Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

When I’d eaten, I leaned forward and peered at the sky in the west. It looked as if it were brightening a little; in a few places the grayness had broken into blue, as if an old layer of paint were showing through there. Time to get out, I thought, poured the rest of the coffee down the sink, and put the cup on the counter. Spinners, rod, rain gear, plastic bags, coffee, cigarettes , I thought. Is that the lot?

Just then, my cell phone rang in the bedroom. I stood still counting the rings. It stopped at eight. Then I repented. It couldn’t have been anyone but Mother, no one else had my number, but she usually rang every Sunday, and today was Thursday, so something must have happened.

Sure enough, Mom’s number was on the display. I’d really rather not have given her my number either, but I couldn’t, she’d have been mad with worry. Now she phoned once a week to find out how things were going, I talked a bit about what I’d read, as there wasn’t much else to tell her about from this end, she talked a bit about what had happened in the family in the meantime, and then she was happy and we hung up.

I took the cell into the living room, where the reception was better, and rang her number.

“Hello, Ingrid here,” she said.

“Hi, Mom, it’s Henrik. You phoned me. Was it something important?”

“No, I was just thinking about you, and wanted to hear how things were going.”

“ Thinking about me,” I said. “So, what were you thinking?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “How are things going out there?”

“Fine,” I said. “It’s perfect fishing weather. I was just going out when you rang.”

“I won’t keep you then,” she said.

“No, no, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of time.”

My young neighbor’s boat came planing into the sound between the two small islands.

“What are you doing at home anyway?” I asked. “Are you ill?”

I knew exactly how he’d slacken off speed and closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t have to watch.

“It is Saturday today,” she said.

“ Saturday? ” I said. “But I was doing my cleaning yesterday. . oh, of course, it was Friday yesterday!”

When I opened my eyes again, he was standing in front of the seat, as I anticipated, with one hand on the wheel and the other on the throttle as the boat slowly nosed the final stretch to the quay.

I heard her smiling at me on the other end.

“Well, say what you were thinking,” I said.

“It wasn’t anything,” she said. “Really, nothing. I just wondered if anything had happened.”

“Happened? In what way?”

“I said it was nothing.”

“A kind of omen?” I said.

She laughed. But I knew that was exactly what it was.

“No, no. Not an omen, Henrik.”

“I know you,” I said. “You saw an omen. And you rang to check up if there was anything in it. You weren’t going to chance ignoring it, because it might be true, eh? Isn’t that what happened?”

“Well, perhaps,” she said.

Again I heard her smiling. It made me happy.

“Have you heard from Klaus?” I asked.

“Not in the past few days,” she said. “But they’re coming early next week.”

“You told me that.”

“It’ll be lovely,” she said.

On the other side of the bay my neighbor was lying on his stomach on the bow fishing for the mooring rope with a gaff hook. When he’d gotten hold of it, he tied it to the bow, placed the gaff hook under the seat, and went aft to check that the mooring was taut enough.

“Give them my love,” I said.

“I will,” she said. “And I hope all goes well with you in the meantime.”

“You, too,” I said. “Bye for now.”

I lowered the phone and heard a faint bye as it cut off. Outside my neighbor was lifting two bags of shopping onto the quay, followed by the gasoline can, before starting to roll out the blue cover. My rules were just as strict about arrival as departure, so I just had to stand there and watch him finish up. When the last loop was fastened, he balanced along the gunwale as he steadied himself with one hand on the quay, climbed the ladder, picked up the bags and the gas can, and began to walk home. Not so long before this had been the cutoff point for my attention; now I had to maintain it all the way until he closed the house door behind him. Like some animal spellbound by a sudden light, I stood there staring at him. He stopped in front of the woodshed, pushed the door open with his foot, and put the gas can inside, continued up the garden path, into the yard, gathered the bags in one hand, opened the door, and disappeared into the house. Relieved, I went out into the hall to put on my rain gear. The smell of sleep forced its way down from the bedroom, and I felt a sudden yearning for the outdoors in my breast. But I didn’t hurry. I fetched my fishing rod and the box of spinners from the cellar, opened it, untangled the hooks, and laid the spinners in their respective compartments, sorted by size, and as always the sight of them aroused a childish pleasure in me, both because of their colors, which were beautiful, and their shapes, which in their imitation of fishes’ bodies had something toylike and almost movingly harmless about them. Then I washed the congealed fish blood off my knife, dried it, tested the blade with my thumb, took the steel out of the drawer and sharpened it a bit, put it in its sheath, and placed it in my pack along with the thermos, rain pants, and cell phone, before buttoning the cuffs of my waterproof jacket tight about my wrists and pulling the zip up to my neck. I put on a pair of woolen socks, pushed my feet into my boots, laced them up tightly, opened the door, and went out.

Just at that moment two gulls took off from the steps. They were so close I could have touched them. Their eyes looked rigidly straight ahead, seemingly independent of their bodies’ movements as they beat their wings and half-turned in the air until they’d gained sufficient height to be able to sail across the narrow bay and settle on the gables of one of the boathouses.

They had strewn garbage all over the steps. Coffee grounds, orange peel, spaghetti, bread crusts, chicken bones, bits of fish and skin, potato peelings, tea leaves, cigarette butts. The wind must have tipped over the can in the night, I thought, and then they’d pecked holes in the bags and pulled out the contents.

Across the bay one of them raised its head and screamed. The cry, which on clear days would have carried far out to sea, sounded strangely thin and frail in the mist. I wondered if the gull noticed. That it couldn’t quite manage the thing today. Or perhaps they weren’t bothered by such minor details on a day like this? At last they’d found where that alluring stink of decomposition came from. They smelled it every day, a deeper vibration in the air, something wet and wonderful that drove them to distraction: where did it come from? They suspected the black can with the hard lid, but hadn’t been certain until this morning, when to their great surprise they found it lying there overturned and open.

I gathered up the garbage in my hands, fetched a new bag from the kitchen, filled it up, went down to the sea rocks at the back of the house and emptied the contents into the water. There was no refuse collection out here, so organic rubbish went straight into the sea, and the rest was burned. Both these operations gave me deep satisfaction. I liked seeing the rubbish sinking through the clear water, where it might make the bottom resemble one of those disaster areas with the remnants of clothing, aircraft seats, and passengers strewn about the terrain: a chicken bone high up in a tangle of seaweed, a peach pit at the bottom of a crevice, bits of potato peel on the sand by the rock wall, a shredded coffee filter caught up in a belt of sea wrack. And I liked sitting on the knoll and watching the flames at work, their canine twisting hither and thither in the wind, the flakes of ash whirled up by the hot air, the beautiful blue tinge that glowed over melting plastic.