Clean Sheets

Clean Sheets

Cleaning, changing the bed, washing the sheets - ordinary, everyday tasks that have no special meaning. But sometimes even ordinary things can tell a story. Words are not needed; only actions.

A husband watches as his wife does ordinary, everyday things in their home. But what is really happening here?

She takes all the sheets to the Laundromat. They will be washed and dried there in the big machines lined up in a row. She leaves the sheets there and comes back wearing a new dress. She bought it on her way home. It’s in light sand-coloured material. Sensible. Washable. It has no scent of its own, but a smell of newness which tells you it has not been worn and washed. A scent which you can only breathe in if you are close enough. From a distance, she tells me she wants to start her life again, to make a clean beginning. She’s not leaving to think things through; she has already straightened them all out in her head.

Quietly, she sweeps the apartment, cleans the bathroom, and removes every one of her long hairs from the floor and the furniture. Next, she takes out her brown suitcase and her clothes, and places them on the bed. One by one she lays the pieces carefully in the case. There isn’t much to pack. She has made some trips to the thrift store recently, taking plastic bags with her each time. I suddenly realize that she has been clearing out her clothes over the past weeks. Then she walks to the bathroom to collect her things.

I’m sitting on the sofa, looking at her suitcase on the bed.

‘I guess this is it,’ I say.

She continues to pack - her comb, toothbrush, make-up, her bottle of perfume. There is a rustling sound as she puts her towels, still wet from her morning wash, into a plastic bag. After that, she goes to the kitchen and gets her cup.

‘You gave those clothes away, to the thrift store,’ I say. I don’t know what else to say. Those were things that I bought or chose for her.

I look at her case. Packing is strange. We packed when we went on trips. We packed when we moved from one apartment to another. Now the case contains only things that belong to her, things she has bought on her own, without telling me or asking my advice.

The clothes are laid in neat, rectangular piles. They are about to make a journey which I am not allowed to go on. She comes over and closes the lock. For a long while she sits on the bed, her back towards me. I cannot see her face, but it doesn’t matter. I know she wants me to see her hair. It is nothing special, but its scent is my first awareness in the morning, and my last as I close my eyes at night.

Then she stands up. The mattress rises with her, but quickly returns to its usual flatness. On the sheetless bed there is no sign of where she was sitting. She takes her case and makes her way to the door. And still, I cannot see her face - and whether there are tears in her eyes.

‘Remember to collect the clean sheets,’ she says, ‘they will be ready at two o’clock.’

She puts on her shoes and walks out. They are new shoes, just like the clothes she is wearing. Shoes she has bought during her trip out in the morning, shoes that will go some place I will never know.

I look around our apartment, my apartment now. It is perfectly clean and tidy. Nothing has been left behind, no clothes, not a single hair. Not even a breath of scent in the air. She did not wear perfume that day.

I look at the bed. I think of the sheets going round and round inside the washing machine at the Laundromat. It is washing even the memory of her out of the sheets. There is a hole in one of them. I cannot remember how the hole was made, but it has become bigger each time the sheet is used. It needed mending some time ago. It’s too late for that now.