All that vanishes comes creeping back.
All that creeps along the walls. That’s the kind of winter it was, everything of importance taking place against the walls. All right, he says, if you say so, and gets in the shower as I vacate it. He turns the tap, the water is cold, cold after my cold shower.
I’m not sure, he says, once the temperature is right.
About what, I ask. My voice sounds strange; I am bent double, towelling my hair.
I’m not sure how much time I’ll have.
He falls silent, as I have fallen silent.
I have to work, he ventures. Removes his head from the jets of water in order to hear.
I tell myself: he means these coming weeks, this trip; only then I think: that’s how it is with him, never really knowing. And then this: that he reckons that’s how it has to be, that you have to know something.
I think: it’s not about knowing, it’s about wanting. Maybe it’s that simple, too.
WILL YOU GO down to the basement with me to find some wine, I ask him. He looks up at me from in front of the bookshelf, on his knees at the CDs. I can go myself, I add, seeing the look of fright on his face. It’s just a bit dark, that’s all.
He puts his hand to his mouth, his gaze collapses in on itself, his lips close and shrink like cakes in an oven. He trembles, I see that now: you’re trembling.
I crouch beside him. What’s the matter, I ask, a nervous chuckle escaping on my breath. You don’t have to, I say.
He sits down on the floor, head in hands.
I take his hand. I don’t understand what’s happening, I say.
It’s too much for me, I can’t deal with it.
It’s all right, I say. Really, it’s all right.
Everything is so quiet. With my free hand I put a CD in the player and switch it on. There is no explanation, hardly an explanation for anything in this world, I think to myself. There is impenetrability—and there is the world that reveals itself to you in detonations of sound. Nothing in between, neither darkness nor light.
There are images you carry with you all your life. An apple tree bearing its bright red fruit through winter. A bucket reeling beneath a beech tree. A bathroom seen from the floor when you lay there writhing. The window of a greenhouse. And one long attempt to return, to find a home somewhere.
THANKS, I SIGHED, for calling.
You called me.
Yes.
SHE THOUGHT: NOW I will leave this city and never come back. I will leave this unreal night, let it remain in this place, and never return to it. On the ferry she wrote a message to the new man, saying she hoped to see him, that it might be good for them. Your son, she wrote, it would be good for him to get out into the country for a while. Don’t think it over too much, she wrote, only to delete it again. She knew he wouldn’t come, she knew she shouldn’t beg. Like a dog at your legs, she ran like that; unable to find rest anywhere anymore, certainly not in the apartment. Every time he left her apartment it once more became a desolate place. It was something he did to it, his way of emptying everything, emptying her.
BUT HE DOESN’T understand I’m using him to postpone death. The way I use everything to postpone death.
I WOULD LIKE to be passed from hand to hand, a warm ring of gold bestowed, dropped between palms. I thought I knew what sleeplessness was; breathlessness, too; I thought I knew the sound of no plans. I fall in love with you, and now I discover: I knew nothing of it. There, it’s said now. It can be that way sometimes. Now that, too, is a part of my reality.
I rise from the bed in an apartment that still sleeps. You have gone, before the blinds began to wrench themselves free, to hurl themselves against the walls. The apartment, dreaming of waking; me, dreaming of the apartment’s dreams of not waking. I thought we had an agreement that this was different; different from anything leading to rising from a bed in an apartment that never slept, blinds weeping at the walls, and finding a farewell letter you don’t really understand. That I do.
My hair, washed, becomes thin rope as it dries.
You balance on the outer edges of your own feet, not knowing if you can avoid the fall, the plunge into your own skin.
Most probably you are boiling in your habitual leather jacket, and most probably you have warmth enough for three.
I don’t want to hurt anyone, you say.
And I thought I’d already heard words like that before. But you said them first. I understand you, I say, meaning: I will never understand you.
There is no one thing about me that is out of proportion, but my entire body and the rest of the world. You thought maybe my falls were too great, and that nothing within me was of any stable rhythm. And it’s true; that, too is true, and all I can say is that the whole world is unstable, the whole world has a pulse, a heart that contracts as the seaweed bladders burst when you walk on the beach at low tide, or as the black seed-pods of the broom rupture in the sun, a hail amid reeds and feather. So much for stable rhythm. So much for proportions.
There is a feeling these days of nature having consumed its stores, the buds are nipped, and we await a flowering all through the summer.
It doesn’t mean I don’t love you, you whisper, enough breath for only one word at a time.
And no, I think to myself, you’re right, I don’t suppose it does. But the fact of you telling me this now, as you lie here on top of me, with foraging hands, means simply that you don’t love me enough.
The love, I write to you on a scrap of paper, the love that does what is right, is the same love that destroys people. There is no easy way, all the good is taken, and we have only remains by which to divert ourselves.
ALL OF A sudden I imagine more seasons. Or one more, at least.
