Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

DISTANCE HAS SHORTENED everywhere, no longer as far from one place to another since they cleared the trees. I go left, down through the wood that is no more. I think of you, decide to call you, but then to wait until later. That feeling I have: of always holding you off. I wonder whether the sentence can be inverted: if you have always held me off. And I — whether I took something in advance that ended up being canceled. I follow the stream, through the snow. I can’t be on my own anymore, and I’ve only just started. It has nothing to do with strength, or lack of strength. It’s about what makes sense. A friend writes me a letter, on this day of all days, he writes that you can’t love a person who cannot love. I know he’s thinking: because it ruins you. I’m not sure who I’m thinking about. Dead man. New man.

One kind of gravity colliding with another, that’s what it is. Being home, and being nowhere at all. Being somewhere you know, without recognizing a thing. I walk the path into the woods. The hills are older, the woodland has advanced all the way up to the vertex; bald, sandy earth.

Does it mean anything, me walking here.

Maybe it means: you are walking here. No more than that. I want to call you, but I want never to call you again. The feeling that wells in me is of a celebration canceled. A number of people want to love me but are not allowed. A number of people cannot, or lack the courage. It doesn’t matter. All there is here is this acute lack of home. The trees are bare, oak, I think. Yes, oak. A low carpet of self-seeded evergreen advancing to the trunks. They look frightened, as though, being caught red-handed on the point of some shameless deed, they lost their crowns in panic. You use me for thinking. I don’t know what use I make of you, apart perhaps from survival. There is no one in the twilight here to notice that the trees and their crowns don’t match. Evergreen and deciduous are different. And still I don’t doubt that is what has happened: panic arisen among the trees, and sudden autumn. Leaf fall, a carpet of needles around the lower trunks, the feet of the oak.

BECAUSE LANGUAGE IS not innocent, but fire and weaponry. One wages war with words, risking all the time to fall into bed with the enemy. I’m not sure now, but that’s what I thought when I got up and saw a boat come though the canal, towing the morning behind it on a rope. I’m not sure either if there is any pleasure in not being compelled to do something. And more generally: pleasure surely has little to do with such a thing as freedom.

SHE WAKES UP at his feet. Stares straight into them. She is lying on her side, and his feet are towers toppled in front of her collapsed eyes.

Her face is twisted askew and is made of dry clay.

Her face, fallen.

So big were his feet, then. So cold the room. He must have opened a window in the night. She remembers nothing of it. What she remembers is them not being able to reach, neither of them could reach. And then this: that he once lifted her up so that she might line the frames with shards of glass. To keep someone away, keep someone out.

The balloons are tired and shrunken after the party.

How distant it seems now: the celebration. And how unreal in this honest light.

He blocks out the sun with his foot. His feet have always been big, it strikes her now. Probably he is of another opinion. They see things differently, though mostly they are one body, one thought.

Look, she says.

He turns his heavy head toward her, a mechanical action, and she sees him against the light, a mane of hair edged by a nimbus.

His throat is a well, a rope hangs from the pulley, clutching a dismal zink bucket. Tomorrow once again, it will batter the lining of his infected gullet.

A wind howls in the well.

Her mouth fills with feet and jealousy.

If this is courage; this is courage.

She points, as well as she is able. Pokes a finger out in front of them. And it is as if he will not believe her; the little tug on her hand.

Come on, he says. Let’s go home, let’s go home where it’s warm. The lake here will be dark soon. There are so many good reasons that only one needs mentioning. The dark, for instance. The others queue up in the mind, too many by far, like figures on the platform in Berlin, so many people soon to break up and be crammed into railway carriages. His woolly hat, always riding upward and back, and he, always pulling it down over his ears again unaware.

He puts his hands in the well to defrost.

Come on, he insists, and does not see the carp. They hang suspended in the frozen lake beneath them.

Carp-mouthed carp, the silver of scales.

She is more beautiful than me, she thinks, and collects her saliva, spits on the ice, and finally they go. The thought of it will not leave her, her spit descending through the ice like a drill, twisting its way ever down, a drinking straw of fish, a leggy man diving for pearls, to save up for the sake of some later amusement.

I GET OUT of bed and stand naked in the blue light. My feet seem unnaturally flat. It’s like the original and the acquired have changed places. My heeled sandals missing, the soles of my feet are admitted to the floors.

THE APPLE TREE runs in through the window and along the hall. Its branches are trailing flames. The apples bruise against the walls.

The storm has woken me up.

The different sounds of the apples. The frozen red ones. Those succumbing, those rotten.

Branches swipe at furniture, stab at the pictures. The blue lithographs sway like street lamps, they buffet the wall, in the way of unknowing birds whose wings have been clipped. Helpless and inept.

If I can’t identify the moments I live for, at least I can identify those I live in spite of.

Nature is disturbed by winter. I am, too.

MORNING HAS COME abruptly. Spring has arrived without them having noticed. Again, we are caught napping. She comes home and is quiet at the door as always. She knows to be silent. Her mouth is open, throat gaping, the air may come and go from her body as it pleases. Without sound. Her body is partition walling inside the apartment. She lifts and pulls the door toward her, turning the key gently, that certain way it must be opened so as not to creak. She is well inside the hall before she sees him. He is standing there, awake. Wanting to walk in the woods.

Good morning. Where does that smile come from. He walks beside her on the path, whose exultant green almost chokes on itself. They pass behind the amusement park, Tivoli Friheden, where everything as yet stands dripping the cold of night. Equal parts expectation and fatigue. And the leaves in the wind: a sound like gravel being raked.

He smiles, and she sees him against the light. He stands in the kitchen, an infant sun swelling behind him. Someone has moved the clouds. The traffic sounds different, the tire-noise belongs to brighter spring, brighter summer. In the summer you can hear the warm snap of asphalt.

She pulls off her running gear and showers. Reluctantly, she applies an extra layer of mascara. They walk in the woods, the anemones have pushed through the earth, are yet to unfold, though their buds are fat and glistening green. The light is unreal and renders everything: unreal. He talks, ignited with enthusiasm. His hands, his energy fill the entire clearing by the lake. She wonders if he even sees the woods. And if he does, whether they disappoint him, whether he will feel let down if he should look at them. An enthusiasm that renders everything unreal.

Someone told him about nature and now they are walking there.

The leaves have heard about the light, they unfold and present it to them. She waits for someone to extinguish him again. They will never be one with nature, but still they walk. It is as if the woods may be translated into portents and predictions.