One of Us Is Sleeping

by Josefine Klougart

  THE DAY DRAGS on. My mother sits down at a table, it’s mid-afternoon. Always some stack she needs to get through. That’s how it is with her, she works her way through her stacks, which grow while she sleeps, whenever she looks away. She monitors them well, but it’s no use.

  Everyone must sleep, once in a while.

  It’ll soon be dark, she says to me, meaning she wants me to go. I look up from my book, lifting one leg to gauge how tired they are. When you sit still you lose touch with your body. A humming noise comes from somewhere. I think about what it means to have grown up in a house ever pervaded by the sound of a clock. If it can make you ill. The church bells, ringing the sun up and down. If that’s why you move away. And because the thought never occurs to you that the sound might be stopped by means of some simple action. An electricity cable, who knows. I think to myself that the humming noise is perhaps simply the sound of a home, more like the sound of sand running away than that of the hands of a clock, fingers flicking through newspaper piles, the rustle of a bag of dry cat food, more the sound of a straw bale being dumped from a great height onto a concrete floor. A door opening, then closing again. And this continued movement is a counting down, that much home. So high up, and so close as hardly to be seen, hardly to be heard. For it has entered your flesh and being, and is now, simply, your eyes; to find that secret place where the mottled hen has begun to lay its eggs, to break those eggs into a bowl, to nudge aside such an angry fowl, or to have my mother do so instead. With big gloves on.

  And the knowledge that these movements are a counting down and not a counting up, and that you will need to remove yourself from all of it.

  One must establish a state of homelessness within the home in order to make room for oneself. And the eyes and the eggs and the brambles are there, and the sound of pellets of dry food clattering into metal bowls like a hail of buckshot, a shortness of breath.

  My legs are no more tired than usual. They are always tired. If you pause to sense how they feel, then I suppose that’s how they are. I stretch myself, the soles of my feet bracing against the armrest of the sofa. I relax, and the cat mimics my movement. Do you want out, I ask her, and she lifts her head, peers out at the snow falling—and simply sees. But she cannot, for she has always something else to be getting on with. Before she can eat, before she can sleep, before she can pause to sense how she feels. There is no room for her in such a life. And yet there is nothing else.

  Room.

  The cold light as it issues from the snow, all its whiteness, the winter tore at her face, a tinkling in the living room, like shattered ice in the swell, beneath a sun as pale as this. The crystal chandelier, hanging so still above the dining table, folders and documents strewn about like skinned animals, ring binders with gleaming metal ribs, a slaughterhouse with meat hooks that dangle from above, along the length of the ceiling, the page and the poem I have copied down. That’s how it feels sometimes: that creative writing has nothing to do with it. You copy down what is. There’s nothing mysterious about it, not a penny’s worth of imagination involved. The object is to become anaesthetized in order that one may be thriftless with the self, to see without the, well, what, exactly. Illusions. Stories. A wish to see the world as it is, here and now. Perhaps most of all to muster the courage to desist from creating narratives.

  When all sentences are hooks by which to barb the world. A pyre of nostalgia; when a home is a state of affairs, and you know it. Reconciliation with the transience of all things, the return home that resides in that. A realisation of flight, to flee, and escape being the only place in which to be; in all that is temporary, the only place upon which to stand. The only place that is stable and will not sink; an insistence on there being, for every locus of predication, every flag of adornment, a sentence that hasn’t the strength to keep up the pretence, the vanity; it’s like nature taking over, a birth, perhaps, is what it most resembles. How can a woman scream in such a way, how can anyone write something as hard.

  But maybe that’s the only thing you can do, when all else is: pulling the wool over one’s eyes, talking down to the world, talking down to you.

  How can a person speak that way, so cynically. But then it’s anything but cynical, anything but exactly that: cynical. Maybe it’s the only thing you can do. An open mind, advancing into the world. Either by paring away or else the opposite, by sewing the world together in patterns new and surprising; memory, conception, perception, reflection. Two movements the same; a desire to be able to see, and to say what there is.

