Is that what you’re going to do.
No, he says, I’m not. At least no more than I always am. It’s all like one long attempt to get to somewhere else. That’s how it feels. She nods. Yes, she says. That’s probably it.
THE SOUND OF grain rushing from the silo; a scraping jaw, ten thousand stones, a sudden descent from on high. The silo is red with rust and there is a smell of cold concrete and hay. The floor is cracked and there’s an old Ferguson in the corner. She holds open a sack, and Arne shovels the grain up off the floor. The dust gets in everywhere. The mucous membranes become feeble. A flat paleness all around, a demand for sheen. Winter might just as well come, she thinks to herself. The freedom of driving back through the hills on her own. Settling up in fifty- and hundred-kroner notes. The car heaving itself through the landscape. A feeling of no longer inconveniencing anyone, and yet inconveniencing nonetheless. Shoes on the newspaper in the hall. The rumble of fire in a wood-burning stove, and windows open wide. Are you there. The church bells ringing down the sun too soon. The lawn with its scatterings of stale bread and dismantled chicken carcass. Winter may come now. Winter, too, may come.
IT’S LIGHT ONLY for a few short hours at most in the little attic room of their apartment in Aarhus. They’ve never got round to putting that lamp up. There’s a switch on the wall, to the right of the door, but no cord no socket no bulb. She crouches down and rummages through some boxes with tools in them, and duct tape, until finding a flashlight. She feels like a thief. A beam of light, sweeping faintly over the knots in the timber, a pool of artificial illumination that makes everything different. I must have been mistaken, she thinks to herself. She felt sure the place was tidier, that everything was under control. Only it wasn’t. And yet there is an absence of dust. Perhaps the room is too damp for dust. A number of rolled-up posters and some of her sketches protrude from a ceramic pot in a corner—along with your fishing rod, a broom handle, a roll of paper tablecloth. On the wall to the left are some shelves she once put up. Or they did. The shelves aren’t straight, they threaten to divest themselves of their jars of jam and chutney, their fruit syrup and shampoo. The packing boxes are on their knees. It was only for a while. The way it always is, with everything: just for the meantime. She manages to place a foot in between a tower of boxes on one side and a basket of workout clothes, she thinks, and his shoes, some volumes of The New Yorker on the other. She reaches across some more boxes and opens the skylight. The air is not cool, as she had anticipated. It’s as if it refuses to circulate. A jar of preserved lemons. A wicker basket with worn leather banding. An olive tree, a laurel, as if that could survive. All sorts of things that are mine, she thinks. I can’t take any of it to Copenhagen with me.
She does anyway.
She could.
THEY LIFT THE table out into the sun at the side of the house.
They have bought smoked mackerel and some tomatoes at the grocery store on the way. Their own tomatoes are still hard and yellow. Or their own tomatoes are just plants with budding flowers. She has painted all the woodwork twice. It shines, black and sated. We must remember to enjoy the first days of spring, she says.
He nods, his mouth full of tacks, because then he is putting new roofing felt on the outhouse where the rain came in, and it is autumn. A few tomatoes remain, dangling like hearts in the greenhouse. The perspiring greenhouse. And chives as well. He fetches salt from the kitchen, and she divides the fish. They sit in the sun. She goes into the outhouse, can hear him working on the roof above her. She positions herself underneath him, closes her eyes, sensing what it’s like to have his full weight on top of her. He hammers in the tacks. Dust descends upon her hair, her face.
Would he crush her.
If the roof caved in, would he crush her then.
She looks up through squinting eyes, and sees the gash in the roof. She thinks she catches his eye for the briefest of seconds, then goes outside again. She hands him the hammer he says he needs. Some more tacks. They never mention it, that exchange of glances.
It’s obvious he likes to be here, she thinks.
But it’s obvious, too, that she is the one who likes to be here. To have him here. With her. The thought of their being here together, with nearly everything they need.
A place that is ours.
