Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

He gave me the quickest of glances.

“Aha,” he said.

“That must have been sometime toward the end of the twenties,” I said. “His father was a builder. Many of the houses they built are still standing.”

He said nothing to this.

“But then he turned to fishing when his father died,” I went on. “Out here, too. Herring.”

Not a line of his features betrayed what he was thinking. He stood there impregnable with one hand on the wheel and the other on the cabin roof and his gaze fixed on what was ahead, where the sea lay heavy beneath the black sky. Each time the bows took a wave badly the water came down with a splash on the cabin roof, and a light shower of sea spray filled the air around us. A few hundred yards ahead a light blinked regularly in the darkness. Then a low island appeared through the blackness, and the old man raised his hand.

“Sandholmen’s behind that,” he said.

“Is it?” I said.

He altered course, and the next wave lifted the propeller out of the water, and the engine noise suddenly altered. It was as if it were barking like a dog, I thought. Shortly after, we glided past the headland and entered a calm bay, faintly illuminated by the reflection of the lights on the quayside. Nearest us were five boathouses side by side, on the slope behind were a few houses, threaded by a narrow gravel road that continued into the darkness along the bay, where it was regularly lit up by a shaft of light from the blinking lighthouse on top of the island, and this also revealed the undulating terrain of the hillside: rocks, moss, grass, and the occasional clump of heather.

A small dog was barking furiously on the edge of the quay as we came sailing in. It was tied up, and kept straining forward the whole time.

He moored just beneath it, turned off the engine, and motioned me to go ashore. I glanced up at the frenzied animal.

“He’s as gentle as a lamb,” he said smiling. “He’s just pleased to see us.”

I gripped the slippery ladder and clambered up onto the quay, stepped quickly a couple of paces to the side to get out of range of the dog, turned, and took the suitcases he handed up.

“There’s a wheelbarrow in that shed there,” he said. “Here.”

He brought out a flashlight from the pocket of his insulated coveralls and gave it to me. As I opened the door, I sensed that he was kneeling in front of the dog behind me. I took a few steps in and shone the light around the place. A thick layer of dust coated the planks and the many objects inside, except for a central area near the door, where traffic was obviously heavy enough to prevent it settling. It looked like snow, I thought. Snow from the sky of the dead. Along one wall, between stacks of fish crates and crab baskets, old oilskins and waterproof trousers were suspended from nails, along with coveralls and life jackets. The other wall was covered with various tools, most of them rusty. Scythes, saws, wrenches, screwdrivers, box wrenches, pliers, hammers. An outboard motor, also rusty, was clamped to a sawhorse in the corner, next to it some milk churns, a lawn mower, and a wheelbarrow with its handles propped against the wall. I wheeled it out of the shed and took it to the quay, we each put a suitcase into it, I returned the flashlight. He shone the beam inland and set off walking. Without a word we followed the road into the darkness. The swish of the sea lay like a veil over the landscape, and made the rustle of rain gear and the sound of the wheel running over gravel extraordinarily clear. Here and there parts of the road had subsided, and when we’d passed the row of houses, it became narrower and gradually overgrown too, until the final stretch was no more than a path. Apart from the dockside, which was lit up, it was impossible to see what the country around us looked like. But I could feel it. Again that surge of joy within me: at last I’d be alone.

The house was just as it had been when it was left. All the furniture and lamps, all the crockery and bed linen was from the seventies. The carpet in the living room was yellow, the sofa was upholstered in brown with orange stripes, the chairs were leather, the cupboards and tables teak. He showed me where the wood was, explained how the water pump worked, opened the drawer of towels and bedclothes in the chest of drawers in the bedroom, pointed out his own house on the other side of the bay. If there was anything I needed to know, I was just to knock.

I thanked him and shook his hand. Halfway down the steps he turned and glanced up at me.

“Your grandfather,” he said. “What was his name?”

“Olav Hellevik,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I don’t recognize the name.”

