Josefine Klougart: One of Us Is Sleeping

THE LIGHT COMES creeping in over the plowed fields. Slabs of dark clay soil thrust up in disorder, bull calves fighting in the stalls, the thud of too much body in a space too small. And the snow, so gently it lies now, upon the ridges; upon the landscape, everything living and everything dead. A coat of cold, a deep, reassuring voice. The landscape, naked, unsentimental. Here is the feeling of missing you, though no one to miss.

A landscape of lace that is frost.

The landscape is the same, and yet the landscape is never the same. Where have I been, I ask myself. My lower lip has burst like the skin of a ripe plum. Falling on the patio, knees and the taste of iron; lying on the concrete behind the rectory, waiting for the tractor to return home with the first load; if we’re not up and gone we’ll be in trouble. The way they come driving; hunch-backed trailers. One afternoon we’re friends enough to play; we leap among the stacked bales. Fall down in between and you’ll die of starvation. Like the cat we find, but that’s not until autumn. So it hadn’t abandoned its litter at all.

The path leading off behind the rectory fields peters out at the boundary that cuts through the conservation area, the croplands, acreage lying fallow. So much depends on it. Order. There’s always a man gathering up stones in the field; new ones appearing in perpetuum, the earth gives birth to them and the piles grow large. Here and there, bigger rocks lie waiting to be collected by the tractor. When the time comes. Perhaps one of the boys will do it. Or perhaps the job is too big for them. The sun goes down behind the dolmen, which is older than the pyramids. So they say. How old is that, one wonders. Brothers have no age beyond the years that divide them. My sisters and I one age; we become no older than we were.

The glacial landscape, the kettle holes, where the ice bulged and bunched up the land.

I’m not sure. It felt like I was living out of sync, in every way imaginable. I’ve just fallen and already I’m on my feet, brushing the dirt from my sleeves, smiling to someone passing by, or to nature. It’s only when I think back on something that I gain access to all that ought to be mine. You, for example.

I have returned. Something that was lies spread out across the landscape. A carpet of needles at the foot of the trees. A cape of snow, a forest of fingers, and a sky. Antlers of the red deer, Trehøje Hill, the last ten fir trees on its slopes, hollowed to the bone by wind, forlorn. This is what we’re dealing with.

Oil on troubled waters.

An odd summer dress underneath a sweater and overalls.

IT’S SNOWING AGAIN. I think: when will I be able to leave, the roads are blocked and I’m stuck here. I lean forward in the windowsill, toward the pane. The marble of the sill is cold; the winter is. An afternoon in summer I put my cheek to the same sill; my lips feel too big, my hands. I push aside a potted plant, I remember that. Climbing up into the windowsill, leaning my back against the sun and the pane. The marble is cold; even though the sun has been shining in for hours, the marble sills are cold. Sticky thighs in the heat. Body longing for winter.

Or body longing for warmth.

My hands become — how can I describe it — violet; in the winter, my feet too. A color that can remind me of something like: blue. This afternoon the snowplow went past every hour; with a weariness that had to do with something other than snow, or the absence of snow, it plowed through the village, which parted obligingly. Two lengths of white. Black asphalt shining through a thin layer of broken white. I thought: broken snow is the saddest thing I can think of. And now I think again: when will I be able to leave.

I’m saving up.

Something beautiful from which to depart, something beautiful to sacrifice. It remains nonetheless, left like a shadow, a weight in the images. What could have been. Love annulled.

Are we snowed in, I ask.

My mother is doing accounts, up to her ears in receipts. Forty-nine, she says, as if to tie an end, before looking up at me.

We stare out of the window, our eyes coming to a dead end, like railway tracks in a landscape reaching the point where the workers went home and the job has been left for some other time, tomorrow or never. A sense of nowhere to go. The railway tracks lying there pointing, making the landscape a pool — or a picture you can see.

She contemplates. I understand, that thoughts like that exist: what exactly do I want, where am I going, if I am even able; and she asks me if it’s a problem. If I can’t get away, if I have to stay here, is it then — a problem.

I shrug. I suppose not, I say. But both of us know it is; that it really is a problem.

Cooped up in here.

The winter shuts you in or shuts you out, that’s how it feels, a sense of not being able to get anywhere . It’s inside us both. No way forward, no way back. She wants to know if I’m having trouble finding rest here. You can’t really settle. That’s how she puts it. There’s a pause. Neither of us breathes. Again, I shrug.

I’m fine, I say.

But it’s not about finding rest. It makes no difference, rest or no.

I’m in love, I tell her finally, sitting down at the table opposite her. Her eyes dart between me and the receipts; she thinks better of it and pushes them aside.

Yes, she says.

It’s making me restless, I say in a voice that sounds brittle, dry, combustible. A ray of sun captured in a glass would be enough to make it break; it could happen any time. Forcible means. Because in a way I’ve already seen too much. An odd sense, all of a sudden, of things being arbitrary. That it’s not my dead man who’s important; suddenly it’s someone else, the new man, on whom my life depends . I think to myself: can I never just be in one place. Without that magnetism. That’s what the snow does. Or that’s the illness the snow cannot cover up, cannot heal; the snow as salt falling upon injured raw thoughts, raw emotions. When did it happen. The snow comes in the night, and the magnetism wells up in me, I wake up magnetic, and as a magnet: held back, restrained, the entire space between this new man and me vibrates in that way. A disconcerting tension. Movements drawn in the air, movements revealing themselves — the second before they exist: then perhaps amounting to nothing. Distress at what might have been — so precious.

I think: this is anything but precious.

It’s foreboding, the way a house can be when you arrive at a late hour and the lights are out. Or early — and the lights are out. I think I’d rather be in an unhappy relationship with someone than this: to be without someone. Without those eyes to — well, what, exactly. Give me life. All the time to bring me into being, with just a glance. Rather come into being as a stranger, someone else, than this, not to exist at all.

I am in love with the wrong man. And I am constantly leaving someone I love. A person can come unstuck, but I didn’t come home for comfort.

It’s about the apples. It’s that.

For you have lost everything.

Nothing is like you remember it, and everything you encounter clutters your picture of how . Nothing remains of the world you remember; moreover, it’s impossible, it cannot ever have existed. It’s something other than love, something other than an absence of love. It’s the picture that arises when the two things are placed on top of each other. A blurred image in which all faces become strangely open and desolate, imbued with — well, what, exactly. Time that won’t; a room that won’t.

And the grief on that account.