My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  John was born, and Linda stayed at home with him while I took the girls to school and brought them home every morning and afternoon, I worked at home during the intervening six hours, partly on a translation of the Bible, partly on a novel I was making no headway with, until the following spring, when I started writing about myself. Linda sat on the office chair, in the darkness after the children were in bed, listening to me reading from it, she said it was “heady stuff.” At the end of the summer, which was John’s first, we went to see Yngve in Voss, then my mother in Jølster, and plans for my fortieth had been forged behind my back. It was to be a small party – twenty or so people is not a lot – but for me it was overwhelming. We had set up a long table in the sitting room, and when all the guests had assembled in another room, glass of champagne in hand, and we were about to welcome them, I had thought of saying they were all characters in a novel I was writing and that everything they did and said over the evening would be used against them, but I didn’t have the courage, I said nothing, Linda made the speech, I stood beside her, smiling. Tore spoke, Geir G. and Espen spoke, Linda sang, and Yngve was in despair when he realized that my wish for no speeches was being ignored and that he, as the brother, appeared to be neglecting his duty. I told him it didn’t matter. Later in the evening he got together with Knut Olav, Hans, and Tore and gave a little concert, they played one Kafkatrakterne song, one Lemen song, and one ABBA hit. For the rest of the night we danced and drank, I danced for the first time in what must have been fifteen years, and when we went to bed, at about seven in the morning, I was happy and thinking this had been the beginning of something. On New Year’s Eve, three weeks later, Geir and Christina got married in Malmö, and had their wedding party in our place, that too as low profile as possible: there were six adults and five children around the table. The idea was that they would stay with us for a few days afterward, but they left in the evening of New Year’s Day, Linda’s brother, Mathias, had called, he asked to speak to Linda, I said she was resting, he said it was important, their father had died, could I wake her up?

  * * *

  Today is August 26, 2011. It is 5:59. I am writing this in an unfurnished loft in Glemmingebro, in what we have begun to call the “summer house” as it isn’t insulated. I have just been to the main house to wake Linda up; in two hours Vanja and Heidi go to school. It is a stone’s throw away and there are only thirty pupils in total in the four classes. We never planned to move here, it just happened, like so much else. The plan was that we would have the house as a summer residence, come here every weekend and holiday, but only eight months after we had taken it over we moved in. So now we live here, right out in the country. I get up at four every morning, have a cup of coffee and a smoke before coming over here, into the freezing-cold loft, then I write until eight, when I take Vanja and Heidi to school, and afterward have a thirty-minute nap before resuming my writing for the rest of the day. In the afternoon and evening I’m in the garden, I have been going wild cutting down trees and bushes in the central part, where, it transpired, there were beautiful flagstone paths, completely hidden by soil and undergrowth. I removed the worst, and last week I sowed grass, which has already started coming up. On the first afternoon I cleared away the branches and twigs, tore up bushes and plants, I couldn’t stop; at nine the children were hanging out the window in their pajamas asking me what I was doing running back and forth, dragging whole trees after me, and I didn’t stop until close to midnight, and it has been like that ever since; once I start working I don’t want to stop, and I have to force myself to go to bed to ensure I have enough strength to write the following day. That was what my father did when I was a boy, he was always in the garden working, and I was never able to understand why – what could it possibly give him? – until now. Previously I thought it was boring, a duty, and when for example I helped my mother at home or when we were at the cabin it was a chore, I always preferred to sit and read. Now I understand. From the outside, and invariably I did regard my father and what he did from the outside, gardening is the very symbol of bourgeois stasis, utterly ridiculous and superficial, an artificial way of ordering the world’s chaos by limiting the world to a lawn and a few bushes and subjugating them completely. The garden is also part of your private life others can see and therefore functions as a kind of display window for those around. In other words, a façade.

