Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

It was enormous, almost twice as tall as me, so about ten feet tall. At the same time there was something strikingly weak and powerless about it. Its limbs were smooth and without any visible muscles. And its back. . its back was deformed .

From somewhere there was a ticking sound, and Lamech looked up. It was the man on the chair behind the coffin who was slapping a thin stick against the sole of the shoe on the leg he’d crossed over the other one. And suddenly he became aware of the other sounds in there. The rustling of material, all the feet shuffling over the sawdust, the many low voices that together rose arching like a buzzing and whispering dome over the multitude.

Behind him a man lifted a girl of about five up onto his shoulders.

“Can you see?” he asked.

She kept completely quiet for a long time. Then she said:

“What’s it got on its back?”

Lamech turned back to the creature again. It really did look as if it had something on its back. But it hadn’t. It was its back they saw. From about halfway up it had grown outward at an angle, forming a hump so large that the top part, where the back went in to join the neck, was almost completely flat, like a board or a tray, perhaps two feet deep.

The hands, too, resembled boards. They had no fingers, or if they had, they’d grown together until they were unrecognizable. Things that looked like nails grew on them, not evenly or along the edge, as one might have expected, but spread out all over, as if they grew quite at random.

Its mouth was open, and between the soft lips one could see that the teeth grew like the nails, they were spread out as well, both on the upper and lower parts of the palate.

Lamech felt queasy and really wanted to get out, but he knew just how much Noah would dig and probe, and he let his gaze take it in again as he attempted to imagine his son’s voice.

What did the feet look like?

The knees?

The wrists?

The shoulder blades?

The ankles?

And its face? You haven’t said anything about its face, that’s the most important part of all!

The face was beautiful.

With its mouth open?

Yes. It was beautiful even with its mouth open.

How was it beautiful?

The way a really beautiful face is beautiful. Only more beautiful. And that was the most loathsome thing of all, that was what filled everyone who saw it with disgust, that such beauty could be found there, in that grotesque misshapen creature. Do you understand? It was more beautiful than any human being .

Lamech conjured up the Nephilim to himself several times on the homeward journey, and described what he saw in words he muttered softly to himself, but when he sat up in Noah’s room a few days later, and the boy stared at him with his excited and expectant eyes, he couldn’t paint an adequate picture. Not only were his words slow in coming out, but they were never the right ones, either. He’d often imagined words lying closely packed together on a vast, plainlike expanse in the consciousness. When you spoke, it was from here the words were taken. People who were eloquent knew precisely where the individual words lay, which went well together and which didn’t mix. They knew their words so well that they didn’t need to think when they chose them and put them together. It was automatic. His uncle Obal was eloquent, and when he told one of his stories, Lamech would occasionally picture a pair of hands flitting back and forth at lightning speed across the plain of words, snatching one up, stringing it together with another, then tossing them out of his mouth, word after word, again and again, in a single headlong rush.

When he wanted to say something himself, it was slower. He didn’t know precisely where the words were, and sometimes, when a reply was needed, he had to use a word other than the one he’d intended, it didn’t fit properly with the preceding ones, and so the harmony was disrupted, for the previous word always controlled the following one, and so with each word he was moving further and further away from his starting point, what he’d meant to say.

This was the state of affairs as he sat in Noah’s room. In his mind’s eye he could see the Nephilim as clearly as anything, but none of the words he chose fit properly, and the picture that Noah formed in his mind’s eye was an image of something else.

But the most absurd thing of all was that his halting made Noah’s attention rest as much on him as on what he said. Noah nodded helpfully and supportively at each word, and if his father went silent for a while, he was quick to offer a timely question.

This was wrong. Noah should have been absorbed by the Nephilim, there was nothing that interested him more, but there he sat suffering with his father.

This was often the way when they were alone together. It wasn’t for nothing that his father used to head for the woodshed after these interludes with Noah. There was something marvelously tangible about the log he placed on the chopping block, the ax he raised above his shoulder, the blade that cut through the piece of wood and split it.

He put his hand to the back of his head and looked down at the floor in front of him for a moment.

“But the worst thing was that it was so beautiful.”

“Beautiful?” queried Noah. “Yes. That was why it was so horrible.”

“But —?” said Noah.

His father pursed his lips, raised his eyebrows and waved a hand. That’s it , the gesture said. I’m not going to go any further. Sorry about that .

“Don’t go,” said Noah.

“No, all right. I can stay a bit longer.”

“I’ll draw it,” said Noah. “Then you can see if it’s right.” He put a sheet of paper on the table, picked up a pencil, glanced at his father.

“Its hands,” he said. “They looked like clubs? With nails sort of here and there?”

“Not clubs. More like plates. Or flippers. You know, like seals have.”

Noah drew for a while. His father laughed when he saw the result.

“Flippers was just an example,” he said.

“Well. .?” said Noah.

His father extended his own hand.

“If you imagine an ordinary hand,” he said. “But the fingers have grown together. But so closely that you can hardly see them anymore. There’s just a faint shadow between them. Perhaps not even that. A plate of flesh and blood. With nails.”

This time there really was some resemblance. His father had always been impressed by the boy’s drawings, to look at them was like looking at the object itself, but what he accomplished that evening was almost magical: when he’d finished, the Nephilim was there on the paper between them. Even though Noah hadn’t seen it himself.

His father’s praise made Noah so proud that he’d hardly known what to do with himself. He’d gone downstairs with his father, but none of the faces down there, his sister’s sullen one, his mother’s tired one, or the newly born Barak’s sleeping one, had been able to read the emotions that filled him. Although it was way past bedtime, his father had allowed him to go outside for a time. Whilst he, tired from his journey, sat on the bench by the house wall, Noah had begun to run around the garden. He ran as fast as he could, round and round he went, as the thought that his father must certainly be amazed at how fast he could run sent a thrill of joy through him. I can draw a Nephilim exactly without seeing it , he thought, and I can run as fast as the wind .

“Look!” he shouted, and ran across at top speed, turned suddenly, and ran just as fast back.