My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  I felt an ache in my heart. We had failed.

  As a family we had failed.

  Or had we? Why not view the matter with a practical eye? We made a misjudgment, we bought a place we didn’t have the time to keep in order, and when we realized that we put it up for sale. Why should that cause my heart to ache?

  The heart cannot reason. The brain does that. And if there was one thing I had learned in life, it was that the heart is everything, the brain nothing.

  That was why everything in life was always so horribly painful.

  I stopped the mower and walked over to move the bench, the table, and the chairs, which were half under an apple tree. They appeared to be made of wood, but it was some synthetic material and completely weatherproof. Having done that, I restarted the mower, pushed it slowly across the uneven, undulating soft ground, which was so suffocated by moss that the blades mostly whirred over thin air. Only by the hedge, beside the overgrown flagstones, did they engage again.

  The problem with people is that they are too sensitive. Almost everyone I knew or met or saw was too sensitive. Something had happened to them once and they hadn’t got over it. If your father had lost his temper with you when you were a child and perhaps hit you, what does it matter now? If other kids locked you in the uniform closet in the gym, what has that to do with your present life? If you were a terrible bed wetter, a wussy little shit or your mother drank or your father took his own life, or if your parents totally ignored you, you aren’t them, you are your own person and you have your own time, which is now, so why on earth do you let the past have any influence on it? Why should what your parents did weigh so heavily on your life? Why didn’t we leave it at that?

  What good would all these feelings and musings do?

  I saw it in my own children, how small things could grow to enormous proportions in them. At first they were like animals in the sense that their feelings were closely connected with the moment, from which tears or laughter or fear or well-being resulted, and the very next it was forgotten. Then they became human, that was when things lasted and expanded. Recently, for example, Vanja had started worrying that she couldn’t say her r’s. When she was smaller it didn’t matter, she said j instead, so when she had to say “trädet” for instance, she said “tjädet” or “tjolleji” instead of “trolleri,” and even if it brought an occasional stab to the heart, because I hadn’t been able to say my ‘r’s when I was small, and I remembered the hell it had been, mostly I didn’t think about it, it was part of Vanja, and everyone understood what she meant to say. Then she became aware of it. Dad, I can’t say j, she said to me, looking up on our way to the school. Why can’t I say j, Dad? Everyone else can. I answered that everyone had different r’s. Katinka, who spoke the Skåne dialect, had one; Mommy had a Stockholm accent and had another. And you have yours.

  She was reassured by that, but not for long, now the seed was sown, now it was growing. There was such a thing as correct and such a thing as incorrect, something that was as it was meant to be and something that wasn’t. One afternoon when she had been singing a song with all the letters in the alphabet, she paused just before the r, snorted with annoyance and started throwing things around. She went on and on about how she couldn’t pronounce r. I could see it was terrible for her, but there was nothing I could do except say hers was good enough. But then Heidi happened to have the world’s best rolled r, her tongue flapped against her palate and she pronounced all the words with an articulate felicity. Why can Heidi say it and I can’t? Vanja said. She avoided words that started with an r. I remembered I had muttered about moving to England when I was older because they had an r I could pronounce. Not being able to say r had been a huge thing for me, it was as though it labeled me as a person. Now I was seeing it from the outside, and I wished I could communicate to Vanja that I loved her whatever she could or couldn’t do, did or didn’t do, but of course that was an impossible task, she had to resolve this herself. She had been wearing glasses for some years and had accepted it, now she was asking why so few children wore glasses and if she lost her temper they were always the first thing to go. Bang. Onto the floor with them. In school she was suddenly taken ill, she had a sudden need to sleep, the staff called and said she was sick, we knew better, something must have happened, we picked her up anyway, and at home, lying on the sofa with a blanket over her, watching a cartoon on TV, she let it slip, her best friend hadn’t wanted to play with her that morning. Then she got it into her head that she shouldn’t eat sugar, and refused sweets although she really wanted them. All the freedom there was in the first four to five years of life, which I had done my best to restrict, had stopped, now there was a new consciousness, and the complexity of relationships grew. I knew that none of this was important in itself, it was all arbitrary, but she didn’t, for her this was everything. She was entering a system and didn’t know she was.

