Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

She is disappointed by Pompeii, but decides not to mention it. She thinks there is more Pompeii to be seen in Berlin, that the whole world is spread out over the whole world. Italy in Berlin. Egypt in Berlin. Berlin in the USA. The USA in France. She places a sheet between her thighs. The heat is tremendous. She wakes up early. The sound of a truck braking. A clattering in the back yard, the sound of a metal bucket overturned. A thirst for water. She gets up and has a shower, lies down beside him again in a single movement. She draws something through the room.

I’M AFRAID I’VE forgotten everything. I have forgotten the first time I saw you, and I have forgotten how we got from the højskole to your parents’ summer house. I can’t remember seeing your parents for the first time. I can’t remember what it’s like to wake up with you. I can’t remember what it feels like to come home to an apartment shared with someone else. With you. An apartment that is another person’s home. I can’t remember what it’s like to be so close to another person, almost merged into one; I simply can’t remember that I could look across at the door and that you would push it shut with your foot, because you were nearest. I can’t remember my annoyance at watching you be so slow and meticulous. With breakfast. With envelopes. I can’t remember my anger at finding you passed out on the sofa. Again. I can only remember finding you like that. I can only remember that you were slow and meticulous. I can remember your parents. The feeling of everything being the first time . The summer house I remember, but the days spent with you there I have forgotten; the shrubs of broom, your mother pruning them with a pair of shears. You whispering to me not to tell her they should be dug up instead, that pruning them was a waste of time. And the plantation of trees, the short cut down to the meadow. I have forgotten how far the meadow was. And the feeling of waking up rested and refreshed, though with an aching head from having slept up against you, that too I have forgotten, the way it felt; and now I can’t understand how that could be, with you now lying here again, so close to me that my body is an extension of yours. With so much still missing . With so much being something else, and you still existing.

THE DUST OF the grain, drifting in the sun, vanishing in the shade.

Summer.

The leaseholder passes through the stable. He is visible and then not, in the light and in the dark. He walks as though keeping time to a ticking watch. Each entry into darkness causes all sound inside the stable to be consumed.

But then he becomes visible in the darkness, and quite transparent in the sunlight. A new order. And the shiny ribbon of the feeding trough on each side of the aisle, licked clean and worn down over the years by rasping tongues.

The door is dragged aside with a clatter, sun streams in, the floor ablaze in its light, made to flame by the legs of the cattle causing shadows to leap out across the concrete in panic. Three at a time, the beasts jostle their way down the aisle, haunches taut, skin draped over bony spines; the heavy sway of udders. Their legs can break. Cows are always too heavy for themselves. The nervous way they proceed, neither walking nor running — and never anything other than eager. Never anything other than uneager. It’s as if there’s something they have to get done before anyone finds out. And like a fan, this tide of cattle spreads and unfolds. All that body falling into place. They are cast in the concrete. Each cow knowing its place, a bit like waves on the shore, their movements a matter of course, a routine, something reminiscent of nature.

She keeps thinking she sees him coming, that he’s changed his mind. A friend calls and apologizes. Not so much on his own behalf as love’s. It being the way it is, without justice. Justice has nothing to do with love. Justice has to do with business, money.

Fortunately time helps, she lies.

It doesn’t, is all he says. Most likely it will always be with you; bear that in mind.

You’re right, most likely it will, she says. I suppose you know what you’re talking about. Someone has left something behind inside him. No coming of spring can ever make amends. The cows that emerge first spill out through the doors, over the yard and across the road. Stiff legs verge on breaking into a thousand pieces, clouds of bonemeal under their bellies; the field, soft, sprouting its grass. What is it for. And to think one day you would sit here again, on the ground, where the stable used to be. An empty space now, with the sky falling down upon it. The cows don’t pay their way. Do I, she wonders. She calls him in Copenhagen. She gets back on her feet and walks through the city, and he lingers on every corner. While another lingers in her thoughts. And in his. And she finds herself thinking there will be more and more threads, they will be shorter and shorter, and unable to join up. And more long sentences discovered to be false. More short ones making sense.

Come, the leaseholder shouts, dragging the sliding door aside.

Come, she tells him on the phone. But he must stay in Copenhagen, he is needed at work; and his new girlfriend isn’t happy about us seeing each other, he says. About you not letting go, but otherwise I would, and so on.

A time, inhabiting the body.

A time for that, and a time for something else. A troubled month, or just a troubled night. A magnetic night. An overfilled bed, alone. So now this is where you are once more. And the ribbons of snow are the fan the cows were then; tight French braids, some voices, at least three, weaving in and out; sentences becoming shorter and shorter.

THERE IS A sunrise, occupying a stretch of time. Light, softening the horizon. Doing something to sound.

Branches, graphic silhouettes.

A sky, becoming a sky. Someone loses a shoe on the pavement, a shoe picked up and handed back.

Sit still.

I win a prize for having written something down in order not to forget what it was.

I win a prize and am resigned to the fact that you will never be interested in me. I am resigned to the fact that you will never be anything but interested in me.

The branches are black already, but the light against which they are seen makes it more apparent. That I have woken up too early and am standing here in my parents’ house, watching a sunrise as it mimes a sunrise past.

Aarhus Bay: a morning there.

The skerries, Sankt Anna Skärgård: a morning there.

I do not miss you, for I have yet to understand that you are there to miss. In other words: that you are not here. And now, again, the branches, cutting up the picture. A light that spills into the sky from below. A tea bag, seeping into a napkin.

Humility in the face of the kind of order for which one is no match. The thought that all this is temporary. The stables are temporary. My mother is temporary. Us living together during that period of time, and you beginning to doubt. You speaking the words out loud, without intending to. My life, forever in flux. An image segueing into another. A permanent state of transition — only a transition. The fact of insisting on something until one becomes ready to insist on something else. The tulips looking like they’ve come from a shop, when you don’t have me to arrange them.

You are waiting for things to be different. You are waiting for this transition to be complete, of you learning to live in a place .

I can see, the way things are, that you cannot come. Because you are already here.

Or because you would want to stay.

BENEATH THE WINTER lies a wandering across the field. A walk through tall grass. Sandals, bare legs, dry meadow grass swept apart, to bow and break, and flatten like a tongue fallen out in my wake. A fleeting heel becomes an image trampled underfoot. Yellow cudweed, an island. And then: grass again, and self-seeded fir, hardly more than twigs, sticking out of the ground. That’s what they look like. But then this was before, I am ten years old and we have leased the land from the state. It’s August, and I don’t know if the willowherb can bloom at this time of year, but I remember the willowherb in flower, a curtain of troubled purple, strangling the brambles. That way round: the flowers strangling the brambles, and then in another image the brambles alone, blue fingers and red plastic bowls. It’s like the willowherb’s purple is the same as the fingers’, like the juice of the brambles reveals itself to be flowers, like the flowers have been pressed together into hard pellets, these berries, now ripe and sweet, and which too, well, reveal themselves. Eight kilos. And just as much sugar. And many more jars, and all the steam running down the windows. We see feet being lifted and placed in front of legs, and the grass as it bends and yeilds in front of us. Bare legs so briefly concealed from view, appearing again.