The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  What had he done?

  What was his sin?

  The church filled up in the silence of all funerals, heard in the rustle of clothing, the cautious whisper, the clacking heels of best shoes on the stone floor.

  The priest appeared from the sacristy, and I was stunned. I’d known her once, we’d been in the same class at gymnasium school.

  I had even loved her.

  Kathrine, I said to myself. So this is where you are.

  She halted in front of the coffin and lowered her head as the organist struck up the prelude of the first hymn. I picked up the hymnbook from the back of the bench in front of me, opened it and followed the words without joining in, listening as she led the mourners in song, her voice confident and comforting, and rather splendid in an unadorned kind of way.

  A flower so fine in the forest I see

  ’Neath the pines which tower so high

  Lo, from the moss there and heather doth peep

  A bloom so delicate and shy!

  O, art thou afraid to be thus so concealed

  Where shadows must darken thy light?

  —No, for the Lord is my meadow and field

  His sunshine from Heaven so bright!

  But wouldst thou not in a garden grow tall

  Where folk would come and behold thee?

  —O, no, for I thrive with the little and small

  A flower of the forest is me!

  And though I am little the Lord holds me dear

  He makes me so happy of heart

  Each morning I pray to Heaven sincere

  And with prayer to sleep I depart!

  As flowers in winter I must wither and die

  Yet death with but joy I shall meet

  For my body at peace in God’s earth shall lie

  And my soul shall be God’s to greet!

  When the music faded away, sobbing broke out here and there. Even I, who had not known the girl whose funeral it was, had tears in my eyes. There was so much pain in the church that it was almost unbearable.

  “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” said Kathrine. Her voice was warm and relaxed. She directed her gaze at the first rows of benches, as if to make contact with someone there. I liked the calmness of her manner, and her face was as beautiful as I remembered it, though with more of an edge about it now, a severity even, as if she had been sharpened by life.

  “We are gathered here today to say a last farewell to Emma Johansen,” she said. “Together, we will surrender her into God’s hands and follow her to her final resting place. For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Let us pray.”

  She bowed her head. I bowed mine, and folded my hands together.

  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest. But you, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me!”

  I looked up and saw Kathrine ascend to the pulpit, where she placed a hand on the rail on each side and looked out over the gathering of mourners. It was as if the air trembled, sniffles and sobs could be heard, and occasional whimpering.

  “Emma is dead,” she said. “Emma, so dearly cherished by so many, has been taken from us. And Emma was only six years old. There is no greater grief. There is no deeper despair. The death of a child is the night of life. Today, we shall say our farewell to Emma, and we shall share our memories of her—and those memories are bright. Emma was a tiny star. She was born on the sixth of October, two weeks overdue, her two brothers, Emil and Noa, having waited so patiently for her to arrive. She smiled for the first time when she was ten days old, began to walk at eleven months, and spoke her first word at the age of one. Emma was a happy, giddy little girl who loved animals, especially dogs, and there was nothing she liked better than to go for walks with her mummy Monica and Kasper the golden retriever. Emma was kind and considerate, she had a big heart for others, and filled the house with joy. Her laughter was infectious, she could make everyone laugh. Emma was a master of the jigsaw puzzle. She enjoyed drawing and painting, and loved to wear clothes with unicorn designs.”

  It was insufferable to listen to. But I could hardly get up and leave, not during the memorial tributes, nor after them either.

  I looked at the coffin as Kathrine held forth about the girl inside it.

  A deluge of flowers.

  This was God. A deluge of life. A deluge of death. White flowers with green leaves. It wasn’t about our individual destinies and fates, but rather the inevitable lifeslide of which we all were a part.

  No one was to blame for the child’s death. No one to whom one’s anger and grief could be directed.

  No one was God.

  “Emma was a tiny flower in the great forest,” said Kathrine. “Now, Emma is a light in the darkness. Those who were closest to her will remember and miss her always.”

  God was no one.

  In the first row of benches, someone rose abruptly. It was Frank. He forged a path into the aisle on unsteady legs, his eyes fixed harshly on the floor in front of him.

  A faint gasp went through the great space. His face was inscrutable, but as he looked up on his way down the aisle, I saw his eyes were filled with rage.

  Kathrine was no longer speaking.

  Frank paused at the row where I was seated.

  “Are you coming?” he said, and smiled.

  * * *

  —

  The rest of the day and evening were terrible. I couldn’t leave him on his own in the state he was in, but I couldn’t help him either, other than by staying with him and offering my company, which wasn’t really worth much, as he and I both knew, since I was not a proper friend, but someone he had met on a train and was now hanging out with.

  “Why did you get up and go?” I said, when half an hour later we sat drinking beer outside a cafe on the Bryggen quayside.

  “I couldn’t bear to share her with everyone,” he said, staring out across the harbor, Vågen, whose dark blue waters lay heavy and still against the quays.

