My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  A knife? What kind of knife? Had I written about a knife?

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “The one Geir gave you,” she said. “No one will understand why it’s in the book if it isn’t used. A pistol mentioned in the first act is fired in the fifth.”

  Geir? I puzzled. What did he and his present have to do with this?

  “What pistol?” Vanja said.

  “We’re talking about a play. Drama,” I explained.

  “Quite a drama,” Linda said.

  When the TV program was over she read to the children. I sat on the balcony, my soul chilled. We would have to clear the air once the children were asleep. I had sensed her restrained anger and despair the whole time. She would give vent to them when the children were asleep.

  I couldn’t stay on the balcony. I didn’t want her to come out thinking I was relaxing and didn’t care. So I got up and returned to the living room, sat down on the sofa, heard her say goodnight to the children, their protests, she mustn’t go yet, they weren’t tired, they couldn’t sleep. A banging noise reverberated through the apartment, it was Vanja lying on her back in bed and hitting her heels against the wall.

  She went into the kitchen. Poured some water, opened a cupboard, I knew she was making tea. Just afterwards came the roar of the kettle. Then she came in with a big cup in one hand and sat down on the sofa, on the other side of the table from me. She looked straight at me. I felt sick.

  “What did you mean about the knife?” I asked.

  “He gave it to you so you could stab me. He wanted to get rid of me. Don’t you understand? He’s a vampire. He hasn’t got a life of his own. He lives through you. Do you think him giving you a knife was chance?”

  “It was his prized possession,” I said.

  She snorted.

  “This isn’t about Geir,” I said. “This is about you and me.”

  “With him looking over your shoulder,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “He’s the only person I can go to outside the family. It’s the same for me as it is for you and Helena.”

  “We don’t speak like you do. I say only nice things about you to Helena. I’ve never said anything else.”

  I didn’t answer. I looked down at the floor. She lifted the cup to her mouth and drank. Looking straight at me.

  There was one thing I had to ask her. Something she hadn’t mentioned.

  “What happens if I publish it?” I said.

  “Do so by all means. It’s a good book. I can see that. If it hadn’t been, all this would’ve been impossible.”

  “Is there anything you want me to take out?”

  “No. I mean, yes. One thing. The part where you write that Bergman patted me on the head and said I was a beautiful child. That’s so incredibly embarrassing you’ll have to take it out.”

  “Nothing else.”

  “There were some mistakes and misunderstandings. But we can look at them later. Otherwise nothing.”

  She put down the cup and looked over at the balcony door. It had got darker outside.

  “Who was she?” she asked.

  “Who?” I said, even though I knew very well whom she meant.

  “On Gotland. What was her name? What did she look like?”

  “Don’t go there,” I said. “No good will come of it. I don’t know what her name was. I was drunk. I was out of control.”

  “And then you did it? While I was here with Vanja and Heidi, and Heidi was ill. I trusted you.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  Again she glanced at the door. Then she jumped up. Her eyes were either furious or frightened or both.

  “I can’t stay here. I can’t be here with you. It’s awful. I’m off to Jenny’s. You take the children tomorrow.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “I can’t believe you did it,” she said, and ran into the hall as fast as she could, threw on her jacket, bent down and put on her shoes. Her hands were trembling as she tied the laces, she couldn’t tie them quickly enough.

  “I’ll call you,” she said.

  And then she was gone.

  * * *

  Jenny was a costume and set designer. She had children in the same nursery school as we did, that was where we had met her, and then she and Linda had become friends. She lived in a house with a big garden outside the center, which she had bought with a girlfriend, and Linda had a permanent offer to write there if she wanted. Sometimes she did. Sometimes, when she needed to get away, she slept over as well. So when, the following morning, the children asked where Mommy was there was nothing strange about my answer, she had left early to go to Jenny’s. We were late leaving for school, it was one of those mornings when everything was difficult, and just as we were finally outside and about to cross the street, Linda came walking toward us on the other side from a gaggle of people waiting for the bus. She looked drained and exhausted. She still hadn’t seen us, and when she did, as the lights changed to green and we stepped off the sidewalk, it seemed to come as a shock. It was as if she were seeing ghosts. The children caught sight of her, Vanja and Heidi let go of the stroller and raced over, John stretched out his arms.

  “I thought you were at school,” she said without looking at me. “I hadn’t expected to run into you here.”

  “Where’ve you been, Mommy?” Vanja said. “Were you at Jenny’s?”

  She nodded.

  “I just had to run home to pick something up.”

  She stood up and looked at me for the first time.

  “Will you be there when I get back?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Can I call you then?”

  “I’ll call later,” she said.

  “OK,” I said. “See you.”

  “See you,” she said, and we set off in different directions, me with the children toward school, her toward the apartment.

