At this time I started sending the manuscript to those I had written about in Book 5. It was about the twelve years I’d spent in Bergen. The central figure was Tonje. I sat for a long time over an e-mail to her before I sent it.
When I sent you the first book to read, you wrote that it was a good portrait and you knew it might change later in the narrative; however, you gave me a free hand. That was then, afterward all that happened has happened – including Book 2, which you didn’t get to read in advance – and now everything looks very different. What you once agreed to has developed into something else. I was thinking about that when I wrote Book 5, that is why I hardly go into who you are (to me) as a person, and almost exclusively describe you through the eyes of the lover. You have no reason to be ashamed of or to fear what I have written about you in the book, the only mistake (and it wasn’t a mistake) you made was to get together with me. What you can fear is of course the newspapers and what they write. The headline “Knausgaard Suspected of Rape” is bound to appear. Naturally it’s terrible for you to be associated with this. On the other hand, the book puts all the blame on me, nothing on you, every reader will understand that. If you like I can change the scene when you return from Kristiansand, remove the infidelity, and instead simply have you say it’s over.
Not long afterward I received an e-mail from Jan Vidar, he was going to Copenhagen with his family, could they drop in? Of course, I wrote back, it would be nice to see you after all these years. I spent all day cleaning up the flat, going shopping, and cooking. They came in the late afternoon, Jan Vidar, Ellen, and their three children. I had only seen the oldest two when they were tiny tots, now they were big girls.
Linda wasn’t well and wasn’t feeling up to meeting anyone she didn’t know, so she went to the bedroom as soon as she had welcomed them. I suspected Jan Vidar interpreted that as a rejection, that really she didn’t want them to be there.
We chatted all evening. He hadn’t changed an iota, he was as calm and relaxed as ever. We worked through everyone we had known in those days. Jan Vidar still lived in town and was in touch with many of them. We also talked about the books I had written, mostly about the hoo-ha around them. Jan Vidar told me he had refused all interviews up to a certain point, then as the attacks on me had increased and accusations of immorality were raining down, he gave up his resistance and defended me. I knew that, my mother had mentioned it, and I said I was pleased he had.
If there was anyone I had needed when I moved into the area as a thirteen-year-old it was him, I thought as we sat in one living room, while all the children were on the sofa watching a movie in the other. Loyal, incorruptible, considerate, independent. He had stayed, I had left. He had learned to play the guitar, I hadn’t. He had three children, I had three children. The differences between us at that time had been minor, for when you are in your early teens age is decisive, the world that seems to be forming before your eyes is the same. Jan Vidar was the first person I got drunk with. He was the first person I went to parties with. He was the first person I experienced girls with. Predominantly talking about them because almost everything revolved around music and girls, but also cycling over to see them, each of us on a sofa, making out with a girl to the sound of “Telegraph Road” by Dire Straits, which was made for the purpose.
Now the small differences that existed had become bigger, but he was still the same person he had always been; the differences were in the layers of experience that time had deposited.
* * *
Jan Vidar said one thing that evening that I turned over in my mind after they had gone. It was about what my father had been for him. Jan Vidar and I were the best of friends, and for the first three years I lived there Dad had been around as well. While Jan Vidar’s father became an important person in my life, always interested and present when I was at their house, Dad was nothing to Jan Vidar, a kind of shadow he knew existed and occasionally saw but with whom he never exchanged a word. He talked about a time I had just got off my bike and Dad came storming out of the house and gave me an earful for something or other. He realized he was strict and suspected I was afraid of him, but actually he knew nothing. We never talked about it. And that was odd to hear. Why did I never talk about Dad in those three years? Normally we talked about everything. Perhaps it was because there was nothing to say. That was how it was. Perhaps because there was no language to express it? I don’t recall thinking about him either. I just think I reacted to him, kept him at bay, dealt with what he said and did out of a sense that everything he stood for and did was unchangeable, a bit like a power I lived under. And probably I was ashamed. That must have been why I never spoke to Jan Vidar about him. We were in our early teens, which is the age when it begins to dawn on you that there are other ways of doing things and other ways of thinking than those in your family.
At any rate I wasn’t ashamed of Dad, but of the way I was. I can’t remember that much about him during those years. His presence in my childhood is clear, then from thirteen until I was sixteen he is vague and indistinct, hardly there at all, he reappears full of vigor and gravitas when I was sixteen and he and Mom divorced.
In those three years he spent most of his time in the living room on the ground floor of the barn while Mom and I were in the house, and when he came in I invariably went up to my room.
No friends. No social life. Only his job, evenings at home. The occasional trip to his parents in Kristiansand over the weekend.
When we moved there he was thirty-eight. He must have felt he was a prisoner in his own life. And he must have been lonely. When I think of him, he is like a kind of shadow.
