Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

Bright, shining apples don’t know how to cease. They refuse to drop in October, to rot in the grass, and a person cannot forget them in a hurry. Autumn turns into winter, and winter departs to reveal a spring; but the apples know nothing of seasons. They will not accept the haste dictated to them.

I find myself too close to the pane and must wipe away my breath. So cold, the glass — it surprises me. Although it’s December, it surprises me. The skin that encloses my body shrinks, an abrupt contraction, a puckering fabric, a curtain you draw aside. I step back and sit down on the bed again. Pull my feet up and bury them under the duvet that is still warm and heavy with sleep. My mother speaks out of my mouth: you can’t lie there, lazing .

What would she know. You can’t tell me what to do anymore, I lie.

IT’S LIKE I’VE been running to catch a train, and now the conductor has seen me and waits. What am I waiting for. Me, I suppose. It’ll be a long wait, I say to myself out loud. People in the train look at me, a woman squints over the top of her glasses.

I’m tired of waiting.

BUT THERE’S NO gratitude. Just like you can’t be, can’t continue to be, grateful for being well again after illness, just like you can’t be grateful for things not having been worse. Just like you can’t find any comfort whatsoever in the assumption that everything will be all right.

You’ll see.

For the first time during those days, I would not help repair the brickwork, and refused to care about the animals in the stalls. Maintain what.

THE TABLE ON which the candles have burnt out while we slept. Where did the night go. A mess of empty glasses. Even though there are only four in all. A mess. He turns toward the wall, away from the sunlight that fills the room with song. I am up and standing in the middle of the room. Either you’ll make a fantastic father, or else you will be no father at all. These are the possibilities for a man like you, I think to myself.

His breathing is unsettled, has no rhythm. Too immersed in feeling something yourself. A child would release him from the detention of his body. His body, wanting all the time, always in a state of expectation. Something needs to be different, the piano tuner, always a false note in the flesh. Only then it isn’t in the flesh at all, it’s something else instead, another thirst.

Stay, he says, half in sleep, or else too awake by half.

I stand erect, solitary, a tree where once was forest, a twiggy remnant is how I must look. The light is pale. I shake my head, as though it were neither thought nor reason inside my brain that decided, but a wind sweeping through a landscape. Now that the trees no longer afford shelter, now that I am up.

Awake.

There is always one of us who cannot sleep; in any bed someone must always lie awake. One who cannot sleep a second more. I go about the apartment, gathering things together the way we do in gardens on summer evenings. That same cold feeling of too late . One of us is sleeping.

My clothes lie scattered like resting creatures on the floor. I pick them up without a sound, and leave.

You think I’m in the kitchen and mumble my name at the partition. I have closed the front door with the caution of a previous world, ours when we lived in Aarhus. You speak my name more than once.

Dead man, a dead voice, unable to muster the strength to call out.

Unable to summon yourself, you sleep again. You are no one’s father, your sleep is your own. Sleep from it all, I think to myself — but sleep sleep sleep, I pray, and descend the stairs on the limpest of legs. It feels like a dam has burst, a gigantic blister ruptured, and now: my body hurtling down through the stairwell. I take with me everything, and leave everything behind. Taking in air only when emerging onto the street. I hurry some ten paces before turning my head back toward the building and casting a glance up at the windows. But you have not risen, you speak to me still through the partition, but it is the brick of the outer wall your voice must penetrate, that, or the window. I creep through the city with eyes closed. To cheat the morning, to postpone something. Already there are dogs. And fresh flowers in the buckets outside the florist’s. The air is sharp, the world restless, unwilling to wait any longer. It is quite unsentimental. There are those who come with us, and those who don’t.

The city’s sky and all the city’s streets are the same.

The same brittle light. My relief at having slipped away was the same color as the sky.

YOU’RE NERVOUS AT seeing me. You tremble, I sense.

I thought it would be good for us to see each other, you say, but we both know: it makes no difference if we see each other or not.

A thought such as this: to have to go back and make sure you left nothing behind. To see if you switched off the lights. There is always light left on; always a waste of light in this world.

SHE SURPRISES HIM on the back stairs, wanting to say goodbye. I’m leaving tomorrow and wanted to stop by before not stropping by for a very long time. He flicks the tea towel over his shoulder and leaves it there, shakes the dishwater from his hands. His eyes, scanning the courtyard, trimming everything that is wild. The sun reflects from a metal sheet and some piping left against the wall. Some oak leaves half hidden by snow that will not melt and relinquish itself to any spring. Hi, he says, thinking: what are you doing here. She wonders, and zips down her coveralls, knowing he cannot avoid noticing her blue dress and the necklace.

He takes her by the arm: let me show you my room. She goes inside with him, and there they are; she wriggles out of her coveralls, he wrings his hands and sits down on a chair. She looks around the room and sees her own things. Everything looks foreign in this way, him living here seems improbable, quite as improbable as him not living here. His sentences are short. Small glass prisms dangle from thread in the window. You should see it when the sun comes in, he says, the wall becomes a rainbow. It’s like a psychedelic explosion. He throws out his hands. She nods. Places her boots with the heels to the wall. You’ve got it looking nice, she says, and means it.

Thanks, he says. I should have asked you over before now.

She nods and is glad to be wearing perfume, its scent is heavy now that her body is warm from all her layers of clothes. She feels feminine. He wrings his hands. He is not breathing.

You’re pale, she lies. He gives her an apologetic look and then the door opens and his girlfriend is standing there, distraught. You, she says, before correcting herself: hi.

He jumps to his feet, only to stand motionless. Handwringing, teethgrinding, heartrending. I just came to say goodbye, I’ll be gone again in a minute.

Okay, she says.

Her mouth hangs open, she is not breathing, it’s as if her body is hoping her lungs are as open as her mouth and that the air will somehow find its way in. An icicle succumbing and breaking off, that’s how she goes. She leaves a space behind her in the room, like a streak of rust in the picture where she stood. Or perhaps his whole room is a stage, a non-existent place in the world, his life there, for her always: a non-existent life. A plummeting fall that will never reach an end.

It was nice seeing you, he lies.

Was it a bad time, I ask him. He nods: she’s thinking of leaving me before I leave her.

Is that what you’re going to do.

No, he says, I’m not. At least no more than I always am. It’s all like one long attempt to get to somewhere else. That’s how it feels. She nods. Yes, she says. That’s probably it.

THE SOUND OF grain rushing from the silo; a scraping jaw, ten thousand stones, a sudden descent from on high. The silo is red with rust and there is a smell of cold concrete and hay. The floor is cracked and there’s an old Ferguson in the corner. She holds open a sack, and Arne shovels the grain up off the floor. The dust gets in everywhere. The mucous membranes become feeble. A flat paleness all around, a demand for sheen. Winter might just as well come, she thinks to herself. The freedom of driving back through the hills on her own. Settling up in fifty- and hundred-kroner notes. The car heaving itself through the landscape. A feeling of no longer inconveniencing anyone, and yet inconveniencing nonetheless. Shoes on the newspaper in the hall. The rumble of fire in a wood-burning stove, and windows open wide. Are you there. The church bells ringing down the sun too soon. The lawn with its scatterings of stale bread and dismantled chicken carcass. Winter may come now. Winter, too, may come.