My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “No,” I said. “Half an hour maybe?”

  “How far away is it?”

  “As far as the first part of Bolibompa.”

  “What’s Heidi been doing?”

  “How should I know! I’ve been with you all day.”

  “Did she get an ice cream?”

  “I would think so. But you did, too.”

  “Yes.”

  We came into a biggish town full of dirty white-brick houses, unlit neon signs, and northern Europeans in holiday mode. Sand dunes were visible between the outermost rows of houses, above them the sea, blue and calm. The last kilometers were built up all the way: houses, supermarkets, garages, hotels, a whole forest of hotels. The bus was going fast, soon we would be heading down the hill to the last bay before our hotel, where we had gone for a walk one afternoon when we could no longer stand being in the compound and found a restaurant right by the sea. The waves had foamed and crashed against the terrazo wall, the wind made everything flap and bang, the shadows were long and sharp, the connection between the light over the countryside and the slowly sinking, burning globe in the sky hard to understand. The restaurant, overlooked by a hotel, was from the fifties or maybe early sixties and already in disrepair. Both Linda and I liked it, the atmosphere of transience and slow demise was irresistible, we sat down and ordered, but the girls were restless and irritable, so it was a case of gulping down the food and getting out as fast as possible.

  The sixties, that was forty years ago. Not exactly ancient history. Nevertheless, even mass tourism was lent an aura of passing time.

  Up the hill, into the right-hand lane and down to the big hotel complex where we were staying.

  “There are Mommy and Heidi!” Vanja shouted.

  And indeed, there they were, walking up the hill, Linda with her big belly pushing the double stroller, in which Heidi sat leaning back in one of the seats with her legs dangling, wearing a brightly colored summer dress. The bus stopped, we got off, and Vanja ran up the hill to meet them. I was curious to hear what she would say, often it turned out that she had experienced quite different things from me, but this time it was just that she had seen some dolphins and had fallen asleep to stop herself being sick.

  “How did it go for you?” I said, coming to a halt in front of them.

  “Fine,” Linda said. “We’ve had a good time.”

  “Are you tired?”

  “A bit. Nothing serious. I had a nap with Heidi.”

  “OK. Shall we go and get something to eat?”

  She nodded and we strolled down toward the center, where the restaurants and shops were. They were concentrated around a kind of patio, half covered by a roof, with a little fountain in the middle. The floor inside the shops was the same as on the patio, terra-cotta tiles, and the lack of any distinction made me feel uncomfortable, in the same way that the sight of lawn turf being laid does. We found a table in the restaurant at the top end, ordered spaghetti bolognese for the children, I had a hamburger, Linda a pizza. The sunlight glinted and glistened on the metal railings running around the restaurants. People wearing swimming trunks and suits, with Crocs on their feet, Foppatofflor in Swedish, walked to and fro beneath us, many pushing strollers. The low sound of Euro-disco music came from the speakers above our heads. Vanja banged her knife against her glass and then Heidi followed suit. I told them to stop. Children plunge into everything, sound too, it never bothers them; if you have a lot of children in one room, such as at a birthday party, they can shout and scream and laugh amid a total cacophony, a noise level that is unbearable for adults but that they don’t even notice.

  Over the past few years I have become more and more sensitive to noise, it was as if the slightest little bang or clink went straight to my soul, which shook and trembled, and one day it struck me it must have been the same for Dad because if there was one thing he reacted to, if there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was noise. Footsteps across the floor, doors banging, cutlery clinking against crockery, children chomping their food. Mom, on the other hand, had never been bothered by noise. Perhaps she was more at peace inside herself, perhaps she was more closed to the world, perhaps it was only that her tolerance levels were higher. But Dad really lived on his nerves, nothing was at peace inside him, one sudden noise and he exploded.

  Now it was my turn.

  Not so loud! No, no, no! Stop it! DO YOU HEAR ME? BE QUIET!

