One of Us Is Sleeping Read online

  Copyright © Josefine Klougart and Rosinante/Rosinante & Co., Copenhagen 2012 Published by agreement with Leonhardt & Høier Literary Agency A/S, Copenhagen

  Translation copyright © Martin Aitken, 2016

  First published in Denmark as Én af os sover

  First edition, 2016

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Names: Klougart, Josefine, 1985- author. | Aitken, Martin, translator.

  Title: One of us is sleeping / Josefine Klougart; translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.

  Other titles: Én af os sover. English

  Description: First Edition. | Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015049056 (print) | LCCN 2016000525 (ebook) | ISBN 9781940953410 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mothers and daughters--Fiction. | Loss (Psychology)--Fiction. | Psychological fiction. gsafd | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Love & Romance. | PSYCHOLOGY / Interpersonal Relations.

  Classification: LCC PT8177.21.L68 E513 2016 (print) | LCC PT8177.21.L68 (ebook) | DDC 839.813/8--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015049056

  This book has been translated with the assistance of the Sharjah International Book Fair Translation Grant Fund.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  ONE OF US IS SLEEPING

  CONTENTS

  THE LIGHT COMES CREEPING

  THE LANDSCAPE

  A FUNERAL

  THE LANDSCAPE

  THE NEW MAN

  THE LANDSCAPE

  A FUNERAL

  THE LANDSCAPE

  THE LIGHT COMES CREEPING

  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 cov
er 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.

  The illusionist.

  I FALL AND remain lying in the grass. Lying the way I landed. Late August, a tractor idling in the field out back. The door of the cab is wide open, abandoned, mid-sentence.

  There is a lack of movement in the landscape.

  As though the day in fact is night; as though the sun in fact is a rice-paper lantern suspended from the ceiling, as though someone just wants to make sure everyone is asleep. That no one is reading or talking, or interfering with each other, or looking at comics. In other words: that no unreason occurs.

  But then there is nothing but unreason: all of a sudden unreason is the only thing there is.

  Are you asleep, I whisper to my mother.

  There’s no answer. The words linger, an echo from before, my dead man’s voice; are you asleep, he asks.

  And I was.

  Or else I was playing dead.

  The knots in the ceiling planks resemble almost anything. A five-legged deer. A half-moon, dripping. Something a person doesn’t forget in a hurry. An apple tree with red apples in a corner of the garden, those kinds of remains; summer in mid-winter. And still it snows.

  As it has snowed all day, it continues to snow.

  As though the snow wants to prove something: that the composure with which snow can fall never has to do with fatigue; the snow is not sedate, it is simply inhuman. Like the winter this year, inhuman in every respect. Marching tirelessly on, repeating itself in patterns understood by no one. The dark is paled by the brightness of snow. Every now and then a red apple falls through the dim gray into the snow, here beneath the tree’s basket of a crown, black bark. A snap as the apple strikes the membrane of hard ice formed by the change in the weather that never materialized other than as a moment’s hesitation in the winter, a sudden mid-winter assault—of summer. At once the frost came whistling. Then a hard casing of ice, fifty millimeters thick, now with a coat of new snow. It’s all right, I say to my sleeping mother, whispering the words in the dark, sleep now.

  It can be as simple as that, too.

  That you can lie quietly together and be somewhere else, alone.

  Yes, says my mother, awakening with a start.

  Where have you been, I ask myself, what was it you needed to finish.

  Can’t you sleep, she asks, turning in the bed. I think: what am I doing here, in my parents’ bed. I’m far too old to lie here; and always have been.

  Everything is the opposite. The snow whirling up, vanishing into a cloud that cannot be distinguished from sky. I whisper to my mother: yes, I whisper, go back to sleep. She sleeps at once, without transition, departs the room, and yet lies so completely still. For years you don’t notice, but then it becomes so clear, death residing in your own mother; you see your grandmother in her, her mother in yours. And then another face still, recognizable, and yet unfamiliar. A disconcerting face, this third one.

  She turns over onto her side and sleeps on.

  Then turns and sleeps again.

  More than once: a face, my mother’s face, disappearing. And the third face that can only be my own, the only explanation: mine.

  Inhumanly tall grass.

  Inhuman nights. I think—I have been so spoiled. I have never wanted anything I couldn’t have. Now there’s only one thing I want, him, and everything I don’t want I can have.