There is a time: for apples that will come when they are but beginnings, the size of little olives, growing on the garden’s oldest trees, wild in the woods. There is a time: for apples, growing into sweet fists, red, and sweeter still. There is a time: for apples, letting go, dropping, gathered up, arranged in boxes with newspaper wrapped around. There is a time: for apples, rotting in the snow in the ground in boxes. But where is the season of no apples. The momentary escape from these red eyes. Perhaps they are always here. And then there is no use for seasons, perhaps they do not even exist but in the language. There is so much falling to the ground: rain roofs riders children blood apples ceilings pictures. The summer, melting away before the warmth has come, before summer—what did we have before the summer, something no one cares to gather up or care about. Something you want to swap for something else; something you want to wear out to get to something pure inside; something that looks like bone, that kind of illumination, an island of bone; something like reality, presumably, something that remembers. It might have been snow, or you, you might whisper. But then it’s me, whispering, me, calling.
TO BE A complete human; only then to be a repeat of another. To remind him of another woman. To be reduced to a symbol. When emaciated dogs are not allowed to be emaciated dogs; when moonless nights are something other than moonless nights. When the past and all one’s worries bed down and remain for winter. What kind of autumn then. What kind of winter, what kind of contract, the lakes at evening. When encounters can no longer be chance. I wander and search the streets for you. I travel to Berlin to let you find me.
I don’t think a person can decide to do anything in this world.
And yet that is what you do. You decide that we cannot see each other anymore. Now I am a symbol of something else. You tell me that. I repeat the words. But what if I am a symbol of everything that is meaningful here in life. I missed you from the very first day, and it has become worse with each day that has passed. Speculation, phone calls, journeys, journeys, seasons, the wish to be a complete human somewhere, a complete season; winter, it could be, winter winter winter.
THE LANDSCAPE
THE LIGHT IS milk inside the room. I sit up, as well as I can beneath the sloping wall. My nightgown is a rigid tent and belongs
to my mother. My legs are stiff, my arms, too. It’s the cold. I haven’t turned the radiator on. A creak from within my bones, a person can be this cold on a day such as this. It has become winter, and the calender tells me it is no crime, though perhaps it is anyway.
Regardless.
My joints grate like something being extracted from a freezer, my legs shiver as I climb out of the bed. The silence is excessive. It must be late or early, I decide.
The light is alien.
It has been snowing, and what is seen is the brightness of snow, not the light of the sun. I reach to open a window, and imagine my hand going through the pane. The cold is a sharp slap in the face, and my eyes howl.
The silence outside is excessive, and nothing is late or early. That’s how nature is, its only utterance: I am here. Reconcile yourself with that.
I lean out of the window and the trees rise up, cold fingers in gloves of white. They stretch away from the ground, but toward what. A sky that is already draped about their ears, heavy with snow.
THE ENTRY CODE is the same, though the lock is new; the smell is the same, and the same sounds on the stairs, the same light. She lets herself in with a code she thought she’d forgotten. It’s the afternoon. You’re supposed to be here, should we wait until you’re here, she texts on her phone, and sends the message to her dead man. She steps inside the storage room in the basement, one light still working. There is a band of narrow windows facing the street. Many of the packing boxes have sunk at one, two, or three corners. There are no vertical lines at all in the room. Everything is crooked, the windows weep in the heat. The air is moist. Passing ankles, and afternoon in the summer outside. Barbeques, a gradual drawing back into the shade. Windows that stick in their frames, blinds pulled down askew. No, he texts back; take what you want. Most of it’s yours anyway.
She drops the phone into a pocket of her empty basket bag. A former neighbour crouches down on the flagstones outside, tips her head to speak through the window. The sun slants inside the dimness. Just to think that someone stayed, that someone has lived here ever since. Two years, three almost. The voice of the dead neighbor cuts into her side:
Are you coming back to live, she asks.
No, I don’t think so.
She had forgotten about all these things, so much they had accumulated. Plus everything out at the allotment. There are so many remnants of them.
These boxes, packed as if for some weekend trip. And all the things she’d forgotten about, and all those she would like to forget in a hurry. And him, texting from Italy. A grief slicing Europe apart. He calls her up, and they’re unable to find a way of talking. He lies and says he wishes he could lend a hand, but they both know he is grateful not to be there with her in that crooked room. His relief breaks a hole in the icecap of her loss, is a piece of wood floating in the rainwater receptacle at the side of the house back home. She would expect him not to want to hear about it, that he would prefer to forget; that’s the way these things work. But the reality of the matter is he wants to know. About these things of theirs, that are here still. Their having packed away sugar and pasta and tinned tomatoes, spices and wicker chairs, magazines—all with the idea of coming back. The fact that the packing boxes have become damp, that they are disintegrating, that the pipes that run along the ceiling have been dripping, that one drop after another has collected and formed, then to fall; we have awoken in other beds, in other rooms, the fact that she wiped away a bead of perspiration from her brow in a Copenhagen café where her novel is displayed, sadly resplendent in its stand of amber or bone, and the fact that that droplet of moisture penetrated the wall into the basement storage room, there to be sucked up by the thirsty house of cardboard that is sinking around its contents of old photo albums and worn-out shoes, drinking glasses, and vases dulled and fatigued by the biding of time.
