Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

That is what I want. To sit there. Or lie there, buried alive. Windows shattering, one by one. Water gushing in, the way horses fill a stable. A frenzied struggle for life, and what rules may exist by which to win. A matter of he who has the most wins, I think to myself, and lift the lid of one of the two blue barrels of grain, shovel wheat and sunflower seeds into a bucket. Every seed and every grain, for the birds are waiting in the branches of the trees, and the garden has eight feeding stations. Eight is always the number. Eight paces between the feed store and the manger in the stable. Some things match up that way.

We’re at your grandmother’s, my mother tells me over the phone, a month after we buried her.

How long does a place go on belonging to a person.

Does a grandmother cease to exist only when the heirlooms have been allocated.

What does it mean, my returning home to a village where the leaseholder has pulled down the rectory stables.

I replace the little roof of the birdhouse outside the kitchen window, and a moldered piece of cardboard drops out and lands in the snow. I pick it up and hold it between my lips as I put the roof back into place, then stuff it into my pocket. Everything is turning into something else all the time. I don’t miss you anymore, have never missed you. I empty the bucket, upending it and striking it four times with the shovel. The snow contains a firmament in reverse. Dark spangles in the white. The footprints of a bird are another alteration of the picture. All the time, the landscape is new. All the time, there is something else one remembers. All that comes, and all that is lost. I have a feeling of homsesickness, but perhaps it’s not that at all. Perhaps it’s the opposite, a disconcerting sense of inversion. That my homesickness is actually a home, this magnetism a feeling of too much home, a face revealing too much belonging, a flailing, headlong plunge into a landscape in which to become. Become what, exactly. Invisible. Or simply oneself. Here .

THE LANDSCAPE HAS torn itself away. Its constituent parts are in motion or else still and separate. The hill extends from the rhododendrons on the eastern side of the house to beyond the washing line and the oak trees along the boundary. A single sweep of slope. The field on the other side of the boundary, where the snow lies in elongated drifts, is another. A bonfire one summer, that you later understand to be a person. Laughter at the fact that you can spend your time eternalizing one thing and another. Art. Theatre, a conquest of land. And a feeling nonetheless of having a responsibility. They are removing soil from mushrooms with toothbrushes.

She wonders if he can remember once having said to her that she had grown so thin, that her head seemed too big for her body. That she looked like an African .

She recalls the way she squirmed in the passenger seat. It was hot, and the sun slanted into the car. The next time they stopped for gas, she ran into the restroom to look.

She always focused on appearing to eat more than she did: I eat . She placed a bucket of cold water outside on the veranda in the shade. When they carried the things in from the car and unpacked, she put a carton of milk and a bag of frozen peas in the bucket and pushed it under the bench out of the sun.

They drank fizzy drinks together outside, until the mosquitoes came and chased them in again. They woke up too early, or else they woke up all the time, never finding sleep; the place kept waking them up. If I was on my own here, she said to him in the night, I’d be miserable.

So what are you now. Now that you’re here with me.

She decided not to cry any more that night.

He slept.

Are you asleep.

I won’t fall asleep until morning, she remembers thinking to herself. The place kept getting in through the tiny windows, insistent. And she didn’t sleep: at 6 A.M. she began to fondle his earlobe, blowing gently into his ear. His hand swatted out in sleep a couple of times before his body submitted and his eyes opened. Where have you been, she wondered, what dreams have you dreamt, she said. Mm, he said.

She goes out onto the veranda and retrieves the carton of milk from the bucket. He comes out in his underpants and a sweater, wooden shoes on his feet, a bag of oats in one hand, a packet of raisins in the other. This is how they seat themselves on the bench. The milk carton drips onto the decking, then stands in its own pool on the table. It’s cold enough, he says, meticulously pouring a measured amount onto his oats. He eats like a ritual, sleeps in the same way. A change has taken place: what began as a singular exception has become a state of exception; which in turn has become a state of repetition, that has become an instance of love. Exception has become ritual, and the ritual is now quotidian. Love has become a ritual. Sex has become a ritual. What are we going to do today, he says. She thinks: survive. I was thinking of going kayaking, he says. Or maybe we could go fishing.

Some time passes.

Maybe, he repeats with a nod. Coffee.

We’ll need to get the stove going, fetch some wood, and that.

Yes, you’re right, he says. The wilds of Sweden, I’d nearly forgotten.

The wilds of Sweden, yes.

He slaps his arm. Mosquito, he says. She laughs.

The wilds of Sweden, she repeats.

And you didn’t sleep a wink.

No, she says. You could say that. They laugh, and their laughter is recognizable from somewhere. From where, exactly, she doesn’t know, but recognizable, nonetheless.

ALL KINDS OF things we said to each other that had already been said. I read out loud from a manuscript, and you listened, shifting uneasily. I have begun to doubt whether you actually understood that I was real . That I was there .

I get the feeling I could become someone else. If I pulled myself together.

But then it’s your feeling instead.

You shiver in the sunshine on the shore. I pull a blanket up over our legs, lie down on my stomach again, flick back a few pages in Duras’s Moderato Cantibile . Start from there again. So now we are lying here. What is it that keeps postponing reality. That’s my feeling.

Expectation and postponement, and nothing else.

SHE PHONES TO cancel an appointment. What excuses might be valid. The body does not count. The weather does not count. Disasters count.

IT’S SPRING ALREADY in Berlin, her father writes. It’s just the place to be.

She writes back and says it’s nice to know that spring is on its way. That it’s nice to know they’re thinking about her, and that she is thinking, too — I’m thinking about you, too, a lot.

The confusions are many. Sentences begin to doubt themselves. Mothers suspect they are less woman than other women, less mother.

A bit like me, she thinks.

A couple wrap themselves around each other and kiss, and think everything is for the first time . Roasted chestnuts, for goodness sake.

ARE YOU COLD. They arrive back at the hotel, and he has been drinking. She pulls her legs up underneath her on the sofa and puts her head in his lap. Warmth, and the feeling of having a home in the midst of being away . I’m tired, she says. He mutters something back. Smooths his hand across her hair. Nudges her playfully. Be still, she whispers. Leave me alone, she thinks. He reaches for the remote and changes the channel. She closes her eyes; I don’t understand how you can be tired now, he says. He shifts her body, altering its position; placing it so as to give him room. She is so tired of wanting to be somewhere else all the time; it’s mostly that kind of fatigue that consumes her. And the next day there is a bird sitting on the railing on the decking outside. He wants to stay asleep. She lies there looking at the bird. She does not rise. It hops about on the railing. Flits down onto the ground, hops about there, as if searching for something. Other places. He doesn’t understand that a person can long to be home when they have no home to long for. I am here, what more do you want. That was what he said. Wasn’t that what he said. Quite without irony. But there is no logic in the world. Who told you that. That there is a logic of dreams . Whatever it might be. There is awake , and there is asleep , and neither of the two states cause the world to work by any principle of logic.