Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

A SINGLE ROOM. A bed beneath a window, a desk, their suitcases gaping. Her dress on the chair; and he on the bed, in the shade. The doorway teetering, a slab of hot light. A little window facing the sea. The Amalfi Coast. The sun is high, the rented room dark and cool. From outside they look like lovers.

She goes out onto the terrace and leans over the railing, is giddied by heat and altitude, the sea crashing against the rocks below, atomizing into spray, vomiting its white insides. He comes out and stands beside her, a bottle of wine in his hand. He drinks from it without any semblance of elegance, the slosh of its contents as he tips back his head to swallow. He goes back in and lies down again; he is tired, but cannot sleep. How can anyone sleep in this heat, he asks.

How can anyone do otherwise.

The roads here are gouged from the cliffs, half the time they lead through tunnels in the rock. The sudden astonishment of a view, a division of travel into dark and light, twisting the twine of day into rope of two continually interchanging complexions. He couldn’t be bothered to leave, and she wants to stay here forever. But the next day they pack their suitcases and head on as planned. There are no birds here, he says. Yes, there are, she says. They are sitting in a bus on the way to the train station. No one knows how long they must wait there.

IN NABOKOV’S LOLITA there’s a scene toward the end where the brutality of desire is revealed in a glimpse. It’s when the reader and the main character see Lolita, there in the bathroom, her distress. At once, a darkness is cast upon all that came before. You realize you’ve been seduced. You see yourself in that mirror, humbled, because you couldn’t see any better. Again, you have involved yourself in something you didn’t believe existed.

THEY MEET IN the sun one morning. He has just opened up the second-hand bookstore he’s taking care of for a while. She gets off her bicycle and wheels it along to the little café table and the chairs they’ve put out front. You can get coffee there, and sit outside.

This is nice, she says, and gives him a measured hug, as though she were afraid he might fall inside her if she held him too tightly for too long. Their bodies: open wounds that may join up and heal as one if they’re not careful. A merging of tissue, like plants climbing a trellis to arch across a garden path, across disorder.

Congratulations on your. . success, he says.

She bows her head, gaze fixing the ground to make her seem shy; then slowly she unfurls and looks him in the eye. She doesn’t know what success he’s talking about, but she knows he means the book. As if that meant anything. It means nothing to her, not now. Thanks, she says, emptily. It’s not like I got the Nobel Prize or anything, she says.

He shrugs and says congratulations anyway. Just getting published is reason enough.

She shrugs. Thinks: what kind of sadness is this. All the leaves of the linden trees are pale, the sun is drawing the color out of everything. They don’t speak.

Do you want to see my window, he asks her, sweeping out his hand. She leans the bike against the wall. Duras, Jelinek, J. P. Jacobsen. Some nice publications that look like exercise books. A tattered Taschen, Picasso. He has angled them carefully, wanting it to look accidental and yet alluring. Two books, one at each side of the picture, have been leaned against supports. She smiles and nods; nice choices, she says. He is so enthusiastic about the display, she sees, and hopes not a book will be sold from out of his window today. That it all may stay the way it is and be resplendent.

HE IS STRETCHED out on the sofa with one leg draped over the backrest. It is morning. Drowsy from sleep: when did you get home. His bare foot dangles like a wilted child in the sun. It is summer, seven o’ clock. His face is covered by a blanket; she lifts it gently, startling them both; I thought you were asleep, she says in a voice that is quite emptied of voice. Breathless. Seamlessly, she lets go of the blanket and puts her hand to her mouth. What happened, she whispers, alternately pointing and putting her hand back to her mouth; his face is streaked with dried blood, in places near-blackened, in the creases around his eyes. Violet. And his face then moves, first the eyes, tentative and with scepticism, as if the muscles themselves do not believe movement to be possible. He groans, and furrows his brow as if to rouse his face. He shifts his weight awkwardly, like a piece of heavy furniture, and she recalls the time in Berlin when he wanted to get in the bath tub with her, drunk; the way he looked like furniture then as well.

Alcohol makes people into furniture.

Dependent on others to move them about.

What happened, she asks again. I walked into a cupboard, he sighs. She can’t help but laugh, only then to fall silent as a fire quickly smothered. She nods and leaves him on his own. She runs her usual route beside the sea, passing the Varna Palæet, following the path around the point, down the steps to the bathing jetty and the changing rooms. She writes her name in the book and finds her towel, pads serenely to the end of the jetty, the morning is quiet here. She immerses herself in the sea, and afterward she sits down on the edge of the wooden structure and dangles her legs. The planks make a bench; it’s March and they’re already lined by bodies, pale and doughy, slowly reclaiming life, bodies walking down the jetty and back again. A switch occurs in her mind, and she imagines nocturnal corpses, drifting in the swell, gently buffeting each other at the first sand bar, in the gloom beneath the jetty, wherever the current will take them. The woman next to her has only one breast. She imagines the missing breast floating amid the night-heavy corpses. She tells the woman about her morning. Perhaps to correct the imbalance of her mentally having encroached upon this unfamiliar body’s domain without having first been invited in. If such accounting is possible.

So you fill in the ledger, and then burn it. Didn’t he need stitches, the woman asks without drama. She shrugs, spilling coffee on her thigh. I suppose he did. She gets up and goes into the changing room, calls home. He doesn’t answer, of course he doesn’t. She runs through the woods and gets him into a taxi to the ER.

SHE TAKES OFF her shoes and puts her feet up on the dashboard; they are driving too fast through the Swedish forests, Småland, on their way to the eastern skerries, the Sankt Anna Skärgård, fleeing from the mosquitoes further inland, the melancholy of that remote former smallholding lay like a dropped undergarment around one’s feet, thick ribbons of mosquitoes blowing in from the lake. It is summer, we can sleep in the car or under the trees, stricken with the fever of the season, a sense of this never coming back, and at the same time the comfort of that, the fact of everything soon reaching an end, on account of it not being real .

If anything ever is.

Without you I wouldn’t have survived a day here, she thinks, I would have died of homesickness. The AC blasts its air, her skirt billowed about her midriff as she tries to find a radio station, as she tries to love him for some other reason than necessity.

WINDOWS THROWN OPEN, something else to come, and the thought, in the mornings especially, of everything now in flux, the sky above us is different, and the light, a totally different light, settled on all things that surround us. Our legs, in that light, as if finding sheen, the glow of shoes on newspapers outside front doors, scuffed boots polished by sun, laundry basket gilded on the tiles of the laundry room. Health. The fact of you lifting your legs a little higher when you walk, the fact of you wanting to come, of saying yes, that would be nice; and the fact of her once again dropping something that smashes into pieces and cannot ever be repaired, and there being no point crying about it. He has this idea, and asks her to help him move the sofa over there, just to see what it looks like, to see what it does to the room. All of a sudden she feels so tired, she thinks to herself, and lifts the sofa with him, carries it across to the other side of the room. It looks like it’s trying to escape.