The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  By the time I eased off the throttle again and the bow sank back, the boat slowly gliding in toward the jetty, she still hadn’t answered. I moored, lifted the bike ashore, took the fuel can with me and went up to the house.

  It was nearly ten o’clock.

  I’d have to go and collect him, there were no two ways about it. And then I’d put him on the next bus back the other way.

  I put the fuel can in the shed, lit a cigarette and got myself a beer from the fridge, put the parasol up on the decking and sat down with my feet up on the rail.

  I took a long slurp. And then phoned her.

  No answer.

  She had to have some kind of contingency plan in case I didn’t turn up, surely? It would be totally unlike her to run such a risk.

  But I couldn’t be sure.

  What would happen if no one picked him up?

  It’d be a case for the authorities then. The child protection system.

  Which would hurt her more than me, seeing as she had custody.

  But what if they took it away from her? Would it then be passed on to me?

  I couldn’t have him full-time. It wasn’t even an option.

  Did she have a contingency plan?

  I phoned again.

  No answer.

  I finished my beer, went into the kitchen and put the empty bottle in the crate next to the fridge, then stood there for a moment staring into the room without really seeing anything.

  My phone vibrated as a text came in.

  Not answering your calls. So now you know how it feels. Boarding flight now. Enjoy yourself with Viktor!

  Her triumphant tone filled me with loathing. I saw the look on her face, the smirk she put on when she knew she was right. Her eyes, at once goading and as cold as ice.

  At least we weren’t together anymore, that was one good thing.

  Can’t collect him, I’m afraid, I typed. Hope for your sake someone does. You’re the one with custody.

  That would give her something to think about.

  I fetched the fuel can from the shed again and went down to the boat.

  She knew I’d cave in eventually, knew how weak I was. She’d seen me with tears in my eyes when we’d argued. But also when something unexpectedly good happened, she’d seen me cry then too.

  It was beyond her comprehension. That a modicum of goodness all of a sudden could bring me to tears.

  I couldn’t have stayed with her.

  With the fuel can beside me on the jetty, bright red in all the blue, I drew the boat in, stepped on board, untied the moorings and connected the fuel line to the outboard, backed out carefully in a tight crescent and threw the motor into forward gear before setting off.

  If I ever wrote a love poem, I’d dedicate it to the skerries here. To the maritime life, where the water is the way and boats the mode of transport. I’d never been able to express to anyone what it meant to me, what lifted inside me when I saw the jetties in town where people moored up, the ferries that plied between the islands, the water lapping toward the bank building, the hotel, the warehouses that lined the road, the fish processing plant where the mackerel lay on their beds of ice in polystyrene crates, the flags that flapped in the sea breeze, flaglines snapping against their poles. The cormorants out on the islands, the grassy hollows of the islets, the lighthouse at the mouth of the sea, the fish in the depths, the crabs on the barnacles at night. I’d tried many times over the years, to explain to friends and girlfriends I’d had, and to a point they’d understood, nodding and agreeing how pleasant it all was. But that wasn’t it at all! Whenever I looked around, at the waterways and the boats, the houses that were turned toward the sea, the sea buffeting the land, be it the islets and islands, inlets or towns, whenever I saw all that, what struck me with such force was that it was so alien, so other, as if it were the inception of a different world altogether, a world of water. And when I crossed the square with my carrier bags of groceries and went down the steps to the boat that lay moored there in the middle of town, and sailed slowly out through the channel toward the open sea, it was as if I inhabited Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities.

  It was a feeling that never ran down. On the contrary, it became more entrenched with every year I lived here.

  It was by no means unthinkable that Viktor in time would relate to the place in the same way, though it was hardly likely, I thought to myself as I entered the narrow strait between the two main islands, where the houses stood huddled together on both sides, red or white, an occasional yellow ochre, windows glittering in the sunshine. He was a city boy and preferred the indoors.

  But maybe we could enjoy a few nice days here together anyway.

  A bit of fishing, a bit of swimming. A trip into town now and then for an ice cream.

  What more could a ten-year-old want?

  But a whole week was a long time. I already longed to sit down and read, go for a walk afterward, read again as darkness fell, and perhaps do some more writing too.

  I sailed at the sedatest of paces among all the boats in the strait. People didn’t care once they were out here, but lay sunbathing on their decks, filling themselves with food and beer, music blaring as if they were at home, not a thought for being in a public space.

  I wished they weren’t here. That the strait was devoid of boats, the islands devoid of people. So it all could emerge in its true form and come into its own. Or perhaps that wasn’t the way to put it. I just wanted the sense of being here, here in this particular place, a place on earth. I wanted the place to inhabit me, and I it.

  That’s how it was in autumn, throughout the winter and early spring. So I couldn’t complain.

  And other people had just as much right to be here as me.

  But they were encapsulated in something else when they were here. They turned up their music, listened to their radios, exchanged chat and banter, immersed themselves in their phones. They brought their own worlds with them and barely absorbed this one.

