The difference was that the lawyers not only had to understand the acts in themselves but also how they applied to the law, which furthermore was in writing, formulated on the basis of expectation regarding future events, thus as a kind of prognosis – based on thousands of years’ experience of mankind, which indicated that theft, embezzlement, and murder would continue to occur while some of the more culture-specific laws died as the culture that had necessitated them also died. Actions were language-less, while the law and its interpretation were language-based. A law without language was as inconceivable as a poem without language. Law and poetry were connected; they were two sides of the same coin.
One of the other editors walked past, smiled, congratulated me on my book, and disappeared into his office. Silje talked me through the schedule, I listened with half an ear; it was a long time since I had dreaded anything so much. The doorbell rang, that would be the journalist, and I went into the bathroom for a pee and to put some more gel in my hair, there was to be a photo session after the interview.
When I returned, the journalist from the Norwegian News Agency had arrived. She was dressed in a way, or had an air about her, that I associated with motorbikes. We shook hands, she said the photographer was on his way, we sat down, she began to ask her questions, it was going very well, I thought, and the questions were of a general nature except when they concerned me. Half an hour or so later I was in the backyard being photographed and then I was ready for the next item on the agenda, the telephone interview with Bergens Tidende. I spent the intervening minutes in Geir Gulliksen’s office; he had come while I was doing the interview with the NNA journalist. We talked about the next novel. We had edited the first one together here, he had sat with the manuscript in front of him, I had the computer, and we had worked through his suggestions, most of which were deletions. Apart from the opening, which we considered removing because the tone was so different from the rest of the manuscript, and the long passage about the new year’s party, which he wanted to take out, I did exactly what he recommended. I could see at once it was better. The text was tighter and had more force. Now, sitting there, him on his swivel chair by the desk, me on a chair up against the wall, I asked him when we should begin editing the second volume. It had been ready for a while, but when all the fuss surrounding the first started I realized it couldn’t come out in its present form, it was far too aggressive and in some parts almost slanderous, I had been frustrated and angry when I wrote it, and the frustration and anger had occasionally infused it in ways that would damage both me and those I had written about. I had deleted the worst of it, but the balance was still wrong. The idea was that I should write about my life as it was now and then go back in time, through my childhood, up through my teenage years into adulthood, to end with meeting Linda in Sweden, in such a way that our love story, which was so intense, would cast its light back on the events of the second book. But the patience this required was inhuman, the picture I painted of us too one-dimensional, and it felt as if what was supposed to provide depth and perhaps give a rationale was too far ahead for it to work. So one morning, only a week earlier, I had sat down and written the story of when we met and what happened between us. Almost exactly twenty-four hours later I had finished, the story had turned into fifty pages and exuded the light the novel needed so that all the rest would not be incomprehensible. I had an hour’s sleep, then I left to do an interview with Dagbladet in the café in Malmö Art Gallery, exhausted in a way I felt only when I had been drinking the night before.
“We don’t need to do any more,” Geir said now. “We’ll publish it as it is.”
“Do you mean that?” I said.
“Yes, I do,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“As sure as I can be.”
“No deletions? Nothing?”
“The little there is we can do at the proofreading stage.”
“I’ll have to trust you,” I said.
“Yes, you will,” he said with a laugh. “By the way, how did it go with the NNA?”
“It went pretty well, I think. But now it’s Bergens Tidende. I’m dreading it.”
“It’ll be fine,” he said. “I talked to him yesterday, as I told you. What was his name? Tønder?”
“Yes.”
“First off he said he just wanted a bit of background info about you. But I knew right away he had an agenda.”
“What was it then?”
“Well, it was all about the biographical details.”
“So he knew about Gunnar?”
“He did.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I couldn’t talk about your book in those terms. I think he understood. He just asked about this and that. I don’t think you have anything to fear.”
“I hope not,” I said.
Silje knocked on the half-open door and popped her head in.
“You can call him from an office on the floor below,” she said.
“Now?” I asked.
“Yes, I think he’s probably ready and waiting.”
I got up and followed her down the stairs. The office was at the back to the left. The coffeepot and my cup had mysteriously moved to the desk there. Beside the phone lay a pen and a pad. Silje passed me a slip of paper with a phone number on it.
“Here’s his number,” she said. “Dial zero first.”
“Thank you,” I said, and sat down. She left and closed the door behind her. It went through my head that I didn’t have to call. I doodled on the pad. Then I pulled myself together, lifted the receiver, and dialed the number.
The voice at the other end spoke Bergen dialect, and whenever I’ve heard anyone speaking Bergen dialect since, I have heard that voice resonate and it’s sent shivers down my spine. It is the most unpleasant voice I have heard in the forty-nine years I have been alive and it was the most unpleasant conversation I have ever had. It wasn’t what the voice said, I don’t remember that very clearly, no, it was the tone it was said in, which fluctuated between flattery and condemnation, though without ever relinquishing a sense of self-righteousness, however insidious or covert.
