My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  I shoved the chair back, my face burning, and went in to check on Vanja.

  “Do you want to watch the film or Bolibompa?” I asked.

  “Bolibompa,” she said. “Is it on now?”

  I nodded, turned the DVD off with the remote, and switched the kids’ channel on. She’d been sitting on her own in front of the TV for a long time, it was a lousy last resort, and though I was distraught and restless I sat down on the sofa beside her. Because she seldom climbed onto my lap of her own accord but was often glad when I picked her up, I put my arms around her and lifted her onto my knee. She wrenched my arms away, but stayed put.

  John lay motionless at the other end, his breathing a murmur, his hair damp with sweat. The sun was a barrage against the window, but the blinds kept most of its rays out and transformed those that came in into a white, hallucinatory shimmer, apart from the window of the balcony door, which was unprotected and allowed a cylinder of light into the room, full of floating specks of dust that whirled like electrons in the air.

  “I’m hungry,” said Vanja. “I want a sandwich.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Vanja,” I said. “What did I tell you! I said you’d be wanting a sandwich soon. You haven’t eaten your dinner yet. You can eat your dinner instead. You can see that, surely?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Do you want me to bring over your plate again?”

  “No. Can I have an apple?”

  “If you eat some more of your dinner.”

  “I don’t want any.”

  “OK, then,” I said. “You can have an apple, if that’s what you want. But you can go and get it yourself.”

  She slid off my knee, scurried out into the kitchen, and when she came back, already munching on an apple, she climbed up next to me.

  I got up and went to find some clean pajamas. The air in their room was warm and close, I opened the two small vents above the window and the sounds of the city seeped inside.

  There were toys all over the floor. I made a mental note about having to clean up tomorrow, opened a drawer and found a nightgown. Heidi could sleep in the dress she had on, John in his shorts; if I was lucky they wouldn’t wake up when I carried them to bed.

  “Here, put this on,” I said, tossing the nightgown into Vanja’s face. She picked it up and gave me a fleeting smile, then started to get undressed with her eyes glued to the TV. I went and fetched her toothbrush and once she’d got changed I brushed her teeth.

  “Do you want to read here or in bed?” I said.

  “Bolibompa’s not finished yet!”

  “It’ll be finished in a minute,” I said. “Bed or sofa?”

  “Bed.”

  I went in and scanned their bookshelf, picking out three books so there was a choice. Rapunzel by the Brothers Grimm, Gittan och fårskallarna, and one of the Petra books, the one where she starts nursery school.

  “What about John and Heidi?” she said after I turned the TV off. “Don’t they have to go to bed?”

  “I’ll carry them in after I’ve read you a story.”

  “I want to be carried in too.”

  “All right,” I said. “And are you going to pretend to be asleep?”

  “No. Just carry me.”

  I lifted her up and carried her to the bed, sat down next to her, and said she could choose a book. She picked Rapunzel. A good choice, I liked it too. Earlier that summer I’d spent two days in Germany, I’d done a reading at a castle in the same area the Brothers Grimm had collected many of their folktales, so I was told.

  “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair!” I said to Vanja as she sat there beside me on the bottom bunk, looking at the pictures as I read out loud. I had no idea why she’d got attached to this particular tale when there were so many of the others she didn’t care about. It started with a man and a woman having to give their child away to a witch, and to a child that surely had to be the most primeval of all fears, perhaps that was what appealed to her, or perhaps it was the strangeness of a woman letting her hair down from a tower and a man climbing up it to set her free. For me the fairy tale was a kind of literary archetype, or rather a primordial force of literature itself, since on the surface everything was about transformation, including the world’s own transformation into fairy tale, and at the same time this transformation involved a kind of simplification, reality contracting into a small number of figures that were so precise and so perfectly honed after having been through so many differently shaped experiences that their truth surpassed any individual experience of the circumstances, this was the same for everyone, and when these different figures were set into motion, the depths in each and every listener opened, and those depths were bottomless. For many years I’d thought of having a novel take place in that domain, in the forests, where there were trolls and ghosts, workhouses and kings, talking bears and foxes, and in the nineteenth-century reality of the Norway through which Asbjørnsen and Moe had traveled when they collected their folktales. Kristiania, Telemark, the valleys of inner Østland. But it would take years of work, and time was something I didn’t have at the moment. Nevertheless, whenever I read folktales to the children, the thought came back to me that the potential was there. One of the Grimms’ tales was especially compelling, the woman who falls into the well and comes out into another world. Sadly, the version we had was a dreadful translation, which was a shame. Vanja didn’t know that though, and it was for her sake we were reading.

  “The end,” I said when we finished the last page. “Sleep time now.”

  “Will you tickle me and sing a goodnight song?”

  “Of course,” I said. She lay down on her tummy, I drew up her nightgown and ran my nails lightly up and down her back. That was what she meant by “tickle,” and we had to do it every night while we sang.

  Vem kan segla förutan vind?

  Vem kan ro utan åror?

