My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  How could I have done that?

  The truth was that when I sat down to write the novel I had nothing to lose. That was why I wrote it. I wasn’t only frustrated, the way you can become when you live as a parent with small children and have many duties and have to sacrifice yourself, I was unhappy, as unhappy as I have ever been, and I was all alone. My life was pretty dreadful, that was how I experienced it, I was living a dreadful life, and I wasn’t strong enough, I didn’t have the spine to abandon this and start anew. I often thought about leaving, sometimes several times a day, but I couldn’t do it, it was no good, I couldn’t bear the thought of the consequences for Linda and her life, because if there was one thing she was afraid of it was this: that I might leave her or I might die. I was also afraid of her anger. And I was afraid of her mother’s anger. The terrible reproaches I would have to confront, the treachery I had inflicted on Linda and our children, I couldn’t face that. But that was what made me decide to write a novel in which I threw caution totally to the winds and told it as it was. Only when the book was ready to be published did I realize what I had done and went through the manuscript and crossed out the worst. Not about Linda, but about the people around her. And then I added our love story, for that was what had brought me to where I was. How could two people who so clearly had such love for each other, whose hearts burned with love, end up in such darkness, in such misery? It wasn’t the everyday grind that had darkened our existence, far from it. I didn’t mind changing diapers, dressing and undressing the children, taking them to school, walking in the park and playing, cooking, doing the dishes and the laundry. What I couldn’t cope with was doing all this and writing at the same time – and encountering nothing but criticism, always hearing that I didn’t do enough, and whenever I wanted to do something else not being able to because she couldn’t be on her own with the children. She offended my mother, she offended my brother, and she offended my close friends, and she could be so unpleasant that I was torn apart with conflicts of loyalty. But what made the whole thing so crazy was that her mental picture of what was happening was the exact opposite of reality, and that was the picture we lived by. In it she was the hub of the family, the person who drove everything and sacrificed herself. Even when I was in the bathroom scrubbing and cleaning, and she stood watching, she couldn’t refrain from letting drop a critical comment, I was too fussy, at that rate I would never finish, and although she never did any cleaning, apparently she was the one who kept the apartment in order. Even when I had to take the children in two strollers to school, as well as John, because she was tired and wanted to sleep a bit more, and even though only three days before I had broken my collarbone, she was the one who wore herself out doing everything with the children. She often stayed in bed, and could lie there for days on end, she constantly had pains somewhere, either in her throat or her stomach or her head, it was always the same, she was ill, and then she couldn’t do anything, on those days I had to do everything. As for me, I was rarely ill. And if I was, she refused to acknowledge it. Once, when I had a temperature of one hundred and four, she said I took to my bed for no reason, typical man, if she had the tiny ailment I had now, no problem, she would soldier on. I stared at her, mouth agape. What insanity was this? Were we living in Upside-Down Land? Me, who was never ill, whereas she, who had such a low threshold for anything disagreeable, never took to her bed for anything – was so egregious that I was speechless. Furious, I staggered to the nursery school with Vanja, hardly able to stand upright, we lived in Stockholm then, and for the rest of the day I lay delirious in my office. If anything went wrong at home, something as trivial as a lightbulb going, it would never be repaired or changed unless I did it. I could clean the whole apartment one Saturday morning and have the children at the same time, but if she had the children and I cleaned, she complained there was so much on her shoulders and so little on mine. I did all the food shopping, trudged home with all three children, and four or five shopping bags filled to the brim, I had to get everything in one trip to save time so I could write, and it was like that with everything, I didn’t have a minute free because once the apartment and the children had been taken care of I had to write, apart from five minutes on the balcony, sitting alone smoking, for which she also berated me, she never had any breaks like that. It was as though she regarded the time I wrote as my own, leisure, something for me, and after I had finished and went out, I had to continue to do all sorts of things, for now she wanted her downtime. She didn’t write when she could have, so it wasn’t that, she didn’t have a job either, and although she talked about it, she didn’t do anything specific. I had no problem with that, for when she did write she wrote something essential and brilliant, and that was enough for me. The problem was that she had an image of herself as someone who was always working and constantly exhausted as a result, while I was someone who thought only of myself and never did anything. It was crazy, absolutely crazy, because I couldn’t correct this picture if I tried, she just said I didn’t “see” her and all she did, and that was typical of men, women did everything, but invisibly while what men did was visible. It was impossible to fight against this. Of course I saw what she did with the children, but I did exactly the same, plus all the other stuff. She also reproached me for not loving her enough and said I was selfish and prioritized writing above family life. I wrote perhaps for five hours a day while the children were at school, and I didn’t write on weekends, which was strictly forbidden, so in reality I worked minimally at what brought in the cash and maximally at everything else. This situation lasted for many years. I couldn’t stand it, but I had to if I wanted to keep everything in one piece. Occasionally I reached the breaking point. The first time I told her I didn’t want to keep this up and I was going to leave her was the summer we moved to Malmö. We had been living for a few weeks with Linda’s mother and her husband, in the mornings I went into town and worked on the Bible translation, returning in the afternoon while Linda was with her mother and Vanja and Heidi. One evening I didn’t go back, I went out with Geir, that was fine with Linda, we went to the Södra Theater, the outdoor terrace there, and I got so drunk I couldn’t stand up to walk to the train I had said I would catch. When I arrived back at two in the morning she was furious with me and shouted. I became so desperate that I started crying. I yelled that I couldn’t take any more. I can’t take any more, Linda, I said. I simply can’t do this. I’ve had enough. I’m leaving. And I’m leaving now. After I had said that I marched into our room, threw my clothes in a suitcase, shut it, carried it outside, and set off down the forest path as Linda screamed for me not to go, I couldn’t leave her, please don’t go, don’t go. Her tearstained face and her vow that she would change made it impossible for me to continue. I stopped, walked back, put down the suitcase, and stayed. When we were moving, only a few days later, while Linda was at Helena’s, I worked nonstop for thirty-two hours packing everything we owned into cardboard boxes and finished half an hour before the moving van arrived. Then we all went by train to Malmö.

