The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “Are you still on the job?” he said. His voice was faint, but not weak.

  I nodded.

  “I had to assist in theater. I’m on my way home now, though.”

  “All right for some,” he said.

  “How are you feeling?” I said.

  “I’m alive,” he said. “That’s the important thing. It is to me, anyway!”

  “So your head’s still hurting, is it?”

  He nodded, albeit reluctantly.

  “Not that it’s any wonder,” he said. “They were rummaging around in there for hours.”

  I smiled.

  He smiled too.

  “Just ring for help if you’re in too much pain,” I said.

  “I will,” he said.

  There was a pause.

  Then we both started to say something at the same time.

  “Do you think you can—” he said.

  “Have you seen—” I said.

  We smiled again.

  “What were you going to say?” I said.

  “You first,” he said.

  “No, you,” I said.

  “It was nothing earth-shattering,” he said. “I was just wondering if you could do me a favor and pull the blinds up? I can’t sleep, and it’s nice to lie here and look out.”

  “Of course,” I said, and went over to the window.

  The new star shone down from high above the town.

  “What do you think it is?” I said.

  “The new star?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, looking up at it.

  “It’s a new star,” he said.

  “The new star’s a new star?” I said.

  “It has to happen,” he said. “New stars forming in the universe.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What were you going to say?” he said.

  “It was nothing,” I said. “You must try and get some sleep, or at least rest. I won’t disturb you anymore now. I just wanted to see how you were getting on.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

  * * *

  —

  I showered hastily in the changing rooms in the basement, dressing alone before going out into the warm night air. It was sticky and I wondered if there was going to be a thunderstorm.

  I was happy and unsettled at the same time. The music came on when I turned the ignition, it was loud and belonged to another frame of mind, so I switched it off, rolled the window down, pulled out onto the road and crossed the river. The traffic lights at the junction were red and I looked down at the barrack-like club venue they called Riverside on the bank below. Perhaps twenty youngsters were hanging around in the car park outside, some leaning against the cars, most with a bottle or a glass in hand. As so often when something intense had happened at work, it struck me how different the world outside was. None of the young people down there had a thought for what went on inside the hospital day and night. Of course not, why should they? Death was always somewhere else. Right until it came close to them, as it would, and for a while encroached upon the life they led and pushed it into the background.

  The lights changed to green and I turned onto the empty main road that led out of town and into the valley, the new star at my rear. A large herd of cattle, a strain that had been imported into the area a few years before with a view to enhancing meat production, lay in the field and resembled boulders in the gray nocturnal light of the late summer. They stayed out all year round, and I saw them every day. One winter morning, I’d seen one of them lying dead on the ground; by the time I drove back the other way in the afternoon it had been removed. And that spring I’d seen a newborn calf get to its feet for the very first time, its legs trembling, its mother lowering her head toward its little frame and licking it clean.

  They were such beautiful creatures and seemed to live such a harmonious life, even when they stood bracing against the wind and snow in winter.

  The image of Ramsvik flashed into my mind as he’d lain there on the operating table with his eyes open. The faint, tormented sound that had come from him.

  I was only glad it wasn’t me who had to fill in the operation report.

  What could it say?

  The heart had stopped when he’d been taken off the life support. The blood circulation in the brain had ceased. So he must have been dead. The heart not beating for a short while didn’t have to be decisive, many patients had regained consciousness after relatively long periods with no cardiac activity. Brain activity was the decisive factor.

  What was it Henriksen had said? Death is irreversible. No one can come back from the dead. Ramsvik having done so meant only that he hadn’t been dead.

  The white farmhouses that lay scattered about the landscape around me gleamed dully yet intensely in the grayish light. Most of the windows were dark. I looked at the clock on the dashboard: almost two.

  * * *

  —

  The downstairs lights were all on when I got home. I sighed to myself. Line never gave a thought to others, never assumed responsibility for anything.

  Still, it was too late to educate her now.

  I was exhausted, but made myself a cup of tea and buttered myself a slice of bread which I ate while standing at the window, before looking in on Mum to see if she was all right.

  She was fast asleep and I switched off all the lights, put some more milk in my tea so that I could drink up in one gulp, went upstairs to my bedroom, undressed, folded my clothes, pulled the duvet aside and got into bed, making myself comfortable on my side, hands folded under my cheek, the way I’d done ever since childhood.

  I lay awake for some time, too tense to sleep.

  My bedroom was directly above Mum’s, and when she’d moved downstairs I’d thought it would be an advantage, allowing me to hear if anything was wrong, but in practice it was a source of unease, for there was never a sound from down there and often I would imagine her no longer breathing, but lying dead in her bed.

  It was the same unease I’d felt after Line was born.

