My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  * * *

  One of the three parking spaces at the top end of Brogatan, by the back entrance to our building, happened to be free as we drew up, this was hardly ever the case and I said to Geir we were in luck.

  The sun, which when we left had been above the building housing the job center, was now above the bank, and its rays, slanting down toward us, were filtered through the foliage of the tree that grew in the nameless square meters of space between Brogatan and Föreningsgatan, causing the car roof and bodywork to flicker in the play of light and shade that manifested itself in iridescent nuances of red, from very bright and intensely lustrous to a darker dullness.

  I got the key out of my pocket and crossed the area behind the building, which was in shadow most of the day, for which reason the temperature there was markedly lower than it was only a few meters away, tapped the orange key card against the panel, pulled the door toward me, and held it open until Geir and Njaal had gone in. I followed them down the stairs, they stopped at the door that led into the basement passage, which I opened in the same way. The air was cool and smelled of brick, fusty in the way of everything that was under the ground. Through the door at the other end, just as we entered, came the Polish woman who lived two floors below us, a blue IKEA bag in one hand, her grandchild in the other. I sent her a nod but she didn’t see us, or pretended not to, and we went through to the stairs, where I pressed the button for the elevator, which was at the floor above us and came gliding down after only a few seconds.

  “Now we’ll see if Mommy’s arrived,” said Geir.

  “And Vanja and Heidi,” said Njaal.

  John’s stroller was parked outside the door, and as I went in I saw the little pile of shoes on the mat in the hall.

  “Hello!” I called out.

  “Hello,” Linda called back from the kitchen. I stepped a bit farther inside so Geir and Njaal could come in. As I bent down to take off my shoes, first Linda then Christina appeared from the kitchen. Njaal bustled past me. Linda had all the radiance of when she was happiest, I noticed, a glow of sociability about her, particularly visible in the luster of her eyes, which was stronger than usual, but also in the skin of her cheeks, which had a slight blush to them. Her entire being smiled. I straightened up and we hugged each other.

  “I missed you,” she said softly.

  “Good to have you back home,” I said, my head lowered to her neck.

  “Hi, Karl Ove,” said Christina, and looked up. She was crouching in front of Njaal, asking what he’d been up to.

  “Hi,” I said. “Good to see you.”

  She got to her feet and we hugged fleetingly. Behind us, Linda and Geir did likewise. Njaal tugged at Christina’s dress, wanting her to go into the living room with him. She smiled at me apologetically and went with him.

  “Were they all right when you picked them up?” I asked.

  Linda nodded and put her hand against my hip.

  “So when did you get back?”

  “About an hour ago, I suppose. I bought them each an ice cream.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “I haven’t got the prawns yet. I was thinking I’d pop out.”

  I went to the kitchen, took the coffeepot and the filter holder over to the sink, and tipped the used filter into the bin before emptying what was left from earlier into the sink, rinsed the pot a few times, and then filled it with fresh water, which seen through the unwashed glass didn’t look fresh at all but took on a faint yellow tinge.

  Linda sat down at the table and took an apple from the big, almost flat blue dish we’d once borrowed from her brother and never returned. It was ceramic and decorated with an Arabic-looking pattern in black that set off yellow apples and bananas especially well.

  “Helena and Fredrik give you all their best,” she said, biting into the apple.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Are they doing all right?”

  She nodded as she munched.

  Geir went through the hall, glancing at us as he passed, before going into the living room and by the sound of it sitting down on the sofa.

  “It’s nice to be home again though,” she said. “I’ve never been away from the children that long before.”

  “That’s positively sick,” I said. “You were only away three days. That’s nothing.”

  “It was enough for me,” she said. “Anyway, I got talking to a man on the train. It turned out he was head of a school. He wants me to be a substitute teacher. I got his number. I’ve got a job!”

  I poured the water into the coffeemaker, put a filter in the holder, measured out six heaped spoonfuls, then switched it on.

  “Is that what you want?” I asked. “I thought you wanted to write, and make radio programs.”

  “But I never really get going with any of it. It’s so incredibly taxing, making a radio program all on your own. I need something simple. Something more clearly defined. With this I’d go to the school, teach, and then go home again.”

  “What are you going to teach?”

  She gave a shrug.

  “Whatever they give me. As long as I can read through the syllabus beforehand, I should be all right.”

  “True,” I said.

  “You don’t sound very convinced,” she said.

  “Yes, I am,” I said. “It’d be fantastic if you had a steady job, of course it would.”

  I took an apple too, and sat down opposite her at the table.

