IT IS A dreadful realization: that there is so little one can write about. Practically nothing, and all of it the same. Everything else becomes exotic and, well, irrelevant: unreal. This feeling of unpleasant surprises, from all quarters; one longs for sanctuary and a hot bath, and for someone to have been waiting without having noticed a thing. Either it’s knives and scissors, or else nothing is even worth the effort.
The thought that there might be something I perhaps ought to keep from writing, a thought about there having to be something left. Elsewhere.
But then there is no elsewhere.
And then perhaps there is no room for such consideration, maybe it’s like that. That all consideration eats you up in the end. I can’t even tell a proper bedtime story. Once, maybe, but then they cried, too, and wanted to go home.
There is only one thing to write about: all to which I cannot say goodbye. Including my mother. Including you. My dead man. There is a corpse in the bathroom, I think to myself. There’s that corpse I cannot evade; you, and all the love that accumulates.
The images, the five to which I keep returning. The bright apples in the garden in December. They are so real to me. I look out of the window and there is a sense of the world not hanging together. It’s as if the winter that is all around the red apples is artificial. The apples, however, are so real that if a fire broke out, then the sky behind them, the corner of the ochre-colored outhouse, and the earth beneath them would burn and crumble, whereas the tree would be the only thing left, luminous. A figure, punched out of a sheet of cardboard. One gets the feeling that all reality is only temporary, and the artificial can go on and on. But perhaps with those five images it will be different. In the end. Then perhaps I will be writing not merely to postpone my own death, but to prevent that of the apples. Then perhaps it will be love for you that I demand. A farewell one simultaneously approaches and writes oneself away from.
Bright, shining apples don’t know how to cease. They refuse to drop in October, to rot in the grass, and a person cannot forget them in a hurry. Autumn turns into winter, and winter departs to reveal a spring; but the apples know nothing of seasons. They will not accept the haste dictated to them.
I find myself too close to the pane and must wipe away my breath. So cold, the glass — it surprises me. Although it’s December, it surprises me. The skin that encloses my body shrinks, an abrupt contraction, a puckering fabric, a curtain you draw aside. I step back and sit down on the bed again. Pull my feet up and bury them under the duvet that is still warm and heavy with sleep. My mother speaks out of my mouth: you can’t lie there, lazing.
What would she know. You can’t tell me what to do anymore, I lie.
IT’S LIKE I’VE been running to catch a train, and now the conductor has seen me and waits. What am I waiting for. Me, I suppose. It’ll be a long wait, I say to myself out loud. People in the train look at me, a woman squints over the top of her glasses.
I’m tired of waiting.
BUT THERE’S NO gratitude. Just like you can’t be, can’t continue to be, grateful for being well again after illness, just like you can’t be grateful for things not having been worse. Just like you can’t find any comfort whatsoever in the assumption that everything will be all right.
You’ll see.
For the first time during those days, I would not help repair the brickwork, and refused to care about the animals in the stalls. Maintain what.
THE TABLE ON which the candles have burnt out while we slept. Where did the night go. A mess of empty glasses. Even though there are only four in all. A mess. He turns toward the wall, away from the sunlight that fills the room with song. I am up and standing in the middle of the room. Either you’ll make a fantastic father, or else you will be no father at all. These are the possibilities for a man like you, I think to myself.
His breathing is unsettled, has no rhythm. Too immersed in feeling something yourself. A child would release him from the detention of his body. His body, wanting all the time, always in a state of expectation. Something needs to be different, the piano tuner, always a false note in the flesh. Only then it isn’t in the flesh at all, it’s something else instead, another thirst.
Stay, he says, half in sleep, or else too awake by half.
I stand erect, solitary, a tree where once was forest, a twiggy remnant is how I must look. The light is pale. I shake my head, as though it were neither thought nor reason inside my brain that decided, but a wind sweeping through a landscape. Now that the trees no longer afford shelter, now that I am up.
Awake.
There is always one of us who cannot sleep; in any bed someone must always lie awake. One who cannot sleep a second more. I go about the apartment, gathering things together the way we do in gardens on summer evenings. That same cold feeling of too late. One of us is sleeping.
My clothes lie scattered like resting creatures on the floor. I pick them up without a sound, and leave.
You think I’m in the kitchen and mumble my name at the partition. I have closed the front door with the caution of a previous world, ours when we lived in Aarhus. You speak my name more than once.
Dead man, a dead voice, unable to muster the strength to call out.
Unable to summon yourself, you sleep again. You are no one’s father, your sleep is your own. Sleep from it all, I think to myself — but sleep sleep sleep, I pray, and descend the stairs on the limpest of legs. It feels like a dam has burst, a gigantic blister ruptured, and now: my body hurtling down through the stairwell. I take with me everything, and leave everything behind. Taking in air only when emerging onto the street. I hurry some ten paces before turning my head back toward the building and casting a glance up at the windows. But you have not risen, you speak to me still through the partition, but it is the brick of the outer wall your voice must penetrate, that, or the window. I creep through the city with eyes closed. To cheat the morning, to postpone something. Already there are dogs. And fresh flowers in the buckets outside the florist’s. The air is sharp, the world restless, unwilling to wait any longer. It is quite unsentimental. There are those who come with us, and those who don’t.
The city’s sky and all the city’s streets are the same.
The same brittle light. My relief at having slipped away was the same color as the sky.
YOU’RE NERVOUS AT seeing me. You tremble, I sense.
I thought it would be good for us to see each other, you say, but we both know: it makes no difference if we see each other or not.
A thought such as this: to have to go back and make sure you left nothing behind. To see if you switched off the lights. There is always light left on; always a waste of light in this world.
SHE SURPRISES HIM on the back stairs, wanting to say goodbye. I’m leaving tomorrow and wanted to stop by before not stropping by for a very long time. He flicks the tea towel over his shoulder and leaves it there, shakes the dishwater from his hands. His eyes, scanning the courtyard, trimming everything that is wild. The sun reflects from a metal sheet and some piping left against the wall. Some oak leaves half hidden by snow that will not melt and relinquish itself to any spring. Hi, he says, thinking: what are you doing here. She wonders, and zips down her coveralls, knowing he cannot avoid noticing her blue dress and the necklace.