  She was six now. In three months she would be starting at real school. For the first time in my life with her I could remember what it had been like when I was her age. No longer vague or based on single memories, but clear and distinct, all the intensity of the world, which I had drawn down into my lungs with every breath as I ran around Tybakken, where everything, the smallest object and tiniest incident had a meaning all its own and rushed toward me as if seen through a magnifying glass, and where great emotion was invested in all the people I had around me. It felt as if everything was about life and death, life was stretched to the bursting point, and when I fell in love with a girl in my class, it filled me in a way I can no longer understand, least of all when I look at Vanja. Does she feel the world so intensely? I look at her and see a little girl going about her business within the framework we have set, we live here, in a city-center apartment, we send her to a parents’ co-op nursery school every day. She draws and plays with the countless little animal and human figures she has; sometimes alone, sometimes with Heidi and John. She climbs trees in the park, she casts longing gazes after any dogs that cross her path. She reads her dog book, she has one of her school friends over or she goes over to their house. She swims at the Badeland complex, she has baths at home, she pushes the cart for me when we go shopping. I react to what she says and does, this is “Vanja,” my daughter, whom I have seen almost every day of her life. I know everything looks different to her, inside her other laws apply, her laws, she is a person who sees the world and is filled by strong feelings for it, but hardly ever thinks about it, what it actually means. I am so numbed by all the routines we follow, by the system of coordinates that has been placed on my life, that I unconsciously assume everyone around me feels the same, not least the three small people with whom I share my apartment. Even their almost volcanic emotional outbursts I see in my terms, as irritating disturbances, desperate aberrations, obstacles in the way rather than as signs of distinct life inside them.

  In this kind of life, as in everything else, there is probably a sense and a purpose: a life where you constantly relate to and empathize with those of others must be unbearable, and perhaps it is also harmful in the case of children, who need distance from the adult world in order to be able to see it and develop in relation to it. Be that as it may, this doesn’t stop me thinking that I empathize too little with the lives of other people. Most conspicuously and persistently with regard to Linda. One of the many things she criticizes me for is that I don’t see her. This is not quite true, I do see her, the problem is that I see her more or less in the way you see a room you know well; everything is there, the lamp and the carpet and the bookcase, the sofa and the window and the floor, but somehow transparently, no mark is left on your mind.

  Why do I organize my life like this? What do I want with this neutrality? Obviously it is to eliminate as much resistance as possible, to make the days slip past as easily and unobtrusively as possible. But why? Isn’t that synonymous with wanting to live as little as possible? With telling life to leave me in peace so that I can … yes, well, what? Read? Oh, but come on, wha
t do I read about, if not life? Write? Same thing. I read and write about life. The only thing I don’t want life for is to live it.

  * * *

  I put the lawn mower in the shed, which was empty as I’d had to clean it out when the bathroom was being built and I’d never put everything back. I walked over to the hedge and looked at the two buckets of shit. One had a lid, the other didn’t, it was covered with a plastic bag. I had considered driving them to the dump, but first of all I was afraid the bucket without the lid might topple over or the contents would spill, because it was filled to the brim, and I suspected that even if the rental company were to allow the transport of bits of wood, drywall, and dust in the Mercedes, they might well feel differently about liquid excrement. And secondly the dump was packed with people from all over the district with their trailers, it was also full of people working there, and what section would shit come under? Garden waste? I could imagine myself carrying the buckets and one of the employees coming up to me and asking me what I was throwing away, because that is what they did, it was important that everything was disposed of in the right place. It wouldn’t work. I would have to get rid of it here. The obvious option was to bury it. There was already a big hole where the pipe came in, under the bathroom. If I dug it deeper, I would be able to throw the garden waste in there as well. I had put aside some of the flagstones the plumber had taken up, they would stabilize it, I reasoned, and then I could cover the whole thing with earth.

  I started digging. When I figured the hole was deep enough, I tossed branches, bushes, and rotting leaves in. Then came the shit. I grabbed the bucket with the lid first. It was heavy, so I had to use both hands. I breathed through my mouth. The stench when I removed the lid was still so pervasive that it triggered my gag reflex. The contents of the bucket were thin and liquid and dark brown. Agh, damn it. Oh shit. I poured it out, retched again. Fucking hell. I didn’t have gloves, and my hands and the bottom of my jeans were spattered with shit. I turned on the hose and rinsed the bucket, washed my hands, put the hose by the edge, still breathing through my mouth, I could feel the nausea rising in my chest. I felt as if I were in an inferno, my brain was on fire, everything was bathed in a flickering light, and the whole time I was frightened someone would come and see what I was doing. But the worst was still to come because I would have to hold the bucket without a lid or handle close to my chest. Which I did, splashing even more shit over myself, but then it was done. The buckets were empty and rinsed, the hole glistened. I went to get more of the garden refuse and threw it on top. I shoveled some earth over, but I’d put in too many branches, they were springy and the earth wasn’t heavy enough to keep them down. The stench was unbearable. My head was reeling. I put the flagstones on top, the branches sank under the weight and I covered it all with more earth. The branches were gone and the area was level, none of what lay beneath was visible. But the smell hovered above the ground and was apparent from meters away, and if you stepped onto the filled hole it moved beneath your feet.

  I had to hope the stench would dissipate of its own accord and none of the potential buyers coming to the viewing the following day would stand just there.

