His throat is a well, a rope hangs from the pulley, clutching a dismal zink bucket. Tomorrow once again, it will batter the lining of his infected gullet.
A wind howls in the well.
Her mouth fills with feet and jealousy.
If this is courage; this is courage.
She points, as well as she is able. Pokes a finger out in front of them. And it is as if he will not believe her; the little tug on her hand.
Come on, he says. Let’s go home, let’s go home where it’s warm. The lake here will be dark soon. There are so many good reasons that only one needs mentioning. The dark, for instance. The others queue up in the mind, too many by far, like figures on the platform in Berlin, so many people soon to break up and be crammed into railway carriages. His woolly hat, always riding upward and back, and he, always pulling it down over his ears again unaware.
He puts his hands in the well to defrost.
Come on, he insists, and does not see the carp. They hang suspended in the frozen lake beneath them.
Carp-mouthed carp, the silver of scales.
She is more beautiful than me, she thinks, and collects her saliva, spits on the ice, and finally they go. The thought of it will not leave her, her spit descending through the ice like a drill, twisting its way ever down, a drinking straw of fish, a leggy man diving for pearls, to save up for the sake of some later amusement.
I GET OUT of bed and stand naked in the blue light. My feet seem unnaturally flat. It’s like the original and the acquired have changed places. My heeled sandals missing, the soles of my feet are admitted to the floors.
THE APPLE TREE runs in through the window and along the hall. Its branches are trailing flames. The apples bruise against the walls.
The storm has woken me up.
The different sounds of the apples. The frozen red ones. Those succumbing, those rotten.
Branches swipe at furniture, stab at the pictures. The blue lithographs sway like street lamps, they buffet the wall, in the way of unknowing birds whose wings have been clipped. Helpless and inept.
If I can’t identify the moments I live for, at least I can identify those I live in spite of.
Nature is disturbed by winter. I am, too.
MORNING HAS COME abruptly. Spring has arrived without them having noticed. Again, we are caught napping. She comes home and is quiet at the door as always. She knows to be silent. Her mouth is open, throat gaping, the air may come and go from her body as it pleases. Without sound. Her body is partition walling inside the apartment. She lifts and pulls the door toward her, turning the key gently, that certain way it must be opened so as not to creak. She is well inside the hall before she sees him. He is standing there, awake. Wanting to walk in the woods.
Good morning. Where does that smile come from. He walks beside her on the path, whose exultant green almost chokes on itself. They pass behind the amusement park, Tivoli Friheden, where everything as yet stands dripping the cold of night. Equal parts expectation and fatigue. And the leaves in the wind: a sound like gravel being raked.
He smiles, and she sees him against the light. He stands in the kitchen, an infant sun swelling behind him. Someone has moved the clouds. The traffic sounds different, the tire-noise belongs to brighter spring, brighter summer. In the summer you can hear the warm snap of asphalt.
She pulls off her running gear and showers. Reluctantly, she applies an extra layer of mascara. They walk in the woods, the anemones have pushed through the earth, are yet to unfold, though their buds are fat and glistening green. The light is unreal and renders everything: unreal. He talks, ignited with enthusiasm. His hands, his energy fill the entire clearing by the lake. She wonders if he even sees the woods. And if he does, whether they disappoint him, whether he will feel let down if he should look at them. An enthusiasm that renders everything unreal.
Someone told him about nature and now they are walking there.
The leaves have heard about the light, they unfold and present it to them. She waits for someone to extinguish him again. They will never be one with nature, but still they walk. It is as if the woods may be translated into portents and predictions.
Only they can’t.
He is at least three different men, and she at least three different women.
YOU’RE SMILING, HE says, concerned. As though arriving home unexpectedly to find a table set for a candelit dinner.
Am I, she says.
She sits quietly, as if under a sky towering above fields at harvest, a cape of metallic blue to shroud the corn as it positions itself for the angry work of machinery.
AFTER EVERYTHING, HE visits.
It is afternoon, the weather is amazing. We ought to be out, she thinks. Nice chairs. Things you’re familiar with. There are some clothes on her bed, some cupboards gaping, and all these books splayed apart. Look at this place, he says, and laughs. He says it’s good to see she can allow herself to relax now. With things like that.
But it’s my face you’re talking about, she thinks.
It’s her face he’s talking about.
SHE IS STANDING in the kitchen, looking out onto the courtyard. Or else she is in her parents’ kitchen, the budgerigars unsettled in their cage. The hedges are full of spring, the season resides now in the tiny feet and beaks of titmice and blackbirds. She descends into the cellar and retrieves the sun lounger. She finds blankets, and takes her duvet outside as well.
It’s still too cold for anything, really. But still a person can lie down here, wrapped up in woollen blankets and duvets, in a spot of sunlight. There is sky, and there are windows cleaned, and nothing, but nothing in the way. The clouds travel across their backdrop of blue, and yet in an upward motion, ever more distant as one draws in the air. A shudder runs through your ribs, a feeling of demasking, a promise in all things — of clarity. No more talk. Everyone stops talking, work is done: sounds of a city at work. Posts hammered into the ground, duvets shaken in the air, the clatter of sundry objects dropped from balconies, the thunder of beaten rugs, a clicking of tongues, children reluctant to go back in and eat. And tomorrow the rain may come and draw its herringbone across the road in front of the house as drains gurgle. And he will perhaps be standing under the trees. As though waiting to be consumed. By nature. Because he is missing something and doesn’t quite know what.
HE SAYS:
Sit down here a minute, meaning:
Summer is over, and the thought is unbearable. The apples, bright as eyes in the tree, little heads dangling from a belt. Summer, leaving without paying.
HER GAZE SWEEPS over the lawn. It picks something up. A little case of some sort. A bag of ripe redcurrants. The greenhouse perspires in a corner of the garden. The stalks of the tomato plants wilt after a long winter. You say there is nothing like tomatoes picked when red and ripe. The ones you buy in the supermarket are a different thing altogether. She borrows a car and drives out to the allotment gardens. No one has been there for ages. Perennials lie upon the ground. A single sunflower left standing, stalk broken under the weight of the head’s heavy disc. Four wrinkled tomatoes hang bright as Japanese lanterns. Some things that need distributing between them. Everything that never turned out. Everything that never happened.