Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

No, things didn’t improve for them. But neither did they get worse. The passing years were marked principally by an ever-increasing richness in their world. With each generation something was added, and with each generation something was taken away, but even the things that were taken away added to the richness: that was the way we used to do it then , they said, that was what we used to believe then , they said, without thinking that this then was raised up by this means into their now as if by a ladder. And who said that a ladder is used only to climb upward? Can’t it just as easily be used to climb down? Were things worse then than now? No, of course they weren’t. After a particular method had been used by three generations, the fourth might suddenly go back and begin to use the method people had used centuries before, sometimes consciously, sometimes without knowing that this was what they were doing, believing that they had discovered it. It wasn’t all that important either, what remained constant remained constant: there are certain things everyone has to do, no matter how they think of themselves. They weave and spin, carpenter and smith, sow and reap, shepherd and slaughter. They make saddlery and shafts, oaken wheels and barrels, coffins and hatchets, sickles and scythes. Copper kettles, silver goblets, baking griddles, beds, bedclothes. They churn butter, parboil chitterlings, stuff sausages, salt sides of mutton and hang them up, brew beer, fill great chests with corn, and bins with potatoes and rutabagas. On a day in March they drive barrels of bones out into the field, dig them deep into the earth next to the outfield where the soil has least heart and the field is poorest; clean-scraped joints and bones from sheep and cows, hens and pigs, sometimes also ragged porous pieces of material that long ago lost all resemblance to the clothes they wear now: skirts, trousers, shirts, jackets, aprons. The field on the other side of the river is better, the soil richer; here they sow at the start of the fourth month if possible, in the fifth if the spring has been poor. Each year they plant potatoes or turnips in a different part of this strip, the remainder is used for oats and barley; the seed corn flows over his fingers when he dips his hand into the bag that hangs over his shoulder, with small, even flicks of his wrist it is sprinkled over the land as he walks across it, as if calling something to him all the time, as if this is some mysterious ritual, an exorcism, a prayer for a miracle, and see! a few weeks later it germinates and each cast of the hand can be read and judged. With searching eyes he carefully inspects the field to see if there are any places that are unevenly sown, but no, he seems content and goes over to the cart with its barrels of ash from the hearths, which they’ll spread; his hands and face are blackened, the ash hangs like a cloud over the earth. They dump heaps of muck from the cart on the meadow by the farmyard, the smell is rank as the two farmworkers drive their forks into the heaps, in through the hard, shell-like surface that covers the soft, lighter-colored mass, they spread it over the ground in even heaves. Great, plump flies buzz around them; green flashes on the warm heaps, the shimmer of wings in the air. The rain has already begun its work on the lying muck, thinning it to a fine layer of sludge that slowly filters down into the soil from where grass roots take nutrition and grow, throughout the spring and into summer, until haymaking in the first week of July; the row of men who, with short steps and long sweeps of the scythe, move up the meadow toward the forest’s edge, streaming brows, hot cheeks, the hissing of the blade as it cuts through the grass and mingles with the voices of the women working below; girls’ laughter, heavy mothers’ shouting. The straws and flower stalks are cut and fall lightly onto the field on which, until a moment ago, they were growing, to be raked up and hung on drying racks, dried and driven down to the hay barn by the cowshed. Winter feed. When this meadow is finished, they go up the valley and make hay in the outfields, and up in the mountains too; here they transport the hay on a hurdle made from two young birches lashed together, or tied to their backs, down to one of the farm’s five outlying hay barns. The hay from here is poorer, the grass less, more meager and straggly, but it must be brought in, if not, the beasts will grow exhausted and thin during the winter, as they did the year the river flooded and the entire crop failed. As soon as their own corn is gathered in, they go down the valley to help the people there with the harvest, gathering the sheaves and tying them up; shock after shock of corn stretching away, which in the twilight sometimes looks like severed heads on blocks, because that’s how their murderers are turned off here, with the ax, and if there are aggravating circumstances surrounding the deed, the prisoner is first branded at the scene of the crime, then at the place of execution, then one hand is cut off, before the executioner severs the head, and the decapitated body is flung into a nameless grave. This didn’t happen often, but it happened, a couple of times each century. The most terrible murder occurred in the fifteenth century, after Cain and Abel’s time, when one of the farmworkers slept with a maid on the farm and she got pregnant, and rather than offer to marry her in order to escape with a fine, he stabbed her one winter’s night and dragged the body across the snow and down to the frozen river, where he hacked a hole in the ice and pushed her through, the girl who was carrying his own child. They saw traces of blood all over the cowshed, the struggle must have been awful, as was the fury after his confession, and again after his execution, when his corpse was desecrated.

There were indeed some murders, but none was ever as fabled as the first, the fratricide itself. Some of its power lay in its being the first murder, some in their being brothers, some in God showing himself to them, some in that the places were still there: one could go to the mound in the field and know that here Cain and Abel sacrificed to God, one could go to the end of the field and know that it was here Cain killed Abel, one could turn to the pass and know that that was the direction he fled.

Although God hadn’t shown himself to any mortal since he’d appeared to Cain in the field that rainy night, and he’d therefore only lived as words among them for more than fifteen hundred years, no one seriously contested his existence. And why should they? They were there in the midst of his creation. Everything they could see bore witness to him. The sun that rose in the morning and filled the world with light, the clouds that came floating in from over the sea and emptied their water on the earth, the profusion of growth that sprang up in the fields. It was to this that they sacrificed each spring and autumn, without ever expecting that God would show himself to them. After all, what were they, except animals among animals, God’s creations among God’s creations?

THROUGHOUT all these centuries the cherubim’s flames continued to glow above the hills in the west. They were as familiar as the sun or moon or stars and were considered to be as permanent. But one day they simply vanished. It was the autumn the river broke its banks, after rain had fallen continuously day and night for months, early on a morning that began like most mornings: the middle-aged farmer’s wife crossed the farmyard and opened the heavy doors of the cowshed; they were thick with muck, as were the walls, and the cows, with skeins of it hanging from their bellies. They got up as soon as they heard her, the cowshed was filled with motion, hooves scraping on the floor. She felt their warmth and spoke calmly to them, pushed the hatch to the cellar open and smelled the stink rise, began to scrape the muck over to it. A calf stood in a pen by itself, pushed its head over the low wall and stared at her, rubbed itself on the wooden boards and snorted. She smiled at the clumsy movements, leaned toward it, and stared into the dark, liquid eyes. It pulled back, so much more alertly than the other mild, subdued ones, the ones waiting for her to pull the stool up and milk them, a contact they liked, her hands firmly sliding down their udders. They knew her, her dexterity, her voice, and they liked her.