Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

He made no answer, just bent over the twins, who were still sleeping, and stroked their cheeks again.

“I must go now,” he said.

She stood at the door watching him go down the hill. He walked quickly, as he always did, with his own characteristic gait, with his right foot seeming to slap against the ground at each step. When he’d disappeared behind the knoll by the river, and she went in to the twins, she felt more alone than she ever had before.

But at the same time something had turned. The whole of the first year she’d looked away from the life there. It had been as if she stood with her back to it all. Looked toward the valley was what she’d done, it was there she thought the future lay. In the years that followed she did what he’d said, thought the opposite, if unwillingly and sarcastically to begin with, and extraordinary as the idea subsequently seemed, she had actually never thought the thought before: that this was where her life was.

It didn’t change everything: she hated the poverty that marked their lives, which manifested itself in everything from the children’s clothes to the food they ate, the earth they tilled, and the house they lived in — and which had also stamped itself on her face, she saw it on the rare occasions she glanced in the mirror, something dull and lackluster had come into her skin and eyes, as if her entire being was covered in a thin layer of dust — but something had changed, perhaps the most important thing of all: she began to view it as hers. She began to put down roots. Maybe there was even something good about the idea, which at first she’d regarded as the most terrible one of all: There’s no way back . But only maybe. For even during these years it was the knowledge that she could leave the place at any moment that fueled her tenacity.

Life with Javan evened out as well. He carried on with his things, fiddled about in his boat, did some felling in the forest, tinkered with plans for building a mill up by the river, which he could hire out, spoke to neighbors about constructing a breakwater out in the bay, was for a time the moving spirit behind an idea he’d had for trapping mink and getting them to breed, just as one did with dogs, what money there might be in that, with the prices that pelts were fetching now? Nothing of this came to anything, of course; Javan was all talk and no action. But he was in his element, she could see that. It still happened sometimes that they rediscovered what they had seen in each other in those first few weeks, and the strange thing about these times was that they could set aside everything that had happened to them since. And perhaps even more strange was the affirmation she felt for what she did. Wasn’t there a pleasure in standing blushing before him again? Wasn’t there a pleasure in lying naked before his gaze, bashful and yet quivering with desire? Wasn’t there a pleasure in laughing when he entertained her afterward?

There was a radiance in them now. She no longer saw him as weak, she no longer saw him as lightweight, a man who drifted, she saw only the radiance in him. The radiance in her. The radiance in them.

Gradually, as Omak and Ophir grew, she thought less and less about the people at home. The twins and her work about the farm took all her time. They had three cows now, and they’d also got a few sheep. The house had been extended and painted: now it lay on its prominence and shone. They had built a new outhouse. And all the protruding rocks had long since been concealed under a thick covering of grass and flowers.

It still sometimes happened that her grief over Barak would touch her, but it was many years since she’d wept over him. Noah was in her thoughts more often. He was the only one of them she really missed. They’d grown up together, and although their characters were very different, there had always been a special intimacy between them. She hadn’t felt the intimacy when she lived within it, it was only now, when it was no longer there, that she saw it. Her father didn’t know her, he never had, nor did her mother, not really, and Javan certainly not. But Noah did.

Did he feel the same about her, wherever he was now?

From what Javan had heard, he was away in the forests northeast of Nod living as a trapper. On a couple of occasions people from the valley had seen him trekking into town in the evening to sell his pelts and buy provisions. It sounded like a lonely life, but presumably it was better, she thought, than the one he’d had on the farm, where he’d constantly had to conform to everything he wasn’t, rather than be what he was.

In her mind’s eye she could see his expressionless face as he’d passed her that evening; how, without turning, he’d climbed the fence and vanished into the forest, and she remembered what she’d thought. That Noah was choosing for her as well. In a flash she’d seen how her life would turn out. No, she’d known how it would turn out. Barak had gone, Noah had gone, but she couldn’t go. She had to live her life there. Just because on that evening she hadn’t listened to the thing in her that knew, but pushed it aside in favor of her easily swayed reason, didn’t mean that she had to go on with it forever. The knowledge hadn’t gone, it lay in a place no argument could reach, and rather than being diminished by the years, it had grown bigger. She remembered her own childhood, suffered to see the circumstances her own children were growing up in, and when her mother died ten years after Anna had left for the fjord, she decided to act on her intuition.

The children were still young enough, they had turned nine, not only to take in their new surroundings but to be molded by them, and Javan. . Javan. . were his roots out here too deep? No, Javan had no roots anywhere. The problem was that he was content with life as it was. She suspected that he’d rather be a poor smallholder here than a well-to-do farmer there.

And so it turned out. She’d gone to Milka’s funeral alone, talked to Lamech, he had no objections, on the contrary, in his heart of hearts it was really something that he’d been hoping for — it was just a question of making the move.

But Javan wouldn’t.

They sat on the slope at the back of the house, the sun shone, the wind blew, there were white-crested waves on the sun-spangled fjord below them.

“We belong here,” he said.

“Then I’ll take the children and go without you,” she said.

He sighed, wrapped his arms round his knees, gazed outward.

“I mean it,” she said.

“I know you mean it,” he said. “But you’re being too hasty. We must think this through carefully.”

“I’ve already done that.”

“I said we ,” he retorted. “We know who we are here. But what will we become there? We’ll have to think it through. And then we can decide. Perhaps you’re right, perhaps it’s best to go, perhaps not.”

Anna realized that he was trying to leave himself an escape route. He didn’t want to do it, but by saying they had to think, not rejecting her view, he could later acquiesce without losing face.

“Yes,” she said. “That sounds sensible. But we haven’t got forever to make up our minds.”

“No,” he said. “We haven’t.”

So the decision was made. When they got up from the slope that afternoon, they both knew they would go. The planned consideration was merely a sham.

Just how well-founded his reservations had been she realized only many years later.

What did they become there?

Out by the fjord the children had been themselves, two little boys like peas in a pod, straightforward and happy, not exactly quick-witted, but they laughed easily, were full of consideration, and filled their parents’ hearts with delight. When they moved to the valley, they obviously went on being just what they were. What changed was the way they were viewed. Suddenly there arose the question of whether they were good enough. They were measured against a future, the farm’s future, and against that they fell short.