  * * *

  This autumn was the best we’d had since we first got together. It was the new town, the new apartment, the open sky and beautiful late-summer weather that did it, but perhaps it was also because the depths of my despair had revealed themselves to her, because our relationship opened as well, there was more room to maneuver, and once the first six months were over it became clear we were expecting another child, and the good times rolled on until they didn’t, presumably they had been too much for both of us, and we were back where we had been. We argued and shouted, that was her way of solving disagreements, which I had to face, while mine was distance, the most frightening of all for her, and so the spiral wound downward again. I became unloving, dismissive, did what I had to do out of duty, took my frustration out on her, was ironic, sarcastic until she’d had enough and met it with a furious outburst, which was the most frightening response of all for me. It wasn’t always like this, there were good days too, and whenev
er we had guests or visited someone we found each other again, then it was “us two,” and the darkness that shrouded what we actually were, which was no small thing, namely soul twins, lifted. We also had children, whom we obviously both loved above all else, and we were almost of one mind with regard to who they were, what qualities they had and showed; we saw the same, thought the same, and felt the same. But the disharmony between us spilled over them too, of course, because we weren’t above arguing in front of them, and when I was at my angriest with Linda but swallowed my anger and didn’t want to talk, it was the children I took it out on. If Linda had stretched out on the sofa and said I should take them for a walk because they needed some fresh air, they didn’t have to put up much resistance before I was shouting, almost frothing with rage, or shaking them. Once Linda and I had been yelling at each other in the kitchen, the children appeared in the doorway, in descending order of height, we saw them and quieted down. Then Vanja came in and reenacted what had happened, Dad shouted and banged the table, there, Mommy shouted and threw a cup on the floor, there. Linda and I looked at each other, her face was ashen, we both realized what we were doing. The situation could not continue like this, but it did. The only reason I could write about it was that I had reached a point where I no longer had anything to lose. It made no difference if Linda read this, she could do what she liked. If she wanted to leave me, she could. I didn’t give a damn. I woke up unhappy, spent the day unhappy, and went to bed unhappy. If only I could have an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year alone, everything would be fine, I knew that. That is for me, not for her. For Linda it wouldn’t be good, I knew that too. The very thought of leaving filled me with guilt and a bad conscience, in my mind I was living a double life. I was also afraid of facing all the fury and the abyss-opening fear which my departure would create. Linda was frightened, that was the point, she was afraid, whereas I was so conflict-averse that I would rather live in despair than say how things were. And as soon as the tide turned, and we were fine again, I thought, I love her, and perhaps it was difficult just now, but it would pass. When Linda’s father died I was so emotionally blunted to everything that I couldn’t give her any of what she needed. I was giving everything to the novel and the children, I was giving nothing to her.

  Then there was a change, something out there turned against me and went on the attack. It was as though everything inside me was in jeopardy, as though the ground beneath my feet had gone. There was something out there, and to confront it I sought courage in what I had within, my real life, Linda, Vanja, Heidi, and John, and found strength there. I knew what I had. I knew what they meant to me. I saw Linda, who she was, and I saw our children. I saw my family. I didn’t want to lose it. I didn’t want to lose Linda. She was everything I had. And she kept me alive. If I turned away from life, if I wanted to retreat and disappear from the world, she tugged at me, I wasn’t allowed to, I had to be there for her, in the midst of life. I needed her, and I needed the children, they made me a whole person. And she needed me, and the children needed me.

  * * *

  Such was the situation when, some days after we had returned from Prague, this topsy-turvy autumn, I gave Linda the manuscript. When I wrote it I’d had nothing to lose, when she read it now, suddenly I had everything to lose.

