Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

“Not bad!” said his father.

“Look now!” he yelled, held out his arms and ran zigzagging across. “I’m a bird!”

“One more go,” said his father. “And then it’s time for bed.”

The last thing Noah had done before going to bed, and the first when he got up, was to gaze at the drawing. His wonder at the Nephilim had been great, and it never quite left him. Even now, ten years later, he would sometimes get out the drawing, yellowed and creased, and study it with the same hungry eyes as before. For Nephilim could still be found. People knew a bit more about them now than they had then, but not much. A further two specimens had been shot and killed — one had lived for a couple of days, but died of its wounds in a strange way, because the wounds in themselves weren’t fatal — one bullet had entered the thigh, another the upper arm — but they never healed, for some reason the blood didn’t congeal, it just went on leaking out, until the creature died — and one had been caught alive. It was now kept in a cellar somewhere in Nod as far as Noah knew.

He got up and went to the cupboard in the corner of the room, pulled out the bundle of papers that lay within, and leafed through them until he found the drawing of the Nephilim. Just as he was sitting down at his desk again, he heard the door downstairs.

That must be Anna. Unless his father, contrary to expectation, had returned so soon.

He sat still and listened.

The steps were light and almost inaudible, the movements discreet.

It was Anna.

After a bit of moving about in the hallway, she came up the stairs, halted outside his door, presumably in the hope that he was awake, so that she could share some of her happiness with another, but he didn’t make a sound, and she soon carried on to her own room. If there was one thing he wasn’t prepared for now, it was his sister’s bliss. Sitting there in the semidarkness and filling the room with her obscure, summer’s night emotions.

He stared down at the drawing once more. If the assumption really was correct, that these were the progeny of angels, what did that say about the order of creation?

All the Nephilim that had fallen into human hands had been of the same sex. So had each one that had been observed. In other words, the Nephilim couldn’t reproduce. Not only had there been death before them, but there was also death after them. Angelic life didn’t take hold on earth.

What did this mean?

The most important characteristic of angels in this context was that they lived forever. This linked them to everything else that was eternal, both the things he’d classified under “dead things,” and those he’d put under “the living dead.” But even though one of the classes of angels, the cherubim, also burned eternally, one couldn’t place them there automatically. Because man was formed in the angels’ image, and they were therefore like human beings, and because the angels had progeny — something unthinkable for “the living dead,” as their life was death’s life, barren and unfruitful — they somehow had to have a foot in “living things” as well. But if “living things” could be eternal, his whole system would collapse. Also, one of the most important characteristics of “living things” was that they could reproduce themselves. Grass, flowers, trees, insects, birds, fish, and animals all carried the life of their species on. But angels didn’t. They were infertile, no angel could have progeny with another angel. In order to create life, they had to break into a chain of life outside their own, namely, that of human beings. The breaching of nature’s laws was apparent from their deformed and sterile offspring.

But if angels didn’t belong in “living things” or “dead things” or even “the living dead,” where did they belong?

God?

No, even though God was eternal, like the angels, and was like man, he was the creator of everything. It was his creative act that each species of “living things” continued through its progeny. While the angels’ creative act led only to the life of the Nephilim, each of which died out of its own accord.

Noah gave a deep sigh. Sometimes he could have wished that angels hadn’t existed at all. Then everything would have worked out. Of course, he could institute a special category for them, but that wouldn’t help much, because where would he place it? Angels had links to the sun, dead things, living things, and to God, but didn’t belong with any of them.

In some way or other he knew that the answer lay elsewhere. Not in living things or the force of life, nor in dead things or the force of death, but in the third force that permeated everything in existence. The force of image.

Man was fashioned in the angels’ image. So the distance between mankind and angels was the distance of image. The same as the distance between the insect and the insect in the stone, or the flames on earth and those in the sky in the winter. The one alive, the other dead, the one hot, the other cold.

Could angels possibly be some kind of negative human being?

Were angels dead perhaps?

No. Oh, no, no.

Was that why the Nephilim were deformed? Had the seed of the dead fertilized living women?

With his soul frozen to its depths, Noah rose from his writing table, turned the drawing of the Nephilim over, because he couldn’t bear to look at it anymore, went across to the cupboard and filed it at the bottom of the pile of paper, put the stones back in their place on the table, he didn’t look at them either, for they had something to do with that horrifying thought as well, picked up the oil lamp, and hurried out.

On the ground floor where the windows weren’t curtained, the rooms were filled with a bluish gray dawn light, and he placed the lamp on the kitchen table before starting to wander through the downstairs rooms. He’d long ago discovered that he derived more comfort from the traces his family left behind them than from his family itself. He never felt more tenderness for Barak than when he looked at one of his small sweaters lying on a sofa or over the back of a chair, while Barak himself lay sleeping in another part of the house. Or Anna’s shoes in the hallway, so daintily placed side by side, or his mother’s head scarf deposited on the hallway table, or his father’s battered straw hat, which he took so much care of that Noah suspected him of thinking that it was lucky.

He sat down on the sofa, put his legs on the table, and looked out at the apple orchard in front of the house. The house was quite still. And bit by bit the same stillness settled on him. He held Barak’s jumper up in front of him, and felt a great wave of affection for him. It was green with a pattern of blue, and much smaller than you’d have thought. He was only a small child! He must remember that, he thought. It was so easy to forget. For although Barak aspired to adulthood, and the sudden elements of childishness in his nature were easy to see as some kind of regression, even calculated regression, as it often seemed when he wanted something in particular, the opposite was equally valid: that he was really a child, and it was the adult elements that were the true calculation in his character.

Noah brought the sweater to his face and sniffed.

It smelled of forest. Earth, spruce, leaves, grass, mire.

He replaced the sweater, fetched the lamp from the kitchen, and went back up to his room. He no longer found it unpleasant, perhaps because the tranquillity of the downstairs had displaced the sensation of horror, or perhaps because of his own sudden weariness; so when he undressed, doused the lamp, lay down, and pulled the bedclothes over him, it was in the next instant to fall heavily asleep.

As if from far away he heard a strange, banging sound. Half asleep he sat up, peered up at the ceiling, where it was coming from.