During the two years that have passed since the first volume of this novel appeared I have met a lot of journalists, and I have always had something good to say about them, there has always been something conciliatory about them, whatever they have written and however stupidly or nonsensically or uncompromisingly they have described me, but there was nothing conciliatory about this voice, it was just hideous, and I never want to hear it again. After the interview was over I felt nauseous, and repulsive to myself, the voice had been in my ear, in my head, and I had never realized before that a voice was an alien force that could penetrate your body and fill you with its being. The worst thing about this voice was that it seemed to be trying to lure me into a trap, a bit like the way you can imagine the police interrogate their suspects, switching between everyday topics in order to gain their confidence and give them enough scope to slip up, to say more than they should, only then to ask a question that can nail them. You weren’t there, were you? You were actually there, weren’t you? You can tell me. I know what really happened.
The voice was like that. It asked me why I hadn’t written about my mother in the novel. That is a strange question to ask a novelist who has written about his relationship with his father and his father’s death. Why did Kafka write letters only to his father and not to his mother? The voice didn’t ask the question because it wondered why my mother wasn’t in the novel, it knew that very well, underlying the question was an accusation, unformulated but obvious, and all it wanted was for me to admit it. I didn’t, of course. Instead I said it was a book about my father and my father’s death, not about my mother and my mother’s death, and the voice, which didn’t believe a word of what I said made a mental note to be used later when I contradicted myself and was beginning to fall into the trap. It was an interrogation, not an interview. The voice assured me it had really enjoyed t
he book and asked some relatively harmless questions. It wanted to know in what way the novel related to reality. After my answer he said that I had claimed the novel was about reality, but it was also at odds with reality, and he wanted to know how I could explain that.
“You write that your father lived for two years with his mother. But that’s not true, is it? He stayed there for only two months, didn’t he?”
“I did not write that,” I said. “That’s not in the book. It doesn’t say anything about how long he lived there.”
“Yes, it does. It says he lived there for two years.”
“No, it doesn’t. I took it out. You couldn’t have read that. It’s not there.”
The voice was silent for a few seconds. Then, in a confidential, deeper tone, it said:
“As you know, I’ve spoken to your family.”
“You’ve spoken to Gunnar?”
“Yes. He says what you’ve written doesn’t correspond with the facts. In the book you’re presented as a hero. But actually you’re not such a fine fellow. You didn’t really clean the whole house, now did you. You don’t know how to clean, isn’t that the truth of the matter?”
I said I had cleaned the house exactly as I had described, and that cleaning was about the only thing I could do well, but it wasn’t possible to talk about the novel in this way, discussing whether it was me or my uncle who had cleaned the house, this was absurd. Again I could tell the voice wasn’t taking in a word of what I said, and I had myself lived with the image it had of me ever since I hit puberty, I was an untrustworthy little shit with a high opinion of myself, no morality, no self-restraint, none of the common decency necessary to be a respectable person. And I had written that I had cleaned my grandmother’s entire house after my father’s death to present myself in a favorable, honorable light whereas in fact it had been my uncle who had cleaned the place. And I had turned my father’s death into something verging on the grotesque and transformed what had been an ordinary heart attack into the result of a self-destructive hell on earth and, not content with that, I had even dragged my ever kind, sweet old grandmother through the mud and mire, which was mine and no one else’s. And behind all this towered my mother, the Knausgaard-Avenger, who had turned her son’s head.
Why hadn’t I written more about my mother? Why had I described her in such positive terms and my father in such negative ones? Why had I written that my father lived with my grandmother for two years when the truth was that he had stayed there for two months, and barely that? Why had I written that I had cleaned the whole house when I barely knew anything about cleaning and had actually got in the way?
It wasn’t just that the voice obviously believed everything that Gunnar had told it, including the theory that it was my mother who had indoctrinated me, which upset me so much I felt nauseous sitting there with the phone in my hand, it was also the insidious way this was expressed, faintly acknowledging I was good at writing while at the same time maintaining I lied and was mendacious, an immoral person, yes, that voice spoke to me as if I were a criminal. It was one thing for Gunnar to do this, after all he was deeply involved in this business, and I was the one who had involved him, against his will, so regardless of whatever accusations he came up with, I was to blame. But this voice wasn’t involved, I wasn’t to blame for any of its accusations, yet it passed judgment on me, with all the moral legitimacy and self-righteousness the post of journalist at Bergen’s biggest newspaper could accord while nonetheless wanting something from me and needing me, for the sake of the news story. It knew: no me, no article, so it both condemned and begged me at one and the same odious time.
Yes, it was an odious voice.
I knew it had believed Gunnar. Berdahl, who had also spoken to Gunnar on the phone, said he came across as collected, sensible, and moderate. It was only in his e-mails that he unleashed his fury. The crime correspondent at Bergens Tidende had spoken to him on the phone and believed him. Gunnar was an accountant, a respectable citizen, as was the voice, I could imagine, and when my novel was read with that in mind he saw exactly what Gunnar saw: I was untrustworthy, mendacious, and had written the novel because I hated the Knausgaard family and, prompted by my mother, wanted to take revenge on them. With that Gunnar had deprived me of all my independence and individuality: even hating was not something I did of my own accord but on behalf of my mother. He had turned my novel into a burlesque, something unworthy and contemptible. Bergens Tidende agreed with him about everything. I had lied, and what I had written was not a novel but trivial and socially unacceptable, an attack on living people in book form.
