They have come through the back garden, through the gap in the hazelnut, behind the house and the woodshed. Everything has been left so neatly, the dishwasher emptied, the table wiped. They have walked all the way from the summer house to Agri. But no one is here. They find some fizzy drinks in the fridge and sit out on the patio. Only that doesn’t feel right either. They feel like burglars. She hangs the key back where it belongs, on the nail under the eves. He sends messages to Copenhagen, a couple each day. She doesn’t care. It may be a bad sign, and she thinks about that. We’ll give it one last chance, she hears him say, mostly for his own benefit; it’s like he can’t be talked into anything, the sheer impossibility of him. And then coffee, drowsiness, exhaustion, perhaps the heat. They chink glasses in a toast. They drink, and make love, and live their separate lives, together again in the midst of the summer, in this recollected landscape, this recollected summer house. Do you remember this, remember that, the time I nearly broke that window helping your parents pull down the old cladding. Always the disputes of chronology, for which reason it’s easiest to leave it out when reminiscing, together. Where does that thought come from: that they are only together because they can’t stand the thought of having forgotten something. An odd mistrust of memory, an odd displeasure at its existence.

  HER MOTHER SQUEEZES her hand. Sometimes
it’s hard to understand, she says. She thinks she does, and yet tries to see the incomprehensibility of it. She stays with her parents for a few days, it is the winter holiday, they were supposed to have been together, she and the new man, the dead man’s successor, the nocturnal worker, while everyone else sleeps, a moonlight contract, the body refusing to give up anything at all. But only she is here. She keeps waiting to be, what—unhappy.

  However it may look, that kind of sorrow.

  The sofa is so deep you either have to sit on the edge and not lean back or else succumb with legs outstretched. She feels the springs through the fabric of the upholstery, hears their metallic complaint as she settles into place.

  Her father comes home and nothing about him seems changed. He is the same person, though there is no guessing who. His moods are arbitrary, as if they depend only on themselves, regardless of circumstances. The time his father died, her mother gathered her daughters on the old red sofa, their legs dangling above the floor, it is as if all the furniture has grown smaller since then, the gardens shrunken, unlike nature, oddly enough, whose proportions are unaltered; wild. She told them Daddy very likely feels sad, that’s the way she put it. That they were to show consideration and be nice to him. And yet he came home and there was nothing to be detected, he was no more broken, no more repaired than usual, one minute at ease, the next quivering with tension. That constant unpredictability. I come home, abandoned by a man who passed through my hands and died; I come home, abandoned by the new man, and on neither occasion is he moved by it. In the midst of my doubting I will ever be alive again, or even want to be; I think to myself that in a way it ties us together. Both of us unpredictable. A rhythm that remains the same, regardless. A threat. They have already parted, or else they will never part. Nothing new under the sun.