  “The priest was talking as if she knew her. She didn’t. And hardly anyone else there did either.”

  He looked at me.

  “What do I do now, Egil? I’ve got maybe forty years left to live. And nothing to live for.”

  I swallowed a mouthful of beer and wiped the froth from my lips.

  I could say he had to accept his loss and live on with the memories, and that one day perhaps they would be less painful. But it would just be words, unfounded in experience, worthless.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “No, I don’t suppose you do,” he said. “But do you at least believe what I told you on the train?”

  “About the dead people you saw?”

  “Yes. In particular the one who told me I was doomed.”

  “Something in you saw them. I believe that.”

  He stared at me for a long time. His gaze was like the ones you can encounter in clubs and bars late at night when someone has decided they’re looking for trouble. But then he let it drop, leaned back in his chair and looked out across the water again.

  High above us in the sky, some gulls circled. Their occasional cries were distant.

  “I’m sorry I can’t be more of a help,” I said.

  “You’ve been a great help,” he said without looking at me. “I just need to get through today, that’s all. And tomorrow. My problem is that I don’t know why. And don’t tell me to get counseling, please!”

  He laughed bleakly.

  A gaggle of tourists straggled past, trailing a guide who was wearing shorts and holding a stick in the air
with a little red pennant on top. He was in his mid-twenties, the tourists all pensioners, but it still looked like a nursery school outing.

  “Are you having another?” I said.

  “That’s the cleverest thing you’ve said all day,” he said.

  We drank another couple of beers there on the Bryggen before going into town and finding a restaurant for something to eat. I ordered a chateaubriand with fried potatoes, starving as always after a funeral. The first time was when my grandfather died and they had served soup in the community hall afterward. The salty meat and the vegetables had tasted so good, and my hunger was so insatiable that three portions had been barely enough. Since then I’ve found it to be the case on every occasion, including the one I describe here, where I sat next to the wall in a French restaurant in the company of a man I didn’t know, who had just buried his daughter.

  I knew the situation required restraint, but he had himself overstepped just about every imaginable boundary that day, so I considered a good meal to be admissible once the chance came round.

  We hardly spoke, immersed in our own thoughts at the table—or rather, I don’t suppose Frank had that many thoughts, for he was in thrall to his emotions, held captive in their darkness. Now and again, he would glance up at me, often smiling faintly.

  “You’re hungry, I see,” he said eventually.

  My mouth was full of food, and all I could do was nod.

  “Funerals do that to people,” he said. “Give them an appetite for life.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It must seem incredibly insensitive of me. But all that drinking has made me ravenous.”

  “Worse things have happened today,” he said. “And a lining on your stomach helps with the booze.”

  We enjoyed a few glasses of cognac after the meal, a 1973 vintage, its taste unruly and wild, which was only natural, for it had lived an entire life sealed from the world, only then to be released inside us.

  “I know you want to go now,” he said as we waited for the bill. “And I understand that. But I’d like you to hang around if possible, until this day’s over. I’ll be fine in the morning. But I can’t cope today if I’m on my own. I know it’s a big ask. Perhaps you could think of it as a good deed?”

  “Thou art my neighbor,” I said. “I’ll see you all the way to the door.”

  “You are a Christian!” he said. “I knew you were!”

  I said nothing. “Christian” seemed so rigid; that wasn’t what I was.

  The sun was still high in the sky when we emerged onto the square and found it teeming with life. Again, I found myself thinking of deluge: a deluge of people, a deluge of events, a deluge of movements great and small. Heads bending toward the ground, turning this way and that; hands waving in the air, gripping carrier bags, lifting glasses, tying shoelaces; glances here, glances there; loud voices, low voices; laughter, deep and rumbling, or shrill in the register’s upper reaches.

  All that appeared before the eyes disappeared again in the very next instant.

  That too was a form of death, was it not?

  But what then was fate? Fate, which connected the one with the other and allowed it to prevail?

  Kathrine had not disappeared, she had come back.

  Was that why Frank had been delivered to me?

  Or was it to teach me about death and the dead?

  “Where do you fancy going?” Frank said. “Maybe you know of a good cafe somewhere?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I haven’t been here for years. Last time I was here, there was a kind of arts venue farther along by the water. It was a good place to sit.”

  “I know where it is,” he said. “The walk will do us good, too.”

  We stopped for a beer in a place down the hill from the theater, it was packed with punters, and then we had another, with a Fernet-Branca chaser, even though we both agreed it wasn’t a drink for hot weather. Frank seemed to have gained some equilibrium, but still barely spoke, so it was hard to tell what was going on inside him.

  On our way along the Nordnes point, passing through an avenue of chestnut trees where there were no more shops or restaurants, he started talking again.