  * * *

  I left the Mercedes in the multistory parking garage, put the keys through the door flap of the rental company, and walked home through the side streets. With my trousers stained with shit and my clothes filthy from soil and plaster, I wasn’t going to risk walking along the pedestrian street, where I occasionally bumped into the few people I knew in Malmö. Sometimes I’d also been stopped by strangers, who wanted to say something about my books and the reflections they’d had. Back home, I went straight into the bathroom, tore off my clothes, put them in the washing machine and switched it on, then ran a bath and got in. Slowly the buzz of hysteria that had circled through my head for the past few hours ebbed away. For perhaps half an hour I lay in the bathtub staring up at the ceiling without thinking of anything specific, as the steam stuck like adhesive tape to the window and mirror, and in my imaginary world the bathroom turned into a tank, a room detached from everything else.

  With reddened skin, fingertips crinkled like raisins, I got up, rubbed myself down, wrapped a towel around my waist, and padded into the bedroom, where I rummaged through the heap of clothes until I found a shirt, a pair of jeans, and a pair of matching socks and could finally join the others in the living room, the children on the sofa in front of the TV, Linda lying on the bed by the wall.

  “How was it?” she said.

  “Fine,” I said. “It was a nightmare emptying the buckets of shit. Anyway, at least it’s done now.”

  “Which buckets of shit?”

  “At the cabin,” I said. “Don’t you remember what it was like before we got the toilet?”

  “Did you empty them? Where did you do that?”

  “Where they’re supposed to be emptied,” I said. “Have you eaten?”

  “Yes,” Linda said. “There’s some for you in the kitchen.”

  After eating I began to pack for the trip. It was only one night away, so I didn’t need much. But I took my laptop in case there was any time to write on the plane, and the first volume of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which I absolutely had to read before I went to the cabin to finish the novel. At least I had to skim through it so that I knew what it was about.

  “Will you put the kids to bed?” Linda said when I’d finished and sat down on the sofa. “I’ve been with them all day.”

  “Will you sort out the cabin while I put them to bed? Or what were you thinking?”

  She didn’t answer, just looked at me for a few seconds. Then she turned to face the wall.

  “Of course I will,” I said.

  “Can we have a bath, Dad?” Vanja said.

  “Can you manage it by yourselves?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you can.”

  They jumped up and raced off to the bathroom.

  “Do you have to go?” Linda said. “I don’t know if I can manage with them on my own.”

  “Of course you can,” I said. “It’ll be absolutely fine.”

  “Can’t you cancel it?”

  I shook my head. I had canceled one trip to Luleå already, this was the second attempt, and to cancel it would have been inconceivable, it would have taken a natural disaster. I had also canceled an appearance at the Literature Festival in Lillehammer, the children were going camping with their classmates and Linda couldn’t take them on her own by train and bus, so I had e-mailed the organizers and canceled, the children had been so looking forward to going, it was the high point of this half of the year. But I’d become so well known in the meantime that the cancellation was not received without a murmur as before, no, Mom called to say it was in all the papers and had been an item on the TV news.

  “A deal’s a deal,” I said. “And it’s only one day. I’m back the day after tomorrow. This is my job after all. You have to respect that.”

  * * *

  In Iceland I hardly dared phone home, I was sure she would moan and say how difficult everything was and how badly things were going. And she did, that is she didn’t complain, what she said was that this was no good. This is no good, Karl Ove, she said. This is no good. It has to be, I said. Stick it out.

  I returned home late in the afternoon the next day. The children came running over as soon as they heard the door open. I gave them the presents I’d bought at the airport, three cuddly toys. Linda stood at the end of the hall, looking at me. She seemed scared.

  I unpacked and put the suitcase on the top shelf of the hall closet. Vanja came over with a ribbon in one hand and scissors in the other.

  “Can you make me a necklace?” she said.

  “For me too,” Heidi said, close behind.

  I cut off two long strips, tied one around the neck of Vanja’s dog, the other around Heidi’s neck.

  “With a loop!” Vanja said.

  I made a loop at the end for her hand, and did the same for Heidi. Then I went onto t
he balcony. The children seemed fine at any rate, I thought, things can’t have gone that badly. Experience of an event wasn’t the same as the event.

  Linda opened the door.

  “Can’t you stay inside?” she said. “I’ve been on my own with them for so long.”

  “Coming,” I said. “Just finishing a cigarette.”

  “Will you put them to bed?”

  “Of course.”

  The trip had filled me with energy, so it was no effort brushing their teeth, finding their pajamas, a glass of water, reading a book, and resolving all the little squabbles. Besides, I was looking forward to the following day, when I would be at the cabin writing. It was mostly the thought of being completely alone and working that was appealing; when I did actually sit down and try to start, the resistance I felt was nearly insurmountable.

  When at last they were in their beds and had reconciled themselves to the day being over, I went to Linda, who was on the balcony smoking in the darkness, wrapped up in the green parka I had once given her for her birthday.