One of Us Is Sleeping. Josefine Klougart
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 appears. 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