The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “Wow, Marie!” Gaute exclaimed in the background.

  He’d been standing next to me as I filmed and had put his arm around me.

  What would he say if I told him I was leaving him?

  But I wasn’t.

  I wasn’t.

  I put the phone back in my bag. The noise of the engines changed; we must have already started our descent.

  He wouldn’t understand. He’d think I’d found someone else. It would be the only explanation he’d be able to comprehend.

  “What have I done?” he would say. “Is there something I can do differently?”

  What was I supposed to say then?

  I hadn’t found anyone else, he hadn’t done anything, and there was nothing he could change to make it any better.

  But what is it, then?

  We’ve nothing but the children in common anymore, haven’t you noticed?

  No. We’ve got everything in common. We have a life together.

  I’m sorry, Gaute. But I can’t go on.

  Would he cry? Would he be angry? Would he refuse to have anything to do with me after that?

  No, I couldn’t leave him. I had no reason to. Besides, it would be devastating for the children. Especially for Peter, who was so sensitive. Things were difficult enough for him as it was.

  Was I really that selfish? So selfish that I would completely mess up our children’s lives and Gaute’s too, just because I felt like it?

  Below, the lights of the city came into view. It wasn’t often I’d seen it from that angle; usually the flights came in from the south, over the rugged fells and the small islands there, but now I could see the entire city clearly: there was Sandviken, there was Nordnes, there was Bryggen, there was Klosteret, there was Sydneshaugen.

  The sky was clear, and the lights of the Vågen harbor district shimmered on the inky water.

  * * *

  —

  After the long walkways of Gardermoen, it felt good to enter the small airport terminal and walk just a few meters to the staircase leading down to the baggage reclaim area and the exit.

  At the bottom I paused to put my case down and pull the handle up when there was a voice behind me.

  “I didn’t think priests were supposed to tell lies.”

  It was the man from the elevator. He smiled.

  I began to walk away.

  “No offense,” he said, coming up alongside me. “Only you said you weren’t going to Bergen. And where are you now?”

  “Do I know you?” I said without looking at him, pressing on.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  I knew I shouldn’t say anything, that it would only encourage him further, yet there was something about him that invited me to ask:

  “How do you know I’m a priest?”

  “I go to church now and then,” he said. “I’ve noticed you. You’re a good priest. You’ve got lots of interesting thoughts. Not all priests have.”

  I said nothing, but carried on through the exit, and when I halted outside to get my bearings and look for the taxi rank he was gone.

  * * *

  —

  Torgallmenningen lay almost deserted in front of me as I walked toward the hotel. Only the odd night owl was about. The hotel was in one of the side streets off the square. I’d booked the room from the taxi. It felt strange to be in town in such circumstances. I crossed Torgallmenningen several times a week and had done so nearly all my life—this was my city, it was where I’d grown up and spent my entire working life—but all sense of familiarity and belonging seemed suddenly to have dissolved. I wasn’t supposed to be there, I reasoned, and so I felt detached from it all.

  It was as if I’d put my whole life to one side.

  As if for one night I was now someone else.

  A woman in her twenties was standing behind the reception desk in the lobby and glanced at me as I came in through the door, only then to continue staring at the screen in front of her. I heard the clicking of her keyboard. Her face was pale and rather full, in contrast to her slim figure, formally dressed in a blue jacket, blue skirt and white blouse. Her lips were too red, but her hair was thick and beautiful. It made me want to be her. She looked like she had no problems, and even if she did, they wouldn’t have been anything I couldn’t have solved.

  “Kathrine Reinhardsen,” I said. “I phoned just a short time ago and booked a room until tomorrow.”

  She looked up and smiled.

  “Hi, and welcome,” she said. “I’ve got your key ready for you here. If you’d just like to sign your name?”

  She placed a sheet of paper and a pen on the counter, and once I’d signed she handed me the key.

  “So, you’ll be on the third floor. The elevator’s over there. Breakfast between seven and ten. OK?”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “Goodnight!”

  “Goodnight,” I said, and pulled my case behind me to the elevator. The walls inside were mirrors and I stared at the floor as we slid upward.

  There were no sounds to be heard from any of the rooms I passed along the carpeted corridor. I unlocked the door at the end and stepped inside. The room was a lot smaller than I’d envisaged when this ridiculous idea had occurred to me.

  I felt stupid.

  I left the case where it was, unopened in the middle of the floor, and lay down on the bed without removing my coat or shoes.

  Now they would all be asleep at home. My family.

  And I was lying there.

  What should I do?

  Go to a bar?

  It would only make things worse.

  Go for a walk, then?

