The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  They had, and for the next eighteen months I’d worked exclusively on the project.

  At the opening, to which were invited all and sundry in the way of artists, politicians, sponsors and local celebrities, Helge Bråthen came toward me pointing his finger at me.

  “The Blake exhibition in London!” he said. “Am I right?”

  I nodded.

  “So you’re not just interested in art, it’s your job too? What else would you be doing here, I ask myself.”

  “You could say,” I said. “How about you?”

  “No, I’m only an architect,” he said. “What do you think of the exhibition, then? You were rather critical of Blake, I remember.”

  How could he remember that? He surely met all sorts of new people every day?

  I smiled.

  “I like it rather a lot,” I said. “How about you? What do you make of it?”

  “Some of it I like,” he said. “And some of it not so much.”

  “What parts of it don’t you like?”

  He looked at me as he ran his hand over the stubble on his scalp.

  “The lighting in room 2 is awful,” he said. “Far too dark. It gives the wrong atmosphere. Atmosphere must come from the pictures, not from the damn lighting. The colors on the walls are awful too. Same reason.”

  “But what about overall? The art itself? It works pretty well, wouldn’t you say?”

  Now it was the stubble on his chin that he rubbed.

  “To an extent,” he said. “It’s just so very difficult to mix up different ages like that, even if there is a thematic link. It makes things so obvious. Do you follow me? What you want is for the pictures to work together, as it were, to play off each other. Rather than just representing the age to which they belong.”

  I nodded.

  “But the crows, now that’s very good. And Vanessa Baird’s pictures. I love Vanessa Baird.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  He looked at me as if confused for a second, as if he’d forgotten who he was talking to, before nodding and smiling at me. Then he glanced around, presumably in search of a waiter with some wine.

  I nodded and went off to mingle.

  The next day he phoned me.

  “Helge Bråthen speaking. Blake in London, if you remember?”

  “Oh, hello,” I said.

  “You pulled one over on me yesterday! Pretty emphatically, too. I would never have said what I really thought about the exhibition if I’d known you were the curator!”

  I laughed.

  “It was interesting to hear your opinion,” I said. “And the lighting’s been sorted now. Thanks for bringing it to my attention! You were right, of course.”

  “No, not at all,” he said. “Let me make it up to you. Can I take you out to dinner?”

  “Yes, I’d like that,” I said.

  “Tonight?”

  “I can’t tonight,” I said, and sensed myself smiling. “It’s our public opening.”

  “It can’t go on all night, surely?”

  “Until ten.”

  “Meet you after that, then?”

  “There won’t be any kitchen open then, will there?”

  “Not a problem. They’ll stay open for us. Shall we say ten thirty? Restaurant Sjølyst?”

  We said ten thirty, and not many months after that I moved into his apartment. I saw that he was happy then, but I saw too that he was concerned.

  “What do you actually want with me?” he said the first evening after I moved in. “I’m not far off sixty. You’re thirty-three.”

  “I want to have a baby with you,” I said.

  He stared at me in disbelief.

  “You are joking, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “What on earth do you want that for?”

  “Because I love you.”

  “You do?”

  “Mm.”

  “As much as that?”

  “Mm. And besides, you’ve got good genes.”

  * * *

  —

  I put the porridge on while he went and showered. Then I heated some rolls in the oven, made more coffee, fried an omelet and pressed three glasses of orange juice, all of it ready when he came down the stairs.

  “Well, I must say,” he said, rubbing his hands together as he sat down.

  “Don’t just make do with the porridge,” I said, lifting Åse into her chair and then holding a glass of juice to her lips. Her face twisted into a grimace at the first sip, but then she wanted more.

  “Why not?” he said.

  “It’s what solicitors and businessmen eat when they’re going in for the Birkebeiner race. I can’t think of anything worse, to be honest.”

  “Yes, you can,” he said, dropping a dollop of butter into the middle of his porridge and sprinkling cinnamon on top. “Industrial livestock farming, the oil industry, the extinction of the species. Just to name a couple of examples. All worse than porridge.”

  “You forgot whaling,” I said.

  “That goes under extinction of the species,” he said.

  He began to eat, and looked up at me.

  “Can’t you sit down?”

  “I’m just about to,” I said, and nodded toward the brown Gudbrandsdalen cheese. “Perhaps you can cut her a piece?”

  I sat down and he placed a piece in front of her, which she took and put in her mouth, as quiet and as concentrated as when she’d eaten her bilberries.

  “Isn’t she lovely?” I said.

  “That’s an understatement,” he said. “She’s fantastic.”

  “Which of us do you think she looks like today?”

  He looked at me, then at her.

  “Your eyes, thank goodness. My nose. Your mother’s facial shape. Your sister’s hues. But everything taken into account, she’s very much her own person. With her own soul.”