But only her name on the deeds.
The hoe I leaned up against the trellis, the only sloping angle there is. Everything else is a vertical movement.
His bicycle lies in the gravel in front of the perennials, looking like an animal that has fallen asleep. He looks like one of her very first friends. The sun’s a lot warmer now, he says, placing a slice of tomato on a slice of bread. Rather impatient, but here, nevertheless.
THEY DON’T WANT to take any more than is absolutely necessary.
She wants to walk all day.
Mist lies between the houses, and the square has been hosed. It’ll be hot today, she says. We’re going out, what should we see, she asks.
But she goes out alone that day. There’s something he needs to do. Some sleep. I sat on the square, he tells her that evening. The life there.
She nods. Some other time, he says. Tomorrow, perhaps. Only then—perhaps not tomorrow at all, she thinks. That, and her feeling that she travels alone, always wishing he were there, that there was something he wanted to do. That they wanted to do something together, movement in the same direction.
HER DEAD MAN wears a long yellow scarf around his neck. He has not shaved, and yet she does not doubt that he has gone to great lengths.
She smiles, walks through the room like a knife cutting its way through the skin of a fish. A grating sheath of scales, at once keenly and with difficulty. He takes pains to smile, to put on a face. They embrace each other, she swiftly withdrawing, almost pushing him away before he falls inside her. She holds up a corner of his scarf: nice scarf, she says. He bends his neck to look at it. How hard it is for him. Being here.
You came early, she says.
He nods. He is a child leaving home every day, or: he is the tide, returning and retreating. By turn obstinate and governed by something outside himself, something inside himself—but then perhaps all of life is like that; an eternal state of arrival and departure in a pattern over which one has no control; a rhythm one must simply tolerate.
She wishes the new man had not been with her today. It is as if he now is reaping all that was sown before. Me, she thinks.
He has nothing to give to her, of this she is constantly aware; there is nothing like a ripe time. That time was long before; it’s always difficult, a continuing state of exception.
Already everything is too late.
When did that happen.
Her dead man—the look in his eyes, effortlessly sweeping all the flowers and all the wine and all the piles of books from the table.
So much parting collected in one room.
This is your day, someone says to her. Her stomach tightens into a knot. She cannot remove from her mind the thought that someone else knitted that scarf for him; and that the new man has never been as unhappy in all his life. Displaced, in every respect.
Her dead man has brought an old friend with him, understanding nothing. Or perhaps he cannot bear to recognize himself in this room. He is holding a bottle of champagne. It’s for her: this is for you, he says. As if champagne were the solution to a puzzle. And then they leave, the two of them together, to be there no more. No longer to be present.
She drinks a glass of white wine rather quickly, and is introduced to a man with a Russian name. His lips promise, but cannot be pictured again; he is there as one looks at him, only then to be gone; broken faces embed themselves within you; whole faces are forgotten.
Because they have yet to reveal themselves in pieces.
All that has not revealed itself to be art.
I COULD STAY here forever, he says. But what he means is, he would like to have a home. The night is warm. The sun goes down between the houses, and all the r
oofs look like they’re painted on. Thrusting surfaces of earthen red and ochre. They have only the shoes on their feet.
Their backpacks put next to each other against the wall.
It is cooler inside the room than out. One night in every town, that is their rule. And no more than three days planned ahead. Always they are dashing for trains. Always they come from something better, and always on their way to somewhere supposed to be fantastic. They sip coffee at a railway station café, tucked into a booth with a bench upholstered in red leather. It sticks to the thighs. A dog goes by, dragging its leash behind it. A voice on the loudspeaker announces another change of track: binario due, binario cinque, binario due, and the train is continually late. Ten minutes, twenty minutes at a time. We could have had lunch, he says. She nods; they notice a supermarket that will be cheaper. A deserted beach that turns out not to be deserted at all, though for a short while it is. It’s like the book she’s reading is better for being read here. Or different, at least.
