My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  He leaned forward, placing his hands on his knees, shaking his head slightly until his hair was the way he wanted it. His daughter was sitting on her haunches in front of the twenty-centimeter-high wooden fence that penned in the play area, lining up little stones along the top of it. The sun shimmered against her waterproof yellow trousers. Vanja was climbing on the red play train. On her knees, she turned and looked at me. The wind blew her hair in front of her face, she pushed it back, the wind blew it forward again. I waved to her and glanced around to see what Heidi was up to. There she was, sitting on the little bench inside the train. Her posture was exactly the same as his, bent forward with a hand on each knee. Little person, I thought to myself, something Linda would say so often about her. Then she got up and stuck her head out the window, and watched the other children as they carried their bundles of leaves to the pond from under the tree on the lawn.

  I leaned back on the bench. Under the trees that lined the park some fifty meters away, a chunky woman came along pushing a bike at her side. The trees above her head swayed gently in the wind, filling the street below with shifting nuances of light and shade. On a balcony no bigger than a box or a cage, a few meters up on the front of one of the apartment buildings behind the trees, a man and a woman stood looking out, each with a glass in their hand. From the gateway below, two men appeared lugging a table between them. A third man, who had been waiting on the sidewalk, flicked a cigarette onto the ground, climbed into the back of the van that was parked there, then emerged again with a gray blanket bundled in his arms. In the blue sky above them a plane angled steeply upward, impossible to separate from the white trail it left behind.

  The world is old, yet simple, I thought to myself, and everything in it stands open.

  It was as if my soul lifted as the thought occurred to me. But then a yell went up from Heidi and my eyes darted in the direction of the play train. She was lying on her stomach in front of it with her face in the sand. I dashed across and picked her up, scanning her face for blood, but she had been lucky, it didn’t look like she had been hurt at all. Three times that month she had fallen badly, twice banging her mouth hard, once on the edge of the table and once on the tabletop, there had been blood everywhere and we had had to take her first to accident and emergency then the dentist. For some time following these accidents she would put her hand to her mouth whenever she fell, it didn’t matter where the hurt was coming from. This time, though, nothing had happened. I hugged her tight, she put her face to my chest and sobbed, but soon she lifted her head and began to look around her and I was able to put her down again. When I returned to the bench and sat down next to him he was immersed in his book. A sudden movement in the upper corner of my eye caused me to look up. It was a leaf falling to the ground. Or rather, not falling at all. It was twirling, round and round, like the rotor blades of a helicopter, descending gently through the air.

  * * *

  Thinking about this made me remember something I had read some months before, it was a passage in a Swedish book called Linjen that brought together a dialogue between Heidegger and Jünger in which the latter had written something about patterns that had made a deep impression on me at the time and melded into some other thoughts I had with such intensity and fervor that I had jotted it all down on one of the blank pages under the heading “The Third Realm” with the idea of it forming the basis of a new novel.

  I couldn’t remember what exactly I had written and so I went into the living room to look for the book again. Linda put her newspaper down as I came in.

  “What time are you leaving tomorrow?” she asked.

  “The flight’s at seven,” I said. “So about five-ish.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “A bit. It’ll be worse tomorrow, though.”

  My eyes passed over the spines of the books on the shelves. The ones on the bottom shelf had all been shoved in, some so far they had vanished into the depths. It was John’s doing, and I had long since stopped bothering to pull them out again after his ravages, he was only going to shove them back again, probably within a matter of hours. Let’s have a look … H, H, H … there! Jünger/Heidegger, Linjen.

  “Bath!” said Vanja.

  “Speak in full sentences when you speak,” I told her.

  “Bath!” she said again, and looked at Linda.

  “Can I,” I insisted.

  “Can I have a bath?” she said.

  “Are you up to it?” Linda asked me.

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “But then will you put them to bed?”

  She nodded.

  “Wait just five minutes,” I told Vanja, beginning to leaf through the pages of the book that was now in my hand. The passage in question wasn’t from Jünger’s text as I had thought, but from an entry in his diary quoted by Anders Olsson in his afterword.

  On our way back along the shore we discovered a bank of shells. None of the mussels and clams that had been washed up there was bigger than a bean, many were smaller than a pea – but what we saw was the universe itself, with its ovals, circles and spirals, in the space of perhaps a foot. Obelisks, Gothic and Roman arches, serrations, lances, tacks, crowns of thorns, olive trees, turkey wings, tooth marks, rakes, spiral staircases, kneecaps … And all shaped by waves.

  “Bath now!” said Vanja.

  “Are you a little baby tonight, or what?” I said.

  “Bath!” said Vanja.

  “Bath!” said John.

  “Let me just look at this book, then we’ll go and have a bath,” I said. “Five minutes.”

  I leafed forward to the final, blank pages and read what I had written.

