One of Us Is Sleeping Read online

I’m sorry. She apologizes. She didn’t want to get in the way of my work. She thought it best to wait. I think about what she imagines I’m working on. Do the others know, I whisper.

  Are you there, she asks. I clear my throat. Do the others know, I ask. Again. I think about my sisters.

  Yes, she says.

  So I’m the last, I think: So they all know, I say.

  I sense that she nods. I picture her biting her lip so as not to cry. I bite my own lip so as not to cry—and I cry. Aren’t you upset, aren’t you afraid, I whimper.

  Yes, she whimpers back, yes, but I’ve cried and cried, I’ve no tears left, she lies. Maybe she thinks the distance makes me blind, makes us blind.

  We’ve wasted so much time, I think. And the two of us, I say. We’ve spent so much time on . . . I come to a halt.

  On what, exactly. Don’t you think this puts everything into perspective, I ask her.

  I’m not breathing.

  Again there’s no answer; there is noise and light.

  Yes, she says at last, I suppose so, but I’m still just as . . . disappointed.

  I wipe my nose on the duvet cover. Okay, I say.

  Are you coming home soon, she asks. She’s standing in the kitchen doorway, looking at the birds that keep the air moving so nature won’t freeze up.

  Of course I’m coming home, I answer. I’m not breathing.

  The question is if the mother who is telling you she is ill in actual fact is the disease itself. If a person can survive that sort of thing: death entering the stage, a burglary in the home that is life, theft of everything you knew. When you lose your mother, not because she dies, but because she becomes death, the disease that is death.

  The conversation does not end with our saying goodbye and hanging up; it’s as though we simply become quieter, as though we’re standing in an open field, walking backward, away from each other, speaking with increasingly greater physical distance between us, and eventually we can’t hear each other anymore, we put down our phones, each on its own surface. The sound of my mother’s phone on the sideboard and the sound of my own phone on the dining table.

  She goes out to feed the birds. I look out across the sea. I’m not breathing. Everything is still, or there is some other music, detached from the image. It’s not music, it’s a sound of something unfamiliar, something you don’t really know anymore.

  WHEN I LIE down in my bed at night I look like a woman lying down in the grass and becoming a heap, a dead calf. I lie down and think: have I risen; I’m in doubt. All that went before. The days. The ones to come. I sleep and do not dream; I am awake in sleep and tell myself a different story just to find peace. I tell myself about the vegetable garden at home, my mother presenting it with a pride more usually characteristic of mountains; she tells me about the various varieties. There are four rows of potatoes: Secura, Sava, Folva, fingerlings. Half a row of them. She points them out, one by one. I remember the plan of the vegetable garden, the sheet of paper with four lines, one row of this, another of that:

  The rows of potatoes run parallel with the hawthorn hedge. On the other side runs the willow from which she was going to make baskets, only she never found the time. It became a kind of willow hedge instead. Not inferior, just something else. Another dream that never was. The fruit bushes, black currant, red currant, hanging over the path like those standing passengers on trains. Calves and trees. Disappointment. She digs up a potato plant with the spade, squats down and inserts a broad silver spoon between the small shiny tubers. The spoon is inherited and is black, its entire surface oxidized apart from the worn area on the underside of the bowl. The spoon makes the same sound as the spade—when it cuts through stony soil, washed in spirits.

  YOU’RE CRYING, SAYS my dead man, concerned and reassuring all at once, sounding like someone coming home to an unexpected table, lit candles and food full of promise. I try to smile.

  Am I, I say in a voice that seems cleansed of all humanity. Or the opposite, a voice that is all too human, as though too much person has been pressed into the sounds.

  My attempt at a smile makes my face look atrocious.