  Vanja slipped down from her chair and crawled under the railing. Heidi followed her, and soon they were both lying on their stomachs by the fountain splashing the water with their hands. I took out a pack of cigarettes and lit up. Linda sent me a miffed look.

  “I am pregnant, you know,” she said. “Couldn’t you at least go and sit somewhere else?”

  “Take it easy,” I said. “I’m going.”

  I got up and headed for one of the tables farthest away. If I was sensitive to noise, Linda was sensitive to smells. It was like being married to a bloodhound. In her present state smoke for her was torture. But I was still annoyed that she had been so miffed. She didn’t have to be so pissed off, for Christ’s sake! I had barely had a chance to have a cigarette all day. How many had I actually smoked? Three? Yes. One in the morning, one in the café with Vanja, one now.

  A waiter with a tray in one hand stopped in front of our table and put down the glasses of mineral water and soda. Linda looked up at him and smiled.

  Down by the fountain Vanja and Heidi were giggling. Vanja dipped her hand into the water and flicked it at her sister, whose dress was already drenched at the top.

  “Vanja!” I shouted. “Calm down now!”

  She looked up at me. Several other people did too.

  But at least she stopped, and the next time I looked over they were hanging from the metal railing on the other side.

  After eating we went to the exit at the other end of the shopping center, past the restaurants, clothes shops, and souvenir boutiques, at Vanja’s request we stopped in front of a big amusement arcade with plane simulators, car simulators, war-game machines, and one-armed bandits, continued past a couple of empty retail outlets, stopped again by a long counter where tickets for activities and excursions were sold. We had talked about getting out of the compound the following day, perhaps finding a good beach somewhere. An amiable-looking man of about my age came over to us.

  “Do you know of a good beach nearby?” I asked.

  Yes, he did. Taking out a brochure and showing us pictures of a magnificent beach, he said it was some distance away, but there was a minibus going there the following morning. I asked how much it cost. He replied that it was free. Free? I echoed in surprise. Yes. The beach actually belonged to a hotel, it was new, and all we had to do to get the free trip and the beach chairs was to commit ourselves to viewing the hotel and promise to tell our friends about it when we got home. That was voluntary too, of course, but it would be a great favor to him if we did, he said, as he would a get a bad reputation if everyone he sent just went straight to the beach.

  “Please have a look at the hotel first and then you can go to the beautiful beach.”

  I exchanged glances with Linda.

  “What do you think? Shall we? So that we get out a bit tomorrow?’

  “Sure, why not?” she said.

  The salesman handed us a form, we filled in our names and address, he gave us a ticket, we said goodbye, and returned to the compound, to the fenced-in playground behind the main hotel, where we stood side by side watching our two children go down the slide and play on the swings while people in sodden swimming suits with wet towels over their shoulders came past in a steady stream on their way back from the pools. In an hour’s time they would go out again, couples dressed in short-sleeve shirts and cotton dresses, red-faced from the sun and the party atmosphere, on their way to have dinner at one of the restaurants, some of them holding their children’s hands, some alone. The thought that many of them probably considered being here fantastic, indeed almost like paradise, and might
have saved up for ages for this very holiday, moved me, there was something wonderful about it, as well as something sad, because the place was terrible, constructed only to shovel in money from sun-starved Scandinavians, a kind of advanced form of exploiting the unwary. The worst part was what it turned me into. Was I – someone who despised all this – any better than they were? Wasn’t I actually the idiot here? They were happy, I was unhappy, but we’d paid the same money.

  In the evening, after the children had gone to bed, I put on my running shoes and jogged up the hill, across the footbridge to the barren lava-black plain beyond the interchange. The idea was to get into the mountains and then run a little there to see something different from roads and hotels on my holiday. I followed a narrow asphalt road. The heat rose from the ground. The sun shone onto the mountains ahead of me. There wasn’t a soul in sight. I was out of shape and ran slowly. In front of me a bus rounded the bend and came toward me. As it passed I saw it was full of elderly tourists. Where on earth had they been? My breath coming in pants now, I continued upward, the road went into a tunnel, another tourist bus came toward me, the roar of the engine reverberated against the bare rock face. At the other end was a little valley. There were more buses in a large gravel parking lot by an enclosed area that turned out to contain a Western town, as I had seen them on TV when I was growing up. If I hadn’t known where I was, the deserted, sun-scorched countryside and the run-down wooden buildings could have tricked me into believing this was somewhere in the Wild West and not an island in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa.