  Lucretius – On the Nature of Things

  Nazism

  Africa

  The atom bomb

  A man alone on Gotland

  Eugenics

  Atoms

  natural science

  biology

  species

  materialism

  Title: The Third Realm

  Aristocrat

  Mass

  Hölderlin

  Heidegger

  Jünger

  Mishima

  Patterns in the universe, the great and the small

  Faust

  The body, the blood

  the biological

  the clear, open

  the sacred

  the obscure

  Animals that can be controlled

  Albertus Seba

  America, discovered, but left in peace

  That was all.

  The way I remembered this, it had been a detailed noting down of concrete ideas, a universe in which the novel would be set, but it was nothing other than the usual affinities I felt to certain words and the associations they awoke in me. “The body, the blood,” “biology,” “the atom bomb.” And Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things had been appearing in my notes ever since the midnineties.

  But it was a novel. It was. A world described through the material and the mechanical, sand, stone, shells, atoms, planets. No psychology, no feelings. A story that was different from ours, though similar. It was to be a dystopia, a novel about the final days, told by a man alone in a house, in the midst of a dry, warm landscape in late summer. And I had an ending ready, I had told it to Linda, who had lit up, it was sublime, amazing. It was!

  “OK, do you want your baths now?” I said, returning the book to the shelf.

  The girls slid down from their chairs and skipped off to the bathroom.

  “Yes!” cried John, and toddled after them.

  Even before I caught up with them, the girls had pulled off their clothes and were standing naked in front of the bath. I took the yellow Jif bottle from the shelf under the mirror, unscrewed the green top, and squirted the bottom of the bath with detergent.

  “A shark!” said Heidi, peering over the edge. It was the shape made by the dribbles of detergent that fascinated her.

  “Is that what you think it looks like?” I said.

&nbs
p; She nodded.

  “If a shark comes you have to hit it on the nose,” said Vanja. “To scare it away.”

  She demonstrated what she meant, batting the air with her little fist. I wet a sponge under the tap in the sink and wiped the bath clean, then rinsed it with the showerhead, watching the water as it took with it the yellow detergent, which here and there dissolved in tiny clouds, pressed the rubber-edged metal plug into the drain, turned the mixer tap on, put my hand into the thick gush of water to gauge the temperature, and straightened up.

  “OK,” I said. “Everybody in!”

  As Vanja and Heidi climbed into the bath I helped John off with his clothes. He stretched out an arm, his other hand was clutching a rubber duck. I took his arm out of the sleeve and he changed hands.

  “That’s right, John!” I said, and pulled the sweater over his head, tossing it in the direction of the laundry bin, from which our dirty clothes seemed to be advancing like a plant, unbuttoned his trousers, took them off, tore open the tape of his diaper and lifted him into the bath, where he immediately began splashing with both hands.

  “I saw a witch today on the street, Daddy,” said Heidi.

  “It wasn’t a witch,” said Vanja. “It was an old lady.”

  “But what if she was a witch?” I said, crouching next to the tub.

  “There’s no such thing as witches,” said Vanja.

  “Are you sure about that?” I said.

  She looked at me and smiled.

  “Yes,” she said. I could see part of her was going to say no.

  “Imagine if I were a wizard,” I said.

  “You’re just an ordinary daddy!” said Heidi.

  I laughed and got to my feet. The water reached their tummies now. They loved bathtime, all three of them, and always had. I wondered why. Maybe it was the sudden switch from one element to another? Heidi gripped the side of the bath with both hands, then put her feet up on the other side to make a bridge. Look, Daddy! she cried, and let herself go with a splash, showering me with bathwater in the process.

  “Stop that!” I said firmly. “You can hurt yourself! And look at me, I’m soaked!”

  She laughed. John laughed too. Vanja made to repeat the stunt.

  “No, you don’t,” I said.

  “Just once!” she pleaded.

  “OK, then,” I said, and stepped back out of range. The splash was even bigger this time; the floor was awash.

  They howled with laughter. When John decided to try I took his arm and held him back. No, no, I said. Yes, I want to, he said. No, I said. Yes, he said. Yes, I said. No, he said. And with that the danger was averted.

  “C’mon, let’s get your hair washed,” I said.

  “John first,” said Vanja.

  “OK,” I said. “Did you hear that, John?”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  “Yes, you will,” I replied, putting my hands on his shoulders and pressing him gently back into the water. At first he resisted, then when I kept pressing he wailed and started to squirm. I let go.

  “All right,” I said.

  He shrieked. I took the shampoo bottle with the pictures from the Pixar film Cars on it that he had chosen himself in the supermarket and squirted the thick red liquid into my palm. When I’d finished washing their hair I ordered them to stand up, took three cloths off the pile on the shelf, put soap on them and washed all three of them between their legs. It felt like an assault, that was the thought that came to me every time. Imagine if someone came in and saw what I was doing, what would they think? A perverted father rubbing the crotches of his daughters? It was a thought only a man who had witnessed the incest hysteria of the eighties was capable of thinking, I knew that, but all the same it didn’t help, the feeling was there and couldn’t be ignored, and when they sat down again and I rinsed the cloths, wrung them and hung them over the radiator to dry, I was as relieved as ever that no one had come in and seen me.

