Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

Only they can’t.

He is at least three different men, and she at least three different women.

YOU’RE SMILING, HE says, concerned. As though arriving home unexpectedly to find a table set for a candelit dinner.

Am I, she says.

She sits quietly, as if under a sky towering above fields at harvest, a cape of metallic blue to shroud the corn as it positions itself for the angry work of machinery.

AFTER EVERYTHING, HE visits.

It is afternoon, the weather is amazing. We ought to be out, she thinks. Nice chairs. Things you’re familiar with. There are some clothes on her bed, some cupboards gaping, and all these books splayed apart. Look at this place, he says, and laughs. He says it’s good to see she can allow herself to relax now. With things like that.

But it’s my face you’re talking about, she thinks.

It’s her face he’s talking about.

SHE IS STANDING in the kitchen, looking out onto the courtyard. Or else she is in her parents’ kitchen, the budgerigars unsettled in their cage. The hedges are full of spring, the season resides now in the tiny feet and beaks of titmice and blackbirds. She descends into the cellar and retrieves the sun lounger. She finds blankets, and takes her duvet outside as well.

It’s still too cold for anything, really. But still a person can lie down here, wrapped up in woollen blankets and duvets, in a spot of sunlight. There is sky, and there are windows cleaned, and nothing, but nothing in the way. The clouds travel across their backdrop of blue, and yet in an upward motion, ever more distant as one draws in the air. A shudder runs through your ribs, a feeling of demasking, a promise in all things — of clarity. No more talk. Everyone stops talking, work is done: sounds of a city at work. Posts hammered into the ground, duvets shaken in the air, the clatter of sundry objects dropped from balconies, the thunder of beaten rugs, a clicking of tongues, children reluctant to go back in and eat. And tomorrow the rain may come and draw its herringbone across the road in front of the house as drains gurgle. And he will perhaps be standing under the trees. As though waiting to be consumed . By nature. Because he is missing something and doesn’t quite know what.

HE SAYS:

Sit down here a minute, meaning:

Summer is over, and the thought is unbearable. The apples, bright as eyes in the tree, little heads dangling from a belt. Summer, leaving without paying.

HER GAZE SWEEPS over the lawn. It picks something up. A little case of some sort. A bag of ripe redcurrants. The greenhouse perspires in a corner of the garden. The stalks of the tomato plants wilt after a long winter. You say there is nothing like tomatoes picked when red and ripe. The ones you buy in the supermarket are a different thing altogether. She borrows a car and drives out to the allotment gardens. No one has been there for ages. Perennials lie upon the ground. A single sunflower left standing, stalk broken under the weight of the head’s heavy disc. Four wrinkled tomatoes hang bright as Japanese lanterns. Some things that need distributing between them. Everything that never turned out. Everything that never happened .

I DON’T THINK I want to move, she said. She remembers the way he lifted his head from his book and stared at the wall before turning round in the swivel chair and looking at her.

No, was all he said.

I’d have to sell the allotment.

He nodded, that was all.

She remembers thinking about a train, a train of non-sound, passing through a room like theirs, like light.

Then stay, he said. But I’m moving.

He barely packed a thing. She more, though not much. They leave each other without being able. A transition into something else. Doors unslammed. They have done this behind their own backs and realize only gradually that something impossible has taken place. The way it does, all the time.

SHE WAKES UP with the feeling of needing to go home. She tries to slither out from underneath, to rise from the bed without him noticing. She moves his left arm, which lies draped across her. Again, she has ended up here, a shifting tide backward in time. So they are trying again, once more there is hope of some kind. And yet it is a sorry hope, for each of them knows there will never be anything more than this. His arm: like opening the heavy wooden door of a stable in order to emerge into sunlight. He does not wake. It feels like he has borrowed his apartment from someone, there is something temporary about it.

And his face.

This is your face now. The way it changes all the time. I think I liked it better once. Always, liking better what once was . She puts on her clothes, open-mouthed, her body drawing in air without sound. She shuts the door behind her, knowing that she has no key. I will never be back, she thinks. She: the way she shakes her head when he holds up a spare set of keys in front of her one afternoon they meet at a café. Take these, he says. He, saying: take these, dangling them in front of her, the keys dancing like awkward adolescents held up by the scruff of the neck, legs like that. And her face, the feeling of not wanting them, of their belonging to someone else now. The feeling that everything has changed. And this pain of absence; how easy it is to miss someone, and how strongly. That desire to keep and conserve.

We can be friends.

But then maybe you can’t stay friends without castrating each other. That’s what she senses. He makes her incapable of loving others, and she does the same to him. She shakes her head.

Give them to someone else.

Has your new girlfriend got her own keys. She, asking him.

He shakes his head. He looks at the ground.

Give them to her. Then.

She gets up and leaves, walks out through the room; she thinks of her own apartment. The spare keys to her own place.

Where they are now. Berlin. In the pocket of her new man, who already has been buried, alive. In the arms of his own past, buried there in the woman he left in order to be with her.

She will ask him to return them. Perhaps they can be sent.

Only then she cannot bring herself to write to him. The fear of him actually sending them back. She goes down the stairs, her legs are pistons, she descends through the stairwell, taking all the air with her outside. She is assailed by the sun. She bends down and unlocks her bike. The particular chill of Frederiksberg in the mornings. She wheels the bike along Gammel Kongevej; changes her mind and walks back. She buys some bread at the bakery on the corner, where the light of the sun and the light of the city lakes collide like heavy girders, disrupting every face.

Again, she stands there outside his entrance. With bread inside a paper bag. The bag feels heavy, the bread rolls it contains feel like warm kidneys or hearts pumping. The body shares its rhythmic composure with everything that is dead. With bread. He looks glum as they sit there facing each other in the kitchen. Threadbare. She begins to regret coming back. Or coming back in order to leave in order to come back. She doesn’t really know what she regrets. She doesn’t really know what has worn her down. She has all sorts of thoughts about it, only they go off in different directions, first this way, then the other. She doesn’t trust her own emotions. They come to her and leave her again in all their dictatorial arbitrariness. A person can tire of never understanding how things happen. Or you can become fatigued from knowing all too well what it takes. Knowing, and yet at the same time knowing it will not happen. That the option isn’t available . His mind is a conglomerate of basements, she sees that now. Literally. Inside are corridors, rumbling echoes as the watchmen run through them at night, high on morphine. Maybe he doesn’t know, but he hopes I will come back. This is what she thinks. A victory march.