One of Us Is Sleeping

by Josefine Klougart

  I return, and my mother has not moved, not even her eyes. Her gaze is tethered by the little pool that has appeared on the table. The ceiling light reflects in it, but my mother’s gaze seems fixed on something beyond, beneath the tongue, beneath the pool. A wet table. I lay a dry tea towel on top, and my mother gives a start. She has left her eyes behind, I catch myself thinking.

  How clumsy of me, she says. Anyone would think it was me who couldn’t sleep.

  You’re not alone, I think to myself. Such sleeplessness does not make you pale and fatigued. As long as one of us is sleeping, and there is always one of us who can, and one who cannot.

  She puts the lid back on the box, and I feel the waft of air pass across my hand as she presses it into place.

  How’s Henrik coping. On his own, I ask.

  How does anyone, she says, as if to win time. He’s working again, at least.

  I nod. As if that were any indication. She reads something out. Knowing I already know and couldn’t care less.

  I think it’s tearing him apart, though, she says, and looks up at me. Her not being here anymore. It’s strange, isn’t it, that we survive each other like that. The way people go on living in the objects they leave behind. Things become so oddly meaningful. A wheelbarrow in a garden, a basket left under an ash tree.

  She shakes her head.

  You’re recovered, I say. Your treatment’s finished now.

  Yes, she says, and thinks me wiser than that. For it has only just begun, and will never be any different. One does not simply put aside a grief of such nature, it cannot be talked into submission, nor be vanquished by any conspiracy of silence. It’s like it is with you, like with all things momentous. They come back at you in a loop, and with increasingly greater force they kick the air from your lungs.

  I have a short list. The older I get the longer the list will become. You are on it. My mother is on it. The kind of days when you realize things will never be any different, that you have lost, lost, lost. When that is the way it sounds: three or four times in a row. Such a blow to the gut: you.

  Of course he misses her, he’s bound to.

  Of course, I repeat. I’ll go up and see if I can sleep, I lie. My mother has turned in her chair, is looking across at Lene and Henrik’s house, where an upstairs light is on. One only, upstairs.

  Alright, she says.

  Alright, she says again, and turns toward me. Good idea. Take the throw with you.

  A FUNERAL

  WE WERE TOGETHER. That was how I worded it. When I tell others about it, that’s what I say. We were together. Whatever that means. Whatever it might involve. A fear inside me that can be kept at bay like that, but then again. It changes nothing, one could just as well say the opposite about us. That we were never together. We lived together for a certain number of weeks, a certain number of months and days. So what happened, one might ask. What happened then was that we were no longer together. Perhaps the truth is simply that, that it will never be more complicated, always that simple: that you are together, or else you are not. It is not a matter of decisions and emotions, or anything in the way of agreement. It is the body that continues to have the final word. The tangibility of where you’re at in the world. Whether you are in a room together, or not in that room together. Our bodies make the arrangements, brains do nothing. The manager of the ice-cream kiosk at Svinkløv Badehotel, where I once had a holiday job, told me one afternoon when the rain was keeping everyone indoors that ninety percent of what we communicate is communicated by the body. But it’s not true. I know that now. Everything is told by the body. Our thoughts and words are all tied up in the body, in the lips, in the hands that tremble or lie still in the lap, when for instance there is nothing more to reach out for. All is movement or absence of movement. Something plummeting. Something else wandering across a landscape. A body wandering across a landscape, a thinking body, a living human being. As long as it lasts: life. One can miss a person, love someone, and yet leave them.

  And this, too—the insistence on being concerned, though not nostalgic. The insistence on grief, and on remaining within it.

  The insistence on possessing a body, quite simply that. Nostalgia purges the body, nostalgia steps inside one’s thoughts like a malicious guest, a sudden urge to frighten your sister—did you know you were adopted, that they didn’t want to tell you in case having no parents made you sad. Hateful incisions that force one to keep a cold compress—the fabric of one’s dress—in place over the flesh. And then the correction of that same urge. There is no momentum in nostalgia, one is unperturbed, having circumvented the body and the concern that is attached to having a body, to moving forward in time, forward across a landscape. Can a landscape terminate—can one go to the edge, step forward and fall; the collapse of a building, a cliff, animals. And the woods, they too, a downpour of rain, ironed clothing on hangers, the kind of day when it takes more than just that.

  To enter inside the grief and remain there. One might think that the backward step into the nostalgic is a harmless one, and for that reason that one can only be free of distress, without body. And yet I cannot think of anything more perturbing. To walk backward over the edge, divested of one’s body, to plummet without, and die as such bodiless. I will insist on being a distressed person within the world, continually coaxing nostalgia into my being, the struggle that is. To proceed backward and forward at the same time. Nostalgia comes of a fear of death, of simply not living enough, possessing emotions of sufficient depth. I wish only to try and see the emotions that are there; to remain in grief, and go back only in order to be here. Inside my own body, a ghastly face.

  I DON’T GET it, he says. I mean, if you still don’t want me.

