My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Oddly enough he did as he was told. I turned off the light, closed the door again, and went back to trying on clothes, item by item, in every conceivable combination. Linda could get annoyed with me about it, I knew that, she disliked anything that resembled vanity. I could spend more time figuring out what to wear than what I was going to say to an audience. But once I knew I was going to be on view, I became obsessive about it. It didn’t matter if the clothes were cheap or expensive, new or old, it was the ceremony of it, shirt on, shirt off, the stubborn self-appraisal, good, not good, awful, better, or maybe this one instead?

  After half an hour, constantly aware of what Linda might be thinking, I went back into the living room.

  “Can I wear this?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” she answered. “Du ser jättefin ut.” You look good.

  It was what she always said, but I needed to hear it nonetheless.

  A hefty thud came from the children’s room, a thump against the wall. “What’s the matter with them tonight?” said Linda.

  This time it sufficed to open the door. John scuttled immediately back across the floor and Heidi scurried up the ladder to her bunk.

  “I mean it this time,” I said. “Once more and I’ll be really angry with you.”

  They lay quite still and peered out with wide eyes. I went into the bathroom, found the scissors, and began to trim my beard.

  There was a little patter of feet in the hall. It had to be either John or Heidi.

  “Back to bed, this minute!” I shouted.

  “I can’t sleep!” said Heidi, appearing in the doorway.

  “Come on,” I said, lifting her up and carrying her back to bed. I stood for a minute behind the door, before opening it again to see Heidi on her way down the ladder.

  “Back to bed!” I said firmly. “It’s sleep time!”

  “But I can’t sleep,” she said. “I’m awake!”

  “I know what we can do,” said Vanja. “We can hold hands and close our eyes and fly away to ketchup land!”

  “OK,” I said. “As long as you go to sleep, then.”

  And they did, they held hands, closed their eyes, and were quite still. Ketchup land was something they had heard about at the nursery, so I assumed, not really wanting to know since it filled me with such a sense of unpleasantness, ketchup being red, red being blood, blood being dead. And there they lay with eyes closed …

  I went back to the bathroom and picked up where I’d left off with my beard. Again there was a patter of feet in the hall, whoever it was scurried past into our bedroom. I flung the door open to see Heidi climbing onto the bed. She turned toward me.

  “Back to bed!” I shouted. “At once! I’ve just about had enough. Come on. Off to bed with you! You’re NOT staying up. DO YOU HEAR ME?”

  She took one look at me and burst into tears.

  Oh, Heidi!

  “I was only getting a book!” she sobbed. “Grown-ups can’t get mad at children!”

  I felt so sorry for her I almost started crying myself. Fortunately she didn’t react with rage, as so often before – in such cases it was impossible to comfort her. No, she simply wept, and I lifted her up, held her little body close to mine and carried her back to her room, switched on the light and told them I would read them all another story. Heidi snuggled into my arms, Vanja sat up and buttoned up the coat of one of her many cuddly dogs, listening with one ear, while John messed around on the floor playing with whatever toys he happened to find. I read them a story about the Moomin who wakes up in winter while his parents are still hibernating, he can’t wake them up and so he goes off on his own. Heidi twisted about, wanting to know this and that – Why are they laughing at him? It’s not nice to laugh at other people. What’s he saying there, Daddy? – while Vanja snorted at such childish questions and John immersed himself with his own projects on the floor, which now involved something he could press to make a loud noise like a siren.

  By the time we reached the end of the story and I turned the light off again, they had finally settled down. I went in to Linda, who was watching the news, and said I wondered why they were so difficult tonight. She said Heidi had slept two hours after nursery school, and John had slept until late too. I sat down, put my feet up on the table, and stared at the television.

