Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Noah, who must have had his suspicions about what kind of thoughts his sons were harboring, never tried to convince them. He’d said what he had to say. But they knew it couldn’t have been easy for him from the note of joy in his voice one morning when he got them up, and they came crawling out of their shack one after the other and still befuddled by sleep peered over at their father, who stood at the far end of the meadow pointing to the hills in the west.

“Look over there,” he cried. “The cherubim are leaving!”

And they saw. What had all their lives been just one flame, rolling back and forth across the hills at night, quivering and almost transparent during the day, was now dividing into four. Four lights hung in the gray morning sky far away, rising slowly upward, faster and faster, until, no bigger than stars, they vanished into the depths of the sky.

The sight filled them with fear. They all turned to their father, but if they’d expected him to come out with words of comfort, they were disappointed, for hardly had the lights gone when he turned and walked into the forest, and soon afterward the sound of a chopping ax could be heard. Of the brothers, only Ham perceived that this sudden turning away could be connected to the pleasure he’d just shown at the departure of the cherubim, and while Shem and Japheth stood staring up at the sky, he picked up his ax and followed Noah into the forest.

He stopped a few yards from his father. Although Noah must have noticed that someone had come, he didn’t look up, just kept on chopping, half turned away and with lowered head.

“Where would you like me to begin?” said Ham.

His father didn’t look up now, either, but pulled his ax out and swung again. The blow echoed on the mountain behind them, and there was stillness again. Another blow came, and another silence followed.

“Father!” Ham said, and tilted his head slightly to the side in an attempt to establish eye contact with him. It was then that he saw his father was weeping.

Aghast, he turned and looked across the meadow, where just at that moment his brothers were walking, at each end of a beam. He’d never seen his father cry before. All he wanted to do was to get away from there. But he couldn’t do that. His father would then realize that he knew.

In the meadow his brothers vanished behind the part of the hull that was already planked.

Ham turned to his father once more, brushed a wet hank of hair away from his brow, swung his ax a few times through the heather on the forest floor.

“Father,” he repeated. “Where do you want me to start?”

This time his father straightened up. Without meeting his son’s eyes, he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, as if telling him what he saw in his eyes was only sweat and rain, and nodded toward the fallen tree that lay in the undergrowth a few yards to the side of them.

“Could you make a start there? Trim it a bit?”

Only after the cherubim had gone did they fully understand just how important their proximity had been. It was as if a wall had been removed in the room they inhabited. The world no longer enveloped them completely, there was suddenly an opening, through which even the most unexpected could pour in. The sky darkened, the water rose, and when they looked to the west, where the light of the cherubim had once been, their glance no longer met any resistance, but swept on through more of the same: trees, mountains, a darkening sky, rising water.

In the days that followed they worked like madmen up in the meadow. Even though the brothers had their doubts about whether the ark would even be seaworthy, constructed of green wood as it was, the actual work gave them a kind of peace, and at the most difficult times, when, wet and cold, they would wake in the morning and stare out at the muddy meadow, the rain that fell relentlessly, the colossal skeleton of the ship that for all the world looked like a product of one of their nightmares, they found comfort and courage in the thought that it was the Lord’s will they were obeying, and not their own.

Further than that they didn’t let their thoughts roam. What would happen to the people down in the valley, when the Lord’s will was done and the entire world was covered in water, was impossible for them to contemplate if they wanted to keep their sanity. They concentrated on the present, and so, by refusing to give house-room to the thought of what was to come, they managed not only to get through these terrible weeks and months, but subsequently to forget nearly everything about them. There were only two days that would stay in their minds forever. One was the day the cherubim left, the other was when the rain stopped and the sun came out again. Just like the people in the valley, this unexpected cessation filled them with new hope. When the brothers saw the sunlight glittering in the watery fields down below, and the steam beginning to rise from the shoulder of the forest, they thought that their father really had misled them. Noah, who was every bit as happy at the unexpected change as his sons, couldn’t make sense of it other than to assume the Lord had repented, extraordinary as that seemed.

But that was going too far. The afternoon wasn’t very old before the wind rose up.

With the skeleton of the fifty-foot-high bow towering above them, Noah and his sons stood at the end of the meadow and saw the way the wind was churning up what had, only minutes before, been the calm surface reflection of the water in the fields, how the trees in the forest nearby began to wave back and forth, and the clouds once again came drifting in from the sea far away in the southwest.

“Did you know there’d be a storm?” Japheth inquired, looking at his father.

“Of course not,” said Noah. “Why do you ask?”

Japheth turned and nodded toward the steep mountainside that sheltered the ark.

“If we’d built it anywhere else, it would have blown down,” he said. “At least if the storm worsens overnight, as I expect.”

“No, I chose the place quite at random,” Noah said.

But his sons weren’t so sure. Their respect for Noah had increased over the autumn. His many eccentric notions and peculiarities, which they’d previously regarded as weaknesses, and either got annoyed about or smiled at, were now seen as signs that he truly was chosen.

Beneath them the wind came blasting up the valley with increasing violence. In what had at first sounded like the rush of a far-off river, or breakers washing on a beach, there was gradually introduced a kind of roar, not unlike the noise that comes when whole forests are on fire, and when darkness began to fall, the wind speed was so high and its gusts so wild that the measured fall of night seemed almost unnatural to those inhabitants in the valley who as yet hadn’t taken shelter in their cellars, but were still to be found outdoors, either tying down their roofs, fetching supplies, or saving valuables that were outside. They had half expected that dusk would come rushing in on them. That the infinite particles of darkness would be hurled through the air like dust or sand, and lie on the ground only for brief moments, only to be whirled up again and carried off to the ends of the wind and the earth. But darkness and wind belong to discrete parts of reality; even though they operate side by side, they never react to one another: even on this stormy night, twilight came as normal. Gradually its small black particles were distributed across the landscape. A pale, almost invisible shadow fell over all things, like a thin film or a fine veil, which they at first shone through without difficulty, but then, as the density of the particles gradually increased, the surfaces that were already dark turned black, the white ones gray, until the processes of dusk were complete and every color was layered in the night’s blanket of darkness, which is impenetrable to the eye. By that time the wind was so strong that it was no longer possible to stand erect in it, and even the most desperate and possessive of the valley’s inhabitants had been forced down to their cellars, where there was little else they could do but sit with their hands in their laps and wait until the storm was over. For it would end, wouldn’t it? The wind wouldn’t be like the rain and just go on and on, day after day?