Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

When I grew up in the 1980s, there were seagulls everywhere. Each morning, on the estate where we lived, I awoke to hear them screaming on the grass in front of the houses, and when I closed the door behind me and, with satchel strapped to my back, began to walk toward the main road, the sudden noise made them take wing, flapping and crying. There was something loathsome about them, perhaps because of the nakedness and openness of their bodies, which sat so badly with the impression they otherwise gave: gluttonous, brutal, primitive. Or maybe it was because I knew what they were capable of. During the war in my grandfather’s time, they were always supposed to be circling above the battlefields, and sometimes would land on dead soldiers while they were still warm and the battle still raged around them. We used to hurl stones at them, but of course they were too quick for our slow, childish movements, and took off without difficulty long before the stones could reach them. Only when some of the older boys got hold of saloon rifles were they seriously threatened. I remember clearly how we’d go off to the scrap heap on Saturday mornings, hot on the heels of the older boys, who would take up position in the woods above the heap and begin to let loose at the screaming gulls, and the jubilation when, on some rare occasion, someone scored a bull’s-eye and the bird hit the ground, spasms racking its body for minutes afterward. I could never share their enthusiasm, in some odd way my sympathies were displaced; suddenly it was my young neighbors who were loathsome. When I think about them now, their freckled faces, red heads, and lean bodies mingle in my imagination with the sweet, moldy smell of the garbage heap, as if they were two sides of the same coin, that this is the real landscape of childhood: a mountain of wrecked furniture, broken fridges, stoves and radio cabinets, smashed crockery, garbage bags full of outdated clothes, old newspapers and magazines, old-fashioned bottles and cast-off games, all bathed in bright spring sunshine, surrounded by forest stillness. Occasionally we caught glimpses of roe deer, foxes, badgers, elk, weasels, and mice, as well as all the birds of the district, but none of this impinged on us at all, we’d simply been dumped there, a crowd of kids on an estate in the middle of the forest, and it was this lack of belonging that we shared with the gulls, for what were marine birds like them doing here, so far away from the open sea? The common assumption was that they were sponging off us, rather like rats. Nobody considered that they might be yearning for us. That that was why they lived so close to our world.

I had no notion of this until the summer of the year I turned thirteen, when, late one evening, my dad, my brother, and I set out to go crab fishing. This was an unusual event in itself, normally my father never did anything with us, preferring to stay in his office in the basement, silent and somber and tormented. When he did come up, he often flew into rages, so that our relationship with him was one of fear and apprehension rather than love. But occasionally he would become mild and amiable, as on this evening when he came in to us and asked if we wanted to go for a trip in the boat. We did. The streets were empty as we walked down to the floating jetties in the late summer darkness, no gaze fell on us, and I saw how this put him at his ease; he leaped gaily aboard, took the equipment we handed to him, rolled up the covering, loosened the moorings, started the engine, backed slowly out of the slip, put it in gear, and set out across the sound, standing in front of the front thwart. That was how he liked it. All the families on the estate had boats, it was the main occupation out there, trips to the inshore islands on weekends and during holidays, fishing in the evening after work, unless you just stayed put and puttered about onboard with something that wasn’t quite as it should be while the boat was moored or laid up for the winter. Many of the children had their own boats, and large parts of our formative years were spent down at the docks, where everything that happened was noted and talked about. For a long time ours was the only family without a boat, as my dad spent all his spare time on his garden, which was certainly unique in its mixture of rampant fertility and military precision, but which had, more than anything else, an air of hopelessness about it because none of the neighbors shared his interest and so made it seem like the limit of refinement lying there like some island in a sea of wrecked cars, caravans, garages, concrete mixers, slipped rock banks, and heaps of earth. We weren’t allowed to walk on the grass in our garden, no one was, and the other youngsters were as scared of him as we were, although they laughed at him in secret too. Could it have been that he wanted to make amends for this state of affairs when all at once he made up his mind to buy a boat? He’d phoned up from town and told us to go down to the jetties. My brother and I went there with our mother, and after half an hour he came planing into the sound in the new boat. His face lit up like a child’s when he caught sight of us. But we weren’t the only ones there. Other kids had gathered to see what was going on, every new boat arriving was an event, and this one especially, being ours. Initially they were just inquisitive, I think, they expressed themselves like connoisseurs once the boat was close enough for them to see what type it was and what sort of engine it had, but their curiosity turned to malicious pleasure when Dad was about to come alongside. I suppose he must have been fearing this moment all the way home, and had therefore planned each step in advance, because there was no hesitation in his actions when the speed slackened and the boat began to glide toward the landing dock. An arc, he must have thought, reduce speed and steer in a simple arc in among the pontoons. But he hadn’t made enough allowance for water resistance, and he sailed slowly past the slips as we stood watching, the tense body that didn’t know what to do, other than needing to hide its uncertainty behind movements that were always equally assured. The boat slid past, he wanted to reverse, but instead put on speed, and with a roar crashed into the stern of the cabin cruiser alongside. The kids around us laughed. I was mortified by the whole thing and had to distance myself from my dad, and laughed with them.

Did he see me?

Yes, he did. Just as he finally got the motor into reverse, he glanced up at us, and saw that I was laughing too. His gaze filled me with fear, I knew he’d have a go at me later on. Strangely enough, I was wrong. He never said a word about the incident.

He backed out about fifty yards before trying again, this time more carefully, but even so the same thing happened again, the boat drifted away, and he stood as if paralyzed behind the wheel as the boat floated past us a second time. Out again. When the same thing happened the third time, he gave up, motioned my mother onto the pontoon and threw the rope to her, and she hauled the boat in so that he could get ashore and push the boat into the right place. He was a respected man in most matters, and perhaps that was why the laughter among the onlookers was so free that evening. But he’d made up his mind, and didn’t give in, even though he must have known that a number of humiliations lay ahead. Another problem arose during the summer and autumn, it got harder and harder to make the boat plane, and one day he went over to some of the older boys and began talking to them, in a kind of quasi-technical, jocular sort of way, the thought of which makes me blush even now, years later, peppered as it was with references to boats, cars, and engines. With seeming casualness, he maneuvered the conversation around to his own boat, why it was getting less and less responsive, what did they think could be the matter? They followed him over to his boat, squatted down, and scrutinized the hull for a few seconds.