  Yesterday I sat in the garden reading a text Yngve had written about the Aller Værste! and their album Materialtretthet, in which he also interviewed the surviving band members about that period. One of them, I think it was Harald Øhrn, described himself as a vagabond, a man who had lived the life of a vagabond. That instant the attraction was back: seeing the world open up before you, always traveling, no roots, only that, the world continuing to open. That was what I dreamed of when I was in my teens, but I didn’t know what it was and I never realized the dream. The band they had in 1979 was about that, the freedom to do exactly what they wanted, completely unfettered by anything that had gone before. Chris Erichsen put it best, punk was about out with the old, all history, all the old heroes, all the bygones, and in with the new, what is here, right now, this is what counts, follow it wherever it may lead. This is what it is like being twenty, everything is open, but as that which isn’t open still hasn’t revealed itself, you don’t know about it, what it entails, until it is too late, and then the next generation has the world at their feet while you putter around in a suburban garden with children and a car and perhaps soon even a dog, if our eldest gets her way, which of course she will.

  That is how I felt yesterday as I read Yngve’s text with Heidi swinging under an apple tree and occasionally shouting whatever came into her head at me, for example she asked me if I knew what she was going to be when she was big. No, I said. I’m going to be a pixie, she shouted. She laughed at that for a long time. I said it sounded like a good idea, and read on. Taking life into your own hands: not studying, not working, just jamming with a few pals in a band. Or traveling down through Europe, finding a job, earning some money, always on the move.

  That was the attraction. It was about being open to the world, letting what happened, happen, and not being governed by the fixed structures that education, job, children, and a house constituted, this calcification of life that came with institutions: school for your children, hospital and a care home for your parents perhaps, a job for you.

  So when I was running around the garden like a crazy man, with a petty-bourgeois fire burning in my insides, not dissimilar to my father, although his beard was thick and mine wispy, his upper torso strong and mine weak, it was hard to regard this as anything other than an escape inward. Yet there was something about it that I liked. The smell of soil, all the worms and beetles wriggling and crawling in it, the pleasure of a big branch falling to the ground and the light flooding across the previously overshadowed flagstones, the children wandering over sometimes to see what I was doing or to say something to me.

  I’d had the chance when I was twenty. I hadn’t taken it. Now they had the chance. Now it was their turn. It was their future.

