Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

He lay with his face turned away from her. She raised herself on one arm and leaned forward to look at it.

It told her nothing. It was just a face.

She lay back and looked up at the ceiling. This is awful , she thought. This is awful.

The only thing that would allow her to endure it was the knowledge that she could leave it at any time . Tomorrow, next week, in a year, in ten years or twenty.

It was the only way she could live there.

When she awoke the next morning, Javan was standing at the chest of drawers by the wall, shaving. He was holding a mirror in one hand, a razor in the other. His torso was bare, his face white with foam.

She stretched, and he turned the mirror so that their eyes met.

“Good morning!” he said.

She got up and went over to the window. Far below her the fjord lay blue and glittering.

“I’ve never seen the sea,” she said. “Is there anywhere close by where I can look at it from?”

“Certainly,” he said. “It’s just a matter of going up the mountain at the back of us here.”

He leaned forward and rinsed his face in the bowl that was brimful of water on the chest of drawers, took the towel that lay next to it, and turned toward her as he dried his cheeks and throat.

“Come here,” he said.

She pretended she hadn’t heard, leaned on the windowsill, and looked down over the sunlit slope, at the aspens on the mound below shimmering in the breeze.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, putting aside his towel and crossing over to her.

“Nothing,” she said.

“I know you’re disappointed,” he said. “But it’s better here than you think.”

He laid a hand on her neck, she twisted away.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

“Are you?” he said. “Really?”

She gazed at him for a long while. It had made him happy.

Suddenly she was overpowered by emotion. She didn’t know if it was sorrow or joy, she could just as easily have started laughing as crying out of despair, but when she saw that he understood this, and a trace of concern showed in his eyes, she gave way to tears.

“It’ll be fine,” he said, and squeezed her close to him. “It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

“D’you think so?” she said, and sniffed.

He held her head in his hands and smiled at her.

“Yes, I do,” he said.

She had already learned to read that look. He looked at her as if she amused him. She was only twenty, he was thirty-three, and this was how she interpreted his amusement: he viewed her as a child. That merry look only appeared when she did something to confirm this notion. She knew what he sometimes thought: whims. That she was whimsical.

For this reason she felt displeased with herself after such outbursts. They turned him into something. He became something then. But at the same time she also longed for exactly that. It made him no longer a stranger. But what happened then was that she became further removed from herself! Or went astray in a part of herself that she didn’t like.

As she stood there sniffling, and he smiled at her, the desire to yield and weep on his shoulder was matched by an equal reluctance. But then she pressed herself against him and felt the way he ran his hands through her hair, across her shoulders, her back, through her hair, through her hair.

“How long have you known?” he whispered.

“Only a few days,” she whispered back.

“It’ll be a spring baby, then,” he said, and held her away from him.

“Are you hungry?”

She nodded.

“We’ve no food here,” he said. “But I can go down and borrow a bit from our neighbor. I know him well. Just until we get on our feet.”

He went across and put on his shirt, pulled his braces over his shoulders, smiling all the while.

“I won’t be long,” he said, and left the room. She washed in the water he’d brought up while she was asleep, dressed, and went outside, just as he became lost among the trees that clothed the mound at the bottom of the slope on which the house stood.

The previous evening the darkness had been too great for her to make out anything but the contours of the terrain around the farm. What she hadn’t seen, she’d supplied with images from the ideas she’d formed earlier. Now, as the sunlight bathed the countryside, she saw it as it really was for the first time. The field, which in her mind had stretched so far, to a distant hillside, was no field at all, but a little patch of soil, perhaps sixty yards long and the same wide, thin and barren, broken up everywhere by small hummocks and projecting rocks. Before that, by the small tarn, the land was even more undulating. Wherever she turned, hummocks of bare mountain rock rose from the soil.

Even the house looked like a kind of rock, she thought. It was unpainted, with boards as gray as stone, with splits so large in places that you could put your hand into them. There was only one window in the entire north wall, and that was broken.

The barn, a stone’s throw from the house to the west, was in the same condition, unpainted too; and small, so small that you could hardly call it a barn.

She’d come to a poor smallholding.

That was the truth.

She’d become a poor man’s wife.

She walked across the farmyard and sat down on one of the rocks beyond it, lifted her face to the sun. This time she wouldn’t display her feelings. This time he wouldn’t be able to think she was whimsical, spoiled, or whatever else he thought when he looked at her like that.

When they’d eaten, Anna began to wash and clean the house, while Javan went to dig up the potatoes he’d planted with his brother that spring along the forest edge behind the barn. The pile of things she was throwing away grew each time Javan came past on his way to the cellar, and although she saw him stop a couple of times and gaze at something in the pile, as if he thought that not everything in it was fit to be tossed, he said nothing, just smiled and went on, or set down his buckets of potatoes and went over to hug her.

Her washing continued for several days, it wasn’t only the floors that needed scrubbing, but all the walls, and ceilings, and all the drawers and cupboards. She cleaned the few carpets she hadn’t discarded, all the tablecloths and all the curtains, these looked almost bashful she thought, suddenly hanging there in their original colors after all these years. As if they felt they were better than they ought to be.

In the evenings, when the day’s work was done, she took two buckets and a spade and walked across the field and into the forest on the other side, filled the buckets with earth, carried them down, and emptied them on the protruding rocks. She spent a couple of hours on this each evening. One bucket of earth made no difference, the little speck of black soil looked risible and useless, and if she raised her head and looked at all the other rocks that were there, rather like an archipelago, her project seemed even more doomed and ridiculous, and two buckets of earth made no difference, nor three, but at some point it would turn, at some point, if she just kept going long enough, the whole of the first rock would be covered, and then the next, and the next, and the next, until all the rocks on the whole farm would be covered, and then it would no longer resemble a poor man’s plot with barren, stony soil, but a proper farm.

The hours she spent with buckets in her hands were among her finest memories of that autumn. Even though she was tired after a long day, and her fingers were so stiff she could hardly close them around the handles, she experienced the world more profoundly than she did during the rest of the day: from within the forest’s dimness she could see how the country fit together, how it changed imperceptibly from one state to another, wooded hillsides, meadows, copses, fields, hummocks, escarpments. She saw how, at last, the land lowered itself gently down into the fjord, she saw the fjord, night glossy, plumb deep, she saw the mountain wall stand sheer on the other side, and she saw the sky arching over the earth with its twinkling stars.