  It’s evening. I haven’t talked to anyone since I talked to my mother; I don’t know what to say to my sisters. I’m not sure we have the same mother; I’m not sure we’re a family anymore. When did it get to this, I think to myself, but maybe it was like this always. That we are neither one body, nor one family, or else: maybe a family is not the same as a family. It’s a construct; it’s like that because we can’t endure anything else. We excuse ourselves, saying some plants resemble others, that some animals do; we’re a bunch of flowers held together by string; an arbitrariness that steps forward when least expected; the stalks wither and the string becomes loose; when it starts to rustle. Thoughts rustle, a home, the faltering family. A home revealing itself to be something other than a home. Rustling. A place that is always someplace else, a different light there; and then the clatter of homelessness, the body that threatens to abandon thought; what remains then, one’s good intentions.

  And there you stand.

  An idea of a home, ideas on the whole; what do we need them for. There are those we take with us, and those we don’t. It can be as simple as that, too. No bus to pick you up, no bridge built to take you across. A fortuitous delay, or a delay hardly fortuitous at all; the fatality of a certain hesitation that is thought’s expulsion from the body or the blood, the fact that one might never arrive. Those who came with us, and those who didn’t.

  THE LANDSCAPE

  EVENING WALKS DISCREETLY in and occupies the afternoon without a word; you can hear its breath. The darkness is only aggrieved light. You have driven all the way from your parents’ house in Risskov to meet me out here. You sag at the knee like an uncoiled spring, as if to oblige; your forward lean makes you spill your words. I watch you greet my parents, you bend down to pass under the low-hanging branches that drape across the paths and are lips.

  You have missed each other, I see.

  Should it make me feel guilty.

  I think so.

  Being in the way, or something; I feel nothing. Shame, perhaps.

  My mother’s hands are gray. I decide to ask you later, when we’re on our own. If you noticed, if you thought about it too.

  But she’s alive, you’ll maybe say. Or: why talk of gray hands when she could be dead.

  Her gray hands pour the tea. A couple of years ago you were not a guest. That was then. Eight years in a family is enough to become a fixture. Not drawing attention, and yet alien. Having a body in a different way than indigenous family. At times you were here more than me; making yourself tea, hardly anyone noticing. No one offering to help or show you how and where. I, however, have always been a guest here. As you were a guest outside my body, homeless there. The no-man’s land outside. I think you sensed it. You felt nothing else.

  I ought to write about my mother.

  I think: I ought to be able to write about her; write her into existence without breaking her and changing things. Simply write the book or the poem, the best possible, the most accurate picture. The way she is for me. Left to me. Like someone else, but like her, too. Whoever she may be.

  But all my words—they become something else. The portrait of you, of my dead man, only now do I have the courage. I think you always hoped I would. Write about you, the attention. To make another person one’s own, to consume them. There’s something more real about the people you don’t know, the ones you call strangers. The closer you get to someone, the more unreal they become.

  A wish to be seen; a desire to vanish completely in someone else’s eyes.

  But then that’s not what happens. Maybe even you’re disappointed when you realize you don’t stop inhabiting your own body just because you’re taken over by someone else’s, another’s gaze, movements. To be evoked, brought forth in the eyes of another and in language, to encounter oneself there—and find another. What resembles, and what is: and something in between that a
ppears. Somewhere else entirely. Unsparing. The drawing in the hand; holding up a pencil, one eye shut. Measuring you, measuring one’s mother. Scientifically almost, yet ending up the opposite.

  My images mingle unpredictably with life.

  I leave nothing untouched, and still there is the constant, alarming sense of something emerging somewhere between reality and what is conceived—something that is not without history, but newborn. Moreover: the world moves, you move as I watch. Without touch, without hands.

  And thus I may be compared to natural disasters.

  You sit on the edge of the sofa. Run your hands repeatedly through your hair and laugh. You have a beautiful face, I think to myself. I haven’t seen it for some time. I haven’t seen it for a long time, and yet it has changed. It’s hard to say in what way. Or to put a finger on it. But it’s like it’s drawn. The way fatigue accentuates a face, deepening the lines, darkening the lips, the lips beneath the eyes; the jaw and chin in need of a shave. You look up at me: it’s so good to be here, you say.

  I nod.

  The days now.