She is disappointed by Pompeii, but decides not to mention it. She thinks there is more Pompeii to be seen in Berlin, that the whole world is spread out over the whole world. Italy in Berlin. Egypt in Berlin. Berlin in the USA. The USA in France. She places a sheet between her thighs. The heat is tremendous. She wakes up early. The sound of a truck braking. A clattering in the back yard, the sound of a metal bucket overturned. A thirst for water. She gets up and has a shower, lies down beside him again in a single movement. She draws something through the room.
I’M AFRAID I’VE forgotten everything. I have forgotten the first time I saw you, and I have forgotten how we got from the højskole to your parents’ summer house. I can’t remember seeing your parents for the first time. I can’t remember what it’s like to wake up with you. I can’t remember what it feels like to come home to an apartment shared with someone else. With you. An apartment that is another person’s home. I can’t remember what it’s like to be so close to another person, almost merged into one; I simply can’t remember that I could look across at the door and that you would push it shut with your foot, because you were nearest. I can’t remember my annoyance at watching you be so slow and meticulous. With breakfast. With envelopes. I can’t remember my anger at finding you passed out on the sofa. Again. I can only remember finding you like that. I can only remember that you were slow and meticulous. I can remember your parents. The feeling of everything being the first time. The summer house I remember, but the days spent with you there I have forgotten; the shrubs of broom, your mother pruning them with a pair of shears. You whispering to me not to tell her they should be dug up instead, that pruning them was a waste of time. And the plantation of trees, the short cut down to the meadow. I have forgotten how far the meadow was. And the feeling of waking up rested and refreshed, though with an aching head from having slept up against you, that too I have forgotten, the way it felt; and now I can’t understand how that could be, with you now lying here again, so close to me that my body is an extension of yours. With so much still missing. With so much being something else, and you still existing.
THE DUST OF the grain, drifting in the sun, vanishing in the shade.
Summer.
The leaseholder passes through the stable. He is visible and then not, in the light and in the dark. He walks as though keeping time to a ticking watch. Each entry into darkness causes all sound inside the stable to be consumed.
But then he becomes visible in the darkness, and quite transparent in the sunlight. A new order. And the shiny ribbon of the feeding trough on each side of the aisle, licked clean and worn down over the years by rasping tongues.
The door is dragged aside with a clatter, sun streams in, the floor ablaze in its light, made to flame by the legs of the cattle causing shadows to leap out across the concrete in panic. Three at a time, the beasts jostle their way down the aisle, haunches taut, skin draped over bony spines; the heavy sway of udders. Their legs can break. Cows are always too heavy for themselves. The nervous way they proceed, neither walking nor running—and never anything other than eager. Never anything other than uneager. It’s as if there’s something they have to get done before anyone finds out. And like a fan, this tide of cattle spreads and unfolds. All that body falling into place. They are cast in the concrete. Each cow knowing its place, a bit like waves on the shore, their movements a matter of course, a routine, something reminiscent of nature.
She keeps thinking she sees him coming, that he’s changed his mind. A friend calls and apologizes. Not so much on his own behalf as love’s. It being the way it is, without justice. Justice has nothing to do with love. Justice has to do with business, money.
Fortunately time helps, she lies.
It doesn’t, is all he says. Most likely it will always be with you; bear that in mind.
You’re right, most likely it will, she says. I suppose you know what you’re talking about. Someone has left something behind inside him. No coming of spring can ever make amends. The cows that emerge first spill out through the doors, over the yard and across the road. Stiff legs verge on breaking into a thousand pieces, clouds of bonemeal under their bellies; the field, soft, sprouting its grass. What is it for. And to think one day you would sit here again, on the ground, where the stable used to be. An empty space now, with the sky falling down upon it. The cows don’t pay their way. Do I, she wonders. She calls him in Copenhagen. She gets back on her feet and walks through the city, and he lingers on every corner. While another lingers in her thoughts. And in his. And she finds herself thinking there will be more and more threads, they will be shorter and shorter, and unable to join up. And more long sentences discovered to be false. More short ones making sense.
