He takes her by the arm: let me show you my room. She goes inside with him, and there they are; she wriggles out of her coveralls, he wrings his hands and sits down on a chair. She looks around the room and sees her own things. Everything looks foreign in this way, him living here seems improbable, quite as improbable as him not living here. His sentences are short. Small glass prisms dangle from thread in the window. You should see it when the sun comes in, he says, the wall becomes a rainbow. It’s like a psychedelic explosion. He throws out his hands. She nods. Places her boots with the heels to the wall. You’ve got it looking nice, she says, and means it.
Thanks, he says. I should have asked you over before now.
She nods and is glad to be wearing perfume, its scent is heavy now that her body is warm from all her layers of clothes. She feels feminine. He wrings his hands. He is not breathing.
You’re pale, she lies. He gives her an apologetic look and then the door opens and his girlfriend is standing there, distraught. You, she says, before correcting herself: hi.
He jumps to his feet, only to stand motionless. Handwringing, teethgrinding, heartrending. I just came to say goodbye, I’ll be gone again in a minute.
Okay, she says.
Her mouth hangs open, she is not breathing, it’s as if her body is hoping her lungs are as open as her mouth and that the air will somehow find its way in. An icicle succumbing and breaking off, that’s how she goes. She leaves a space behind her in the room, like a streak of rust in the picture where she stood. Or perhaps his whole room is a stage, a non-existent place in the world, his life there, for her always: a non-existent life. A plummeting fall that will never reach an end.
It was nice seeing you, he lies.
Was it a bad time, I ask him. He nods: she’s thinking of leaving me before I leave her.
Is that what you’re going to do.
No, he says, I’m not. At least no more than I always am. It’s all like one long attempt to get to somewhere else. That’s how it feels. She nods. Yes, she says. That’s probably it.
THE SOUND OF grain rushing from the silo; a scraping jaw, ten thousand stones, a sudden descent from on high. The silo is red with rust and there is a smell of cold concrete and hay. The floor is cracked and there’s an old Ferguson in the corner. She holds open a sack, and Arne shovels the grain up off the floor. The dust gets in everywhere. The mucous membranes become feeble. A flat paleness all around, a demand for sheen. Winter might just as well come, she thinks to herself. The freedom of driving back through the hills on her own. Settling up in fifty- and hundred-kroner notes. The car heaving itself through the landscape. A feeling of no longer inconveniencing anyone, and yet inconveniencing nonetheless. Shoes on the newspaper in the hall. The rumble of fire in a wood-burning stove, and windows open wide. Are you there. The church bells ringing down the sun too soon. The lawn with its scatterings of stale bread and dismantled chicken carcass. Winter may come now. Winter, too, may come.
IT’S LIGHT ONLY for a few short hours at most in the little attic room of their apartment in Aarhus. They’ve never got round to putting that lamp up. There’s a switch on the wall, to the right of the door, but no cord no socket no bulb. She crouches down and rummages through some boxes with tools in them, and duct tape, until finding a flashlight. She feels like a thief. A beam of light, sweeping faintly over the knots in the timber, a pool of artificial illumination that makes everything different. I must have been mistaken, she thinks to herself. She felt sure the place was tidier, that everything was under control. Only it wasn’t. And yet there is an absence of dust. Perhaps the room is too damp for dust. A number of rolled-up posters and some of her sketches protrude from a ceramic pot in a corner — along with your fishing rod, a broom handle, a roll of paper tablecloth. On the wall to the left are some shelves she once put up. Or they did. The shelves aren’t straight, they threaten to divest themselves of their jars of jam and chutney, their fruit syrup and shampoo. The packing boxes are on their knees. It was only for a while. The way it always is, with everything: just for the meantime. She manages to place a foot in between a tower of boxes on one side and a basket of workout clothes, she thinks, and his shoes, some volumes of The New Yorker on the other. She reaches across some more boxes and opens the skylight. The air is not cool, as she had anticipated. It’s as if it refuses to circulate. A jar of preserved lemons. A wicker basket with worn leather banding. An olive tree, a laurel, as if that could survive. All sorts of things that are mine, she thinks. I can’t take any of it to Copenhagen with me.
She does anyway.
She could.
THEY LIFT THE table out into the sun at the side of the house.
They have bought smoked mackerel and some tomatoes at the grocery store on the way. Their own tomatoes are still hard and yellow. Or their own tomatoes are just plants with budding flowers. She has painted all the woodwork twice. It shines, black and sated. We must remember to enjoy the first days of spring, she says.
He nods, his mouth full of tacks, because then he is putting new roofing felt on the outhouse where the rain came in, and it is autumn. A few tomatoes remain, dangling like hearts in the greenhouse. The perspiring greenhouse. And chives as well. He fetches salt from the kitchen, and she divides the fish. They sit in the sun. She goes into the outhouse, can hear him working on the roof above her. She positions herself underneath him, closes her eyes, sensing what it’s like to have his full weight on top of her. He hammers in the tacks. Dust descends upon her hair, her face.
Would he crush her.
If the roof caved in, would he crush her then.
She looks up through squinting eyes, and sees the gash in the roof. She thinks she catches his eye for the briefest of seconds, then goes outside again. She hands him the hammer he says he needs. Some more tacks. They never mention it, that exchange of glances.
It’s obvious he likes to be here, she thinks.
But it’s obvious, too, that she is the one who likes to be here. To have him here. With her. The thought of their being here together, with nearly everything they need.
A place that is ours.
But only her name on the deeds.
The hoe I leaned up against the trellis, the only sloping angle there is. Everything else is a vertical movement.
His bicycle lies in the gravel in front of the perennials, looking like an animal that has fallen asleep. He looks like one of her very first friends. The sun’s a lot warmer now, he says, placing a slice of tomato on a slice of bread. Rather impatient, but here, nevertheless.
THEY DON’T WANT to take any more than is absolutely necessary.
She wants to walk all day.
Mist lies between the houses, and the square has been hosed. It’ll be hot today, she says. We’re going out, what should we see, she asks.
But she goes out alone that day. There’s something he needs to do. Some sleep. I sat on the square, he tells her that evening. The life there.
She nods. Some other time, he says. Tomorrow, perhaps. Only then — perhaps not tomorrow at all, she thinks. That, and her feeling that she travels alone, always wishing he were there, that there was something he wanted to do. That they wanted to do something together, movement in the same direction.