  “You can’t think about much apart from those e-mails, can you?” she said.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “You musn’t worry.”

  “I can’t help it. It won’t go away. I know it’s irrational. But it feels like someone died. The intensity of it, I mean. Something terrible that’s there all the time. Even when I’m not thinking about it, it’s there.”

  “You’ve got to shake it off. You can’t write four books in a year and then let yourself be totally swallowed up by this as well.”

  “But I can’t help it, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “Do you want me to read what he’s written? Maybe it would help, make it easier to talk about?”

  “Yes, if you want.”

  I got to my feet and went to the bedroom, where the computer was still switched on, put the apple down on the desk, and opened the browser. Linda came in just as the first message appeared on the screen.

  “This is the first one,” I said, picking up the apple again. “You can scroll up to the others.”

  She nodded and sat down. I went into the living room, where Vanja and Heidi were playing with some Playmobil on the bed we used as a kind of divan up against the wall, with a blue-and-white-patterned throw to cover it, while Njaal stood with a plastic sword in his hand, making fencing moves in front of Christina, who turned her head toward me and smiled, a bit uneasily, I sensed.

  “Have you seen John anywhere?” I said.

  “I think he’s asleep,” she said. “He was before, anyway.”

  Njaal was directing all his attention to her, presumably in reaction to the complication of Vanja’s and Heidi’s presence. They had each other, he was on his own, and so he fenced with his mother instead.

  “I think there’s a pirate’s eye patch in the toy box over there,” I said. “And a hook for your hand. Is that right, Vanja?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Come and look then.”

  “But we’re playing!”

  “Njaal can find them,” said Christina. “Can’t you, Njaal?”

  “Haa!” he said, lunging forward and striking her thigh with the flat of the sword. It wasn’t made of plastic or wood, but of some other material a bit like foam rubber, only harder, and it had started coming apart all the way up the “blade.”

  I went into the other room, where Geir sat leafing through a book.

  “Do you want some coffee?” I said.

  “Yes, please,” he said.

  “It’ll be ready in a minute,” I said, and sat down in the chair across the
table while munching what was left of my apple. Usually I ate them whole, core, stalk, the lot, and had done so ever since I was a boy, and there was something about that, to do with the slightly bitter taste of the stalk and the seeds, and the stringy consistency of the core, that for some reason always reminded me of childhood, as if the deviance of that action, for that was how I perceived it, as a rather deviant thing to do, opened up new spaces of experience compared to the norm, which was the taste of the white, succulent flesh of the fruit. These spaces were not large expanses, more like tiny stabs of the past prickling the consciousness, the feeling of fingers passing over the surface of a dark blue down jacket on the road outside the house in the dim light of morning, or the rain as it began to fall on a Sunday morning, patches of snow still left here and there at the roadside, bicycle wheels plowing through a sludge of gray mud on the gravel track.

  “What are you reading?” I asked, placing my arms on the armrests and, since he wasn’t looking at me, staring out the window at the small section of the balcony and the rooftops beyond it that was visible through the slats of the blinds.

  “Daniel Defoe. About the Great Plague in London. Have you read it?”

  He looked up, and I glanced toward him.

  “What do you think?” I said. “The chances of your picking a book out here that I’ve actually read aren’t that great.”

  “Here it is, Njaal,” I heard Vanja say from the next room.

  “Thank you,” said Njaal.

  The next minute Heidi was standing in the doorway. She was wearing a white summer dress with a red print on it.

  “Can we watch a movie, Daddy?” she said.

  “Not when we’ve got visitors. Play with Njaal. We’ll have some nice dinner soon.”

  “What are we having?”

  “Prawns.”

  “Prawns?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they nice?”

  “I think so.”

  She gave me her skeptical look. I loved it when she did that.

  “Njaal’s playing with Vanja,” she complained.

  “Come on,” I said. “Two minutes ago you were playing with Vanja. It can’t have changed that much since then. Join in.”

  “What?”

  “Go and play.”

  She turned her head and stared into the other room. I got up and went to the kitchen, where the coffee stood black in the pot. I closed off the filter so it wouldn’t drip after I took the pot away, then poured the coffee into the thermos, the red Stelton we’d been given as a present by Axel and Linn, though what the occasion had been I could no longer remember.

  Linda came through the hall.

  “Do you want some coffee?” I said when she came in.

  She nodded. Her face wasn’t as lively as it had been only minutes before. Now she looked drained, paler.

