My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Nostalgia is an illness, but it belongs to the person through whom time is filtered, unpredictably and individually, with all the flaws and defects inherent in human beings. The era that had passed is located in pockets of consciousness, some hidden and unseen, like ponds in remote forests, some bright and familiar like houses on the forest edge, but all of them fragile and changeable, and they die when consciousness dies. Films were a curse because they belonged to everyone, and they were mechanical and unchangeable, storage space for an era, corpses passed from one generation to the next, and still so new that the consequences were unpredictable. Already there were thousands of films in which all the people who had taken part in them were dead. This was a new way to be dead, with your body, life, and soul captured on camera forever while the body had decomposed long ago and was gone. Films were a graveyard, a necropolis, but still a work in progress, for what would they be like in two hundred years, in five hundred years, in a thousand years? In my grandparents’ time it had been only actors and famous people, by and large, who were immortalized on film, and that was easy to relate to, that their images would live on. But now everyone filmed everyone else, every day thousands of films were posted on the Net, and after we were gone how would it feel to our successors to be able to see us all the time? They would be swimming in dead bodies in quite a different way. This would inevitably change the whole view of death, the perception of what it meant to be dead, and ultimately the view of what it meant to be alive.

  And time? What would happen to time if the past piled up? Would it eventually be so overwhelming that it would drive out the present? We could already see one consequence of this, that trends from earlier eras were returning, that the eighties, which in a different world would only have existed in individual consciousness, bound up with individual life, was recreated in collective forms of expression: fashion and music.

  Despite these feelings, we still let the children watch almost as many films as they wanted. I wasn’t proud of it, and I didn’t like it, but the calm that settled over the apartment was too wonderful to resist. Besides, in my defense, I thought, they learned a lot from what they saw.

  Well, maybe not from The Little Ghost Godfrey.

  * * *

  If the island were a person and the road an artery, we got on the bus on one of the fingers, I mused a few hours later as I gazed inland at the black rocky landscape; the road was narrow and the roads crossing it were also narrow and disappeared between the mountains in this deserted region. And the activities that took place here, in low brick buildings behind wire fences, were of no interest to anyone except for those involved. Then the road widened, there were more cars, we came to large intersections with bridges and roads that wound around and met others, the traffic infrastructure grew, the complexity increased, the intervals between signs became shorter, soon there were buildings and life everywhere, we were approaching the center, the place all and sundry flocked to, the heart of the island. We glided past sidewalks thronged with people, surrounded by cars, in streets that became narrower and narrower until we arrived at a large concrete bus station, where the bus came to a halt and we alighted.

  The transition from the deserted, uneventful countryside to the center of a town is the same everywhere, whether it is from Tromøya to Arendal, Jølster to Bergen, Cromer to Norwich, or Norwich to London. It was like falling, the speed increased the closer you came to the hub, and even though it was an external phenomenon, it was impossible not to experience subjectively, which seemed to cause your insides to vibrate with activity too, that is how open we are to the world, it flows ceaselessly through us and leaves its mark on not only our thoughts and ideas, but also on our moods and emotions. There is no other way I can explain the pleasure that arose in me as we strolled into town and sat down at a sidewalk café, Linda and I with a coffee, the children with an ice cream; it was as though I had come out of myself, as if after a long, hard winter, everything suddenly was wonderful and carefree, I started chatting away, I might even have been laughing in the sunshine, why? Everything was the same. Linda was the same, the children were the same, the sun in the sky was the same one that had been there for the ten days our holiday had lasted. What wasn’t the same were the surroundings. Parks with wizened old men dressed in dark suits sitting on benches in the shade, often smoking, always elegant; small, crooked seventeenth-century brick houses, cobbled streets, big dilapidated churches in open squares, priests and nuns fluttering past, old women in black, either skeletal or voluminous, sitting on a chair outside a door or on doorsteps inside an archway. Avenues of palm trees, buses full of tourists rumbling past, semis, trucks carrying cement mixers, tradesmen in pickups or small vans, boxlike cars from the eighties, sparkling new aerodynamic sedans, mopeds – endless mopeds. Functional sixties and seventies architecture, resplendent eighties architecture, restrained nineties architecture, almost dystopian with its great expanses of dark stone and glass.

  The town wasn’t big, but it was a capital, and it was Spanish, though separated from Spain by a sea and hence different, not in anything major but in the minor detail. You saw signs of the old days everywhere, as though time hadn’t wrought such great changes here, hadn’t flooded the town and changed it radically, as it had done in other Spanish cities, where the past was fenced off, preserved in specimens, but here it had just seeped in all over the place. In addition, the fact that the sea made its presence felt everywhere made me think that Las Palmas was like the old South American colonial towns, where I had never been but whose atmosphere I nonetheless believed I could recognize and which I had longed to see all my life.

  I said as much to Linda. We were ambling across a cobbled square in front of a white church, Vanja ran over to a marble lion and climbed up it while Heidi crouched down in front of the water in a little fountain.

