Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

The valley people had realized immediately that they were from the coast. The people out there were shorter, thicker set, and darker skinned than they were here. It sometimes happened that someone from the coast would come traveling up the valley on his way over to the fjord on the other side, and occasionally a girl from the valley might marry into one of the families out there, but apart from that the two groups had never had anything to do with each other. The fact that a whole crowd of people from the town was here now, deep in the valley, could only mean that they were fleeing. But from what?

The handcarts they had with them were mainly loaded with food, presumably scraped together very quickly: some barrels of salted herring, some bundles of dried fish, some kegs of spirits, some bags of salt and pepper, a couple of smoked hams, some boxes of bread. That was all. The clothing they wore was light, many of the garments either too large or too small, and almost none of them had shoes.

The wife from the largest farm, the woman called Anna who’d seen the cherubim vanish with her own eyes, spoke up and answered them.

“You can stay in the barn here tonight,” she said. “And for as long as you need to.”

She stood in the midst of the crowd, but the spokesman of the coastal people had no difficulty in tracing the voice back to the face from which it had emanated. Like ripples in a lake an almost imperceptible restlessness spread out in the mass around her. Eyes turned sideways, necks twisted, brows knitted, mouths opened.

Traditionally the townspeople of the coast had always entertained, if not contempt, at least a skepticism for the folk of the valley. They were dull, oldfashioned, slow, and inward looking. They knew everything there was to know about their own people and history, but nothing of that of others, it was said, and as if in parody of themselves they had reinforced the coast dwellers’ concepts when they’d arrived: dour and drab they had huddled together and stared at them, without even a smile of welcome.

But in this woman’s eyes he saw something different. The superiority with which she eyed him wasn’t without foundation, he knew that immediately, and for some reason her gaze made him feel ashamed.

She might be in her midfifties, small, but not exceptionally so. On her head she wore a kerchief, and from the tufts of hair that stuck out from under it he could see that her hair was gray. Her cheekbones were high, almost horizontal, her mouth small, her upper teeth slightly protruding. But the most characteristic feature of her face was the shape of her eyes, they were vaguely almond-shaped and gave to her otherwise open face a touch of something that those who saw her often thought of as alien. Naturally no one among them knew that this characteristic had been handed down in her family for centuries, and had manifested itself in generation after generation ever since it first appeared in Abel’s face. None of her sons had inherited it, but her only daughter had, and she had a feeling that the child her daughter was expecting would have it.

His face still burning after meeting her eyes, the spokesman looked quickly down at the ground, as if in preparation. When he glanced up again it was with a smile.

“We all thank you for that,” he said. “But we’re not planning to stay more than one night.”

Later there was a discussion about whether it had been right for Anna to speak out in that way. It wasn’t her farm, but despite that she’d invited the strangers to stay there. And even if it had been her farm, it would naturally have fallen to her husband to answer them and make the offer, not her.

Just how brazen could people get? Didn’t she know that both Dedan, the farmer there, and Javan, her husband, had been shown up by her behavior? Even as they stood there, Dedan had become aware of this, and immediately stepped forward from the crowd. To compensate for his tardy initiative he spoke extra loudly.

“That’s the barn we’re talking about!” he said, pointing. “If you follow me, I’ll show you where you can bed down!”

The strangers grabbed their carts and began to walk slowly across the muddy farmyard. As if they were a race apart, the children among them stared hard at the children of the valley people. They weren’t given to hiding their feelings: all that was needed was for them to begin barking at each other.

“What’s happened?” called a young man as they passed.

Dedan turned to him.

“They’re tired, can’t you see! Leave them in peace now!”

When they had gone up the barn bridge, and begun to enter the dim, and to them wonderfully large, dry space, the crowd below dissolved. Some of them, mostly young people, had settled into the barn, and now shambled up to pack up their things and set out for the other farm that remained undamaged after the storm. The others returned to the house. There was no longer any trace of excitement or pleasure in their faces. All they talked about was the presence of the strangers, which everyone found ominous. What had brought them all the way up here? What had happened to the rest of the citizens of the town? Could they be trusted? How long would they stay?

Not until dusk was the barn door thrown open. The rain had increased in strength, and the three figures that appeared on the barn bridge jogged across the farmyard to the house, where Dedan’s wife, Rebecca, stood ready at the door to receive them. She showed them into the kitchen, and after a few minutes’ small talk, which included them praising, in strong terms, the potato liquor they’d been served, and once again expressing thanks for being allowed to shelter in the barn, they began to explain what had happened. The small, broad man with the beard was still doing the talking. He introduced himself as Lud. The two others were called Geter and Eber, and were, they realized, his sons.

Quietly, and with his gaze fixed on the dusk-darkened landscape outside the window, he told of a huge tidal wave, at least a hundred feet high, that had loomed up without warning out by the sea banks off the coast one evening a few weeks earlier. The survivors had all been among those who’d first seen it. They had dropped what they were doing, gone out into the streets, and run as fast as they could upward. The town was built on a steep mountainside, roughly in the shape of an amphitheater around the harbor, it was full of narrow, winding streets and stairs, and even though they shouted out warnings as they ran upward, few followed them, the reaction of most being to go over to the nearest vantage point to see what was happening with their own eyes, and as every second counted, because of the enormous speed of the tidal wave, the impulse cost them their lives.

No one had seen the impact itself. When the wave was several hundred yards off, it had appeared so high that they thought it would top the mountain, and without another thought they’d turned and run farther inland.

“What I’ll never forget wasn’t the sound of the wave when it hit the town,” he said, looking over for the first time. From all the pairs of eyes that were fixed on him, he chose one. “But the sound when it went out again. There was a boom like that of an earthquake, and then a slow, slurping sound, like water running down a plug-hole, only a hundred, no, a thousand times louder.”

He looked out the window again. Apart from the gray black band of sky above the mountains, it was quite dark out there.

“But that wasn’t the end of it,” he said. “Just after the first tidal wave had gone out, there was another. And another after that.”

Not until the sun was sinking in the west, just visible as a pale, yellowish area in the overcast sky, had they ventured up to the lip of the mountain to look.