  I kept running. My T-shirt was slowly getting soaked, the sun sank into the sea, and when I returned to the compound it was almost completely dark. In the hall of our apartment I opened the door to the bedroom where Vanja and Heidi lay asleep. Their regular breathing, their limp arms and legs, and their total lack of awareness to their surroundings, where almost anything could happen without them reacting, had fascinated me from my first moment with them. It was as though they lived a different life, were connected to another world – to the dark, vegetal realm of sleep. It was so obvious where they came from, the unseeing existence inside their mother’s body, and they clung to it long after their birth, when they just slept and slept. Their state wasn’t dissimilar to when they were awake because their hearts were beating, their blood was circulating, nutrients and oxygen were being supplied, blood corpuscles created and destroyed, in their insides fluids and organs gurgled and pulsated, and even their nerves, the lightning of the flesh, shot through their own dark pathways as they slept. The sole difference was consciousness, though even this was present in sleep, except that it was turned inward rather than out. Baudelaire wrote about it once in his diaries, I recalled, what courage it took to cross the threshold into the unknown every night.

  They lived as trees live, and, like trees, they didn’t know. Tousled and heavy with sleep they would open their eyes the following morning, ready for another day, without giving a second thought to the state they had been in for almost twelve hours. The world was wide open for them, all they had to do was run out into it and forget everything, as the premise for openness is forgetting. Memory leaves trails, patterns, edges, walls, bottoms, and chasms, it fences us in, ties us up, and weighs us down, turns our lives into destinies, and there are only two ways out: insanity or death.

  But my children were still in the open, free stage. And then I go and obstruct them! I was strict, said no, told them off! Why was I so eager to destroy the best thing they possessed? Which they would lose anyway.

  I closed the door, took off my shoes, and was about to open the bathroom door when I changed my mind and, instead of taking a shower, took a beer from the fridge and joined Linda on the balcony, where she was reading. She put her book aside when I appeared. I sat down and lit a cigarette, but my lungs, which had just put in a hard shift, weren’t up to it and I coughed for a long time.

  “Why don’t you stop smoking, Karl Ove?” Linda said.

  I scowled at her and took a swig of beer.

  “I want the children to have a father for as long as possible,” she continued.

  “I do too,” I said. “Grandma said once I’ll live to be a hundred. I believe that implicitly.”

  At last my lungs adapted and I was able to draw the smoke deep down.