  She came back in the evening, after the children had gone to bed. I made us some tea, we sat in the living room. Even though the despair was still present it wasn’t as close to the surface as it had been. My insides were as chilled as they had been at other times in my life when I’d found myself in crises, when it is as though everything around me is burning with white heat and the only other thing left is feelings, which are completely out of control. Being in a crisis is being at the center because when everything is on the line, everything is vital. That is all that exists. This was that sort of crisis. Everything else had fallen by the wayside, there was only this, her and me.

  I didn’t know what to say. We drank our tea in silence. We looked at each other, we looked down.

  “How are you?” I said.

  “Better,” she said.

  “We should talk,” I said.

  “Yes, we must,” she said.

  “We must talk seriously. No pretense.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve had a terrible time,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “I’m sorry you had to read about it in a novel. But the novel’s not the point for me. It’s life. That’s what we should talk about. We can’t be like this. It’s impossible. We can’t.”

  “No,” she said. “I know.”

  “Not just for the children’s sake. But for ours too. We’re as far away from where we were when we got together as it’s possible to be. Do you remember what it was like then? Do you remember how fantastic it was?”

  “Of course I do. I long for it too.”

  “But we’re in a different place now. You say ‘goodbye, romanticism.’ But this isn’t about romanticism. It’s about this life. It’s all we have. And we have to try to make it good. As good as possible.”

  I got up and sat next to her. Put my arms around her. She cried. She cried and cried. I cried too. We went to the balcony and sat down in the darkness, she lit a cigarette, so she had started smoking again, I lit up too. We went into the bedroom. We stayed there the whole night, in the dim light from the hall lamp. I sat w
ith my back to the wall looking ahead in the gloom, she lay beside me. We talked about everything there was to talk about. We were completely honest. It was as though everything we had established between us, all the images, ideas, dreams, desires, and hopes had crashed, and all that was left was the core, which we talked about. Her and me. Who we were to each other. It was like when we lay in bed in the little Stockholm apartment in Bastugatan and talked and listened to music and were completely open, completely naked, completely honest, because there was nothing to hide, not only did we have each other, we wanted each other. I wanted her, she wanted me. We could never return to that, we were somewhere else now, but it was perhaps a better place, it had a deeper feel to it because we had our children, we were a family, it was real, it was us, we didn’t need any dream between us and life. She had to accept me as I was. She had to leave me in peace. She had to trust that I too wanted the best for everyone. And I had to support her because she couldn’t carry on as she was, she had lost herself, slipped into a darkness where she no longer knew what was up and what was down, what was children, what was her, what was me.

  At last I was calm. What had happened, had happened. There were no dangers. I hadn’t felt like this since we first got together. It was like that then. There had been no tensions and we had been utterly free. Everything had been open. Now we had done what we’d planned with such passion. We had started a family, we had children, and it was unbelievable that it had been that which would cleave me to her, and her to me. But that’s what had happened.

  We stayed there talking all night and when morning came she went back to Jenny’s. She had more to ponder alone. At twelve she called and said she’d sent me an e-mail. I walked down to the Internet café because our connection still wasn’t working and read it there, in the dark between all the bright screens and the shouts from the war-game players.

  Darling Karl Ove. I feel this is the only thing I can say. It is as though someone has died. Was it me? Have I died? The person I was.

  You have told me so often to live my own life.

  I know you are right. I’m so frightened.

  You know how frightened I am.

  You say you don’t want to be everything for me. I sense a way to go and I’m afraid. I’m standing at the bottom and know that I have to start living.

  I know nothing about this life.

  I see myself with the children. I see myself cycling in the wind. I see myself abandoning things before I need to. I see the two of us in the evenings. I have to let you out of my sight and do something I want to do. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what is good for me. I know that I have to make something of myself.

  I want to take photos of the children. The mess in the apartment. I want to do something with the children.

  You say we have to accept each other completely. I know this is right. Deep inside me I hear a clear voice. I want to quietly mourn the child I was. I want to be an adult now. What is the endless grief that pours forth when I see you breaking down this door?

  I love you. I will love you till eternity. And I know that it’s hard to bear all this love and all this yearning. I would like to be able to love you in a way that is good for us. I know I must let go. I am letting go, Karl Ove. I love you so much. You and the children are a miracle that has happened to me.

  When she came back that afternoon and we cooked and ate as usual it felt as if we had lived through a year in the past two days. I was utterly exhausted, she was too, but at the same time something trembled inside me, and I knew that feeling, it was happiness. Whenever I felt myself tremble like this I tried to repress it, for if there is one thing I had learned in the forty years I’d been alive it was that it was so much easier to carry despair than hope.

