Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

The three brothers stared at their father in disbelief.

“So this rain is no ordinary rain,” he said, looking up at the sky. “It is the beginning of the end.”

Ham craned his head back and squinted up to see what his father saw. But the clouds looked like ordinary clouds. The rain like normal rain.

Everything was as normal, he thought. The house, the farmyard, the garden, the small patch of field, the wooded hillside, the mountains, the sky. His two brothers, with their rain-glistening faces and dark tufts of hair sticking out from under their hats.

Only his father wasn’t as normal. And wasn’t it tempting to think that it was only there, in his imagination, that the world would be destroyed?

“This ark,” said Shem, unable to conceal his skepticism. “What had you in mind regarding the look of the thing?”

His father gave a barely perceptible smile.

“I know you find it hard to believe me. But you don’t need to believe me, provided you do exactly as I say.”

“You want us to obey you unquestioningly,” said Shem.

“Yes,” said Noah. “I’m your father, and you do as I say. It’s as simple as that.”

“This ark,” said Shem. “What do you have in mind?”

Noah smiled again.

“It’s not what I have in mind, but what the Lord has in mind. And according to God’s word it must be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high. It must be furnished with many rooms, it must have a roof, and it must have a door at one side. And it must be tarred both inside and out.

“Three hundred cubits. .,” said Japheth. “Where could we build a ship of that length?”

“That’s the question,” said his father. “There are no treeless spaces big enough around here. My first thought was that we’d have to build it down in the fields in the valley. But in the first place, this would mean everybody could see what we were doing, and secondly the rising water level would soon make our work impossible. So we must go up,” he said, and pointed to the mountains. “We must head up there.”

And so it was. Early the next morning Noah and his sons left the valley. On their backs each had his bag of tools: hammers, nails, saws, axes, knives, planes, crowbars, levels, plumb lines, and across their shoulders they’d coiled as much rope as they could carry. They walked over the shoulder of the valley and down to the river, which they followed all the way up into the mountains, and didn’t stop until they’d got as far as the gorge, where, after balancing across the stone bridge one after the other, they ate the food they’d brought along, standing on the mountain on the other side. None of them spoke, whether because of exhaustion after the climb or the roar of the water, which in the funnel-shaped gorge was magnified to something almost impenetrable. Silent as cows they stood there and munched in the pouring rain. Then their father shouldered his bag and started into the forest without waiting for his sons, who had to jog quite a distance along the muddy animal track before they caught up with him.

He stopped at the forest’s edge in front of the meadow where Cain and Abel had killed Jared fifteen hundred years earlier, and turned to his sons.

“What do you think?” he asked.

The meadow extended to a little over a hundred yards and was therefore too short in relation to the ark’s planned length, but it was so good in other respects that these more than compensated for its lack of length, which they would be able to add to without extra effort by felling into the forest: they’d need timber anyway. The meadow was high up, and there was plenty of forest in the vicinity; it sloped gently down, which would make it easy to launch the ship when the time came; and perhaps most important of all, the steep mountainside to the southwest shut the meadow off from the gaze of the community in the valley. Even when the five-hundred-foot-long, eighty-foot-wide, and fifty-foot-high ark was ready, it would be hard for the people down there to see it.

“It looks good,” said Shem.

“The first thing to do is to lengthen the meadow into the forest,” said Noah.

“Shouldn’t we begin by putting a roof over our heads?” said Shem.

Noah nodded.

“You and Japheth can do that. Ham and I can begin to fell.”

In the next few months they worked on the ark from early morning until late at night. But despite the fact that it rained constantly during this time, and the valley beneath them was slowly covered in water, the brothers continued to doubt their father’s words. They agreed that God could have appeared to him, especially as people who knew him always said two things of Noah, which his sons had heard several times: that he was just, and that he walked with God at his side. Naturally they’d assumed the latter was meant figuratively, that he was especially lucky, especially endowed, or especially happy, but now up here on the mountain, beneath the somber clouds of catastrophe, they began to wonder if, after all, it wasn’t meant literally. Shem even thought he could remember an occasion in his childhood, on a hunting trip with his father in forests of the valley, when he’d several times seen a movement up on the hillside, a strangely rapid one, and when in the middle of the day they had built a fire, he’d suddenly seen something glide past in the trees only a few yards from them, shining metallically, but when he’d raised his hand and, pointing, had asked his father what that could be, he’d only looked at him doubtfully and said there was nothing there, he must have been seeing things.

But he’d never turned to look! Shem told them now, that was his link with God, but this was too thin to convince Ham and Japheth of course, and even Shem himself wasn’t really convinced, he’d been only seven or eight years old at the time, and could no longer tell if he’d really seen it, or just imagined that he had, either at the time or later. But it wasn’t unthinkable. Hadn’t Ham seen something among the trees just before his father had come over to them and told of his revelation?

But God revealing himself to Noah was one thing, that he should have selected him to become the first person in a new world, quite another.

Why should God the father, the creator of all things, allow his entire creation to be destroyed in a great flood? And even if he did, why choose one family to survive it, and even if he did, why them?

Once the discussion among the brothers reached this point, they would look over at their father, after which all argument was superfluous: was he , this man with his milky, light-sensitive skin, his skinny arms and mild countenance, chosen by God to take mankind onward? He who had to keep to the shade during the warm part of the year? He who left all the heavy work to his sons, and just tended the bees and fruit trees, except to go “hunting,” the term he gave to his weeklong wanderings in the wilderness during the autumn, even though the most he ever brought back was a brace of ptarmigan or a couple of fox or marten skins?

And when they looked down into the valley below and saw how the fields were becoming more and more like lakes, and then glanced along the enormous keel that they had stretched across the whole length of the meadow, muddied eddies of doubt would again begin to rise for them.

Could it really be true? Would they really be the last human beings?

The doubt wasn’t of the paralyzing kind, however; Shem, Ham, and Japheth were all practical men, and all three drew the same conclusion: as long as they couldn’t tell whether the world would be destroyed, the only correct thing was to complete the construction of the ark. If there wasn’t a flood after all, no damage would have been done, other than the laughter that their constructing an enormous ship high up in the mountains might occasion in the people of the valley. And that would be bearable, they thought as they went back and forth between the meadow and the forest and hewed, split, sawed, carried, stretched, riveted, and nailed, as the ark with infinite slowness began to take shape behind the provisional scaffoldings they had erected.