* * *
The autumn the first volume of this novel came out I received a letter from a man in Bodø who had once known my father. He didn’t write much, he was more interested in writing about his own life and what the novel meant to him. When, a few weeks later, I was signing books in a shop in Oslo another man came up to me and said he had worked with Dad, and Dad had been an outstanding teacher. Then, not long before Jan Vidar and his family visited us, I got another letter from someone who had known Dad as a young man. He wrote that after reading the first four volumes he wondered how much of Dad’s upbringing had affected his relationship with Yngve and me. He wrote that he had lost contact with Dad after gymnas as he’d moved to Bergen, where he has lived ever since, and Dad had moved to Oslo. He wrote that Dad’s life had been full of bluff and lies when he had known him, and what I had written about this side of him was nothing in comparison to what he had seen. He wrote that Dad’s father had been quick-tempered and moody, and ruled his son with an iron rod, often boxing his ears and not letting him go out. He also wrote about one incident when Dad had been beaten up by some kids his age and left lying on the ground, bleeding and with a split lip.
Reading that, I thought he had never had a chance. Something had been broken inside him at a very young age.
This is a dangerous notion because no one apart from ourselves has responsibility for what we do, we are humans, not creatures subject to forces that drive us here and there without offering any resistance. Unless of course being under the sway of others is part of the human condition, and being a good person is the same as being a lucky person.
* * *
My father died in a chair in his mother’s house. The house was full of bottles, there was excrement on the sofa, his nose was broken and his face covered with blood. He was in the chair, dead, had been for more than a day, and during that time his mother was in the house. No one knows what she was doing. No one knows how Dad broke his nose or his face got covered with blood. But I do know for certain now that was what happened and what it looked like. If there should be a lawsuit on the basis of My Struggle, as my uncle Gunnar has suggested many times there will be, I have a document as proof. When I received it I was furious. I don’t think I have ever been so furious. I had written about how Dad died, and then Gunnar said I was lying. What did that make me, lying about my father’s death? Ho
w could he say I was lying about the circumstances surrounding Dad’s death to journalists, to the publisher, and to everyone in my family, when I wasn’t?
I called Kristiansand and asked them to send me a printout of Dad’s medical records. Which they did. From the records it was clear that he had lived with his mother for a year and five months before he died. It wasn’t quite two years, but it was a long, long way from the two months Gunnar had claimed Dad stayed there. How could he say Dad stayed there for only two months and that I was lying? And how could the Bergens Tidende journalist say that?
I had described what I had seen. After Gunnar’s e-mail I had begun to doubt what I had seen. Now I was sure I had seen what I had seen. And that before we arrived Dad had been dead in the chair and Grandma had walked around him, he was dead, he was covered in blood, the place was full of bottles, and it had been like that for a considerable time. Then the ambulance came.
Who called it?
I called Kristiansand again and asked if such conversations were logged. They were, but the person I was speaking to didn’t know how long they were kept, he would check it out, he said, and then contact me, but I never heard from him and assumed there was nothing.
Where did the blood come from? Had he fallen and then struggled up, sat down in the chair and died? That might have killed him, the bleeding from the nose, because he had an enlarged heart, which was the only detail I remembered from the autopsy. The undertaker had said the death was alcohol-related.
How could anyone say everything had been in order?
I was furious. Also because I knew I would never find out how he died. Grandma had given a variety of answers. In one she was sitting beside him and discovered that he was dead, we asked her if it was light or dark outside, she couldn’t remember. In another she had fallen asleep and woken up and seen that he was dead.
But there wasn’t just blood on his face, his nose was also broken, and how had he done that? There wasn’t any blood anywhere in the room, I knew that, I had cleaned there, no matter what Gunnar maintained. Could he have gone outside, got into a fight, crawled home, and then died in the chair from the effort? Or did he fall indoors and hit his nose on the floor or perhaps the fireplace? That was most likely. But the blood? Grandma wouldn’t have been able to clean it up, that’s for certain.
I called Yngve and we talked. He said he could barely remember anything from those days. He couldn’t even remember calling the doctor, which I had said he did. Could it have been me who called? I had no memory of it, I thought he had done it, but I wasn’t sure. I mentioned the blood that wasn’t there. Wasn’t there any blood on the carpet? he said. Was there some? I said. No, I would have remembered that. No, there wasn’t. I’m sure. Because the first time I realized there was some blood was when the undertaker warned us before we saw the body. Didn’t he say something? Yngve asked. Didn’t he just say his nose was broken? No, no, I’ll never forget, it came as a shock, he warned us, there had been a lot of blood.
Yngve said he’d found another document among Dad’s possessions, he had mentioned it earlier, but I’d forgotten. He went to get it from the cellar and called back. It was after a visit to the doctor. Dad had an incredibly high blood-alcohol concentration, and the doctor who had written this doubted everything Dad said, even that he was a gymnas teacher. There wasn’t very much of the teacher about him. But he kept lying, it was typical of him to say he was about to start a job as an educational consultant.
What kind of death had he suffered?
When we were in Kristiansand and encountered the dreadful sight I immediately accepted it, that was how it was, but reading this document now, there was no longer anything to accept, I saw it from a distance, him, Dad, dead in the chair, broken nose, bloody face, surrounded by bottles, Grandma walking around. But he is her son. Her eldest son. Her beloved eldest son. Now he is dead, and he’s been dead for a while, and she was with him, her dead son, she was walking around him. Is she making coffee? She had done that thousands of times. I knew exactly how she did it, I can visualize all her movements, and she, Grandma, who filled my chest with happiness whenever she paid us an unexpected visit and I smelled her perfume down in the hall, is pouring coffee into a cup and lighting a cigarette. Menthol, that was what she smoked, definitely.
