Emerging onto the road again, Frank walked faster than before.
“Now do you believe me?” he said as I caught up. His face was wet with tears.
I nodded.
“I don’t want to believe you, but I believe you,” I said.
“Now let’s get drunk and forget all about it,” he said, and looked at me with what I understood was supposed to be a smile, but which in fact was a grimace, his upper lip twisted and trembling.
“Sounds good,” I said.
* * *
—
I left Frank at around nine that evening, at which point he was slumped on his hotel bed asleep, and have not seen him since. I have thought about him a great deal and have on a couple of occasions visited the library in the town closest to where I live to look him up on the internet, though he never told me his surname and all I have to go on is his daughter’s surname, which I now assume was not his own. He knows my name though, so if he wished to make contact all he needed to do was phone.
The image of the girl in the shade beneath the tree is something I have seen every day since.
I saw her, and she was dead.
It could not be explained.
And yet it was the case.
The first thing I did when I returned to the summer house in which I live was to take from the shelf a three-volume work I have owned ever since I was a student, though without having read it, which is The Realm of the Dead: A World History. Its author is one Olav O. Aukrust, and the reason I bought it all those years ago was that I thought it to be by the great poet Olav Aukrust, which of course it is not—how could I ever have thought that he had written a major treatise on death without my having heard of it?—but all of a sudden my mistake stood me in good stead. I read about how the Babylonians, the Egyptians and the Greeks perceived death, as well as about various Gnostic conceptions, and how the death realm was imagined in the Viking Age, in the medieval period, in Indian, Tibetan and Chinese cultures, and of more modern takes such as are found in parapsychology and spiritism.
I traveled to London and visited my father, though not because I had read Swedenborg, who of course postulates a London beneath London, for his visions were, I believe, the result of pathological delusions combined with megalomania. No, I spent my time browsing the new and second-hand bookshops in search of books concerning the dead. There was no shortage of literature on the subject, for life after death has been a keen interest of all cultures. As far back as we can see, to the very origins of written language, man has concerned himself with what occurs following death. The written language forms the horizon of our cultures, as death forms the horizon of our lives, and that we should turn so immediately to address death in our writing may be as strange as it is understandable. But whereas the visible, tangible world has been explored and charted through centuries, meaning ostensibly that no mysteries remain to us, only facts that continue to slot into place in our constantly modified theories of reality, our insight into death has not changed. Einstein knew as little about death as did the first cave dwellers. In the slow process by which natural science over centuries has diminished the size of truth so considerably in its quest to discover the smallest possible entity, which is the particle of the atom, thereby to explain the world from that vantage point, death has been given no place. In earlier models of explanation such as those obtaining in classical antiquity or in the European Middle Ages, truth was sought in the antipole of the particle, which is to say in the world’s very complexity, and from such a holistic perspective, however incorrect it may seem from our own vantage point, death was accorded an important place.
What do we do about what we can sense, but cannot know?
We close our eyes to it.
We are rather like the drunk standing under the lamppost late at night, staring at the illuminated ground at his feet when a passerby stops to inquire if he is looking for something. He nods and says he is looking for his key. The passerby helps him search, but the key is nowhere to be found. Is he sure he lost it just there? No, says the drunk, pointing away into the darkness, I lost it over there. But I’m never going to find it there, so I’m looking here in the light.
I returned from London with my suitcase filled with books, and more on their way in the post. I could not forget that I had seen a dead girl sitting by an outdoor swimming pool, silent and withdrawn, dressed in the clothes she had been wearing when she died, nor could I pretend not to have seen her. So I began to write about it, and about what it could mean. And as I wrote, it was as if something opened up inside me, I began to understand to what great extent our language constrains the world, arranging it and placing its various elements in logical systems that are of such nature that we see neither the system nor the logic, only the world it presents to us. I saw the gulls sailing high under the blue sky, I heard their cries and understood that they, as us, were living creatures, without name, boundless, free. Their soul was something that lifted in the world, opening wide to become a presence, and it was unthinkable, unthinkable to them that such presence could ever cease. I saw the oak trees in the woods behind the house, so ponderous and calm, and I saw that they too, as us, were living things, without name, boundless and free. In glimpses I saw the world behind language, a world of transformation and mystery, and one night I saw my mother, Torill, in a dream. Which is to say that I was asleep and images filled my mind, but the nature of those images seemed in no way random as is the case with most dreams, or at least mine. No, it was as if Torill had been waiting for me in that dream, and was already there when I came. I walked toward the jetty, the sea was gray and made choppy by the wind, the waves were topped with white, and I saw that someone was there, someone in a yellow waterproof, and as I stepped out onto the jetty, the figure turned and it was her.