  Vem kan skiljas från vännen sin

  utan att fälla tårar?

  Jag kan segla förutan vind,

  Jag kan ro utan åror.

  Men ej skiljas från vännen min

  utan att fälla tårar.

  Who can sail without the wind?

  Who can row without an oar?

  Who can leave a friend so dear

  without shedding tears?

  I can sail without the wind.

  I can sail without an oar.

  Yet not leave a friend so dear

  without shedding tears.

  After I’d sung I tucked her in under the duvet, took off her glasses, and put them on top of the little set of drawers next to her bed.

  “Daddy?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “Why can’t he leave his friend without shedding tears?”

  “Why do you think it’s a he?”

  “Because it’s you singing.”

  “You’re right, I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose it’s because he’s very fond of his friend, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” she said, and put her head down on the pillow, apparently content with the answer. “Night night.”

  “I’ll be back again in a minute,” I said. “I’ve got to put John and Heidi to bed as well.”

  “Oh yes, I forgot.”

  I fetched John first and put him down carefully in his crib, then Heidi, which was more of a problem, I had to get her out of the stroller, and my efforts woke her up. No! she wailed, squirming as I clutched her tight to my chest and scuttled into the bedroom, depositing her inelegantly on her bunk above Vanja’s, hoping that reality’s intrusion into sleep would be so brief as not to get the better of it, and luckily, after drawing herself up onto her knees and staring at me for a few short seconds, she lay down on her side and closed her eyes, and before long her breathing grew heavy again.

  “Night night, little one,” I said to Vanja, and switched off the ceiling light.

  “C
an you leave the door open?” she said.

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “Sleep tight.”

  “Sleep tight.”

  I went in and checked my e-mail. There were no new messages. It was a relief in one way, but disturbing in another, since Tonje and Jan Vidar had both been sent copies of the manuscript some time ago, and that neither had got back to me about it could only mean one thing.

  To allay their worries a bit, or assume some kind of control over them, I decided to send both a new e-mail. To Tonje I wrote:

  Dear Tonje,

  Not having heard back from you, I’m assuming maybe you’re upset and shocked at having been dragged into a novel just like that without having asked for it. The way I see it, I’m not holding you up in any bad light, on the contrary, as Tore said when he read it, “Tonje’s a princess, her entry makes you glad,” but at the same time I understand that just being included in a novel is to be held up in some way. If you want, and I’m sure you do, I’m quite willing to change your name and those of everyone in your circle so that you can’t be associated with the novel (in any other way than having been married to its author, but of course that’s unavoidable).

  All the best,

  Karl Ove

  To Jan Vidar I wrote pretty much the same. Once I’d done that I looked in on the children, they were all asleep now, picked up the phone, went out onto the balcony, sat down, poured myself a coffee, lit a cigarette, and called Mom.

  She answered right away.

  “Hello? Sissel speaking,” she said.

  “Hi, it’s Karl Ove,” I said. “Have you read the e-mail now?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m incensed, I must say,” she said. “And upset. I’ve been sitting here trying to work out what to say to him. But I suppose it’s best to wait a while.”

  “You shouldn’t reply to him,” I said. “If you do, you’ll be meeting him on his own terms, you’ll be descending to his level.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “Your grandfather once said folly isn’t worth an answer. It’s a good piece of advice. But I’m so angry I’d like to give him a piece of my mind. He signs himself your father’s brother. Well, your father would never have done anything like this, I want you to know that.”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” I said, and laughed uneasily. “You’re my only source as far as all this is concerned.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what he says, isn’t it? That I got it all from you.”

  “Oh, that. It’s sort of an odd opinion, that I should be responsible for you when you’re forty years old. How long can a person be held responsible for what their children do?”

  “He watched me grow up. I think to him I’m still a teenager.”

  “You might be right there. But the idea of me hating the Knausgaards like that is just ludicrous. I’ve no doubt I was shy and reserved when I came into the family as a twenty-year-old, he’s right about that, and your grandmother on your father’s side was certainly a very warm and sociable person, especially to you children. So there is a grain of truth to what he says. In a way he’s describing a caricature of me. I can see I could be perceived like that.”

  “A cold wind from Vestland?”

  “Yes. Visiting us that time obviously left an impression on him. A peasant smallholding, he calls it. Funny to see that word again, but compared to what he was used to, we were poor. It was a totally different culture. Maybe it frightened him. Grandmother was quiet, she never said much, that must have been different for him too.”

  There was a brief silence. I lit another cigarette and put my feet up on the railing as I stared at the gray-blue summer sky with all its planes on their way in and out of the two airports, Kastrup and Sturup.

  “There was something he wrote that touched me in a way,” I said after a moment. “That bit about him having known us when we were little. You know, where he talks about “the boys”? He says you neglected us by not putting Dad right and intervening when we most needed it. I had no idea anyone else could see that Dad maybe wasn’t good for us. But he saw that. He must have, for him to put it like that. His conclusion is different from mine, because I was there and I know you were the one who rescued me, but just the fact someone else could see what was happening, or there was some knowledge of it, touches me, strangely enough.”

