The lilac bushes are in bloom, at their peak.
She wonders where they have gone. They have left her behind in a world of her own. A feeling of missing out on something, and at the same time a sense of having won a prize.
The past does not come creeping in the form of images, it’s there all the time, tugging at your sleeve, trailing along behind you, occasionally wanting to be lifted up and carried.
A chinking of bottles from carrier bags suspended from handlebars. The street lamps are cupped hands. Ready to be filled with rain again. She lives in Copenhagen now, and is on her way home. A celebration folded up and put away in her mind. She could sleep all through next morning. All she needs is to drape a sheet in the window. Strange nocturnal voices sprout at every corner, their pale, near-transparent roots encroach, offshoots striving upward like hair made electric. A drunken babble on high, bodies plummeting, no time to reach out and break one’s fall, faces hurtling toward the ground, buffeted by doors and windows that open and shut. This entire hall of mirrors, with its outside and in, its being in transit, and where have you all gone. The summer’s parties and homelessness, the coming from below of this morning. Distant days repeat through the cracks. And again this light, this light, again.
BENEATH MOSS THEY find the False Chanterelle. Here, he says with pride. Yes, she says. They leave fairy rings, their tramping about. Apples fall. And leaves. They still go home together, intentions seemingly still the same. The warmth that consumes you, rising up inside you, when you’re standing in the kitchen and have been outdoors the whole day. The feeling of hunger, absorbed in the steam of mushrooms, butter and cream, a nausea and satiety of a kind that has nothing to do with either food or no food, but with expectation and having walked through woodland, that peculiar kind of concentration so reminiscent of reading: attentiveness, and its exact opposite. To command large areas of forest floor, survey the ground as though it were soup to be skimmed of impurities; to find the mushrooms that are there. Searching for something in particular without knowing exactly what. Proceeding toward a place that exists only as movement and direction.
IN A CORNER of her garden, the greenhouse, like a dead man, the warmth of life yet to leave the body. She hears him, weeding the path with the hoe. Now and then he pauses, perhaps to remove some more stubborn plant, to pull up the root. Getting rid of. Or else to wipe his brow with his T-shirt. He leans the hoe against his chest, gripping the hem of the garment with both hands, lifting it to his brow, wiping so that the sweat will not run into his eyes. Or else he rummages in the shed, to mend the roof where it leaks. He tidies the raised beds. Or else she is alone and it is later, and the sounds he made hang like voices out of windows. Long after he is gone. Always, this feeling of long after.
HE WALKS AS if his every step is an item he finds on the ground and decides to pick up. Some movements in the ranks, some of us switch spots and will be next. Washing hangs from the line between the trees at the far end of the garden. It is the first time this year they have been able to dry their clothes outside. She walks with her mother through the garden, up the slope. The light is warm now. She closes her eyes and turns her head, the sun falls upon her face.
She stands a moment.
Her woolen sweater prickles at her throat.
But her face.
That’s right, she says. Summer has yet to come. That sense of new beginning. You know it won’t last, in fact it is gone the very instant you sense it to be there. Always something catching up with you — always something that is already too late.
We are taken unaware by the blossom of white, the yellow of the broom, and then the pink, and before we know it we are bathing in the lake, piling into cars with towels wrapped around us, already on our way home from the year’s last swim, the lake freezing over, frozen over, the summer sealed inside, letters sealed with red, and it is Christmas and well into the new year before you even realize Christmas is gone, summer is gone, what happened, and where are we now.
NOTHING DRIPS. RHYTHM of that sort does not exist. Not below freezing. The sound of frost is the same as the sound of polished boots standing lustrous on an unread newspaper in an empty, white room. Unused shoes without laces. They have agreed to meet on her birthday. Nevertheless. The way they always do. Besides, there are some matters he wants to discuss with her, he says on the phone. She has a strong feeling it would be best not to see him at all. She knocks over a vase of sprigs and lilac. The smell of stagnant pond. The water runs across the shelf and drips onto her books. One of those accidents that make her give in and go along with him, in spite of what she feels. It’s my birthday, after all. She pulls the damp towel from her body and places it on the shelf. She shakes the books one by one, wiping the covers dry with a corner of the towel; flicks the pages and leaves them to dry on the windowsill, opened out like fans. They look like stuffed birds with outstretched wings, about to — well, what, exactly.
SHE HELPS HIM into the shower. He is feeble and slack, and though her sleeves are meticulously rolled up she is quickly soaked. She talks to him. About the soap, about whether he is able to stand on his own while she washes his hair; she tells him to be careful and not to fall; she says the lather is rinsed away now, and asks if he can dry himself or wants her to help. His eyes flicker, he is angry, but too tired to do anything about it. Sick, and incapacitated by alcohol. She rubs his hair with the towel.
He gets up, it is well into the afternoon and she isn’t there.
The apartment is empty.
He stands in the last rays of sun as they slant weak warmth down between the roofs of the buildings opposite. He imagines Arizona, fields of maize, grasshoppers consuming unscrupulously. She has a feeling inside her, as though she were separating an egg, passing the yolk from hand to hand, the fragile yolk that might break at any moment. She remembers all the objects she has broken. A small vase. A cup he gave her once. A glass that stood out only on account of being green in a particularly detached and dusty kind of way. Stand still, he says. She gathers the shards in her hand. Stand still, he says again, this time with annoyance. You’ll cut yourself. I won’t cut myself. That evening he tells her he thinks her parents scolded her unduly as a child. For breaking things. That had to be why, the reason she gets so upset. But it wasn’t like that at all, quite the opposite, she thinks to herself. She finds it unreasonable not being allowed to be saddened by time passing. By doing things that cannot be undone, by suddenly dying. That is what a person cries over when they break a glass — no more than that, spilled milk, borrowed time.
He wakes up alone in the apartment, most of the day gone. She is out buying groceries. But how is he to know. He thinks she is angry, but she cannot be angry at all. Disappointment is a greater, more satisfying revenge, one may think, and perhaps it might be true.