My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  I liked it that a well-known author came over to our table that evening. It gave me a feeling of power. This feeling meant that I could say what I liked or refuse to say anything at all, it didn’t matter, nothing would change as a result. When I met him for the first time I was a student in a writing course that he taught; when I met him for the second time I was a student with hubris, going around and interviewing all of Norway’s famous writers. I had to put in an enormous effort even to be worth his time; when I interviewed him I had prepared for several weeks and done nothing else but. I had devised smart, probing, worthy questions which some years later I realized were totally transparent and laid me bare, and this was not only the case with him but everyone I met: final-year students, professors, writers, editors, and journalists, and as I was so immensely prestige-oriented, the bigger or more prestigious the name, the more I exerted myself. Oh, the time Professor Buvik not only remembered my name but also asked me a question during a lecture. The first time I met Jonny Halberg, Tone Hødnebø. Henning Hagerup. Eldrid Lunden. Thure Erik Lund. Ingvar Ambjørsen. Cecilie Løveid. Olav H. Hauge. Marit Christensen. Øystein Rottem. Kjartan Fløgstad. Ole Robert Sunde. Georg Johannesen. Kjersti Holmen. Erlend Loe. Åsne Seierstad. William Nygaard. Kjetil Rolness. Einar Økland. Frode Grytten. Trond Giske. I’d understood that the only way of managing was to act as if this didn’t mean a thing, as if you were completely uncorrupted, while inside you were thrilled by the meeting and hoped someone would notice. It wasn’t until I was sitting in this pub that I realized there was some movement and a goal, my name was suddenly so emotive that others were behaving toward me as I had previously behaved toward other emotive names. Not that I didn’t understand what they were doing, I knew from my own experience, I knew all about the base, all too human art of fawning. That is why I also understood that it had nothing to do with me, for I had been the same, with my tongue hanging out of my mouth for all those years, making myself appear better than I was by behaving how the uncorrupted behave, which was no more than a more sophisticated form of corruption, I had been the same. All that had changed was the name and the associated image. I had always done readings for a fee of fifteen hundred kroner, but now I was being offered sixty thousand for a forty-five-minute gig. I turned it down, not because I didn’t want the money, but because I wanted to have something that was worth more, namely integrity; not because I was someone with integrity, but because I was someone who was doubly corrupt. Yes, I was so corrupt that I no longer cared what Vagant might think about what I wrote, as, in the values hierarchy, not caring ranked higher than caring, and the hierarchy was all I cared about. That is how it was. I had sold my soul twice, it was nothing worse than that, I was at the top. If you showed you wanted to be at the top and basked in the glory, you weren’t at the top after all because you were only at the top if your integrity was intact and you said no. No to newspapers, no to TV, no to social gatherings and performances. You were only at the top if you said no to the top, but not even that was the absolute top because there were those who really didn’t care, who sat alone and unsung in some valley writing their stubborn, angry, uncompromising prose – if we are talking about authors at the pinnacle – and who would be happiest not even sending their work to a publishing house but burying it in the forest and starting on the next.

  When the evening was over, Linda and I, holding the statuette in one hand, walked to the hotel arm-in-arm. She was hungry, I went down to the 7-Eleven to buy some food for her, and on the way back I burst into laughter, it came from nowhere, and I stopped and turned to the wall. Ha ha ha, I laughed. Ha ha ha. Then I carried on walking, through the rain and darkness, over the shimmering asphalt, to the hotel, which was the Savoy, where I stopped again and lit a cigarette, the last before going to bed. I didn’t know what I had been laughing at, but just the thought of it made me laugh again. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.

  I was still chortling when I entered our room. Linda had gone to sleep. I sat down on the bed and placed my hand on her brow. You wanted something to eat, didn’t you? I said. But she was too far into the darkness of her soul, so I pulled a chair over to the window, sat down, ate her food, and drank a Pepsi Max looking out the window and watching the rain fall and the lamp hanging from a thin wire across the street swing back and forth in the wind.

  * * *

  One weekend at the end of May 2010 I rented a car and drove to the cabin outside Malmö to sort out the chaos there. Linda had put the property up for sale, there had already been one viewing, but no one had been interested, and no wonder, nothing had been done to hide the neglect. The thought of it, how everything had gone to the dogs, had been on my mind for ages. After emerging from the last roundabout and entering the subdivision area, which extended on both sides of the street and consisted of several hundred small cabins with small gardens, almost all impeccably maintained, the thought weighed more heavily on me than before. The fact that I was actually here and would soon be coming to grips with the mess was like a light inside me. Not a flame or a shimmer, more like a clearing you approach in the forest, the expectation of it.

  There was supposed to be another viewing the following day, and if I could tackle the worst of the neglect it was not impossible that someone might make an offer, they might even be drawn to its dilapidated state and the idea of fixing it up.