  She watched him attentively as he spoke. Sometimes I felt they admired each other from a distance. They hadn’t entirely got the hang of each other yet, but they would.

  We had talked no more about it that first evening, and neither of us mentioned it in the days that followed. But then in the car one day, on our way to the supermarket after work, he put his hand on my knee.

  “It’s fine by me,” he said. “Let’s have a baby. But looking after it will have to be your job. I’m too old to go to work and be a modern dad. And you’ve got to be completely sure. It has to be something you really want. Bear in mind that I’ll be seventy by the time the child’s ten.”

  “I’m competely sure,” I said, and squeezed his hand.

  Now he pushed his empty plate aside, cut a roll in two halves and placed a slice of cheese on each.

  “You must have some omelet too,” I said. “It’s very good, even if I do say so myself.”

  “Mm,” he said, and took a bite of his bread, leaning forward over his plate so the crumbs from the crispy crust didn’t end up in his lap.

  “What have they got in store for you at the office today, do you know?” I said.

  He shook his head and swallowed, then took a slurp of his orange juice.

  “A cake in the shape of the new post office or some such nonsense, I shouldn’t wonder,” he said. “I’ve told them I want no fuss this time. No doubt they think I was only joking.”

  “Weren’t you?”

  He snorted.

  “Fifty was all right. I hadn’t yet grasped the gravity of the situation. Sixty’s another matter altogether.”

  We were quiet for a few minutes, all three of us. The radio kept repeating the interview I’d heard earlier in the morning, the eager astronomist over and over again.

  “Listen to that idiot,” Helge said, leaning back in his chair. “The way these people drone on about how everything that
happens must have happened before and will happen again in exactly the same way. Science is built on the notion. Everything following certain laws which are unchangeable. I’ve always thought it can’t possibly be true. Well, not always, but at least since my twenties. It’s no more than three hundred thousand years since man emerged. And that was something completely new, something that hadn’t been there before.”

  This was Helge’s guiding idea. That the world wasn’t governed by laws, but by habits. He’d taken it from Peirce, whom he’d read with some friends in their student days. He’d even called his thesis “Architecture and Habit.” I’d visited the university library and borrowed it the day after our first night out, and I’d been impressed. Subsequently, he’d left theory behind and had never pursued the ideas that nevertheless were still so important to the way he understood the world.

  “But that’s biology, evolution. Surely there’s no contradiction between that and the laws of nature?”

  “But our whole experience is about change!” he said. “It’s not that long ago since they split the atom, for instance. And only a few generations back there were no such things as cars or sewing machines or planes or computers or space rockets or what have you.”

  “That’s just man exploiting the laws of nature to his advantage,” I said. “That doesn’t exactly nullify them, does it?”

  “But try and imagine a world without natural laws. No eternally recursive patterns, no boundaries for what can occur and what can’t. But where everything nonetheless evolves and everything has a history.”

  “So gravity, for instance, just evolved?” I said to provoke him, though he clearly didn’t grasp the intention.

  “Exactly! It was never a given! Matter simply began to behave in that way. It became a habit, and after billions of years it’s become a habit so difficult to turn around again that we think it to be an eternal law. To begin with, though, it was merely a case of improvisation. Everything in nature is improvisation. Some solutions just turn out to be better than others, and so they become entrenched.”

  “But how does matter know how to behave? Habit presupposes some kind of conscious mind, doesn’t it?”

  I looked at him with a smile.

  “You don’t believe matter can think, do you?”

  “Let’s say the idea sounded right, the utterance less so,” he said, and smiled back. “Still, let’s entertain the idea for a moment that matter can think. Or perhaps not think as such, but that it possesses some form of consciousness. Consider atoms, the way they slot into patterns that work. And that everything new that happens strives to do likewise, to slot into patterns that work.”

  “I’m not sure I understand the difference,” I said. “The end result’s the same, gravity exists no matter what.”

  “But there’s a huge difference!” he said. “If evolution applies to everything, then something completely new can occur at any time. Take that supernova up there, for example,” he said, poking a finger upward. “What if that’s something completely new? Science won’t be able to embrace it, because they’ve already decided that nothing new can happen. They won’t be able to see it.”

  “What do you think, Åse,” I said, running my hand through her hair. She’d been sitting quietly, watching Helge gesticulate as one by one she placed the dry cornflakes I’d given her in a line on the table in front of her.

  “You realize, of course, that it was probably the first metaphysical thought in the world?” I said.

  “What was?”

  “That everything is alive, even matter.”

  “There’s no reason to believe their thoughts were any poorer than our own,” he said, getting to his feet. “What are your plans today, anyway?”

  “I was thinking I’d try and get a bit of work done, if Åse will let me. I might take her into town with me later, too.”

