Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

“Guess,” he said.

“You’re wondering what father has got for you,” said Noah. “And then you’re wondering when he’ll get home. Maybe tonight? Or early tomorrow? Or oh no! perhaps tomorrow evening! ”

The three of them sat smiling at Barak.

“Wrong,” he said.

“What were you thinking about then?” asked Anna.

“Guess,” he repeated.

“Hmm,” said Anna. “You were thinking this is the last year you’ll have to sit at home and be bored by us. That this time next year you’ll be at the market.”

“Why d’you all think I’m thinking about the market all the time?” said Barak. He sounded genuinely exasperated, and the other three laughed.

“What are you thinking about, then?” asked his mother.

“Nothing special,” said Barak.

“That won’t do,” said Anna. “What was the point of guessing in that case?”

“If you really must know,” said Barak, “I was thinking about what you said just now. That they might have been struck by lightning up in the mountains.”

Noah looked at him. Maybe he’d been thinking that a while ago, but not when he’d looked at him.

“Oh, don’t,” said his mother.

Then a silence fell around the table. It was almost like when their father sat with them, Noah thought. Like then, it wasn’t the silence itself that worried them, but the consciousness of it.

Or was it only he who thought like that?

He had always picked up tensions that existed between people, and taken the responsibility for them on himself, in the sense that he longed for their cessation more than anything else, and there was a time in his life when he would have done anything to make them disappear. After a while, however, it had become apparent to him that the tensions he sensed possibly weren’t quite as objective as his notions would have led him to believe. Sometimes, clearly, he was the only person who noticed them. The question then was whether they existed at all outside himself?

On the other side of the table Anna wiped her mouth with her napkin, crushed it, and laid it by the side of her plate, pushed her chair back.

“A lovely meal,” she said.

“Don’t you want a bit more?” said her mother.

“No thanks. It was good, but I’m full.”

“You’re eating practically nothing nowadays, young woman!” said her mother. There was something sharp in her tone, which the subsequent smile couldn’t quite smooth over.

Noah pushed his fork under a small pile of peas, steadied them with his knife, and after the faint clink of metal as they touched, raised it to his mouth. Chewing, he glanced over at his sister. The peas’ dry skins rubbed gently on the roof of his mouth, and he washed them down with a sip of water. She’d been sweet on people before, he thought. But never as bad as this.

He hoped he was worthy of her.

After dinner he went up to his room on the second floor. With eyes shut he lay in bed listening to the voices from below, the clatter of glass and cutlery, plates and dishes, the thumps as they knocked against the bottom of the kitchen sink. The sound of voices so far away that the words were impossible to hear was one of the most soothing things he knew. The nesting colony-like hubbub that came from the river in the summer when a crowd of children gathered to swim there, the laughter that arose from the bank beneath the leafy trees when the harvesters stretched out for a break, his mother’s hummed and his father’s grunted mumbles from the garden on a summer’s evening. But now there were tensions in the voices. The meaning this imparted to the melody meant that his thoughts couldn’t float along on them anymore, they had caught a hint of meaning and only wanted to decipher words. Because he couldn’t be bothered to take in any more, he let them drift out of the situation and into the hike he’d been on the night before. The mountains’ unhuman tranquillity, he thought of that. The ice that had filled the entire valley wall in front of him, glittering in the bright light of the moon. The way he’d noticed its coldness from down in the forest. The water that seeped out across the full width of the glacier, forming a veil over the bare mountain. The heap of gravel, sludge, and rocks on the bank of the little lake in the hollow below. The eagerness with which he’d searched through it after he’d found the first stone with a picture. He thought about that. He’d found eight stones of that kind altogether. Not one of the pictures was the same. Three of them were of plants, five of insects. But not plants or insects that he’d ever seen. He’d got one such stone already, he’d been given it by his father, who had bartered for it at the market many years previously, and he’d hardly been able to believe his luck when he’d found one stone after the other up there.

He sat up in bed and looked over at the stones, which lay in a row on the table by the wall, among all his other finds. Skeletons of various small animals: mice, rats, lemmings, squirrels, a cat; the skull of a dog. Shells of all sizes and shapes. Some corals. A crystallized branch. Various eggs, placed next to stones with identical shapes and patterns. A couple of club mosses. A mass of birds’ feathers. Two dried starfish. A board covered with pinned butterflies leaning against the wall. Another of beetles.

How often did his eyes travel over his collection like this? Many times a day, and it always filled him with pleasure.

He got up and was about to go over to fetch the stones when a drop hit the floor just in front of him. Automatically he looked up to the ceiling. Water was seeping along the underside of one of the ceiling boards and forming into small clusters roughly above his head, from where drop after drop detached itself each time it grew too heavy.

Pat. . Pat. . Patpat. . Pat. . Pat. . Pat. . Pat. . Patpat. .

Sheets of paper lay in piles all over the room, and Noah moved the ones closest to the landing spot. Then he went down to the ground floor to fetch a bucket. As it was no longer raining, he assumed the roof must be leaking, and a puddle must have formed on the attic floor, which was now supplying the water to the ceiling.

When he got to the kitchen, his mother was still doing the washing up. He told her about the leak, she said she’d send one of the men up onto the roof the next morning to have a look. He opened the door of the cubbyhole and took out a bucket, said that he ought to go up to the attic to mop up the puddle, but that he couldn’t be bothered, the bucket would have to do, his mother smiled and said that it didn’t matter.

On his way through the hall he came across Anna. She was very anxious, he could tell that even though she had her back to him.

“Going out?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, bending down to tie her shoelaces. He looked first at her rounded back, how the bones of her spine showed up clearly beneath the material of her dress, and then at her hands. The rapid movements over her insteps made her hair flick from side to side slightly. She was only nineteen, but there were already traces of gray in it. Perhaps that’s why she’s in such a hurry , he thought. There’s so much she has to do before she gets old .

The idea was meant to be humorous, but it was too near the knuckle to make him smile, on the contrary it made him sad. He knew that her gray hairs worried her. That she avoided looking at herself in the mirror. And the notion that a lovely girl like her thought about that when she was alone made him sad. And her expectations, they made him sad as well.

She straightened up and took her jacket from the peg without meeting his glance. But he knew that his presence troubled her, there was something in the conscious way her eyes moved. There is a big difference between a glance that doesn’t look at something because the thoughts behind it are engaged elsewhere, and a glance that doesn’t look at something because its thoughts don’t want it to look there.