THEY MEET IN the sun one morning. He has just opened up the second-hand bookstore he’s taking care of for a while. She gets off her bicycle and wheels it along to the little café table and the chairs they’ve put out front. You can get coffee there, and sit outside.
This is nice, she says, and gives him a measured hug, as though she were afraid he might fall inside her if she held him too tightly for too long. Their bodies: open wounds that may join up and heal as one if they’re not careful. A merging of tissue, like plants climbing a trellis to arch across a garden path, across disorder.
Congratulations on your. . success, he says.
She bows her head, gaze fixing the ground to make her seem shy; then slowly she unfurls and looks him in the eye. She doesn’t know what success he’s talking about, but she knows he means the book. As if that meant anything. It means nothing to her, not now. Thanks, she says, emptily. It’s not like I got the Nobel Prize or anything, she says.
He shrugs and says congratulations anyway. Just getting published is reason enough.
She shrugs. Thinks: what kind of sadness is this. All the leaves of the linden trees are pale, the sun is drawing the color out of everything. They don’t speak.
Do you want to see my window, he asks her, sweeping out his hand. She leans the bike against the wall. Duras, Jelinek, J. P. Jacobsen. Some nice publications that look like exercise books. A tattered Taschen, Picasso. He has angled them carefully, wanting it to look accidental and yet alluring. Two books, one at each side of the picture, have been leaned against supports. She smiles and nods; nice choices, she says. He is so enthusiastic about the display, she sees, and hopes not a book will be sold from out of his window today. That it all may stay the way it is and be resplendent.
HE IS STRETCHED out on the sofa with one leg draped over the backrest. It is morning. Drowsy from sleep: when did you get home. His bare foot dangles like a wilted child in the sun. It is summer, seven o’ clock. His face is covered by a blanket; she lifts it gently, startling them both; I thought you were asleep, she says in a voice that is quite emptied of voice. Breathless. Seamlessly, she lets go of the blanket and puts her hand to her mouth. What happened, she whispers, alternately pointing and putting her hand back to her mouth; his face is streaked with dried blood, in places near-blackened, in the creases around his eyes. Violet. And his face then moves, first the eyes, tentative and with scepticism, as if the muscles themselves do not believe movement to be possible. He groans, and furrows his brow as if to rouse his face. He shifts his weight awkwardly, like a piece of heavy furniture, and she recalls the time in Berlin when he wanted to get in the bath tub with her, drunk; the way he looked like furniture then as well.
Alcohol makes people into furniture.
Dependent on others to move them about.
What happened, she asks again. I walked into a cupboard, he sighs. She can’t help but laugh, only then to fall silent as a fire quickly smothered. She nods and leaves him on his own. She runs her usual route beside the sea, passing the Varna Palæet, following the path around the point, down the steps to the bathing jetty and the changing rooms. She writes her name in the book and finds her towel, pads serenely to the end of the jetty, the morning is quiet here. She immerses herself in the sea, and afterward she sits down on the edge of the wooden structure and dangles her legs. The planks make a bench; it’s March and they’re already lined by bodies, pale and doughy, slowly reclaiming life, bodies walking down the jetty and back again. A switch occurs in her mind, and she imagines nocturnal corpses, drifting in the swell, gently buffeting each other at the first sand bar, in the gloom beneath the jetty, wherever the current will take them. The woman next to her has only one breast. She imagines the missing breast floating amid the night-heavy corpses. She tells the woman about her morning. Perhaps to correct the imbalance of her mentally having encroached upon this unfamiliar body’s domain without having first been invited in. If such accounting is possible.
So you fill in the ledger, and then burn it. Didn’t he need stitches, the woman asks without drama. She shrugs, spilling coffee on her thigh. I suppose he did. She gets up and goes into the changing room, calls home. He doesn’t answer, of course he doesn’t. She runs through the woods and gets him into a taxi to the ER.
SHE TAKES OFF her shoes and puts her feet up on the dashboard; they are driving too fast through the Swedish forests, Småland, on their way to the eastern skerries, the Sankt Anna Skärgård, fleeing from the mosquitoes further inland, the melancholy of that remote former smallholding lay like a dropped undergarment around one’s feet, thick ribbons of mosquitoes blowing in from the lake. It is summer, we can sleep in the car or under the trees, stricken with the fever of the season, a sense of this never coming back, and at the same time the comfort of that, the fact of everything soon reaching an end, on account of it not being real.
If anything ever is.
Without you I wouldn’t have survived a day here, she thinks, I would have died of homesickness. The AC blasts its air, her skirt billowed about her midriff as she tries to find a radio station, as she tries to love him for some other reason than necessity.
WINDOWS THROWN OPEN, something else to come, and the thought, in the mornings especially, of everything now in flux, the sky above us is different, and the light, a totally different light, settled on all things that surround us. Our legs, in that light, as if finding sheen, the glow of shoes on newspapers outside front doors, scuffed boots polished by sun, laundry basket gilded on the tiles of the laundry room. Health. The fact of you lifting your legs a little higher when you walk, the fact of you wanting to come, of saying yes, that would be nice; and the fact of her once again dropping something that smashes into pieces and cannot ever be repaired, and there being no point crying about it. He has this idea, and asks her to help him move the sofa over there, just to see what it looks like, to see what it does to the room. All of a sudden she feels so tired, she thinks to herself, and lifts the sofa with him, carries it across to the other side of the room. It looks like it’s trying to escape.
That’s it, he says, and takes up various positions, viewing the arrangement from all angles. It makes her think of cattle auctions, or just the horse trader from Femmøller, this act of appraisal, though without their sceptical point of departure, with an enthusiasm instead that seems to her like a tribute to everything there is, but which perhaps in actual fact — this is the feeling she has — is the exact opposite. A way of not seeing what is. He claps his hands together, a crack of sound. So what do you think, he says, already on his way to the kitchen to make coffee; and everything is already the same.
THERE ARE TWO tight bundles of images and recollections; have I told you this before, he asks. Yes, you have. He slows down, holding up the traffic, leans over and points: that’s where I used to live. And that’s where I worked once. The warehouse, how hard was that, a warehouseman, and he tells her once again about their fingers in winter, having to wear those gloves with the fingertips cut off, never exactly knowing if it was so they could work the machines more safely or because the gloves would wear out at the fingers anyway. She stares stiffly through the windshield. She wishes they could drive quickly through a landscape that is unfamiliar to her. A fleeting face without history. This disinclination toward him, that in actual fact is an allegiance to the love she still awaits.