  * * *

  We went to bed an hour later. Kissed each other goodnight, turned off the light. I was nervous and realized right away it would be a while before I could fall asleep. I was nervous about the next day, the round of interviews that lay ahead, but not for the old reason, the way it normally was, the horror of having to talk and take up space, and be quoted on everything I said, the horror of making a fool of myself; this time I was scared about what I had written. The novel, which would be out in two days, and which had been given the title My Struggle 1, had been written in solitude. Apart from Geir Gulliksen and Geir Angell, no one had read any of it along the way. A select few had been aware of what I was writing about, among them Yngve, but they knew none of the detail. After a year like that, where the only perspective that existed was my own, the manuscript was ready to be published. Four hundred and fifty pages, a story about my life centered around two events, the first being my mother and father splitting up, the second being my father’s death. The first three days after he was found. Names, places, events were all authentic. It wasn’t until I was about to send the manuscript to the people mentioned in it that I began to understand the consequences of what I had done. I sent it out in late June. Yngve had to be first. There were things I had written about him that I had thought and felt but never articulated. As I sat down at the computer and attached the document to the e-mail I had written to him, I felt like dropping the whole thing, calling the publishers and telling them there would be no novel this year either.

  I sat there for half an hour. Then eventually I clicked send and it was done.

  The next day we went to the beach at Ribersborg, it was Sunday and there were lots of people there, we found ourselves a spot by the pier leading out to the open-air baths of the Kallbadhus. The structure dated back to the first decade of the twentieth century and was built on poles a hundred meters from the shore. John was asleep in his stroller. Vanja and Heidi paddled for a while at the water’s edge and collected shells, Linda and I sat farther up the beach watching. After about half an hour John woke up and we took them to the bathhouse café, finding a table outside next to the railings at the end, the water glinting and glittering all around us as we sat with our ice cream. It was almost like being on a boat. We had the bridge to Denmark on one side of us, the Turning Torso skyscraper on the other, and the Barsebäck nuclear power plant visible in the haze to the northwest.

  I saw all of this: people swarming on the long city beach and on the wide footpath behind it, cyclists and roller skaters whizzing by, the row of concrete blocks from the fifties or perhaps the sixties, the city’s final bastion against the sea, that great light-catcher, calm and in no way dramatic here in the strait facing Denmark. The couples and the families sitting all around us, summer-clad and tanned, the big sky above us whose blue had no end until evening, when it would fade to gray and the first stars would seem to emerge from the space beyond, making visible its enormous distances. My own children sitting on their chairs with their short legs sticking out in front, absorbed in their own little worlds; ice-cream wrappers, dripping lollipops, and ice-cream cones. Linda, now and then wiping their mouths with tissues, her eyes almost hidden behind her sunglasses. I saw all of this, though as a film, something of which I myself was not a part, my thoughts and feelings being somewhere else. It was Yngve I was thinking about, though not actively, it was more like he just kept appearing in my mind. He was my brother, we had grown up together and I had leaned on him nearly all my life. We had been so close that instead of accepting his weaknesses or shortcomings the way I accepted my own, I identified myself with them and took on responsibility for them, however indirectly, in the feelings that ran through me wheneve
r he did or said something I wouldn’t have done or said myself. No one knew this, not even Yngve himself, because how could I ever express such a thing? Sometimes you’re not good enough for me?

  What was to be gained by telling things the way they were, representing my own feelings toward him? Compared to what I could lose? He could say fuck you, I want nothing more to do with you.

  What would I do then? Remove it all? Or keep it and lose a brother?

  I would keep it and lose a brother.

  There was no doubt about it.

  Why?

  Was I mad?

  Both Vanja and Heidi had bitten off the bottoms of their cones and were having a job licking up the ice cream that was now melting and dripping from two different places. John had chosen a popsicle, in principle it was easier, but he was so little he was having problems too. His fingers and chin were red and sticky from all the juice. But they were all immersed in what they were doing, which was good.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Linda.

  “Yngve,” I answered.

  “It’ll be all right, I’m sure it will,” she said.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” I said.

  What I had written about Linda was much worse. But all I could do was take things one at a time.

  A new wave of horror and shame washed over me.

  * * *

  Home again, I was checking my e-mail about twice every hour. It was Sunday, so my in-box stayed empty all day. Yngve was at Mom’s in Jølster, which I was glad about, it would give him the chance to talk to her about it, which might soften his reactions, so I thought. We put the children to bed and sat for a bit on the balcony, and I checked my e-mail one last time before going to bed: nothing.

  The next morning his reply was in my in-box.

  Your fucking struggle, said the subject line.

  I stood up without reading it and went out onto the balcony, sat there smoking and looking out over the city, cold and despairing.

  But I had to read it.

  His words were there, whether I read them or not.

  I could put it off until evening, but that would only prolong my suffering, and the result would still be the same.