  As if breathing were something that occurred in defiance and the natural condition, for infant and elderly alike, was not to be breathing, the breathless state being an equilibrium to which they were naturally drawn.

  It had happened once to one of the other women in the mothers’ group I’d attended, she’d been in an elevator, the baby had been lying in its stroller and had stopped breathing. Fortunately, she’d noticed something was wrong, and without thinking, she recalled, she’d lifted the child into the air by its feet and shaken it.

  The child began to breathe again.

  We’d laughed when she told us, finding her description comical, but we’d all recognized the fear.

  How long ago it was.

  Twenty-one years.

  And the last thing I was afraid of when it came to Line now was that she would stop breathing. She was in the midst of breath’s very realm.

  Mum, on the other hand, was at its perimeter.

  I lifted my head, pulled the curtain aside and looked down toward the neighboring farm, where the lights in the attic shone yellow above the veranda. My eye followed the road to the forest where it disappeared from view, consumed by motionless spruce towering dark in the night. I could hear the rush of the waterfall, lay down again and closed my eyes. The last thing I remember was an owl hooting three times in the distance. But it could have been a dream.

  KATHRINE

  Perhaps it was the twin brother of the man I’d met at the airport, I thought as I left the church and crossed over to my office again. Perhaps he’d come to Bergen for the funeral. It was hardly likely, but certainly possible.

  He had looked exactly the same.

  But how well did I actually remember that face?

  It could have been someone who just lo
oked like him, nothing more than that.

  That would be it.

  I smiled at Karin and closed the door behind me, sat down at the desk and began attending to the pile of e-mails that always accumulated so quickly. But I found I couldn’t concentrate, so I went out and got myself a glass of water and an apple from the fruit bowl in the conference room, sat down again in my office and looked out of the window as I munched. The lawn outside was scorched yellow, white almost where it met the gravel of the car park. Behind the wall of the churchyard beyond, I saw water showering into the air and picked out the rhythmic tick-tick-tick of the sprinkler, though so faintly I could easily have been imagining it.

  I looked at the photo of Gaute and the children; it was from the summer before, they were sitting on the smooth rocks at the shore and looking at the camera, Marie on Gaute’s knee, Peter leaning close to him.

  My people.

  I wondered if I should get Peter a mobile phone. We’d be able to text each other during the day. It would give him an extra sense of security.

  He was special, Peter, not like other boys, and the other children in his class had begun to reject him. He didn’t understand why, and tried to impose himself in the ways that were available to him. He thought it would help if he knew better than them. That they would want to be friends with him if only they understood how clever he was, and how good at things.

  His teacher had rung me up one day in the spring. There had been an incident involving Peter and a boy with a stutter. Peter had mimicked the boy in front of the others and tried to make him say difficult words. I did not take the matter up with him when I got home, hoping instead that he might tell me about it himself. When he didn’t, I went into his room before he went to sleep. Lying with his cheek against the pillow, he looked at me quizzically. He’d just had a bath and was clean and delicate. The look he gave me was innocent, but immediately became tinged with fear: he knew.

  I sat down on the edge of his bed.

  “Your teacher phoned me today,” I said.

  He said nothing, but stared vacantly into the air in front of him, abruptly depleted.

  “He told me you’d been teasing a boy who stutters. Is that right?”

  “I didn’t mean it,” he said quietly.

  “What did you do, exactly?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Peter, what did you do?”

  “It wasn’t just me,” he said. “The others were doing it as well.”

  “That’s no excuse,” I said. “You were bullying him. Have you thought about how he feels? Have you?”

  His eyes filled with tears.

  “I didn’t know it was wrong,” he whispered.

  “Of course you knew it was wrong,” I said.

  “No!” he almost shouted, and started to cry.

  It was as if something took possession of him. His body squirmed under the duvet, he sobbed loudly, his tears now running down his cheeks.

  “Peter,” I said.

  “I—didn’t—know!” he sobbed.

  “You must make amends,” I said. “You must apologize to him. And never do it again.”

  “I—didn’t—know!” he sobbed again, writhing, his eyes wild with despair.

  “Peter, settle down,” I said, and smoothed his hair with my hand.

  Howling sounds began to issue from him. His body thrashed.

  He was hysterical.

  “Peter!” I said, and tried to pin him down. “That’s enough!”

  “Aaaaaaaahh,” he howled. “Aaaaaaaahh, aaaaahhhh.”

  “That’s enough, Peter,” I said again, and got to my feet. “You’ll apologize to him at school in the morning, and let that be the end of it.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder and bent over him.

  “Goodnight,” I said.

  He looked up at me.

  I switched the light off, closed the door behind me and went downstairs into the living room where the TV was on, a frozen image on the screen of a man getting out of a car in what appeared to be an English village.

  “Gaute?” I said.

  “In here,” he said from the kitchen.

