YOU LOOK TIRED, my mother says as we finish the game. I tell her I’m pale because it’s winter. This is how I look when I have no makeup on. In winter. Are you sleeping well, she ventures, tipping the green marbles back in the box. They sound like cattle crossing a concrete floor. A downpour of hooves. A sense of many restless movements coming together in a sudden fever of activity. Earth trampled into mud, a concrete floor, foaming with sound. A cauldron of hooves, boiling over. I look out of the window behind her. The view of Lene and Henrik’s apple orchard, behind their house. As if it has never been disturbed.
Is it three years now, I ask.
Since what.
Since Lene died.
Yes, my mother says, too quickly. I look at her. She looks away. She sweeps my own marbles across the board, collecting them in the corner for red, unaware that she is trying not to think about her illness. It is something she does without volition, like a function of the body. She is enveloped by warmth, her cheeks flush, abruptly, as if suddenly she has caught fire. Reaching for the lid, she knocks over my cup. A tongue of tepid tea unfurls upon the table. We sit quite still and stare: it inches toward the edge. It trickles, and drips without sound. Tea soaking into the carpet. Calmly, I pick up the cup and get up to fetch a cloth. I shuffle, to keep the throw around my legs.
I return, and my mother has not moved, not even her eyes. Her gaze is tethered by the little pool that has appeared on the table. The ceiling light reflects in it, but my mother’s gaze seems fixed on something beyond, beneath the tongue, beneath the pool. A wet table. I lay a dry tea towel on top, and my mother gives a start. She has left her eyes behind, I catch myself thinking.
How clumsy of me, she says. Anyone would think it was me who couldn’t sleep.
You’re not alone, I think to myself. Such sleeplessness does not make you pale and fatigued. As long as one of us is sleeping, and there is always one of us who can, and one who cannot.
She puts the lid back on the box, and I feel the waft of air pass across my hand as she presses it into place.
How’s Henrik coping. On his own, I ask.
How does anyone, she says, as if to win time. He’s working again, at least.
I nod. As if that were any indication. She reads something out. Knowing I already know and couldn’t care less.
I think it’s tearing him apart, though, she says, and looks up at me. Her not being here anymore. It’s strange, isn’t it, that we survive each other like that. The way people go on living in the objects they leave behind. Things become so oddly meaningful. A wheelbarrow in a garden, a basket left under an ash tree.
She shakes her head.
You’re recovered, I say. Your treatment’s finished now.
Yes, she says, and thinks me wiser than that. For it has only just begun, and will never be any different. One does not simply put aside a grief of such nature, it cannot be talked into submission, nor be vanquished by any conspiracy of silence. It’s like it is with you, like with all things momentous. They come back at you in a loop, and with increasingly greater force they kick the air from your lungs.
I have a short list. The older I get the longer the list will become. You are on it. My mother is on it. The kind of days when you realize things will never be any different, that you have lost, lost, lost. When that is the way it sounds: three or four times in a row. Such a blow to the gut: you.
Of course he misses her, he’s bound to.
Of course, I repeat. I’ll go up and see if I can sleep, I lie. My mother has turned in her chair, is looking across at Lene and Henrik’s house, where an upstairs light is on. One only, upstairs.
Alright, she says.
Alright, she says again, and turns toward me. Good idea. Take the throw with you.
A FUNERAL
WE WERE TOGETHER. That was how I worded it. When I tell others about it, that’s what I say. We were together. Whatever that means. Whatever it might involve. A fear inside me that can be kept at bay like that, but then again. It changes nothing, one could just as well say the opposite about us. That we were never together. We lived together for a certain number of weeks, a certain number of months and days. So what happened, one might ask. What happened then was that we were no longer together. Perhaps the truth is simply that, that it will never be more complicated, always that simple: that you are together, or else you are not. It is not a matter of decisions and emotions, or anything in the way of agreement. It is the body that continues to have the final word. The tangibility of where you’re at in the world. Whether you are in a room together, or not in that room together. Our bodies make the arrangements, brains do nothing. The manager of the ice-cream kiosk at Svinkløv Badehotel, where I once had a holiday job, told me one afternoon when the rain was keeping everyone indoors that ninety percent of what we communicate is communicated by the body. But it’s not true. I know that now. Everything is told by the body. Our thoughts and words are all tied up in the body, in the lips, in the hands that tremble or lie still in the lap, when for instance there is nothing more to reach out for. All is movement or absence of movement. Something plummeting. Something else wandering across a landscape. A body wandering across a landscape, a thinking body, a living human being. As long as it lasts: life. One can miss a person, love someone, and yet leave them.
And this, too — the insistence on being concerned, though not nostalgic. The insistence on grief, and on remaining within it.
The insistence on possessing a body, quite simply that. Nostalgia purges the body, nostalgia steps inside one’s thoughts like a malicious guest, a sudden urge to frighten your sister — did you know you were adopted, that they didn’t want to tell you in case having no parents made you sad. Hateful incisions that force one to keep a cold compress — the fabric of one’s dress — in place over the flesh. And then the correction of that same urge. There is no momentum in nostalgia, one is unperturbed, having circumvented the body and the concern that is attached to having a body, to moving forward in time, forward across a landscape. Can a landscape terminate — can one go to the edge, step forward and fall; the collapse of a building, a cliff, animals. And the woods, they too, a downpour of rain, ironed clothing on hangers, the kind of day when it takes more than just that.
To enter inside the grief and remain there. One might think that the backward step into the nostalgic is a harmless one, and for that reason that one can only be free of distress, without body. And yet I cannot think of anything more perturbing. To walk backward over the edge, divested of one’s body, to plummet without, and die as such bodiless. I will insist on being a distressed person within the world, continually coaxing nostalgia into my being, the struggle that is. To proceed backward and forward at the same time. Nostalgia comes of a fear of death, of simply not living enough, possessing emotions of sufficient depth. I wish only to try and see the emotions that are there; to remain in grief, and go back only in order to be here. Inside my own body, a ghastly face.
I DON’T GET it, he says. I mean, if you still don’t want me.
Are you having second thoughts, she asks.
I’ve always had second thoughts, he says; I never left you.
Okay, she says, picking up her bag from beside her chair. She thinks about her, whether he is seeing her now, or if it was just fascination, the way he said.
Okay, he says, acquiescing, collecting himself like a shattered glass, walking through the city in that way. Picking up shards as he goes, dripping through the streets, gashing himself relentlessly.