It sounded hollow, she looked at me, we continued to eat, the children slipped down from their chairs, they hadn’t noticed anything unusual, there hadn’t been any raised voices.
* * *
The next day was a Saturday, the sun was shining and we were all going to the park, we had packed a picnic basket and taken a large blanket, it was the first time Linda had been out with the children since I came home from Iceland. Ingrid and Sissel and the children were waiting for us outside, I didn’t know that, I was walking arm-in-arm with Linda through the corridors in the cellar and emerged at the back of the building, which was closer to the park. I assumed they were already there.
After waiting for a quarter of an hour, Linda’s mother had lost her temper and cursed me, Mom told me later that night, when everyone was in bed. Mom was also angry, it was her son Ingrid had cursed, but I said it didn’t matter, and I understood Ingrid. She had every right to be furious with me. But she also liked me, and that was perhaps harder to understand.
* * *
All this was kept from Linda. When she came all the tensions between us ceased, then we concentrated on her. Of course I said nothing about it when we were alone, even if that was exactly the kind of thing we discussed normally, other people, the relations between them. Linda saw other people – that was a gift she had. Now there was nothing left of it in her. She rarely spoke, the little strength she had she devoted to the children. Nor did I tell her that Book 5 was due to come out soon. I was expecting a storm because I had written about a rape allegation I’d been subjected to once, and bearing in mind all the other trivialities I had written that had ended up as front-page stories I considered it inconceivable that this would not suffer a similar fate. I had also received some furious e-mails from people I’d written about and whom I had accordingly made anonymous. But the woman who said I had raped her, she existed, she lived in Bergen, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if someone had located her and interviewed her, although neither her name nor anything else was mentioned that might identify her.
For this reason, the day I was to be interviewed by Siri Økland I said nothing about it to Linda, who was in bed after going out for a walk with her mother, this time all the way to Pildamm Park, only that I had an interview and it would take an hour, maximum two. She said OK, and then I left for the Art Exhibition Hall, where I had done almost all the interviews for the first four books. Siri Økland was waiting there with a photographer. The interview went well, although I was constantly on the defensive, constantly entrenched, it was obvious that what I had done was wrong. Afterwards there were photos outside, in the street, and then I came home. Ingrid was out picking up the children, Linda was asleep, Mom was in the living room reading. She looked up when I entered.
“So how’s it going here?” I said.
“Well, it’s been good,” she said. “Linda got up while you were out. She joined us in the kitchen. She talked for an hour.”
“Really?”
“Yes. She cried and talked about how she felt.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she couldn’t do anything and she wasn’t doing anything. She said she was utterly useless. She couldn’t handle the children on her own, she didn’t have a job, and it didn’t look like she was going to get one either. She was desperate.”
“But she talked,” I said.
“Yes, she talked.”
* * *
One morning Linda had made her bed and was sitting on the duvet with her back to the wall when I went in, and although the look she sent me was still desperate, she appeared to be different and stronger than the day before. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Perhaps it was that not everything just vanished inside her, not everything just streamed inward, but that something also came out. She’d made her bed, she was sitting on the duvet, and she met my gaze.
“I tried to read a little,” she said.
“Oh yes?” I said.
“Can’t do it.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s good you’re up. Feel like going for a walk?”
She nodded. We ambled through the small park, crossed the road, followed the wooden fence along the old stadium into Pildamm Park, turned, and strolled back.
Instead of lying down and sleeping as soon as we arrived, she asked me to put a radio in the bedroom. I did, found a channel with classical music, closed the door behind me, and went into the study. Not long afterwards the phone rang. It was Yngve. He said Bergens Tidende had a big spread about Book 5. Well, several spreads. Including an article about the rape allegation.
“They close the article by saying BT has her name,” Yngve said.
“What the hell do they mean by that? Is it a threat?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Anyway, the book hasn’t come out yet,” I said. “There’s a release date.”
“Doesn’t look like they’ve taken any notice of that,” Yngve said. “And it’s the same negative slant.”
“I’ll give the publisher a call. See you.”
I called Elisabeth. She said that what had happened was that they had given a copy of the manuscript to Siri Økland, as she would be interviewing me. The condition had been that the manuscript was only to be used for that purpose. They had promised and then proceeded to break their promise. Elisabeth had spoken to Siri, she was very sorry, she said she had nothing to do with it, they’d ordered her to hand over the manuscript. Elisabeth was livid. It wasn’t unusual for a newspaper not to stick to the release date, Verdens Gang never did for example, and as a result they didn’t receive the books to be reviewed in advance. But this time BT had been given the manuscript because they were the only ones to have a prepublication interview, and they had made an agreement and given their promise. Which they broke without a second thought. Why? They probably reckoned they had the right to treat me as they liked because in their eyes I had done something deeply immoral.