“Egil,” she said. “My child.”
I said nothing.
“I never understood who you were. I’m sorry if it made things difficult for you.”
“Not at all,” I said.
“I was not a good mother to you. To your brothers, yes, but not to you.”
“You were a fine mother, of course you were,” I said.
She stepped toward me and zipped up my anorak, as she always used to.
The next thing I knew, I was staring at the ceiling in my bedroom. I got up and pulled the curtains open. The sea was gray and choppy, the waves topped with white. The jetty slippery-looking with rain.
But there was no woman there in a yellow waterproof.
* * *
—
Foxes emerged, and deer in the fields beyond the road. The weather grew warmer. One morning, an enormous flock of black birds settled on the rocks at the shore. I have never seen anything quite like it, there must have been thousands. They remained there, huddled together for several hours, before taking off all at once, a gigantic black cloud rising into the sky, a shifting curtain of flesh, almost as one, to disappear over the trees across the inlet.
And last night a new star appeared in the sky.
It shines above me now.
The Morning Star.
I know what it means.
It means that it has begun.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Henry Marsh, Pål-Dag Line, Cecilie Jørgensen Strømmen and Naomi and Yaron Shavit for invaluable help with things I know nothing about, and to Bjørn Arild and Kari Ersland, Yngve Knausgård, Monika Fagerholm, Birgit Bjerck and Kristine Næss for reading the manuscript as it progressed.
Credits
Quotes are from the following works.
Aristotle, On Philosophy, cited in a fragment by Sextus Empiricus in Aristotle: New Light on His Life and on Some of His Lost Works, trans. A.-H. Chroust (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1973).
Johan Alfred Blomberg, “A Flower So Fine in the Forest I See,” 1890, trans. Martin Aitken.
Hesiod, “Theogony,” The Homeric
Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914).
Friedrich Hölderlin, “Timidity,” trans. Stanley Corngold, found in “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 18–36.
B. S. Ingemann, “Deilig er jorden” (Danish: “Dejlig er jorden”), found in Fashioners of Faith: The Danish Hymn-Writers Kingo, Brorson, Grundtvig and Ingemann, trans. John Irons (Odense, Denmark: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2018).
Søren Kierkegaard, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Friedrich Nietzsche, cited in Carl Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Theodor V. Oldenburg, “Deep and Glorious, Word Victorious,” trans. Carl Doving.
Philostratus, Heroicus, cited in Daniel Ogden, Greek and Roman Necromancy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Book of Monastic Life,” The Book of Hours, in Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Robert Bly (New York: Harper Perennial, 1981).
Verses cited in the funeral service are from the Church of Norway’s official order for a funeral (https://kirken.no/globalassets/kirken.no/om-troen/liturgier-oversatt/funeral_2003.pdf) and The Apostles’ Creed is from the Order of the Principle Service (https://kirken.no/globalassets/kirken.no/om-troen/liturgier-oversatt/the-order-of-the-principal-service.pdf). Erlend’s draft translation is an adapted version of Leviticus 3:12–17 from the New Revised Standard Version, Anglicized Edition. Other quotes are from the King James Version.
About the Author
KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD's first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win The Norwegian Critics' Prize and his second, A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, was widely acclaimed. A Death in the Family, the first of the My Struggle cycle of novels, was awarded the prestigious Brage Award. The My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece wherever it appears.
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