Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

I forgive you everything; my body remembers it all. Going on is impossible; so, seemingly, is escape. It’s already too late: when we met we died in each other’s arms, in that very place; we died by that very look.

We drank each other like semi-poisonous drinks. Unthirsty. That is, I kept you until later. A later that never came; there was always something fatal about it. The truth is: perhaps there was something else too, though who can keep such things apart. That which is fatal, and, well, how to put it, love, perhaps. Serenity, perhaps, a home. It all short-circuits, thick belts crackling across the landscape: love, and something that can hardly be called love at all.

The fatality of that .

What you saw never being what you will ever see, those tiny disappointments, a thirst in need of a throat, following after us like a pack of stray dogs. And all the time the idea of what might have been: begging dogs, whenever you move to get up from a table, or leave through a garden gate, the past is waiting there. Undead, and not even past.

How naïve I’ve been, I think to myself. Or rather: how lonely. How closely I scrutinized , how clearly I saw it all in my mind — all that nearly was. The person who could love, almost; this almost-love, forever postponed, something else in its place. What, exactly. Reality. Whatever that is. Yours, I suppose.

WINTER. THE SNOW rumbling in still, without sound. Sometime after Christmas, I’m not sure.

The snow. That has laid itself upon it all, all that dares to remain exposed for more than a few seconds at a time, upon everything dead and everything living; the living and the dead; the violet stalks of the Brussels sprouts stand askew, keeping their balance in the broken rows of the vegetable garden, packed in by snow, as old wine bottles are encapsulated by melting, then stiffening candle wax, and the snow falls with the drowsy resolve of that image.

Obstinacy all around. We can’t go anywhere. We are inside a house, and the house is a giant corpse. We lie here and wait, beneath the skin. Movements are agitated and take place indoors. Outside only when something compells one of us: to fetch wood for the fire, feed the birds, clear a path. Outside there is only snow and the flies. True, the fattest of the flies are survivors.

The roasting trays are by turn hot and cold. We girls stand and stare, crane our necks beneath the ceilings. Fledgling birds. Our mother, nearly burning the bread. It can still be done, in the old oven. Her lips tighten and she winces at the sizzle of wet cloth, the only thing she has time to put between her fingers and the hot tray. She burns herself, the skin blisters: the things I do for you, she says, a wry smile. The water runs from the tap, I am horrified. The two sisters each understand more or less than me, who understands exactly what is required to see the fatality of it, in that sentence. Blisters.

Nothing to be worried about, she says, comforting me, in that way. She means it, and yet her words are a weight to haul back into the boat, the clothes of the men are heavy with water, and we must sail on. Once more an about-turn; we always comforted each other in reverse ; when I need comfort, when she does.

I think I looked utterly distraught.

The warm filling runs out of the sweet Shrovetide buns. The recipe book lies open on the table, Karolines Køkken . The filling of the buns, vanilla, and these rich yolks. I spell out the words on the title page, the Dairy Association’s recipe series, the oddness of the subtitle, Oh, Freedom —someone must have been thinking of heaven, or something quite like it.

Sunday mornings at the Thorup Dairy. My eyes watering at the muslin cheesecloths, the dairymen slicing the blocks with wires. You can work in the dairy when you grow up, my father says to me. Perhaps that’s where it comes from: the idea of your parents, for all that, not knowing you better. The disappointment of them not seeing the gravity of it. He hands me a slice of cheese, draped over his fingers, and I remember thinking of dog ears, the same feeling of body about it.

I hated the smell of sour milk, the swarming cheese. An army of holes. And I wanted to go in and yet not for anything in the world, to go in. The wind from the sea across the road sweeps across the parking spaces and me, a mad dog thrashing in its chains, I shake my hair and drag a comb of fingers across its ribs before clambering into the rear seat.

The bread has risen immensely, its back split open like a wound. The bread, the comb of its broken spine.

An old friend she has forgotten and suddenly recalls. My mother. She misses him, repeatedly. I’m not sure.

My lips are cracked. My thoughts.

My mother ties our hands behind our backs with her eyes, goes from the oven without closing it first; the oven issuing its heat into the kitchen. We try not to look each other in the eye. We glance about the room, our eyes are darts whizzing about the bread and the leaking filling of the Shrovetide buns as it sizzles on the tongue of metal.

The mother returns to her young in the kitchen again, interrupting them with her example: look, my wounded hands, she says. Holding them out in front of her. So that her offspring may inspect. The fledglings gather on the finger branches. They nod.

The tips of her fingers are swathed in band-aids. Ten little brown boxes on skin-covered bones. Their mother’s hands, at least one joint in excess, as with each of her arms, each of her legs, shins, lower arms. And her bottom lip is twice as big, she has doubled in size.

Her hair is thick and glossy, wet slabs of molded blue clay. Her beaded bracelets rattle as her young once more look away. She is melancholy for three days, then busy for three, but her love is the same every day, quite insane and far more durable than anything ever before seen in this world. Her remaining . Something rare in that, that choice: remaining until—

Until what, exactly. Until the end. Until it no longer makes sense, until she is abandoned by us or by our father or by the feeling that in spite of everything there is meaning in the madness, the victims.

She puts bread and sweet buns in the freezer for the birthdays in spring. Her children were born in March, April, and May. If she’s to be believed.

Sometimes I’m not sure, she can be so absorbed .

There is a fundamental lack of credibility about busy people, the way they insist on besieging dates and days and half-nights, annexing the world like that, colonially, with their own bodies. Come home for Christmas. Come home in good time.

Later, I’m like that myself, it’s what all of us grow up to be, all three of us, in part, at least. At best there’s something naïvely mendacious about that kind of vigor. At worst it’s calculation, thinly veiled. So many important dates. So many children and even more mouths to feed and navels from which to pick the fluff. Giddyap, giddyap, all my horses!

Always this wish to be just as busy. As decent as our mother; we are watermarked. Maybe one day just like her, without these grubby, rural fingernails.

But our cuticles resist. My nails collect dirt. Earth is what they want.

I bring in some wood, a bustle of activity. A few seconds is all, and then a pillar of salt.

THE GOLD-THREADED bristles of a carcass poke up windswept, to be tumbled over the cloak of snow. So coarse, encapsulated each by frost, and the ice cap’s desolate.

A slothful movement in the snow. Most things have given up and lie still. A slightness of motion every ten seconds. The world is giving a ball, and at each round an animal is selected, or a tree, or a person, who must leave the stage and retire to the wings with ears blushing. The ones who didn’t move. Wrapped in hide of bison. The birds are in panic. No leaves remain to return the sound of their beating wings. No socks hung out to dry on the line, the metal hearts of the clothespins are glazed with pristine ice, frost blooms by turn on blue and red plastic. Posing arms of crystal. There is nothing like the echo of a world such as this.