Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Oh, what a terrible business it was. The fishes’ bodies writhing in my grasp, the blood running down over their eyes when their soft heads struck the rock, the spasms that could drag on for hours afterward. Even with their heads cut off and their entrails cleaned out, their muscles could tense and their tails thrash. Sometimes I would feel it against my back as I walked home in the twilight, the dead fish leaping in my pack, and once it had made me lose control; furiously I’d yanked them out of the bag they were in and thrown them out to sea one by one, where they lay floating on the surface, dead and still, until the ever-vigilant gulls arrived a few minutes later and turned the quiet evening scene into a cacophony of ugly cries and swirling feathered bodies. It was at moments like these that isolation could be a burden, because where could I take my frustration and anxiety? There was nothing that could assuage it, whether I sat in my living room or went for a walk up to the lighthouse, it remained the same, and sometimes even grew in intensity, so that I would end up crying in bed, unable to prevent myself, I just cried and cried. It happened regularly, but not that often, perhaps once a week, and I thought of it as a kind of equalization, enabling the inner world to empty itself into the outer one, and reestablish the balance between them: the day after such an attack I always felt calm and relaxed, somehow closer to my surroundings, as if crying were a sort of way of regrouping the elements of consciousness, where the internal sludge, which had settled into great middens between my ego and the impressions from my surroundings, was sluiced away, so that my ego could again reach right to the edge of the world. There the shifts in sky and sea were more important than those of the emotions, and if a memory were awakened and rose up within me, it instantly dissolved in the majesty of the present moment, and in that way was placed in its rightful context: they were nothing more than a few impulses in a brain, an electrical phenomenon in an organic body, and seen in that perspective might as well have belonged to one of the many birds that lived out here.

I stood there for half an hour before I got a bite, and another half hour before I caught a fish. It was small and orangey brown and had a round mouth, and I chucked it back in. Then, just as I took a step back and raised the rod over my head again, I suddenly remembered my dream of the previous night. Without thinking about it, I completed the cast and followed the spinner’s trajectory through the air with my eyes as I tried to fix the images from my dream in my mind. I’d been climbing up a mountainside, my fingers were numb, suddenly I’d lost my grip and fallen backward, struck my head against the rock, and lay there. I knew that I was unconscious, I couldn’t move my body, I was imprisoned within myself and my own blackness. After a time some people had come and lifted me up. And it was then, as I hung between them, that he had risen inside me. It was the sound of his terrified voice that had died out in the room as I awoke.

A little of the same fear rushed through me, like a fire suddenly coming to life again long after the flames have been extinguished, but then a sound made me turn my head, and when a second later the express boat passed through the little islands and into the sound, the memory of my dream left me as quickly as it had come. The white hull, paper-sharp against the soft gray of the sea and the sky, looked as if it were stationary from a distance, framed by the plunging mountainsides, but this tableau-like quality dissipated as the boat approached and the center of attention moved from the whole to the individual details, like the rock breaking into pieces as the sledgehammer strikes. The windshield wipers waved from side to side on the bridge, the radar swiveled on the roof, the young ticket collector came down the deck with a mailbag in his hand. I raised my arm in greeting, and he returned it. Just then the line went taut, and as the wash from the boat struck the rocks beneath me, I let the line run out, watched it loop on the surface, and realized that the spinner had caught on the bottom. I reeled in the slack and tried to get it loose by jerking the rod, without success, it was too firmly embedded. Only when I put the rod down and began to haul in with my hands did it come free. But not with a start, as I’d expected, the weight remained even though I was pulling it nearer. It was a fish, and it must be a large one. I picked up my rod and stood on the very edge of the knoll. The rod bent, I paid out more line, the fish moved away parallel to the land, I followed it a few paces, reeled in, and brought it several feet closer before the resistance became too great and I had to let it out again. This was repeated several times. Then suddenly it stopped fighting. I reeled in as fast as I could, my gaze fixed on the surface all the while, and caught sight of it a few seconds later, a dark, gliding shadow in the greenish water. I put down the rod and hauled in the line with my hands. It slipped into the seaweed of the rocks below me without a struggle.

For God’s sake .

It was enormous. I got the gaff hook out of my pack, crouched down, and hit it as hard as I could on its side. Just as I was starting to pull it up, it began to thrash its tail. In my confusion I threw the whole lot away from me, gaff hook and all. It landed on the rock with a slap and lay writhing this way and that while I stood there watching. The gaff hook clattered against the rock with each movement it made. The sight of its gray green back, white gills, yellow eyes, and gaping mouth filled me with loathing. Only after a few minutes, when it had lain still for some time, did I bend down toward it. I saw that the hook was embedded in the corner of its mouth, and held its neck with one hand while I tried to extricate it with the other. Immediately it began to jump once more. I withstood the desire to get up again, but instead pressed it even harder against the rock while I tugged at the hook with all my might, but although the corner of its mouth fractured, I couldn’t get it out, the angle was wrong, and when I stood up, I thought it would be better to kill it first. But it was too big for me to swing against a rock effectively. Perhaps it would be best just to let it lie there until it died of its own accord? I could have a smoke in the meantime.

I washed my hands in the water, dried them on my trousers, and carried my pack to the top of the headland, where, using my jacket as a groundsheet, I sat on the rocks, got out my thermos, poured out a cup, and lit a cigarette. In the inlet below me the express boat came back into view. I followed it with my eyes until it disappeared behind the holm that hid the channel leading to the island with the filleting factory and the shop. From there it took an hour to reach the administrative center on the mainland, which itself was another four hours by boat from Bergen.

I went down half an hour later. The fish had to be lying quite still by now. I yanked out the gaff hook, clutched the great slippery neck, and carried it down to a small pool. I pulled my knife out of its sheath and began to cut off its head.

Suddenly it struck out hard with its tail, and I threw it away from me again.

It was hopeless.

What was wrong with me? Couldn’t I even kill a bloody fish?

I grabbed it, and cut as hard as I could. It continued to writhe and I continued to cut. Even with its head completely off, half-submerged, and staring with its idiotic eyes, spasms passed through its body. Nevertheless I stuffed it in a plastic bag, which only half covered it, thrust it into my pack, and began to walk home with my rod in hand and the pack with the fish tail pointing skyward on my back. When I got into the kitchen, I put it in the sink and began to gut it. It must have been an hour since I’d landed it, and fifteen minutes since it had been decapitated, but its tail thrashed against the sink in no less an outraged manner as I opened its belly. I scraped out its entrails, they slipped between my fingers, and I felt nauseated as I threw them into the water below the house, where the gulls turned up half a minute later, with their thrashing wings and piercing wails.