Josefine Klougart: One of Us Is Sleeping

The illusionist.

I FALL AND remain lying in the grass. Lying the way I landed. Late August, a tractor idling in the field out back. The door of the cab is wide open, abandoned, mid-sentence.

There is a lack of movement in the landscape.

As though the day in fact is night; as though the sun in fact is a rice-paper lantern suspended from the ceiling, as though someone just wants to make sure everyone is asleep. That no one is reading or talking, or interfering with each other, or looking at comics. In other words: that no unreason occurs.

But then there is nothing but unreason: all of a sudden unreason is the only thing there is .

Are you asleep, I whisper to my mother.

There’s no answer. The words linger, an echo from before, my dead man’s voice; are you asleep, he asks.

And I was.

Or else I was playing dead.

The knots in the ceiling planks resemble almost anything. A five-legged deer. A half-moon, dripping. Something a person doesn’t forget in a hurry. An apple tree with red apples in a corner of the garden, those kinds of remains; summer in mid-winter. And still it snows.

As it has snowed all day, it continues to snow.

As though the snow wants to prove something: that the composure with which snow can fall never has to do with fatigue; the snow is not sedate, it is simply inhuman . Like the winter this year, inhuman in every respect. Marching tirelessly on, repeating itself in patterns understood by no one. The dark is paled by the brightness of snow. Every now and then a red apple falls through the dim gray into the snow, here beneath the tree’s basket of a crown, black bark. A snap as the apple strikes the membrane of hard ice formed by the change in the weather that never materialized other than as a moment’s hesitation in the winter, a sudden mid-winter assault — of summer. At once the frost came whistling. Then a hard casing of ice, fifty millimeters thick, now with a coat of new snow. It’s all right, I say to my sleeping mother, whispering the words in the dark, sleep now.

It can be as simple as that, too.

That you can lie quietly together and be somewhere else, alone.

Yes, says my mother, awakening with a start.

Where have you been, I ask myself, what was it you needed to finish.

Can’t you sleep, she asks, turning in the bed. I think: what am I doing here, in my parents’ bed. I’m far too old to lie here; and always have been.

Everything is the opposite. The snow whirling up, vanishing into a cloud that cannot be distinguished from sky. I whisper to my mother: yes, I whisper, go back to sleep. She sleeps at once, without transition, departs the room, and yet lies so completely still. For years you don’t notice, but then it becomes so clear, death residing in your own mother; you see your grandmother in her, her mother in yours. And then another face still, recognizable, and yet unfamiliar. A disconcerting face, this third one.

She turns over onto her side and sleeps on.

Then turns and sleeps again.

More than once: a face, my mother’s face, disappearing. And the third face that can only be my own, the only explanation: mine.

Inhumanly tall grass.

Inhuman nights. I think — I have been so spoiled. I have never wanted anything I couldn’t have. Now there’s only one thing I want, him, and everything I don’t want I can have.

Rest and stillness.

ALL THE TIME I had the feeling there was only one thing left keeping me in this world. But then one evening we parted. And the morning after, I’m still here, alive regardless. I do not wake, for I never slept. You have gone home to Frederiksberg, where you now live. You have a room in a large apartment, and you sleep in the same T-shirt as when you slept with me. You are deceased, and yet you are there, alive and well.

Without me. There in that way.

The morning slips in with the sun, that’s how I think of it; that the morning begins somewhere beyond the ice-cream kiosk and the fishermen on the far spit on the other side of Langelinie, that it enters the city, passes through Østerbro. The sky is poorly sealed, the sun thin and liquid. It pours into the streets from the bottom end, pushing cars and people in toward Rådhuspladsen, out across Amager, Islands Brygge.

I don’t know what you thought you had done that evening, unburdened your heart, I suppose, but then it was all so much heavier than before, your heart included; that’s how it must be. You think something will last, and then you endure, and somehow — live with.

I imagine there to be someone, but then no one is there.

I felt sure of a mother, always, but perhaps she, too, is to be struck off.

I climb into the bed, pull the duvet over my legs and put my arm around her. Now I have returned to the landscape I thought would always be there.

Is it still snowing, my mother asks me.

I nod. Yes, it’s still snowing.

Did you feed the birds.

Yes, I fed the birds.

I SIT IN a corner of the living room, yet in its midst. I can sit like this, here on the white sofa, and all the time I am somewhere else. My mother walks past again, a shadow falls across the room, it’s mid-afternoon. The shadows play on the walls and everything else around. The gardens are asleep; there is unease because everything outside is shrouded in winter and cannot breathe. The snow has fallen, upon all that is alive and all that is dead; the snow makes it all the same. All that is buried suffocates and rots, or grows and expands beneath the blanket of white; a membrane becoming thinner and thinner, a skin pulled taught. The snow creaks, the vice that grips the plants, the shrubs, the tree stumps. My mother looks out the window, disturbed by a feeling of having lost contact with some part of her body, like an arm that’s fallen asleep. She picks at me with her eyes, pinches me to bring me back. All the time: the sense that her daughter lives in another world. The calamity that resides in that. Being alone, or at least without.

Shut out of one’s own house.

A room within the family, a room within its narrative, a former colony now suddenly standing alone , and yet still reverberating with narrative.

She cannot understand how I can do it; but then she doesn’t really know what it is I’m doing.

She leans forward over the sofa, places a hand on my knee, retracting it almost at once, as though it were unexpectedly wet, as though it were on fire. Winter, phosphorescent and unreal, a whimper of wind. Dressed landscapes. The snow remembers every wandering, traces left that cannot be wiped away; the snow remembers; the body does. But this winter perhaps is different. This winter, the snow perpetually blown into drifts; it snowed again, and again it snowed. It’s impossible to remember anything, and yet one cannot doubt that something was left behind beneath the snow, something that would be found again in the spring. Beneath the layers of remembered footprints, traces forgotten, yet as recollections to remain, a latent illness that may return at any time. Awkwardly in spring, awkwardly in a broken face.

I look up at my mother.

Yes, I think, this face is broken. Like if you dig with too much abandon, if you dig like a person possessed or don’t know when to stop. My mother’s face, my grandmother’s, and now this third, strange and yet familiar, which is what else but my own. A feeling of having returned too late, of rattling a locked door and knowing your things are inside. So we share this too, this puzzle of arrival, eternally postponed arrival at something that is — well, what, exactly; still , perhaps.

WHEN I THINK back on the days in the summer house they seem oddly architectural. As though in recollection they share something in common with structures and exact drawings. They are not allowed to be simply days. Remembered, they become the days when .