Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

After a while Milka must have gone out of the living room and up to the bedroom, because the next thing Noah remembered was her kneeling in front of Barak with a cloth in her hand washing his face, and that there was no longer any blood on the front of her dress.

Then they sat in the kitchen. One of them was always getting up and going into the living room to look at him, or at the darkness outside. They never looked at each other, they never spoke to each other. They put behind them minute after minute. Each and every one of them was unbearable. But they bore it.

Then there was the sound of footsteps outside. It was Anna returning home. She behaved as if nothing had happened. They heard it, how carelessly she kicked off her shoes and placed them by the wall, how carelessly she removed her coat and hung it on the peg. Her happiness was greater than she was, they could feel it even before she’d opened the kitchen door.

She stopped when she saw them.

“What’s happened?” she asked.

“Barak is dead,” said Noah.

“Don’t say things like that,” she said.

When Noah didn’t answer, and Lamech and Milka said nothing either, but just looked down, her mouth fell open. The expression with which she regarded them was at first uncomprehending. Then more and more frightened.

She steadied herself on the door frame.

“It’s not true,” she said.

Her face was white.

Noah nodded in the direction of the living room. She walked slowly through the kitchen, but when she got into the living room, and saw him lying on the bench, she ran over to him.

She wailed.

She wailed out her sorrow as loudly as she could, and for the people locked in their silence in the kitchen, it released something.

Milka went in to her. Anna sat with Barak clutched tightly to her, rocking him from side to side.

“Barak! Barak!” she cried.

Milka laid her hand on her shoulder, and Anna turned to her. Her whole body shook. When Noah came in, they stood and embraced each other. Anna’s grief was fathomless and naked, and it unlocked the others’ grief as well. There had been no space between it and death, it had been closed in on itself, concentrated, timorous, hard and cold.

Only Lamech remained unaffected. The life that Anna had brought in with her didn’t extend to him; he saw it, but he didn’t feel it.

Unnoticed by them, he’d gone out. When Noah went into the farmyard to look for him a while later, he saw a light in the lean-to beyond. He positioned himself in the darkness a few yards from the window and looked in. His father was sawing. On the table beside him lay a pile of ready sawn planks, a box of nails, a carpenter’s rule, a square, a plane, a hammer. His face was as it always was when he thought himself alone: expressionless. The only thing Noah could see in his eyes when he turned, laid the plank on top of the others, took the rule, plucked the pencil from behind his ear, and measured up a new length, was concentration.

He was supposed to be fetching him, Anna and Milka had set out a little food, but he left him alone, and went back to the house.

Somehow they got through the night. Nobody slept. It seemed terrible to have to wrestle with one’s thoughts alone. Even more terrible was the prospect of waking up to what had happened. At the moment they were conscious of it. True, it waxed and waned in strength, sometimes they were completely overwhelmed by it, at others it almost disappeared, but because it was the transitions between these states that were worst, when the realization that he was dead suddenly filled them, it was waking up that they feared most. It would be as if he’d died all over again, they felt. As if he’d been alive while they slept, and for a brief period of their waking, because they might open their eyes and look round the room and vaguely sense that something was wrong, but without knowing what, and during these moments he’d be alive, until they suddenly remembered, until they suddenly realized, until the knowledge of his death came washing over them once more, cold and vast.

They didn’t sleep, and a new day dawned about them, unnoticed by them, everything outside themselves had something nebulous and indistinct about it, nothing left any trace on them, all they thought about was to endure. Move on. And this they had done. When Lamech had finished the coffin, he’d gone out into the field with his spade over his shoulder, dug a grave for Barak, and when he came back, he’d said he was to be buried that evening.

Those were exactly the words he’d used. He’ll be buried this evening , he’d said. His mother had dressed Barak in his best shirt and trousers, socks and shoes. She’d wept the whole time, whereas Anna, looking on, had not. And as soon as it was dark enough for Noah to go out, they had put him in his coffin. They looked at him one last time, and then everyone apart from his father left the room. No one could bear to see him put the lid on the coffin and nail it down.

And now they were sitting here.

Noah turned back to the table. His father pushed his bowl toward the pot and filled it. His mother held a small bone up to her mouth and chewed the meat off it. Anna had her head bent over her bowl and slurped at her soup as she stared at the table.

He glanced toward the window. The reflection from the room was so strong that it was impossible to see through it. Nothing of the landscape outside penetrated the picture of the four people sitting eating round the table, the benches and the cupboard behind them.

They grieved in the same way. But if the object of that grief was the same for all of them, the shape it took within them was as different as their characters. Noah’s thoughts during the whole of the past day had revolved around what Barak was now. How he was lying in the coffin out there, down in the earth, all alone, while they sat here and ate, that was how Noah’s thoughts ran.

For Anna it was otherwise. She thought mainly of what he’d been, her tears came when scenes from his life entered her mind, whilst Lamech’s thoughts were constantly directed toward what he would have become.

What then of Milka? Where did her thoughts turn?

Milka had borne him. She’d known him since before he’d been born, his movements, the small habits that had formed while he lay floating within her, she had looked forward to his coming, and when he had come, he’d been just as she’d expected. Not in appearance, but in the atmosphere he brought with him. Perhaps it had something to do with the way he’d looked at her that first time? Perhaps it was something about the way he’d crawled, still bloody and slimy, toward her breast? For months after the birth he’d been part of her, it had just been the two of them, nothing else existed, and even after that first time was over, and he slipped into the rhythm and life of the family, he was a part of her. She knew his body as well as she knew her own. She washed him every day, she held him close every day, there wasn’t an inch of his body her hands hadn’t touched. When he raised his head for the first time, she’d been there, when he crawled for the first time, she’d been there, when he said his first word, she’d been there. All this had been stored within her. That was where he was. The smell of him, the taste of him, the feel of his skin against hers. Barak was a part of her, and when he died, a part of her died. Not in a figurative sense. Her body asked for Barak, it asked for Barak all the time, but it no longer got any answer.

For her it was no good throwing away everything to do with Barak, as his father had begun to do. For some reason this knowledge made her sorrow easier. There was comfort in knowing that, that the sorrow would never leave her. That it would always be with her.