  I stubbed my cigarette out and got to my feet, went inside into the living room, walked past the kitchen, where John was sitting in his chair with a spoon in his hand while Linda was reading the newspaper, into the bedroom, sat down on the chair, moved the cursor to the text line, two clicks and there it was.

  Just wanted to scare the hell out of you, but the last few days have been rather intense, seeing my life pass backward and forward in front of my eyes on account of your book and me going through old papers and letters here, yours and mine.

  I don’t quite know whether to go into the book or our lives and the relationship we have to each other, the latter definitely needs to be treated differently than it has been until now, or maybe not? As far as the book goes, there are passages that are extremely unpleasant for me to see down on paper, even if I can see why you’ve included them.

  The part with you, me, Ingar, and Hans really made everything go black for me. Obviously, I’ve seen you feel ashamed of me in certain situations, and still do see that. It’s hard, because it touches on aspects of myself that I’m painfully aware of – the way I can sometimes not be there inside myself; the way I can criticize things that I haven’t thought of myself; preferring the role of someone who reads Adorno rather than actually reading Adorno. Mediocrity combined with poor self-awareness and big ambitions doesn’t come out very well. But reading it again it doesn’t seem as bad … it’s about you, not me. Which I suppose doesn’t leave much room for the times I’ve been ashamed about you!

  “We rarely looked each other in the eye.” Is it as bad as it’s made out to be here? Do we look at each other any less than other people?

  And Yngve and Espen not getting along? That’s simply not true from what I can see … I thought it was Tore and Espen who didn’t like each other?

  I’ll read the rest over the next few days. Maybe you can give me a call?

  Yngve

  I went out into the hall and called him up. There was a slight feeling of uncertainty between us. He told me again about how he’d felt reading what I had written, but he wasn’t angry, it was more like he was accepting some personal criticism, and that created a buildup of pressure in the situation that I found almost excruciating, because he had no reason to. Not looking each other in the eye, the fact that we never shook each other’s hand, or physically touched at all, were things we were unable to talk about, it was out of the question, but when, a few weeks after this phone conversation, he came to see us in Malmö with his two kids, Ylva and Torje, he looked me straight in the eye and put out his hand as soon as I opened the door. No irony, no subtleties, he wanted to make amends. My eyes grew moist and I had to look down.

  * * *

  After Yngve had read it, I put off sending it to the others I had written about. I was dreading it all summer, until eventually at the beginning of August, only a month before publication, I mustered up the courage. I sent an e-mail to Jan Vidar asking how he was and received a reply within a few hours, he and his family were doing fine, he was going off on a fishing trip with some friends of his the next day, it was a thing they did together, Finnmarksvidda in the summer. I hadn’t been in touch with him for years, the last time I saw him was when I had been in Kristiansand beginning a new novel after my debut, Out of the World. It was nearly ten years ago. In the book that was coming out now he was one of the most important characters. We had been best friends from when we were thirteen until we were seventeen, or thereabouts, after which we drifted apart. They had been significant years. We’d moved from Tveit, I was new at the school, he came up to me and we made friends, spent all our time together, not least with the band we went on to form. When I started writing about that time I found it all to be so much closer to me than I had imagined. The atmosphere of our house, the woods at the back, the river below, all the things we did together, which basically wasn’t much at all, and yet it had been everything. The person Jan Vidar had essentially emerged for the first time when I sat writing about it all in Malmö more than twenty years later.

  I had Googled him, and besides a number of hits to do with angling competitions where his name appeared, a band came up in which he clearly played. Several of their songs were online. I listened to them. They were a blues band. He was the guitarist, and his solos were really good. What had happened? We had been awful back when we played together. Since then my playing had not developed in the slightest, it was still exactly the same as when I was fifteen. But he had turned into a virtuoso. Because I hadn’t seen him in all those years it seemed baffling to me. In my mind he was still seventeen.

  I sent him the manuscript and hoped for the best.

  I sent it to another old friend too, Bassen, he appeared only fleetingly but had been an important figure for me then and we had kept in touch for some time, I still had his number. He read through it right away and had no objections to the use of his character and name, and yet the conversation I had with him was unsettling, he said there would be trouble and that I shouldn’t rule out the possibility of proceedings. That hadn’t occurred to me, and we talked about it for quite a while. He was a criminologist with Statistics Norway and knew what he was talking about. My first thought was that he was exaggerating, but something about the gravity in his voice told me otherwise. Sued? Action for damages? For writing about my own life? If anyone reacted negatively I would alter their names, it wasn’t that big a deal.