  An odd passage between something that was and something perhaps, perhaps not, to come. There are days where you think: when love reveals itself to be something else, life too will reveal itself to be the exact opposite. It’s a transition, a time existing between two states: something that was, and something else to come, but a time at present that wants no gender.

  I live here with my parents now, I tell myself out loud. He nods. That’s good, he says. But you’ve got the apartment in Copenhagen, when you come back.

  I sit quite still, hearing my mother explain it’s just for a bit: why not stay here for the time being, so as not to be alone. Being alone is no good, she lies.

  I stare.

  There’s no sense in being alone, best to stay here, at home, for a while.

  Yes, I say: now that I’ve been deserted and think I’m going to die. They laugh, and I smile. The days are impossible. Not being home, not being away. Trying to live somewhere, a place, to find a way back. The uncertainty that grips him now—so dismal, a reminder that nothing is ever the way you leave it. That time actually messes things about while you’re gone. The purple beech dying, elm sickness, the Eternit roofing; plastic bags lifted up by the wind and settling in the hedgerow by the slope; the electric fencing falling down because the wire broke, and nothing can keep the rotten poles upright anymore; now the snow has come, now everything’s in boots of snow, the trees have drifts at their ankles, houses clutching the land, snow clambering up the houses. Above the clouds is a sky that cannot be seen. A few cracks one afternoon, but then they too are clawed back. An unfamiliar car pulling in, then pulling away around the bend. A longhaired cat from down in Vrinners, however long it might survive, up here.

  My father is resting on the sofa opposite. He lifts his foot and wriggles his toes in my mother’s face. She laughs. I wonder where it comes from, her laughter. There would be several possibilities, I think to myself. She shoves his foot away: no thanks, keep your smelly feet to yourself. And you; the laughter inside you can only be from one place, for you have so few chambers, none superfluous: a chamber for what is fatal, another for, what should we call it, the feeling when things can be that simple, that pleasing. It sounds so easy, just two chambers, the fear and the joy, and yet it’s so impossible to deal with. I keep mistaking the two signatures, mixing them up all the time.

  Only then I don’t mistake them at all.

  Death and love; death and sickness and the anesthetic in one compartment, love in the other. And then all the time love comes creeping in across the fields, in sentences like: take care.

  There’s something heart-wrenching about people when they possess consciousness, at least, their eyes full of it—eyes that grow fat upon the clearness of the thought: that there is nothing else, and guess who comes out on top.

  Amputees.

  It’s like there’s not enough protection.

  Take care, I can whisper.

  And you know what it is I need you for, what you must help me postpone. You become distant again, but that’s only natural. There’s nothing odd about a heart without atria not working properly; anything else would be alarming. You are a construction built not to endure, but to demonstrate, without uncertainty, that this is no way to survive.

  The fact that you survive nevertheless, another day, another day.

  IF I SURVIVE you, I told myself, you will become a monument. If I don’t, the monument will be me.

  IN THE VILLAGE where I grew up, the houses weep in the mornings. Smoke that cannot be told apart from fog rises in columns from the rooftops. Sagging structures, lopsided farm buildings long since abandoned, gutters drooping like tired eyelids.

  Cycling past the houses one morning in September. Hearing an early apple, a scabby Ingrid Marie, drop onto a heavy lawn, hollow earth. The will to remain standing, a feeling of I want this.

  My dead man’s utterly impossible infatuation must be exposed as impossible.

  And the houses are upright today, upright tomorrow. The village will not be moved, not for anything.

  Farm buildings endure. The farmhouses themselves.

  There is a strength inside those who inhabit such dismal places; the need to preserve. In the storm they draught-proof their windows and tie down tarps.

  Of the two of us, one is forever in doubt.

  I WAKE UP. The room is no longer cold, but the bed is clammy and damp. It keeps hold of its dankness. The room faces out back and is used only when we girls are home, seldom now.

  My younger sister is always busy, we all are.

  A rush and bustle handed down through generations. Sit down here awhile. Work unfinished. The cold of the sheets and admonishment. I don’t really know what it is to feel welcome. I know what it is to belong. Except then I become unsure.