  “There’s something South American about the atmosphere here, don’t you think?” I said. “It’s as if you can imagine this is Buenos Aires. Not that I’ve been there, of course. It’s just the feeling you get. A bit offbeat, slightly run-down, colonies, palm trees, but also modern. Spanish, but not Spain.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “It’s wonderful.”

  “It is.”

  “You’re so happy. That makes me happy too.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should be like this all the time. There’s no reason to be any other way.”

  “We’re not going to move to Buenos Aires then?” she said.

  I laughed.

  “No, seriously. Why not?”

  “There’s nothing I’d like to do more,” I said. “But for someone who fears the slightest change I can think of better alternatives than moving to Argentina with three small children.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that,” she said. “It might be fantastic. It might be just what we need.”

  “I’d do it at the drop of a hat.”

  “That’s agreed then? We move there? At some point in the future, I mean.”

  “If you’re fine with it, there’s no reason not to,” I said.

  We followed one of the narrow, shaded streets, discovered a museum devoted to Columbus’s expeditions to America, and entered, it was like an augury. An atrium with the sun flooding in, flowers along the walls, a little fountain with a murmur of running water in the middle. The museum was located in the surrounding rooms, we walked through them, dark and cool after the bright light outside, full of charts, models, a few artifacts from ships or the days of sailing glory. Heidi was tired, she shrieked at the slightest thing, so after a quick circuit we agreed I would go for a walk with Heidi in the stroller to get her off to sleep while Linda and Vanja stayed there.

  I walked down the shady side of the street, which opened, in narrow shafts, onto sun-filled yards or dark, tableau-like shopwindows where it wasn’t always easy to establish which branch of commerce it was: a wooden torso dressed in servant’s livery, was this attire an antiquity or an item that was sold to hotels? We emerged into a squ
are, went to the right, and crossed a wide boulevard with trees that afforded some shade. Heidi was quiet, but her eyes were open.

  “You need to sleep now, my girl,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, pushing her across another street into a park and out on the other side, where the modern center started. Something about the light above the part of town we had just left reminded me first of Stavanger, then Bergen. Not the light itself, I immediately realized, but the proximity to the sea, the feeling of how close it was.

  What effect did this have on my thoughts?

  The streets, the market squares, the houses, the apartments, the shops, the cafés, all the people occupying them and who occupy your mind as well.

  Then the exoticism all around you.

  How frightening it must have been for Columbus and his men when they docked at the harbor here, the last outpost before the unknown. They didn’t know what lay out there. How terrified they must have been!

  I leaned forward and looked at Heidi, who still had her eyes open. I placed my hand on her chest.

  “You can sleep if you like,” I said. “You’re tired, aren’t you?”

  She didn’t say anything, she didn’t react to my touch, just sat still staring at everything around us. H&M, Sony, Adidas, Zara. Glass gleamed, music blared from the open doorways, and as we passed them I could also feel that particular coldness that air-conditioning has. There were people everywhere. But no one with a stroller. I was the only person pushing one!

  No, I wasn’t. There was one. Black and attractive, with a little infant inside wearing a lace dress. The woman pushing the stroller was young and walking beside another woman, perhaps her sister, they were talking earnestly and intensely about something in the midst of a stream of besuited men and shorts-clad tourists. Then they were gone. I walked the length of the pedestrian street and by the time I reached the café where we had been that morning, next to the park, Heidi was asleep. I parked the stroller by a table, ordered a double espresso, and flipped out a cigarette, retrieved the Gombrowicz book from my backpack, but only managed a few lines, it felt wrong to read where there was so much to look at.

  A suntanned man in his sixties with thinning sandy hair was reading a newspaper at a table close by. It was Verdens Gang. He looked up and met my gaze.

  “Are you Norwegian?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  It was so rare for me to initiate a conversation with a stranger. Apart from when I was drunk, of course. Now I felt so light and carefree that it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “You too?” he said.

  “Yes. Well, I live in Sweden, but I’m Norwegian.”

  “Here on holiday?”

  “Yes. I take it you aren’t?”

  “No, I live here. The climate, you know. Sun and warmth all year round. I was sick of shoveling snow.”

  “I can understand that,” I said.

  He took a long swig of beer and lit a cigarette.

  “And it’s so lovely and cheap here. Buying a packet of cigarettes doesn’t spell financial ruin.”

  “Do you live here in town?”

  “Oh, no, no. I live farther north. I have a place in a little town there.” He wore a lightweight gray jacket, a blue shirt, and a pair of Dressmann-style trousers underneath. He wasn’t exactly scruffy, but nobody would call him well dressed. His shirt was wrinkled and I spotted a couple of dark stains on the breast of his jacket.

  I told him the name of the hotel complex where we were staying and asked if his town lay nearby. He shook his head, took another swig of beer, and wiped his lip with a finger.

  “I live on the other side.”

