The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Mum sat watching me as I went back and forth between the kitchen and garden. It was the first time we’d eaten outside all summer, for some reason it seemed such an extravagant thing to do when it was just the two of us.

  When everything was ready I gave Line a shout and helped Mum to the table.

  She was still well enough to eat on her own as long as I cut her food into bite-sized pieces. It was an exertion for her, and rather painstaking, but it was important she managed while Line was there. Her helplessness bothered her especially then, I knew. It wasn’t the way she wanted her grandchild to remember her.

  Line stared blankly at the table as she ate, immersed in her own world, while Mum kept glancing at her, bent over her plate, moving her trembling hand to and from her mouth.

  She whispered something and I leaned toward her so I could hear what it was.

  Thomas, was that it?

  “Thomas,” I repeated. “Are you asking Line how Thomas is getting on?”

  “Yes,” she breathed.

  “He’s doing fine, Gran,” Line said, remembering to lift her voice. “He’s thinking of going to college.”

  “What sort of college?” I said.

  “Police college,” she said. “But he’s got to meet the admission criteria first.”

  The breeze from the fjord made the branches around us sway and rustle their leaves. Sometimes, when the wind rose, it was as if the trees braced themselves, reaching up onto their toes before releasing again and sinking back.

  “Have you told Gran what subject you’re going to be doing?” I said.

  “No,” said Line. “I’m sure you have though.”

  She looked up at me, as if to gauge my reaction, before looking down at her food again.

  I gave Mum some water, holding the glass to her lips. She didn’t quite manage to swallow, and some of it ran down her chin. I tore off a piece of kitchen towel and wiped it away hastily, as if by the by.

  “Psychology,” Mum whispered.

  “Gran says psychology,” I said. “So yes, we must have talked about it! Are you looking forward to it?”

  Line nodded enthusiastically and gave her a smile. I could tell her enthusiasm was affected, but whatever it was that was preying on her mind, it was gratifying at least that she made an effort to please her grandmother.

  * * *

  —

  After dinner, Line went up to her room and I helped Mum into the living room where I put the television on for her before sitting down again outside with a cup of coffee to enjoy the last of the sunshine.

  Overhead, some crows came flying up from the fjord. More followed, and soon the sky was teeming with birds. It was like a curtain of living flesh, I thought to myself, beautiful, shimmering patterns of black and darkest blue that a moment later broke up as the crows began to settle in the line of trees leading up to the churchyard a bit farther away where they had their nests.

  Upstairs, a window opened and I heard the sound of Line’s voice, soft and gentle amid the gruff squawking of the crows in the trees.

  Who was she talking to?

  It wouldn’t be Thomas. Although they were involved to a certain extent in each other’s lives, they didn’t actually have that much in common apart from being brother and sister. I certainly couldn’t imagine her phoning him now just for a chat.

  A friend, then?

  Or perhaps she was going out with someone and hadn’t let on?

  She was leaning halfway out, her arm resting against the sill, the phone in her other hand. Our eyes met and I smiled. She smiled back before lifting her head and looking out at the landscape.

  I hoped she saw the beauty in it. The steep fell, the quiet waters of the fjord, the slowly darkening sky, and, on the other side, the treetops now reddened by the dwindling sun.

  * * *

  —

  In the kitchen, I found the dishwasher had stopped working. It kept stuttering as if it had got stuck, and when I opened it, it was full of water. Presumably, the hose was clogged, perhaps it was calcium build-up. I made a note to phone someone about it in the morning.

  I emptied everything out of it and started washing it all up by hand.

  The thudding of the dishes against the bottom of the sink, the dull, rounded sound they made, gave me a peaceful feeling. The warmth that enveloped my hands did too, and the networks of tiny bubbles that slid from the surface of the plates as I lifted them up to rinse them in the adjoining sink.

  Ever since childhood, I’d connected those grumbling underwater sounds with creatures. Big, stubby grubs, gray and without eyes.

  It was one of those things I could never tell anyone, I thought, and smiled to myself.

  Oddly, I saw Inge’s face as I thought about it.

  Had he made such an impression on me?

  I was tired, that’s all, I thought, and looked up. The sky above the fell on the other side of the fjord was still blue, whereas the details of the sheer fellside, stretching away for several kilometers, were now being erased by the dimming twilight.

  I tried to imagine what it must be like to see something that wasn’t there. And to believe in it. That the fell didn’t actually exist other than in my head. That all of a sudden a man was standing in the kitchen looking at me.

  If I turned round now, he would be there.

  I smiled again and laid a tea towel on the work surface to put the clean dishes on, instead of the overfilled rack.

  The floor upstairs creaked.

  What was it that was preying on her mind?

