My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  The documentary was based on the Hindenburg’s last flight, she had once come across some articles from the time in a Swedish paper, from which it appeared that a Swedish journalist had been on board and telegraphed reports of the journey several times a day. He died when the airship caught fire and burned up on the other side of the Atlantic just before docking at its destination. It was a brilliant story, which would be contrasted with one about space travel.

  She was away for eight days doing research and called me full of enthusiasm from her hotel room. She had ridden on a dogsled, stayed in an ice hotel, wandered around an area full of space junk. She had spoken to a lot of people and arranged to meet them, it almost seemed as though she was also friends with them as some of what she told me could only have been said in confidence.

  Her voice at the other end sounded excited and full of life. I went to the balcony, sat down clad in a hat and coat, and smoked. The children were asleep. I felt a strange unease. It was as though I wasn’t in actual communication with her.

  “I walked around the area. It was enormous, covered with snow, and everywhere there were big chunks of metal. It was a space cemetery. Can you imagine that, Karl Ove?”

  “Sounds exciting,” I said. “Did you interview anyone?”

  “No, I just walked around with the microphone talking about what I could see. But I know it was good. It was so fantastic there.”

  “OK.”

  “And now the stars are so clear. Can you imagine what it’s like up here?”

  “Do you have to get up early tomorrow?” I said.

  “Yes, oh, the man from the ice hotel, sorry, I just have to tell you this before I forget, he said we absolutely have to come up here together. We can have a room for free.”

  “An ice hotel? You’re kidding.”

  “It’s very special up here, you know. In a way, it’s magical.”

  “OK. Linda, I think I’ll have to go to bed now if I’m going to have any chance with the kids tomorrow.”

  “Yes, I understand. Goodnight, my prince. I love you.”

  “Goodnight.”

  * * *

  She came back home still excited by what she’d experienced and what she was going to do. She wrote a manuscript, the idea being that she would dramatize the zeppelin flight based on the journalist’s reports. It was approved, a budget was set up. Linda hired actors, directed, and did the recording. She went to work at seven in the morning, came home at six in the evening. She was a changed person. I had seen her work as hard only once before, that was during the exam period at the drama institute, then she had given her all. But this was different. Now it was as though she was investing everything she had, her whole existence, as if it was now or never, not only for this documentary but for her whole life.

  On the Friday evening after her first week of work we sat drowsily watching TV as the children slept.

  “You’ll take them tomorrow, won’t you?” she said.

  I looked at her.

  “Why? What are you doing?”

  “Working.”

  “Do you have to work on the weekend?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “It’s important. There’s a deadline.”

  Important? Deadline?

  I started to fume inside. I looked at the TV screen for a few seconds. Then I turned back to her.

  “Darling,” I said. “You’ve always refused to let me work on the weekend because it’s important we do something together as a family. I haven’t worked one single weekend in seven years. And now you’re going to work on the weekend?”

  “How mean you are,” she said. “You’re so incredibly mean.”

  “So the family rule doesn’t apply now that you’ve got a job?”

  She got up.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “To bed,” she said. “I have to be up early.”

  I stayed where I was, listening to her footsteps fade into the hall, I wanted to follow her and smooth things over, but I was still fuming inside, it wouldn’t be a good conversation. Besides, I was actually happy that she was full of energy and determination, and in the long run perhaps there was a chance I would be able to work on the weekend.

  Those were my thoughts. Actually it was good, actually it was as it should be.

  She got up early the next morning and cycled to work. On Sunday we all went to Slottsparken, followed our usual route through the town to the first playground, which was really only a merry-go-round and a slide beneath some enormous deciduous trees whose crowns in the summer were like a ceiling, but now the branches were leafless beneath the gray sky, on to the second playground, across the park, which bordered a large residential area, where Linda and I stood beside each other in the wind keeping an eye on our children running around in their red all-weather jackets, Linda seemingly on her way down, inside herself for the first time in many weeks. At home the children watched a film while she rested and I read the Sunday papers. If she hadn’t been obliged to work, with a schedule and a budget for what was a relatively large production, she would have been able to stay at home during the coming week, lie on the sofa, watch mediocre films, and sleep until the darkness and gloom disappeared. Now she couldn’t, she had to work. On Monday morning she rose early and got herself ready while I took care of the children. I was rummaging through the shelves of clothes to find something for John to wear when she closed the bathroom door. Inside, she threw up. It lasted for several minutes. Then she opened the door, came out, went to the hatstand, where the coats were hanging, and put on her black leather jacket.

  “Did you throw up?” I asked.

  She nodded. Her face was white.

  “But I’m going now. See you this afternoon. Don’t know exactly when I’ll be back. Six maybe.”