  “Monica turned the kids against me. She was so angry about the divorce, you’ve no idea. And since this happened, the reason you’re walking here with me now, she’s shut me out completely. Won’t let me see the boys, or the house we lived in together. She’s taken my grief away from me too.”

  He glanced at me with drunken eyes.

  “Which is only to be expected, I suppose. I wasn’t that bothered. They were all right, I was all right. It was an OK deal. Only now Emma’s in the ground, and it’s so terrible. It’s so terrible.”

  He shook his head in despair, and I put my hand on his shoulder. He looked at me as if I’d gone mad, and I withdrew it again.

  “In the ground,” he said. “She can’t talk. Do you understand what I’m saying? She can’t move. She can’t even think! She’s lying there completely still and alone. It’s so terrible. And then that cunt of a priest with her hymn about the little flower in the forest. And what else did she say, that Emma was a star in the sky? She’s nothing! Nothing! Nothing!”

  He swiped the air in front of him, once for every “nothing.”

  And after that he looked at me and smiled.

  “I’m really sorry to have dragged you into this. But there’s a good chance you’ll remember this day for a while. And that’s something, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  He blew out some air.

  “Let’s find that place you were talking about and get drunk,” he said.

  “Sounds like a good plan,” I said.

  We followed the road along, but we must have made a wrong turn at some point because all of a sudden we found ourselves at the aquarium instead. The car park was packed with tourist buses and there was a long queue to get in.

  “There’s bound to be a restaurant inside where we can get a beer,” said Frank.

  “We’ll have to queue up though,” I said.

  “True,” he said. “Anyway, they’ve probably only got bottled. No time for that. Maybe if we go that way instead?”

  He nodded toward a narrow road on the other side of the point. I lit a cigarette and smoked it as we went. The rush I’d felt from the alcohol was beginning to subside, an enormous fatigue taking its place.

  The road we followed took us down toward the fjord. After a bit, an outdoor swimming baths appeared just below us. It had a white-painted pool with a diving tower and springboards, and beside it was a children’s pool. The grassy areas surrounding it, leading up to where we stood, were brimful of people sitting around on rugs and towels with their picnic baskets and whatnot, children running about in trunks and bathing suits.

  “We used to come here,” said Frank.

  “You and . . . ?”

  “Me and the kids, yes,” he said. “You don’t have to be so afraid of mentioning them, by the way.”

  He put his hands on the railing and stood looking down on the life that abounded there. Against the great blue sky, the still blue of the fjord, with the green fells and hills in the background, the bathers with all their paraphernalia were a patchwork of color.

  Suddenly, he raised his arm and pointed. His mouth opened, though without a word escaping.

  “What?” I said.

  “Over there,” he said. “Can you see her? Under that tree. By that yellow mountain bike?”

  I looked. A little girl was sitting with her arms folded around her knees.

  “I can see a girl?” I said, immediately feeling the urge to move on before the situation escalated, realizing straightaway what he was thinking. That it was Emma.

  “It’s Emma,” he said. “It’s my little Emma.”

  He started toward
the entrance, breaking into a run.

  “Frank,” I said. “It’s not her. It’s just someone who looks like her.”

  He wasn’t listening. I hurried after him. I had to make sure he didn’t make a scene in there.

  I caught up with him as he reached the lawns. He moved as quickly as he could among the sunbathers, the towels that were spread out on the grass.

  “Frank,” I said as gently as I could. “You don’t know what you’re doing anymore. Come with me instead. Leave her alone.”

  He halted and looked at me. His eyes flashed.

  “You shut it!” he hissed.

  “All right, all right,” I said.

  He walked toward her, slowing as he came closer. The girl did not look at us, but sat unmoving under the tree, gazing in the direction of the swimming pool. Frank crouched down in front of her. I pulled up a few paces behind him.

  “Emma,” he said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so terribly sorry. You’re the most precious little girl in all the world. Do you know that?”

  She gave no indication of even noticing he was there. All she did was stare into space.

  A sliver of doubt crept into my mind as I noticed that her T-shirt was flecked with what appeared to be blood.

  “Say something to me, Emma. Anything at all. I love you. I love you, my petal.”

  She stood up, and a chill went through me. The right side of her head was crushed.

  “Don’t go,” said Frank. “Not now that I’ve found you again.”

  She walked up the slope toward the fence where there was some thick shrubbery, and then she was gone.

  Frank put his head in his hands. I turned round. Everyone looked away abruptly, as people do when caught staring.

  It couldn’t be true.

  It could only be a hallucination.

  But we’d both seen her.

  Was I now so completely on Frank’s wavelength as to have been induced to see the same as him?

  He straightened up and without looking at me began to walk back. I followed him. People had lost their inhibitions now and watched us as we wove our way between them.

  Why had no one else seen the girl?

  And why had I seen her?