  I entered the more open part of the strait and picked up speed. It was quarter past eleven already, but I still had plenty of time.

  Between the green trees growing on the two islands, houses and outcrops of rock projected in explosive displays of color and detail. At the end of the strait lay the town, as if vibrating beneath the blue sky, white-painted houses clinging to its steep streets, the old radio mast rising up from the top of the hill.

  Jesus had been a loner, he had all the features. He rejected his mother and brother, didn’t want to know about them. The disciples he attracted were no substitute family—the relationship was one way only: Jesus spoke, the disciples listened; Jesus dictated, the disciples obeyed. Weeks in the wilderness. A clear longing for death.

  What had he done in the thirty years before stepping out as the Savior?

  Had he reimagined himself? Was that why he suddenly emerged into the open and became visible?

  Emerged from what? From what existence, from what life?

  One of the things I’d been thinking about most that summer was whether religion—specifically Christianity—was mainly a social phenomenon or whether conversely it was turned away from the social domain. The teachings of Christ were of course highly social in nature, to the extent that they were all about turning the other cheek and looking after the weak and infirm. That all men were equal was easy enough to proclaim, and indeed many did, but the full implications of such a standpoint were in fact almost inhuman. In an essay he once wrote about Rembrandt, Jean Genet goes off track and describes a situation in a train carriage in which a hideous and loathsome-looking man is seated opposite him, and Genet is struck by sudden, terrifying insight as he asks himself whether such a man could be his equal. Are you equal to me?

  Idiots, liars, murderers, wife-beaters, pedophiles. Equal to me?

  Yes, and yes again.

  I
t was the social aspect of Christianity that Nietzsche railed against and so brutally exposed. In Christianity, the weak discovered they could browbeat the strong. So weak became strong, bad became good, sickness became health. Morality constrains, oppresses, hinders. No true development, no true freedom, no true greatness is possible under the tyranny of the weak. But Nietzsche was impossible to read without consideration of the fact that he himself was a loser, weak and alone, and that everything he wrote about will, about power and about the strong, was to compensate for his own inadequacy. His thoughts were by no means poorer on that account, for there is no doubt that Nietzsche was one of the greatest thinkers since the classical era, the freedom in his thoughts, their sheer power, was unrivaled—but they remained just that, thoughts. The thoughts of Christ changed the world. Nietzsche’s thoughts changed merely thoughts. And Jesus was not weak, his unprecedented power shines throughout the Gospels, though they were written so long after his death.

  But it wasn’t the message of love for one’s fellow men that turned me toward Christianity. On the contrary, in fact. The great problem of our time was that everything was about human beings and nothing existed any longer outside the sphere of the human. No matter which way you turned, you encountered human eyes, or something human eyes had seen. In a way, I was as far removed from faith as could be. From the moment I opted out of the Church of Norway at the age of sixteen, I’d felt nothing but contempt for Christianity—and all other religions too, for that matter—but I was still interested in faith as a phenomenon, what it meant, basically, to believe. Faith was something that gave meaning to life, I assumed, and meaning interested me. But to believe seemed to me to pander to a system, a package as it were of conceptions and values, something ready-made and compiled by others, and the price to be paid for being rewarded with that meaning was constraints on one’s freedom. Faith was for the feeble of mind, those lacking independence, the submissive, who gladly allowed themselves to be led. I read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and realized there was another way of believing, and a Christianity other than the one Nietzsche had attacked—issuing from the idea of the social realm. Kierkegaard’s book contains a number of strange vignettes concerning the weaning of a child from the mother’s breast, that first relationship in a child’s life, the symbiosis, warmth and security it was suddenly denied, and one could almost see the desire for what no longer was there, and the turning outwards toward everything else, which to the child as yet barely existed. Other people, the social world, society. Faith was thus a turning away from the realm of the social, again toward something that as yet barely existed. This was where Abraham went when he climbed the mount to sacrifice his son to God. He was filled with a father’s love, and his faith directed him toward an abyss. Perhaps what awaited him there was simply emptiness, the terrible void. His faith surmounted his fear, which made faith inhuman, for what person can kill his son with intent and leave the human realm to face the unknown that perhaps indeed was the terrible void? I found the thought compelling, but it meant nothing to me, it was without consequence, there was no way I could absorb it into my own life.

  But something must have happened, unbeknown to my conscious self I must have been working away at it, because during the winter I had become converted. In an indescribable moment of joy, everything slotted into place. The insight, for that’s what it was, had since faded somewhat, and I strove continually to approach it once more. And although the days were dark, its light was somewhere always shining, whether in my soul I was in the forest or on the sea, all I had to do was go toward it.

