My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  But there too Gombrowicz had given me a little hope, lit a barely perceptible flame in the great darkness of my banality. Didn’t he write, “Physical comfort can sharpen the sensibilities of the soul, and behind the cozy curtains, in the suffocating sitting rooms of the middle classes, engenders a toughness of which those who attacked tanks with Molotov cocktails could never dream.”

  Oh, to hell with everything.

  It would soon be four years since my last novel came out and I hadn’t written anything of note in the meantime. Fuck all, in fact. For close to a year I’ve been fiddling around with an opening to a novel in which Henrik Vankel, the protagonist in my first novel and the intended writer of the second, wakes up in a hospital after a suicide attempt. I had left him in a bathtub in a house on an all-but-deserted island at the end of the previous novel, just after he had slashed his face and chest, and the idea was he would complete what he had started and cut an artery and slowly his blood would drain away, and his life too. I described how his eyesight was overrun, how there was something vegetative about the waning clarity, something growing and spreading inside him, it was death, and then the knocking at the door. Far, far in the distance, like outside a dream. Later it transpired it was the neighbor’s son, one of the island’s four other inhabitants, who had dropped by for a cup of coffee. A naval vessel lay anchored just off the coast, he contacted it, they took Henrik on board, and saved his life. I didn’t believe in this story for a second, the part about the ship was particularly dubious and stupid, but there really had been a ship anchored up when I was living on the island, and it had made a great impression on me because it was somehow completely faceless, it just stood there in its world, with its cannons, not a single person to be seen on board. One day a little rubber dinghy was launched, it came into the bay in front of the house where I lived, four men in uniform pulled it ashore and ran inland. The dinghy lay there, beached, the whole day. In the evening it was gone. The next day the ship was gone too. All this was charged with meaning, so to speak, because both the ship and the crew of the dinghy stood out so incredibly clearly in an otherwise uneventful life on the island, they were out of the ordinary in every sense, although I didn’t know what the meaning was. The events arrived sender unknown, out of nowhere, and the mysteriousness of the clarity fascinated me, it was like a poem. At the time a Russian submarine had sunk somewhere in the Barents Sea, the members of the crew were alive, but the boat couldn’t be saved, and they died within a few days. While I stood brushing my teeth and surveying the mist-wreathed island with its yellow grass, dark brown rocks and crags, the surface of the water black and still, there were several hundred young Russians in a death trap somewhere out there at the bottom of the sea. At this very moment. When I joined my neighbor in his boat to go to the main island to buy some provisions, I saw the front pages of the newspapers as openings in the world. Kursk, Kursk. Every radio program started with an update on the situation. They were going to die in days, hours, minutes. I walked around the island, I sat reading, they were trapped in the deep. So all hope was gone, they must be lying there, every last one of them, at the bottom of the sea, like dead fish. Did they bang their fists against the walls in their last moments of life? Did they stagger around screaming with rage and despair? Did they lie there, motionless, waiting for the inevitable?

  They died, and then they were forgotten, new accidents and disasters captured the world’s attention. I too forgot all about it until I began to write about Henrik Vankel’s last days on the island. Then I reflected that the events represented two diametrically opposed phenomena. One was the openness of our times, in which we are informed about everything, even about those dying at the bottom of a distant sea, while it is happening. The feeling this produced was one of constriction, a sense that we are never left in peace, we are always seen, there is no longer anywhere we can be alone. The way these incidents were dramatized created a familiarity with them. The second event, concerning the naval boat, wasn’t dramatized at all, it was just something I saw, unprocessed, there was nothing familiar about it, it was an absolute mystery. From all this I concluded that writing had to move toward the unfamiliar, what we know but cannot describe. Actually that was true for everything because even if everything were explained and understood, it would always exist as a phenomenon as well, something in itself, closed off and apart.

  The world had to be closed again.

  But I was getting nowhere. I began to write about what happened in the grandmother’s house when Henrik Vankel’s father died and he was there with his brother, Klaus, but I didn’t have an ounce of faith in it, everything was artificial and for show. I spent three weeks describing how Henrik took his luggage off the carousel at the Kristiansand airport, when Klaus went to pick him up, then I rejected it.

