The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “Are you a Christian?” he said.

  I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to answer.

  “I mean, since you made a documentary about them? They think Jesus was born human, don’t they? That he didn’t become divine until later. Through his deeds. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What do you think, then?” he said.

  “About what?”

  “Was he born human, or was he born divine?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  He laughed.

  “Of course not! But what do you think?”

  I didn’t reply. The train started moving again. Lights flicked by as we picked up speed. A car waited for green at a lonely junction. An empty room with all the lights on stood out in an office building, its furniture crying out in the glare. Then, almost abruptly, all that was to be seen were trees, pale beneath the balmy night sky.

  “I’m an anesthetist,” he said. “For some years now, I’ve worked the air ambulance helicopter. It’s one of the toughest jobs there is, inasmuch as we only fly out to the most serious incidents. Traffic accidents. Drownings. Strokes. Heart attacks. We go where normal ambulances can’t reach. Remote villages and farms, islands far from the mainland. But I like it. It’s a very special feeling, landing by a fjord in the middle of the night or early morning, descending into a drama of life and death. Because that’s what it is, nearly every time.”

  He fell silent.

  After a moment, he looked up at me.

  “How about another?”

  “Go on, then. It’ll have to be the last, though,” I said. “I need to sleep before we get there.”

  “Sleep’s not that important,” he said.

  The train was climbing, but so slowly that I only noticed when occasionally we reached a point where we could see into the valley below us.

  “You mustn’t think I’m mad,” he said. “Because I’m not. But this spring just gone, some funny things started happening.”

  “While you were on call?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m not mad,” he said. “But sometime during the winter I started seeing people who weren’t there. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “I was seeing more people at the scenes than the colleagues I was on the job with could see,” he said. “It was a while before I realized. But when we talked about the calls we answered afterward, I would suddenly refer to someone, an old man who’d been staring at us from the sofa in the living room, for example, or the woman who’d been standing watching the helicopter when we landed, and my colleagues wouldn’t know what I was talking about. They hadn’t noticed these people. And when I realized this, I understood that it wasn’t a matter of them not having noticed, but that they simply couldn’t see them. It was as if they weren’t there.”

  “What was it you saw?” I said, though I knew the answer.

  “The dead,” he said. “I saw the dead who were there when the helicopter came.”

  He paused.

  “I’ve never told anyone before,” he said. “I don’t want to be the guy who believes in ghosts. But you and I aren’t likely to see each other again.”

  “What do you think they wanted?” I said.

  “They didn’t seem to want anything at all,” he said. “They were just there. A bit like animals, watching what was going on around them. And in every case, it was people who had died only recently. At least, that was the feeling I got.”

  “And no one else could see them?”

  “Not that I know of,” he said. “And that’s what I don’t like about it. How come I could see them and nobody else could? And why, all of a sudden?”

  He fell silent again.

  I leaned back against the wall and looked at the pale, rocky landscape outside with its radiant white birch under a sky that seemed oddly bright.

  “But that’s not all,” he said. “One of them spoke to me. We were in the parlor of a farmhouse. The man of the house, a big, old fellow, had suffered a heart attack, and on the sofa opposite us this young lad is sitting who no one else sees but me. Our eyes met. It’s never happened before, they usually just go about in their own world. But this lad he looked at me. And then he got up and pointed straight at me, and said, You are doomed.”

  “You are doomed?”

  “That’s right. Nothing else. We were just on our way out, but I noticed there was a picture of him on the wall. A portrait from his confirmation. You know, taken in a studio.”

  For a while, the noises of the train were all that was heard. The wheels clacking along the tracks beneath us, the rattle and sigh of the couplings, the faint whistle of the wind bearing down on the carriages.

  “You don’t believe me,” he said.

  “Of course I don’t believe you,” I said. “Or rather, I believe that you saw what you saw. But I don’t believe that what you saw was an accurate representation of reality.”

  “An accurate representation of reality?” he said rather derisively. “You’d have made a good academic. But what you’re saying is that what I saw existed only inside my head?”

  “Something like that. I saw a dead person too once, my grandfather. He was as plain to me as you are now. But he wasn’t there. He was in my mind.”

  “What was he doing there?” said Frank, and laughed.

  I smiled and lay back, and turned off the little night lamp next to my pillow.

  “Do you mind switching the ceiling light off?” I said.

  He stood up without a word and did so, then lay down as I had done, on top of his duvet.

