Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

It was good no one had seen it.

He turned on his side and closed his eyes. But he couldn’t sleep. The thought that he might be dead wouldn’t leave him.

Wasn’t it a simple enough thing to find out if he was actually alive, he thought, and swung his feet out of bed, threw a cape across his shoulders, and went down to the ground floor. He walked, he saw, he thought. But for all he knew, the dead might be able to do that as well. He opened a cupboard in the kitchen and took out a loaf he’d baked the evening before, broke off a piece and put it in his mouth. The dead couldn’t eat, he thought, swallowing, and took another piece. But he didn’t even know that for certain.

If only there were other people here! Someone he could wake and ask. Am I alive? Or am I dead?

This is madness , he thought. “Of course I’m alive!”

But he wasn’t completely convinced, and went up to his bedroom again, dressed, looked at himself in the mirror, shook his head at his own foolishness, but still couldn’t abandon his desire to have the thing cleared up once and for all, so he went down again, put on his outdoor clothes, took his stick from its corner, and went out into the morning. It was still early, but down in the small town people had long been astir. He crossed the courtyard, where the traces of his sleepwalking, or whatever it was, were still clearly visible. He kicked the snow clear of the gate, opened it, and followed the road down toward the town. The branches of the trees stabbed into the mist, the snow lay wet on the landscape, and took on a bluish tinge, which at first made him think of thin, sour milk, then of veins under white skin.

Would a dead man have thought that?

He laughed to himself and flourished his stick in the air in front of him as was his wont. If he was dead, let him be dead, he thought. It seemed most pleasant. An excellent condition.

When he saw the lights of the town before him, muted by the mist, he realized, not without some amusement, that no one there could confirm or refute anything at all. If he was dead, they might all be as dead as him. What they said meant nothing. Perhaps they were dead and imagined they were living?

Perhaps everyone was dead? Perhaps he’d always been dead? That what he’d always assumed was life was actually death?

Then it makes no difference , he thought, and could have cuffed his own face in irritation. We’re here, we do what we do, and so what does it matter what we call it?

But despite that he didn’t stop. It didn’t matter if all the townspeople were in the same condition as him. But if they weren’t and, for example, didn’t see him because he was invisible to them, or began to scream because he looked like some phantom, it did matter.

He doubted that was the case. But now he was so close anyway that it wouldn’t hurt to finish what he’d begun.

He walked down among the houses, chose one that had lights in the windows, stood for a moment considering what excuse to use, then went up and knocked at the door.

A woman opened it. She looked at him in surprise, but was not dumbfounded or terrified. It was the hour that surprised her, not his corporeal state.

He said that he’d had a little turn, a fit of some kind of dizziness, and could she supply him with a glass of water?

She could. He gleaned from her attitude and the look she sent him as he drank, thinking herself unobserved, that she’d heard of him. He was a character, an eccentric, a figure of destiny.

He handed her the glass, thanked her, and walked back up to his house. When he closed the door behind him half an hour later, he sat down at his desk and wrote out the events of the night and morning. This took the whole morning. Then he ate, slept for an hour, went into his study again, and remained there all evening, but never noted down what he occupied himself with. He was fearful of sleep, the remnants of the eerie occurrence of that morning still hung about him, but no sooner had he doused the light and stretched out than he knew it would be a good and peaceful night.

He woke just as early the next morning. He put on his cape and went to the window. The weather was the same. The air was just as damp, the snow fell just as heavily.

He went down and had breakfast, went up again and shaved, dressed in clean clothes, and for some reason, perhaps because of the morning before, when it had been so pleasant to feel the moist air on his skin, see the snow falling through the mist, hear how the whole countryside was muffled, he decided to go out.

He kicked the snow away from the gate, opened it, and set off in the opposite direction to the previous morning.

Beneath him lay the valley, white and still in the mist. On the other side only the foot of the mountains were visible. They looked as if they were hiding, he thought.

He halted. High up in the mist he saw a gleam of light. It could only be coming from a fire, and he ran down the road again, hurried across the courtyard and into the house, where he pulled his old pack out of the cupboard in the hall, carried it into his study, and rapidly found a rope, some scalpels, a large pair of scissors, writing materials — objects he’d always taken with him on his wanderings — ran down to the hall again, got out a lambskin coat, a woolen hat, a pair of mittens, and a pair of thick socks, put them on, and hurried out.

After tearing away for the first few hundred yards, he realized that he’d never get there in one piece at that rate and began to take things easier. In any case, something inside him knew that he had plenty of time. The angels were there and they wouldn’t disappear that quickly.

He followed the river through the valley. It seemed narrower than it actually was because of the snow, which softly rounded itself into drifts along the length of its banks. Black and smooth ran the water through the otherwise white landscape. He hadn’t been out here for many years and something wistful arose in him as he spied once more his old fishing place. He’d been so happy here, and life, life itself, had stretched before him, although he hadn’t given it a thought, so completely self-absorbed as he’d been then. And he might even have had a good life. Perhaps there might have been a continuity in it, an extension of what he’d been when he’d fished here as a nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old, to something else, and then to something else again, in which something of the former state was always carried over. That he might have lived a life of fullness and meaning.

Was that what his mother had meant? Was that the sense in which he was dead? He had no children. He’d brought no life into the world.

If only he hadn’t stopped fishing that day, he thought. If only he hadn’t set out to explore. If only he hadn’t destroyed that anthill. Then he would never have seen the angels, and his whole life would have been different.

He bent down, picked up some snow, and pressed it into a snowball. The snow was so wet that water trickled through his fingers. He threw it into the river, where it vanished with a small plop, only to reappear again a few seconds later, slowly turning in the black river water.

But then he wouldn’t have known that God was dead. Then he would still have believed that all this had some meaning.

He continued on past the rapids, stopping now and again to look at the snowflakes falling into the river, where for a fraction of a second they remained whole on the surface of the water before they dissolved and disappeared. He was hot, the snow reached to his knees and was difficult to negotiate, and he undid the top buttons of his coat, picked up a bit of snow and rubbed it over his face, wiped the moisture away with a handkerchief, and carried on. Above him the dim yellowish glow in the mist had gone, but he didn’t let that worry him; if they weren’t there, they’d be somewhere else in the valley behind.