HER DEAD MAN wears a long yellow scarf around his neck. He has not shaved, and yet she does not doubt that he has gone to great lengths.
She smiles, walks through the room like a knife cutting its way through the skin of a fish. A grating sheath of scales, at once keenly and with difficulty. He takes pains to smile, to put on a face. They embrace each other, she swiftly withdrawing, almost pushing him away before he falls inside her. She holds up a corner of his scarf: nice scarf, she says. He bends his neck to look at it. How hard it is for him. Being here.
You came early, she says.
He nods. He is a child leaving home every day, or: he is the tide, returning and retreating. By turn obstinate and governed by something outside himself, something inside himself — but then perhaps all of life is like that; an eternal state of arrival and departure in a pattern over which one has no control; a rhythm one must simply tolerate.
She wishes the new man had not been with her today. It is as if he now is reaping all that was sown before. Me, she thinks.
He has nothing to give to her, of this she is constantly aware; there is nothing like a ripe time. That time was long before; it’s always difficult, a continuing state of exception.
Already everything is too late.
When did that happen.
Her dead man — the look in his eyes, effortlessly sweeping all the flowers and all the wine and all the piles of books from the table.
So much parting collected in one room.
This is your day, someone says to her. Her stomach tightens into a knot. She cannot remove from her mind the thought that someone else knitted that scarf for him; and that the new man has never been as unhappy in all his life. Displaced, in every respect.
Her dead man has brought an old friend with him, understanding nothing. Or perhaps he cannot bear to recognize himself in this room. He is holding a bottle of champagne. It’s for her: this is for you, he says. As if champagne were the solution to a puzzle. And then they leave, the two of them together, to be there no more. No longer to be present.
She drinks a glass of white wine rather quickly, and is introduced to a man with a Russian name. His lips promise, but cannot be pictured again; he is there as one looks at him, only then to be gone; broken faces embed themselves within you; whole faces are forgotten.
Because they have yet to reveal themselves in pieces.
All that has not revealed itself to be art.
I COULD STAY here forever, he says. But what he means is, he would like to have a home. The night is warm. The sun goes down between the houses, and all the roofs look like they’re painted on. Thrusting surfaces of earthen red and ochre. They have only the shoes on their feet.
Their backpacks put next to each other against the wall.
It is cooler inside the room than out. One night in every town, that is their rule. And no more than three days planned ahead. Always they are dashing for trains. Always they come from something better, and always on their way to somewhere supposed to be fantastic. They sip coffee at a railway station café, tucked into a booth with a bench upholstered in red leather. It sticks to the thighs. A dog goes by, dragging its leash behind it. A voice on the loudspeaker announces another change of track: binario due, binario cinque, binario due, and the train is continually late. Ten minutes, twenty minutes at a time. We could have had lunch, he says. She nods; they notice a supermarket that will be cheaper. A deserted beach that turns out not to be deserted at all, though for a short while it is. It’s like the book she’s reading is better for being read here. Or different, at least.
She is disappointed by Pompeii, but decides not to mention it. She thinks there is more Pompeii to be seen in Berlin, that the whole world is spread out over the whole world. Italy in Berlin. Egypt in Berlin. Berlin in the USA. The USA in France. She places a sheet between her thighs. The heat is tremendous. She wakes up early. The sound of a truck braking. A clattering in the back yard, the sound of a metal bucket overturned. A thirst for water. She gets up and has a shower, lies down beside him again in a single movement. She draws something through the room.
I’M AFRAID I’VE forgotten everything. I have forgotten the first time I saw you, and I have forgotten how we got from the højskole to your parents’ summer house. I can’t remember seeing your parents for the first time. I can’t remember what it’s like to wake up with you. I can’t remember what it feels like to come home to an apartment shared with someone else. With you. An apartment that is another person’s home. I can’t remember what it’s like to be so close to another person, almost merged into one; I simply can’t remember that I could look across at the door and that you would push it shut with your foot, because you were nearest. I can’t remember my annoyance at watching you be so slow and meticulous. With breakfast. With envelopes. I can’t remember my anger at finding you passed out on the sofa. Again. I can only remember finding you like that. I can only remember that you were slow and meticulous. I can remember your parents. The feeling of everything being the first time. The summer house I remember, but the days spent with you there I have forgotten; the shrubs of broom, your mother pruning them with a pair of shears. You whispering to me not to tell her they should be dug up instead, that pruning them was a waste of time. And the plantation of trees, the short cut down to the meadow. I have forgotten how far the meadow was. And the feeling of waking up rested and refreshed, though with an aching head from having slept up against you, that too I have forgotten, the way it felt; and now I can’t understand how that could be, with you now lying here again, so close to me that my body is an extension of yours. With so much still missing. With so much being something else, and you still existing.
THE DUST OF the grain, drifting in the sun, vanishing in the shade.
Summer.
The leaseholder passes through the stable. He is visible and then not, in the light and in the dark. He walks as though keeping time to a ticking watch. Each entry into darkness causes all sound inside the stable to be consumed.
But then he becomes visible in the darkness, and quite transparent in the sunlight. A new order. And the shiny ribbon of the feeding trough on each side of the aisle, licked clean and worn down over the years by rasping tongues.
The door is dragged aside with a clatter, sun streams in, the floor ablaze in its light, made to flame by the legs of the cattle causing shadows to leap out across the concrete in panic. Three at a time, the beasts jostle their way down the aisle, haunches taut, skin draped over bony spines; the heavy sway of udders. Their legs can break. Cows are always too heavy for themselves. The nervous way they proceed, neither walking nor running — and never anything other than eager. Never anything other than uneager. It’s as if there’s something they have to get done before anyone finds out. And like a fan, this tide of cattle spreads and unfolds. All that body falling into place. They are cast in the concrete. Each cow knowing its place, a bit like waves on the shore, their movements a matter of course, a routine, something reminiscent of nature.
She keeps thinking she sees him coming, that he’s changed his mind. A friend calls and apologizes. Not so much on his own behalf as love’s. It being the way it is, without justice. Justice has nothing to do with love. Justice has to do with business, money.