  “Would you believe me if I said the lad was right? That I was doomed?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “My daughter died,” he said. “She was six years old. Hit by a truck on the road outside our house. She’d just learned to ride a bike and had only gone out to pedal about a bit in the drive. She wasn’t wearing a helmet.”

  My eyes filled with tears.

  He couldn’t be making that up.

  “Do you see now?” he said. “It wasn’t just inside my head. It really was the dead I saw.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.

  He laughed.

  “I believe you!”

  I couldn’t go to sleep and leave him dangling like that. He was on the edge of an abyss.

  But what could I say?

  Nothing I said would be any help.

  If I asked him about his daughter, it would allow him to talk about her, but then most likely he would break down. And if I didn’t ask about her, any conversation that followed would feel inauthentic and wrong.

  Someone opened the door between the carriages and the noise of the train rose abruptly, as if the door led out into a busy factory hall. When it closed again, voices were heard, passing along the corridor.

  Frank got up from his bed and stepped toward the window.

  “Do you mind if I open it just a crack?” he said.

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “It’s the hottest summer on record, they say.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said.

  He drew the top part of the window down a measure, and a draft came flapping in.

  “Are you married?” he said, pressing his brow to the pane.

  “Divorced,” I said.

  “Why?”

  None of your business, I thought. But I couldn’t snub him now.

  I drew myself up onto my elbows.

  “I couldn’t stick it.”

  “Simple as that!” he said with a laugh, and then turned to face me. “What was she like?”

  “There were different sides to her.”

  “Too much for you?”

  “No, it wasn’t that. At least, I don’t think
so. But she was always looking for an argument.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  “No.”

  “You’d rather sit in a chair and read Lucius Accius?”

  He was mocking me, and a shadow fell over me. He must have realized, for his tone changed immediately.

  “I’m divorced as well,” he said. “Twice, actually. Officially because I spend too much time working. Unofficially because I couldn’t keep my hands to myself.”

  He sat down on his bunk again.

  “But it goes deeper than that, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  He was quiet for some time. I lay down again and closed my eyes. I heard him settle too.

  “I’ve not been a particularly good person,” he said then. “Not that I failed, because I never set out to be one either. Why should I? We’re here for a while, then when we die it’s all forgotten. Including what was good about us. Do you know what I’m saying? We might as well live. Go your own way, that’s what I’ve always thought. Or perhaps not thought as such, but it’s certainly how I’ve lived.”

  “And now you’ve stopped?” I said.

  He didn’t reply at first, and I imagined him shaking his head down there in the dark.

  “I no longer know what I think,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

  Another pause.

  “How about you?” he said. “Are you a good person?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It depends on what you mean by good, I suppose.”

  “What was your wife’s name?”

  “Camilla.”

  “Like the girl in When the Robbers Came to Cardamom Town?”

  “I think that was Camomilla,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he said, and laughed again. “But were you good to her? Did you care about her? I mean genuinely care? Did you think about what it was like to be her? What she wanted? What she wanted you to do? Did you turn yourself toward her, fully and with all your heart? At least occasionally?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t know? Well, I’ll tell you. You didn’t. Am I right?”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “But there are two in a relationship.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong! A good person gives without expecting anything in return. You’ve got to be unselfish.”

  “But that’s canceling yourself out,” I said.

  “To you, yes. But not necessarily to her. Anyway, I’m speculating now. I never did myself. Care like that. Which is fair enough. But what gets me now is that I didn’t care about Emma either. Not properly. I thought she was lovely and all that, and she gave me joy. But I didn’t really care.”

  “Emma? That was your daughter?”

  “That’s right. With emphasis on the was.”

  Again, he paused.

  “What do you think about that?” he said then.

  “About how you related to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think it was enough that she gave you joy and that she knew that.”

  “That’s not what you think at all,” he said. “You’re just saying that because you think it suits me. But we don’t know each other. And we’re never going to see each other again. We might as well be honest.”

  “But it is what I think,” I said.

  “Have you got kids?”

  “Yes. A boy aged ten. He lives with his mother.”

  “Right, so you’re most probably talking about yourself. Listen, I’ve got a bottle of cognac here too. How about we have some of that?”

  * * *

  —

  We sat there and drank through the night, talking about our lives as we crossed the fells, their wild, faintly illuminated expanses, before descending into the valley, following a river that hurtled over its rapids and gleamed in the sun of morning below green hillsides. Gradually, I let go of myself completely, saying things I’d never said to anyone, he likewise, though the whole time I felt a nagging doubt as to whether what he was telling me was in fact true, or whether he was making things up, or at least embellishing the truth, wishing primarily to be distracted from his own thoughts. At one point I even wondered if his daughter really was dead. At the same time, I found it so edifying to talk to someone in such a way, quite freely, that sometimes I was convinced he’d been sent to me. That he brought with him a message, to me.