  I stood up, slipped the key card into the inside pocket of my coat and went out again. First down to the ferry terminal, then out in the direction of Nordnes, past the old city gate and up to Klosteret, the old town, the houses there incandescent in the yellow light of the street lamps. There was a chill in the air, it felt uplifting after the long, hot summer. I walked all the way to the park at the far end, sat down on a bench at the point and gazed out at the lights across the fjord.

  What a lovely evening it was, I thought to myself. And then I thought of the children and started to cry.

  When I stopped, I looked around, feeling suddenly unprotected.

  If only I could talk to someone.

  There was nothing I couldn’t share with Camilla. But I couldn’t phone her now, not this late. Anyway, I didn’t know what to say. It was nothing.

  Sigrid, whom I’d know all my life, was another person I could talk to about anything. Apart from Gaute and our relationship. Her husband, Martin, had become good friends with Gaute, and I didn’t quite trust her not to divulge to him the things we talked about. Or rather, I trusted her, but a person’s loyalty to their partner is so often greater than to their friends.

  It was just the way it was.

  But when had I last told Gaute anything that no one else knew?

  I’d even kept my great crisis from him.

  Someone came walking along the path behind me. I turned to look, but there was no danger, it was just an elderly couple with a dog.

  I got my phone out and scrolled through my contacts.

  Stopping at my mother’s number.

  I could phone her late, she wouldn’t mind.

  But did I want to?

  I put my hands in my coat pockets, pressed my arms close to my body.

  The darkness in the tall trees around me was dense and seemed almost to be a part of them as they loomed there, black against the sky.

  When I was a child, I’d known every tree in the neighborhood. In my mind they were individuals, each with their own particular characteristics, though the thought hadn’t ever been so explicit. They bent down to me, and like feelings see
ped into my consciousness. Birch, oak, spruce, pine, aspen, ash, rowan.

  My father had been like a tree. Wasn’t that what I’d thought when I’d sat on his shoulders so high above the ground with my hands holding on to his head?

  I remembered his hands, they were so big. And I remembered his beard. His eyes, the gleam in them. But if I tried to think about him, those images dissolved and I was left with only the vaguest suggestion of him ever having lived.

  He existed only at the edgelands of my thoughts now, the habitation of the vague. Suddenly, I saw myself surrounded by great, living creations. Silent and inscrutable, neither hostile nor friendly, and quite without opinion regarding us little people, who always scuttled and scurried about at such a speed that they themselves could not comprehend it, nor even did they care. And they were living creations, not just things, as people so often considered them.

  As a teenager I’d read an absolutely staggering poem in The Book of Hours by Rilke. My God is dark, it said,

  and like a webbing made

  of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

  I know that my trunk rose from his warmth, but that’s all,

  because my branches hardly move at all

  near the ground, and just wave a little in the wind.

  It was the first time the thought of God transcended me and what was mine.

  The trees were living creations, and God was their creator.

  The darkness, the earth, the moisture: this was the God of the trees.

  What was my God?

  What was my warmth?

  I’d said that I was a Christian long before I became one. Someone in my class had been a member of Ten Sing and persuaded me to go along with them one night. I knew my mother would dislike the idea intensely, and perhaps that was part of the reason I went, because it was something forbidden that wasn’t actually illegal. I was thirteen years old, with a right to my own life. That was basically how I felt. When I was sixteen, I left Ten Sing and joined a church choir, with whom a year later I attended a choir festival in Kraków, Poland. We sang in a magnificent old church, and as our voices filled the room I heard them as if from without, at the same time as I was a part of them, and my soul filled with an intense joy and delight, stronger and purer than anything I had ever known, and in the same way, both from without and within. I think it had to do with being alive, the feeling of being alive, but also of belonging, of being a part of some greater connection, and it was in that connection all meaning resided.

  These had been the feelings of a seventeen-year-old. But they were still valid now, more than twenty years on, they were still true, regardless of how much experience and knowledge I’d gained. Meaning wasn’t in me, meaning wasn’t in another, meaning arose in the encounter between us. Singing in the choir was the simplest example of that. And the teachings of Christ were about practicing it. Everyone was equal, everyone was a part of something greater, and in that greater thing was God. The radicality of that idea could not be overestimated. But in order to properly understand it one had to peel away two thousand years of theological history and look at what Jesus actually did and said. He had sought those who were marginalized, those without a voice, the oppressed. In one of the few passages of the Bible where a woman is heard, namely in the Magnificat, Mary says of the Lord that He put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted the humble and meek; that He filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away. The Lord she exalted was subversive. And the child to which she gave birth, Jesus, later went among the ostracized and the unliked, the sick and the poor, lepers and whores. His message, that we are all of us equal before God, cannot live as theory, for the majority are excluded from theory, which was precisely why Jesus went among the disenfranchised rather than aspiring to join the Scribes, or the theorists, as I tended to refer to them. There was a chasm between the theorists and the ordinary run of people, and there was a chasm between the ordinary run of people and those at the bottom of society. The teachings of Christ were practical: he did not write about those he went among, did not write even for their sake, but went among them. Talked with them, listened to them, included them. All were equal, all were a part of something greater, and in that greater thing was God. And in God grace, in God forgiveness, in God the fullness of being.

