I DON’T THINK I want to move, she said. She remembers the way he lifted his head from his book and stared at the wall before turning round in the swivel chair and looking at her.
No, was all he said.
I’d have to sell the allotment.
He nodded, that was all.
She remembers thinking about a train, a train of non-sound, passing through a room like theirs, like light.
Then stay, he said. But I’m moving.
He barely packed a thing. She more, though not much. They leave each other without being able. A transition into something else. Doors unslammed. They have done this behind their own backs and realize only gradually that something impossible has taken place. The way it does, all the time.
SHE WAKES UP with the feeling of needing to go home. She tries to slither out from underneath, to rise from the bed without him noticing. She moves his left arm, which lies draped across her. Again, she has ended up here, a shifting tide backward in time. So they are trying again, once more there is hope of some kind. And yet it is a sorry hope, for each of them knows there will never be anything more than this. His arm: like opening the heavy wooden door of a stable in order to emerge into sunlight. He does not wake. It feels like he has borrowed his apartment from someone, there is something temporary about it.
And his face.
This is your face now. The way it changes all the time. I think I liked it better once. Always, liking better what once was. She puts on her clothes, open-mouthed, her body drawing in air without sound. She shuts the door behind her, knowing that she has no key. I will never be back, she thinks. She: the way she shakes her head when he holds up a spare set of keys in front of her one afternoon they meet at a café. Take these, he says. He, saying: take these, dangling them in front of her, the keys dancing like awkward adolescents held up by the scruff of the neck, legs like that. And her face, the feeling of not wanting them, of their belonging to someone else now. The feeling that everything has changed. And this pain of absence; how easy it is to miss someone, and how strongly. That desire to keep and conserve.
We can be friends.
But then maybe you can’t stay friends without castrating each other. That’s what she senses. He makes her incapable of loving others, and she does the same to him. She shakes her head.
Give them to someone else.
Has your new girlfriend got her own keys. She, asking him.
He shakes his head. He looks at the ground.
Give them to her. Then.
She gets up and leaves, walks out through the room; she thinks of her own apartment. The spare keys to her own place.
Where they are now. Berlin. In the pocket of her new man, who already has been buried, alive. In the arms of his own past, buried there in the woman he left in order to be with her.
She will ask him to return them. Perhaps they can be sent.
Only then she cannot bring herself to write to him. The fear of him actually sending them back. She goes down the stairs, her legs are pistons, she descends through the stairwell, taking all the air with her outside. She is assailed by the sun. She bends down and unlocks her bike. The particular chill of Frederiksberg in the mornings. She wheels the bike along Gammel Kongevej; changes her mind and walks back. She buys some bread at the bakery on the corner, where the light of the sun and the light of the city lakes collide like heavy girders, disrupting every face.
Again, she stands there outside his entrance. With bread inside a paper bag. The bag feels heavy, the bread rolls it contains feel like warm kidneys or hearts pumping. The body shares its rhythmic composure with everything that is dead. With bread. He looks glum as they sit there facing each other in the kitchen. Threadbare. She begins to regret coming back. Or coming back in order to leave in order to come back. She doesn’t really know what she regrets. She doesn’t really know what has worn her down. She has all sorts of thoughts about it, only they go off in different directions, first this way, then the other. She doesn’t trust her own emotions. They come to her and leave her again in all their dictatorial arbitrariness. A person can tire of never understanding how things happen. Or you can become fatigued from knowing all too well what it takes. Knowing, and yet at the same time knowing it will not happen. That the option isn’t available. His mind is a conglomerate of basements, she sees that now. Literally. Inside are corridors, rumbling echoes as the watchmen run through them at night, high on morphine. Maybe he doesn’t know, but he hopes I will come back. This is what she thinks. A victory march.
So she thinks.
That he misses her. He gets up and goes over to the fridge, fetches something, or nothing at all, then sits down opposite her again. He places his hand on top of hers on the table and they look into each other’s eyes. Or else they look down at the table.
IT’S STRANGE, HE lies, I never miss you when you’re not here. I get so scared I might forget you, he tells her. He has talked her into meeting. I’m beginning to forget you, he says. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, malicious voices tell her, only these are her own thoughts, they carry her signature. And presumably it is what he wants, or what a person dreams about at night; dreams about during the day, not wishing it upon one’s worst enemy. They walk there together, in the park by the National Gallery. It is summer and they are constantly on the run from someone. Both of them seeing someone else now, and one of them always wanting to try again. But only one.
He tries to explain to her that they are standing at a crossroads. He extends his fingers and turns his hands into stiff tools, crosses them on top of each other. An intersection, he says. They both look at his hands, and he lowers them again. They walk around the city for hours, drifting like a plow through endless fields of America, following the highway or cutting cross-country. Drawing a trail of moist soil behind them like snails, through shaded gardens, cultivated landscapes gouged open to the flesh.
I don’t believe in you, she says.
He looks at her and asks what she means. And then they are silent for a long time, walking through the landscape that Copenhagen sometimes can be.
It’s a very beautiful day, she thinks.
Sometimes it can be that simple.
THE MORNING COMES from below. It is summer, and the air is static, embracing everything, warmth and light. She recalls a morning at Agri when she awoke refreshed from sleep, the feeling of having slept sufficiently. Immediately, she knows they have gone off without her, that she is there alone. The sounds of the house are undisturbed. No one to encounter, no sisters to disturb the life of things, a life that hums and emits noise in its own quiet way, a bit like words whispered under a door, through a keyhole: please open up and come out, so we can talk about it all. She gets up and her blue nightdress falls into place around her body. She pads on heavy feet along the corridor, the doors of the other rooms wide open like graves plundered by robbers; the beds, these empty boxes, the stairs. In the kitchen, a shaft of light picks out half a cucumber left on the table, crystals of ice encircling the seeds. Or perhaps they are crystals of sugar, a staring eye, dissected blandness of water, a shimmer. A tea bag, trapped by the lid of the pot, the table stained by its dripping. She picks up the cloth that is already there, still damp, and wipes the table, wipes away the stain. She goes over to the French doors, the sun strikes her face. At this early hour, the hill delivers its measure of shade to the house. The door is not locked, but the handle is turned upward as if it were. A barrage of sound, she opens the back door, a barrage as she opens the door, like a rush of water, finding its way and consuming a home; the grass is cold as a church, and wet, crying out that it is summer, as though it were a seldom occurrence, as she walks over the lawn in her bare feet. The garden: a detonation of green, white, yellow.