Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Obal looked at him for a long while. Then he shook his head, smiled in a manner that Lamech took to be condescending, and turned back to the mirror again.

“Why did you hit her?” Lamech asked. “She hadn’t done anything.”

Obal stirred the razor back and forth a few times in the basin of water on the shelf beneath the mirror, stretched the skin on his jaw with one hand, and drew the razor down it with the other, then rinsed it again.

“She was a whore, Lamech,” he said.

“Was that a whore?” said Lamech.

Tarsis, who sat ready dressed on a chair on the other side of the room waiting for his brother, laughed out loud. Obal smiled.

“Oh ho, she certainly was, my boy,” he said.

That it was Tarsis who should laugh at the event, while Obal was the one to darken and drag him away, was something that for years he’d found strange. Ever since his youth Obal had been known as a “fast liver,” whatever that peculiar euphemism signified, and indulged himself in almost everything, but Tarsis, who was often described in epithets such as “upright” and “principled,” kept himself on a shorter rein. Within the family it was always thought that Obal’s was a “weak character,” and if no one actually warned Lamech against him, their attitude kept him away. That Obal couldn’t be depended upon, and was probably also rather foolish, at least compared with his own father, Methuselah, was something Lamech somehow just knew .

Now he knew better.

It was Tarsis he should have been warned against, not Obal.

That was often the way. Were he to offer Barak a piece of advice, it would be that. Always ask yourself: what if it’s the complete opposite?

Upright was another word for self-righteous. Principled for naive.

Obal was the man he liked, Tarsis the one he resembled. Like Tarsis he’d always been content so long as he was safe.

Obal had always been closely engaged with the world, all his life he’d entangled himself in it, sometimes getting stuck here, sometimes there, he’d attempted to extricate himself in many different ways, never entirely succeeding, whilst Tarsis had treated it like a kind of visitor, and therefore had never been more committed than suited him.

But now they were old. He’d seen it yesterday, as they’d sat in their chairs and slept openmouthed. Obal was in his sixties, Tarsis in his seventies, and none of the contrasts they had maintained throughout long lives mattered anymore. Their hair was just as white, their sight just as weak, their hearing just as poor, their hearts just as tired.

Perhaps that was why he hadn’t been able to relax. The images he’d formed of Obal and Tarsis in his childhood and youth had remained so strong within him that he’d seen them all these years as they’d once been. Obal twenty-something, Tarsis thirty-something. Of course he knew they were old, but he hadn’t seen it. Until yesterday evening. It was as if a curtain had been drawn aside or a mask torn off. One moment they were young, the next old.

That was what he’d been thinking about.

When he was growing up, the age difference seemed enormous, but there wasn’t more than ten years between him and Obal. He’d turned fifty and couldn’t count on being fully active for more than ten years more, perhaps fifteen, if he was lucky and his health lasted that long.

Ten years wasn’t much.

But by then Barak would be grown up. That was what mattered.

He got up and walked along the edge of the forest. At the end of the field there was a small meadow, with a little rounded hill above it, from where the forest stretched a few hundred yards to the sheer mountainside, many hundreds of feet high. The meadow’s old name was the Feasting Place, and it was still called this, even though feasts hadn’t been held there for at least three hundred years.

He’d always felt happy there. The same was true of several such places on the homestead; the old mill up by the stream, for example, with its gaping, half-collapsed walls, gray with age, which he should have demolished but had allowed to remain. The wall of what had presumably once been a threshing mill in the forest on the other side of the river. The small house below it, of which only the cellar remained, an overgrown hollow in the field with the odd stone from the foundation wall protruding from the scrub. Just why he felt content in these places, he couldn’t really tell. And it wasn’t often he visited them, there was never enough time, but when, on mornings such as this, he went to them, he always thought that he ought to do so more often. Everything looked different from there. Probably due just as much to the fact he wasn’t working as the mood these places produced in him. When he worked, he was in the landscape, it served his purpose and was therefore part of him. When he wasn’t working, and was at peace with himself, he stood outside it.

He halted at the top of the rise, which still lay in the shadow of the mountain, and looked out. There was a sap in the landscape in the mornings, he thought. The grass was damp, the shadows deep, the light of the sun’s rays rich. In just a few hours, when the dew had evaporated, the shadows had dispersed, and the light was clear and transparent, this same landscape would have a hint of desolation about it. The sap was there because something was just beginning, it had a freshness, a power that would later be employed in enduring through something that just wore on and on.

Far off he saw a figure emerge from the door and cross the farmyard to the cow-house. He removed his hat and scratched his scalp. A straw had worked loose, it had been rubbing against his skin all morning, and he pushed it back in among its fellows before replacing the hat and walking off to retrieve his pack.

He covered the last leg so that he could be seen from the windows. Barak always came out to meet him, it had been one of their rituals, and something Barak always looked forward to. His pleasure as his father caught him running and tossed him up in the air. His anticipation, his furtive glances at the pack, which he couldn’t conceal even though he wanted to.

With a thumb under each strap of the pack, his hat pushed back on his neck, a white shirt that wasn’t so white anymore, black trousers, and a crumpled black jacket, he strode out across the field. When he was a few hundred yards from the house, he suddenly noticed that there was a man on the roof. But the door opened just at that moment, and he forgot all about it. Barak had begun his long sprint, and Lamech stood smiling and waiting for him.

When Barak was only ten yards away, and Lamech already kneeling down to catch him, he suddenly slackened his pace.

“Hello Dad!” he said, and stopped in his tracks.

Lamech stood up. Even though he realized that Barak felt too old to be tossed in the air, he took two quick paces forward, gripped Barak under the arms, and lifted him up in front of him.

“Hello, young man!” he said.

Barak’s eyes flashed with pleasure. But then they grew embarrassed and his glance wavered to the side.

Lamech set him down on the ground again.

“Everything been all right here?” he asked.

Barak nodded.

“Everything all right at the market?”

Lamech nodded, and they began to walk toward the house.

Barak looked up at him.

“Have you bought a new hat?” he asked.

Lamech nodded.

“Have you bought anything else?” Barak asked.

Lamech nodded again.

Nothing more was said until they reached the house. Lamech took off his pack, hung his new hat by the side of the old one, and walked, pack in his hand, into the kitchen, where Anna was sitting at her breakfast.

“Hello, Father,” she said. “Have you had a good time?”