  Are you having second thoughts, she asks.

  I’ve always had second thoughts, he says; I never left you.

  Okay, she says, picking up her bag from beside her chair. She thinks about her, whether he is seeing her now, or if it was just fascination, the way he said.

  Okay, he says, acquiescing, collecting himself like a shattered glass, walking through the city in that way. Picking up shards as he goes, dripping through the streets, gashing himself relentlessly.

  She thinks to herself that it is perhaps not a fascination with another person, more a dream of something else, something existing that can do that to a person, render one’s body free of distress. That such a wish can destroy so much.

  She loves him more than ever before, slowly relinquishing their being together.

  SAY SOMETHING, TELL me something, he says.

  Have you seen the snowdrops over there, she says, with a nod toward the trees in the park.

  And there, in the flowerbeds, he says. So many signs of spring now, you dream of them at night and in the day they make you ill. She nods. She understands what he’s talking about.

  And in summer it’s the heat, she says.

  You dream of it at night . . .

  . . . and in the day it makes you ill, he joins in.

  Exactly.

  She asks him: Do you know that feeling . . . like there’s a predominance of things you remember that will hardly leave you alone. In the spring. Because it reminds you of so many things. Other springs. Other people you used to love, she thinks to herself, he thinks to himself.

  He looks at her and she cannot gauge the look in his eyes, cannot tell if he is angry or impassive. And then she knows what it is. A spectrum of colors contracting into a beam of cold light. A look that could cut glass.

  Yes, he says, inquiringly. Is it something you want to talk about. Is that what you want. Is that really what you want. That’s what he thinks, she knows he does.

  She lowers her gaze. They are seated on a damp bench, her skirt is wet, her jacket, unlike his coat, not long enough to protect her thighs. She sits there, and tells him too much. The jealousy, what it does to her.

  What is it you miss, she asks herself. Seated there, four, maybe five useless thoughts in her head. I was never even happy whe
n we were together. What’s different now. Everything’s the same, only worse. Because both of them are older now; we are older now. It only makes things worse to have grown older and wiser and still be making the same mistakes. The dawning realization that it will never be any different.

  He gets to his feet, scuffs at the ground. She wants to go back to the apartment. I’m going home, we can talk another day.

  I OFTEN HAVE such thoughts, of being able to go home. Snow has fallen again. Not much, but all the windows are edged in white, the rooftops upholstered. That kind of wrapping up of bodies and objects. I have no desk at which to work, still no desk. I think it might make a difference. If I had a desk to work at. Then I could get to my feet and leave it, on a Friday afternoon, for instance. Today, I could get to my feet and let the books be a job. Go home to something else. To something other.

  Whatever that would be.

  I feel guilty about not having a proper job, but every time I try one, every time I have a job, all I can think about is going home.

  A proper education. A proper person. As if some people are more legitimate than others, or as if you only get to be a legitimate person in time, by choosing a path and doing something. In which case children, for example, wouldn’t really count. Women neither, perhaps, in theory, at least not on an equal footing. And the unemployed, the homeless, they wouldn’t either.

  The age in which we think we live. I always have this feeling: it’s different than the one we think.

  My body works constructing the images, bodies working like pistons. Hands working like pistons. Melting snow with traces of rust in old window frames is real. I arrive at a reading, only then to leave again, unable to bear being present. I leave early, like everyone else I feel like the only survivor in a plane crash. To be outside of something, the whole time, excluded.

  WE AGREE ON a casual meeting, and your face tries to convince me our seeing each other is innocent, rather funny, in fact. When something is presented in that way, I think: it is neither. Not innocent, not funny. There is nothing innocent about concealing something from a person of whom one is fond. It’s not about feeling, or the absence of feeling. Love, or the absence of love. It’s about saying I love you in one room—and it being true. And the next minute, in another room, to another person, saying the same thing, quite as truthfully. I love you. Not to superimpose the two images, or declarations of love; not to see the image become blurred and nauseating, the way it does. Devoid. To be able to erect a wall down the middle of oneself, down the middle of one’s language, so the two utterances are accorded their own chambers, there to rest unchallenged, by anything but absence. Parallel lives and nothing but open doors, possibilities.

  What to be done with possibilities.

  And this, recurring—I wouldn’t want. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone.

  No matter how much you narrow your eyes you will see a different reality than the one they see; the maddest of enterprises. And it has nothing to do with love or the absence of love. Children, removing goldfish from their bowls, dabbing them dry and putting them to bed under the sheets. The desire to see vistas, open landscapes; fir trees felled, though bearing lofty nests with speckled eggs inside, close to the trunk, vertical meters of collapsing life.

  A person can suffocate from not being able to see far, you tell me, though meaning: I want to see something else.

  I’m not sure, but I think it was here that the thought first came to me. That those who leave us will be our judges in the end.

