Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

I wake up with a snap abrupt as a wall, its beginnings a hesitation some hours after midnight. The wind switching to the east. The movement is an exact reflection of the slip of continental plates during an earthquake. Blankets of snow avalanching by turn. A shroud of matted marrow for the outer layer of the snow-cloak.

The sigh of the curly kale, its shelves of leafage.

Blankets that drop from plant cots.

An audible crashing-down. The smell of something giving way. Something else sinking slightly.

Crystal arms colluding with panes of glass, and something contracts and gathers in a droplet. A droplet plunges from the eaves to land upon the sunken head of a withered rose. The nod of the bush. My pillow has grown into my brain. She who is used to stained and lumpy pillows will fall asleep with her head in most any bony lap.

This infernal sound of droplets impacting and disintegrating. I wake up more fatigued than when I lay down to sleep.

ON THE LAST day of the year, my mother claps her hands in front of her chest, her eyes become tender mussels, orbs wedged tightly between lips of calcium. She enthuses — a rush of sibilants — about the grapes, Léon Millot, the ones she cuts in bunches from the vine in the greenhouse.

Being able to do such a thing. In December.

Winter all around. If this is not a miracle; if this is a miracle.

THAT WAS HOW I imagined it. That was what I wanted, to return here and to have a family of my own, in the village where we lived. The kind of face you see as you turn your head quickly inside an old house at evening, houses with such sounds .

There are images that will always occupy me. I have come to see them again, to be done with them again, or rather not, to not be done with them, ever. To continue being occupied. Continue staying , and yet leave.

YOU ARE PEELING an onion, you strike it hard against the chopping board and remove the outer layers with a large knife. Out in the yard they are slaughtering chickens. They ask me to fetch more boiling water in which to scald them, or polystyrene boxes to divide things up. A cow, half a cow. I vomit over the fence, into the pasture of sheep, my bile dangling like entrails in the windowed rectangles of wire, where it remains for some time before descending into the couch grass. Take her inside, someone says, and my mother smiles and comforts me. The onions, tenderizing in the pot. I find myself thinking you look like my father. You look like my father, I whisper. In the darkness you turn, sedated by fatigue.

What.

You look like my father, I say again.

They roll back to sleep. The kitchen sparkles, stars illuminate the bedroom. Can a room be dark and then so abruptly light without anyone having altered anything. The same stars in the sky, the same night.

You sigh; later, a whimper. To what kind of exile have you delivered me, your sleeping, sleeping body wonders, a wheezing enquiry.

What do you think. What do you want. But at the same time, I regret everything, approached by creeping nausea, the kind that reminds a person they knew all along and even savored the disaster’s unfolding. I have a penchant for catastrophe. There is comfort in the sun always going down. The fact that in a way there is no hope, you know it is what will happen, and we can do nothing to prevent it. Death. I pick up a couple of blankets from the lawn, the dew has fallen, I tell myself, and again I am doing this too late (this is the kind of thing that makes me doubt I am no longer a child, and wonder if I will ever be anything else).

We drive through the plantation to Svinklovene. The roads are uneven concrete, massive slabs split like clay plowed up and frozen overnight, in the first frost. Lie down here. And the covering of morning: the world hushed, only the rhythmic snap of the flaglines, pealing bells in the distance; and then we are at the harbor, some buckets put down in a basement somewhere, where washing machines idle — outside, everything is silent, like an odd shoe someone lost on the road.

Your body is accusatory, because I have taken you with me. That is your dream.

And yet you have no dream other than peace, so why blame me. Simple.

I SUPPOSE I had grown used to you, your being here; the sound of my own heart, the sound of a bush beating at the window all night, all day.

ONLY THEN IT wasn’t you who had fallen asleep, and me lying sleepless; but the sound of me alone in a bed, and you turning in your sleep, beside a body that cannot find rest, a single movement that connects us all; me, waking as you turn, another woman getting up. It’s not you, you will say; I just can’t handle intimacy right now. I need—

Space, I say.

It’s never one person leaving another; you leave each other, I think to myself. It takes place, a single movement; you have become one body, and this body falls apart. There is no blame to apportion, but accounts to be settled, and no one to send the bill to. All that I possess is yours. That kind of feeling.

The debts left by love. A single movement and you lose all, and must borrow everything. And thus it must all be carried about: everything that is yours, and all that you have lent out. A body like that.

SHE CAN’T REMEMBER beginning to love him, and she can’t remember stopping. The feeling doesn’t move like that, forward or backward. It exists, like a darkness that surrounds us, surrounding me. A desire for light, twenty-four hours a day.

Traversing the land to clamber up on Stabelhøj Hill.

The sky increasing in size, a sail unfolding above, the further one walks into the landscape. The cows are returning home, emerging from the pastures; it’s that time of day, and their swaying udders are heavy and sore, pressed between their legs, weeping milk; the swarming flies that crawl upon the air, that find a settling place in the corner of an eye, a groin. The calves say nothing, they are knees that bend, and stiff hind legs, stilts brushing the tautness of the udder. Jets of milk spatter the earth upon every glance, liquid lingering a moment, pearls of purest white in the couch grass, then absorbed by the clay-like soil, beneath clovers of only three leaves. The veins of the mottled udders: blue. A woodland in which to become lost, a landscape that is not dark, not only. One could contend that all pathways are luminous. A lattice of trellis-work visible, holding a miscellany of wishes in place. You nudge me, to make me turn onto my side.

That’s better, you say.

It’s as if our bodies have melted together in that position, all other bodies to come are perfect casts of: this. Too much or too little body. I can’t remember when we became more than two in this bed. But suddenly we were more, and I was someone else. Are you asleep, you ask.

IT’S RAINING, AS if there were a fire to put out, a steady downpour throughout the day, a recalcitrant blaze that will not succumb. When was rain ever a solution to anything.

THE FLIES ARE busy. They scurry across the walls of the kitchen, hasten across my sister’s hand. She lets the hot water run in the sink, on the empty bottles with their stoppers.

Her hand, a surface of skin gripped by flies, is at rest on the counter.

Her other hand is reddened by hot steam. She holds them up to the light in front of her, the way you do with bottles of red wine, to see how much is left. She lets out a sigh, and stirs the pot on the cooker. The third sister has put her foot on the counter and is mending her laddered tights with garish nail varnish. From a tiny point of origin on the back of her footballer’s calf, the ladder plunges toward the heel. Heavy drops of rain draw green streaks down the gray of the panes. The dripping from the tips of all the ferns after the rain. She closes her eyes and continues stirring briskly, so that her sister will not notice her and realize her disgust at the entire scene, the tableau of footballer’s calf, nail varnish, kitchen. Beneath her brittle ribs lies a conscience. On the cooker, she has shapely legs in one pot, elderflowers in the other. She always feels guilty about something.