  * * *

  The whole of autumn 2009 and spring 2010 were like this, for if the two days had felt like a year, the year had felt like ten. I had three novels published that fall, and two the following spring. All of them had to be edited and marketed, three of them also had to be written, at the same time I couldn’t let Linda carry the whole burden at home, so the solution was to write fast, I set a quota of ten pages every day, and if, an hour before I was due to pick up the children, I had done six, I had to write four in that hour and then go and get them. It worked fine, I liked the feeling that something new was happening all the time and never knew where what I was writing would end. The pressure to write so much made it possible, and although I didn’t like what I wrote, I liked the situation, everything was open and there wasn’t a gatekeeper in sight. The media pressure, which grew with every day that passed, was more difficult to manage for me, but by completely ignoring it, by instructing everyone I spoke with not to mention a word to me of what was in the newspapers, not so much as a hint, the problem solved itself. If they did despite my instructions, it was utter torture for me, such as the time I saw that my old teacher had commented on the book he was in. I read in Weekendavisen that he had appeared in their quotations column. The media furor had just started when we returned from our brief trip to Prague. The first novel, which had just been reviewed in the literature pages, was now being discussed in other sections, and while reviewers had read it as a novel with material from reality and had not made anything of the fact that the people I wrote about were not only characters in a novel but also existed in reality, the potential consequences of this dimension soon began to dawn on journalists, especially as this perspective had been so dominant in Bergens Tidende’s coverage. They had interviewed my uncle about the book and also censured it in an editorial written by Jan H. Landro. On Tuesday I called Geir Gulliksen, and at the end of the conversation he said he was about to debate my book with Landro in the culture program on NRK radio. I called him afterwards to ask how it had gone. He said it had been fine but a bizarre experience. Landro hadn’t quoted any concrete examples from the book to show what was wrong with it, apart from one, which did have some emotional force because it hurt someone, but ethically and legally it was insignificant. Somewhere in the book he said I had written that as a twenty-year-old I’d had a girlfriend I didn’t really love. How might she be feeling when she reads that, Landro had said, according to what Geir told me. But she’s anonymous, isn’t she, Geir had said. Her name isn’t even mentioned! If a writer can’t write about a woman he went out with twenty years before and can’t say he didn’t really love her, if he does it anonymously, not mentioning any names, what would happen to Norwegian literature then? It would disintegrate, wouldn’t it. That was more or less what Geir told me he had said. But why on earth didn’t Landro say anything about the family? I thought that was the whole point. They’d interviewed your uncle and, based on his reaction, they condemn what you’ve done.

  I think I know why, I said to Geir. Tell me then, Geir said. I received a copy of an e-mail today, I said. Gunnar sent it to Bergens Tidende at two o’clock to thank them for the way they’d covered the case. I’m fairly sure Landro read it before he met you. I can’t see any other explanation. So far they’ve communicated with Gunnar on the phone. Berdahl too. And on the phone Gunnar is sensible and clear. But when he writes he seems to lose all proportion. Landro must’ve suddenly realized who he’s been defending. Actually, he can’t do that because Gunnar will unpack his whole theory about my mother’s family to them.

  Really? Geir said.

  So they chose principles instead, I said. But I’ll pass on the e-mail. He’s only sent copies to my mother, Yngve, and me this time, and to Tønder and Landro, but not the publishing house.

  Send it to me, Karl Ove, Geir said. We’ll talk later.

  * * *

  Linda’s mother, came down to help us that fall, we had so much going on, and Ingrid’s own mother had always gone to help her when her life was busy, she looked after Linda and Mathias, cooked, and kept the house clean. Ingrid took after her mother in this. She got up early and made pancakes for the children, they were so thin, she thought, or baked bread rolls for them, she brushed their hair, helped to
dress them, and when they had gone to school with Linda, she went out to get the items she needed for what she’d be cooking that day. She prided herself on the food she made, and we were spoiled; everything was made from scratch with fresh produce from the big market in Möllevangen and the plethora of immigrant shops along the streets there. She made lunch, and when I picked up the children, dinner was ready and waiting for us. She was invaluable. Yet I had described in great detail the conflict-filled relationship I had with her in Book 2. She had received the manuscript close to the deadline, and had been obliged to read it quickly and give feedback in a couple of days. She thought it was a great novel. She said, Lars Norén, eat your heart out. But she was also annoyed with what I had written about her, I noticed that when she was at our place, the constant ambivalence toward me. One of the first days she came over to me and said, That’s not me you’ve described in the book. You should know that. It’s a character bearing my name in a novel. But you can have it as a present from me.

  I traveled to Stavanger to do a reading at Café Sting with, among others, Tore, who picked me up from the hotel in his Toyota and drove me to his apartment. He’d got divorced and was now on his own. The walls were covered with books and records. Darkness was falling outside. I had a beer in my hand, some group Tore was into and I had never heard of was on the stereo. We tried on clothes. This shirt, Tore, or that one? Take that one. This jacket or that one? Take that one. Him standing in front of an ironing board in the kitchen, me in front of the mirror. And from all this, unless it was just me, arose a strong, distinct sense of going out in the early nineties, student life. It hadn’t been magical then, it was what it was, neither “student days” nor “being young” nor “freedom” but something else. Everyday life. In the midst of it Tore and I read Proust, spellbound by the mythical world he described, and we discussed the very attraction of those things that had not existed during those times. Now our decade, which had meant nothing at all to us, had itself become something, and occasionally – now, for example – exerted an immense appeal.