  Another important character was Hanne, my first real love, once the light of my life, my everything. It had not worked out for us back then, and apart from a brief encounter in Bergen, we hadn’t seen each other since. She too was viewed from my immature perspective, which moreover was suffused with infatuation and conceit.

  I tried to get hold of her address, but couldn’t find it on the Internet, and she wasn�
��t in the phone book either. I called Bassen again, the three of us had been in the same class together, he dug out a number he thought might be hers, I called it, no one answered. I tried again, several times, but there was never anyone in.

  Tonje, to whom I had been married, hardly appeared in the book, only fleetingly in the parts concerning my father’s death, but I sent it to her too, explaining that there would be five more books coming out and that I anticipated her playing a more significant role in one of them than was the case here.

  Finally, I sent the manuscript to my uncle Gunnar. He was ten years younger than my father, which meant he had been little more than a boy when his elder brother had married and his first child came along. From growing up I remember him as a young man in his twenties, very different from Dad. Gunnar had long hair, he could play the guitar, and he had a boat fitted with a twenty-horsepower Mercury motor. Once, he managed to get Yngve the autograph of IK Start footballer Svein Mathiesen, it was a big thing and it wouldn’t surprise me if Yngve still has it. Gunnar was a person Yngve and I looked up to, someone we always hoped would be there whenever we went to visit Grandma and Grandad in Kristiansand, or be with them when they came to visit us. By the time I was in my teens, he was married and had his own family, lived in a neat row house, and spent his free time in summer out at the cabin Grandma and Grandad had bought in the fifties and which he gradually took on. He was a joker with a line in puns, in that way he was like Yngve, and he was responsible, the last ten years of our grandparents’ lives it was he and his wife who were on hand to help them with whatever they needed. As Dad began to let go of me and everything else, Gunnar’s role in my life changed. Presumably he remained the same, but my attitude toward him changed. In my mind he had sussed me out. At that point I’d started writing for local papers and had become visible in a way I sensed he disliked, and at the same time I’d become wayward, ditching school, drinking, occasionally smoking pot, an outrageous transgression I for some reason believed Gunnar to be aware of, unlike everyone else around me, and this rubbed off on the way I related to him. In the years after I left home, at the age of eighteen, I didn’t have much contact with him, but the few times I visited him it was obvious to me that his children had complete trust in him, there was no sign of terror in their eyes when they looked at him, and I respected him for that. When I came into my twenties, with Dad becoming increasingly alcoholic, Gunnar became the representative of all that was orderly and proper, to which I, unlike my father, aspired, and as such I made Gunnar a kind of father figure, as well as a kind of superego. If the kitchen was littered with empties, I would think, What would Gunnar say if he came in now and saw this? If I had been absent from lectures for a few months, I would think, What would Gunnar have to say about this? Every time I did something excessive, Gunnar would appear in my thoughts. It had nothing to do with the person he was, it was something I had constructed, and yet it was by no means completely without foundation: during the summer when I was writing what would be my first novel I stayed for a while at Mom’s in Jølster, I was twenty-eight years old, and one afternoon when I was visiting my maternal grandmother’s sister Borghild and chatting with her about what life on the farm there had been like in the old days, since I was thinking of using it in my novel, Gunnar had been to see Mom and taken her to task for me being such a slacker and a layabout who was never going to make anything of himself. Because my father was no longer able to take responsibility for me, my mother needed to step up, he said, and at the very least stop encouraging me in my starry-eyed dream of becoming a writer. But there was a solicitude in that too, I thought, and my feelings were divided: on the one hand I wanted to write and was willing to make any sacrifice in order to do so, and moreover I was drawn toward the avant-garde, ever since my teenage years I had despised all that was conservative and staid; on the other hand, the avant-garde filled me with anxiety, and the pull toward the conservative, the staid, and the secure was at least as strong; it was a big part of why I got married and went to university at all. My father couldn’t care less about me, so when Gunnar came and condemned the life I was leading, I felt there was something good in that too: at least he cared about what became of me.