Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

“Brrrrr!” said Milka, hugging herself.

“See that!” said Barak. “The lightning hit the forest just there! ”

“Are you scared, little brother?” said Anna.

“Course not!”

“Did you know that Noah was scared of thunder when he was small?” said Milka, meeting Barak’s glance as he looked up at her.

“I was scared of everything,” said Noah. “Even the well.”

“The well?” said Barak.

“Yes. I thought there was something in it. Noises came out of it.”

“And you were scared of foxes,” said Anna. “Do you remember the time you woke the whole house because you thought there was a fox in your room?”

Barak laughed. It was the silliest thing he’d ever heard. At the same time he felt a pang of sadness, as he always did when people talked about how things were before he existed.

Noah laid a hand on his shoulder.

“I was frightened of everything until Barak arrived,” he said.

Barak turned and looked at him.

“Truly,” said Noah.

At that moment lightning flashed outside, and Barak turned quickly back. Thunder rattled the windowpanes.

“Where did that strike?” asked Barak. “Did anyone see? Did anyone see?”

But no one had seen. Barak stood for a moment searching for smoke from the last strike, he had a faint hope that a real fire might blaze up somewhere, but no smoke appeared, and he went into the living room, where Milka was laying the table for dinner.

“Father must have got soaked to the skin in this weather,” Anna said.

Noah, who’d already sat down at the table, looked at her. She stood at the window looking out at the garden behind the house. She was happy, he could see that. But as always she’d kept her happiness to herself. Just as when she was a child she’d cupped her hands around whatever she’d found, a ladybug, a piece of mica, a four-leaf clover, so that she could see it, but no one else could. She hid the things that made her happy away from them, but she couldn’t hide the happiness itself, it completely illuminated her from within, and so it was now, he thought. If she was folding clothes in the kitchen, it was with small, ever-present smiles on her lips; if she met his gaze, her eyes were shining; if she went to the well to fetch water, she was so full of suppressed emotions that she broke into a run as soon as she thought she was out of sight.

“I hope they’re not in the mountains,” said Milka, placing the saucepan of steaming potatoes on the table.

“Don’t worry, they’ve got enough sense to look for shelter with lightning like this,” said Anna.

“Stranger things have happened,” said Milka.

Lamech had been away at the market on the outskirts of Nod for almost a fortnight, and was expected back any day now. He went there every year, and had done so ever since childhood, always in the company of two uncles, his father’s brothers, Obal, who was a horse dealer, and Tarsis, who did a bit of this and that: a bit of fishing, a bit of trapping, a bit of farming, a bit of forestry. He always took skins with him to Nod, and the first time Lamech had gone with them, he’d been given one, which he could barter for anything he liked. This had become a tradition. Even now, though Lamech was in his fifties, Obal his sixties, and Tarsis nearing seventy, Lamech was given a skin at the start of the journey. Barak had been present, and Lamech had said to his two uncles that next year they must give the skin to Barak. Then he would be ten, the same age as Lamech himself when he’d first gone.

Milka came in with the meat, and everyone sat down at the table. Noah was tired, he’d been out walking all night, he’d got right up to the foot of the glacier in the side valley, and he’d had to run the last few miles of the return journey to reach the house before the sun got up. This happened occasionally, but more and more rarely; after several years of nocturnal wanderings he knew almost exactly how far he could go before he had to turn, no matter which direction he’d taken. In the beginning he sometimes miscalculated and didn’t get home in time, and then he’d be forced to find shelter from the sun beneath some overhanging rock or boulder, or build a bivouac himself. In the forested sides and bottom of the valley many such bivouacs gradually appeared, consisting of a few poles lashed together into a frame, thickly woven with conifer branches and leaned up against some tree trunks or a rock wall. There he would take shelter and sleep until the sun went down.

But this morning he’d managed to get home in time. After emptying his bulging pockets on the table, he’d lain down to sleep, but was awoken a few hours later, perhaps by the heat, perhaps by the noises of the house, perhaps by excitement over the stones he’d found. In any case it was toward them he stretched out his hand as soon as he opened his eyes. For a long time he lay in bed examining them, turning them over, and when he finally pulled the blanket aside and put his feet to the floor, it wasn’t to wash, dress, and go down to eat, but to sit at the table, take out a sheet of paper and a pencil, place the stones on the table in front of him, and draw them, one by one, from every conceivable angle. Only when he’d finished this did he go down, to find his mother, Anna, and Barak standing in front of the house looking at the spectacular cloud formations that had piled up in the sky above the mountains, their infinite shades of blue, gray, and black, the darkness they spread over the valley.

Like the swishing wings of birds, the trees had thrashed to and fro in the wind. Noah had laid a hand on Barak’s shoulder when a fork of lightning shot almost horizontally across the sky. But he hadn’t been the slightest bit afraid. Eager and excited, yes, but not afraid.

That had been a good moment, he thought as he ate. And it was a good moment now. The rain outside, the grass glistening green beneath the windows, the faces around the table reposing in the subdued light of dinnertime. He cut a radish in two and put one piece in his mouth. The bitter taste fulfilled the promise held out by the red skin and the white flesh, he thought, sharp as its contours against the stone white of the plate. At the same time he felt Barak was looking at him, and raised his eyes. Barak immediately averted his. There was something guilt-ridden about the way he began concentrating on cutting up his meat, as if he’d just given something away that absolutely no one should know about.

Noah smiled. The way Barak thought he could hide within himself, and not have the outer one betray him as it did, moved him.

He tried to remember what he’d been like when he was ten. He’d cried a lot, practically all the time, and he was almost always frightened. It was impossible to read any pattern of development from the fog of emotions he’d found himself in. Barak was more whole, more levelheaded, purer.

The big, undefined areas within him, all he didn’t know he was or could become, had begun to diminish, but it was only in the past few days that Noah had realized just how small they were. Barak knew a lot more about himself than he let on.

Beneath Noah’s gaze his head drooped toward the plate, then turned to the side and peered up at him, as if from underneath.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked. The vowels were hollow and attenuated. That was the way he talked when he was putting on an act and pretending to be someone. A troll, an old man, a fool.

“Don’t play games at the table, Barak,” said his mother. “And sit up in your chair.”

“You looked as if you were thinking about something,” said Noah. “I was just puzzling over what it might be.”

Barak straightened his back exaggeratedly and threw a quick glance in his mother’s direction before turning to Noah and smiling.