Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

He raised his head and looked at the angels again.

Raphael was walking with Michael in his arms. He knelt in front of the rock wall, laid him carefully down in the snow, got hold of him under his arms, and lifted his torso so that he was sitting with his back resting against the wall.

He began to walk along the foot of the wall. After a few yards he disappeared up the slope.

Antinous looked at the angel he’d left. It sat quite still against the mountain. Eyes closed, hands in its lap, wings by its sides.

Snow had begun to cover its face.

He looked up. Nothing. Just mist, snow, mist.

This was what he’d dreamed of. All his adult life he’d dreamed of this: a dead angel.

But he remained prone. Perhaps because he was scared that the other angels might come back. Perhaps because he wanted to make sure it really was dead. He wasn’t sure of that himself. But something told him he had to remain flat.

He kept watch on the dead angel for several hours. It was thirty yards off, sitting against the glistening black rock wall, gradually being coated with falling snow.

Only when dusk started to fall did he get up and go over to it.

He stroked the snow off its brow and felt it. Cold as ice. He raised its hand from its lap and pressed his thumb to the artery on the wrist. No pulse. He was quite calm. He knew the truth about himself. There was no place there for any of the conceptions he’d had about himself. He’d never taken the final step that could have enabled him to see it. It wasn’t because he didn’t know there was a step to take, but because he’d persuaded himself it didn’t exist. He had known really. But now the angel who’d shown him that was dead. And he was alive. He was the one who was alive. He’d thought of that these past hours. Could he still live knowing what he knew? Yes, he could. And not only that. It would also set him free. He could do as he liked. He needn’t take account of anything anymore.

Not even the dead angel.

He bent forward and grasped it beneath the arms, raised it. It was light, much lighter than he’d expected. It was not unlike carrying a mummy, he thought.

He lifted it a few yards clear of the rock and laid it down in the snow, knelt down, and stood up with the angel in his arms and set off in the opposite direction from Raphael, until the mountain slope became gentle enough to walk up without difficulty.

All the way home, first through the river valley, then across the plateau and up the mountain on the other side, he thought about the angel he had in his arms. But not about what it was. Only what it represented. It could get him everything he’d yearned for. Fame, respect, admiration. His works would last forever. If he just gave way. The angel had seen who he really was, what he’d never been able to admit to himself that he was, and it was what he hadn’t been able to acknowledge that he had to give way to. He wanted to know, but no one else wanted to. They would worship him.

So ran his thoughts. Then he’d imagined how he’d lay it on the table in his study as soon as he got home, lock all the doors, cover all the windows, light the lamp, lay out his dissection instruments, get his preserving solutions ready, a book to make notes in as he worked. How he would cut open the skin from the throat down, cut open the ribs one by one, carefully lift out the organs and lay them on the adjacent table. Heart. Lungs. Liver. Kidneys.

Would it have a heart?

The mere thought had sent rushes of expectation through him. He didn’t know what awaited him. Nobody knew. He would be the first to dissect an angel. The angels had had eternal life, then they’d been trapped here, and become mortal. But they hadn’t become human. Their anatomy now ought to be the same as when they were eternal beings. He might be holding the very key to life.

It was late evening when he got to the road. He stood for a while looking around him. When he was sure there wasn’t anyone else in the vicinity, he walked up the road on the last part of the journey to his house, kicked open the gate, crossed the courtyard, opened the door, and went in.

He laid the angel down on the floor of his study, cleared his writing table of books and papers, and laid the angel on it. All this took place in the dark. He couldn’t bear to have a light, he was fearful that the sight of the dead angel there on his desk would fully bring home to him what he was really doing.

He sat down in a chair and looked at it. He wasn’t in a fit state to begin a dissection now. All his senses had to be keen. At the moment he could hardly think. In addition he should have a witness. Someone who could vouchsafe that the organs really did belong to an angel. That it really was an angel’s anatomy he’d sketched. At the same time, it had to be someone who wouldn’t get any credit for it. Someone from the village, perhaps, he thought.

It couldn’t stay there at any rate.

He rose and picked up the angel again, carried it down to the ground floor, and then descended into the cellar. He laid it down on the floor and lit a candle. He threw some bucketfuls of ice into one corner, smoothed them out with his foot so that they formed a kind of bed, and laid the angel on it. Then he pushed four crates of apples against the side of its body that wasn’t next to the wall, placed two by its feet, so that it was shut into a small, coffinlike space, and emptied a few more buckets of ice over it. He carefully avoided looking at the angel all this time.

Back on the ground floor again, he had a bite to eat, opened the door onto the courtyard several times, without seeing anything except snow and darkness, drew the bolt at last, and went up to his bedroom, got into bed, and closed his eyes, but he couldn’t sleep, the thought of the angel lying down in the cellar was too disquieting. His emotions vacillated the whole time between feelings of extreme triumph and an equally profound remorse.

He went to the window and looked out, the courtyard was as empty as before, and then downstairs, stood poised with his hand on the handle of the cellar door, but changed his mind, it would only make things worse, he thought, and sat down at his desk, but he couldn’t sit there, it was where the angel had so recently been lying, he realized that he’d touched it, and washed his hands in the bowl in the kitchen, before fetching a sheaf of paper and going to another table, in the sitting room, where he sat down and began to write, something he always did when he was plagued by anxiety. He began by writing out the strange dream he’d had, continued with his ramble to the mountain, the fire he’d seen, the tracks he’d followed, the place by the river he’d recognized. He wrote about the angel that had flown above him in the mist, its eerie cry, he wrote about the angel he’d seen in the oak tree, the strange contortions of its face, of how he’d followed it. He told of the burning wheel in the snow, and of the two angels who’d come dragging a roe deer calf. He wrote of the blood that had welled out onto the snow and of the roe deer’s eyes that had gone on living for a few seconds after its head had been severed from its body. He wrote of the angel that had snarled and the blood it had had on its chin and chest, the whirring of its wings as it spread them out and attacked the other one. He mentioned the irony of getting lost again, that all the time he’d been up there he was both eleven years old and fifty-four, and the footsteps of the two angels that had walked past him. He wrote about the convulsions that had racked it, he wrote about the unendurable scream and the look it had given him. He wrote of the fear in its eyes as it died and about the other angel that had propped it up against a rock face. It was almost as if it had done the same thing before , he wrote. It strikes me now that there was something customary about what it did, like a mother following her routines when she puts her children to bed . Then he writes a bit about what his mother did with him when he was small, and then, while he’s still writing, he realizes what he’s just said.