She lifts a box down onto the floor, though can hardly find room for it. There is nothing written on it, no indication of what it might contain. She pulls apart the flaps of the lid, and on top are two socks belonging to different pairs. Then piles of American magazines. Some food magazines, and kitchenware. The cast-iron pan they got from her parents for Christmas one time. She runs a finger over its surface and finds it still to be greasy. A drop of moisture descends from the pipe above her head and atomizes against it, myriad beads dissipating across the surface in perplexing patterns. She looks up to see another droplet forming. She thinks of how she oiled the pan with rapeseed oil, only days before they went away. She remembers it always being left out on the stove. Or was that the older one, also from her parents, she wonders, suddenly in doubt. She can’t remember. First there was one, then the other. This is going to take months, she thinks to herself.
Later in the evening the light is warmer, an hour comes during which the space is aglow with descending sun, only then to darken almost at once. She is sorting some bowls, thinking about which ones she actually wants. She sighs and sits down against the wall, drinks from her bottle of water. She picks out some cutlery and throws the bluntest knives into a dilapidated box that has quenched its age-long thirst in condensation and become a box for things discarded. The things she knows he doesn’t want. In spite of everything. She finds a tablecloth, rolls the good knives up inside it and puts them in her bag. The granite mortar and pestle, too. Some jars of honey, though their contents are mottled with white crystals. Is it yours or mine, that mortar and pestle, she wonders, without knowing for sure. There is a whole case of tumblers, three-sided, flat. Liquor. A small metal sieve for the shaker when pouring, to filter away the flesh of lemon, the seeds, and ice, from the cocktail. Her phone lights up again, and she texts back to cancel a meeting with a friend. She cancels the thought of her dead man even being capable of being here in the basement with her. She thinks there would always be some excuse. Some reason for unfortunately not being able, no matter he much he really would have liked—and it might be Italy or Copenhagen, work or something else, something getting in the way. You know how it is. She doesn’t think it could ever be any different than that. Something like doing something on your own. Like when she used to go for morning walks with him in the woods, the times he tried. He, who had always been, so she thinks now; you, who always will be:
disappointed by the woods.
Everything shifts, the world I describe vanishes word by word, that mother of mine. Everything that has to be sacrificed for something that can never compete with what came first and is most genuine. A lonely place in which to stand, exposed as the trees they allow to remain here and there when harvesting timber, not having the heart in the final analysis to leave the landscape entirely bare. And maybe you come home after a long time away, with a feeling of having been lost—a feeling of why did I go, what was I doing.
The landscape you make your home in childhood is a landscape that forever resides in your face. You carry it with you the rest of the way. And the consternation that awaits: the appalling dismay of returning home. Standing there with a face that doesn’t fit; a face fallen, like the trees toppled by wind.
There not even being a home here anymore.
What kind of a face is it that has become,—well, what, exactly. Foreign to the world, planets floating in space, wrong planets, confused, bewildered faces in peculiar orbits around something such as home, something such as an instance of love.
NATURAL DISASTERS DON’T distinguish between what is foreign and what is not. Nothing stays as you left it. The return home is impossible, one must reconcile oneself with a face that is foreign.
The landscape doesn’t miss you. The hills have not pined. To the hills, one person is no more or less foreign than another. All people are always both parts: there is always some recognition, something shared; and no one willing to be shunned in that way. Marginalized like foreign bodies, infants mixed up at birth, planets likewise confused. And maybe unreality is like that, too, indifferent as to how much history and how recognizable.
THE THIN MAN’S cigarette divides t
he darkness in two. He walks along the pavement in the other direction.
The roads go on ahead, they will be home before us, I think to myself.
I have lived nowhere in particular for nearly three years, you confide to the tree, proudly. As though you have wandered without water, now to reap here upon the summit.
There was really nothing I wanted more, you say, halting with your arms slightly extended at your sides. A bit like the crane, its wings out to dry.
Than what, you ask, nothing you wanted more than what; than to show you, I say, to show you how someone lives.
THE DOORBELL RINGS, and she presses the button to open the door without lifting the entryphone to hear who it is; she knows it’s him. She adjusts a few small things, places some open books in a pile, lights a candle. Hi, he says. His face is torn open, and expels the image of a person dejected. He asks about her books, how things are going in that respect, and she tells him they’re not. Then you must be living a lot, he ventures optimistically.
You could say the opposite.
As if literature had anything to do with any apportionment; anything to do with that kind of fairness. As if fairness even had anything to do with apportionment, balance. She lifts her legs and places her cold feet in his lap. He talks as he rubs warmth into her toes. I’ve found a new apartment, he says all of a sudden, I’m going to be living on my own. She doesn’t entirely believe him, that it could even be possible. He is a ring that passes from one girl’s hand to another, is glassy-eyed from encounters of skin. Good, she says. Does it mean you’ve split up, you living on your own.
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