  Rest and stillness.

  ALL THE TIME I had the feeling there was only one thing left keeping me in this world. But then one evening we parted. And the morning after, I’m still here, alive regardless. I do not wake, for I never slept. You have gone home to Frederiksberg, where you now live. You have a room in a large apartment, and you sleep in the same T-shirt as when you slept with me. You are deceased, and yet you are there, alive and well.

  Without me. There in that way.

  The morning slips in with the sun, that’s how I think of it; that the morning begins somewhere beyond the ice-cream kiosk and the fishermen on the far spit on the other side of Langelinie, that it enters the city, passes through Østerbro. The sky is poorly sealed, the sun thin and liquid. It pours into the streets from the bottom end, pushing cars and people in toward Rådhuspladsen, out across Amager, Islands Brygge.

  I don’t know what you thought you had done that evening, unburdened your heart, I suppose, but then it was all so much heavier than before, your heart included; that’s how it must be. You think something will last, and then you endure, and somehow—live with.

  I imagine there to be someone, but then no one is there.

  I felt sure of a mother, always, but perhaps she, too, is to be struck off.

  I climb into the bed, pull the duvet over my legs and put my arm around her. Now I have returned to the landscape I thought would always be there.

  Is it still snowing, my mother asks me.

  I nod. Yes, it’s still snowing.

  Did you feed the birds.

  Yes, I fed the birds.

  I SIT IN a corner of the living room, yet in its midst. I can sit like this, here on the white sofa, and all the time I am somewhere else. My mother walks past again, a shadow falls across the room, it’s mid-afternoon. The shadows play on the walls and everything else around. The gardens are asleep; there is unease because everything outside is shrouded in winter and cannot breathe. The snow has fallen, upon all that is alive and all that is dead; the snow makes it all the same. All that is buried suffocates and rots, or grows and expands beneath the blanket of white; a membrane becoming thinner and thinner, a skin pulled taught. The snow creaks, the vice that grips the plants, the shrubs, the tree stumps. My mother looks out the window, disturbed by a feeling of having lost contact with some part of her body, like an arm that’s fallen asleep. She picks at me with her eyes, pinches me to bring me back. All the time: the sense that her daughter lives in another world. The calamity that resides in that. Being alone, or at least without.

  Shut out of one’s own house.

  A room within the family, a room within its narrative, a former colony now suddenly standing alone, and yet still reverberating with narrative.

  She cannot understand how I can do it; but then she doesn’t really know what it is I’m doing.

  She leans forward over the sofa, places a hand on my knee, retracting it almost at once, as though it were unexpectedly wet, as though it were on fire. Winter, phosphorescent and unreal, a whimper o
f wind. Dressed landscapes. The snow remembers every wandering, traces left that cannot be wiped away; the snow remembers; the body does. But this winter perhaps is different. This winter, the snow perpetually blown into drifts; it snowed again, and again it snowed. It’s impossible to remember anything, and yet one cannot doubt that something was left behind beneath the snow, something that would be found again in the spring. Beneath the layers of remembered footprints, traces forgotten, yet as recollections to remain, a latent illness that may return at any time. Awkwardly in spring, awkwardly in a broken face.

  I look up at my mother.

  Yes, I think, this face is broken. Like if you dig with too much abandon, if you dig like a person possessed or don’t know when to stop. My mother’s face, my grandmother’s, and now this third, strange and yet familiar, which is what else but my own. A feeling of having returned too late, of rattling a locked door and knowing your things are inside. So we share this too, this puzzle of arrival, eternally postponed arrival at something that is—well, what, exactly; still, perhaps.

  WHEN I THINK back on the days in the summer house they seem oddly architectural. As though in recollection they share something in common with structures and exact drawings. They are not allowed to be simply days. Remembered, they become the days when.

  The days surrounding.

  These are the days before, these are the days after; they fall like thick hair on each side of a broken face: how long have you known, I ask. My mother phones; I am still in bed, only then I sit up.

  I’m not breathing.

  How long have I known, she repeats, buying time.

  There’s a feeling of sitting in the back seat and being in my parents’ hands. Planetary coercion. The grubby sky that hangs above the fields. The trees stand clustered like animals in the pasture.

  I’ve known for almost a week, she says.

  I nod.