  Her footsteps sounded on the staircase and then she was standing in the doorway.

  “Going for a walk,” she said.

  “Good idea,” I said. “Where were you thinking of going?”

  “Up to the waterfall, maybe.”

  A minute later she went past outside the window, putting on her jacket. Everything about her seemed so strangely clear and well-defined against the dusk.

  Her high cheekbones and the faintly sweeping line of her eyes made her beautiful.

  But she was negative too. A person who demanded and took without giving.

  A negative person.

  How had she got to be like that?

  No, that wasn’t how she was at all. It was how she was now. She was young, still facing off with the world, but a time would come when she would be able to open herself to it and receive what it had to offer, and then she would be able to give.

  I heard her voice in my mind. “Mum, you’re so naive,” it said. “Mum, you don’t even believe that yourself, do you?”

  I took a clean towel from the cupboard and dried my hands, hung it over the handle of the oven door and went in to see to Mum. She’d dropped off, but wasn’t yet quite asleep; as I sat down on the pouf in front of her, she opened her eyes.

  “Do you want me to massage your feet a bit?” I said.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  I put her legs up in my lap and began to cautiously bend and stretch them. Her muscles would often stiffen and she would cramp up several times a day, usually very painfully. Massage helped, and walking helped.

  I rubbed her calves.

  Her arms, stiffly bent at the elbows, trembled as I worked. Her head trembled too, her lower jaw trembled.

  It hurt so much to see her that way.

  But her eyes were bright.

  She whispered something.

  “What was that, Mum?” I said, leaning toward her.

  “Line,” she whispered.

  “How’s Line? Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think something’s troubling her. But she hasn’t mentioned anything.”

  “Ask?” she whispered.

  “Yes, I could ask,” I said. “But I’d rather s
he came to me of her own accord. I’m thinking it might be why she came. What do you think?”

  “Yes.”

  I took her feet in my hands and began squeezing and rubbing them.

  “Do you remember when I would come home at her age?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I shared everything with you, do you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think you ever told me anything about yourself, though.”

  “No.”

  Her eyes lit up in a smile.

  I turned her foot gently in an arc.

  She tried to formulate a sentence.

  I heard you, I heard don’t, I heard self and I heard either.

  “You’re saying I don’t tell Line about myself either?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said. “But that’s because she’s not interested.”

  I changed feet, slowly describing a circle as I began to repeat the process.

  “I don’t suppose I was either, come to think of it,” I said. “Not at that time. I took you for granted, you and Dad.”

  Yet those evenings had been so open and full of light, it had been such a good place to come and share my experiences of the world outside.

  I put her feet down gently on the floor again.

  “Do you want me to help you have a shower?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Hair,” she whispered.

  * * *

  —

  I showered her, put a diaper on her for the night, and her nightdress, and had just started to blow-dry her hair when Line came back.

  “Mum!” she called out from the hall.

  I switched the hairdryer off.

  “We’re in here,” I called back.

  She came in, her face flushed with life after having been out, too excessive in a way for the small rooms of the house.

  “Have you seen the baby birds in the gateway?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Aren’t they sweet?” I said.

  “Yes, but why didn’t you say anything?”

  “There was no occasion,” I said.

  “What sort of birds are they? I only saw the babies.”

  “There’s a pair of wood pigeons that nest there,” I said.

  She opened her mouth and was just about to say something when I interrupted her.

  “Are you hungry? I could make us a snack before we go to bed?”

  She realized I didn’t want to talk about the birds, and a look of surprise came over her, but fortunately she didn’t pursue the matter, only shook her head slightly instead.

  “We’ll be finished here in a minute,” I said, and switched the hairdryer on again.

  The pigeons came every spring, built their nest in the same place, laid eggs, the eggs hatched and the young grew—but just before they became fledglings ready to leave the nest, often only a few days before, the same goshawk would come and eat them.

  It had happened four years in a row and there was nothing to be done about it; I couldn’t bring myself to move the nest, so the only thing to do was wait and see and hope for the best.

  I hadn’t the slightest intention of telling Line. If she found out what the goshawk did—or even worse, if she saw it happen—she’d be devastated. She’d always had such a big heart for animals of any kind—when she was very little she would fill her pockets with worms and spiders, all sorts of creepy-crawlies, and bring them home with her, and even in gymnasium school she was still talking of becoming a vet.

  It was one of the reasons she’d liked coming here so much when she’d been growing up. At that time, there’d been animals on the farm—not many, just a couple of cows, often a calf, a horse and some hens, but to her it was an unimaginable wealth.

  It had been for me too. I remember thinking that at least she had that from her childhood, the summers she spent here, even if everything else should turn out difficult.