  That was how far I’d got. For this reason, reading Gombrowicz was humiliating, the standard was so high, and to make things worse I agreed with just about everything he wrote.

  I picked up the book and resumed reading. I had got to the last part, where Gombrowicz has left Argentina and moved to France. All the power, all the tension, and all the radicalism had disappeared from his prose, suddenly his style is drained of life and any remaining sharpness seems a little tired, mechanical, and repetitious.

  What happened? Had he got old or was it the loss of exotic surroundings that did it? Europe is an old continent and that is where he came from, where he grew up, it was in him. In those days he was on familiar ground, he was strong, he was young. Could it be that this vitality, which otherwise would have died along with his curiosity, in his forties to judge from others, could it have been prolonged by his foreign adventures? Or was it just that he was dying in a dying culture, a bit like the composer in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice?

  I read for an hour. Then I went indoors and got into bed, in my running gear, I couldn’t be bothered to change. The next morning I put on a film for Vanja and Heidi, The Little Ghost Godfrey, showered, had a smoke on the balcony, and went down with the others to the hotel entrance, where a minibus pulled up ten minutes later. We showed the tickets we had been given, placed the folded stroller and the bag of swimming things in the back, and got in. There were two other couples with us. Soon we were whizzing along the same cliff road Vanja and I had been down the day before. No one said anything, I gazed across the sea, squinting. Heidi started to cry, her face was ashen, was she carsick? She lay with her head on Linda’s lap, Linda stroked her hair until she fell asleep while, luckily, Vanja was unaffected by any potential jealousy and stared across the sea, which lay like a floor beneath the roof of the sky.

  Less than an hour later the minibus drove up a paved road to a resplendent luxury hotel on a hill, alongside verges of flowers, rows of palm trees, and lustrous green lawns. The driver stopped the vehicle, opened the door, and we – the motley package-tour family from Malmö – got out into the already oppressive heat. A woman with a name badge on her chest stood at the entrance looking at us. I unfolded the stroller, ashamed of all the stains on the canvas, looked over at her, and smiled politely. We’re just going to the beach, I said. But we were supposed to take a look at the hotel first, I understand?

  “Come this way, please,” she said.

  Vanja and Heidi stood looking around, slightly wary in these strange surroundings. Linda had her eyes fixed on me. She smiled when I met them.

  We walked through the swinging door and into the reception area. The dark tiles on the floor shone in the light flooding through the enormous panoramic windows, the air was cool, the people working behind the counter wore suits or uniforms. Elevators went up and down all the time, not inside invisible shafts, but on the outside of the walls in glass tubes. Inside, there was a kind of shopping arcade with small, exclusive boutiques on both sides. It resembled an ocean liner, I thought, one of the gigantic luxury liners where no expense is spared and everything is available on board.

  The woman with the name badge showed us into an area to the left of the rec
eption desk with sofas and chairs, where a few lost tourists in holiday garb were sitting, and a counter where we were given a form to fill in. Name, address, telephone number.

  What on earth was all this about?

  We filled in the information, gave back the form, they said we could sit down and wait, we would be called when the time came.

  Called?

  Vanja and Heidi climbed up onto the stone ledge running along the inside of the window, crawled along on all fours, stood up suddenly like monkeys, and pressed their hands against the glass. Don’t do that, I said, you’ll leave marks. They ignored me, shouted to each other, crawled farther along. I checked to see if they had caught anyone’s attention, they hadn’t, and I sat down beside Linda, who was leaning back with her hands over her protruding belly. A TV screen hung from a column not far away, showing pictures of what I presumed to be the hotel where we were, probably the lower floor because there was a beach, the people there were suntanned and slim and seemed to be having a good time. Behind them was a building with terraces all the way up, filmed from a distance. A palace, a golden beach, and in the sea beyond a water-sports paradise.