  This is the voice of resignation speaking here, but also of necessity and sudden insight: this is how it must always have been. I never knew. But someone has always known, for someone has always been there. Ulysses deals with this as well, the difference between being the son, which Stephen Dedalus is, and being the father, which Leopold Bloom is. Stephen outdoes Bloom in everything, but not in this. Leopold has nothing of Stephen’s yearnings and aspirations, he doesn’t want anything else, he’s at home. Leopold is a complete person, Stephen Dedalus an incomplete person. Only Stephen can create, for to create is to want everything, to create is to want to come home, and the whole person doesn’t feel that unrest, that urge, those yearnings. Hamlet, like Stephen, is a son and actually no more than that. It is his father’s death that triggers his crisis and his mother’s desertion that keeps it alive. Hamlet has no home. Jesus wasn’t a father either, but a son, and
he had no home. Hamlet, Stephen, Jesus, Kafka, Proust were all sons, not fathers. So there was something about being human that they didn’t know and perhaps didn’t know about either. But what was it? What is it to be a father? Being a father is a commitment, so it is possible to have children without being a father. But what are you committing yourself to? You have to be at your post; you have to be at home. Yearnings and aspirations are irreconcilable with this because what you hunger for is limitless and what home does is set limits. A father without limits is no father, but a man with children. A man without limits is a child, that is, the eternal son. The eternal son takes or gets, he doesn’t give, and he takes or gets because he isn’t whole and he isn’t his own person. It is not some accidental detail that Dad moved into his mother’s house before he died; he died a son. He had abrogated his responsibility as a father, and you can only do that if paternal duty is an external entity, a role you have assumed out of obligation. I believe that is how it was for him. He didn’t want to be there. He became a father at twenty and must have suppressed all his urges to break with propriety, combated all the yearnings and aspirations because that aggression, that anger and frustration he had, which characterized my whole childhood, could only exist in someone who didn’t want to be there, who didn’t want to do what he was doing. If that was so, he had sacrificed his entire young adult life, the years between twenty and forty, doing something he didn’t want to do but was forced to do. I was sixteen, as good as grown up, when he left the family, which suggests he took his responsibilities seriously. But he was no father, he was a son. He wasn’t whole, he had no inner peace, none of the inner gravity adults have. Mom was also twenty when she became a mother, but she was an adult or grew into adulthood with the responsibilities that came. She was also his mother, in the sense that she set his limits, which was what he was unable to do himself, and no sons can. This is a simple explanation, but I believe it to be true. Linda’s father was without limits in a very different way: he had been diagnosed as a manic depressive, which is as good as a complete disclaimer of any responsibility for his own life, since the self cannot control the mania’s frenzied activity and the depression’s inactivity, there is something inside that constantly drives the self up or down, which means it is never present, it either expands into the world or implodes, and of course the disclaimer applies to the lives of his children as well. Both Linda and I were the children of sons, and we had experienced firsthand fathers without limits, Linda from the time she was quite small, me from the age of sixteen, but actually also from the time when I was quite small, as what I witnessed and experienced with respect to Dad was a limitless man setting limits, which in the absence of any inner peace or gravity were defined by the outside, and for someone born in 1944, this was the authoritarian, rule-setting father. The mother of Linda’s father died when he was thirteen and he alone had been responsible for his siblings. He had been in the hospital when she died, he had been lying beside her on the bed. He’d been very attached to his mother and perhaps it was as simple as this: his attachment never weakened because her life ceased before he had cut himself free. It remained strong inside him, I suppose. I don’t know, I met him only three times. Once in our apartment in Regeringsgatan, once in his apartment, and once by chance on the street. He was a warm, open person, perhaps too open for his own good. In my life with Linda he was a distant figure, I imagined she had distanced herself from him long ago because she had no choice. When she was in her midtwenties she too was diagnosed with manic depression, or bipolar disorder, as it is called, and had spent more than a year in the hospital. Her increasingly intense life was suddenly out of control, as though she had fallen over the edge. She fell into the limitless. It was one of the options in her life, one of the paths that were open to her. When we met, the manic phase had passed and was over. At that time her father was living alone in an apartment only a hundred meters from ours, somehow outside the community, because he hadn’t had a job for many years, from when he fell ill, and he had organized his life in the best way he could for himself. He died alone in a new apartment, just after moving in. It was New Year’s Eve. By the time Linda found out, it was New Year’s Day, she sat down on the hall floor with her back against the wall. The children were asleep. She wept. Christina and Geir packed their bags and left to give us some space. In the night I woke to Linda crying beside me, I stroked her back and fell asleep again. I didn’t realize that for the next three weeks she went through exactly the same thing as I had gone through with my father, when he’d died eleven years earlier. She traveled to Stockholm, dealt with the undertakers, dealt with the solicitor, pored over her father’s worldly goods in the apartment with her brother Mathias, and grieved. She mourned the loss of her father, but I, her husband, wasn’t there for her. I was writing. And what was I writing about? I was writing about the death of my father, which at that time, eleven years ago, had consumed me totally, darkened my life, and it still consumed me. When it happened to Linda I saw it from a great distance, and my attempts to console her and be sympathetic were mechanical. When it came to the crunch, I failed her. I told myself my role was to take care of the children and I had to write, not only for my own sake, but for the family’s, we needed the money. I was also angry with Linda and had been for a long time. But sometimes you have to be big enough to rise above the trivial and the mundane, all the pettiness and self-absorption in which we live our lives, or at least I do, because now, when it really counts, when it is a life-or-death situation, the minutiae don’t matter and the person who clings to them is small-minded.

