Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Lamech once said: If only there was a bit of wickedness in those two boys! Just a bit of wickedness, and they’d be fine .

They always stuck together, the two of them, and usually were unhappy only on the occasions when they were separated. They sat chatting together in the evenings, they slept together, washed together, had breakfast together, played together, worked together. They laughed at the same things, wondered about the same things, talked about the same things. This unity was their great strength, because while they had each other, they didn’t need anyone else, but it was also their weakness, because since their earliest boyhood they’d had a tendency to shut the rest of the world out, a tendency that increased during their adolescence, so that, by their early twenties, each had become the embodiment of the other’s future. Anna feared that, like two old maids, they’d end up sitting in their room, and for a time she tried to separate them: when they were sixteen, she sent Omak to the winter fishery, while Ophir stayed to help on the farm. Her hope was that each would form ties on his own behalf, make friends, meet a girl perhaps, start to stand on his own feet. But they simply made themselves ill pining for one another, they were desperately unhappy in their separate lives, and the acquaintances they did make paled into insignificance as soon as they were reunited back on the farm.

Would things have been like this for them if they’d stayed on the holding by the fjord? Everything was smaller there, even the threshold to other people. Occasionally when she thought about it, she was overwhelmed by a sudden pain. If she’d acted wrongly toward Javan, she could live with it, he was a grown man, she wasn’t responsible for him, but Omak and Ophir were children, they had no part in the decision, they’d simply been transplanted here — and the thought that it had been an added complication in their lives was hard to bear.

But then, they were happy. She could see that. They got along well, both in each other’s company and with the others on the farm, they laughed and joked all the time — so why did it give her such pain to think about them sometimes?

Maybe because the twins themselves didn’t realize anyone could look at their lives in this manner. They had no inkling that in many people’s eyes they were inadequate.

They were as innocent as two babes, and they would remain so until the day they died.

For Javan, too, the farm in the valley was too big, although in a rather different sense. His problem wasn’t that he didn’t live up to expectation, but that he never managed, or ever quite wanted, to take control of it. It never became his. All the tools, all the sheds, stores, houses, and outhouses, all the fields and pastures, remained alien to him. One could read that in him. Anna never got completely used to his being there, she caught herself thinking this several years after they’d moved there. Is Javan here? As far as she was concerned, it was the house she’d grown up in. It was the house of Barak, Noah, Lamech, and Milka. Javan represented life outside. Now he was inside, but it was only as if he were there on a quick visit.

She recalled the first time his family had come visiting. She had hardly met them before, but now they came trooping in. His parents, his brothers, his brothers’ families. They’d dressed up, his mother in a flower-patterned dress and a rather silly hat, his father and brothers in the men’s customary black suits. Javan met them, welcomed them, and led them into the living room. There sat Lamech, the embodiment of all authority. He had the naturalness Javan lacked, he had the intimacy with his surroundings Javan lacked, and when he rose and left the room after a curt nod to the strange company, they all felt they had been left alone. That they weren’t supposed to be there. And this in their own son’s and brother’s home. It was bad, very bad, but there was nothing Anna could do about it. The fact that the land wasn’t his , that the forest wasn’t his , that he felt all the time as if he were walking in another man’s footsteps, was doing another man’s work, was wearing another man’s clothes, meant that he never settled down to anything he was doing, and this was a vicious circle, for if he wasn’t absorbed in it, it lost its meaning, and when it lost its meaning, his absorption was even less. He was never completely apathetic, but indifferent enough to allow Anna to take over some of the responsibility, while he increasingly began to spend his time on more peripheral things. Some of these worked out. He had done woodwork with his father for many years, he was good at it, and one day he began to pull down the cowshed, which was several generations old, and put up a new one in the course of the autumn. Some weren’t so successful. Like the singular, long, low building he erected by the river one spring. At last, he must have thought, he had the time and money to realize one of the projects he’d hatched over the years. He’d constructed a building in which he could breed mink. And the building was excellent, with its many small cages side by side, and clever systems for pushing food and drink into them on small trays, but when he finally got hold of two live mink, trapped by an acquaintance farther down the valley, and placed them in the same cage to mate, the one tore the other’s throat out. He made another attempt, but when the same thing happened again, only that this time it was the experienced cage-mink that was killed by the newcomer, he gave up. So the mink shed stood there, an object of general amusement, a kind of monument to his folly, which he didn’t even have the wit to demolish.

He also drifted down to the village. No one on the farm had ever done that before.

And so their lives went on. The first year they had another child, little Rachel, who was quite different from her brothers, wary as a bird and every bit as thin. But pretty. There was a lot of Noah in her, and to her delight Anna saw that her father, who had by now retired from all responsibility on the farm, took care of her as he’d once done with Noah. From a tender age she’d had a penchant for being on her own, but Lamech had her trust. There must have been something in him that she recognized, Anna sometimes thought, that Noah, too, had known.

Barak came more often into her thoughts here. Almost every morning after her work in the cowshed, she would take a short walk up the wooded hillside above the river. There, everything was as before. The fallen tree still lay there, the little hillside still dipped down to the forest beneath, the river still ran past through the branches of the trees, on clear days you could still see the ice from the glacier shining at the head of the valley, and on dark winter mornings the fire from the cherubim still lit up the sky in the west as it had done the evening she’d sat there mulling over the future.

That time seemed infinitely far away now. Almost as if it had happened in another age. This was also true of the vicinity of the summer farm, that she now inhabited with her daughter. When she looked at the places where she and Javan had been then, and thought about what they’d done, it was as if she were thinking of two totally different people.

Just as Javan had represented what was new in her life, her father was the sole remaining link to the old. And now that he was no longer working, he often did what he’d never had time to do previously, sit and talk to her. She told him how much she’d longed for that when she’d been young and Noah had taken up all his attention; he told her how they’d considered that she might manage, while he needed them, he needed them all the time, and she asked if he missed him.

Her father had shaken his head. I miss Barak, and I missed you, but I’ve never missed Noah , he’d said. Why not? she’d asked. I don’t know why , he’d said. But it was right for him to leave. I know that .