  Perhaps it’s the only thing I can say: I love you. Nothing else but that. I don’t love you. Sentences like that are only true for a moment, uttered in a certain place. From here, this is true.

  A person speaking in love is the most touching of all things, if one is able. To accommodate. To sense the person within the words.

  My mother cannot go outside with me, her body convinces her a person can conclude a matter, that one’s life can be orchestrated in that way. She breathes deeply, a sigh of sorts, meaning no. As if I could have imagined differently, but this is my gift: to allow her to wince. In this way, my mother is forever a child overlooked. In this way, I love her. I must. The way it is choreographed in the spine. Someone has to do it the whole time, love her; maybe that’s a preposterous thought, but it’s the way I feel about it: that she deserves a constancy of love. And my father: what about my father. Where is he.

  I pull an orange knit-hat down onto my head and go out through the mudroom. Before the door even shuts I hear my mother call out behind me, asking me to feed the birds. I’m dressed for it now. I take the trash out with me and untie the knot of the bag. The garbage men haven’t been all week, they can’t get through the snow. Three full sacks up against the wall. I press the trash down slowly, not quite knowing if it’s because I’m scared there’ll be some broken glass; only I find myself thinking about some nice drinking glasses I once saw. Mouth-blown, I think, though I don’t remember where. They had a kind of knot halfway up the stem, like a knee. I wanted to have some, the glass was green, and even if you never saw them before you would recognize them when you did.

  The snow goes on. In Copenhagen, a thought to which I keep returning, in the cities of Paris, Vienna, rain and snow that cannot escape. There is no room. Water rises in the streets, snow compacts, layer upon layer. Advancing up the walls of the buildings, consuming floor upon floor. No one can breathe. Towers protrude, steeples. And children standing on top, with foxes on leashes. That image—the way they drink their tea or warm milk, expelling pillars of steam from their nostrils as they sit upon the tails of rooftop weather-cocks, attic-room apexes, sharing an orange in equal parts beneath the sky.

  I don’t know what it is about disasters that is so appealing.

  That is what I want. To sit there. Or lie there, buried alive. Windows shattering, one by one. Water gushing in, the way horses fill a stable. A frenzied struggle for life, and what rules may exist by which to win. A matter of he who has the most wins, I think to myself, and lift the lid of one of the two blue barrels of grain, shovel wheat and sunflower seeds into a bucket. Every seed and every grain, for the birds are waiting in the branches of the trees, and the garden has eight feeding stations. Eight is always the number. Eight paces between the feed store and the manger in the stable. Some things match up that way.

  We’re at your grandmother’s, my mother tells me over the phone, a month after we buried her.

  How long does a place go on belonging to a person.

  Does a grandmother cease to exist only when the heirlooms have been allocated.

  What does it mean, my returning home to a village where the leaseholder has pulled down the rectory stables.

  I replace the little roof of the birdhouse outside the kitchen window, and a moldered piece of cardboard drops out and lands in the snow. I pick it up and hold it between my lips as I put the roof back into place, then stuff it into my pocket. Everything is turning into something else all the time. I
don’t miss you anymore, have never missed you. I empty the bucket, upending it and striking it four times with the shovel. The snow contains a firmament in reverse. Dark spangles in the white. The footprints of a bird are another alteration of the picture. All the time, the landscape is new. All the time, there is something else one remembers. All that comes, and all that is lost. I have a feeling of homsesickness, but perhaps it’s not that at all. Perhaps it’s the opposite, a disconcerting sense of inversion. That my homesickness is actually a home, this magnetism a feeling of too much home, a face revealing too much belonging, a flailing, headlong plunge into a landscape in which to become. Become what, exactly. Invisible. Or simply oneself. Here.