  That was my warmth.

  But what good was it when I couldn’t even sustain my relationship to the people who were closest to me in my life?

  I pictured myself arriving home, pecking Gaute on the lips, bending down to hug Peter and Marie, finding their presents in my suitcase, catching Gaute’s smiling look over the top of their heads as they unwrapped them, smiling myself.

  It was theater.

  It wasn’t me.

  But who was I then?

  What did I want, if things could be exactly as I wanted them?

  Did I want to install myself in a little post-divorce apartment, with the children every other week?

  I turned the phone so the screen lit up, and saw that it was just past midnight. I found Mum’s number and tapped it.

  It rang for a while.

  “Is there something wrong?” her voice said when at last she answered. “Are the children all right?”

  “Hi, Mum,” I said. “Everything’s fine. I’m sorry to be calling so late. Were you asleep?”

  “Yes, I was asleep. What time is it? It’s the middle of the night, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said, and wished I hadn’t phoned. I didn’t know what to say, or if there was anything to say at all.

  “What is it, then?”

  “Nothing, really,” I said. “Or rather . . .”

  “Or rather what?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “I didn’t go home tonight. I went to a hotel.”

  “What for?” she said. Her voice was so objective and unsentimental that I had to resist the feeling of being rejected. It was the way she was. It had nothing to do with me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Are you crying?” she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Are you and Gaute having problems?”

  I wiped my tears with the sleeve of my coat.

  “In a way, I suppose,” I said.

  “Do you want to divorce him?”

  I didn’t answer.

  There was a silence at the other end too.

  “I don’t know, Mum,” I said. “I think so. Or no. I can’t really, can I?”

  I began to sob.

  “Where are you now?” she said.

  “Nordnes.”

  “Can we meet up tomorrow and talk about it properly?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How about lunch? Half past twelve at Kafé Oscar?”

  “All right,” I said.

  “You get yourself a good night’s sleep,” she said. “It’ll all look different in the morning, and then we’ll have lunch.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight,” I said, but she’d already hung up.

  * * *

  —

  As I slept, the nausea stirred and grew inside me. I sensed it in my dream, imposing itself, though without my waking. For what felt like a long time, it was a place from which I tried to escape, but it kept drawing me toward it. It had no name, and was nowhere in particular, just a place from which I wanted away. Gradually, thoughts began to interject—I feel sick, why do I feel sick?—and I drifted in and out between them, thoughts that were neither mine nor not mine, until at last I identified them as my own, and opened my eyes.

  It felt as if the slightest movement would cause me to vomit.

  For a while, I lay quite still in the hope that it would pass. But then suddenly it
all welled up, I jumped out of bed, dashed for the bathroom, knelt in front of the toilet bowl and let everything spew out.

  Afterward, I brushed my teeth, and stood under the shower for some time before getting dressed and sitting down on the edge of the bed to text Gaute and tell him everything was all right, and to remind him about what the children needed to take with them to school, and the bill he had to remember to pay.

  Mum was right: it all looked different now.

  I sent her a text to say that the conflict had resolved itself, apologized for having phoned her so late, and told her we no longer needed to meet up for lunch.

  I don’t believe it, not for a minute, she wrote back. Besides, what if I wanted to see you? Half past twelve.

  She was such an annoying person. Not least because when she thought she could see through a matter, it very often turned out that she was right. I’d always had to contend with it. Struggled to hold on to my illusions, even though I knew they were illusions, just because it was she who pointed her finger at them.

  As you wish, I replied. Looking forward to seeing you!

  I deleted the exclamation mark, finding it made the message come across too chirpy. Without, it was measured, ominous almost, but at least closer to the way I felt.

  As you wish. Looking forward to seeing you.

  She didn’t reply, and I called Karin to tell her I wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be in today, but that I would try to get some work done at home. It wasn’t untrue, I’d just been sick after all, and for the next two hours I sat at the little desk in my room, replying to e-mails, running through the funeral order for the day after, and continuing my discussion with Erlend about translating Leviticus, and my ongoing quarrel about Ezekiel with Harald, whom I so disagreed with on some points that our correspondence bordered on conflict.