  “Many other Norwegians there?” I asked.

  “There are a few of us, yes.”

  “So do you go home in the summer?”

  “Many do. Not me though. I’m a resident.”

  There was an air of loneliness about him, perhaps also of unhappiness. The well-meaning friendly glint in his eye vanished as soon as he turned away.

  “Are you happy here?” I said.

  “Yes, I am,” he said. “I don’t have to shovel snow anyway.”

  “No, that’s true,” I said.

  “We do actually get a little sometimes, but it doesn’t settle, you know. It melts right away.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He pulled another cigarette from the packet and raised it to his mouth. The hand holding the lighter trembled slightly.

  I pretended to start reading again to give him some peace. But I was aware of his presence the whole time, whether I was staring toward the park, along the pedestrian street, or down at my book. He was my father’s age, and although he hadn’t reached the same state as my father, something about him was the same.

  They came here to live in peace for their remaining years.

  I looked down at Heidi, placed my hand on her head, just to touch her.

  Once, a couple of years before he died, some friends of Mom’s sister Kjellaug ran into Dad in the Canaries, in a bar, as far as I remembered, they had recognized him while he had no idea who they were. They’d started talking, he said he was a seaman but he’d come ashore now.

  When Mom told me that, she had smiled because, as she put it, there was a lot of truth in what he said.

  In the park a girl came up the dusty path, a boy on a bench sat up straight, he was almost glowing, and sure enough the very next moment they stood in an embrace, then they sat down next to each other, full to the brim with conversation and gestures. I glanced at the man beside me, he was reading the sports pages, then he looked up at the waiter, who placed another beer on his table.

  I leaned back, stared up at the cloudless blue sky, lit a cigarette, inhaled, and blew the smoke out with relish. I always smoked Chesterfield abroad, it was my favorite brand, but they weren’t sold in either Sweden or Norway apart from at Sørensen Tobakk on Torgallmenningen in Bergen, where they had been so expensive I could only afford them when my student loan arrived.

  A beer would have been a pleasure.

  But not with Heidi asleep in the stroller.

  Anyhow, I would have to get back to Linda and Vanja soon.

  Another quarter of an hour.

  I caught the waiter’s eye, he came over, I ordered another double espresso, took my notebook and a pen from my backpack, described the trees in the park, first the shadows they cast over the parched, dusty ground, tried to make out what color the shadows really were, if the green of the sparse grass or the faintly reddish soil rubbed off on them, then I made a note of the dry, cracked, and probably brittle bark on one tree, the smoother, shinier bark on the second, and then the way the trunk seemed to cleave into branches, thinner and thinner until they became the small, trembling twigs at the farthermost ends. The way the sunlight seemed to be poured out over the leaves at the crown, as if from a bucket, and trickled down through the layers of foliage until it dripped down onto the ground below.

  When I moved to Stockholm I went for a walk in Haga Park one morning with Geir, my new friend, it must have been mid-May because it was warm, but I still hadn’t got together with Linda. We had walked from the Copper Tent and down the hill, along the big grassy slope where people lay sunbathing everywhere and into a more wooded area. I had started talking about all the fantastic trees that grew here. How individual they were, each with its very own shape, yet how alike, they shared the same features, both as trees generally and within the various species. How alive they were, just standing here in our midst, although we never thought of them as such, as living beings, or ever talked about them. Most of them were much older than we were, I said, some of these are from the nineteenth century, maybe even the eighteenth. Isn’t that incredible? They are here, like us, but in a very different state. A very different form of life. We wonder whether there is life in outer space, what sort of weird and wonderful forms of life might exist there while we walk around among these fantastic creatures every day!
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  Geir burst into laughter.

  “You know what everyone looks at these days, don’t you?”

  I shook my head.

  “There are women lying all over the place. Many of them are beautiful. And most have only a bikini on. And there’s you, looking at trees! Wake up, my boy!”

  “There’s no contradiction in that, surely?”

  “Yes, there is. One is biology within the human domain. The other is biology outside the human domain. You’re human.”

  “That’s someone talking who can feel the sap rising. The difference is not as great as you imagine.”

  “Oh yes, it is. I don’t know anyone who effuses about trees. No one! And over time I’ve gotten to know a lot of people.”

  “It doesn’t mean I don’t think about women.”

  “Are you offended?” he said with a laugh.

  “A bit maybe,” I said. “I don’t think it’s as unusual as you make out. There’s even a weekly magazine about it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Woman & Tree.”

  “Ha ha ha. I can remember someone who used to run around this park hunting for trees. A friend of mine in sociology. He had to organize a stag night and the idea was they were going to play volleyball here. He ran around with a tape measure looking for two trees exactly the same distance apart as the net posts on a volleyball court. He’s the biggest pedant I’ve ever met, so he wouldn’t accept any approximations. No, the measurement had to be exact. I hardly need to tell you it took him an incredibly long time to write his thesis.”