  “It’s awful,” she said. “How can he say such things? I’m afraid for you, Karl Ove. He wants to hurt you.”

  “Come on!” I said. “I pissed him off, that’s all.”

  “No, he’s lost it. He’s lost control of himself. It feels dangerous. He’s completely unstable.”

  “No, no. It’s unpleasant, that’s all. Everything’s going to be fine. I promise. Did you want some coffee?”

  She nodded, and then I remembered that she had already nodded in response to the same question. I got four cups out of the cupboard, they were brown on the outside, with a faint tinge of red and white on the inside, and the four saucers that belonged to them were also brown. They were meant to go with some kind of Italian coffee, as far as I remembered, but they were just as good for regular filter coffee, and if I was displaying my social incompetence in that respect it was only to Geir and Christina, whom I’d never suspected of laughing at us behind our backs after they’d been to see us, though of course you could never be certain.

  No, I was pretty sure they hadn’t.

  I took the thermos and the cups with me into the other room, where Geir was sitting, put them out on the table, and sat down. Then I remembered Linda needed milk, so I got up again and went back into the kitchen to get it, got the carton out of the fridge and checked the expiration date, which said it was on its last day, so I opened the carton and smelled inside, just as I heard Geir ask Linda if she’d read Gunnar’s messages, and since there seemed to be nothing wrong with it I took it back with me into the other room and put it down next to the thermos on the table, while Linda told him how awful she thought it all was.

  “What if it goes to court?” she said. “You might have to stay in Norway all autumn. What am I supposed to do then? Imagine this place. Am I going to be left on my own with the kids? And how will you deal with the pressure?”

  Geir gave her one of his most sardonic smiles and glanced at me as she went on. Linda noticed, of course, and I could see how a sudden rage welled up in her, which the presence of guests meant she had to keep inside, and her eyes clouded over. She flashed me the blackest look before getting to her feet and going out into the hall. I sent Geir a look of reproach, but it seemed like he misunderstood and thought it was Linda I was annoyed with; whatever the reason, he simply smiled again, or maybe he was just smiling at the whole thing.

  “Help yourself to coffee,” I said, and went after Linda, who was already in the bedroom by the time I got to her.

  * * *

  The spring Linda and I got together we went out a couple of times with Geir and Christina, it was when we were still obsessed with each other, kissing and touching, unable to keep our hands off each other, and even when I met Geir on my own, for instance in the place I had then, I was still immersed in the thought of her and just sat there blushing with joy, listening to whatever Geir was going on about without any of it actually seeping in, for I was no longer a person, or so it felt, I had become something else, a creature floating in the sky, high above the world and everything in it. I was the sky man, she was the sky woman, and together we were going to have a sky baby. But then we came back down. The sky life stopped and something else began.

  Linda wrote about it in a short story, the two lovers lying in bed talking, she saying she had once seen a strange bird in her childhood, and describing it to him, never before had she seen such a bird, and never since, and it turned out that he had seen one exactly the same in his own childhood, for this is how it is to be a sky man and a sky woman, everything joins up, everything becomes meaningful. But in the story this was the conclusion of something, and she compared that conclusion with the last day spent in a summerhouse, when everything is packed away, the windows closed and the door locked. And this was how it was too. We had been somewhere together, a place filled with light, and now we were going somewhere else. She was afraid of that, it was a darker place. And because she was afraid of it she tried to keep me where I was. This was new to me, something I hadn’t known before, and it made me afraid too. We started arguing, and the walls of her apartment, into which I had moved, closed in on me, its rooms became smaller and smaller. Our arguing turned her into my father, I was afraid of the loudness of her voice, her sudden fits of anger, and had no idea how to handle it, so I was cowed by her, and when it passed I would be on my guard, trying to act in ways that would placate her, wary of the slightest sign of displeasure, and it was that subjection, the fact that I was always trying to assuage and appease, that made our relationship increasingly difficult, because at the same time I was trying to get away from it, I needed to gain some measure of independence, to become my own person, find my own space, and I started getting just as angry with her whenever we argued, maybe even angrier, because I needed to come free of myself too, the bonds within. She went to college, I tried to write, on weekends we tried to be like before. One Sunday we ran into Geir and Christina in a restaurant, Linda and I were going somewhere else afterward, we invited them along, and they came with us, Linda hissed in my ear that Geir was doing it on purpose, hadn’t I noticed he was doing it on purpose, he wanted to ruin things for us. I didn’t understand wha
t she meant, we spent nearly all our time together, wasn’t that enough for her, couldn’t we ever see anyone else?