Cup in hand, I went out to the balcony, sat down, and took out a cigarette. A plane passed high above like a small ball of light; it was still too dark for me to distinguish the fuselage from the sky around it. In an hour and a half I would be sitting up there myself, I reflected, and then I thought of the Cortázar short story which so often surfaced from my subconscious when I was sitting here because it shifted perspective in such a dizzyingly abrupt way between someone on board a plane and someone on the ground, to be precise on an island in the Mediterranean. Cortázar was the master of giddy shifts of perspective, and even if his short stories occasionally bore a likeness to those of Borges, in this respect he was unrivaled.
The man reading about the man reading about the man reading. The line of faces which disappeared into the illusory depths of the mirror when, as a boy, I had stood in front of it holding another mirror to reflect the image. Smaller and smaller and smaller, deeper and deeper into the distance, into all eternity, for it was impossible to stop this movement, it could only become so small that it could not be distinguished from its surroundings.
I drew the smoke deep into my lungs. I was cold, partly because I was wearing only a shirt, partly because I was tired. And partly because I was afraid.
But there was nothing to be afraid of, was there?
The plane was no more than a tiny dot now while daybreak seemed to have come closer to the town, and the darkness in the air between the buildings below me was filled with a kind of light so hazy that it was as if someone had stirred the gloom, causing the light hiding at the bottom to mingle and rise to the surface.
Ever since I was in my teens I had imagined that the universe might well be microscopic and perhaps encapsulated in an atom belonging to a different universe, which in turn was enclosed in an atom in a different universe, and so on ad infinitum. But it was only when I read Pascal and saw the same idea there that it gained validity and authority as a distinct possibility. Yes, that was probably how it was. The fractal system, on which so much in our world is based, was like that: an image within an image within an image, ad infinitum.
I stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray, chucked the rest of the coffee over the railing, heard it hit the roof far below as I opened the door and went in. Placed the cup on the counter, put on my new suit jacket and new shoes, packed a tub of hairstyling gel, an extra pair of underpants, and a shirt in my backpack, passport, plane ticket, cigarettes, and lighter in the outside pocket, hung one strap over my shoulder and was about to open the door when Linda came in.
“Are you off?” she said.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Well, good luck,” she said.
We kissed briefly.
“See you tomorrow!” I said.
“Yes, looking forward to that,” she answered.
I walked out to the elevator. She closed the door behind me, I averted my eyes from the mirror on the way down, lit a cigarette as I emerged onto the street. There were two taxis outside the hotel, I ambled toward the traffic lights and crossed over to them. The driver in the first car was asleep. I leaned forward and knocked on the window with one knuckle. He didn’t give a start, as I had expected, but instead opened his eyes without moving his head or body, evincing a kind of out-of-place regal dignity.
The window slid down.
“Are you free?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “Where do you want to go?”
I opened the rear door and got in. Actually the plan had been to catch a taxi to the railway station and then the train to Kastrup, but it didn’t feel right to wake him up for such a short trip, which would earn him no more than a hundred kronor, besides which I needed the immense feeling of power and luxury it would give me if I went by taxi all the way to the airport, something I had never done before, apart from once with the children when we were going to the Canary Islands and had so much luggage we didn’t feel like lugging it all onto the train.
“Kastrup,” I said. “Is it a set price?”
“Yes,” he said, flashing his left indicator.
It cost four hundred more. Almost as much as the plane ticket. But what the hell. The novel was coming out tomorrow. I would be getting at least sixty thousand kroner for it. Surely I could indulge myself. Besides, I was going to do a lot of interviews, so it was important I was rested and my energy levels were up, after all, this was my job.
I leaned back in the seat and looked at the town, its lights glinting in the gray dawn, and another wave of nerves surged through me.
* * *
For nearly two years I had worked as a language consultant on the new Norwegian translation of the Bible, and I had caught the plane from Kastrup to Gardermoen so often, there and back in a day, that what I had previously considered unremarkable, though it was certainly unusual, a kind of travelfest, had now become routine, as commonplace as catching the bus. I collected my boarding pass from one of the machines in the departure hall and walked up to the first floor and over to the security control in the long corridors there. My jacket over my arm and belt in hand, I put the backpack on the carousel when it was my turn, picked it up on the other side, surrounded by besuited men in their fifties and equally professionally dressed women, some cheery and outgoing, others withdrawn into themselves, standing like trees. I presumed that I would give the same impression if anyone looked at me when I looked at them. I put my belt back on and then my jacket as I walked through the tax-free shopping area to the café at the entrance to the B gates, where I would usually sit after buying Norwegian and Danish newspapers in the big kiosk there, and had a coffee at the bar.
