The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  He had met Torill in the Norwegian expat community when she was working as an au pair in London, a Scandinavian beauty whose life when the two of them got together took a turn she almost certainly could never have envisaged. Something of a neurotic, she loved me more than any other. Torill had depth, but was also unreflecting, her emotions totally unsorted, everything was intense for her. She took me with her to the cinema even when I was a small boy, and before I was thirteen or fourteen I’d become quite the film buff. Films were her emotional release, allowing her to let go instead of keeping everything in, which must have felt like a blessing.

  They divorced during the summer of my sixteenth birthday, and we brothers moved back to Norway with her. Torill was a master in making me feel guilty, forever spinning her little webs in which I would become trapped. She was only forty years old then, and still very good-looking, but something had unraveled inside her, perhaps because she’d never built anything of her own, and in that respect it was no help at all that her family lived in the same town; in fact, if anything, it probably only infantilized her somewhat.

  Physically, my development had really taken off the year before we moved, and by the time I started gymnasium school I was no longer overweight. I looked all right, though without it having any noticeable effect, and the same was true of me coming from London, something I’d thought would automatically make me popular. The other kids found me a bit odd, presumably because I was introverted and never instigated anything on my own, preferring instead to keep well out of things, but also I think because I took such an interest in many of our lessons. Torill would occasionally ask me about girls at school, and I answered her as truthfully as I could, but I never mentioned Kathrine, although by remaining silent about her it felt like I was betraying her. There was nothing between us, but she was sacrosanct to me, a place in my heart that I would guard as I lay on my bed reading, dreaming about getting up, leaving the room and never coming back.

  I discovered Bjørneboe’s books and identified strongly with him, he too the anarchist son of a shipping magnate. I read Kaj Skagen’s Bazarov’s Children and Erling Gjelsvik’s Dead Heat, which led me to Hemingway, from where it was a short step to Turgenev, and from there an even shorter one to Dostoevsky.

  I fantasized about killing someone, not Torill, although it would have turned my life into something fantastical, but someone random. The chances of being caught in such a case, where there was no connection between the murderer and his victim, were, I knew, immeasurably small. But in view of my propensity to feel guilt—I couldn’t actually kill a fly without feeling torment—I realized that I would surely give myself away. I couldn’t leave Torill either. And contradict my father? Not without tears welling in my eyes.

  I put it all behind me the summer I finished gymnasium, and standing on the deck of the ferry on my way to Denmark, watching Norway disappear from view, I was consumed by a feeling of happiness. I was planning on being away for a year, traveling around the continent, taking odd jobs here and there to earn some money; in my rucksack was a book called Vagabonding in Europe which listed different jobs that were easy to get, picking oranges in Spain, for instance, or laboring on French docks. But I still wasn’t completely free, Torill having insisted that I was to phone her every day, something I’d been unable to refuse. To start with, heading toward Munich, from where I was going on to the Alps, I ventured not to call her a couple of times, only she’d felt such despair, had been so worried about me, that I hadn’t the heart to do it again.

  I zigzagged through Italy, and from Brindisi caught the ferry to Athens, from there sailing out to some of the islands before plotting a course north again, arriving in Zurich in late September. There I succumbed to a kind of collapse, gripped one evening by a sudden fear, frightened for my life, frightened about everything that could happen, and when morning came I found myself unable to get out of bed. I lay there the whole day, trying to sleep to get away from it, but little helped, and when darkness fell I descended into such panic that my whole body trembled. I was hungry, had nothing to eat and was quite unable to go out and get something. And the fear I felt doubled, for being scared only scared me that much more, and being alone in a foreign city made it even worse. I couldn’t phone Torill, I realized that even in the fragile state I was in. And I certainly couldn’t phone my father, which would have been too great a failure. But eventually I did so, and sat trembling on the floor with the phone in my hand, dialing his number at the tone.

  “Stray speaking,” he said at the other end.

  “It’s Egil,” I breathed.

  “Sorry?” he said. “Who did you say it was?”

  “Egil,” I said.

  “Egil!” he said. “Where in the world are you?”

  I started to cry.

  “Is something wrong?” he said. “What’s the matter? Has something happened?”

  I couldn’t speak, all I could do was weep, and then I hung up. I hadn’t the strength to go to bed and could only lie down on the floor. After a couple of minutes, the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear.

  “Egil?” said Dad. “I’ve found out where you’re staying. If you can’t answer me now, so that I can hear you, I’ll send a trusted friend to help.”

