I’m not even sure we’re together, if you could call it that. She nods.
It’s mostly just living together, he says.
She nods again. I’m not sure I understand, she says.
No, he says, I’m not either. The winter is an anesthetic.
But then it’s not just the winter.
HE SAYS HE doesn’t understand why she doesn’t go away for a while. You can write wherever. She turns to the window, tries to push it open, only it sticks.
What’s stopping you, he asks. You can make a new home somewhere else.
He doesn’t believe it himself. He gives her a hand, a sharp shove against the bottom rail. She imagines his hand going through the pane, a shower of glass descending like a veil, the world outside at once becoming clear, commanding the mind, the way some lithographs do, razor-sharp and in a way more real than anything ever seen. It opens, and the warm air of inside collides with the cold of the courtyard.
Or you could come back.
It’s as if he forgets, between each time they speak, that other people exist. That she has someone else, or more precisely, hasn’t. That she is tied and bound. That he is.
She looks at him and smiles:
Great, she says, that would be fine.
BABY CARRIAGES IN the courtyard. Windows thrown open, duvets spewed out like foam to dry; the clatter of bicycle locks, back doors that slam, a scattering of green buds, the way nature exists inside the city; an absence of all else but thoughts revolving around not revolving around death and winter and men who are no longer here. The impossibility of taking leave of something that never was. Something else that cannot be taken leave of, precisely because it was. Tangibly, when the past is pressed into everything, and when your thoughts are. The fact that there is a storage room in the basement and things there that they have accumulated. An indivisible remainder, everything fractioned, stumps of teeth inside a mouth; she is broken by all their things; she is again broken by the mere thought of what she can remember and what she has already forgotten. That, on its own. When there is no one to witness, a glove in the snow, left behind and forgotten all winter, now suddenly come to light, bulging with something inside, reminiscent of a hand, the humanity of it, dulled suede against the black soil, and then ten days on: snowdrops like stars all around, a sky in the borders, in a corner of the garden.
How many days like this.
How many days of spring can a person actually stand.
THE KEYS OF your apartment were shiny and bright as eyes too old for the face in which they are suspended. The apartment into which you moved that winter when you left me—it was like it was forever uninhabited. From the very start, uninhabited, and it seemed like that would never change. I knew straight away, I . . .
I know I can come here always.
It has nothing to do with will or absence of will:
you never change the lock.
Seen from above we looked like a litter of hungry fox cubs falling over each other in the rush.
Do you love her, I asked you, my eyes darting between new furniture and some things she’d done to dress the place up like a home. A decorated space, and you noticed.
You were sad in a way I recognized from somewhere, though I couldn’t gain the purchase to see clearly.
You are quite unable to place something in a room without it looking like it’s only temporary.
Do you love her, I asked, and saw the torment come over you, though recognizing it as something unrelated to the wish to escape.
Well, you ventured, hesitating, first man on the ice. No. But I could begin to love her. It could turn out to be something good.
Do you still love her, the other woman had asked you. And your two replies resounded then together, filling the room from floor to ceiling with dissonant overtones, chain-sawing the air, or anything else that might ever present itself.
Yes. Of course I love her. The way you love a season or a thought. Or: I have loved her. As if the past is past. Blade box: it’s easy to leave someone if the swords don’t go through the skin, if you can talk about the past as past.
Love someone like a season, a thought.
Both of us then expelling a sigh, thinking: it’s already over.
He is no one yet. You are no one yet. And we both of us miss you.
I COME TO your apartment again, out of breath and in a cold sweat. I do not fumble with the keys, I run up the stairs, pull off my jacket and unlock the door in the same movement. I run through the hall, into the living room; throw myself down on the sofa.
Her breathing is noise.
I am not breathing.
SHE ADOPTS HER dead man’s sense of the life that is hers not being her life, but the recollections of a stranger. An unfamiliar woman’s walk down memory lane, everything swollen up, as it were, infected by some nature of explanation and system. The way recollections may be orchestrated to achieve a cohesion that wasn’t there before, that doesn’t exist in the life that is.
She told him one night as they lay together after strange sex that had seemed mostly like swimming.
His voice was hoarse.
You talk too much, he said.
No, she replied. This is a life lived by another woman, retold by herself.
Who do you tell your life to then, he asked her, and the question sent her reeling. It was the very reason why she was lying there, the reason why, in spite of everything, she couldn’t be without him in her life, the way he was able to identify the essentials in all things. If ever she lost herself in sentimentality he could pull her from the flames again with only his eyes. To whom do you tell your memories.
His eyes were clear in the dim room.
She said: I don’t know. I don’t know who I tell. Just someone who’ll listen.
Hm, he muttered, on the verge of sleep. Builders would start their work in only a few hours. Their work, patient hammering and the rasp of a saw, became sounds she would later associate with the feeling of being recognized—heard by him, the dead man. Eyes of before.
IT WOULD BE better for you not to live on your own.
