Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

“Well?” my father asked.

“Haven’t you ever heard of growth, Mr. Vankel?”

They would never have used that tone with him if he hadn’t entered their special area of expertise.

“Growth?” said Dad. “But the boat’s plastic!”

This rejoinder quickly spread through the estate and long remained a byword whenever anyone wanted to express incomprehension about something. But the boat’s plastic!

Over the next few days I was dispatched to the boat with a scraper, snorkel, and face mask to clean off all the algae that had attached itself to the hull. There I lay for hours, the butt of general derision, splashing around in the cold water and scraping away until my skin was numb and my limbs stiff with cold. He couldn’t even manage to do that right; the boat should have been lifted out and put into drydock over at the yard, of course, where he could have scraped the bottom and put on the chemicals in a matter of hours, a fact that the onlookers never failed to point out.

Even though now, a year later, he’d learned from his mistakes and mastered the necessary seamanship to some extent, he didn’t like it. Boating had joined the long list of things to be avoided without us noticing the fact, after all we’d grown up with the idea that he never went to the hairdresser but always cut his own hair, that he never took the bus, that he never shopped at the local shop but always at shopping centers miles away, that we never had visitors at home, that he never touched us or our mother, that he never played soccer or went skiing or skating, like the other dads, but always sat in his office listening to music, classical music — with tears in his eyes, as I discovered one afternoon when I went to fetch my bicycle pump from the back of the house and happened to look in the cellar window as I went past. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known he was there. But now I cupped my hands and bent down. His head was only eighteen inches away from me. He was swaying backward and forward to the music, his eyes were closed, tears streamed down his cheeks. Shocked, I jerked my head back. All the rest of that day I couldn’t think of anything else, and each time that image of him welled up, my heart beat harder within me. But it didn’t make me feel sorry for him, on the contrary: I only felt even more scared. It made his fits of temper seem even more sinister.

The boat passed under the bridge, and for a few seconds the sound of the engine became hollow and cavernous. I glanced up at the carriageway, rocking slightly in the darkness above us. When we passed this spot during the day, it was possible to see the stone piers of the old bridge on the bottom nearer to the shore, and there were rumors that vehicles with corpses inside them were there as well, casualties of the time the bridge was blown up toward the end of the war. We had never seen anything, even though we went diving there every summer, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t right. There were plenty of places in the vicinity with skeletons from those times. The best-known was Roligheten, a clearing in the forest a few miles farther inland, where several hundred men had been executed; group after group had been ordered to kneel before a trench, blindfolded, hands tied behind their backs, shot in the neck, and kicked in, and for several days after the trench had been filled in, you could see how the ground undulated like the sea as the gas made the bodies swell. The hottest summer on record, it bubbled and simmered under there continuously, sometimes small fountains of blood spurted up from the ground. The stench must have been unendurable. After the war they decided that the grave should remain as it was, and apart from a monument on the edge of the forest, a kind of obelisk with a commemorative plaque to the fallen, there isn’t anything now to mark that clearing out from any other. Perhaps the grass is still a little greener and lusher, that’s all. I first went there on a class visit and subsequently read every description of the event I came across, because there was something fascinating about it, mainly because of the sensational awfulness of what had happened, of course, but also because it displayed a truth of a different kind to anything I’d come across up until then. It robbed the participants of everything apart from their bodies, executioners and executed alike, those who left that place alive and those who were left there to rot. No spirit, no humanity, no feelings, no concepts of good or evil, only eyes and mouths, hair and teeth, rib cages and arms, kneecaps and soles, grass and trees, earth and water, air and sunlight, and blue, blue sky.

My brother, with whom I sometimes discussed this, usually brushed it aside by saying that I’d have thought differently if the dead had been close to me, and I agreed with him. Yes, maybe so , I’d say, but deep down I knew it wasn’t true; no one in my life was important enough for that, not even him, my brother, sitting next to me now on the bench in the wispy darkness of a summer evening as we passed the two gas tanks and could make out the electric glow from the town as a faint vaulted dome of light between the forested hills. He meant nothing to me. Neither did my father, I thought as I turned, looked out across the sound between the two islands, at the black, even surface of the water, at the pulse from the lighthouse, the way it splintered the darkness into short intervals, as if something were being opened and closed, the rapid beating of a heart. .

We pushed slowly past the shipyard and the new housing estate, always accompanied by the even drone of the engine, the swish of the bow cleaving the water. We passed the line of deserted bunkers, which I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t known they were there, surrounded as they were by the duskiness of trees, then all the holiday homes among the drumlins, then the naval base, with its gray-painted, faceless warships, which were always moored there, as if closed in on themselves. I’d begun to feel cold, and was glad we were almost there. It was nearly ten o’clock, I saw and met my father’s gaze. He smiled at me. I smiled back.

“Will you do the rope, Henrik?” he called.

I nodded, grabbed the rope, and got onto the deck as he slackened speed and bent forward to find the grapnel. A few minutes later we were on our way up the island. The black sea rocks still radiated warmth. We’d landed near the older of the two lighthouses — it stood in darkness in the middle of the island and seemed to draw all the lines of the landscape toward it — and dropped our things against its white wall. Dad got out a thermos of coffee, handed out plastic cups, poured, and lit a cigarette.

The gulls that had taken screaming to the air when we arrived were still circling above us. When we walked down to the sea on the other side, they dive-bombed us, more aggressively than I’d ever known before. They must be sitting on eggs close by , I thought, and raised the shaft of the landing net above my head. They must have reckoned it was part of my body, as their attacks halted above it, and then they flew up again to gather themselves for the next dive. Even so my heart was in my mouth.

“It’s all right!” Dad shouted. “They’re not dangerous!”

He stood waiting on a ledge of rock with Klaus. Carefully I began to walk down. Three of them followed me. They screeched out their ugly cries each time they came winging out of the dark, and didn’t stop until I was on the sea rocks. When I turned to look at them, one was being chased by the other two, first across the sea, then up toward the lighthouse, where I lost sight of them.

Dad had stopped down at the water’s edge and set his bag on the rock. When he began to undress I wasn’t quite sure what to think.

“Are you going swimming now?” I asked.