  “Yes,” I breathed.

  “I don’t know what’s happened,” he said. “But we’ll sort it out. It’s no problem.”

  I started crying again, disintegrating into sobs, not wanting him to hear me, and again I hung up.

  An hour later there was a knock on the door. I was lying in bed and couldn’t get up to answer. A besuited man in his forties came in. He was wearing glasses, rectangular lenses in a very thin frame, his features rather nondescript, in fact he would have been quite anonymous had it not been for the fullness of his lips and a somewhat oblique smile.

  “Hello there, young man,” he said in German. “Not doing too well, I hear?”

  All I could do was stare at him while I shook inside.

  “My name is Dieter. I’m a friend of your father’s. I’m here to help you.”

  He smiled. His hair was thin and sandy-colored. His eyes were blue.

  “First we must get you out of here,” he said. “Are you able to get dressed?”

  I said nothing.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll help you.”

  He opened my rucksack and took out some clothes, holding my blue-green paisley shirt up in front of me.

  “Will this do?”

  I didn’t answer him, couldn’t answer him, and he smiled again, picked out a pair of trousers and then sat down on the edge of the bed, drew the cover aside and began to dress me. Once I’d got the trousers on, he slid his hand under my back and raised me into a sitting position, helping me on with the shirt as if he had all the time in the world, doing up the buttons, then proceeding to the shoes, a jacket.

  He packed my bag, slung it over his shoulder, took me by the hand and pulled me upright. His arm around me, we left the room. He’d already paid the hotel, he said. Now we were going back to his house, where I would spend the night, and in the morning I was booked onto a flight to London, where my father would come and pick me up.

  “How does that sound? A good plan?”

  I burst into tears.

  He had two kids of his own, he told me as we drove out of the city. Six and eight years old and a right handful, but I wouldn’t have to worry about them.

  “Are you hungry?”

  I nodded.

  He parked outside a rather swish residence, got out of the car and came round to open the door on my side, where I sat without moving. His wife, whose face was gentle with a smattering of freckles running across the bridge of her nose and dispersing over her cheeks, her eyes rather narrow and creased at the corners, was in the kitchen rinsing vegetables in the sink when we came in.

  “This is Egil,” said Dieter. “E
gil, this is my wife, Annika. Egil isn’t feeling that good, so we’re putting him up for the night. Is there something for him to eat?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Annika.

  How I got through the evening and night I can’t remember. I assume I slept. The next morning, a nurse came to the house, she was to accompany me all the way to London. Dieter drove us to the airport, where he bid me a hearty farewell, embracing me as if we were old friends. My father was waiting for me at Heathrow, welcoming, if rather measured. There was no one to help me where he was living, he said, so he’d put me into a small private clinic close by where I could rest until I was well again.

  He was no doubt thinking a week, perhaps two. I stayed there for six months. I remember hardly anything from that time, it seems such a blur. I know that I was unable to read, unable to listen to the radio or even to music. It wasn’t that I couldn’t concentrate, though I couldn’t do that either, it was more like there was no room in me for anything that came from outside, everything from outside hurt. It even hurt to look at a vase of flowers or a curtain. It was terrible. The most terrible thing was perhaps that as such there was no way out. All I could do was exist in the same darkness, the same hurt the whole time. I spoke to no one, and for six months opened my mouth only to take in nourishment.

  It was spring by the time they let me out. I remember that. Dad came and picked me up sometime in the morning. I’d packed and got myself ready. Torill was going to come too, only I’d told her not to. She was staying at a hotel, waiting to meet me. But that’s not the reason I remember that day so well, at least not the only one. Because when I followed my father out of the door and walked to the car beneath a mild, white spring sky, it was with the very strong feeling that the world did not wish me well. That nothing good would come of my life.

  It was all so very ironic. I’d had a kind of vision on one of the Greek islands, not Patmos, of which I knew nothing at the time, and not Hydra either, but a totally unknown and unimportant little island where I’d been staying for a week or so. It was no major vision, certainly nothing that was worth telling anyone about, yet it was significant enough to me. In the mornings I would wade out to a small islet some way off the beach, taking with me some food, a towel, a change of T-shirt and a couple of books in a bag I carried above my head, and I would spend the day out there on my own, reading and swimming and taking in the sun, while back on the island in the evenings I would eat at one of the restaurants, have a few beers and pass my time people-watching. I felt restless during my stay there, anxious even, it was as if I didn’t really want to be there, as if there was something I was longing for without really knowing what it was. It wasn’t people, because in the little village in the evenings there were people all around me, which made me want to go somewhere else—especially if someone tried to strike up a conversation—though again it wasn’t something that exerted any great pull on me. One evening, I decided to go for a walk. I walked up through the narrow streets to where the village came to an end and the mountain began, and carried on upward, determining all of a sudden to reach the top. There was a tall radio mast there, blinking red in the darkness. I sat down and lit a cigarette, and looked out at the sea that was quite black with little dots of light from the ships out there, and at the sky, it too black, though more velvety than I was used to from the night sky at home. Occasionally, lights blinked there as well, from planes on their way to or from the airport in Athens.