Gunnar didn’t want this story to be told. I can understand that. But I can’t understand him saying I lied. Saying I had made it all up to avenge my mother, whom my father had left fifteen years earlier. I was so happy when they got divorced. I was so happy to get rid of him. I hated him, and I feared him, and I loved him.
That was how it was.
Now I had written a novel about him. It wasn’t a good novel, but then he hadn’t lived a good life either. It was his life, it ended in a chair in a house in Kristiansand because he had reached a point where he had given up all hope. There wasn’t any hope. Everything was destroyed. So he died.
We could have traveled down to Kristiansand, forced him to go into a clinic, if it was possible, or somehow have got him out of the house. We didn’t. I don’t regret that. That was how he wanted it, and he was our father. I am his son. The story about him, Kai Åge Knausgaard, is the story about me, Karl Ove Knausgaard. I have told it. I have exaggerated, I have embellished, I have omitted, and there is a lot I haven’t understood. But it isn’t him I have described; it is my image of him. It’s finished now.
* * *
In the days before May 17, Constitution Day, the school was closed for several days, and to give myself some writing time, as I had a deadline hanging over me, I went with Heidi and John to Voss while Linda took Vanja to Oslo to visit Axel and Linn. The idea was that Yngve and his children would look after mine and I would be able to work. After that I would go on a short trip to Iceland and be interviewed at Nordens Hus, and then I would go to our cabin and finish the novel there. Mom and Ingrid would help at home while I was away and then it would all be over.
It didn’t happen like that.
We had been at Yngve’s for only a few hours when Linda rang. I was in the living room with John and Heidi running around me, chased by Ylva, when my phone began vibrating in my jacket pocket.
“Hi, it’s me,” she said.
“Hi,” I said. “Have you arrived?”
“Yes, but guess what. I have some good news.”
“What?”
“My book’s been accepted.”
“Really?”
“Yes! The phone rang just before we left. It was Modernista. The editor there. He said it was fantastic. He hadn’t even finished reading before he called.”
“How wonderful!” I said, gazing at the scenery outside the window, which at first fell away steeply to the water below, then rose up the mountain to the peaks on the opposite side. “Congratulations! That’s exactly what you needed. Now you can really relax. About work, I mean. Now you’re a writer again.”
“Yes. I’m so happy.”
“And when will it come out?”
“Next year. It takes a bit longer in Sweden. But I’ll believe it when I see it. Do you remember when Bonniers withdrew their acceptance of my previous book?”
“That won’t happen again. Relax. It’s fantastic news, Linda.”
John stood below me and looked up. I lowered the phone.
“I’m talking to Mommy,” I said. “Would you like to say hi too?”
He nodded, I passed him the phone, he put it to his ear. I could hear her excited voice, saw him nodding to everything she said. Then he passed me back the phone.
“We’ll have to celebrate when we’re back home,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “We must.”
“Great. I kept telling you how good your writing was.”
“You did, but we’re married.”
“So it doesn’t count?”
“Yes, of course it does. But you should’ve heard how enthusiastic he was.”
* * *
The first of Linda’s short stories I read was called “Universe
,” I had told her to send it to Vagant. This was several years before we got together. It had language and a suggestive power that went straight to your heart, something that was both naked and robust, helpless and supreme, beneath a bitterly cold winter sky. It was about the best thing I had read for many years, and when I noticed how happy she was when I said that I realized she had no idea how gifted she was. During the weeks when we became a couple she wrote a little essay about the Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt, and I thought this was the world she moved in. But it wasn’t, the essay was an exception, she had barely come into contact with literary theory and she was ashamed of that. But that was precisely what was so good, her writing was her, and what she found inside herself possessed a different form of complexity from that which emerged when a writer was striving for it, as happens when you want the text to be something particular. Her problem was that she wrote very little and lacked confidence. Her writing came in bursts, a few hours of light, then it was gone.
* * *
An event from another world: we live in Regeringsgatan in Stockholm, we have one child, she is only a few months old and is asleep between us in bed. I read aloud to Linda from a book Yngve and I were given by my mother’s parents when we were small, Asbjørnsen and Moe’s collected fairy tales. I read “Valemon, the Polar Bear King.” I love fairy tales, the darkness in the best of them, and Linda loves them too. Afterwards we talk about it. Linda is particularly taken by the metal claws the girl is given to climb the rock face. A few days later she starts writing. She invests the whole of her being into this girl who wants and gets the bear. What she writes about belongs to what we cannot discuss, it’s impossible, but it’s still there, somewhere between us. It makes me think about what is actual, what is real, how dependent we are on language and form for it to exist. That which does not have language or form does not exist, even if it is there. And that was the problem for Linda and me, that what was there between us but didn’t exist, grew weaker and weaker, more and more indistinct and nebulous, as the inexpressible dimension between us weakened.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 119