  She grabbed her bag and left while I continued to dress the children. After taking them to school, I returned, sat down, and worked on Book 4 all day, picked them up, cooked, and was eating with them when Linda arrived. She seemed drained. The next morning it was the same, she vomited in the toilet, then went to work, and the following morning again, and the one after that. I thought she was exaggerating, it was only a job after all, but of course I couldn’t say that. After five years and three births, a life that consisted of nothing but children and childcare, with a few tentative attempts to get something up and running last year, this was her big chance, an opportunity for her to show what she was worth. Had it been anyone else she wanted to show I could have told her to take it easy, it wasn’t that important, but she wanted to show herself that she had ability and there was nothing I could say to that. She was sick in the morning, went to work, came home in the evening, less and less confident. Her mother came down to help us and I was able to devote more time to writing.

  At two o’clock on Friday I heard the front door open and ambled out to see who it was.

  Linda, head bowed, was taking off her jacket without looking at me.

  “Are you home already?” I said.

  “I failed,” she said. “I couldn’t do it.”

  “Sorry?”

  She was crying.

  “I broke down in the control room,” she said. “I realized I’d never be able to do it. It’s just no good. It’s no good, Karl Ove.”

  She went into the bedroom. I followed. It turned out the producer had said she should go home and take a couple of days off. The producer was strict and demanded a lot, she had understood what Linda was capable of, but perhaps not how fragile she was.

  “I couldn’t do it,” she said. “I’m a fiasco.”

  Her mother came in, stopped in the doorway and retreated when she saw that Linda was crying.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “I can’t get the two parts to gel,” she said. “And now there’s almost no time left. It won’t work. It’s impossible.”

  That was bad. A defeat after investing everything she had, it couldn’t have been worse.

  “Can’t you make it simpler? Take a few sho
rtcuts?”

  She didn’t answer. But after the children had gone to bed that evening she asked if I could listen to the little she had. Naturally, I said. In fact it was the last thing I wanted to do. I can handle my own failures, but not those of others.

  She passed me the headset and pressed play.

  It was good. Of course it was good. There wasn’t much, but the little there was, was good.

  On Monday she forced herself to go back, ashen-faced and determined. Her radio program had become a fixation, a much larger entity than itself, and when the producer said it wasn’t working and would have to be completely rejigged, she collapsed again. Like the last time I thought it was really over, that she had failed, her race was run. And like the last time she gave it another shot.

  Eventually the program was finished. I was invited to Sveriges Radio as a kind of test listener, and there we sat in a run-down studio in Malmö, two producers, one technician, Linda, and I.

  I was almost angry when I heard the program. It was brilliant. I had believed Linda when she said it was a disaster, she hadn’t given me any reason to believe anything else.

  Afterwards she broke down. Over the following weeks, much longer than usual, she was in the grip of her darkness. She was quick to tears, watched films, said less than usual when we were alone together. With the children she made an effort to be as she always was with them, but I could see she was relieved when I took them out on my own. She would never do any radio again, she said. But when the darkness lifted, and light began to fill her, and her world became easier and easier, she started toying with the idea of other documentaries, she had a foot in the door.

  * * *

  I completed Book 4 after a week in the cabin, where I wrote night and day while the third book came out. All my old friends, to whom I had sent the manuscript, were keen to read about those days, all had consented to its publication. I received a lovely enthusiastic letter from my oldest friend, Geir Prestbakmo, whom I hadn’t seen for thirty years. He described some scenes he remembered, among others, standing in a boathouse and holding a hose during a thunderstorm as we had heard that lightning didn’t strike rubber. The spirit and tone of the letter were exactly as I remembered him. I spoke to Dag Lothar on the phone; he reminded me about the discussions we’d had about the connection between colors and the taste of hard candy and the summer we biked out past Eydehavn and played tennis. It felt as if I had given them our story, in a way, and not taken it. It was a good feeling. Everyone invited me back to visit them the next time I was in the area. The problems started again with Book 4. Instead of using authentic names and sending the manuscript to individuals, I used made-up names and just forged ahead with publication, I couldn’t face another storm. But still people were angry. I wrote Book 5 in eight weeks, by then I really didn’t give a damn, at the same time I found a tone that reminded me of the literature I used to read when I was the age I was describing, and it struck me this was the novel I had wanted to write when I was twenty, but I hadn’t had it in me. Now I did. Last week Linda flew to Tenerife with our children, Helena, and her children, and I was finishing the book while the Winter Olympics were on TV, I sat on the sofa alone, cheering loudly when Northug, or “the wolf,” as the Swedish commentators called him, won, and then I went into my study and carried on. When it was finished I sent it to the people I had described. Some were angry and said I had ruined their lives, I changed their names, some asked me to delete a couple of episodes as they contained a lot of dangerous things I hadn’t understood at the time, and some said to leave it as it was. Tonje, who was the most important person in the book apart from Yngve, said to leave everything as it was. I asked Linda not to read it because it would be unpleasant to read about a love story with another woman. Similarly, but for a different reason, I had asked my mother not to read Book 3. After reading the second book she had texted me to say that it hurt to be demeaned. After reading Book 4 she called me and was as angry as she could be. I had written something that simply was not true, about what had happened between us when we lived in the house in Sandnes, to do with alcohol, and either I must have completely misunderstood or I’d made it up. I cut it. Dagsrevyen, NRK’s evening news program, came and interviewed me, after it was over I returned home, got into bed, and could hardly move, I was paralyzed with fear, the interview would be on Saturday, all of Norway would see it, and I had barely managed to utter one coherent sentence.