  Could a person live without a name? I wondered at once.

  Without identity?

  Could a person exist without being connected to anything?

  Unbound to any past or history, family or society?

  Could a person simply be a human being on earth, who could go wherever they wished without interpreting what they saw in terms of any kind of system, but thinking quite freely? In other words: seeing what they saw as if for the very first time, in every instance? Could a human being simply exist? Without ambition, without plan, without theory? Could I live, not as Egil Stray, but simply as someone, anyone, no one? A human being through which the world streamed without attaching itself, and who for his part likewise streamed through the world, without attaching himself?

  Or, to put it differently: could a person be completely free?

  That was the vision I had. To be a person without a name, without a history. To be nothing more than a human being.

  It was, on the surface of it, so threadbare an idea that it couldn’t have made sense to anyone but me. Certainly, those with whom I subsequently shared it did not understand it the way I did. It was so simple a thought that it could barely be called a thought at all. “Yes, of course. To not have a name, yes. And no identity. Interesting. A bit like an animal, yes? Is that what you mean?”

  Yet to me, the thought was flesh and blood and quivering nerves. I knew it could not be brought to fruition, but I considered that it could be something to strive for, an ideal for life, as it were.

  But how could a person disconnect?

  I could, for instance, have bought myself a boat and set off around the world, on my own, sailing wherever I wanted, going ashore wherever I wanted; my father would more than likely have given me the money if only I’d asked him, and even if he would have disapproved, he’d seen the direction I was heading and had probably already written me off. But even then, I think, I’d begun to realize that the ties that bind are inside a person, and that disconnecting from the external world was unlikely to make a difference.

  Nevertheless, the idea became precious to me in the weeks that followed and, so I thought, would remain so for the rest of my life. But then when I had my breakdown, everything changed, my whole life turned around at once, because after that everything was about making sure I would never end up there again, in that terrible place inside me. The doctors talked about keeping firm structures, firm contexts, maintaining an overview, developing routines. Which of course was the very antithesis of simply existing as a human being.

  All this, indeed everything in my entire life, became catalyzed that winter day in the summer house, suddenly and unexpectedly slotting into place in my conversion.

  How can I explain it?

  I can’t.

  When later I read The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air again, it was hard to understand exactly what had made such an impression on me the first time round. I couldn’t trace back the grand emotions I had felt to any single sentence or paragraph, though many had been underlined in what seemed to be a state of inner fervor. But this is a mistake we make time and again, we think thoughts are isolated units, apart not only from our emotions, but also from the surroundings in which they are conceived. Which is probably why philosophers have always been so concerned with building systems, for in the system a thought is given its own designated place, independently of whatever happens outside of it; thoughts are thus protected from the world and may appear as entities in their own right, so pure and impersonal that they may be thought by anyone, over and over again, wherever and whenever. But the fact of the matter is that thoughts cannot get by on their own. When Nietzsche conceived the notion of eternal return, the apex of his thinking, it was as if he became so gripped by emotion that he was barely able to contain himself, the letters he wrote about the great discovery he’d made were manic in their enthusiasm, at the same time as he was unable to reveal in a single word what exactly it was he had thought that was going to change everything. This would be his labor, trying to put the thought and its implications into words, for the thought in itself, naked and bereft of emotion, was indeed anything but grand and fabulous, and actually, when at last it could be considered, manifested as black ink on a white page, rather banal. Its grandness lay in the storm it had precipitated inside him, and it was the storm he wanted to convey, not the thought on its own. The thought had to be supported from below, underpinned and lifted by the thoughts that surrounded it, in order that it might produce the gasp
of awe that he considered it to be worth.

  As different as they were, Kierkegaard had in common with Nietzsche that his writing was so personal that it was nigh on impossible to take his thoughts and make them one’s own, at least not without mutilating them. When he wrote