  I DECIDED TO wheel my bike home, for once having the feeling that everything in the world was going too fast. The flagstones barely had time to lay themselves down beneath my feet. I remember having to focus in order to believe they would be there for me. Sound, too, can have that kind of delay, I thought. Emotions, too, perhaps. A bit like thirst: you don’t know you’re thirsty until you start to drink.

  Later, some months later, I’m sitting outside the same unlikely apartment buildings, on the same bathing jetty at Islands Brygge, wondering if I ever was in love with you. The first winter and the first summer. Whether I actually came to love you. I don’t suppose I did. But always I had the feeling you could save me.

  You probably still can, in a way. If I changed—if I became another instead of the tedium of more and more myself.

  I may be sentimental, but I’m not half as nostalgic as you.

  Even if you can no longer pick out the moments you live for, you can pick out those you live in spite of. That might be a comfort of sorts. At least, it’s the way I try to look at it.

  THEY WALK UP the uneven street. She tucks her arm under his. One of their numerous attempts that summer.

  Because now it’s different—because we’re wiser now.

  He indicates a café, she gives a shrug. She finds a table inside while he orders coffee.

  I’ve been thinking about you and objects, he says. The way it makes you sad if you break something.

  She looks up at him, thinking. Does it, she says after a pause. Her fingers have come to a halt. Maybe it does. I don’t know, I suppose I’ve never felt it made sense whenever my parents said it’s only an inanimate object. As if you weren’t allowed to be sad. Prohibiting grief deemed to be irrational. What kind would be left, then. If we reject the grief that is out of proportion. Surely we can’t distinguish like that. Isn’t it all a matter of death.

  Death, she repeats.

  He thinks: you and your drama. And he loves her then. She can see that. He puts his hand on top of hers, her unsettled hand.

  She can see the other woman like some strange fungus in his eyes.

  She picks up his cup of coffee and blows into it a couple of times before drinking a sip. Maybe that’s why he’s unable to move on and love someone else. Because recollections always intrude. Every time he is on the verge of loving, truly loving her, or the other woman, he finds he can’t.

  Not forgetting or not loving, it’s all the same to him.

  It’s the only way she can look at it; there are those who love, and those who do not. Those who can, and those who cannot. And then there is the tragic group, those who can love, but do not. Because they get confused, they mistake things. Forgetting something and choosing something.

  He must make himself blind to imagine that he has now moved on, that he was able to forget; what kind of a person was it then he had to offer. Blind and deaf, and without a past.

  The guilt of remembering something, remembering her, in the face of the new woman.

  The guilt of being something oneself.

  And now he is trying. He must not talk of it, but refrain from mentioning everything about which he thinks, her, about whom he thinks, and then everything will be all right. Albeit for the nausea of being so thoughtless; but then one will always have thoughts.

  She sticks a hand in her pocket and rubs the key with her thumb, feeling for its teeth as the tongue feels for a sore in the mouth, passing tentatively across unfamiliar flesh.

  I shouldn’t drink coffee, he thinks. It’s always the same whenever he drinks coffee; it makes me depressed.

  You shouldn’t drink coffee, she says casually.

  You’re right. I get so . . .

  . . . troubled, she says.

  Yes, he says. That’s it: troubled.

  SHE WAS IN her nightdress. She went down the stairs, in this long nightdress, it had peacocks on it, she tells him, at least I think they were peacocks. Or were they; yes, peacocks. Eight in all, if you counted all the way round. With tail feathers interlaced, shimmering colours, though dulled by age. I always thought those real peacocks, the ones in the pen at Toggerbo when we went for drives in the evening, or in the autumn when we went mushrooming there; that those peacocks were somehow wrong. That their colors were too strong. Too dark.

  He nods. Perhaps thinking she ought not to reminisce all the time, spend so much energy remembering.

  The consternation of remembering.

  The consternation of not.

  TH
E LANDSCAPE

  BUT THE SNOW. The way it keeps falling. My mother pulls a tea bag out of the pot. She presses the last drops of liquid from it, on the edge of her plate, then lifts it across the table with a hand underneath to protect the tablecloth; her hand is a shadow on a lawn, beneath a sky, faithfully following along over the landscape. She nudges a piece of gingerbread cake to the side of her plate so it doesn’t get wet.

  What is it you wanted to get done; what does the snow prevent you from doing.

  Blankets of snow, falling in different bands; how much wind, how big the flakes. Overlapping belts of white.

  A way of traversing a landscape.

  A way of smothering the sound that exists; the sound of snow falling.

  Plans, and work postponed.

  We have snuggled into blankets. Now it is she who frowns and leans across the table. On the first day of the summer holidays she plaited our hair into tight French braids so the salt water wouldn’t ruin it. Or so she didn’t have to set it all the time; every time an elastic slipped off a ponytail, whenever the water turned hair into a slippery rope. With the tip of her index finger she turns a glass marble on the board, making the light reflect differently in its streaky color.

  Is that mine.

  Uh huh, I say. She picks it up and moves it in an arc over the board. A planet in its inevitable orbit. Then lowers it into a space there, as if to prove a point. Or to apologize.