  Heidi knelt in front of a large flowerpot picking up the Leca pebbles from inside. I walked over to her, moved her away, and put the pebbles back while Vanja pressed her lips against the window, and I walked over to her and lifted her down. Can’t you two come and sit with us for a bit, I said, but they couldn’t, they wanted to go to the other end of the concourse where the avenue of shops started, there was an aquarium, and I went there with them, picked them up in turn so that they could see the fish close up, while glancing behind me from time to time to see what was happening. The people who passed us looked affluent, and I wondered what it was that made me think that, because it was the morning, they were on holiday and walked around wearing everyday shorts or skirts. Could it be something about their self-confident posture? Whatever it was I felt inferior and, with the children’s arms and legs all over the place, lacking in authority and dignity.

  That’s Dad, Heidi said, indicating an unmoving yellowy-brown fish with an enormous lump above its head. And that’s Mom, Vanja said, pointing to an elegant orange fish with a long veil tail. And that’s me! Heidi cried. She directed a little finger at a tiny blue and yellow fish, beautiful as a jewel. That’s me! Vanja said, and pointed to a red and white clownfish. Nemo! I’m Nemo!

  “OK,” I said. “Now we should go back. Come on, you little clowns.”

  They ran after me, taking their own illogical routes across the floor, and pulled up right behind the sofa where Linda sat, very abruptly in fact, for there, only a few meters away, stood a teddy-bear-like creature – as tall as a man with an enormous head – which, when it caught sight of us, started to walk our way. Ill at ease and probably afraid, but also fascinated and excited, they stared at it with innocent blue eyes and mouths agape. He stopped in front of them and stretched out a hand, but neither Heidi nor Vanja realized that they were supposed to hold it. He held a paw in the air as though he had suddenly remembered something, turned, and shuffled over to a table, then came back with two disposable cameras, which he handed to them.

  “Mommy, Mommy, what’s this?” Vanja said after he had gone.

  “A camera, I think,” she said.

  “Can I see?” I said.

  Vanja passed hers to me. It was a disposable underwater camera.

  “You can take pictures underwater with this,” I said.

  “Can we?” Vanja said. “I want to do it! When are we going swimming?”

  “Soon,” I said.

  “Why did we get it?” Vanja asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. She raised the camera to her eye. Behind her a middle-aged man wearing jeans and a blazer came toward us. He was semibald with dark hair at the sides and holding a thin folder in one hand.

  “Linda and Karl Ove?” he said.

  We nodded, he stopped and shook our hands, told us in faintly accented Swedish to follow him and he would show us around. We walked down the arcade, he paused in front of a wall full of pictures, all of celebrities. Norwegian, Swedish, and the occasional American.

  “They’ve all stayed here,” he said.

  “You don’t say,” I said.

  He stretched out a hand, and we went down a long corridor. Tiles, mirrors, gilt balustrade.

  “What do you do back in Sweden?” he asked.

  “Karl Ove’s a writer,” Linda said.

  “Linda is too,” I said.

  “How interesting,” he said. “Might I have heard of you?”

  “Karl Ove’s quite well known,” Linda said with a smile.

  Why did she say that? Jesus Christ, how foolish.

  “Ah!” he said. “Then we’ll have to take a picture of you afterward and hang it on our celebrity wall.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” I said.

  He laughed out loud.

  “I was only joking, sir,” he said.

  Red-faced with embarrassment, I looked down at the floor in front of me.

  “I realized of course,” I said.

  “But perhaps you will be famous one day, you know. Then we’ll hang up a picture of you. I promise you. If you become guests of ours here, that is!”

  “Mm,” I said.

  He came to a halt by an elevator and pressed the button, which glowed dimly. Heidi stared at the light. Pressed the button. At that moment the door opened and an expression of shock spread across her face.

  The elevator was almost completely covered with mirrors. I inadvertently glanced at myself for a brief instant. I looked like an idiot. The white T-shirt, bought for 49 kronor at Åhléns two years before, loose at the neck and a bit too tight around my waist where the fat bulged out, and the military-green three-quarter-length trousers with all the pockets and dangling laces, also bought at Åhléns, for 149 kronor, which in my imagination I had seen as pretty cool gear, and the worn-out Adidas, once white now gray, which I wore without socks, became in these luxurious surroundings a sort of curse, it was impossible not to feel deferential, undignified even, as the elevator sank to ground level.