Come, the leaseholder shouts, dragging the sliding door aside.
Come, she tells him on the phone. But he must stay in Copenhagen, he is needed at work; and his new girlfriend isn’t happy about us seeing each other, he says. About you not letting go, but otherwise I would, and so on.
A time, inhabiting the body.
A time for that, and a time for something else. A troubled month, or just a troubled night. A magnetic night. An overfilled bed, alone. So now this is where you are once more. And the ribbons of snow are the fan the cows were then; tight French braids, some voices, at least three, weaving in and out; sentences becoming shorter and shorter.
THERE IS A sunrise, occupying a stretch of time. Light, softening the horizon. Doing something to sound.
Branches, graphic silhouettes.
A sky, becoming a sky. Someone loses a shoe on the pavement, a shoe picked up and handed back.
Sit still.
I win a prize for having written something down in order not to forget what it was.
I win a prize and am resigned to the fact that you will never be interested in me. I am resigned to the fact that you will never be anything but interested in me.
The branches are black already, but the light against which they are seen makes it more apparent. That I have woken up too early and am standing here in my parents’ house, watching a sunrise as it mimes a sunrise past.
Aarhus Bay: a morning there.
The skerries, Sankt Anna Skärgård: a morning there.
I do not miss you, for I have yet to understand that you are there to miss. In other words: that you are not here. And now, again, the branches, cutting up the picture. A light that spills into the sky from below. A tea bag, seeping into a napkin.
Humility in the face of the kind of order for which one is no match. The thought that all this is temporary. The stables are temporary. My mother is temporary. Us living together during that period of time, and you beginning to doubt. You speaking the words out loud, without intending to. My life, forever in flux. An image segueing into another. A permanent state of transition—only a transition. The fact of insisting on something until one becomes ready to insist on something else. The tulips looking like they’ve come from a shop, when you don’t have me to arrange them.
You are
waiting for things to be different. You are waiting for this transition to be complete, of you learning to live in a place.
I can see, the way things are, that you cannot come. Because you are already here.
Or because you would want to stay.
BENEATH THE WINTER lies a wandering across the field. A walk through tall grass. Sandals, bare legs, dry meadow grass swept apart, to bow and break, and flatten like a tongue fallen out in my wake. A fleeting heel becomes an image trampled underfoot. Yellow cudweed, an island. And then: grass again, and self-seeded fir, hardly more than twigs, sticking out of the ground. That’s what they look like. But then this was before, I am ten years old and we have leased the land from the state. It’s August, and I don’t know if the willowherb can bloom at this time of year, but I remember the willowherb in flower, a curtain of troubled purple, strangling the brambles. That way round: the flowers strangling the brambles, and then in another image the brambles alone, blue fingers and red plastic bowls. It’s like the willowherb’s purple is the same as the fingers’, like the juice of the brambles reveals itself to be flowers, like the flowers have been pressed together into hard pellets, these berries, now ripe and sweet, and which too, well, reveal themselves. Eight kilos. And just as much sugar. And many more jars, and all the steam running down the windows. We see feet being lifted and placed in front of legs, and the grass as it bends and yeilds in front of us. Bare legs so briefly concealed from view, appearing again.
Walking across the field today, the creaking snow, walking there in summer. Yours being the eyes that see the soles of my feet. The landscape actually being you. You lying in a bed in Copenhagen, it being evening, and you lifting her hand from your chest once she has fallen asleep. Or just the thought of it. Or the thought of her walking through the same grass. Or turning round to see that no one has been there. I turn and look back. Between the woods and me lies the indiscreet snow, disclosing my path, disclosing something more besides. I don’t quite know what. You, perhaps. It could be you.
One of Us Is Sleeping Page 14