Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Even at his birth it was clear to everyone that Noah had been chosen. His skin was as white as snow, so was his hair, and his eyes were red. When his father, Lamech, saw him for the first time, scripture tells us that he said: This boy shall bring us relief from our work, and from the hard labor that has come upon us because of the Lord’s curse upon the ground . But he was wrong. Noah was God’s chosen, he was right in that, but he hadn’t been chosen to comfort them. He’d been chosen to survive them.

At midsummer earlier that year, God had shown himself to Noah for the first time. Dressed all in white, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and with his face covered with a veil, Noah had been working among his beehives under the trees in the garden. His three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, who over the past few weeks had been boarding the almost completed main building, and now stood each on his own ladder just beneath the apex of the east gable, would turn now and then to look at him with, what was for them, a not uncommon mixture of awe and mirth in their faces: that ever-present alien quality in their father’s figure seemed to be emphasized when he put on his beekeeper’s equipment and began mincing around the hives with those slow, almost terpsichorean movements. They joked about him coming from another planet and how this was the way he tried to get in contact with it again. The fear they had felt as small children had long since passed, but a certain distaste must still have lingered, for when the bees began to settle on their father as he stood out there, and in the next instant had formed a kind of living shield on his breast, crawling and black, they had all turned their eyes back to their work. And so they didn’t see the way he stiffened when, just afterward, he stared up at the forest brow, or how he immediately fell to his knees, right in the middle of the swarm of buzzing bees.

Only when the final nail had been hammered home, and the brothers climbed down for a rest before beginning to cut boards for the north wall, did they discover that their father wasn’t there anymore. The air between the five hives was still black with bees. Some of the combs of honey lay discarded on the ground.

“Where’s he got to?” said Ham.

“Something must have happened,” said Japheth.

Shem pulled the teetering ladder toward him and began to lower it carefully sideways, changing his grip several times to find the point of balance.

“Nah,” he snorted as he began to move to the other wall of the house with the ladder in his hands. “What could happen here? He’s probably just got problems with his gut again. Come on.”

Japheth immediately obeyed his brother, but Ham, who was taking down the last ladder, stood for a moment looking up toward the forest, where he thought he caught a movement among the trees, but when the two others called him, he thought it was probably nothing and followed them to the back of the house.

Shortly after it began to rain. In some ways this was welcome: the sky had been gray for weeks without shedding a drop, and that after an uncommonly dry early summer, forcing them to water the small parched fields every day with water from the tarn, a job that was both long and time-consuming, as it lay in the forest several hundred yards from the buildings; in other ways not: the plan had always been to paint the new boarding as soon as it was in place.

They glanced up at the sky, buttoned their jackets, pulled down their hats, and went on with the work. While Shem and Japheth began to cut the boards, Ham set about clearing away all the clutter around the house. He piled up all the scraps, which he would later transfer to the woodshed, heaped the other rubbish down below the barn, pushed a few fistfuls of wood shavings in at the bottom, and lit it. He stood for a long while staring into the flames, which were pale, almost transparent at first but which grew in body and intensity, and were soon leaping yards into the air before him. Several times they licked up with such intensity that they lost contact with the bonfire beneath them, and for brief moments hung in the air by themselves, before seeming to curl up and disappear. The smoke, too, took different forms, from a thin, perpendicular bluish gray column to the succeeding foggy, white-white that slowly seeped out from all over the bonfire, to the strong, upwardly thrusting and ash-laden black smoke that came when the fire was burning at its purest and fiercest.

As he stood there thinking of nothing in particular, his father appeared in the opening in the forest on the other side. He was still wearing his beekeeping garb, and so out of context was it now that it made him look even more outlandish and lost than before. But that wasn’t why Ham’s eyes followed him with such interest. His behavior, too, was unusual. After supporting himself against a tree for several minutes, sometimes looking up into its crown, and sometimes into the forest behind him, always with a singularly rigid facial expression, as if he’d lost the use of it, he came tottering down the slope. At first Ham thought him drunk. As that was unthinkable, he thought he might have suffered a small stroke. Perhaps that was why his face was so immobile and his gait so unsteady.

Hesitantly he began to walk toward him. At that moment his father halted in the small field. He raised his arms to the side, tilted his head back, and stared up into the sky.

For some reason Ham was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. The white beehives beneath the green branches, his father standing immobile among them with his veiled face turned heavenward, his hands open to the rain. His white clothes, just darkened by dampness at the shoulders and thighs, the yellow, desiccated grass. The hiss of raindrops falling on the treetops in the forest behind him, the low cloud drifting in among their crowns, the sound of hammering from the house.

When his father righted his head again and began to walk toward the shed, his steps had once more become purposeful. Ham was made even more curious by the way the shakiness and uncertainty had deserted him so quickly. What was he actually seeing when he looked at his father?

He came out of the shed again a few minutes later, dressed in his normal blue overalls. On his way to the house he caught sight of Ham and beckoned him but didn’t stop until he stood before Shem and Japheth, who had long since seen him, and stood waiting, each with a hammer dangling from his hand, and Japheth with two nails sticking out of his mouth.

The sawdust that lay in a pyramid under the horse they’d been using stood out sharply white against the otherwise muted, diffuse colors. The blade of the saw, discarded in the grass next to it, reflected the gray of the sky as water would have done, or a mirror, except where an incipient layer of rust had dulled its surface, and only the metal itself, brown and grainy, was visible.

“So you’re keeping at it,” said their father.

“Yes,” said Shem. “I think we’ll be finished sometime tomorrow. Then we just have to hope for fine weather so we can get it painted too.”

“That’s good,” said their father, and turned to Ham, who’d just come up.

“You’re here as well,” he said. “Then we’re assembled.”

Shem and Japheth exchanged a quick look. There was a trace of amusement in their eyes, and Ham had to look down to prevent himself smiling.

But Noah, an unusually sensitive man, who’d undoubtedly caught the atmosphere he’d created, took no notice of it.

“God has shown himself to me,” he said, and rested his eyes on each of them in turn. “In a few months a great flood will cover the entire earth. It will exterminate all living things. But he wants to enter a covenant with us. We are to build an ark, and when the flood comes, we shall get into it, and take with us a pair of all living creatures, so that they will be saved with us.”