  THE LANDSCAPE HAS torn itself away. Its constituent parts are in motion or else still and separate. The hill extends from the rhododendrons on the eastern side of the house to beyond the washing line and the oak trees along the boundary. A single sweep of slope. The field on the other side of the boundary, where the snow lies in elongated drifts, is another. A bonfire one summer, that you later understand to be a person. Laughter at the fact that you can spend your time eternalizing one thing and another. Art. Theatre, a conquest of land. And a feeling nonetheless of having a responsibility. They are removing soil from mushrooms with toothbrushes.

  She wonders if he can remember once having said to her that she had grown so thin, that her head seemed too big for her body. That she looked like an African.

  She recalls the way she squirmed in the passenger seat. It was hot, and the sun slanted into the car. The next time they stopped for gas, she ran into the restroom to look.

  She always focused on appearing to eat more than she did: I eat. She placed a bucket of cold water outside on the veranda in the shade. When they carried the things in from the car and unpacked, she put a carton of milk and a bag of frozen peas in the bucket and pushed it under the bench out of the sun.

  They drank fizzy drinks together outside, until the mosquitoes came and chased them in again. They woke up too early, or else they woke up all the time, never finding sleep; the place kept waking them up. If I was on my own here, she said to him in the night, I’d be miserable.

  So what are you now. Now that you’re here with me.

  She decided not to cry any more that night.

  He slept.

  Are you asleep.

  I won’t fall asleep until morning, she remembers thinking to herself. The place kept getting in through the tiny windows, insistent. And she didn’t sleep: at 6 A.M. she began to fondle his earlobe, blowing gently into his ear. His hand swatted out in sleep a couple of times before his body submitted and his eyes opened. Where have you been, she wondered, what dreams have you dreamt, she said. Mm, he said.

  She goes out onto the veranda and retrieves the carton of milk from the bucket. He comes out in his underpants and a sweater, wooden shoes on his feet, a bag of oats in one hand, a packet of raisins in the other. This is how they seat themselves on the bench. The milk carton drips onto the decking, then stands in its own pool on the table. It’s cold enough, he says, meticulously pouring a measured amount onto his oats. He eats like a ritual, sleeps in the same way. A change has taken place: what began as a singular exception has become a state of exception; which in turn has become a state of repetition, that has become an instance of love. Exception has become ritual, and the ritual is now quotidian. Love has become a ritual. Sex has become a ritual. What are we going to do today, he says. She thinks: survive. I was thinking of going kayaking, he says. Or maybe we could go fishing.

  Some time passes.

  Maybe, he repeats with a nod. Coffee.

  We’ll need to get the stove going, fetch some wood, and that.

  Yes, you’re right, he says. The wilds of Sweden, I’d nearly forgotten.

  The wilds of Sweden, yes.

  He slaps his arm. Mosquito, he says. She laughs.

  The wilds of Sweden, she repeats.

  And you didn’t sleep a wink.

  No, she says. You could say that. They laugh, and their laughter is recognizable from somewhere. From where, exactly, she doesn’t know, but recognizable, nonetheless.

  ALL KINDS OF things we said to each other that had already been said. I read out loud from a manuscript, and you listened, shifting uneasily. I have begun to doubt whether you actually understood that I was real. That I was there.

  I get the feeling I could become someone else. If I pulled myself together.

  But then it’s your feeling instead.

  You shiver in the sunshine on the shore. I pull a blanket up over our legs, lie down on my stomach again, flick back a few pages in Duras’s Moderato Cantibile. Start from there again. So now we are lying here. What is it that keeps postponing reality. That’s my feeling.

  Expectation and postponement, and nothing else.

  SHE PHONES TO cancel an appointment. What excuses might be valid. The body does not count. The weather does not count. Disasters count.

  IT’S SPRING ALREADY in Berlin, her father writes. It’s just the place to be.

  She writes back and says it’s nice to know that spring is on its way. That it’s nice to know they’re thinking about her, and that she is thinking, too—I’m thinking about you, too, a lot.

  The confusions are many. Sentences begin to doubt themselves. Mothers suspect they are less woman than other women, less mother.

  A bit like me, she thinks.

  A couple wrap themselves around each other and kiss, and think everything is for the first time. Roasted chestnuts, for goodness sake.

