Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Noah said nothing, but walked on to the door and peeped into the living room, where his mother sat on the edge of the bench with Barak sleeping next to her, softly illuminated by the light of a lamp in the window on the opposite side of the room.

She raised her head to him and smiled, put her finger to her lips. Noah smiled back. Then he sat down at the kitchen table.

“Has anything happened?” he asked quietly.

His father shook his head.

There was a long pause. Darkness filled the room uniting it with the landscape outside.

Noah leaned forward and looked up at the stars.

Just then they heard Barak groaning.

“Ah, ah, ah, ah.”

Then he was violently sick.

Lamech and Noah got up. When they entered the living room, Milka sat holding him in her lap. Her white chest was red with blood.

She rocked him back and forth, back and forth.

Then she looked up at them.

“He’s dead,” she said.

They buried him the next evening. There were only the four of them. They carried the coffin between them across the field and over to the mound. While Milka and Anna stood watching from a few paces away, Lamech and Noah lowered the coffin into the grave that Lamech had dug earlier that day. The trees swayed in the darkness over them. The clouds scudded across the sky. No one spoke. When the coffin reached the bottom, Lamech pulled up the ropes, handed them to Noah, and stood up in front of the grave, took off his hat, lowered his head.

“Rest in peace,” he said.

They stood in silence for a long time and looked down at the light-colored wooden coffin in the black earth. Then Lamech and Noah each took a spade and began to fill in the grave. When they’d finished, they lifted the stone onto it. Anna, who’d wept all night and all day, and was still weeping, stood for a while completely still with bowed head in front of it.

“Good-bye, Barak,” she said.

She turned and walked through the trees and down toward the field. The others followed. Soon they saw the house shining in the darkness before them. Noah wished it would be like this forever. That they could go on walking along this muddy cart track with the house shining in the darkness before them forever. What lay behind them was unendurable, what was in front of them was unendurable. But walking here wasn’t. There was a sort of peace here.

When they arrived, Anna was already indoors. She’d lit the stove and set the pot of soup on the plate, and was in the act of laying the table in the kitchen. Usually it was the living room that was used on solemn occasions. But no one could bear to be in there.

Milka took out an unleavened crispbread from the corner cupboard, broke it in pieces, and piled them on a dish. Anna stirred the soup with a ladle. Noah pulled out a chair and was about to sit down when he realized that he’d be looking directly into the living room. He moved to the end of the table and was just about to pull out that chair when it struck him that he’d be looking straight out onto the field. That was no better, for Barak was now lying out there, alone in the earth.

“Sit down,” said Lamech.

His voice was low, there was no sharpness in it; if it held anything more than those two words, it was resignation. Even so, it agitated Noah. Hardly a word had passed between them during the past day. That gave even the mildest reproof a sting.

But then he saw his father’s eyes, racked with sorrow, and did as he said.

Milka put butter and a drinking bowl of beer on the table. Lamech put his face in his hands, rubbed it a few times, looked up when Anna arrived with the soup pot. She fetched a ladle, put it in, and sat down.

They ate quickly and voraciously. Hunger always haunts the purlieus of death. The dripping spoons were lifted to the craning heads, mouths were opened, soup slurped in, the spoons clattered on the bowls as they ladled more.

All the lamps in the kitchen were lit. Nothing was concealed in the sharp light over the table. Everything was as it was. The faded rose-painting on the drinking bowl, the small depressions in its rim from all the lips that had grasped it over the course of time, the cracks in the soup plates, the faint yellow stains in the white tablecloth. The strands of gray soup meat, the smooth sinews, the white fat. The pale orange of the carrots, the pale green of the leeks. The red, shiny rim round Anna’s eyes. The teeth that a constantly repeated twitching of the upper lip revealed. Lamech’s forearm between the table edge and the soup plate, the white mottling that appeared on the back of his ruddy hand when he tried to force it to lie still. The crumbs of bread in the corners of his mouth, the fat glistening on his lips.

Noah felt the darkness of the living room behind him all the time. He’d been sitting in the same spot when it happened, and with every ounce of willpower, he tried to hold the thought of it at bay. But then his mother inhaled deeply, and her breath shuddered, and he looked up at her. At that he saw the whole thing again. While his mother sat on the opposite side of the table, she was also sitting in the living room behind him and rocking Barak on her lap.

Noah couldn’t resist the impulse to turn and look into the other room. He noticed how his movement seemed to communicate itself to the three others, something passed through them. He knew they were thinking about what had happened. His father, who had at first refused to believe it, Barak had only a broken rib or two, he wasn’t dead , you had only to look at him — and the expression on his face really had been one of Barak’s typical ones, so that for one wild second it had even given Noah a grain of hope — and how then, when he’d laid him down and vainly felt for a pulse, in his wrist, in his neck, in his chest, he still hadn’t relinquished hope, but stooped over him and attempted to revive him with his own breath. His mother, who’d put her arm around him and shouted to him to stop. Stop it! she’d shouted. Stop it, Lamech!

The strange tranquillity that had filled the room when his father had finally stopped. It was as if time had ceased. No one had moved. Barak lay still on the bench, with his legs together and slightly twisted to one side, as if the top half of his body lay in one position, the bottom half in another. His right arm hung down from the edge of the bench, the left rested on his stomach.

Lamech was kneeling on the floor next to him. The upper part of his body was bent forward, one hand was propped on the bench behind Barak’s head, the other rested on his chest. His mouth was open, his brow furrowed and his eyebrows frowning, as if he was desperately trying to understand what he saw, or didn’t really believe it.

Milka stood a couple of paces off and looked at them, leaning slightly back, as if she was about to retreat. One hand was pressed to her breast, the other hung at her side and clutched the material of her dress.

Noah stood in the doorway perhaps five yards from them, outside the circle of light that held the three others. He didn’t move either. He stood watching them as if asleep. The blood on Barak’s chin, the blood on his father’s lips and fingers, the blood on his mother’s breast.

The light from the lamp, which threw a veil over them, it stretched from Barak’s face, over Lamech’s bald crown, one shoulder, and upper arm, to end in Milka’s hair, neck, and back.

What will we do now? he thought.

What will we do now?

He couldn’t remember how they’d got through the next few hours. But they had. Gradually his father must have risen to his feet, gradually his mother must have lowered her hand and taken a few steps toward him, gradually Noah must have gone across to them, for he recalled standing there with them looking at Barak. How long for, he didn’t know. The worst thing that could happen had happened, he was dead, and they didn’t know what to do. Being there was unbearable, in that room where he lay and filled it with the chill of his death, it was also unbearable not to be there. It was unbearable to be alone, it was unbearable to be together. It was unbearable to look across the room, it was unbearable to shut one’s eyes.