  “Where on the island are you staying then?” he asked.

  Linda gave him the name of the hotel complex. He nodded.

  “How much did you pay in all? For everything?”

  “Twenty-five thousand,” I said. “Then costs for food and so on top of that.”

  “That’s not cheap,” he said as the elevator came to rest and the doors slid open. The heat hit us as we exited. We were at the foot of the hotel, right next to the beach.

  “Let’s go this way,” he said. “To that island. It was made when the hotel was built.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “No expense spared here. Our prices are still low though. It’s based on an entirely new holiday concept. It’s a standard hotel in one way – you can rent a room – but it’s also possible to buy a room or a suite if you want. Forever. You pay a one-time sum and then you can stay here every summer for the rest of your life.

  “Oh?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s brilliant. It costs a lot less than an apartment would cost here. And at the same time you get so much more for your money. We’re talking real luxury here.”

  Heidi had had enough. She stretched her arms up to Linda.

  “I can’t carry you, you know, my love,” she said.

  “Baby in your tummy!” Heidi said.

  “That’s right,” Linda said.

  “How old are your girls?” he asked. “How sweet they are!”

  Vanja turned her head away, I lifted Heidi up and started to walk across the terrace, past an Italian café and ice-cream parlor, where two elderly ladies with wrinkled suntanned skin were sitting in bikinis drinking coffee, both wearing sunglasses and sun hats.

  “Vanja’s three and a half,” I said. “Heidi’s one and a half.”

  “And when are you expecting the next one? You are, aren’t you?�
��

  “Yes, we are,” I said, with a glance at Linda. “In the middle of August, right?”

  She nodded, walking a few paces behind us, holding Vanja’s hand.

  “And you live in Sweden?”

  “We live in Malmö,” Linda said.

  “It’s a nice town,” I said. “Big enough and a little offbeat. But what about you? How come you speak Swedish?”

  “I worked in Sweden for many years,” he said. “In Stockholm.”

  “Oh!” I said. “We did too. Where did you live?”

  “In Nacka,” he said.

  “In Nacka!” I said. “We’ve been there a lot. Some friends of ours live there.”

  “It’s a small world,” he said with a smile. “It’s very nice there. I love Sweden.”

  “Mm,” I said, putting Heidi down. “Now you can walk yourself. We want to go over there. Vanja, can you hold Heidi’s hand?”

  When we were on the island, which was like a park with trees and fountains, he wanted to know if we’d heard about the hotel. We hadn’t. What about the concept then? It was in fact Norwegian, he said, and mentioned the name of the entrepreneur. I shook my head, then, to my surprise, Linda said she had heard of it. I looked at her. Had she really? He wanted to know where she’d heard about it, whether some friends had told her, she said she had seen a TV program. Was she making that up? If so, why?

  He started to talk about the hotel, how elegant and luxurious it was, how the sand on the beach had been transported all the way from the Bahamas, the restaurants and shops were top class, all the rooms were magnificent, even those in the lowest price range, and there were always lots of Norwegians and Swedes here. All the time he was talking, beneath the dark blue morning sky, the sun beating down with such intensity that my shoulders, cheeks, and the bridge of my nose were burning, and the light seemed to neutralize all the nuances of the countryside around us, all this time I was keeping an eye on Vanja and Heidi, who wandered ahead of us and behind us. And the longer he was with us the more unkempt and dirtier I felt. He was silver-tongued and pleasant, had a kind of management air about him, and could well have been if not the hotel manager then perhaps his deputy. It was beginning to pain me that he was spending so much time on us. The idea was of course that we would talk about the hotel to our friends. But it was inconceivable that any of our friends would stay at this hotel, certainly not mine anyway, so we were wasting his time. I didn’t know how to express this to him. At the same time it was as if he trusted us, as if he realized the way we dressed didn’t convey the whole truth about our personal qualities, and I tried to reinforce this by being as friendly and jovial as I could. And, I told myself, I really would mention this hotel to people when we got home. We owed it to him, I thought, as we strolled along side by side. The sun didn’t seem to have any effect on him; apart from a shimmering film of moisture on his forehead and above his top lip, the heat left him untouched.