Spring by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Author:Karl Ove Knausgaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

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We lived in this Bergmanesque summer house on Fårö for five days, long enough to fall into a certain rhythm: in the mornings I drove to the grocery shop to buy breakfast, before noon we drove to one of the beaches on the north-eastern side of the island to swim, eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant there, and in the evenings, after the children had gone to bed, we watched Bergman films, since I was terrified of coming unprepared to the event I was to participate in.

One evening your sisters stayed up sitting on the sofa with us, we saw The Seventh Seal, and they were transfixed. In particular, the witch who was bound to a wall interested them, what wrong she had done, they kept referring to that scene for several months afterwards. I think what fascinated them was firstly that the notion of witches wasn’t just something that belonged to the world of fairy tales, it also existed in historical reality, that came as a small shock to them, and secondly that in this reality it wasn’t actually true, but people believed it to be true, so that certain women were treated as witches anyway. I told them about the witch trials and the ordeal by water, that they were tied up and thrown into water. If they floated, I said, they were witches and were burned, if they sank they weren’t witches and were allowed a Christian burial. But they died either way! they said. That’s so unfair! They weren’t witches! No, they weren’t, I said. But that was a long time ago. The world was different then. To us it seems almost like a fairy tale. And what you saw was a movie. The woman who was bound to the wall was an actress.

I in turn was fascinated by their fascination, for though they lived in the same house, walked around in the same world as us, they related to it in different ways, in which little of what we thought about and experienced existed. We hardly ever watched the news on TV, so that visual explosion and concentration of violence and accidents, problems and concerns was something that merely existed in the background, as a vague backdrop which might suddenly become relevant, as when one day the elder one said she thought Putin was evil or that the Sweden Democrats were an evil party, or when out of the blue her sister asked, as I was reversing the car to park outside the house, why the Nazis had killed the Jews. In a strange way, I enjoyed witnessing this fracturing of their safe, harmless reality, for it was as much a case of them taking steps up into the adult world as of the world filtering down to them, and I thought of it as a conquest, that they would take their places in it. That the greed for understanding was just as important as feeling safe. Other parts of the

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