Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

If Anna did the same, slipped in before her brother, wrapped her arms around her father’s legs, and made crying noises, he would simply tousle her hair and say, Don’t be silly now, young woman .

His parents assumed that Noah’s strange behavior was the result of his being inside all day long and simply not having enough to do or think about, so that all his attention was focused on individual events and people. If only he’d been able to go outside like other children, they thought, his attention would have spread naturally, and he wouldn’t have needed to cry each time someone raised his voice in Noah’s vicinity or gave him a reproachful look. So, in the summer of his tenth birthday, his mother made some special clothes for him: white trousers covering heel and toes, white shirts with long arms, white gloves, and a broad-brimmed hat made of straw. Even though he still couldn’t go outdoors when the sun was at its height, this new outfit radically improved his freedom of movement, if not his self-consciousness. For he was quite a sight walking about cautiously near the house with his white gloves, white clothes, and huge hat. The costume wasn’t much of an invitation to run about and play. So perhaps it was a blessing in disguise that Noah wasn’t interested in playing — he wasn’t interested in other children at all, neither his sister nor the dirty, barefooted neighboring children, whom he sometimes threw stones at to keep them away, for his overdeveloped sensibility toward others did not extend to his peers, least of all Anna, whom he always behaved coldly toward when they were small — but actually liked his own company. On overcast summer days he could be seen mooching about in the woods behind the farm, always at a distance from others, for if there was one thing he feared, it was being seen and talked about. If the sun shone the next day, he would sit indoors and draw what he’d seen. Trees, leaves, bushes, flowers, insects, birds, animals. It was obvious he was thriving more, particularly as the worst of his emotional outbursts disappeared during the course of the autumn. True, he still tried to clasp his father as close to him as he could, and even though the closeness he demanded was excessive by normal standards, its unhealthy overtones had vanished. By the age of eleven Noah was no longer a prisoner of his feelings, he had slowly learned to deal with them, and finally to control them.

Another thing that played a part was that Milka and Lamech had a third child that autumn, for Barak, as the new baby boy was called, altered the entire balance of the household. Yet again the father began to visit the house several times a day, as if glowing with suppressed joy, and if he talked no more about the new child than he had about the last, everyone realized that his happiness was due in no small part to the fact that this time the child was perfectly normal. No chalky white skin, no red eyes. The baby was hale, healthy, and whole: Lamech had at last got a son who could take over from him. Anna had got a baby brother on whom she could lavish her sisterly love, and Milka had found a place where she could meet her daughter. For Noah, too, Barak’s arrival was welcome. He was no longer the undisputed focus of his parents’ tenderness and attention, they were no longer his. In that lay freedom. To Anna later on he would compare his relationship with his father to the time when, as a ten-year-old, he’d been alone at home and a bird had got trapped in the house. There was no real difference between the bird’s desire, which he forlornly tried to placate by granting it, by getting the bird out of the house and out of his mind, where its wings beat in mute desperation, and the desire he noted when his father came through the door after a long day in the fields. Both distressed him madly and were equally difficult to alleviate, but for opposite reasons. The bird because it struggled, and didn’t know its own good, and his father because Noah never knew what was best for him. It got even more complicated when his father tried to adjust to him. It was this that ceased once Barak was born, a certain zone of noninterest was established between them, and it was in this that Noah sought refuge, it was there he found what he’d been yearning for all the time: something of his own.

Barak was a blessing. When he grew up he didn’t discriminate between them, to him they were all just people in his life, ever since, as a baby, he’d smiled up at whoever bent over him, until as a five-year-old he really began to be part of their lives. Stocky, red-cheeked, blue-eyed, boisterous, and happy, he trotted around the farm after his father, went with his sister to the river and bathed, hung near his mother’s skirts as she milked the cows, sat silent with wonder in Noah’s room and watched his own features appear on the paper under his brother’s fingers. He was even allowed to go along on his brother’s rainy-day outings to the woods, the only person who was, and knew when to ask questions and when to keep quiet. They would come home with pockets full of little frogs, dung beetles, grass snakes, beetles, wasps’ nests, birds’ eggs, anything they found, or leaves and bark from trees that Noah thought were uncommon; pinecones and seeds, leaves of bushes and flowers, fruit and berries and nuts, or stones of every shape and color. Barak played with them, Noah drew them, that was their arrangement. If Barak began to be bored, not an uncommon occurrence, he would run off on his own. Up, up, up, was the motto of his young life. Up wooded ridges and hillocks, great rocks and trees, and sometimes even roofs, although this wasn’t allowed. He would balance on the trunks of fallen trees, the tops of stone walls and precipitous rock faces, until winter arrived, when suddenly it was all down, and he swished down mountainsides, jumped down into snowbanks from great heights, dug holes and passages, hacked holes down through the ice and poked in them for fish. He learned to swim as a five-year-old, and discovered perfect bathing places on his own: one just beneath the waterfall, where the water welled up from a ten-foot-deep eddy, perfect for diving into from diving platforms that got higher with each summer; one in the rapids below the bridge, where the rocky bottom on the lower section was both completely smooth and covered with a soft growth of algae, so that you could sail along on the water down the final hundred yards and reach an impressive speed without danger of hurting yourself. Naturally he never got Noah to accompany him there, nor even Lamech or Milka, so he was there either on his own or with Anna, on the rare occasions she could get away from her work.

Noah would inherit the title to the farm. But he couldn’t work it, and without it ever being said in so many words, everyone knew that Barak was the one who’d take over when the day came. How the practical details would be arranged was unclear, but later it emerged that their father had thought along the lines that Noah would retain the title to the farm, live there for the remainder of his life, while Barak would actually run it. The brothers would have to decide for themselves if Noah’s or Barak’s son would inherit after that, but it wasn’t likely to be a great problem: who would want to share his life with Noah?

That was the idea. But not how it turned out. One single occurrence was to turn the lives of everyone on the farm upside down. It happened toward the end of the summer when Noah was twenty, Anna nineteen, and Barak nine. After a lengthy heat wave an area of low pressure had come pushing in from the north, all that morning they’d heard thunder in the distance, later in the afternoon the sky above them turned heavy and leaden, now and then rent by huge forks of lightning, and Milka and her children stood out in the farmyard counting the seconds between the flash and the thunderclap, until, laughing, they were forced inside by a sudden, heavy downpour. Outside the kitchen window they could see how, in minutes, the parched earth was turned into mud, while the interval between lightning flashes and thunderclaps shortened to nothing.