Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

She put her hand on Javan’s shoulder.

“Could you ask him to drive a bit more carefully?” she said.

“David likes to drive fast,” Javan said.

He wasn’t thinking of the child.

“I’m scared of losing the baby,” she said. “Please.”

He looked at her. Then he put his arm around her.

“I’ll hold you,” he said.

“Don’t you understand anything,” she said. “We could lose the baby!”

The trap was still jolting just as much.

He looked at her again. Then he stood and looked at David, with his broad back hunched forward with the reins in one hand and the whip in the other.

When he sat down again and met her gaze, there was something almost anguished in his eyes.

“It’ll be all right,” he said, patting her on the knee. “We’ll soon be there. I’ll ask him to drive a bit slower on the way back, instead.”

She sat there for perhaps ten seconds more. Then she felt as if her rage and fear exploded inside her. She turned, tried to tug at David’s coat to make him turn, but the material was too slippery, her hand merely slid off, instead, she leaned forward and slapped him on the cheek.

He turned his head instantly, at the same time pulling at the reins.

“Are you mad, woman!” he shouted. “What is this?”

“Let me down!” she shouted back. “I want to get down! Now!”

The horse trotted a few yards farther, then stopped. Anna got down and began to walk off as fast as she could, without looking back.

If he doesn’t come now , she thought. If he doesn’t come now, I’m leaving him .

She heard voices behind her. Then the cart moved off and shortly afterward she heard his footsteps.

He said nothing. She said nothing, either. They walked through the rain, and everything was totally black inside her. No thoughts. No images. Just this bottomless blackness.

Occasionally a great wave of fury would rise up in it. She hated him then. She hated him for his spinelessness, she hated him for his submissiveness. She hated him for his kindliness, she hated him for his consideration.

When they got home, and he lit the lamp in the living room, she began to hit herself. Sitting in the sofa she struck herself with clenched fists in the face and the head.

He shouted her name, she hardly heard him. Long after he’d caught up her hands and held them fast, she still tried to beat herself.

He held her close, and then once again things gave way within her. This time it was tears that came.

And her first clear thought.

How can he comfort me, he who’s the cause of everything?

After that evening something in his behavior altered. The concern he lavished on her changed character; it seemed to expect other things from her now than it had done, and she thought that at last he’d understood that her feelings were true feelings, not just the products of her age or background. When she awoke the next day, and for the first time managed to think through what had happened, she came to the decision that she’d no longer acquiesce in everything he wanted. It was her home too. He had to choose between them and her. She never again wanted to see the tortured look he’d worn in the cart, not so much for her own sake but for his. The sake of his own dignity.

“But that’s impossible,” he said. “You’ve got to understand that.”

“Why is it impossible?” she asked. “Aren’t you the master of your own house?”

He gave her a long look. She was torturing him, she knew that of course, but it was for his own good. At the same time there was also something in her that hoped he would say no to her. But he didn’t.

“Yes, of course,” was all he said.

A fortnight later he went off for the fishing season. He was away all spring, and wasn’t there when she gave birth. Before he left, he’d arranged for one of his maternal aunts to look after her during the months he was away. Small, black-clad, and grim, she would come hobbling up the hill to the house a couple of times each week. During her confinement itself, Anna had no memories of the woman, but someone must have helped her. The birth was a long one, it lasted nearly twenty-four hours, but she remembered almost nothing about it subsequently. She recalled fear. She recalled pain. She recalled loneliness. And that right at the end, in the midst of a pain so deep and all-pervasive that it numbed thought itself, she’d had the notion, in a sudden flash, that the baby was dead. She felt it, and the suspicion grew to such a certainty that she found new energy in the final hours: she wanted to push the dead thing out of her.

But the child wasn’t dead. It lived, and it lived double: ten minutes later another arrived, absolutely identical.

Those first hours were happy ones. Her body was battered and torn, it felt as if she’d fallen off a mountain, but when she lay with warm babies close to her, she felt the pain only vaguely, as if it were somewhere far away. They’d been born early in the morning and it was only toward midday that she fell asleep, just for an hour or two, but when she awoke all peace had been shattered. The next few hours were a chaos of limbs and mouths, unknown desires, and screams. Then it calmed down again. And it continued to alternate like this during the first weeks. She cried a lot, but was happy much of the time. She wrote letters to Javan, they went with a young lad who was going out. She told him it was twins, that everything had gone well, but that she yearned for him and hoped he was coming back soon. She signed them your Anna .

So when there was a knock at the front door one morning, she was sure it was Javan. She thought he might be wanting to come into the house a bit more formally now that he was a father, and that was why he knocked.

But when she opened the door with a child in the crook of each arm, it was Lamech who stood there.

“Father?” she said.

“We heard what’s been happening here,” he said. “So I thought I ought to come over and see how you were doing.”

He leaned forward, stroked the cheek of first one and then the other. “Are they sleeping?” he asked.

They went in, she laid the swaddled babies down on a blanket, made coffee and served it to him with some cakes at the living room table. He asked where Javan was, she said he was away at the fishery.

“I see,” he said.

“This is Omak,” she said, pointing to one of the babies. “Can you see, he’s got a bit of string around one arm? It’s the only way I can tell them apart.”

“They’re alike, certainly,” said Lamech.

“And this is Ophir. Would you like to hold him?”

Her father shook his head emphatically.

He’d crossed the mountain overnight, and as he’d planned to return the same day, his visit lasted barely an hour. He didn’t look about while he was there, never rested his eyes on anything other than her or the view. She thought she knew what he was thinking, and even though she didn’t want to complain, she couldn’t hold it back. She spoke of everything that had happened that autumn, including what Javan had turned out to be. Her father listened to her without saying anything. His mouth in a constant twist of displeasure.

“There hasn’t been a day when I haven’t thought of coming back,” she said. “And now these two little ones have arrived. Will they have to grow up here? ”

He rose and went over to the window, looked down at the fjord.

“Perhaps it’s the opposite, Anna,” he said. “Perhaps it’s good for you and them to live here. Perhaps it wouldn’t be good for you to move back to the valley.”

He turned to her.

“That’s what I think,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she said. “Haven’t you heard a word of what I’ve been saying?”