My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “It’s not worth worrying about.”

  “Of course it is,” I said.

  Next to us the door opened and Heidi put her head out.

  “When’s Mommy coming home?” she wanted to know.

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “I want Mommy,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “Do you want to speak to her on the phone?”

  She nodded. I stubbed out my cigarette and got up, went inside with Heidi following on my heels, picked up the phone, and pressed Linda’s number.

  “Hi, it’s Karl Ove,” I said when she answered. “The children are missing you. Want to say hello?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  “Here’s Heidi, then,” I said, and handed her the phone.

  “When are you coming home, Mommy?” she said.

  I went into the living room.

  “Do you want to speak to Mommy on the phone, Vanja?” I said.

  She nodded and got to her feet.

  “Me too,” said John.

  “Not just yet,” I said. “Heidi’s talking to her now, it’s your turn when she’s finished.”

  Vanja sat down again and stared at the television. I recognized aloofness in her body language and could tell she was holding back her feelings, it always happened sooner or later whenever I was on my own with them, but meant nothing other than that she was missing Linda. If Linda had walked in through the door now she would have run toward her and hugged her and told her about all the things she’d done while she’d been away, and not moved an inch from her side the rest of the evening. She accepted the distance I kept as a necessity, not consciously of course, but still for her there was always an element of enduring when we were on our own together, of holding out, the opposite of letting go and living.

  I went back out to Heidi again, she was looking at herself in the mirror while listening to what Linda was saying at the other end.

  “Can you say hej då to Mommy now,” I said, “so Vanja and John can talk to her too?”

  “Hej då!” she said, and handed me the phone.

  “Are you ready for the other two?” I said.

  “Yes, put them on.”

  I stood in the doorway.

  “Vanja?” I said. “Do you want to speak to Mommy now?”

  Vanja shook her head.

  “She doesn’t want to,” I said. “But here’s John for you.”

  John took the phone and pressed it to his ear. His entire little self lit up in a smile as soon as he heard her voice.

  “Yes,” he said with a nod. “Yes.”

  “Bit of a disaster with the sausages, I’m afraid,” Geir called out from the kitchen.

  I went to see what was the matter.

  “They’ve split. There are two things that matter when it comes to heating up sausages. One is to to put a laurel leaf in with them. The other is they’re not supposed to boil.”

  “You’re trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” I said, and peered into the pan. The pink meat peeped out from the red skins of all the sausages.

  “I’d never be so presumptuous.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “They still taste the same.”

  I took five hot-dog buns from the packet, put a sausage in each, placed them all on a dish, squirted ketchup on, and took it all into the living room.

  The phone was dumped on the sofa. I picked it up.

  “Hello?” I said, but it was dead and I dropped it back in the charger under the mirror in the hall. When I came back into the living room they’d each taken a hot dog.

  “There’s more if you want,” I said. “Just say the word. We’ll be in the kitchen.”

  I went in and got the mustard out, a coarse local variety from Skåne I’d been putting on everything for a while, fished out a red sausage with its split skin, put it in the bun, and sat down at the table, where Geir was already demolishing a hot dog.

  “They’re good, the Danish ones,” he said.

  “Mm,” I said. “You should taste the mustard, it’s good too.”

  “I’ll have some on the next one. It reminds me, do you remember that advertising campaign a while back for Gilde sausages?”

  “No.”

  “You must. Gilde sausages have a slight curve to them. They made this slogan about them putting a smile on your face. Some feminists reacted, claimed it was sexist. They even confronted Gilde’s managing director about it. But he had no idea what they were talking about. They’re sausages! he said. Ha ha ha!”

  The sky was completely dark in the east now, and where it was lighter, above the outskirts of the city, it was streaked by what had to be rain. I felt a headache coming on.

  “It was good, what you said about Marx,” Geir said after a while. “The way we work just as much, only now it’s because we’re realizing ourselves. The fact is, people made fortunes from other people’s work then, and people make fortunes from other people’s work now. There’s no difference, it’s all the same, apart from the way we look at it.”

  “Mm,” I said. “I think it has to do with having to learn to live with something. It’s an adequate response to a real issue. As long as we can’t stop working, we have to change our reasons for doing it. The motivation, I mean.”

  “It’s funny,” said Geir, and got to his feet. “A job was a job to my dad, something that had value on its own. The job in itself was what it was all about. He went to work because he had to. Did his best and kept his head down at the same time. The idea of him realizing himself would have been completely alien, I’m sure.”

  He lifted a sausage out of the saucepan, placed it in a hot-dog bun, and sat down again. I shoved the jar of mustard across the table toward him.