  “Pull the plug out, Vanja,” I said.

  “A bit longer, Daddy!” she pleaded.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s way past bedtime already.”

  “Snälla, pappa,” said Vanja. Please, Daddy.

  “Snälla, pappa,” said John.

  “Not tonight,” I told them. “Come on. If you won’t, I’ll do it myself.”

  Vanja sighed and pulled the plug out. The water began to subside around them. When she was younger, Vanja had been afraid of the little whirlpool at the drain, I understood she thought it was alive, and no sooner had I pulled the plug than she would clamber out of the tub as fast as she could, as if pursued by some terrible peril. Neither Heidi nor John had ever liked it much either.

  I held my hand out to Vanja. She took it and climbed out. I dried her with a big bath towel, draping it over her shoulders before she ran off. I did the same with Heidi, relishing the feeling of drying them, the way they stood still and waited for me to finish, a bit like the way a horse will stand still to be groomed, I imagined. John sat down in the bath again, amusing himself with the plug, putting it back in the drain and pulling it out over and over again. He protested as I lifted him up, kicking his legs like a reluctant cat, only then to stand still like his sisters when I put him down and toweled him dry.

  I wiped the floor with his towel, hung it up on the rack above the bath and followed them into the living room, where Linda had got Heidi and Vanja into their pajamas. The big bath towels were two heaps on the floor.

  “I’m just going to pop out to check my e-mail,” I said. “OK?”

  Earlier that summer our Internet had stopped working, maybe it was because we hadn’t paid for it, or maybe there was some technical problem. Whatever the reason, I had solved the issue by conducting all my e-mail correspondence from an Internet café close to the square.

  “Fine,” she said. “I was thinking we might need something for breakfast in the morning. Maybe you could get something while you’re out? Milk, perhaps. And some bread.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of shopping,” I said.

  “OK. Don’t, then,” she said.

  “No, it’s all right,” I said. “It’s not a problem. Milk and bread.”

  * * *

  The air outside on the square had a nip about it and I zipped up my jacket before going over toward the Internet café a bit farther up the street on the other side of the road. I went there at least twice a day, there was a lot going on at the moment, with manuscripts flying backwards and forwards between me and the publishers, and furthermore I had sent a copy to all the people I had written about, and responses were coming in all the time. The first book was all finished and would be back from the printers in two days. The second book was in its final stages, now it was to be edited, then proofed, and everyone I had written about would be given a chance to read it. The mere thought made me feel like I was burning up inside. Despair, guilt, and anxiety were the emotions that flared, and the only way I could keep them at bay was by the thought that as yet no one knew, nothing had happened, but it helped less and less, the day was approaching when I would have to give up the manuscript to Linda and she would begin to read what I had written about our life together. The only thing she knew was that I had written about us. She had no idea what or in what way. She had said that I had to include all the fluctuations and not keep anything back, that the worst thing that could happen was for me to portray her as dull, dreary, weak, what in Swedish she called a mes, and every time I said I was dreading her reading it she would reassure me and tell me everything was bound to be fine. There’s nothing to be afraid of, she said. I can handle whatever, as long as it’s true. But Linda was a romantic at heart, she accepted the despondencies and conflicts of day-to-day life as long as the idea prevailed of there always being something else to fall back on, our love for each other, our lives together. In the space of only a few minutes she could go from shouting her head off at me to declaring that she had never loved anyone the way she loved me, whereas I was completely the opposite, storin
g up and accumulating grievances and frustrations, which then lay like a sediment inside me, fossils of emotions, darkening my mind increasingly until eventually I became as hard as stone, unreceptive to reconciliation and tenderness. I had written about this and had no way of knowing if she could forgive me for it, since it was from that perspective she was being seen.

  Why had I written such things?

  I had been so despairing. It was as if I had been shut away inside myself, alone with my frustration, a dark and monstrous demon, which at some point had grown enormous, as if there was no way out. Ever-decreasing circles. Greater and greater darkness. Not the existential kind of darkness that was all about life and death, overarching happiness or overarching grief, but the smaller kind, the shadow on the soul, the ordinary man’s private little hell, so inconsequential as to barely deserve mention, while at the same time engulfing everything.

  If I was going to write about it I would have to tell the truth. Linda agreed with me on that. But she didn’t know the nature of that truth. It was one thing having an idea what her husband was thinking in his darkest moods, but quite another to read about it in a novel. And our life together was what the novel was all about. Her life, Linda’s, and mine, Karl Ove’s. It was what we had – in fact, it was all we had.

  Oh, I was so completely in the shit. To have to hand her the manuscript and say, here, read this, it’s being published in a month.

  I stopped at the crossing and waited for green. The big shopping mall next to the hotel had just closed; at this time of day there were fewer people about, apart from at McDonald’s and Burger King, where groups of young people, mostly immigrants, hung around outside. Many of the city’s immigrants hailed from Iran, thereby belonging to the people once known as Persian, an army of whom under Xerxes had invaded Greece almost exactly twenty-five hundred years before.