The expectation that in some way I should form a bond with this landscape, simply because the same blood that existed out here for several generations also ran in my veins, was refuted even as I climbed to the lighthouse the next morning, and saw the island as it was for the first time. Bathed in the shadowless light from a sharp, white sky, it lay at my feet, desolate and windswept, with no room for any notions apart from those the instant revealed. No matter how long I stood staring down at the cluster of homes and boathouses in the bay, I couldn’t conjure up the life that once must have thronged the place. No fleet of fishing boats, with its nineteenth-century tangle of masts and hulls, sails and cordage, appeared to my inner eye, no homespun-clad men rolled barrels of herring in and out of the sheds, no women in skirts came carrying water from the well or milk from the cow barn, no children played among the rocks, no cows stood in the stalls, no flocks of sheep moved tinkling up the hill. The houses lay there like desiccated insects, bereft of the life and meaning that had once flowed through them. Even so, the sight of the island filled me with pleasure that morning. It was just such a place as this that I’d longed for. A place that lay beyond everything, a place that lacked all relevance, a place society would never turn its attention toward. A place with no future. That was what I’d longed for. And now I was there.

But after the transport of the first few hours, hopelessness descended again. The next few days I trudged around the island with head bowed, blind to everything but my own despair, and so powerful were these emotions that they even encompassed the landscape as well: when I sat on the sea rocks in the evening and stared at the sunset in the west, it was as if this, too, were merely one of my thoughts. That the sun was going down inside me. That it was my gleaming reflection the sea washed over. Even the starry sky, which was clearer here than anywhere I’d ever been, was no longer a thing out there, that, too, I’d turned into myself. Perhaps this all sounds rather grand, as if by containing the whole world I’d deified myself, but the opposite was the case; the condition stripped everything of its beauty, because what I saw became as inferior and senseless as I was myself. The sun became a miniature sun, the sea a miniature sea, the sky a miniature sky. I had fled into myself, that was what had happened. The advantage of this strategy was that nothing out there could affect me anymore, the drawback was that it all lost its meaning. And as the need for meaning is absolute, I had to seek it elsewhere. This is the only way I can explain the shameful self-idolization that occurred during these years. I was a miserable human being, but precisely by insisting on this wretchedness, I gave myself and my life some meaning. That powerful sense of shame must be seen in this light. Sense of shame was a mechanism whose highly receptive sensors picked up everything — even the tiniest thing — that concerned me. These small things were then put through a kind of amplifier and magnified into events of huge proportions, in order to assure me that everything concerning me was of great, if not huge, significance. This meant that I inhabited a kind of dislocated, Gothic pseudoreality, where instead of relating to the world, with its pure colors and clear shapes, I related to grotesque and artificially animated shadow figures of myself in it, which were forever rising up and shrinking on the walls within me. Such a mock reality is, however, dependent on a continual supply of new events in order to sustain it, I realized. Shame is a social mechanism, it requires a tight set of relationships to function, without that it withers, and this was exactly what happened after a few weeks on the island. The sun of today pushed the shadows of yesterday further and further back, it’s the only way I can describe it, because it was as if more and more light came into my life, while at the same time I moved further and further toward the front of my consciousness, until one day I stood right out on the edge and stared out, filled with an enormous ecstasy: I was here ! I could see this! It took less and less to kindle the joy of life in me. The sight of a heron slowly taking to the wing from a beacon at dusk, for example, the faint swish of its wings when shortly afterward it flies over my head, like the sound of a sail as the wind dies, the strangely exotic cry it makes, the thought of how primitive it seems, as if it’s from another time, a darker and more unfinished one than our own. The sight one afternoon of an otter sliding down a snowbank on its belly, something it finds so amusing that, once it’s shaken the snow off itself, it immediately runs up and does it again. The silence in the grassy hollows in the middle of the island on these high, bright summer days, the sensation then of being on a planet that had managed to come into existence, the almost insane beauty of the colors: the sky’s blue, the sun’s yellow, the algae pool’s green. The way the bumblebees bowed their forelegs when they flew past me low, not unlike a squirrel or a begging dog perhaps, their shimmering wings. The sound of drops falling from a gutter and onto the steps outside the door after a shower, slower and slower, like the ticking of a cooling engine. Every day brought small gifts like these. And I accepted them with gladness.