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 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
