A hand.
The asphalt, unsettled by the heat.
Her mother, who collects her in Aarhus or Risskov; they drive to Mols together. She picks at the fingernails of one hand with the fingernails of the other, eyes glued to the road. She is a martyr, uncertain of what she is fighting for.
So this is what she is fighting for.
They always talk on the drive home, but she has not a single recollection of any specific conversation. Nothing, but their talking. She recalls so little, almost nothing. A heart in the grass. A sky in the south of France, a pink sky, and in front of it a landscape in four layers: mountains behind mountains behind mountains. He in, you in, a bed one morning I return home from a long walk in the woods, you are asleep, and I stand there and am eyes, three thousand eyes.
The road is worn thin, she doesn’t see it anymore. The beauty by which a person is surrounded has its own discreet ways. Only when a tree-cutting schedule or an autumn storm disturbs that order; only then can you see anything at all. When she can see the old man in the man she thought would give her, well—life. Life, the exact opposite of: left alone. When she can see, when I see, that the person is no good, and the life you were supposed to have together was no good—when we split up, the life that begins there: life after you begins here. You write to me and say the downturn ends here, but both of us know this is where what is left begins. The child inside its mother, the turnaround that takes place; a conversation postponing a farewell: what else. A silence, postponing what needs to be said. I am worn thin, a tree-cutting schedule, my body an autumn storm. I am old, I steal my mother’s years, one after another, I steal age from the language, all the books I read make me unnaturally old, those I love make me unnaturally old; it’s like we take on each other’s lives, sharing it all, all the life that has been lived; and the dividing up of the estate is a mad gesture, we clutch and tear, pull the rings from the fingers of loved ones now dead, though their bodies may still be warm. We think we own, in fact, but what we own are memories, and they change all the time, are constantly getting lost. What do we want a ring for. What are we supposed to do with a finger.
We pass the lake—we go that way when possible. Through the plantation. The bends in the road that make you think you’re nearly there. The light ahead, always so full of promise: here is the lake, enticing. A seduction that has nothing to do with a lie. The woods, that have nothing to do with seduction, besides this optical illusion. Expectations of things to come.
An Italian garden in spring: the rainwater channels that run through the town; a band of drought and skinny dogs, the occasional beginnings of plants that nonetheless are but dust in the sun—dry, and human.
The woods are unsettled, the asphalt likewise; in a way the heat makes no difference.
My mother starts to sing. Tentatively at first, then with gusto. There is an endeavor to make the song fit in, to be a pathway alongside the road. A sudden displacement inside me, as I sit there on the seat next to her, leaning my head against the window; a dislocation that runs from fatigue through annoyance to a sadness that mostly is about grief at not being a big enough person.
The trees and the asphalted roads.
The edgelands of all the places anyone is from. The woods, the borderland. Like the way she can think she is always on the periphery of her life, on her way to something better, something else, at least. The insects swarm, and even if you say a poppy or a daisy can break through asphalt: the trees surrender whereas the roads do not, exactly, surrender.
I ask my mother to be quiet, please. And we exchange glances, my mother turning her head, the car moving on through the woods at an even pace. The speed of the woods and the speed of the car and of the silence, a single movement. And her face turns into that dreadful face, transparent: a single sheet of paper, set on fire, but now extinguished. Her document face. I am not breathing.
Her head is so exhausted. Or just: I’m so exhausted.
It’s like we keep on looking at each other the rest of the way, her mouth is open, her body breathing on her behalf, one last favor, gifts of that nature.
The woods have so many layers, you penetrate and press on ahead, trees ever darker; like when I was alone in France with the rubble, the remains of something that was no more, attempting to do something; and the layered mountains, one behind the other, so almost-infinite and increasingly bright, going against everything you ever learned. So few lights this evening, I think to myself back in time, later. Or I lock the door, am alone and will remain so, switch off my phone, for there is something I must finish. My eyes flick their way through the mountains, and I weep. The view here is nothing to write about. But it is the view here, the orange of the mountains, the various blues of the mountains, the blue-black of the mountains, letter-blue, blued letters, blueing mountains; behind the eyes behind the mountains, pitch black, pale red morning, pale red mountains, blood and blood-red and bread, the redly blueing leaves of blue mountains.
The lake, now abruptly the lake. My mother pulls in and parks. The light falls more directly here, descends; the lake is an eye in the woods. The car ticks. We sit for a while, then step out into the heat.
We swim, and our bodies decide to save us, again today. The lake is deep, its ceiling opaque; it is like the grand railway stations that were built at the end of the nineteenth century: glass and iron and light. Grass. Light. Foliage. The lake as a hall, an arrival—a feeling of here begins something else.
GRAYNESS, POURING FROM the sky.
The woods sigh, the remaining trees.
A lot has been cleared here, I tell you. And the barn over by the rectory is gone, they pulled it down.
You are quiet at the other end of the line. How sad, you say after a moment, understanding so little of what you say. I bite my lower lip to make it stop trembling like that.
You have to reconcile yourself with the thought that everything happens at a pace you cannot control. Failed love needs three months, so you’ve been told.
I find myself thinking you don’t know what you’re talking about.
But you do. You’re talking about me. And dreaming I’ll take three months. We both know that as it stands I’ve taken somewhere between eight and ten years.
You borrow something, everything you need you just borrow.
Childhood, a lover, a loan, merely; it’s all a wicked party you clear up the next day, without hardly recognizing each other. Is that you. That girl you found, or the one you had found already; ten years, it cost you. Now you can feel guilty about mentioning, even thinking about me. Because she can’t handle hearing about it. Forgetting on demand, maybe I’m eighteen again, and you’re twenty-three. Subtract an entire life, and the years are gone, forgotten.
You comfort me, a pale hand smoothed over my hair, my mother’s hand, smoothed along my back. She moves down into the living room to read, that night. My grief disrupts her sleep. You were breathing so erratically, she says, closing her eyes to the light of day, of evening, of night, always someone stealing her sleep.
But I am still alone in the room with your voice. We talk about antidepressants, about how they parcel up your senses and allow you not to take in the world as intensely as before.
That’s just what I need, I say.
There is moisture in the air, the landscape proudly upright behind the curtains of moist air that extinguish everything. I long to return to Copenhagen, and I do not long at all. Nature is a fire blanket, it puts out something inside me. What, exactly, I can’t tell. It bubbles constantly to the surface, a weeping about to erupt, a flame that is smothered beneath something heavy and tight and yet not extinguished, an ember rising in the throat, searing, burning. There are tall snow drifts on the left side of the road, on the right you can see the grass, scattered patches of green. The sheep stand with empty