Death, she repeats.
He thinks: you and your drama. And he loves her then. She can see that. He puts his hand on top of hers, her unsettled hand.
She can see the other woman like some strange fungus in his eyes.
She picks up his cup of coffee and blows into it a couple of times before drinking a sip. Maybe that’s why he’s unable to move on and love someone else. Because recollections always intrude. Every time he is on the verge of loving, truly loving her, or the other woman, he finds he can’t.
Not forgetting or not loving, it’s all the same to him.
It’s the only way she can look at it; there are those who love, and those who do not. Those who can, and those who cannot. And then there is the tragic group, those who can love, but do not. Because they get confused, they mistake things. Forgetting something and choosing something.
He must make himself blind to imagine that he has now moved on, that he was able to forget; what kind of a person was it then he had to offer. Blind and deaf, and without a past.
The guilt of remembering something, remembering her, in the face of the new woman.
The guilt of being something oneself.
And now he is trying. He must not talk of it, but refrain from mentioning everything about which he thinks, her, about whom he thinks, and then everything will be all right. Albeit for the nausea of being so thoughtless; but then one will always have thoughts.
She sticks a hand in her pocket and rubs the key with her thumb, feeling for its teeth as the tongue feels for a sore in the mouth, passing tentatively across unfamiliar flesh.
I shouldn’t drink coffee, he thinks. It’s always the same whenever he drinks coffee; it makes me depressed.
You shouldn’t drink coffee, she says casually.
You’re right. I get so. .
. . troubled, she says.
Yes, he says. That’s it: troubled.
SHE WAS IN her nightdress. She went down the stairs, in this long nightdress, it had peacocks on it, she tells him, at least I think they were peacocks. Or were they; yes, peacocks. Eight in all, if you counted all the way round. With tail feathers interlaced, shimmering colours, though dulled by age. I always thought those real peacocks, the ones in the pen at Toggerbo when we went for drives in the evening, or in the autumn when we went mushrooming there; that those peacocks were somehow wrong. That their colors were too strong. Too dark.
He nods. Perhaps thinking she ought not to reminisce all the time, spend so much energy remembering.
The consternation of remembering.
The consternation of not.
THE LANDSCAPE
BUT THE SNOW. The way it keeps falling. My mother pulls a tea bag out of the pot. She presses the last drops of liquid from it, on the edge of her plate, then lifts it across the table with a hand underneath to protect the tablecloth; her hand is a shadow on a lawn, beneath a sky, faithfully following along over the landscape. She nudges a piece of gingerbread cake to the side of her plate so it doesn’t get wet.
What is it you wanted to get done; what does the snow prevent you from doing.
Blankets of snow, falling in different bands; how much wind, how big the flakes. Overlapping belts of white.
A way of traversing a landscape.
A way of smothering the sound that exists; the sound of snow falling.
Plans, and work postponed.
We have snuggled into blankets. Now it is she who frowns and leans across the table. On the first day of the summer holidays she plaited our hair into tight French braids so the salt water wouldn’t ruin it. Or so she didn’t have to set it all the time; every time an elastic slipped off a ponytail, whenever the water turned hair into a slippery rope. With the tip of her index finger she turns a glass marble on the board, making the light reflect differently in its streaky color.
Is that mine.
Uh huh, I say. She picks it up and moves it in an arc over the board. A planet in its inevitable orbit. Then lowers it into a space there, as if to prove a point. Or to apologize.
She is a master of Chinese chequers; there, she says, looking up. First at me, then turning in her chair to look out at the road. There are no tracks in the snow there, not yet, there are no cars out. The sound of the snow as it falls, the non-sound made by that. Its thunder, and its absence.
Your turn, my mother says. She pours more tea, her eyes grow older. The voices of the snow are swallowed by the wind, at the bend by the lake.
Your turn, she repeats. I place a finger on a marble and follow a path across the board. No, not that one, another. Only the next comes to a dead end after four hops. In the minutes of my turn, only falling snow is heard. A sentence that may join all the world together, a way of walking that connects two places.
Are you sure about that, she asks me. I understand there must be a better move.
Yes, I say.
She puts down her cup, draws a green marble all the way through the board into my area. I love you, I think to myself.
I ASK IF we can eat in the kitchen. The darknesss is too oppressive here. My face is warm with sleep that never became sleep. A long day. An exhaustion that comes of the day. My father arriving home, his footsteps through the living room, to the piano. I hear him put down his car keys, see them reflect for a moment in the black varnished wood.
And then they are still and silent in their place. The lake gapes beneath the ice, but the winter is a lid on top of all that is living, all that is dead: as the snow that falls, all the living and all the dead.
Do you remember, I say quietly, when we found that big fish in the lake.
My mother looks up. She is standing with a teaspoon in her hand, removing pips from a cucumber, scraping one half, then the other. She has a steady hand. The same with fish, the way she removes the bones in a single movement, with ease.
I think so, she says. Last winter, was it. Or the one before. It must have been the one before.
It was trapped in the ice, I say. And my hands have come to a halt; my eyes notice them, the way they have come to rest on the chopping board.
I am not breathing.
We both know it must be the winter before last, because last winter we couldn’t see each other. I had made a choice, she said. After that she fell ill, then presumably forgot her disappointment; color washes from wood if only it is left long enough in the sea. It doesn’t disappear, but becomes like the winter: only lighter. Increasingly iridescent, a price on my head that continues to rise. A competition in which we have forgotten to time ourselves.
It must have been, I say. Last year. Why hasn’t he said hello, I ask.
She raises her eyebrows and looks so sad all of a sudden.
Perhaps he’s, I don’t know. .
She turns the cucumbers on the chopping board, slices them into staves, dices them, then lifts the board over to a bowl of yogurt, sweeping it clean with the spine of the blade.
Tired, I suggest.
Tired, yes. That’ll be it.
I crush three cloves of garlic and peel them, passing them on to her with the garlic press. I put the dry skins in the trash. Hi, Dad, I call into the living room. He has sat down at the piano. It needs tuning, always some note that resists. He plays as if there’s something important he wishes to announce to someone.
What is it about that fish.
I don’t know why. I just started thinking about it.
It did look so very strange. Caught in the ice, and frozen solid.
I nod. It’s funny, but it suddenly feels like — well, a long time ago.