  “That sounds nice,” he said, and downed the rest of his coffee, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I seem to be running a bit late now. See you this afternoon.”

  As soon as he left the house, I put Åse back to bed, and once she fell asleep I started on the cake. The ladybugs were all gone from the terrace, and while the sponges were in the oven I sat down and dealt with some e-mails.

  The temperature outside had already risen to thirty degrees, and it would almost certainly get even hotter later in the day.

  I texted Atle, Helge’s eldest son, who’d promised to help me carry things.

  Are you still up for it? I wrote.

  Of course, he wrote back. What time?

  Ten. See you then. And thanks!

  I went back into the kitchen and looked at the sponges through the oven glass. They were still rather pale-looking, so I went upstairs, had a quick shower and got changed, Åse still sleeping, her arms and legs outstretched like a little starfish, before going back down, taking the sponges out of the oven, savoring their delicious smell and golden hue, and leaving them to cool on a rack. One had sunk a little in the middle, but not enough for it to matter.

  I cleared the breakfast things from the table and had just started the dishwasher when Åse began to cry.

  “I’m here, Åse,” I called out as I went up the stairs, finding her standing up in her crib, warm and sweaty, her face creased and tearful.

  “What a long sleep you’ve had,” I said, lifting her up. “Let’s change your diaper, shall we? Then we can go into town. That’ll be fun!”

  She grizzled a bit, and I handed her the hairbrush to play with as I put her down.

  I packed her bag with some diapers and wet wipes, some fruit puree and a couple of small cartons of milk, pressed an empty feeding bottle into one side pocket and a bottle of water into the other, made sure I’d got my money, the car keys and my sunglasses, then carried her out into the hallway with the backpack on and my own bag on my arm, and took the elevator down into the basement.

  I hardly ever drove anywhere, preferring to cycle or walk, but now we were going to the big shopping center on the outskirts of town, so there was no other way.

  Helge had taken the Mini as usual, so it was the Audi I backed slowly out of the space in the cramped residents’ garage, before emerging into the bright sunlight with Åse safely belted into the child seat behind me.

  Once we were on the main road, I phoned my mum.

  “Hi,” I said. “Is it all right if you pick her up at ours instead? It looks like I’m going to be too busy to come and drop her off.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “When do you want me to come? The same time?”

  “Yes. Or anytime before five,” I said.

  “The sooner the better?” she said.

  I laughed.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “In that case, I’ll be there around three.”

  “Brilliant,” I said. “See you then!”

  Mum was almost the same age as Helge, there was only a year between them, and I knew she found it a bit hard to relate to, though she’d never let on.

  It was one thing that they could conceivably have been a couple themselves, but it was quite another that he, a man her age, was sleeping with her little girl—for that’s who I still was in her eyes—which no doubt to her mind, though again she’d never say so in as many words, was tantamount to pedophilia. Or if not that exactly, then at least something against the order of nature, the way things were supposed to be.

  What was such an old man doing with such a young girl? And not just any young girl, but her own daughter?

  We’d never talked about it. She wanted to let me live my life, which I was grateful for. But it was inconceivable for her not to despise him, a man her age running around after girls only half his own.

  I ought to bring it up with her sometime.

  But she would never admit it, not even to herself.

  And what would I say? All I could think of w
ere clichés.

  Age is just a number.

  But it was true!

  The person Helge was, that which was him, had no age. It was swathed in sixty years of lived life, and for many people this was something that made the path to the core so long and convoluted that the person inside remained unto themselves, a tone that was theirs and theirs alone, amid all their thoughts and feelings, which no one else had access to any longer. But in Helge’s case, the path to the core was short. As when he bubbled with enthusiasm about a matter, or when he was feeling down about something, or found something else so indescribably hilarious that he completely lost himself in laughter.

  It made him vulnerable, and his vulnerability was something I loved.

  “I’m thinking about your daddy!” I said, reaching my hand behind the seat and finding hers.

  She pushed it away.

  “Do you want a Popsicle afterward?” I said, immediately wishing I hadn’t. Afterward wasn’t a concept she understood.

  “Nn!” she said.

  And then, when no Popsicle transpired:

  “UAA! UAA! UAAAARGH!”

  “You’ll have to wait a bit, Åse,” I said. “We’ll soon be there, and then I’ll buy you a Popsicle.”

  But it was too late, she was already screaming.

  A gas station appeared just ahead. Without hesitating, I flicked the indicator and turned in.

  “Come on, we’ll get you a Popsicle,” I said, releasing the safety belt from her seat and lifting her out.

  The heat dithered above the asphalt. Traffic rushed by, a merciless racket. The air was thick with exhaust and gas fumes. Åse hadn’t yet understood why we’d stopped, she wailed and kicked her legs and was almost impossible to carry.