Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

“We’re going crab fishing, son!”

I’d been crab fishing with other parents, I knew the drill, it was simple: you shone a light down into the water and then scraped up the crabs that collected on the rock, either with a rake or a landing net.

In only his underpants he bent forward and took out a towel and swimming trunks from his bag, wrapped the towel around his waist, put his hand underneath and worked his pants off, and drew on his trunks, while I stood looking at the rock in front of me. Couldn’t he have changed without using a towel? There was no one else out here. And if there had been, they wouldn’t have seen anything, enveloped in darkness as we were.

Dad took out his face mask, snorkel, and flippers. The air was still filled with the protests of gulls. I turned and saw them flying to and fro over the little island, like thoughts that remain disturbed and disquieted long after the tension of the situation that unleashed them has abated.

“Can you hold the bucket ready, Klaus?” Dad said.

Klaus nodded.

Dad put on his equipment and waddled the last few yards to the edge of the water. Whether it was his skinny legs or the childish face mask or the obvious pleasure he radiated at finally doing something together with us, at any rate I felt a spasm of tenderness for him. He didn’t know how to go about crab fishing, but had decided to do it his way, for our sakes. The least I could do for him, I thought, was to show a little enthusiasm.

“Is it cold?” I shouted, after he’d jumped in and lay splashing in the water, with that ridiculous mask over his face and the flashlight waving in his hand.

He removed the mouthpiece.

“No, no,” he said. “Just follow me.”

Then he put the mouthpiece back and began to swim across, seeming to glide above the bottom in the dark water, twitching his flippers occasionally to keep on course. I met Klaus’s gaze. He only shook his head, and we smiled at each other.

Perhaps five minutes passed. Then Dad lifted his head out of the water, pulled the mask onto his forehead.

“There aren’t any crabs here!” he shouted. “Let’s go over there.”

He pointed, and we began to walk across the slabs while he swam by beside us, Klaus still clutching the red bucket.

I could hardly bear to think of what it would be like if he didn’t get any crabs at all. Far too much capital had been invested.

For a long while he lay motionless in the new location he’d chosen. The beam from the flashlight, refracted in the water, gathered like a ball of light in front of him. His breath whistled in and out of the snorkel. I crouched down, rubbing my bare forearms. The seagulls had calmed down at last, and apart from the almost imperceptible clunking of the water slapping on the rock, everything was still. In a few places silvery patches on the surface of the water reflected the weak sheen of the gloaming. A ship blazed with light on the horizon. It must be the ferry to Denmark , I thought. Just then Dad’s flippers moved and he dived to the bottom. Klaus got up and went down to the edge of the rock, and was standing ready with the red bucket when, twenty seconds later, Dad surfaced again with a bristling crab in one hand.

A narrow plume of water shot out of the snorkel. Then he took off his mask, held on to the seaweed with one hand as he thrust the crab over to Klaus with the other.

“There are lots more down there!” he said.

His skin was white with cold. But he didn’t seem to notice, just swam out again and pulled out crab after crab, not stopping for half an hour, by which time the bucket was full of crawling and restless creatures that were constantly rubbing against each other with a bonelike rustle. He was shivering as he stood drying himself with a towel, but he was in a good mood, and told us to search for fuel for a bonfire while he changed. I kept down on the sea rocks so as not to disturb the many gulls, and by the time I’d been around the entire islet, I had my arms full of driftwood, dry as tinder after the long, hot summer.

When I arrived, Dad and Klaus had seated themselves in a grassy hollow in front of a fire that lit up a wide circle of rocks around them. The reddish yellow gleam from the flames seemed to form an inlay in their otherwise shadowy faces. To avoid having to use my hands to get up there, I made a detour, following a gently ascending spine of rock behind them, and as I was about to turn down again, I saw something white against the darkness of the rock in front of me, stopped, and knelt down: it was a dead seagull. I put my wood down and felt it. Its body was still warm. Presumably it was the one that had been chased by the others, I thought. The ground surrounding it was covered in feathers. I saw the thickening at the joints of the thin legs, the reptile-like fold of skin between the claws, the empty eyes, and was filled with nausea.

“Come along and sit down!” Dad called. “We’re going back home soon!”

I picked up my wood, carried it to the fire, and sat down next to them. Dad handed me the bag of sausages and a skewer. Then he took out a Coke from the freezer bag and opened it for me. He really had thought of everything tonight.

“What were you looking at just now?” he asked.

I speared a sausage and held it over the flames, took a sip of Coke before answering.

“A dead seagull,” I said.

“Sure it’s dead?” he asked.

I nodded.

He tilted his head back without shifting his gaze, as he often did, and crossed one foot over the other. I’ve since noticed myself sitting in precisely the same attitude in photographs. And that’s odd, because I’ve never had any desire to be like him, but, on the contrary, I’ve always cultivated the things that separated us.

“Did you know that seagulls were angels once?” he said.

He lied about everything, but his lies were various; this one fortunately was only meant to tease us.

“I didn’t know that,” I said, and laughed. I could hear how forced it sounded.

The ferry to Denmark glided slowly past on the sea behind him. Its many small lights made it look like an enormous chandelier, I thought. Shortly after came the throb of its engines, somber and secretive, and the first waves began to wash ashore below us. I took the sausage out of the flames, blew on the shining skin. It was covered in black crusts and small, soft blisters. I noticed how my mouth had filled with saliva as I took the first bite. No one spoke, and the silence started to grow oppressive, it reminded us all that this wasn’t how it was meant to be. A father out with his two sons, round a fire, with sausages and Coke, shouldn’t the conversation between them be light and jokey?

Dad sat staring into the flames. I watched him furtively, his high forehead, his thick, black hair, the marked rounding of the back of his head as it turned down toward the neck. The fleshy lips that caused an imbalance in his otherwise clean-cut features, and that, together with his oddly light eyes, gave his face an impression of susceptibility that bordered on the defenseless, as if you saw something you weren’t meant to see when you looked at him.

“What a load of crabs we got!” I said.

Klaus sent me a look full of disdain. And I knew what it meant: we weren’t supposed to help him.

But Dad smiled.

“I’ll cook them when we get home,” he said. “Then there’ll be crab for supper tomorrow.”

He put another stick on the fire, folded his hands round his knees, as if he were still cold, looked at us one after the other.

“There are more sausages,” he said. “But no more Coke.”

We sat there for maybe a quarter of an hour more. Then he got up and began packing things away, sent Klaus down for some water to douse the fire, and just as he’d gone, turned to me.