I didn’t think any of this during the conversation with that insidious, half-begging, half-condemning voice because it had taken over, I had more than enough to do defending myself, and not even when the interview was over did I think about it. The sense that I was a criminal and the fear of the consequences of what I had written, which was now beginning to make itself felt, shut out everything else. It was these same feelings that had raged inside me throughout the end of summer. Completely under their sway, my mind in turmoil, which can happen when a catastrophe beckons but still hasn’t struck, I left the room, went up to the floor above and into Geir’s office. I felt sick and my insides were trembling. But just sitting there helped. I told him what had been said and when Geir Berdahl came in I repeated it. Geir told me the journalist had said the same to him the evening before: my father hadn’t stayed for more than two months with his mother and I hadn’t cleaned the house as I had written. Geir had thought the journalist was testing this out on him and wouldn’t make the same allegations in an interview with me.
“But I soon realized he wasn’t interested in the novel. He was only interested in this. It was his news story.”
“Fortunately I told him I wanted to read everything connected with Gunnar,” I said. “So he said he would e-mail it to me in the course of the day.”
“That’s good,” Geir said. “It’ll be coming out soon and we’ll have to take a stand on it. I’m not sure it’s going to be much of a problem.”
“Actually Siri Økland was down to do this interview,” I said. “Einar Økland’s daughter. But then they put him on it. Slightly heavier artillery. He’s a former crime correspondent, you know.”
“That’s right. You said.”
“Oh, shit,” I said.
Geir laughed.
“It’ll be fine, Karl Ove,” he said.
“That’s the most unpleasant conversation I’ve ever had. He flattered and humiliated me at the same time. My God, and in such a creepy way.”
“Yes, he was unpleasant. I thought the same.”
“And now it’s Fædrelandsvennen’s turn. This is the one I’ve dreaded most. If Bergens Tidende rang around my family what do you think they would have been up to?”
“I don’t think they’ll have done anything,” Geir said.
“I hope you’re right,” I said, getting up. “That BT interview was the worst experience of my life.”
I went down into the street with Silje, where the sun was shining, bright and clear, past the National Gallery and down Karl Johans gate. On the way I stopped outside a newspaper kiosk and picked up a copy of Morgenbladet. Silje, who understood what was going through my mind, said there wasn’t a review section today. I put it back on the stand, we entered the Grand Hotel, where Ibsen used to sit with a mirror in his top hat, and took the elevator up to the bar at the top, where the journalist and the photographer from Fædrelandsvennen were waiting. I sat down with the journalist at a table on the terrace. She had made a point of wearing sunglasses so that she didn’t have to look into my eyes. The book had shaken her, she said. From the way she spoke I realized she hadn’t made any moral judgments. I talked about what she wanted to talk about, as warily as possible, beneath the blue, cloudless September sky, and afterward the photographer took pictures of me on the other side of the terrace. I did another interview, this time with a journalist from Morgenbladet, and I sat smoking a
nd drinking Farris mineral water and coffee while answering his questions. His name was Håkon, I seemed to remember, or it might have been Harald, he came from almost the same place as me, had grown up on the other side of the bridge, and wanted to talk about it, and that was good because as a result there was some distance from both me and the book.
* * *
After lunch I took a taxi up to NRK. I arrived twenty minutes early, so I sat down on a rock outside and was having a smoke in the sunshine when I heard a Swedish voice from somewhere, I turned and saw Carl-Johan Vallgren, a Swedish writer I had met a couple of times in Stockholm, getting out of a taxi and walking toward the reception desk. He was about to launch his latest book in Norway. I stubbed out my cigarette and followed him. He was standing with his back to me as I entered, so I placed my hand on his shoulder, which normally I would never do to anyone, but somehow circumstances had colluded to bring me in here. He turned and when he saw who it was he smiled. He was wearing a suit, and his seventies shirt with large collar points was open at the neck. We shook hands, I said I had enjoyed his last book, he said all the writers in Oslo had been talking about me ever since he arrived, and their voices were not without a touch of envy. He was laughing as he spoke and turned to face the lobby, where someone was coming to fetch him. See you, I said, yes, see you, he replied, after which I went out for another smoke and to call Linda. Meeting him had put me in a better frame of mind, he was the kind of person who lifts your mood when you meet them, some people are like that, not many. I definitely wasn’t one of them.
Linda was sitting outside at a café in Malmö, where the weather was good too. The morning had gone well, she said, her mother had arrived and in the evening my mother would be arriving. I said the interviews had gone fine and there were two more to do before I left to see Axel and Linn. Sounds good, I’m looking forward to tomorrow, she said. I answered that I was too, and then we said goodbye and hung up.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 99
