Two Stories

One of us is sleeping

The whole landscape is motionless. As though the day, in reality, is night; as though the sun is simply a rice lantern hanging from the ceiling; as though someone wanted to be sure that everyone is sleeping, that no one is reading or talking or touching one another, looking at comic books. In other words: that there’s no foolishness.

But really there isn’t anything besides foolishness here; foolishness is suddenly the only thing.

Are you sleeping, I whisper to my mother.

There’s no reply. The words hang suspended, an echo from earlier, my departed man’s voice: Are you sleeping, he asks.

And I was sleeping.

Or I played dead.

The knots in the ceiling resemble all sorts of things: a five-legged deer, a dripping half moon, the type of thing one doesn’t just forget; a tree with red apples, standing in the corner of the garden; the remains of summer within winter. It’s still snowing.

As though the snow wishes to prove something; as though the peace with which the snow falls has never had a thing to do with tiredness, the snow isn’t sedate, it’s simply inhuman. Like the winter this year, inhuman in every possible way. It continues tirelessly, repeats itself in patterns no one understands. The darkness is bleached by the white snow. Every now and then a red apple falls through the gray darkness into the snow beneath the tree’s canopy of black bark. A thuck as the apple hits the membrane of hard ice, the promised change in weather which never materialized other than a hesitation in the winter, simply a downbeat. All at once the frost came whistling, became a hard shawl of ice, fifty millimeters thick, now with a fresh coat of snow. It’s okay, I say to my sleeping mother, whisper it in the darkness, just sleep.

It can also be this simple.

That one can lie quietly together and yet be somewhere else, alone.

Yes, my mother says, she’s woken with a start.

Where have you been, I wonder. What was it you needed to finish.

Are you having trouble sleeping, she asks and turns over in the bed. I think: what am I doing here in my parents’ bed. I’m way too old to be lying here; I’ve always been too old. Everything is backwards. The snow drifts upwards and disappears within a cloud, indistinguishable from the sky. I whisper to my mother, yes, go ahead, go back to sleep. She falls back asleep immediately, there’s no transition, she just exits the room, lies completely still.

For many years you don’t see it, and then you see it so clearly: the death within your own mother, you see your grandmother within her, her mother within her, and in reality also another face. You recognize it and yet consider it unfamiliar. A frightening face, that’s what it is, that third one.

Then she turns and sleeps again.

And you see it repeatedly. A face, my mother’s face, which disappears; and the third face which, ultimately, can only be one’s own, it can only be: mine.

Days in the summerhouse

The question is whether the mother telling you she is sick isn’t actually the sickness itself. Can one survive this: death who steps across the stage, invades the home that was your life, steals everything you knew. When you lose your mother, not because she dies, but because she becomes the sickness that is death.

The conversation doesn’t end when we say goodbye and hang up, it’s as though we just grow more and more quiet, as though we’re standing on an open field moving backwards, away from one another, talk with greater and greater physical distance until, finally, no longer able to hear one another at all, we lay down the receiver on each of our separate tables. The sound of my mother’s telephone on the sideboard; the sound of my own telephone on the dining room...