  The sky was gray and wintry, and the people I saw along the road, some kids on bikes and a woman pushing a stroller and carrying a heavy Co-op bag, were not in contact with it, the way crabs are not in contact with the surface of the sea, it struck me as I drove along at thirty kph. The leaves on the trees had just come out, but without any sun it was difficult to associate them with the life that spring always ushers in.

  I downshifted and turned into the large gravel parking lot. I had pains in my stomach. This was a place you were seen not as the person you were, whatever that might be, but as how you appeared. Here I was a man with long greasy hair and a beard, wearing old black clothes, with wild eyes and restless movements, and when this tramp-like figure arrived with our three children, I saw myself so clearly through the other cabin owners’ eyes, and all my inner confidence and dignity simply vanished. If someone had called social services and told them to come and rescue the children from this terrible father, possibly a drug addict, definitely dubious, I would have been on the defensive, I would have felt there was something in that and would only have defended myself halfheartedly.

  I drove to the barrier in front of the gravel road at the other end of the parking lot, stopped, got out, opened the barrier, swung it to the side, got in and drove forward a few meters, got out and closed the barrier, continued my journey at a snail’s pace between the little wooden cabins. The gravel crunched beneath the tires and the car glided forward like a barge up the narrow canal-like road, past gate after gate until I stopped outside ours. It wasn’t as clean and shiny as the others, but was covered with a layer of greenish algae or fungus. Nor was the fence free of foliage, like the others, as was stipulated in the rules: the hedge on the inside grew between the cracks in the fence and well above the top. I switched off the engine, took out the key, and noticed the sign that had appeared on the fence since I was last here. TILL SALU, for sale, it said in blue on white. I opened the car door, got out, and closed it again. I felt the chill air on my face and hands. The gravel was overgrown with weeds, thereby breaking another of the rules, and when I saw that I felt a pain in my stomach. I wished I could have made myself not care, say to hell with the idiots who sat scrutinizing other people’s gardens, this feeble-minded bunch of wrinkled old folk with sagging skin who were unable to think about anything except what was right and fair and spent their remaining years and days, replete with all the experience a long and unique life had given them, keeping a lawn manicured and foaming with indignation when others did not. I wished I didn’t care about them, but I did. The truth was that I feared them and really wanted to make peace with them.

  I opened the gate and went into
the garden.

  Why hadn’t she cut the grass? Overgrown beds was one thing, they would take weeks to clear, but the lawn? What had she been thinking when she put the plot up for sale. That the first impression wasn’t important? That potential buyers would ignore the neglect and think, actually, this is a nice place?

  I turned. From the window of the doll’s house on the other side of the road an old dear was staring at me. Her husband had been the chairman of the owners’ association. It was his responsibility to make sure that all the cabin owners behaved as they should. So when I caught the bus here to water the grass one Wednesday evening, after a few days of desert heat, he was the one who strolled over to the fence, by chance as it were, always by chance, to ask if I knew what day it was. Yes, indeed I did, it was Wednesday, wasn’t it? Yes, it was. And we have a system here, you know, regarding watering. Odd numbers water on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays while even numbers water on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. What are you? I was obliged to confess that I was an even number and therefore not entitled to do any watering. So it was a case of either catching the bus home or defying him and keeping the hose low behind the house, where no one could see me. Of course that was what I did, sitting on the doorstep and smoking, fearful that he would spot me. Or we all came here one Saturday afternoon and slept over, with the ulterior motive of cutting the grass, which was done all too seldom. And who happened to walk past our fence then but the chairman? You’re cutting your grass, I can hear, he said. Yes, I am. It’s gotten terribly long. Yes, he said. But you’re not allowed to use any machines from four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon until Monday morning, because of the noise. We like to have some peace and quiet. However you can mow the lawn this afternoon and you’ll know for next time. Oh, thank you very much, I said. That’s very kind of you.

  Then there were the pieces of paper they left in the mailbox after their rounds of inspection. A printed form on which they ticked various boxes according to what they had observed.

  I rounded the corner of the house, and out of sight of the neighbors I sat on the doorstep, lit a cigarette, and tried to draw up a plan of action. From the highway to Denmark came a faint drone, in waves, as well as dull thuds and shouts from a football field nearby. I had never seen it, only the floodlights around it, which were switched on every evening and in the autumn and winter stood like a luminous hangar on the dark plain.