  “But your argument about us doing everything in order to compensate isn’t right,” I said. “Normally, we’ve always reproduced the pattern, repeated what we ourselves experienced as children. My dad’s dad used to hit him, so Dad hit us. Not often, only occasionally, but the fact that it existed as a possibility meant it was something he could resort to every now and then. He never made any effort to compensate for anything at all. It wasn’t a part of the role. You were brought up in a certain way, and that’s what you did with your own children. We’re the ones trying to compensate all of a sudden. Do you remember what I said about Rudbeck that time? From his biography? His father hit him and humiliated him, but he didn’t internalize that, never saw it as part of his psychological makeup, but as something objective, an action belonging entirely to the external world. That was in the seventeenth century.”

  “I remember. It was my university lecturer who wrote that book.”

  “So the question is, on the one hand why we give such weight to the traumatic, or construe things as traumatic at all, and on the other, why we bring up our own children differently, in a new way.”

  “You think that’s something we choose, then?”

  “No, just the opposite. Things have changed, beyond doubt. And all of us are a part of that change. I think it’s a response to something. I think the very fact our kids are in nurseries from the age of one, and that we surround ourselves with all sorts of crap that just alienates us, TV, computer games, all that kind of stuff, on its own means we just have to get close to our children. Kids used to be at home all day, a place they felt was theirs, and there were grown-ups around, maybe not close in that sense, but they were there. When that place no longer exists there has to be some compensation. That has to be compensated for. No one planned it that way or probably even thought about it. It just gets like that, and becomes an imperative. That’s what I think, anyway.”

  John came into the kitchen and stared at Geir.

  “Do you want another sausage?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Korv,” he said.

  “Ah, a korv,” I said, and smiled. “Yes, you can have a hot dog, of course you can.”

  I made him another, taking the mild mustard from the fridge and squirting a lon
g ochre-colored dribble along the length of the sausage before handing it to him. He started munching at the same time as he turned and went back in.

  “There’s no alternative either,” I said. “The only alternative to capitalism in our time has been Nazism. The Nazis attempted to change society from the bottom up and start something radically different. And we know how that turned out.”

  “It’s a shame the Germans lost the war, but a good thing the Nazis didn’t win it, as I usually say,” Geir said. He had a red streak of ketchup across his cheek.

  “Daddy?” Heidi called out from the living room.

  “Yes?” I called back.

  “I want another hot dog!”

  “Come and get one then!”

  “No, you have to come!”

  “No!”

  “What?”

  “No!”

  Silence.

  “And what does all this thinking about safety actually do?” said Geir. “What happens when we’re in this state of high alert as to what can go wrong and what we can do about it? All it does is increase anxiety and heighten our fears. We used to walk to school. None of us got killed. Now they’re all taken in cars. None of them gets killed either.”

  “Daddy!” Heidi called out.

  “Yes?” I called back.

  “Come here!”

  “No, you come here!”

  “OK,” I heard her say, and I got up to fix another hot dog. It was ready for her when she came in.

  “Do you want a glass of water too?”

  She nodded.

  “Does Njaal want another hot dog, do you think?”

  She gave a shrug and went off again. I filled four glasses with water from the tap and took them in, handing one to each.

  “Do you want another hot dog, Njaal?” I said.

  He nodded without taking his eyes off the TV.

  “How about you, Vanja?”

  She shook her head.

  “When’s Mommy coming home?” Heidi asked.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “Do you miss her?”

  Heidi nodded. Vanja stared. John looked up at me and smiled.

  “Mamma!” he said.

  How I ever could have produced such a happy little boy was a mystery.

  “Want a beer?” Geir said when I returned to the kitchen.

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “So we structure the social space,” he said, opening the fridge. I sat down, and he handed me a beer. “We redesign the physical environment. We’re on high alert as to everything. We know who designed the fork we use to eat with. We eliminate every peril and take precautions against everything. Spontaneity goes out the door. Why do we want to get rid of our spontaneity? Where does that get us? Spontaneity can’t be predicted, it can’t be repeated, and repetition is the key to all control. That’s where we are.”

  “In a way the circle’s complete,” I said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “The Neanderthals,” I said.

  “Ah, your favorite subject. And what insight have you gleaned from their sad life today, I wonder?”

  “Do you think they were spontaneous?”

  “If you put it like that, the answer’s probably no.”

  “In the two hundred thousand years they lived in Europe they didn’t develop in any way whatsoever. They were still doing exactly the same things, in exactly the same way, when they disappeared as when they came. They even inhabited the exact same places. There was a tribe in France that lived in the same cave for forty thousand years. They only moved on when it started to collapse. Imagine one and the same family living on the same farm for forty thousand years. It’s completely unthinkable. But not to them. They were making the same tools, hunting by the same methods, eating the same food. Nothing about them changed. Fascinating, don’t you think? The fact that our closest relatives were incapable of change. The fact that progress was a completely unknown concept to them. No improvisation, no spontaneity, it just didn’t exist. The first humans were an inconceivable revolution when they turned up. What set us apart from the Neanderthals was exactly what we’re now trying to get rid of.”

  “Is this where you say it’s not that long since the first humans arrived?”

  “Yes, but it really isn’t that long! And at that time there were many different kinds of humans living side by side. It’s got to happen again. Think, say, three hundred thousand years in the future. By then there should be other kinds of humans here too. Maybe even in sixty thousand years.”