I suppose, she concedes, sipping her tea, holding the cup first in one hand, then the other, not wanting to burn her fingers, or for it to get stuck and become a part of her.
You’d have someone to—well, you know . . .
He looks like he’s picking a shiny object up off the ground, a coin perhaps, the gleam of a coin:
. . . stop you thinking.
She nods and sips some more tea.
Coming to see her makes him sad, she sees that. It’s as if he hopes that one day she will leave with him. As if it would ever be better that way, to have calamity hanging about the place. Circumstances. I’m fine, really, she tells him in a letter after he has gone. There’s no reason to be worried, she writes, and says the words out loud to herself:
there is every reason to be worried.
It’s to do with other things, that’s all. He walks home through the snowfall. It stops around midnight. Snow, piling up in the streets, illuminating the city from below. Street lamps reflecting the snowlight in their copper bellies. Cones of light issuing down through the night, these curtains of darkness that hang draped between the structures of the city. Courtyards silent, as if afraid of being found. No one breathes. Soundless traffic. A hand lit up in the glow of a cigarette.
SHE IS SITTING on the balcony, the one that faces out on the little square and the church. She can touch the plane tree with her foot. In the courtyard are three lemon trees with six lemons between them. Will they stay there long enough to see them ripen. Will they leave before. She waits for him to come back from the grocery store. What was it he needed. Sardines and tomatoes and vodka. The way the house is built is strange. No matter how much she goes about the apartment her body continues to be surprised by the way the rooms collide. Boxes tumble, rooms are kicked into place, and all these balconies hanging from the windows. Could a person live here, is it a home. If you come back, she thinks to hers
elf, then I will stay here forever and will not wait a moment to begin living.
NATURE TOILS AWAY, its eternal seasons; at present I am empty and need someone to pluck up the courage and inhabit regions within me. It’s like there are too many plains, and too few animals.
Trees that don’t fit in with the landscape here.
Everything happens too fast or too slow. Even nature’s rhythm has been nudged awry, even the seasons, and the images hasten away, silent, and yet with disconcerting urgency. Inhumanity all around.
IT IS A dreadful realization: that there is so little one can write about. Practically nothing, and all of it the same. Everything else becomes exotic and, well, irrelevant: unreal. This feeling of unpleasant surprises, from all quarters; one longs for sanctuary and a hot bath, and for someone to have been waiting without having noticed a thing. Either it’s knives and scissors, or else nothing is even worth the effort.
The thought that there might be something I perhaps ought to keep from writing, a thought about there having to be something left. Elsewhere.
But then there is no elsewhere.
And then perhaps there is no room for such consideration, maybe it’s like that. That all consideration eats you up in the end. I can’t even tell a proper bedtime story. Once, maybe, but then they cried, too, and wanted to go home.
There is only one thing to write about: all to which I cannot say goodbye. Including my mother. Including you. My dead man. There is a corpse in the bathroom, I think to myself. There’s that corpse I cannot evade; you, and all the love that accumulates.
The images, the five to which I keep returning. The bright apples in the garden in December. They are so real to me. I look out of the window and there is a sense of the world not hanging together. It’s as if the winter that is all around the red apples is artificial. The apples, however, are so real that if a fire broke out, then the sky behind them, the corner of the ochre-colored outhouse, and the earth beneath them would burn and crumble, whereas the tree would be the only thing left, luminous. A figure, punched out of a sheet of cardboard. One gets the feeling that all reality is only temporary, and the artificial can go on and on. But perhaps with those five images it will be different. In the end. Then perhaps I will be writing not merely to postpone my own death, but to prevent that of the apples. Then perhaps it will be love for you that I demand. A farewell one simultaneously approaches and writes oneself away from.
Bright, shining apples don’t know how to cease. They refuse to drop in October, to rot in the grass, and a person cannot forget them in a hurry. Autumn turns into winter, and winter departs to reveal a spring; but the apples know nothing of seasons. They will not accept the haste dictated to them.
I find myself too close to the pane and must wipe away my breath. So cold, the glass—it surprises me. Although it’s December, it surprises me. The skin that encloses my body shrinks, an abrupt contraction, a puckering fabric, a curtain you draw aside. I step back and sit down on the bed again. Pull my feet up and bury them under the duvet that is still warm and heavy with sleep. My mother speaks out of my mouth: you can’t lie there, lazing.
What would she know. You can’t tell me what to do anymore, I lie.
IT’S LIKE I’VE been running to catch a train, and now the conductor has seen me and waits. What am I waiting for. Me, I suppose. It’ll be a long wait, I say to myself out loud. People in the train look at me, a woman squints over the top of her glasses.
I’m tired of waiting.
BUT THERE’S NO gratitude. Just like you can’t be, can’t continue to be, grateful for being well again after illness, just like you can’t be grateful for things not having been worse. Just like you can’t find any comfort whatsoever in the assumption that everything will be all right.
You’ll see.
For the first time during those days, I would not help repair the brickwork, and refused to care about the animals in the stalls. Maintain what.