  That autumn and winter I had been out here writing, alone in this great expanse of cabins, I collected water in a canister from over by the parking lot, went shopping in a supermarket a few kilometers away, knocked off page after page, three or four days in a row, returned home, stayed there for some days, then came back here. Where I was completely disconnected. No newspapers, no Internet, no TV, no radio, just a cell phone, but no one had the number. And not a soul around. In the evening and at night a hedgehog, which slunk through the garden and occasionally, if I was sitting still, nudged its snout against my shoe. During the day the birds. I sat in front of my computer wearing a hat and gloves, a jacket, a blanket or a duvet over my lap. The air was like smoke around my head in the cold light of my lamp. I wrote about my childhood and my teenage years. I had telephone conversations with Geir, whom I read to and I discussed things with, telephone conversations with Linda, who had her mother over to help with the children and who during the hours they were off at school never quite knew what to do or how to do it. The hours that stretched out before her were more frightening than rewarding, I knew. It had been like that for a long time. She had office space in a collective but was scared to go there, forced herself a couple of times but was absent for weeks at a time.

  It was a nice office, she had a Mac with a voice-recognition program on the desk, pictures of the children beside it, books on the shelves for inspiration. Once she took Heidi with her and Heidi had been proud to go to work with Mommy, she had said hi to the others and sat drawing, and I could see how happy Linda was when she came home, for that day she had been like other parents, she had her child with her at work, she had shown her off to her colleagues and let Heidi see what she did for a living. Nevertheless, she went there less and less.

  In Linda something weighed her down and lifted her up. She had to fight it because when it weighed her down everything was black and without hope, and when it lifted her up, it was bright and hopeful, and that colored everything, her whole existence, which kept changing dramatically in this way, even though it was the same.

  When I met her for the first time she was on her way up, and at that time it didn’t stop, it didn’t turn, just carried on and on, there were no limits, she didn’t sleep anymore, the day was endless, and finally a girlfriend found her in her apartment hunched up on a table, mumbling numbers. Linda has stars inside her, and when they shine, she shines, but when they don’t, the night is pitch black. She spent more than a year in a psychiatric hospital, and when I met her and we got together she hadn’t been out long. We had children almost at once, we both wanted them. I never thought about her having been ill, I wasn’t frightened of it, and that confidence was perhaps what made the thought of children possible for her or at least what made it easier.

  In the maternity clinic she had to put a cross by “psychological illness” on all the forms, and I saw how that conditioned the midwife’s view of Linda and me, although Linda was fine now. Her mood went in cycles, she plummeted and soared, but always within a normal range, I never thought about it, that was the way she was, temperamental, and I didn’t react to her happiness when she was happy or the darkness when she was depressed or full of impetuous fury, I reacted to her, to what she said and did.

  She tried all kinds of methods to stabilize her emotions because this took its toll on her, everything changing, the life we lived, which was so different from the one we had before, with the responsibility for the children and all that entailed, the feeling of not being in control was the absolute worst. She feared chaos more than anything else. She was petrified of anything that smacked of irregularity because with her volatile nature the rest of what we had, our home, had to be as solid and constant as it could be. Everything was a threat to her. My time spent writing was a threat. She knew it was my job, and it gave me meaning, and when she was fine it wasn’t a problem, until her spirits sank and the fear came, then it became a threat as well, and she couldn’t stand up to fear, it was insatiable.

  It was at its height when she was pregnant with Vanja, she was terrified of losing her, she was terrified of the imminent responsibility, and she expelled her fear in great outbursts. I responded to these outbursts, which I considered unreasonable, while being afraid of them, they were so violent, I wasn’t used to such strong inner forces, where I came from everything was controlled and rationalized. Vanja arrived, peace settled over us. Linda went to school, Heidi arrived, we moved to Malmö, John arrived. There was a lot of work, but it wasn’t a problem for me, whatever it was; nor was housework a problem. You just had to get on with it. I took things as they came and wanted Linda to grit her teeth as well and tough it out.

  What did she have?

  She had her radio training, but that was already a long time ago, and she hadn’t done any radio since, getting back into it, calling the station and saying she had an idea became more difficult by the day. She had bought a microphone and an editing program, that was as far as she had got.

  She also had her writing. The oldest texts were from long before we met, the most recent ones she wrote last year. They were sensationally good. She sent them to her old publishing house. They were rejected, short stories were too difficult during tough times for publishers, they said. There wasn’t a market for them, they didn’t have the money. She sent them to three other houses, two of them never read the collection, the third said no. My two novels came out, the third was in the pipeline, and while I was writing the fourth Linda called Sveriges Radio and put forward an idea she had for a documentary. It was a big step and a turning point, the conversation was a commitment, the p
roducer wanted to meet her, they met and she had faith in Linda. This time something would come of it. They agreed on a work plan. Linda was excited, full of energy and ideas, we sat on the balcony after the children were in bed and talked about everything she was going to do. She went to Stockholm to interview the Swedish astronaut Fuglesang, then up to Norrland, where she visited a commercial space station and interviewed the employees.