  I had basically vegetated all that winter, sleeping long into the mornings, my phone muted, not bothering to wash or change my clothes, still trying to get out for a walk during the daytime, but mostly lazing around on the sofa. I had started drinking as soon as the light began to fade. In previous years, I’d often thought about how fantastic it would be to live on my own in the summer house, and then, after Camilla, I’d actually moved out here. It wasn’t that fantastic anymore. Of course, I realized it wasn’t the house, or the landscape, or the hermit-like existence that was the problem, it was me. I didn’t care for my own company. This was ironic. For all the years I’d been in various relationships I’d always yearned to be alone, and when eventually I took the consequences of that yearning, it merely led me to yearn even more. But to where? For what? I’d been running away all my life, a person didn’t have to be a psychoanalyst to see that. I’d thought I was running away from the others—my father and brothers, Torill and the whole shebang, my hometown, and home country, the conformity of education, Therese and Helene and Hanne, and all the women I’d had in between, when I was king of the castle—but it was so clearly myself I’d been running from.

  It was an embarrassing insight, all the more so for it being so obvious. Those around me had surely recognized it for what it was all along.

  Was everything a person did down to the disposition of their soul?

  I had refused to accept it, and yet, lying there on the sofa that winter, with that key in my hand, all doors were indeed opened.

  I was cowardly, shied away from conflicts, from work, from people. I avoided every demand, sought the path of least resistance, drank too much, thought only of myself.

  It had led me here.

  The first days of the new year had brought snow, thick and still. The temperature had been around zero, a fog had settled heavily on the sea and woods. When I went for my daily walks, usually in the afternoon just before dusk, always the same route, following the smooth, rounded rock of the shore, along the pebbled beach and back again through the woods, the stillness was so apparent as to seem ominous. Fog deadens all sound, packing the landscape in its dampness, and no one else was out here at that time of year, the nearest road with any traffic to speak of was several kilometers away.

  All I could hear on my walks were my own footsteps, my own thoughts.

  The air grew colder, a thin layer of ice covering the rocks, the fog retreating, but not the clouds, which hung like a dark curtain over the horizon. A wind picked up as the snow fell once more, the air a flurry of tiny shards tossed this way and that. Even the few steps to the shed to fetch wood became an expedition requiring a scarf, woolly hat and gloves. Returning inside, I placed three logs from the pile I held in my arms in the stove, dumping the rest in the box next to it, then I removed my outer garments and lay down on the sofa. It was only just gone eleven o’clock, but it was so dark outside that the fire already reflected faintly in the windowpane. The sea roared.

  Then: church bells.

  Or rather: at first I couldn’t place the sound that was only just audible against the storm, dissolving almost completely into the rushing of trees, the battering wind that raced up from the shore, the low, thunderous rumble of the sea.

  Ding, ding, ding, they said, so faint and so apart from the other sounds out there that it was as if they came from a land beyond.

  I hadn’t even known it was Sunday.

  I’m going, I said to myself, and got to my feet. It would do me good to listen to something other than just my own thoughts. And if I couldn’t stand what I heard, at least there’d be something to look at in there.

  I had put a thick sweater on, anorak, hat and gloves, wound a scarf around my lower face and gone out. It had stopped snowing, though no one would have believed it, for the air was still whirling with snowflakes whipped up by the wind, thrown about at its will.

  The church stood on top of a ridge above the sea and was visible from afar to anyone approaching the land by boat, yet almost completely hidden if you came from the road on the other side, as of course most people did nowadays. An outer wall of stone and brick dated back to the twelfth century when the first church had been situated there, whereas the rest of the structure was eighteenth-century and made of timber.

  I’d been up to the church several times before on my walks, it was only some twenty minutes away
and I liked to emerge from the woods to see it there on top of the ridge: there was something fascinatingly archaic in our modern age about a house of God in the midst of nature. But I’d still never been inside.

  When I opened the door on that particular morning, the service was already under way and the few people who were seated inside—hardly more than six or seven, eight at most, and all elderly—turned as I entered. I pulled off my hat and gloves and nodded tentatively, then tucked myself into one of the rows of benches at the back, unwinding my scarf and unzipping my anorak. My face felt warm on the inside after my bracing walk, cold on the outside because of the biting wind. I rubbed my cheeks a couple of times as I looked straight ahead at the priest. He was elderly too, with a saggy face and glasses whose lenses were so thick, their frames so obtrusive, that they wholly dominated his appearance. His white collar was barely noticeable in comparison.

  They had come to the confession. The priest looked down at the floor as he led the congregation:

  Holy God, our Creator,

  look upon us in mercy.

  We have sinned against you

  and broken your commandments.

  For the sake of Jesus Christ, forgive us.

  Set us free that we may serve you, preserve the Creation

  and love our neighbors as ourselves.

  Had I possessed faith, I thought to myself, I’d probably have found comfort in the words. But since I did not, the words had no force, were connected to nothing. There was no one to look upon us in mercy, no one to forgive us, no one to set us free.

  I looked up at the ceiling. It was green with white clouds painted on it. The green color was beautiful, but unexpected: why not sky blue? The hue reminded me of the sea over a deep sandbank on a summer’s day. The clouds were crude representations and quite identical. Suspended from the sky hung a large model of a sailing ship. What kind of Christianity was this? Rococo clouds under an eighteenth-century maritime sky?