I had hardly talked to anyone about the novel, apart from those closest to me, and they saw me and themselves in it with none of the objectivity a normal novel required, so I knew little about how it seemed from the outside, to people who had nothing to do with me. It was difficult to predict what questions the journalists would ask. But as soon as they began, a certain way of regarding the book would be established because they always thought alike, always asked the same questions, and once I had said something to one of them, then I said the same to the next, it became a kind of platform for the book, which in turn became the book because what was written in the newspapers the following day was further reinforced by a fairly large circle of readers and interested parties, who discussed it on the basis of this same platform. The next time I did interviews the journalists had prepared by reading earlier interviews and reviews. In the process everything apart from a couple of points was filtered away, and these were then so squeezed and wrung dry until the book completely lost any signs of life and lay dead and buried in a warehouse somewhere outside Oslo.
But one thing was certain this time, and that was that they’d ask about the autobiographical element. Why did I write about myself? What was it that made me so interesting that I could write not only one novel based on my life but six? Was I a narcissist? Why did I use people’s real names? That would be fine, they weren’t impossible questions to answer, but if they honed in on individual names, my father and his mother, for instance, and their various relatives, and were bent on talking about the novel’s depiction of reality in specific rather than general terms – Grandma and Dad and those days in Kristiansand – it could turn out to be a nightmare.
A clue as to what they would be asking about was given in the three interviews I had done in Malmö: one for Dagbladet, one for Dagens Næringsliv, and one for Bokprogrammet on NRK. Both Dagbladet and Dagens Næringsliv had been preoccupied with what I had written about myself, about the person I was now. About having no friends, no interest in social life, and about getting so drunk that I lost all self-control. These matters had been almost impossible to talk about. Who would want to state in the newspaper that they don’t have any friends? When I was writing this wasn’t a problem since what I wrote was how things were for me, sitting alone in my room. This novel was tightly drawn around me and my life, but as soon as it all came out into the open, everything changed. An immens
e distance appeared within this private world that belonged to me and my family, it became an “object,” something public, while in reality that which we moved about in, without this ever being formulated, was not a thing, admittedly in the novel it had been given form, but the big difference between a novel and a newspaper article was that the first belonged to an intimate sphere – it was closely associated with an “I,” a specific voice – which the novel reached beyond, as it also addressed itself to one or more readers, although it never left what was its own and what was personal; a newspaper article, on the other hand, had no such personal ties, and therefore it changed everything that was in the novel and turned it into something else, something public and general, with the power of a judgment: Knausgaard has no friends, Knausgaard loses control of himself when he drinks, Knausgaard yells at his children. And that was how it was with everything I wrote in that novel. The novel is an intimate genre and its intimate nature doesn’t change even if eight thousand copies are printed, because it is read by only one person at any one time and would never leave the private sphere. But when the newspapers discussed what I wrote, there was no longer any connection with this private sphere, there was no longer any connection with the intimate sphere, it was objective and public, detached from the “I,” and even though it was still related to me and my world, it was solely via my name, its exterior, “Knausgaard,” one object among other objects – and only then did what the novel was about become a “thing.” I had decided not to read any of the interviews I was going to do, or any of the reviews, they would make me die of self-hatred when I saw my inner self from the outside like that, but the Dagens Næringsliv journalist, a young Sørlander, had insisted I read his review before it went to print, which I did, and I would never do that again. In an e-mail to him I compared my experience of this to an animal being transfixed in the beam of a searchlight.
I enacted various scenarios in my head as I sat in the airport, trying to find an answer to any questions that might crop up – while looking out the window at the planes standing in readiness and the small airport vehicles darting to and fro like toys against the backdrop of the vast, now sheer blue sky and the sun, which, shining from the other side, made the glass and metal sparkle wherever its rays struck; I gazed too at the throng of people, more here than anywhere else – until it was time to board, at which point I got up, put the newspapers in my backpack, and walked down the corridor to the gate, when another colossal surge of nerves, like a torrent of fear, quivered through my body as I sat down.
I had no doubt that Fædrelandsvennen, the newspaper in Kristiansand, would get as close to the truth as they could. They would probably be indignant, for one did not write about one’s private life, and it was extremely likely they had spoken to Gunnar and would push me as hard as they could on that. Court case, lack of regard for the facts, unscrupulous exploitation of innocent people for personal gain.
I got up, I couldn’t sit any longer, and went to the toilet, forced out a dribble of dark yellow pee, washed my hands, put them under the hand dryer or whatever they called the little hot-air machine attached to the wall next to the mirror. After coming out, I wandered down the corridor to a duty-free shop, cast an eye over the goods for a few minutes and walked back, the line for the plane had formed, the airline employee behind the gate desk had opened the door to the jet bridge and was busy checking passports and scanning ticket bar codes.
* * *
As the plane lifted from the runway and rose into the sky I scoured the land beyond the strait, searching for the house where we lived. It wasn’t difficult; it was directly opposite the Hilton, which was the second-highest building in Malmö. It was incomprehensible that only two hours earlier I had been sitting there and looking up here, and also that everything down there had felt as big as up here, because from where I was now I could not only make out the balcony where I usually sat, I could also see all the square kilometers of buildings around it where several hundred thousand other bright sparks sat looking at the world as if they were the only ones in it.