  I was drunk by the time the train pulled into the station, though in full control of myself and with the strong feeling that the alcohol had lit a flame inside me that now burned brightly and would consume my every problem. It was as if anything were possible all of a sudden.

  I stood on the platform outside the carriage and waited for Frank.

  “I suppose this is where we say our good-byes?” I said when he emerged.

  “That would be a waste of good cognac,” he said, extending the handle of his trolley suitcase. “Have you got any plans for the morning? Meeting anyone?”

  I shook my head and we went toward the exit. Sunlight flooded the old station building, flashing in every surface of metal and glass.

  “The funeral doesn’t start until eleven,” he said without looking at me. “How about keeping me company until then?”

  “The funeral?” I said. “You mean your daughter’s?”

  He nodded.

  My blood ran cold.

  Wasn’t she even buried yet?

  Oh, no, no, no.

  “Of course,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”

  “I’m booked into the Hotel Norge. We can have a drink there. You don’t have to stay that long. Only I don’t feel like being on my own just for the moment.”

  “I quite understand,” I said. “No problem.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “A hotel on the Torgellmenningen. I can’t remember what it’s called.”

  “The Norge will be posher, then,” he said. “How come the son of a wealthy man like your father doesn’t stay at the best hotels?”

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” I said, and he glanced at me skeptically.

  I bought some cigarettes at the Narvesen and smoked one as we walked past the pond in the center of town, another before we reached the hotel.

  I sat down in reception while he checked in.

  “We can stay down here,” he said. “It’s a bit more adult than drinking in the room, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, fine,” I said. A wave of fatigue came over me, so if I was going to stay upright, I’d need something more to drink.

  “I don’t know about you, but I could do with some breakfast,” he said after popping up to the room to dump his suitcase.

  The change of environment had altered everything, it was as if we had nothing left to talk about, didn’t know each other at all, and were as different as two people could be, I thought in the silence as we ate.

  Afterward, we downed a few beers. I’d just started wondering how I was going to get away without him feeling offended, when he asked if I would go with him to the funeral.

  “Would that be appropriate?” I said. “I didn’t know Emma.”

  “You know me.”

  “In a way,” I said.

  “You know me better than anyone, I can assure you. Say you will, and I’ll stop pestering you.”

  “Of course I’ll go with you,” I said. “I haven’t got any suitable clothes, though.”

  “For crying out loud, man,” he said. “It’s a funeral. Everything’s over. It’s all darkness and misery. Who the hell cares about clothes?”

  * * *

  —

  Afew minutes before half past ten, we got into a taxi up at Teaterbakken. Frank was drunk, his face stiff and inscrutable, his movements as if incomplete. I was drunk too, though not as conspicuous
ly as he was; a person would have to know me in order to tell.

  There were a lot of people outside the church, women in black dresses, men in black suits, many wearing sunglasses, most relatively young, many in their thirties. The mood was restless and uncertain in the way that is characteristic of those moments that precede the security of the ritual. Nervous smiles, awkward glances. Someone crying.

  “Give me a smoke,” said Frank, stopping at the gate.

  I handed him the packet and my lighter.

  He lit up and inhaled deeply.

  “Do I look drunk?” he said.

  “A bit,” I said.

  “I’m drunk for her,” he said. “Nothing means anything anymore now that she’s dead.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I’m honoring her memory,” he said, and peered at me with narrow eyes, swaying slightly on his feet.

  The church bells began to ring.

  “It’s time,” he said, dropping his cigarette to the ground and stepping on it. I touched his shoulder.

  “My deepest regrets,” I said.

  He looked at me and laughed.

  “Yes, it is certainly regretful. Come on, let’s go inside!”

  Everyone stared at us as we crossed the open area in front of the church. Frank did not return their looks, his eyes fixed ahead as he propelled himself forward in the stiff and measured manner of the inebriated. But people weren’t just looking at us, they were looking at each other too, and whispers were heard.

  “I’ll just sit at the back here,” I said when we entered and I saw the white coffin in front of the altar, so very small. The coffin and the floor surrounding it were awash with floral tributes.

  “No, come and sit with me at the front,” he said.

  “I can’t,” I said. “That’s only for the family.”

  I slipped into the nearest row. He nodded to himself and carried on down the aisle to the front pews. No one seated there acknowledged him. They made room without a word.