  The interviewer had shown me a magazine cover on which was written KNAUSGAARD FOR DUMMIES, and I realized as the camera focused on my face that something had happened to me in Norway that I hadn’t grasped. I had become big. Some of this I had sensed in Oslo before Christmas when I went into a bookshop to do a signing, it was an event, there were TV cameras, radio microphones, camera flashes, and the shop was full to the rafters, and the line in front of the signing table, where I sat with mics by my mouth, was endless. After the signing I walked up to Litteraturhuset, the biggest room was sold out, and another room, where they had set up video cameras, was also full. Tore interviewed me, we repeated what we had done in Odda, but at that time interest had been burgeoning, here it was hysteria. Afterwards, on my way to the back room, a journalist followed me continually asking me whether I’d had sex with a thirteen-year-old. Then I went out with Tore and his girlfriend, we got drunk, and walking toward the hotel I saw the day’s papers in a 7-Eleven. Dagsavisen had devoted its entire front page to a photo of me signing books. It was totally unreal and dreamlike, impossible to associate with me, so the cabin outside Malmö, where I headed the day after I came home, was as much a refuge as a place to write. Everything was as before, sitting in front of a computer screen. Three days there, home to the family, the Saint Lucia celebration in the school, Christmas with a full house, New Year’s Eve. Out to the cabin, back to the family. No interviews, no papers, no TV, as it had been all autumn, and now I was doing the same all winter. Dagsrevyen was an exception, I had been awarded a radio prize for the first novel, I was due to receive it in Malmö, and for it I had to give an interview, and Dagsrevyen had asked if they could tag along. Thinking I had to do an interview anyway, I’d felt it didn’t matter. When I was there, sitting on a chair with a camera trained on my face, it was as though the fear of everything I knew had happened but hadn’t actually understood was gathered here, in this one place.

  After the interview I lay in bed so frightened that I could hardly move, and I called Linda as soon as I heard her come home.

  “Linda! Linda! Linda!” I shouted.

  She came in, stopped at the doorway, and looked at me.

  “You’ll have to look after the children today,” I said. “For the rest of the evening. I can’t. I have to stay in bed.”

  She nodded.

  “That’s not a problem,” she said.

  I could see she was happy to be able to help me. After she had gone to get the children I sat up, switched on my laptop, which was finally online, and lay all evening watching a series of documentaries about the Second World War. The pictures were unique, many everyday shots of how the world’s solidity and fortitude shone through the ravages of war, which made it real in a very different way. When Linda came to bed, I was asleep.

  * * *

  At Easter we traveled to Stockholm, rented a suite in a hotel, I had earned enough money for that, and the idea was I would make a start on Book 6 while Linda and the children visited her mother and spent time with her in various places such as the Junibacken Children’s Museum, the Skansen Open-Air Museum, and the Children’s Room at the Kulturhus. However, nothing went according to plan, Linda was down and couldn’t manage, she called after a few hours and asked if I could take over, and I did. One day Helena and Fredrik invited us to his beautiful house. We caught the train to Uppsala, where he picked us up. Geir and Christina were also there, and after we had been shown around we sat and talked while the children were outside playing. Linda was on a high, so much so that I could hardly communicate properly with her, she was jus
t floating, everything was fantastic. I knew that in reality she was depressed, and I was angry, I hated it when she was like this, so exaggeratedly happy, enthusiastic, and full of praise for everyone although she didn’t feel it deep down. There was something false about it. I noticed the difference so easily, others didn’t, they just thought she was wonderful. And she really was when she was in this state, the life and soul of every party, just not for me.

  * * *

  When we arrived back in Malmö I continued working on Book 6. So far I was no more than twenty pages in, but it wasn’t going to take long anyway, and the plan was to finish it in six weeks. Geir’s book had been turned down, it was too long and wordy for Spartacus to take the risk, Molven wrote. Now two large and two small publishing houses had said no, and we had to think in new ways. Geir had always said it would be like this, it was his experience of the world, while I kept saying it would be fine, that was my experience. How a book that was of international standing and radically different from other documentary accounts that had come out in Norway would not be published was beyond me. Moby-Dick wasn’t turned down because it was too long and wordy. Or too immoral?

  I called Yngve and asked him if he would like to start up a publishing house, e-mailed Asbjørn with the same question, both were enthusiastic about the idea, and so we founded Pelikanen, primarily to publish Baghdad Indigo but also with the idea of continuing afterward, translating books we liked and publishing them.