  She was going to Stockholm to see a theater performance, up by train one morning, back the next day. The previous night I sat wondering whether to remove the passages that would hurt her most, it would be easy to do and wouldn’t detract from the novel, but at the same time I thought it had to be truthful, if not it was utterly meaningless, all of it. I wanted to show her this because it was true. That the truth was not just in a letter to her, meant for her eyes only, but in a novel, meant for everyone’s eyes, made what I was asking her to do actually inhuman. Fear and guilt accumulated in my chest like water behind a dam. I tried to subdue them by telling Linda there were a lot of terrible parts in the novel and she would be angry, but my intentions were not bad. She just smiled, she could take it, she said, don’t worry. She put the manuscript in her bag, stood up straight by the open front door, we gave each other a kiss, again she told me not to worry and said everything would be fine, then she stepped into the corridor, closed the door behind her, and was gone. I went to the balcony and had a smoke, walked back to my study and worked on Book 3, strolled down to the kiosk and bought some more cigarettes, returned to my study and wrote a little more, but the thought of Linda reading the manuscript was burning inside me, there was no room for anything else, and the most difficult aspect of it all was that she was reading without any explanations, without any corrections, I had to soften the blow and dialed her number. It had been an hour since she left. She answered at once. I could hear from her voice that she was sad. She said she was on the train and had started reading. She thought it was good, terrible to read, but she was coping. I told her I had been frustrated, but I wasn’t now. She said, Goodbye, romanticism. She said, One thing’s for sure – all the illusions about our relationship have gone now. Her voice was unemotional as she spoke, and there was something hard there, as though she had told herself to resist. I’m sorry, Linda, I said. I’m sorry too, she replied. But it won’t get any worse than this, will it? she asked. Yes, I said. It will. I’ll survive that too, she said. OK, I said. But now I’m hanging up, she said. OK, I said. Talk to you later.

  I ate, wrote, sat on the balcony smoking, washed some clothes, wrote a bit more, and then I couldn’t wait any longer, I called her. She had cried, she said, but now the train was close to Stockholm and she was looking forward to meeting Helena and maybe thinking about something else for a few hours. We clicked off, I picked up the children, made them some food, they watched children’s TV, I brushed their teeth, put on their pajamas and read to them, then went to bed not long after they had fallen asleep. I took them to school, wrote, talked to Linda on the phone, she was on the train home, she had just read my description of how we first got together and her voice sounded lighter. I told her the worst was still to come and she should brace herself. She didn’t believe me, I could hear, there was a smile in her voice when she said she would.

  An hour later she called.

  “What happened on Gotland?” she shouted.

  “Only what’s written,” I said.

  “What did you do?”

  “It’s all in the manuscript. I knocked on the door.”

  “Who was she? Why did you do it?”

  “I was drunk.”

  “When was it? I remember when it was. I was at home with the children. Heidi was sick. How could you do that? How could you? Who was she?”

  “That doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You know why.”

  “How can you write that in a novel and let me read about it?”

  “I don’t know. It just happened like that.”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  She hung up. A few minutes later she called again.

  “Who was she? I want to know who she was.”

  “I don’t know what her name is, Linda. Nothing happened.”

  “You were banging on her door all night.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. But that’s how it was.”

  “Heidi was sick. I was all alone.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She hung up. I went onto the balcony, smoked, trudged back inside, paced back and forth in the apartment, phone in hand the whole time. Surfed the Net, went back out and smoked, stood in front of the living-room window and gazed across at the hotel, went back into the study and surfed, out again and smoked, shuffled from room to room, finally stopped in the children’s bedroom, the innocence there would do me good, I thought, but it didn’t, everything just got worse and I went back out on the balcony. I didn’t have a thought in my head, not one.

  She called again just as I was going to pick up the children. She was calmer. She had read the manuscript now, she said. What
shall we do? she said. She began to cry as she said that. What shall we do now, Karl Ove? And suddenly I snapped. I sobbed. I said, I don’t know. I cried. I said, I don’t know, Linda. I don’t know.

  * * *

  An hour later I was in the kitchen frying fish cakes when I heard the sound of the elevator outside, it seemed to come all the way up and I called to the children to go and see if it was Mommy. They didn’t need to be asked twice, they had missed her, as they always did when she was away, and now they were in the hall waiting for the door to open. They pressed against her, she knelt down and hugged them in turn, stroking their backs as she sent me an all-penetrating look. She was red-eyed and pale, but still full of warmth when she turned to the children. They didn’t notice the glare she had sent me.

  Look what you’ve done, it said.

  Look what we’ve got and you’re destroying, it said.

  The children clung to her as she took off her shoes and jacket and put the little suitcase by the wall. I set the table, we ate, we said nothing to each other, conversation plied back and forth between us and the children. They were excited and happy to have her back. Afterwards we sat in the living room to watch children’s TV with them. After a while she looked at me and said, in English:

  “The knife.”

  I didn’t understand what she meant. She occasionally spoke English to me when she didn’t want the children to understand, which I was unable to do and didn’t like. That wasn’t what I was thinking about at this moment, of course, only about her pasty face and red eyes, which in some way had something to do with a knife.

  “In the novel,” she said. “The knife.”

  “What are you talking about, Mommy?” Vanja asked.

  “I’m just chatting with Daddy,” she said. “About something he wrote.”