THE TABLE ON which the candles have burnt out while we slept. Where did the night go. A mess of empty glasses. Even though there are only four in all. A mess. He turns toward the wall, away from the sunlight that fills the room with song. I am up and standing in the middle of the room. Either you’ll make a fantastic father, or else you will be no father at all. These are the possibilities for a man like you, I think to myself.
His breathing is unsettled, has no rhythm. Too immersed in feeling something yourself. A child would release him from the detention of his body. His body, wanting all the time, always in a state of expectation. Something needs to be different, the piano tuner, always a false note in the flesh. Only then it isn’t in the flesh at all, it’s something else instead, another thirst.
Stay, he says, half in sleep, or else too awake by half.
I stand erect, solitary, a tree where once was forest, a twiggy remnant is how I must look. The light is pale. I shake my head, as though it were neither thought nor reason inside my brain that decided, but a wind sweeping through a landscape. Now that the trees no longer afford shelter, now that I am up.
Awake.
There is always one of us who cannot sleep; in any bed someone must always lie awake. One who cannot sleep a second more. I go about the apartment, gathering things together the way we do in gardens on summer evenings. That same cold feeling of too late. One of us is sleeping.
My clothes lie scattered like resting creatures on the floor. I pick them up without a sound, and leave.
You think I’m in the kitchen and mumble my name at the partition. I have closed the front door with the caution of a previous world, ours when we lived in Aarhus. You speak my name more than once.
Dead man, a dead voice, unable to muster the strength to call out.
Unable to summon yourself, you sleep again. You are no one’s father, your sleep is your own. Sleep from it all, I think to myself—but sleep sleep sleep, I pray, and descend the stairs on the limpest of legs. It feels like a dam has burst, a gigantic blister ruptured, and now: my body hurtling down through the stairwell. I take with me everything, and leave everything behind. Taking in air only when emerging onto the street. I hurry some ten paces before turning my head back toward the building and casting a glance up at the windows. But you have not risen, you speak to me still through the partition, but it is the brick of the outer wall your voice must penetrate, that, or the window. I creep through the city with eyes closed. To cheat the morning, to postpone something. Already there are dogs. And fresh flowers in the buckets outside the florist’s. The air is sharp, the world restless, unwilling to wait any longer. It is quite unsentimental. There are those who come with us, and those who don’t.
The city’s sky and all the city’s streets are the same.
The same brittle light. My relief at having slipped away was the same color as the sky.
YOU’RE NERVOUS AT seeing me. You tremble, I sense.
I thought it would be good for us to see each other, you say, but we both know: it makes no difference if we see each other or not.
A thought such as this: to have to go back and make sure you left nothing behind. To see if you switched off the lights. There is always light left on; always a waste of light in this world.
SHE SURPRISES HIM on the back stairs, wanting to say goodbye. I’m leaving tomorrow and wanted to stop by before not stropping by for a very long time. He flicks the tea towel over his shoulder and leaves it there, shakes the dishwater from his hands. His eyes, scanning the courtyard, trimming everything that is wild. The sun reflects from a metal sheet and some piping left against the wall. Some oak leaves half hidden by snow that will not melt and relinquish itself to any spring. Hi, he says, thinking: what are you doing here. She wonders, and zips down her coveralls, knowing he cannot avoid noticing her blue dress and the necklace.
He takes her by the arm: let me show you my room. She goes inside with him, and there they are; she wriggles out of her coveralls, he wrings his hands and sits down on a chair. She looks around the room and sees her o
wn things. Everything looks foreign in this way, him living here seems improbable, quite as improbable as him not living here. His sentences are short. Small glass prisms dangle from thread in the window. You should see it when the sun comes in, he says, the wall becomes a rainbow. It’s like a psychedelic explosion. He throws out his hands. She nods. Places her boots with the heels to the wall. You’ve got it looking nice, she says, and means it.
Thanks, he says. I should have asked you over before now.
She nods and is glad to be wearing perfume, its scent is heavy now that her body is warm from all her layers of clothes. She feels feminine. He wrings his hands. He is not breathing.
You’re pale, she lies. He gives her an apologetic look and then the door opens and his girlfriend is standing there, distraught. You, she says, before correcting herself: hi.
He jumps to his feet, only to stand motionless. Handwringing, teethgrinding, heartrending. I just came to say goodbye, I’ll be gone again in a minute.
Okay, she says.
Her mouth hangs open, she is not breathing, it’s as if her body is hoping her lungs are as open as her mouth and that the air will somehow find its way in. An icicle succumbing and breaking off, that’s how she goes. She leaves a space behind her in the room, like a streak of rust in the picture where she stood. Or perhaps his whole room is a stage, a non-existent place in the world, his life there, for her always: a non-existent life. A plummeting fall that will never reach an end.
It was nice seeing you, he lies.
Was it a bad time, I ask him. He nods: she’s thinking of leaving me before I leave her.
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