  We chatted about what had happened that day and what we would do on the next. Linda was sleepy, the dual life, the child in her belly, was taking its toll, and after a while she went to bed while I sat up reading. I was reading Witold Gombrowicz’s diaries, and although I hadn’t exactly been looking forward to it all day, it had been at the back of my mind as a vague presentiment of something good. I underlined sections as I read, which I seldom did anymore, but so much in these diaries seemed significant to me, and that was so rare, that I kept thinking I ought to reread them to remember and reflect on later. At regular intervals I put the book down, lit a cigarette, and gazed up at the enormous vaulted sky or down at the lights from the row of bungalows or at the trees along the avenue leading to the two swimming pools whose still surfaces were not visible from where I was sitting, but the mere thought of it had a calming effect. The reflection from the street lamps lent the green of the treetops an artificial tone, as though nature here, and not just the architecture, was man-made. But my mind didn’t follow my eyes, didn’t take note of either shapes or colors, drunken Brits or young Scandinavian families on their way home across the lawn – it drifted off on its own, in the dark shadows of consciousness, excited about Gombrowicz, to whom it didn’t give another thought, didn’t muse on but treated like a dog treats its owner after a long day’s loneliness. Wagging its tail, licking, barking happily. With my heart and soul I knew these writings were important and my own writing had to go in that direction, into the emerging, the developing, the ever evolving. So I had to go down beneath the surface, beneath the ideologies, which you can only stand up to by insisting on your own experience of reality, and not by denying it, for that is what we do, all the time, deny the reality we have experienced in favor of the reality we have learned, and nowhere was the betrayal of the I, the unique and individual I, greater than in art, as art has always been the privileged domain of the unique. It almost seemed as though the prerequisite for creating art was to renounce art. In which case, that would be the most difficult of all because the creation of art wasn’t loaded with value beforehand, and no one, least of all the artist, could know whether what was produced was just shit or something original and priceless. In the last years of his life Van Gogh suddenly became a name, the enormous progress he made from painting to painting was plain for all to see, and the light, which no reproduction in the world can recreate, given that it would miss its very essence, was ultimately rendered with an almost morbid abandon and beauty, which everyone who sees these pictures knows to be true to life, knows is demonstrable: this is exactly how it is. He hardly ever painted people, the rooms and landscapes are unpopulated, but not accidentally so, it is more as if the beholder is lost to them, hence dead. The way the dead see the world, that is how Van Gogh painted it. In order to get there, to the stark nothing of our lives in the midst of a world ablaze with color, he renounced everything. As he wanted only to paint, he renounced everything when he did that. And who, hand on heart, can say that he or she is willing to renounce everything? For everything does truly mean everything.

  Well, I certainly couldn’t, that’s for sure.

  Gombrowicz?

  No, not everything. A lot, but not everything. He writes that the flight of art has to find its counterpart in the sphere of normal life, in the same way that the shadow of the condor spreads across the ground below. He writes that Gordian knots should not be solved with our intellect but with our lives. He writes that the truth is not just a question of argument but of attraction, that is, the power to attract. And he writes that an idea is and remains a screen behind which other, more important, things go on. There were no complicated truths. And they must have come at a
price. The price was high, it was isolation, but the payoff, freedom of thought, was high too. In the ruthlessness of his thoughts he was akin to Nietzsche, and like Nietzsche’s texts Gombrowicz’s were descriptions of a path, not the path itself. If he had written about his sexual escapades with young men in the Buenos Aires harbor quarter, the joys and humiliations of these nocturnal adventures, the shame and the seduction, about waking up one Sunday in his filthy accommodation with the South American sun shining in through the window, about his many jobs, including one as a bank clerk, about his wounded pride, about his fantasies of nobility, in short, if he had described all the circumstances from which his thoughts – and through them his soul – rose, and in practice connected the highest (for even thoughts about the lowest rank among the highest in the diaries) with the lowest, that is, the fluff in his navel, the worm up his ass, the blood in his piss, the wax in his ears, or just an autumn day strolling in a park in Buenos Aires with a book by Bruno Schulz under his arm, he would have been the world’s greatest writer, the modern-day Cervantes and Shakespeare, all rolled into one.

  But he couldn’t. He was free in thought but not in form, not quite.

  Could I?

  Fuck off, Karl Ove. You stupid little shit. I didn’t even reach Gombrowicz’s boot laces. The mere idea of saying something as honest and true about Norwegian literature anywhere near as honest as he did about Polish literature gave me a stomachache. Yes, my hands trembled at the very thought, that I could actually describe everything as it was. That all I had to do was just go ahead and do it.

  What a treacherous thought!

  “Just” my ass!

  But Gombrowicz pointed, and said: that’s how it is here, better go that way.

  Perhaps I could do that?

  If only I’d had a really profligate, sleazy past in the docklands of Buenos Aires, lived at the bottom like a crab, and gorged myself shamelessly on everything I came across, preferably killed someone with a rock to the head, as Rimbaud may have done, and, like him, fled to Africa and made a living as an arms smuggler, yes, anything but this, on a hotel balcony in the Canary Islands with two small children and a pregnant wife sleeping on the other side of the sliding-glass door, and all that this loaded the future with in terms of propriety and responsibility.