  “Well, give them my best.”

  “Ha ha. But you know how many Neanderthals there actually were, don’t you?”

  “No, tell me.”

  “At most around twenty thousand. Perhaps as few as ten thousand. Somewhere in between. And that was the lot! So imagine what Europe looked like then. Completely devoid of humans, only animals and birds, and forests and plains, and these fifteen thousand inflexible Neanderthals dotted about a few caves around the continent. That’s it.”

  “Your utopia.”

  “Not far off. But do you know what the biggest difference was between the first humans and the Neanderthals?”

  “No hot dogs?”

  “The humans had jewelry. They wore the teeth of the dead around their necks. Meaning they were thinking in symbols. There’s something more than this. And to the Neanderthals that was a completely impossible thought.”

  “I wonder what the idea was,” said Geir. “The teeth around their necks.”

  “What it says is there’s something more.”

  “Yeah, that’s what makes me wonder. Teeth are just teeth. The way the Neanderthals existed in the world seems more reasonable to me.”

  “There’s a decent chance we’ve still got Neanderthal genes in our DNA somewhere. Not in Africans, because there weren’t any humans when the Neanderthals left Africa. But in Europeans, certainly. I don’t think the Neanderthals died out. I think they mixed with humans and merged into them.”

  “You do, huh?”

  “Yes, why not? It’s not unlikely, is it? And so far the Neanderthals were here longer than us. They didn’t know that, of course.”

  “I don’t suppose they did.”

  “So we’ve gone from a world without mystery to one that’s full of mysteries, then back to one without again.”

  “It’s amazing the state actually gives money to people like you to sit around and ruminate, and write books about what you’ve been ruminating on.”

  “There was a small subspecies of humans on an island called Flores in Indonesia. They lived in a cave there. By all accounts no more than fifty to a hundred individuals. They were only about a meter tall.”

  “Midgets?”

  “No, a completely distinct species of human. They lived there well after humans came along. The people who live there now tell strange stories about small people coming and stealing their vegetables. I’ve actually heard one of those stories. This man said the women slung their breasts over their shoulders when they ran. Where the hell would a detail like that come from? The way he described them they were like little trolls of some kind, creatures of mythology. Goblins, or something. But then they found the skeletons in the cave. Tiny little people.”

  “Where do you get all this?”

  “Late-night TV documentaries. I watch them a lot. I’ve no idea how much is true and how much is nonsense. But it fascinates me all the same.”

  “Obviously.”

  “It’s got to do with the utopian as well, I think. Things actually were different once. Not just the environment, but being human itself was different too. I want alternatives, that’s all. Anything would do, really.”

  “So you’d like to be a Neanderthal, is that what you’re saying?”

  “No! But the fact that history is over, that there’s no future anymore other than the repetition of what we’ve got now, makes me feel insanely claustrophobic. I don’t necessarily have to do anything different, or be anything different, that’s not what I mean, bu
t I do want the possibility of a completely different life to exist.”

  “We live in the age of Vision Zero. It means we have zero visions.”

  “That was neat.”

  “I know.”

  I stood up and went into the living room. Geir came after me. Bolibompa was finished, they were watching something for older kids now. I switched it off and glanced at Geir.

  “Should we get them bathed and off to bed?”

  “Why not.”

  “Who’s for a bath?” I said.

  “Come on, Njaal,” said Vanja, slipping down off the sofa. Njaal followed her, then Heidi too. I picked John up and carried him to the bathroom after the others. I put him down on the floor, got the detergent from on top of the cupboard and sprinkled the white Ajax powder into the bottom of the bath, got the scouring pad from under the sink, moistened it, and began scrubbing the enamel. As it dissolved in the water, the white powder not only became liquid, it turned yellow too. I was fond of yellow. Yellow on white, yellow on green, yellow on blue. I liked lemons, their shape as well as their color, and I liked the great fields of rape that spread their intense yellow out across the Skåne landscape in the spring and summer, beneath the tall blue sky, amid the green. And I liked the white Ajax powder that turned yellow when it dissolved in water.

  As I scrubbed, the children undressed, and I sensed how the room behind me was all arms in the air and little bodies bent double. I turned the shower on and rinsed away the detergent and the hairs that were left behind from the last time they were in the bath, put the plug in, flicked the diverter valve, and stuck a finger into the thick spout of water that came plunging like a little waterfall from the tap.

  “In you go!” I said.

  Vanja and Heidi climbed in, Njaal was a bit uncertain and looked up at his father, who had been standing silently the whole time watching them, while John put his arms in the air in front of me. I pulled off his T-shirt, his shorts and his socks, and once I’d got his diaper off and dropped it into the bin under the sink I lifted him up and into the bath, his legs dangling like a little monkey’s.

  “In you go, then, Njaal,” said Geir.

  “You can sit here!” said Vanja, indicating the space between herself and Heidi.