Linda and the children must be up by now, I thought, and recognized first Landskrona, then Helsingborg below me, after which the countryside became anonymous and featureless and somehow homogenized: fields, yeah, right; roads, yeah, right; villages, yeah, right. I took out the newspapers and read until the plane started its descent toward Gardermoen, and I looked down on the sunlit woodlands, dark green with the scattered reds and yellows of autumn, like cries from more unruly trees rent with yearning and happiness and death amid the tranquil, paternal spruces and firs.
A river, dark, some fields, yellow. Some cars, which seemed lonely even when in long lines of traffic. Everything below bore all the signs of waiting for winter not even the Indian-summer sun could erase.
Slowly the plane descended from the sky until the wheels hit the ground and began to roll along the runway, the flight attendant’s voice welcomed us to Oslo and asked us to keep our seat belts fastened, which almost everyone ignored, we knew it wasn’t dangerous anymore, no one would punish us if we didn’t obey, that was what you call freedom.
Click, click, click, everywhere. I usually waited until almost everyone had left the plane before I got up, but now I was short of time, so I pushed my way into the aisle, shrugged on my backpack, and switched on my phone, as everyone around me was doing. I hadn’t received any text messages of course, I never did, but no one else knew that.
I put the phone in my inside pocket and met the gaze of a woman in her fifties, she had just lifted a bag down from the overhead bin and was twisting around to place it on the floor.
“Fantastic books you write,” she said. “Thank you very much.”
Embarrassed, I returned her gaze, my cheeks warm, my lips forming a half smile.
“A Time for Everything is the best book I’ve read in years,” she continued.
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s nice. I’m happy to hear that.”
She gave me a warm smile and then turned to face the front again.
A stranger had never addressed me to talk about my books before. If that wasn’t a good sign, I didn’t know what was.
* * *
An hour later I got out of a taxi in Kristian Augusts gate, paid, and walked through the gateway of the building where Oktober had its offices. The publishing house had just extended its premises and now occupied two floors; I assumed it was the money that Anne B. Ragde’s books had generated that had made this possible. I rang the bell, fortunately someone buzzed the door open without asking who I was, I hated standing in front of those little boxes and introducing myself. When I got up to the first floor there was Silje, waiting for me. I was given a cup of coffee, we went up to the floor above and I sat down on the black leather sofa just inside the door where the first interview was to take place and lit up. Geir Berdahl came in to say hello, perhaps it had been the smell of cigarette smoke that had reached him in his office at the other end. He told me the book hadn’t arrived yet. It was supposed to have been here the day before, but the truck had been involved in an accident in Sweden; as far as he understood, it had gone off the road to avoid a wild boar. He laughed, I smiled. Then he turned serious, as was his wont, reined himself in after all his merriment and said this wasn’t good, tomorrow it was being reviewed in all the newspapers and there wasn’t a single copy in any of the bookshops. But he would personally drive a consignment to the big bookshops in Oslo early tomorrow, he said with a fleeting smile, and returned to his office after wishing me good luck. I sat back down on the sofa, Silje came in with a thermos of coffee, a cup for the journalist, water, and some glasses. I visualized a truckload of books between lines of trees in a Swedish forest, the driver climbing down from his cabin, a phone pressed to his ear, smoke rising from the hood, total silence after the door has slammed shut. Then I pictured Geir Berdahl with disheveled hair and tousled beard driving through the streets of Oslo in a small Toyota crammed with books. That must have been how he worked in the seventie
s when Oktober was a Marxist-Leninist publishing house with its own chain of book dealers through whom they distributed translations of Marx and Mao to the Norwegian population. I knew next to nothing about that period, everything was wreathed in myth, and I decided I would ask him the next time an opportunity offered itself. In fact I had given him nothing but trouble; I owed the company a lot of money because I hadn’t had a book published for five years – although I had no idea how much; it could be anywhere between three and seven hundred thousand kroner, and now that I had finally finished a novel he had to deal with my uncle, who was sending him malicious, rabid e-mails, and talk to him on the phone, as well as having to engage a firm of lawyers to scrutinize my manuscript and all the details of the case. That this should happen to me was actually pretty damned idiotic and unbelievable. I had never gone looking for trouble in my life, as far as possible I tried to be kind and friendly and polite and decent, I just wanted everyone to like me, that was all, and here I was, in such a storm of aggrieved people and lawyers, not through ill fortune but following a reasonable response to an act I had committed. I wanted nothing more than to write and be an author, so how could I have ended up in a situation where lawyers had to read everything I wrote? I had their observations at home along with the usual consultants’ reports I had received over the years, and it was remarkable how different the lawyers’ ones were. In normal circumstances this would have been interesting because the law was language, and when it had to be applied, it wasn’t in any absolute way, it was always a question of an assessment, which had to be formulated with as much precision and exactitude as possible. The lawyers had to describe whatever the case might be, in other words what had happened, and in court this was of course often the crux of the conflict: what had actually happened? And once this was established, with what motives? And to what effect? It was not unlike a novelist’s work.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 98