  On the morning before the funeral we caught a plane to Stockholm. John was a year and a half old, Heidi was three and a half, Vanja approaching five. A friend of Linda’s had given us the use of her apartment, which the children reduced to bedlam within seconds. Late in the afternoon Linda’s mother, Ingrid, arrived, then Linda’s brother, Mathias. We shared a bottle of wine and talked for a couple of hours. Mathias, a warm, attentive person, asked me how my writing was going. I said I was busy with an autobiographical novel and he was in it. His eyes widened. Linda said with a smile that she thought I was performing a character assassination on her in the novel. I countered that she had the right of veto, if she wanted something excised all she had to do was say so. Mathias said Linda could use the veto on his behalf as well. I had such a bad conscience about what I had written that I decided there and then to delete everything to do with them. They were so kind! And on the following day they were going to bury their father and Ingrid’s ex-husband. Who was I to write about them in such a vulnerable situation? The whole time we were sitting there the children kept wandering in and out of the other room, where they were watching a film on a laptop. Heidi sat on my lap staring impishly at Mathias for long periods at a time; Vanja stayed with her grandmother and ignored Mathias, while John was devouring him with his eyes and only turned away for a second when Mathias lifted him in the air, then John burst into laughter as Mathias threw him up toward the ceiling.

  Mathias and Linda discussed the final preparations for the following day, we talked briefly about whether we should let Ingrid look after the children for an hour while we adjourned to a nearby café, but we decided to stay, and after mother and son had left, we tucked in the children and went to bed early ourselves. That is I sat up reading as everyone around me slept, Carl-Johan Vallgren’s new novel Kunzelmann & Kunzelmann, a contemporary thriller I’d bought the day before on the basis of a review it had received on Swedish TV: Ingrid Elam had said, “I don’t think much of this,” which was a mark of quality for me. And it was great sitting there reading in the darkened flat, under the light of a single lamp, surrounded by the breathing of tiny people, without a thought for anything except the story, which was narrated so deftly and with such energy.

  The next day I put on my black suit, and got the girls into their best dresses and their winter gear, which fortunately we’d had the presence of mind to bring along, outside, a gale was blowing, a cross betwe
en rain and sleet, into the back of the waiting taxi, buckle the children in, twenty kilometers to Skogskyrkogården Cemetery, with Ingrid and Mathias, and Helena, who had come along to help us with John during the ceremony. We arrived an hour before the proceedings were due to start. Just inside the walls surrounding the chapel there was a little house, where we left our things while Vanja and Helena’s one-year-older daughter, Blanca, ran between the trees playing, with Heidi bringing up the rear, a little hesitantly. Linda and Mathias went into the chapel to see what it was like and to speak to the undertaker.

  While they were inside a vehicle stopped on the other side of the cemetery. One man opened the rear door, another came to help, together they carefully lifted a coffin onto a bier.

  The coffin contained Linda’s father.

  Slowly the two men in black rolled the coffin along a flagstone path between the green fir trees, which swayed to and fro in the wind. The men came to a halt in front of the doors, opened them, and trundled the bier into the chapel. I just glimpsed them gently lifting the coffin onto the catafalque at the opposite end of the little room before the doors closed. I turned my head to look for the girls. They were running between the trees, easy to spot against the dirty gray snow covering the ground. The doors opened again, the two men in black came out, strolled over to the hearse on the other side of the fence, and got in. The rear lights went red as the engine started up. The sky above the green fir trees was a leaden gray.

  The vehicle slowly passed down the road and was gone. It struck me that there was the quality of a monument about the stone chapel, despite its diminutive size. The aesthetics of the twenties, this spirit of Blood and Soil, Nordic forests and heroic deaths lay over the whole of the enormous cemetery grounds.

  Linda and Mathias returned. I looked down, not wishing to intrude on their grief. Linda suggested the children should eat something, a banana or a mandarin. The fruit was in my backpack, which I had left at home.