  * * *

  —

  I walked Mum into the living room and watched television with her for an hour before putting her to bed in the next room, previously the dining room, now her bedroom.

  After closing the sliding door behind me, I went upstairs to Line’s room and knocked on the door.

  “Yes?” she said from inside.

  She was sitting on the windowsill in the dark and looked at me as I came in.

  Her rucksack was open on the floor, clothes already strewn about the room, the duvet bunched up.

  “Is it not too chilly for you?” I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

  She shook her head.

  “How are things with you?” I said.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Why?”

  “You seem a little distant.”

  “It’s not a crime, is it?”

  I sighed.

  “We should be able to talk,” I said. “I mean, properly.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “You, perhaps?”

  “But I don’t want to talk about me.”

  There was a pause.

  “Fine, that’s quite all right,” I said after a moment, and got to my feet.

  “Good,” she said.

  “Anita, the home help, will be coming in the morning,” I said. “And again at lunchtime. If you’d rather be on your own with Gran and look after her a bit, just let me know and I’ll tell Anita she needn’t come.”

  “I came here to study,” she said. “Not to look after Gran.”

  “OK,” I said. “As long as I know. Goodnight!”

  * * *

  —

  Instead of going to bed, I put a coat on and went outside. The sky was still light, a thin veil drained of all color, the way the nights are in Vestlandet in summer.

  Everything was silent. The fjord lay silent in its hollow, the fell rose silently on the other side, and behind me, on the slopes to the north, the trees stood silent too. My feet in the soft grass was nearly the only sound. That, and the occasional, faint murmur of the forest, as if it were slowly exhaling after holding its breath.

  I went up to the empty field at the edge of the trees, beyond the pasture, the site of a farm building that had been there once, sat on what remained of the foundation wall and looked back down at the house I’d just left.

  I’d always liked to sit there. There could be something liberating about seeing the place from a distance; it made the people inside smaller. It was a thought that had come to me when I’d still been in my teens. Mum and Dad were in there, it was their domain, but only there, for the world outside them was enormous. Who cared what happened in the tiny rooms of that little house?

  Now it was me who lived there, but the thought was the same, the only difference being that now it was my own life I could see from afar, my own life that became small. That I wasn’t all there was.

  In the sky above me, the light of a few stars had almost broken through. It was as if they preferred not to be seen, but knew they had to appear, bashfully pretending not to be there. A bit like Line, I thought with a smile, when she’d been in the school play at the end of term and had looked down at the floor while mumbling her lines so quietly no one could hear.

  Then, I became aware of something happening at the edge of my field of vision, and turned my head to see what it was.

  A light burst over the treetops on the ridge in the west. It looked like the trees had been set on fire.

  For a long time I just sat there and stared.

  The light rose in the sky and grew in size, until only a few seconds later it was clear of the ridge. It looked like a star, only its light was so much brighter. It had to be a planet. But what sort of planet would it
be, passing by here at this time of the year?

  I’d never seen anything like it.

  There’d be a perfectly reasonable explanation, I told myself. Anyway, it was such a splendid sight, the glaring light in the pale sky above the dark, tree-covered slopes.

  I stood up and followed the low drystone wall along the perimeter of the forest. Soon I could see the village lying as if curled up at the inlet in the fjord, beneath the hills whose presence hid the more distant sea from sight.

  The star was higher in the sky now.

  So quickly it rose!

  I walked on past the pond, its waters black at the forest fringe, and went up to the old mink sheds my grandfather had built and run for a few years and which no one had since been bothered to pull down, situated as they were away from the rest of the farm on rocky ground that was no use for anything else.

  Perhaps Inge was the sort who knew the names of the stars and how far away they were?

  But why should he be? I thought then, and snorted at such a silly thought. Still, I visualized him standing at the window in the hospital, staring up at the same star as I was looking at now.

  It was a silly thought.

  I went over toward the barn across the pasture, all the time glancing up at the star.

  Could it be a supernova? A star that expanded as it burned out?

  There was something quite unreal about it. Or did it make everything else seem unreal?

  I stopped at the door of the barn. I remembered so well the warmth and the smell, mellow and yet pungent at the same time, of the cows when I was little, and didn’t care to see the cold and glaringly bare stalls now at all, the remnants of dung and hay, now dry and lifeless, the walls that were almost falling down. Nevertheless, I lifted the hook and pushed open the door that had warped and now scraped against the floor. Inside, I threw the light switch, and the next instant the room was flooded with bright electric light.

  Something moved in the stall at the far end.

  I froze.

  An animal came into view, venturing out onto the floor by the manure pit to look at me.

  It was a fox.

  Its eyes were yellow and it seemed to be weighing me up.