Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

SHE REMEMBERS CHANGING her mind. The image was too arresting, maybe he would be frightened by her, and imagine her without skin.

She puts the phone down and feels like a traveler in shoes. In a land where shoes are unknown.

I STAND, RELUCTANT, beneath a feverish sky. Between the mountains: blood and fire, the evening sun melting onto every surface. The lake and your forehead, and my weary leather boots on the newspaper at the side of the house. Afternoon was just before, now a plunge into evening, then night. Waves, breaking. A darkness here, like a white sheet thrown into the air and straightened into place on top of furniture in the seaside hotel of autumn; absence (perhaps you already feel the absence); the way it runs amok; a sheet draped over a sculpture that is now finished, about to be unveiled. A sheet drawn out across the world; a bag pulled down over the head of circumstances .

I have fallen into doubt as to whether I can ever let you go. Leave you. Maybe I can.

Again, you look like you’ve locked yourself out and have just remembered the key on the kitchen table.

We say nothing, but walk together. Which isn’t really like us at all; to simply walk and not speak. People who knew us when we were together, that summer we kept on leaving each other, would say: you talk, talked, your entire relationship into the ground. My sister said that.

You walk oddly, like your legs have become loose, like your feet have been put on wrong. At the same time, you are serious. You smooth your hair away from your face all the time. Your hair is longer, that must be it. But I know it’s for my sake. As if what you do with your hand, your hand passing through your hair, is for me.

It’s part of a new and better you.

Maybe that’s it. It doesn’t need to be complicated, we’re not that sophisticated.

I stood preparing a fish, chopping leeks and carrots, the kitchen looked like a vegetable garden. You had been working on your thesis while I was at the allotment. I’d handed in my final assignment to the university, you were behind, the way you linger. The slimy trace of a snail on the asphalt, a morning in summer, later, the slime glistens in the early light; then we’re back with you, being able to share such an image. The sun, scintillating in the slime. You come into the kitchen, step up behind me and start kissing my neck, my throat, I remember laughing: I’m busy, my hands are full—

Of fish, you said, cutting me off.

I mean it, I said, later. Only it never was later, only words snipping something into pieces, negotiation, in a country with no real currency. Everything is silent negotiation, in a language you don’t understand. You talked too much, my sister says one evening. I wipe my nose on my sleeve. I shrugged, but the gesture could not be seen for body, a slightly shuddering body, sobbing intermittently. No, I said eventually, I don’t think so.

Now I’m no longer so sure, it might be true, who knows. That, too. Language is never innocent. Conversation isn’t always a good thing, time and again shared understanding is revealed to be some joint decision to let go and let the mind be lazy. Not much reaching for the sky in that.

I THINK WE’RE supposed to think back on the years we had together, and I think it’s meant to be sentimental. The fields want that, the shiny dishes of windswept snow polished silver; it’s like I’m thinking too clearly. I have a vivid sense of the movement that has taken place. A displacement: from love to dependence, to an expensive loan and a reward, dead or alive; and at the end of it all we walk here amid a landscape of winter: disenchanted, big ideas fallen apart. All is conclusion. Spent fireworks in the snow on New Year’s Day are a conclusion. The Stone-Age dolmens scattered across the landscape are conclusions. The birds, surviving in spite. The folded sky above Aarhus Bay is a conclusion. Icicles on the fencing, conclusion. Bleeding hearts, bleeding abrasions, bleeding regret: all of it, conclusion. Blood itself, the gray-red lining inside everything living here; the people with their bodies, indoors, wild horses couldn’t drag me out into that — a conclusion.

But the fact that we are walking here anyway is another matter; madness.

I SLEEP ALL through the night, a sleep that is a wading through deep snow. Knees lifted high when the mantle of ice cannot support you. Snow is new only once, then never more. You can’t smooth it out and start again from the beginning. It’s winter now. According to the calendar this is no crime, and yet that is exactly what it is, a crime. My joints creak, as if wrung from frozen, crystal dust about my knees. I lean out of the window and see the way the trees thrust from the ground like cold, blackened hands. The garden looks abandoned. The birds are busy stealing from one other. I think about the remarkable things that can occur. One morning you wake up without that feeling in your stomach, that sense of emptied , something collapsing. Perhaps you then get up, drink a cup of tea, realize it smells of something other than back then . And the day is no longer — insurmountable. You are no longer, not only , a half. You perhaps realize that you have grown. The days that had seemed so without nourishment, a frozen, sandy soil out west, empty ground; you’re no longer the same, and it strikes you: you are someone else, and bigger. It’s like your person, the person residing inside your body, has grown older and younger at the same time. More fragile and yet stronger. Certainly more attentive to the world that is .

I think I am beginning to love something that was .

I KEEP THINKING about the red apples that nuzzle the sky.

I have an idea I might write about them. The clash of bright red apples and a broken sky. The fact that they remain on their tree, stubbornly, deep into winter, a time to which they do not belong, an irregularity in the composure of the seasons. An anomaly, in every respect.

I HAVE COME to Jutland, and you have come after me. It is Christmas, or sometime in January, you are on your way to visit family, your excuse for stopping by.

I came on the train and arrived late. The whole house smelled of soapsuds, of celebration, and something like hysterical expectation. The way it smelled on the morning of a birthday.

My mother is exhausted, but alive.

This is the kind of assessment we make these days. My father is more exhausted than alive, though fleetingly lit with joy on seeing me. He is so proud I can only give in. The problem with families arises immediately: a sense of annoyance, punctuated by guilt on the same account. The emotions you feel not being the same as the ones you had anticipated feeling. Anger at not simply being able to love. How hard does that have to be. To love those who are there for you, those who once more will tell you: we’ll always be here for you.

The frightening suspicions you can get. The thought of having been mixed up at birth, of not properly belonging here, where I so obviously belong, the place I come running to whenever the world tightens its grip around my throat. The span between the feeling of being loved without condition and being loved on condition of all manner of things. The intangibility of that.

Just because someone is willing to die for you doesn’t mean the grave lies gaping and in wait of its first opportunity. To bury one’s parents is an impossibility, they are pillars before your eyes, they speak out of your mouth, and no matter how far away you remove yourself you will always be able to find your way home. Whatever that may be. A place in the world, or perhaps completely outside of it.

The fear of squandering it all and returning to nothing, an empty pit. A site of something that was. Because you turned into another, behind your family’s back, behind your own.