Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

As I stood there looking into the inlet, the sound of an engine came from somewhere. The mist and the many channels between the little islands at first made it impossible to pinpoint, like a word you have on the tip of your tongue, it’s there, you know it, but still it won’t be cornered, until a dark shadow rounding the headland at the end of the holm brought the uncertainty to an end. It was an inflatable. In it sat two men, both in the stern, their bodies leaning into the wind. One steered, the other held what looked like a map in his hands. Although the boat passed within a few yards of the rock I was on, they didn’t notice me. It swung round the headland in a gentle curve and disappeared from sight, but from the sound of the engine I could tell it was bound for the harbor. I knew that they had nothing to do with me, but still I was troubled by their proximity, and as I went back to the house I made certain to keep out of sight. From the corner of the house I saw the outboard motor switched off and tipped up as the boat’s momentum covered the final stretch to the end of the bay and a little way up the muddy beach. I thought they might be from the lighthouse service, but when they’d tied a loose knot round the door handle of the boathouse, as a precaution against rising water, they began to walk in the opposite direction to the lighthouse, over to the other side of the island, where as far as I knew there was nothing for the lighthouse service to maintain. I considered following them to find out what they were doing, but quickly brushed the thought aside; no matter where they were from, their presence had nothing to do with me. Instead, I picked up my fishing rod and began to walk along the road, took a run at the fence that kept the island’s two remaining sheep out, and cleared it, smelled the breath of salt and rot as I passed the narrow cleft that filled with water when the tide rose, but that now lay empty and shone viscera-like with kelp and sea grass and bunches of mussels, climbed up the little knoll, and followed the path up the hill to the lighthouse, where I stopped and lit a cigarette with my back propped up against the edge of the steps and my gaze on the harbor, which, in its perfect immobility, weather-beaten and waterlogged, looked as if it were part of the island’s vegetation.

The house I rented lay on the end of a narrow spit of land, separated from the other houses by a shallow bay, which in turn was sheltered from the sea by a low rampart of a mountain. From there the ground rose in a grass-covered slope to the island’s highest point, where the lighthouse stood. Although not a single bush or tree grew there, only grass and moss, it appeared fertile compared with the ground on the other side of the lighthouse, where the rock, stretching seaward for several hundred yards after forming a steep descent down a cliff-like escarpment, was so low-lying that the sea flooded it during storms, and made it look more like a skerry than anything: bare, barren, bereft of vegetation.

Right up until the sixties more than forty people lived out here. Now only four remained, and because the purely practical side of life on the island was so complicated, without a shop, post office, doctor’s office, school, or refuse collection, it could be only for sentimental reasons that they stayed on, and that placed them high in my estimation, especially as sentimentality, which is usually considered to be a weak emotion, displayed itself in them in the form of unwavering resolution.

Or perhaps this appreciation was no more than a type of self-defense, as my own grounds for moving out here were at least indirectly sentimental: from my very earliest childhood I’d heard tell of the Utøy Islands, my great-grandfather had grown up here, and despite not knowing his name or what he looked like, it was enough to cause a vague sense of belonging to grow in me, and for some reason this was what I clung to when events the previous year had forced me to break with the life I’d been living. I’d done something terrible, and the terribleness had become a part of me; somber and shady it always lurked in my consciousness, every glance I met, every conversation I had, even if it was only with a supermarket cashier, led my thoughts back to what I’d done and aroused the same feelings each time: baseness, sordidness, blackness. Intellectually I could both understand and explain what I’d done, but in this the power of thought was too insignificant, as it is in all decisive questions, and thrown back on my emotions, I was cast into a hopelessness so pervasive that my days were spent doing nothing but enduring. I slept, I ate, I watched television. Each time a car slowed down outside, I turned off the light and stood by the window to see if they were coming to me, each time the phone rang, it was as if fear broke out within me, in a matter of seconds it had filled me like a vessel, and only an enormous effort of will steeled me to lift the receiver and answer, even though I knew how small the chances were of them finding me there.

This went on for several months. When I finally did manage to get out and rent a house on Sandholmen, as it was called, it was September. Up the fjord the boat following the landscape had begun to yellow, the evenings came early, and when I walked down the gangplank with my two suitcases onto the quay of the tiny fishing hamlet where the landlord was to meet me, the lights from the houses on the islands all around shone like small stars in the thick darkness.

I put the suitcases down and lit a cigarette, let my eyes wander over the few figures on the quay, and decided it must be the eldest of them who was waiting for me. At all events he glanced in my direction several times. I met his gaze and raised my eyebrows expectantly. It was enough to bring him over.

“Hello,” I said. “Are you the house owner?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Egil Leirvik.”

We shook hands. Behind us the thump of the boat’s engines ceased, and the light in the saloon was turned off.

“My boat’s just over here,” he said. “It’s late, so we’d better get going.”

He picked up one of the suitcases and began to walk across the quay. I turned to the boat, which was now in complete darkness apart from the green, phosphorescing lights of the instrument panel in the wheelhouse, chucked my cigarette into the sea between the hull and the quay, took a deep breath and felt how the tang of diesel, seawater, and fog sent a surge of delight through my breast.

A few minutes later I was aboard his fishing boat leaning my elbow on the cabin roof, staring out at the many channels that intersected the small islands. Occasionally we passed a house, spaces like great aquariums of light in the darkness, and I had brief glimpses of how people lived, their lamps, flowerpots, leather sofas, and television screens. Below each house was a jetty and a boathouse and a couple of boats of different sizes, which tugged at their mooring ropes when the waves from our wake reached the land. The old man at my side stood as if he were alone, occasionally turning the metal wheel attached to the wall in front of him, always with his eyes fixed straight ahead, and even though his silence struck me as unnatural, there was something in his bearing that told me it wasn’t necessary to say anything.

On both sides of the inlet the ground was gradually becoming lower and sharper. When we passed the last headland and got out into open water, the boat began to pitch. I noticed several times that his gaze turned to me, but each time, like an animal, he made sure he didn’t make direct eye contact, and I knew that my presence worried him.

I wiped my hand across the cabin roof and gathered the droplets into a little pool under my fingers.

“My grandfather helped to build the chapel out here,” I said. “And the quayside.”