  He was sitting on one of the bar stools at the kitchen island, eating leftovers from dinner with his phone lit up in front of him. He was almost in darkness, only the light above the cooker was on.

  “How did it go?” he said.

  “Fine,” I said, and took a glass from the cupboard, filled it with water and drank as I leaned against the work surface, supporting myself with my other hand.

  “I heard him crying.”

  “Yes, he was full of remorse.”

  “How do you think he’s feeling now?”

  “He’s still crying, I imagine.”

  “And you just left him?”

  He looked at me.

  “He must learn to manage his emotions,” I said. “And he must learn on his own.”

  Gaute’s eyes met mine for a second, before looking away.

  It meant he didn’t like what I had said.

  It meant disagreement.

  “Don’t go up to him, OK?” I said.

  “He’ll go to sleep soon enough, I suppose,” he said, and glanced at me quickly before lowering his gaze again.

  The slices of lamb on his plate, which only a few hours earlier had been soft and succulent, were now stiff and white with coagulated fat. He was eating them with his fingers.

  “What are you watching in there?” I said, putting the glass in the dishwasher next to him.

  “Inspector Morse,” he said. “Or maybe it’s Lewis now, after his assistant took over?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Inspector Lewis, is that it?”

  I turned and looked out of the window. The lights in the houses along the gentle slope of the road were soft, at least compared to the starkly illuminated industrial buildings that lay dotted along the road too. There were some new rows of housing, and then the fell began, rising dark and tree-clad against the gray-black sky.

  “Shall we watch the rest of the episode together?” I said.

  “Yes, we could do,” he said. “I’m halfway through, though.”

  “I don’t care much for detectives, anyway,” I said.

  He smiled and opened the fridge door, scraping the uneaten pieces of lamb from his plate into the plastic container with the rest of the leftovers.

  “Are we really going to eat that?” I said. “I keep throwing leftovers out from there.”

  “We can do a spaghetti bolognese with lamb instead of beef,” he said. “It’s rather good, actually.”

  “OK,” I said, and went into the living room. Pausing in front of the sofa, I stood and listened. It was all quiet up there. Water ran from the tap in the kitchen, Gaute washing his hands.

  I sat down, picked up my phone and checked the local paper, skimming the headlines there. He would go up and look in on him, I knew it.

  “Start, if you want,” he said behind me. “Just need to go to the toilet.”

  “It’s all right, I’ll wait.”

  He would go into Peter’s room first, I guessed, hearing him go up the stairs. He would sit down on the edge of the bed and comfort him for a minute before going into the bathroom and flushing the toilet in the belief that I would hear it and assume he’d been in there all the time and was now finished.

  In so doing, he would undermine what I had said. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, but the worst thing was his secrecy. He didn’t have the guts for even a minor confrontation with me. The few minutes he stole to be with Peter up there weren’t about Peter, regardless of what he thought. They were about him. He didn’t know what to do with his emotions. He never did.

  Suddenly, it struck me that my increasing irritation, which had been coming to the fore more and more frequently, and which I coul
d not always keep to myself, to the extent that it would occasionally turn into anger, could be a form of self-justification.

  That something inside me was blaming him so that something else inside me could be denied.

  He’d done nothing wrong. And he hadn’t changed either.

  The water ran through the pipes from upstairs.

  I breathed in deeply.

  My need to be alone was so great it almost caused me to panic.

  But I controlled it, switched the television on with the remote and turned my face toward him with a smile as he came down the stairs.

  “You started it, then,” he said.

  “Five seconds ago,” I said.

  He sat down beside me.

  “Do you want anything?” he said. “Coffee? Tea?”

  “It’s a bit late,” I said.

  “Drink, then?” he said.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  He put his feet up on the coffee table, resting his arm on the back of the sofa behind me.

  “You can have one, if you want,” I said.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  We watched the episode in silence. When it was finished, I switched off, went into the kitchen and began emptying the dishwasher. He came in after me.

  “Is something the matter?” he said.

  I shook my head, putting the glasses and the cups in the cupboard two by two.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll go to bed, then. Are you coming up?”

  “In a bit,” I said, and smiled. “Just need to have a look at something first.”

  “OK,” he said.

  I went into the study and started on some work. Upstairs, I heard him turn on the shower and sighed: Gaute only ever showered before bed when he wanted sex.

  * * *

  —

  It was hardly surprising that he thought I was being unfaithful, I told myself as I sat absently looking out of the window with the apple core in my hand. Although we clicked reasonably well once we did go to bed together, my aversion toward sex was growing. It was as if there were a distance I needed to traverse, and that distance kept increasing. Once it was behind me, something else would take its place and the resistance and doubt I’d felt would sometimes go away completely then, so it wasn’t that. It was something else that was in the way.