She looks at him and smiles:
Great, she says, that would be fine.
BABY CARRIAGES IN the courtyard. Windows thrown open, duvets spewed out like foam to dry; the clatter of bicycle locks, back doors that slam, a scattering of green buds, the way nature exists inside the city; an absence of all else but thoughts revolving around not revolving around death and winter and men who are no longer here. The impossibility of taking leave of something that never was. Something else that cannot be taken leave of, precisely because it was. Tangibly, when the past is pressed into everything, and when your thoughts are. The fact that there is a storage room in the basement and things there that they have accumulated. An indivisible remainder, everything fractioned, stumps of teeth inside a mouth; she is broken by all their things; she is again broken by the mere thought of what she can remember and what she has already forgotten. That, on its own. When there is no one to witness, a glove in the snow, left behind and forgotten all winter, now suddenly come to light, bulging with something inside, reminiscent of a hand, the humanity of it, dulled suede against the black soil, and then ten days on: snowdrops like stars all around, a sky in the borders, in a corner of the garden.
How many days like this.
How many days of spring can a person actually stand.
THE KEYS OF your apartment were shiny and bright as eyes too old for the face in which they are suspended. The apartment into which you moved that winter when you left me — it was like it was forever uninhabited. From the very start, uninhabited, and it seemed like that would never change. I knew straight away, I. .
I know I can come here always.
It has nothing to do with will or absence of wilclass="underline"
you never change the lock.
Seen from above we looked like a litter of hungry fox cubs falling over each other in the rush.
Do you love her, I asked you, my eyes darting between new furniture and some things she’d done to dress the place up like a home. A decorated space, and you noticed.
You were sad in a way I recognized from somewhere, though I couldn’t gain the purchase to see clearly.
You are quite unable to place something in a room without it looking like it’s only temporary.
Do you love her, I asked, and saw the torment come over you, though recognizing it as something unrelated to the wish to escape.
Well, you ventured, hesitating, first man on the ice. No. But I could begin to love her. It could turn out to be something good.
Do you still love her, the other woman had asked you. And your two replies resounded then together, filling the room from floor to ceiling with dissonant overtones, chain-sawing the air, or anything else that might ever present itself.
Yes. Of course I love her. The way you love a season or a thought. Or: I have loved her. As if the past is past. Blade box: it’s easy to leave someone if the swords don’t go through the skin, if you can talk about the past as past.
Love someone like a season, a thought.
Both of us then expelling a sigh, thinking: it’s already over.
He is no one yet. You are no one yet. And we both of us miss you.
I COME TO your apartment again, out of breath and in a cold sweat. I do not fumble with the keys, I run up the stairs, pull off my jacket and unlock the door in the same movement. I run through the hall, into the living room; throw myself down on the sofa.
Her breathing is noise.
I am not breathing.
SHE ADOPTS HER dead man’s sense of the life that is hers not being her life, but the recollections of a stranger. An unfamiliar woman’s walk down memory lane, everything swollen up, as it were, infected by some nature of explanation and system. The way recollections may be orchestrated to achieve a cohesion that wasn’t there before, that doesn’t exist in the life that is.
She told him one night as they lay together after strange sex that had seemed mostly like swimming.
His voice was hoarse.
You talk too much, he said.
No, she replied. This is a life lived by another woman, retold by herself.
Who do you tell your life to then, he asked her, and the question sent her reeling. It was the very reason why she was lying there, the reason why, in spite of everything, she couldn’t be without him in her life, the way he was able to identify the essentials in all things. If ever she lost herself in sentimentality he could pull her from the flames again with only his eyes. To whom do you tell your memories.
His eyes were clear in the dim room.
She said: I don’t know. I don’t know who I tell. Just someone who’ll listen.
Hm, he muttered, on the verge of sleep. Builders would start their work in only a few hours. Their work, patient hammering and the rasp of a saw, became sounds she would later associate with the feeling of being recognized — heard by him, the dead man. Eyes of before.
IT WOULD BE better for you not to live on your own.
I suppose, she concedes, sipping her tea, holding the cup first in one hand, then the other, not wanting to burn her fingers, or for it to get stuck and become a part of her.
You’d have someone to — well, you know. .
He looks like he’s picking a shiny object up off the ground, a coin perhaps, the gleam of a coin:
. . stop you thinking.
She nods and sips some more tea.
Coming to see her makes him sad, she sees that. It’s as if he hopes that one day she will leave with him. As if it would ever be better that way, to have calamity hanging about the place. Circumstances. I’m fine, really, she tells him in a letter after he has gone. There’s no reason to be worried, she writes, and says the words out loud to herself:
there is every reason to be worried.
It’s to do with other things, that’s all. He walks home through the snowfall. It stops around midnight. Snow, piling up in the streets, illuminating the city from below. Street lamps reflecting the snowlight in their copper bellies. Cones of light issuing down through the night, these curtains of darkness that hang draped between the structures of the city. Courtyards silent, as if afraid of being found. No one breathes. Soundless traffic. A hand lit up in the glow of a cigarette.
SHE IS SITTING on the balcony, the one that faces out on the little square and the church. She can touch the plane tree with her foot. In the courtyard are three lemon trees with six lemons between them. Will they stay there long enough to see them ripen. Will they leave before. She waits for him to come back from the grocery store. What was it he needed. Sardines and tomatoes and vodka. The way the house is built is strange. No matter how much she goes about the apartment her body continues to be surprised by the way the rooms collide. Boxes tumble, rooms are kicked into place, and all these balconies hanging from the windows. Could a person live here, is it a home. If you come back, she thinks to herself, then I will stay here forever and will not wait a moment to begin living.
NATURE TOILS AWAY, its eternal seasons; at present I am empty and need someone to pluck up the courage and inhabit regions within me. It’s like there are too many plains, and too few animals.
Trees that don’t fit in with the landscape here.
Everything happens too fast or too slow. Even nature’s rhythm has been nudged awry, even the seasons, and the images hasten away, silent, and yet with disconcerting urgency. Inhumanity all around.