  ARE YOU COLD. They arrive back at the hotel, and he has been drinking. She pulls her legs up underneath her on the sofa and puts her head in his lap. Warmth, and the feeling of having a home in the midst of being away. I’m tired, she says. He mutters something back. Smooths his hand across her hair. Nudges her playfully. Be still, she whispers. Leave me alone, she thinks. He reaches for the remote and changes the channel. She closes her eyes; I don’t understand how you can be tired now, he says. He shifts her body, altering its position; placing it so as to give him room. She is so tired of wanting to be somewhere else all the time; it’s mostly that kind of fatigue that consumes her. And the next day there is a bird sitting on the railing on the decking outside. He wants to stay asleep. She lies there looking at the bird. She does not rise. It hops about on the railing. Flits down onto the ground, hops about there, as if searching for something. Other places. He doesn’t understand that a person can long to be home when they have no home to long for. I am here, what more do you want. That was what he said. Wasn’t that what he said. Quite without irony. But there is no logic in the world. Who told you that. That there is a logic of dreams. Whatever it might be. There is awake, and there is asleep, and neither of the two states cause the world to work by any principle of logic.

  She is tired all the time.

  She is awake again, she can never wake. No two things exist in this world that may be kept apart, she thinks. She gets up, her legs are stiff and sore from all her odd positions. She slides the glass door aside, so the place may enter. She lies down cautiously again. The bird wants in, but hesitates. It is transparent. One understands in some way what it is frightened of.

  THEY LIVE IN the last apartment block before the woods, where the detached houses begin. Do you remember the first time we saw each other, he asks.

  He beams.

  Yes, she lies.

  They are watching a French film that takes place in cold rooms. Beautiful women with dark hair. Water. You don’t need to know anymore. More doesn’t interest her.

  But you remember it best, she says, staring into the blue rooms.

  They live in the last block, before the city ends.

  All their furniture is hers. She remembers the first time she thought: if I leave him all he will have is an empty shell. He owns nothing except the apartment.

  The three actors kiss. All conceivable combinations are enacted. Albeit simply.

  They go to a bar and eat nut
s. As if nuts were a solution to anything. They drink themselves senseless, and full of life. So potentially lethal is how they understand themselves, that much is obvious, as if everything were a frenzied blur, only then it is the exact opposite. Immaterial.

  Do you want some tea, she asks.

  No, he replies, without considering.

  Do you want some wine, she asks.

  No, he replies. I don’t drink anymore, you know that. I’ve given it up.

  She gives a shrug, her skin is a stiff coat. She sighs and leans back in the armchair. She reaches to the shelf behind her, removes the cork from an already opened bottle with her teeth. Spits it into her lap. She pours some port wine into his empty water glass and uses that.

  YOU LOOK TIRED, my mother says as we finish the game. I tell her I’m pale because it’s winter. This is how I look when I have no makeup on. In winter. Are you sleeping well, she ventures, tipping the green marbles back in the box. They sound like cattle crossing a concrete floor. A downpour of hooves. A sense of many restless movements coming together in a sudden fever of activity. Earth trampled into mud, a concrete floor, foaming with sound. A cauldron of hooves, boiling over. I look out of the window behind her. The view of Lene and Henrik’s apple orchard, behind their house. As if it has never been disturbed.

  Is it three years now, I ask.

  Since what.

  Since Lene died.

  Yes, my mother says, too quickly. I look at her. She looks away. She sweeps my own marbles across the board, collecting them in the corner for red, unaware that she is trying not to think about her illness. It is something she does without volition, like a function of the body. She is enveloped by warmth, her cheeks flush, abruptly, as if suddenly she has caught fire. Reaching for the lid, she knocks over my cup. A tongue of tepid tea unfurls upon the table. We sit quite still and stare: it inches toward the edge. It trickles, and drips without sound. Tea soaking into the carpet. Calmly, I pick up the cup and get up to fetch a cloth. I shuffle, to keep the throw around my legs.