Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

IT’S LIGHT ONLY for a few short hours at most in the little attic room of their apartment in Aarhus. They’ve never got round to putting that lamp up. There’s a switch on the wall, to the right of the door, but no cord no socket no bulb. She crouches down and rummages through some boxes with tools in them, and duct tape, until finding a flashlight. She feels like a thief. A beam of light, sweeping faintly over the knots in the timber, a pool of artificial illumination that makes everything different. I must have been mistaken, she thinks to herself. She felt sure the place was tidier, that everything was under control. Only it wasn’t. And yet there is an absence of dust. Perhaps the room is too damp for dust. A number of rolled-up posters and some of her sketches protrude from a ceramic pot in a corner — along with your fishing rod, a broom handle, a roll of paper tablecloth. On the wall to the left are some shelves she once put up. Or they did. The shelves aren’t straight, they threaten to divest themselves of their jars of jam and chutney, their fruit syrup and shampoo. The packing boxes are on their knees. It was only for a while. The way it always is, with everything: just for the meantime. She manages to place a foot in between a tower of boxes on one side and a basket of workout clothes, she thinks, and his shoes, some volumes of The New Yorker on the other. She reaches across some more boxes and opens the skylight. The air is not cool, as she had anticipated. It’s as if it refuses to circulate. A jar of preserved lemons. A wicker basket with worn leather banding. An olive tree, a laurel, as if that could survive. All sorts of things that are mine, she thinks. I can’t take any of it to Copenhagen with me.

She does anyway.

She could.

THEY LIFT THE table out into the sun at the side of the house.

They have bought smoked mackerel and some tomatoes at the grocery store on the way. Their own tomatoes are still hard and yellow. Or their own tomatoes are just plants with budding flowers. She has painted all the woodwork twice. It shines, black and sated. We must remember to enjoy the first days of spring, she says.

He nods, his mouth full of tacks, because then he is putting new roofing felt on the outhouse where the rain came in, and it is autumn. A few tomatoes remain, dangling like hearts in the greenhouse. The perspiring greenhouse. And chives as well. He fetches salt from the kitchen, and she divides the fish. They sit in the sun. She goes into the outhouse, can hear him working on the roof above her. She positions herself underneath him, closes her eyes, sensing what it’s like to have his full weight on top of her. He hammers in the tacks. Dust descends upon her hair, her face.

Would he crush her.

If the roof caved in, would he crush her then.

She looks up through squinting eyes, and sees the gash in the roof. She thinks she catches his eye for the briefest of seconds, then goes outside again. She hands him the hammer he says he needs. Some more tacks. They never mention it, that exchange of glances.

It’s obvious he likes to be here, she thinks.

But it’s obvious, too, that she is the one who likes to be here. To have him here. With her. The thought of their being here together, with nearly everything they need.

A place that is ours .

But only her name on the deeds.

The hoe I leaned up against the trellis, the only sloping angle there is. Everything else is a vertical movement.

His bicycle lies in the gravel in front of the perennials, looking like an animal that has fallen asleep. He looks like one of her very first friends. The sun’s a lot warmer now, he says, placing a slice of tomato on a slice of bread. Rather impatient, but here , nevertheless.

THEY DON’T WANT to take any more than is absolutely necessary.

She wants to walk all day.

Mist lies between the houses, and the square has been hosed. It’ll be hot today, she says. We’re going out, what should we see, she asks.

But she goes out alone that day. There’s something he needs to do. Some sleep. I sat on the square, he tells her that evening. The life there.

She nods. Some other time, he says. Tomorrow, perhaps. Only then — perhaps not tomorrow at all, she thinks. That, and her feeling that she travels alone, always wishing he were there, that there was something he wanted to do. That they wanted to do something together, movement in the same direction.

HER DEAD MAN wears a long yellow scarf around his neck. He has not shaved, and yet she does not doubt that he has gone to great lengths.

She smiles, walks through the room like a knife cutting its way through the skin of a fish. A grating sheath of scales, at once keenly and with difficulty. He takes pains to smile, to put on a face. They embrace each other, she swiftly withdrawing, almost pushing him away before he falls inside her. She holds up a corner of his scarf: nice scarf, she says. He bends his neck to look at it. How hard it is for him. Being here.

You came early, she says.

He nods. He is a child leaving home every day, or: he is the tide, returning and retreating. By turn obstinate and governed by something outside himself, something inside himself — but then perhaps all of life is like that; an eternal state of arrival and departure in a pattern over which one has no control; a rhythm one must simply tolerate.

She wishes the new man had not been with her today. It is as if he now is reaping all that was sown before. Me, she thinks.

He has nothing to give to her, of this she is constantly aware; there is nothing like a ripe time. That time was long before; it’s always difficult, a continuing state of exception.

Already everything is too late.

When did that happen.

Her dead man — the look in his eyes, effortlessly sweeping all the flowers and all the wine and all the piles of books from the table.

So much parting collected in one room.

This is your day, someone says to her. Her stomach tightens into a knot. She cannot remove from her mind the thought that someone else knitted that scarf for him; and that the new man has never been as unhappy in all his life. Displaced, in every respect.

Her dead man has brought an old friend with him, understanding nothing. Or perhaps he cannot bear to recognize himself in this room. He is holding a bottle of champagne. It’s for her: this is for you, he says. As if champagne were the solution to a puzzle. And then they leave, the two of them together, to be there no more. No longer to be present.

She drinks a glass of white wine rather quickly, and is introduced to a man with a Russian name. His lips promise, but cannot be pictured again; he is there as one looks at him, only then to be gone; broken faces embed themselves within you; whole faces are forgotten.

Because they have yet to reveal themselves in pieces.

All that has not revealed itself to be art .

I COULD STAY here forever, he says. But what he means is, he would like to have a home. The night is warm. The sun goes down between the houses, and all the roofs look like they’re painted on. Thrusting surfaces of earthen red and ochre. They have only the shoes on their feet.

Their backpacks put next to each other against the wall.

It is cooler inside the room than out. One night in every town, that is their rule. And no more than three days planned ahead. Always they are dashing for trains. Always they come from something better, and always on their way to somewhere supposed to be fantastic. They sip coffee at a railway station café, tucked into a booth with a bench upholstered in red leather. It sticks to the thighs. A dog goes by, dragging its leash behind it. A voice on the loudspeaker announces another change of track: binario due, binario cinque, binario due , and the train is continually late. Ten minutes, twenty minutes at a time. We could have had lunch, he says. She nods; they notice a supermarket that will be cheaper. A deserted beach that turns out not to be deserted at all, though for a short while it is. It’s like the book she’s reading is better for being read here. Or different, at least.