  I feel, though with a delay.

  Always ahead.

  I meet you and immediately I see everything. A pair of scissors catching just right on a length of cloth, the blade finding its direction through the texture that is the fabric’s skeleton; the cloth opens and is a fruit whose flesh is white. Such moments I live for, though never discover until later. Like when you sit there thinking it’s too late, now, to think of whether to stay a second longer.

  What if you stayed too long.

  What if you stayed forever and never went farther away than that you could responsibly allow yourself to take a taxi home.

  When such things happen, thoughts that arrive too late, they consume you and refuse to let go of your pale body, my pale body—trembling with something like doubt. I know nothing, and yet I have seen everything. The realization that resides in that; that there are eyes that see, and eyes that do not know.

  A wish to be recognized as the person you are, to find such eyes, a human gaze.

  Cross-eyed days in which you hope. Most days are like that, most eyes.

  I am tired and wish to see clearly, a gaze that is knives and scissors, an incision into what really is. That’s how I want to see, and how I want to be seen. It’ll be a mess, a filthy mess. Disorder everywhere, disappointment as far as the eye can see. But you. And me, who sees you. Maybe it’s more than enough, maybe it’s all you can ask for.

  THE APPLE TREE stands in a corner of the garden, this winter, and already back when. I have been with my parents a couple of days. The snow rumbled in soundlessly. Upholstered everything in frost, storm brigades of white, consuming landscapes, swallowing everything, augmenting itself, stripping what lay in its path. Winter everywhere, a feeling of all this is mine. I wake up in my old room. I know every knot in the pinewood, my own birthmarks, and yours that I used to know. It’s strange how the body’s memory will and won’t by turn. Gathering blackberries in a bowl, sticky fingers curled around the bunches of fruit, occasional berries punctured, some still green, forgotten by the sun, most simply ripe; dark pearls dropping from their stalks, into a hand that both catches and picks, a hand that can do
whatever it wants, and at the same time: I have forgotten the feel of your body. I don’t even know what it looks like anymore. The picture won’t come together. We have become strangers to each other. There are clothes I remember better than you. Perhaps I’ve never known what you looked like. When you’re standing there midstream. The smallest and largest things a blur of movement. Constantly somewhere else, directions and plans, and looking over your shoulder. All the time, transition. Getting there—soon.

  The way I always had this noise in my ears, something like: you’ll take care of it. And: I’d really been hoping.

  Now I no longer know you. We’ve both forgotten most of it, we all have. That’s what we have left in common, a lot of good forgotten. Something gets lost in the translation from then to now. Something dilutes and becomes flaccid, something else now loudmouthed and staggering—homeward—toward a home that never was, a wandering in search of a bicycle you know you left here, someplace, somewhere around here, only it never existed, it was a horse, perhaps, already waiting in a stable somewhere. The kind of stable where the animals sink to the concrete floor to be extinguished by thirst, and the electric light bulbs, too, go out, one by one. The kind of place that exists in the world, waiting for the getting there you keep putting off with all your searching.

  The room is an abandoned corner inside me. That’s the feeling I wake up with. And the sounds of the house are already mine, and the same. The house has a smell; it meets you head-on in the mudroom as soon as you go in; even before you begin to struggle with footwear; the sounds of the house. The rooms, swathing all movement with sounds of their own. All seven or eight rooms, swathing your thoughts.

  The fact that you no longer exist for me doesn’t mean that the sound of your boots, that commotion outside the door, on the stairway on Marselis Boulevard, doesn’t exist. Some things remain, in the face, the body that remembers—the body that denies; the body, the least reasonable of all. A wish to barricade the body, to keep his hands away, hands everywhere; a celibacy, that wasn’t about denying myself, a lack of desire for something, as you suggested, a frigidity that was most of all, perhaps, always a simple fidelity toward a man I hadn’t found yet. A person I found—only then to not find at all. Restlessness in the evenings, the assault of love, restlessness in the mornings, sleep as violence. A mockery. And your eyes, the reproach, that waste of—well, what else, but a squandering of love.