Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

But then, happiness wasn’t something they often saw in his eyes. For the scale of joy and success had its opposite of course, that of trouble and misfortune, whose shadow not infrequently fell across his countenance. But because he always showed the world the same face, this inner life remained hidden from it. Nobody, except his closest family, had any inkling of what he felt. And no one had a clue where his mind was, for even his thoughts were kept concealed behind that notorious taciturnity of his.

One might have thought that this would have led the community to regard him as an enigma, a man full of secrets who could never quite be pinned down, and therefore to be watched with extra care. But it wasn’t so. The village people saw Lamech as an open book. Predictable and consistent in his habits, always the same, stubborn, idiosyncratic, humorless, silent, diligent: that was Lamech.

Some people let themselves be provoked by this. Lamech always behaved correctly, he was always right, he always worked hard, and this placed many of the other members of the community, those who often made mistakes, those who were rarely right, and those for whom working hard was the exception, in a worse light than they felt they deserved. Lamech’s farm was incomparably the best run in the valley, his family the oldest, and even though he never said it in so many words, they knew that he looked down on them. Somehow they didn’t work hard enough. Somehow they drank too much. They would chat to their neighbor for a few hours rather than get on with what they were supposed to be doing. Compliant, lazy, fond of food, addicted to drink, talkative, that was what they were.

But who was he? What right did he have to judge them?

There he stood, as ugly as sin, inspecting them. He said nothing, that was beneath his dignity. He never acted in an unfriendly way. Even when he chanced on the least respected men of the district, like those who came from the families down in the woods, he raised a hand to his hat, and nodded and smiled. For Lamech viewed the village folk from such a height that they all looked the same to him. Everyone who’d been granted a few minutes of his precious time noted how what they said didn’t seem to lodge anywhere in him, but was returned. When Lamech was near, they all felt like gossips and skulkers. If they praised him for anything, they seemed to be fawning and groveling; if they criticized him, they felt petty and small-minded. This could put people’s backs up. But not everyone, there were those who found Lamech a comic character. Wasn’t there something slightly ridiculous about this ugly man who worked so hard just to be better than them? When they saw the tall, spare figure hurtling across the field so fast that the dust swirled about his feet, they smiled a bit, it was true. Then they might turn to each other and say: A good day’s work, and early to bed, what could be better than that? for Lamech had let these words drop on several occasions, and for a long time they were a byword in the village.

Therefore it was a surprise when, after the birth of his first son, it emerged that Lamech had 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 .

Was that how he viewed it? That the earth was cursed and that work was a burden? How could this be squared with the almost shameless pleasure he’d shown in toil all these years?

In the days that followed, when it was known what Lamech’s son looked like, and the village people could confirm the first rumors with their own eyes, that his skin was white as the whitest snow and his eyes as red as berries, some thought that Lamech, who had seen that his son was chosen, had spoken not only on his own behalf, but on behalf of them all. Perhaps even God himself had been speaking through him.

For Anna, who as an adult was to learn to know Lamech better than anyone else, there had been no contradiction between what her father had said when her brother was born and his attitude to life as a whole. The earth was cursed because it never gave them peace, it demanded all their time, filled them with worries, wore out their bodies, made them old before their time. From earth they had come, and to earth they would return, and for the few years that life quickened in them, it was from the earth it took its force. The only way out of it was further into it. Low is the vault of duty’s sky, but it is a sky of sorts. Beneath it stood Lamech, and from it he took his conviction. This conviction had one enemy: to long for something else, and he resisted it with the only means he knew: more work. So his work was both his refuge and the thing he was fleeing from. The comfort he foresaw his son bringing them must come from someone who stood outside this work, freed from it or raised above it, which Noah, as his son was called, so clearly did with his white skin, his white hair, and his red eyes. He was one of them, yet not one of them, he was chosen: through his eyes they would be able to see another sky.

During the first few months of Noah’s life, small errands brought his father into the house several times each day. Everyone there soon got used to him sticking his head into the bedroom or living room or wherever Milka and the child happened to be, then going over to them with a smile, seeking eye contact with the child, and when that had been achieved, leaving again just as quickly. He never picked him up. Nor did he talk of him to others. But anyone with eyes in their head could see this was a joyous time for him. If he didn’t speak more than formerly, his silences had become less ponderous; suddenly he always had a smile on his lips, and if there was no one nearby, he smiled to himself, indeed, once he’d even been heard to laugh as he was out fencing by the side of the forest.

If Lamech knew what was being said, that he’d placed himself and his family on such a pedestal that he thought his son was chosen, whereas in reality he was nothing more than a changeling, because Lamech couldn’t bring himself to believe that his son could be deformed, he didn’t let it affect him. At least not at first. But when Milka gave birth to another baby the next summer, it became clear that he had his doubts. It was a girl child, and when they held her up for him, he couldn’t hide his disappointment, but rushed from the room and was absent for several hours before he returned, and then with a tear-stained face. Not only was the girl uncommonly ugly, she was also covered with a thin layer of black hair all over her body. No one could say of her that she was God’s chosen one, he must have thought, the opposite looked more likely, and if this was so, if his second child was a freak, what of his firstborn? His white skin, white hair, and red eyes, were they changeling features, as some people claimed?

He stood by the wall at the other end of the room and looked over at the three women who were gathered around the bed, the child who lay stretched out on her mother’s stomach and stared with large eyes up toward her face.

His sister, who had assisted at the birth, turned to him.

“Come here and hold her,” she said.

He shook his head and remained where he was.

She went over to him and said that the baby was completely normal. The hair would fall out in a few days, and her face, wrinkled and malicious as it looked now, would soon be as smooth and lovely as those of the other infants he’d seen.

“But her head,” he said. “It’s triangular! It’s pointed on top!”

“Her head will smooth itself out as well in a few days and become round. Everything is normal. You’ve got a daughter and she’s well formed. Be thankful for that.”

She put her hand on his arm and led him across the room. Milka, who was later to say that she didn’t remember anything about it, raised the child solemnly to him.