  “Everything’s about being seen. I understand if you feel that way. Especially if you put him in your father’s place, as you say.”

  “Yes, there is something there. I feel that. Some deeper structures.”

  “But your father saw you, I want you to know that. He knew you for who you were.”

  “I’m not sure about that, to be honest.”

  “Well, it’s true. He did.”

  I cried when she said those words, though quietly and without it affecting my voice, so she wasn’t aware of it. We talked for another half hour or so about Gunnar and what he had written, not so much about the book that had provoked him as about the family, both Dad’s and hers. She told me more about what it had been like for her coming into his family back at the beginning of the sixties, and some more about the person he’d been then. She had done the same when Dad died, I’d called her several times a day, and what she did was to raise him up for me, reminding me over and over that while he may have been tormented he had also been a person who made an impression on people: intelligent, insightful, knowledgeable, inquisitive, farsighted. She knew I needed another image of my father and gave me the man she had known, showing me the way he had appeared in the eyes of an adult when I had still been a child.

  She was doing the same thing now.

  I was being drawn further and further into something whose deeper nature was as yet unknown to me. Gunnar’s letter gave a picture of the family I’d grown up a part of that was completely different from my own, and the picture Mom gave of Dad was different too, impossible to reconcile with my own experience of him. It was as if everything was suddenly turning in on me.

  The first thing I did once I’d finished talking to Mom was call Linda.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Are you on your own?” I asked.

  “Yes. I’m sitting in my room here. It’s such a lovely place they’ve got. And Helena’s taking such good care of me.”

  “Did you barbecue?”

  “Yes, it was really nice,” she said. Jättemysigt, in her Swedish. “But how are you doing? And how are the kids?”

  I told her about our day. We discussed Gunnar’s e-mail and the letter he’d sent to Mom, but it wasn’t the right time for it. She told me a bit more about what she’d been up to, what they’d been doing, what the place was like. While she was talking I remembered another conversation we’d had once, early in the summer the year we first got together as a couple. She had gone to her mother’s place outside Gnesta, it was the first time we’d been away from each other. I missed her so much my whole body hurt. That time too I had tried to imagine what the place where she was staying looked like, picturing a house, a garden, forest. Later, in the first weeks of autumn, I saw it with my own eyes, and of course it was quite different, much more forceful in its impression, and the first, almost dreamlike images that had come to me vanished without a trace, displaced by reality’s chunky solidity. She told me she’d been at the beach that day, that she’d been lying on the jetty with her mother, reading out loud three texts that I’d written that had just been published in a book I’d given her. Her mother thought they were fantastic, she said, and laughed with joy. Later in the evening she had told them all about me, and she said they liked me already. I sat in my apartment, her dark voice in my ear, and imagined the room in which she sat, the person I loved and wanted more than anything else.

  In the photos we took at the time we looked almost frighteningly young. Linda was twenty-nine, I was thirty-three. Linda still looked young, whereas I looked like I’d spent the intervening years living on th
e street, there was something ravaged about my face now, the deep, almost parodic furrows in my brow, my nose longer and more pointed, and my eyes made me look like I was glaring even when I felt most at ease.

  How I’d loved her then. She was the only thing I cared for. I didn’t give a damn about anything else. It couldn’t have gone on like that, of course not, I would have burned out, but was this really where we were meant to go? Was this what we were together for?

  But it wasn’t too late. Nothing had been lost. Everything was still within reach.

  “I wish you were here now,” I said.

  “I’m so glad to hear it, Karl Ove,” she said.

  “I’m not just saying that.”

  “I know. I miss you too.”

  “That’s what I mean. Being away from each other’s a good thing.”

  “Ha ha.”

  We said goodnight, I hung up and went in to check my e-mail again. Not a word from anyone. I surfed the Web for half an hour before getting undressed and going to bed. It was only ten to nine, but if I was going to get through the next morning without irritation I had to wake up rested. And Heidi had fallen asleep so early she’d probably be up and about at five, if not before.

  I woke briefly at about half past ten when Vanja came in dragging her duvet behind her, but fell asleep again right away. The next time I woke, John was standing at the bed staring at me holding his pillow.

  “Is it morning yet?” he said.

  I glanced at the time. Five fifteen.

  “Nearly. Do you want some breakfast?”

  He nodded.

  “Go into the kitchen then, I’ll come in a minute.”

  He did as I said.

  I got up, and Gunnar’s e-mail came back to me. I went through the hallway and picked the papers up off the mat before going into the kitchen. It faced directly east, where the sun already reddened the horizon. I lifted John up into his chair, put a plate of muesli and yogurt in front of him, filled the coffeemaker with water, put a filter in the filter holder, spooned in the coffee, and switched it on. As it ticked and gurgled, I skimmed the culture and sports sections in the two newspapers.