Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

When he’d done this, he turned to the crowd and said:

“Because you have sullied my sanctuary with all your foul gods and all your abominations, in truth I shall cut you down. I shall show no sympathy or mercy. A third of you shall die of plague or hunger within the city, a third shall die by the sword around it, and a third I shall spread to the four winds and harry with brandished sword. My wrath shall be untethered. I will unleash my fury on you and have my vengeance.”

When he’d said this, he fell silent. The gathering outside the door, which was now about fifty strong, stared aghast at him. No one spoke. It was as if they were waiting for something more, an explanation, or some conciliatory words, perhaps, that might moderate the abrupt hatred that had suddenly appeared among them.

But no explanation was forthcoming. Instead, Ezekiel picked up his sword, went into the house, and slammed the door shut behind him.

He remained inside for four hundred and thirty days. For the first three hundred and ninety days he lay in bed on his left side, to bear the guilt of the Israelites for as many days as the years they had sinned, just as the Lord had told him to do. The next forty days he lay on his right side, and this time it was the guilt of the people of Judah he was to bear, one day for each year of sin, this, too, in accordance with the Lord’s will.

During the first weeks Ezekiel’s strange behavior had been the big topic of conversation among the exiles. No one doubted that it really was God’s word he’d preached at the door of his house, yes, that it was God himself who had spoken through him, or that it was Jerusalem’s actual future he’d sketched out for them on the tile outside the house, and the glimpse this had given them of God’s wrath filled them with fear. A feeling that the world might be destroyed at any moment spread among them. Signs and omens were everywhere. A baby girl was born with no forearms, a nestling was found outside the town with four legs and four wings, and in the space of only a few minutes two young men who were helping with the harvest dropped down dead on the same farm. Their hearts must have stopped, both were dead before they hit the ground.

Each time the sun went down in the evening, and darkness fell on the city, its inhabitants thought that it might be the last time. But daylight always returned, every morning the sun rose slowly out of the mountains in the east, and little by little Ezekiel’s prophecies lost their power over their minds, for the days of the world were numberless, and anyway who had said that his predictions concerned the immediate future?

People still glanced at the tile outside his house as they passed by, but the pebble soldiers and the sand earthworks and the small battering rams had all been blown away by the wind. All that was left of the drawing itself was just some faint, disjointed chalk marks. No one knew that Ezekiel was still adhering to God’s word, lying completely motionless all day long shouldering their sins. When the fear of his prophecies had left them, they began to associate Ezekiel with something unpleasant, and most of them were glad that he kept out of sight.

For them, four hundred and thirty days was a long time. Divided up into sunrises and sunsets, meals, work, and sleep, each day was filled with fixed barriers time had to overcome, and when it was constantly encountering unpredictable events as well, it’s obvious that its speed through the days was slow. It was quite different for Ezekiel. Time met no resistance in his life, but flooded unchecked through his days, which were always wide open. Day after day, week after week, month after month, he lay unmoving on his bench by the far wall of the room. His thoughts could race from heaven’s highest pinnacles to hell’s deepest troughs so fast that his feelings couldn’t keep pace, and even the worst agony could be met with a burst of joy. All the old memories that lay deep at the bottom of his consciousness were stirred up by the winds of his thoughts, but when he saw them again, they were in contexts so different to their original ones that at first he didn’t recognize them, and often got the feeling they belonged to someone else. He wasn’t merely alone inside himself, he was also a stranger there. And even though what he saw often filled him with horror, there was also a liberation in it, that he wouldn’t be without, but that was suspended each time his thoughts encountered sounds from the world outside, just like a river flowing out into the sea is suddenly forced into a slower rhythm. A man singing softly to himself in a house on the other side of the street, some children laughing, a cart rolling past on creaking wheels. Then he would grit his teeth, grip the blanket hard, and try to force his thoughts away from the world and into the image that caused him to lie there, the four celestial creatures that had descended so slowly toward him, that time by the River Kebar, and again on the plain outside the town; the hands he’d seen beneath their wings, so white and fine; the beautiful, expressionless faces, the terrible coldness of their eyes. The instant when their feet sank into the sand before him, the soft fluttering of their wings as they folded them on their backs, the air shimmering with heat above them.

And then the rumble across the sky. And then the sight of the Lord.

It had all happened so fast and so unexpectedly that he hadn’t managed to shape a single thought while it was going on. Only now, as he let the events unfold before his inner eye, could he dwell on the individual details.

They’d been so close that he could have touched them.

In his thoughts he raised his head and let his gaze wander over them, one after the other. But even now he didn’t dare to reach out and touch them. Even in his thoughts he was frightened of approaching too close to them. He’d have to make do with their appearance.

He could conjure up the eyes on the wings they covered their bodies with and how they had all stared at him. It had been a wall of eyes. And each one of them had seemed to lead an independent existence. They had stared at him as animals in the dark stare at a sudden light. Quite different to the eyes in their faces. These, too, had fixed him, but the look in them had been averted in some curious way, as if they’d really been looking into themselves.

The eyes of the blind. Angels’ eyes were like the eyes of the blind.

When the four hundred and thirty days were up, Ezekiel got up and went to the marketplace in the middle of the town. He was so weak that he had to steady himself on the walls of the houses as he went. When at last he got there, and saw all the people looking at him with curiosity, he wept. For Ezekiel the Lord’s revelation was something fresh in his mind, he had lived within it for the past year, and in his aberration he’d thought that the same would be true for all the inhabitants. That the Lord’s words, as his prophet had spoken them, would have brought them closer to him. Now he saw this wasn’t the case. Everything was as it had been. He had borne their sins, but they continued to sin. And so he wept. The tears were Ezekiel’s, but the sorrow that prompted them was the Lord’s.

After a while his sorrow turned to anger. Ezekiel raised his arms above his head and shouted across the marketplace:

“The Lord God says to the land of Israel: The end is near! The end is near for the entire land, right to its farthest borders. The end is near for you, now my anger is upon you. I condemn you for your conduct and will repay you for all your vileness. I will have no compassion for you nor will spare you. You shall be repaid for your actions, and abomination will be upon you. Then you will learn that I am the Lord.”