But they stand.
Trembling on the edgeland. Alone. A shift has taken place. They leave a party, and walk through the city. I’m cold, she says. The way he stops there, on the bridge. Takes her hands and pulls off her gloves, holds her hands up in front of his, in front of your, fleshy lips, fleshy and cracked, blowing warm breath against my fingers. Behind you, the tracks as they run beneath the bridge; your breath is moist and warm, and sheaths my white fingers like water.
We say nothing.
A car goes past. A train crosses beneath us, on the tracks under the bridge, it forms a crucifix, and we are in the middle. Your dreadful face is a caring face. What broke it.
When do you realize what these signs mean, a crucifix drawn beneath you. My eyes begin to water, it’s the cold. You think I’m crying, and kiss me. There’s a moment of togetherness there. We walk home, these two people walk home, a man and a woman, without speaking. Before they let themselves into the apartment, he holds her head in both his hands. She can hear herself breathing. The snow can do that: amplify sound. He leans in close, puts his face to hers, and places a kiss below her eye. The feeling of his lips as they touch, before he opens his mouth and licks the skin below her eye, licks the tears from her face, first one cheek, then the other; that kind of moment in time, the fact they exist. And that shift: toward something like words. We have emptied out, she thinks to herself. The noise of a bucket, jarring against the sides of an empty well. A horse, scraping the gravel, putting its muzzle to the ground and blowing, a cloud of dust, a hand feeling inside a dark box when someone has taken the last of the coins and there’s nothing left for anyone. And one day it’s like this: words in abundance, landscapes of them; a face dissolving into syllables: here underneath your nose is the apple tree from the garden at Agri, here is Svinkløv, here are the warm flagstones, everything drawn in outline, laid bare, the dots connected, the face a map: a picture book in which something is revealed, made visible. A person. But all the lines are stiff as wire; you move as if your clothes are still in the cupboard, in a pile: a slide, or a fall, perhaps, a body able — and then again: a body that doesn’t even know what it wants, if it wants, anything other than to talk about — talk about what, exactly. Nothing. Most of what she tells him dissolves as it drifts from her body.
And then.
Where did you go.
She, who still sits on the floor under the sink, unlocks the door and lets him come in, and he falls around her like a loose dress whose shoulder straps someone sliced with a knife.
SHE REMEMBERS SHE was drinking that night. After she asked him to go. Are you sure you don’t want me to stay. I’m sure, just go. She remembers knocking back one glass after another. As alone as could be, but nothing was the way one could imagine it to be: right. Nothing real. Or — too real by half. She wasn’t quite grieving, but pretending. She was drinking, that’s all. Because a person can do that. And because sorrow kept being postponed. By what. Canceled. By this feeling of nothing being real.
I’m not going to leave you, he’d said, more than once.
He was that ignorant, so it seems.
That young.
I’m just telling you like it is, that’s all, he said, and then ran that eternal hand through his eternal hair. He kept revealing himself to be unhappy. Completely unsuited for life.
You leave people all the time.
You leave reality all the time.
She was angry, as if because of some unjust sentence, a match unfairly refereed, unfair weather and unfair fatigue.
The sun dangling from a thread.
Reality, riddled with sentences like:
I won’t leave you.
It’s not too late.
You never know what can happen. And yet we know all too well. We’ve known all along.
Can you remember when we met, he asked her later.
No, I can’t. Can you.
Yes, he replied.
I don’t think so. I think you can remember when we split up. It happened at the same time.
There is a sense of an approach in reverse. A body running backward. A mouth eating a piece of white bread into existence on an empty plate, drinking red wine until the glass is filled, raking chestnuts back across the floor, pearls, an inverse explosion; stripes on a candy stick appearing under the tongue. Collapsing, like a cake in the oven, one’s thoughts, scaffolders falling like rain outside windows. That kind of disaster. That isn’t insurmountable, as you always say. It all happened so quickly, we buried him. And the car, you should have seen the car afterward.
Unreal.
But it’s not lack of reality that this is all about. It’s just the world, when it gets too real. Like me, she thinks; maybe I was just too real for you.
You’ve been chewing your lip. Stop it.
Only he’s the one who chewed his lip. That kind of mix-up.
It’s spring already, summer already, autumn already, and winter has just begun. He has just begun; you have. She goes home and thinks about a child that never was. Herself, perhaps.
She is displaced in time, always.
HE SEES HER to the train and tells her about a film he saw. She thinks to herself his time will soon be short, she counts on the fingers of her hand, how many years, six years older than she, and for a moment she has no idea how old she is herself, but he is twenty-eight, that must be right. You think about children, you dream about children in the night and dream about them in the day. She knows he is thinking the plan is falling apart. And then he tells her about this Bergman film in which a young woman discovers that for a time in her childhood she hated her mother.
Autumn Sonata.
Only there was no place for that kind of emotion, he says. She looks at him, the lines around his eyes.
He throws up his hand. There just wasn’t room, not at that time. And later, he goes on with enthusiasm, the young woman kind of works it out. Realizes that the fear she feels all the time stems from this kind of — pent-up hatred.
She smiles. So now, she says, you think I should let myself hate my mother.
Yes.
She smiles. He smiles.
But that’s not what I’m saying, he says. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.
I think it’s the same for all of us. All Bergman’s films are made for us all.
Maybe you’re right, he says. Are you looking forward to going home to Mols.
She thinks for a moment. I’m looking forward to seeing if I can. If I can be there. I can’t really be anywhere else.
I think it’ll be a release for you, he says then. To get away from the city for a while. From that man of yours.
She nods. Perhaps. She kisses him suddenly on the mouth. Just so you won’t forget me, she thinks. Hey, he says, and smiles. Hey, she says. I didn’t mean it, she lies.
But then it was him kissing her, holding her tight. And then her turn to say hey, and he who lied himself to a kind of repentance.
Nothing is more or less real.
A particular kind of light she remembers from her childhood. A realer light, that makes everything look more real while it’s there, and then afterward, when you think back: more unreal.
Are you coming with me, she asks him.