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.
I get up and it’s like unfolding a worn-out sheet of paper, long forgotten in the depths of a bag, rediscovered one day by the lake while searching for the apple you know you brought with you. The sun shining coldly, early in the day or late evening. My father potters about the kitchen, making sandwiches, stirring some porridge. The gas stove squeals, the light squeals. The sense of prelude, going out. My mother’s fingers poring through stacks and piles. They do not speak; the radio is on. The porridge bubbles beneath its skin, rising like a swollen lip, a finger jammed in the door, a boil fattening in the dermis; a living membrane, bursting, gasping, wheezing, and whistling. What am I doing here, I wonder, and know the answer at once. I came here for the apple tree, and because I remembered something like: we’re always here for you. And in no time I’ve realized it’s not enough.
I need to leave.
Only the apple tree keeps me behind, its branches turning to hands that clutch and grip, and I plummet: here I am.
HIS NARROW BED jars against the wall, next to the unreasonably large window. He is inside her, thrusting as if there were something there that needed dislodging. As if she and the bed are to be shoved through the window and out onto the balcony she never wanted him to buy anyway. She actually thought she had always been the sensible one; actually thought she had looked out of that window about a hundred times before.
No, she thinks now. I never did.
SHE CLIMBS THE hill, the light is the color of white cabbage; you should see me. She thinks back on a morning in Sweden when they were together there; she was wearing a straw hat. They argued about the cafés they passed, there was always something wrong. She, limping along behind after twisting her ankle one afternoon on the rocks. Shade or sun, prices, the feel of the place: always something not right, and they would go on. The sense of time running out while one is still on one’s way. An abiding state of not getting there, postponing arrival. Moving on, the mystery of destination—lack of completion, forever in motion, on our way there, on our way home, or just: somewhere else.
Direction in everything, movement toward.
Except then their patience ran out, and they sat down at a place called Selma and ordered