Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

Walking across the field today, the creaking snow, walking there in summer. Yours being the eyes that see the soles of my feet. The landscape actually being you. You lying in a bed in Copenhagen, it being evening, and you lifting her hand from your chest once she has fallen asleep. Or just the thought of it. Or the thought of her walking through the same grass. Or turning round to see that no one has been there. I turn and look back. Between the woods and me lies the indiscreet snow, disclosing my path, disclosing something more besides. I don’t quite know what . You, perhaps. It could be you.

THE DAY DRAGS on. My mother sits down at a table, it’s mid-afternoon. Always some stack she needs to get through. That’s how it is with her, she works her way through her stacks, which grow while she sleeps, whenever she looks away. She monitors them well, but it’s no use.

Everyone must sleep, once in a while.

It’ll soon be dark, she says to me, meaning she wants me to go. I look up from my book, lifting one leg to gauge how tired they are. When you sit still you lose touch with your body. A humming noise comes from somewhere. I think about what it means to have grown up in a house ever pervaded by the sound of a clock. If it can make you ill. The church bells, ringing the sun up and down. If that’s why you move away. And because the thought never occurs to you that the sound might be stopped by means of some simple action. An electricity cable, who knows. I think to myself that the humming noise is perhaps simply the sound of a home, more like the sound of sand running away than that of the hands of a clock, fingers flicking through newspaper piles, the rustle of a bag of dry cat food, more the sound of a straw bale being dumped from a great height onto a concrete floor. A door opening, then closing again. And this continued movement is a counting down, that much home. So high up, and so close as hardly to be seen, hardly to be heard. For it has entered your flesh and being, and is now, simply, your eyes; to find that secret place where the mottled hen has begun to lay its eggs, to break those eggs into a bowl, to nudge aside such an angry fowl, or to have my mother do so instead. With big gloves on.

And the knowledge that these movements are a counting down and not a counting up, and that you will need to remove yourself from all of it.

One must establish a state of homelessness within the home in order to make room for oneself. And the eyes and the eggs and the brambles are there, and the sound of pellets of dry food clattering into metal bowls like a hail of buckshot, a shortness of breath.

My legs are no more tired than usual. They are always tired. If you pause to sense how they feel, then I suppose that’s how they are. I stretch myself, the soles of my feet bracing against the armrest of the sofa. I relax, and the cat mimics my movement. Do you want out, I ask her, and she lifts her head, peers out at the snow falling — and simply sees. But she cannot, for she has always something else to be getting on with. Before she can eat, before she can sleep, before she can pause to sense how she feels . There is no room for her in such a life. And yet there is nothing else.

Room.

The cold light as it issues from the snow, all its whiteness, the winter tore at her face, a tinkling in the living room, like shattered ice in the swell, beneath a sun as pale as this. The crystal chandelier, hanging so still above the dining table, folders and documents strewn about like skinned animals, ring binders with gleaming metal ribs, a slaughterhouse with meat hooks that dangle from above, along the length of the ceiling, the page and the poem I have copied down. That’s how it feels sometimes: that creative writing has nothing to do with it. You copy down what is. There’s nothing mysterious about it, not a penny’s worth of imagination involved. The object is to become anaesthetized in order that one may be thriftless with the self, to see without the, well, what, exactly. Illusions. Stories. A wish to see the world as it is, here and now. Perhaps most of all to muster the courage to desist from creating narratives.

When all sentences are hooks by which to barb the world. A pyre of nostalgia; when a home is a state of affairs, and you know it. Reconciliation with the transience of all things, the return home that resides in that. A realisation of flight, to flee, and escape being the only place in which to be; in all that is temporary, the only place upon which to stand. The only place that is stable and will not sink; an insistence on there being, for every locus of predication, every flag of adornment, a sentence that hasn’t the strength to keep up the pretence, the vanity; it’s like nature taking over, a birth, perhaps, is what it most resembles. How can a woman scream in such a way, how can anyone write something as hard .

But maybe that’s the only thing you can do, when all else is: pulling the wool over one’s eyes, talking down to the world, talking down to you.

How can a person speak that way, so cynically. But then it’s anything but cynical, anything but exactly that: cynical. Maybe it’s the only thing you can do. An open mind, advancing into the world. Either by paring away or else the opposite, by sewing the world together in patterns new and surprising; memory, conception, perception, reflection. Two movements the same; a desire to be able to see, and to say what there is.

Perhaps it’s the only thing I can say: I love you. Nothing else but that. I don’t love you. Sentences like that are only true for a moment, uttered in a certain place. From here, this is true.

A person speaking in love is the most touching of all things, if one is able. To accommodate. To sense the person within the words.

My mother cannot go outside with me, her body convinces her a person can conclude a matter, that one’s life can be orchestrated in that way. She breathes deeply, a sigh of sorts, meaning no. As if I could have imagined differently, but this is my gift: to allow her to wince. In this way, my mother is forever a child overlooked. In this way, I love her. I must. The way it is choreographed in the spine. Someone has to do it the whole time, love her; maybe that’s a preposterous thought, but it’s the way I feel about it: that she deserves a constancy of love. And my father: what about my father. Where is he.

I pull an orange knit-hat down onto my head and go out through the mudroom. Before the door even shuts I hear my mother call out behind me, asking me to feed the birds. I’m dressed for it now. I take the trash out with me and untie the knot of the bag. The garbage men haven’t been all week, they can’t get through the snow. Three full sacks up against the wall. I press the trash down slowly, not quite knowing if it’s because I’m scared there’ll be some broken glass; only I find myself thinking about some nice drinking glasses I once saw. Mouth-blown, I think, though I don’t remember where. They had a kind of knot halfway up the stem, like a knee. I wanted to have some, the glass was green, and even if you never saw them before you would recognize them when you did.

The snow goes on. In Copenhagen, a thought to which I keep returning, in the cities of Paris, Vienna, rain and snow that cannot escape. There is no room. Water rises in the streets, snow compacts, layer upon layer. Advancing up the walls of the buildings, consuming floor upon floor. No one can breathe. Towers protrude, steeples. And children standing on top, with foxes on leashes. That image — the way they drink their tea or warm milk, expelling pillars of steam from their nostrils as they sit upon the tails of rooftop weather-cocks, attic-room apexes, sharing an orange in equal parts beneath the sky.

I don’t know what it is about disasters that is so appealing.