“But they haven’t printed the interview yet?” I said.
“No, they will on the launch day.”
“I’ll pull it in that case. What do you think?”
“I think we should. I’ll call them at once.”
I hung up, strode to the balcony and took out a cigarette, then went back to the bedroom, where Linda was lying with her eyes closed. She opened them when I entered.
“How did it go with the radio?”
“I can’t take anything in. Not even music.”
She cried.
I lay down beside her.
“You’re better already, Linda. You’re closer now than you were only a few days ago. It’s a question of letting go. I’m sure of it.”
“I’m so afraid,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “But everything’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
She lay back and pressed her head against the mattress.
Her movements were quicker; there was something new about her now.
I picked up the children from school, walked through Triangeln Mall and out the back, where the playground was only a block away. Vanja and Heidi stopped by the railing alongside the parking lot, which they wanted to climb, I took a deep breath and said yes, John sat with his head back staring up at the sky, where the white vapor trails from two planes formed a cross.
My phone rang. It was Elisabeth.
“I’ve spoken to them several times today,” she said. “The last time the editor in chief called. They’re going to publish the interview anyway.”
“But I want to pull it!”
“That makes no difference. They’re invoking the right to freedom of expression.”
“What! Are they crazy?”
“Dad, Dad, look,” Heidi shouted. She leaned back, held on with only one hand, and theatrically threw the other out to the side. I smiled and gave her a thumbs-up.
“Freedom of expression? They’ve committed a breach of contract. They’ve ignored the release date. And then they want to publish on the basis of fre
edom of expression?”
“Yes, that’s basically it. They’ve got lawyers and the whole box of tricks. They’re going to publish anyway. We can’t do anything.”
“I’m never going to do another interview with that newspaper for the rest of my life. I never want anything to do with them.”
“I absolutely agree,” Elisabeth said. “And I doubt they’ll get any interviews with other Oktober authors for a while either.”
“Anyway, thank you,” I said.
“We’ll talk later. The reviews will be in soon. But you never read them anyway, do you.”
“Geir will brief me, I imagine. All right, bye.”
“OK, bye.”
I hung up and put the phone in my pocket.
“Come on,” I said, and started to walk. Stopped, turned. “Come on now!”
They slowly balanced their way toward me.
What two-faced bastards. Oh, how I hated it. Oh, the righteous indignation. Oh, fucking hell. Freedom of speech my ass.
May they burn in hell.
* * *
At the playground Vanja and Heidi headed straight for the tree they called the “climbing tree.” John wanted to go on the swing, I pushed him, occasionally grabbing him by the feet when he came back, then he laughed, and he laughed even more when I raised him by the feet and swung him back as hard as I could. Now it was out, I thought, now everyone knew. Tomorrow the papers would be full of it. KNAUSGAARD SUSPECTED OF RAPE. I had told the events of those days only to those closest to me. I had been so frightened it would be in the papers. It never had been, but now I had written about it, they could just help themselves. But if I hadn’t, some people would have known that I was going easy on myself, I was holding back on one of the most consequential incidents of my life, and by writing about myself I had given everyone else the right to write what they liked about my life. It would have come out sooner or later.
I lifted John from the swing and put him in the sand. He didn’t want to play on his own, and walked beside me to the bench on the other side of the pit. I lifted him up and sat him on my lap, wrapped my arms around him, and rested my head on his neck.
“My little Johnny boy,” I said.
“Don’t, Daddy,” he said.
“OK,” I said, straightening up. “Can you see the girls?”
He pointed. They were sitting among the leaves.
What were they doing?
Talking perhaps. I could dimly hear Heidi’s characteristic laugh and Vanja’s put-on voice.
A quarter of an hour later we made for home. Linda was in bed when we arrived, but after the children had taken off their shoes and run into the bedroom she got up.
“Mommy, can you read to me?” Vanja said.
She nodded, took a book from the pile on the desk, sat down, and the three children were a jumble of limbs around her.
* * *
The next morning I was sure there would be journalists outside. Bergens Tidende had written about the rape allegation, it was out there, and even though no journalist had, so far, been here to see me – the nearest they had come was to take photos of the apartment and interview people in the vicinity – they had contacted everyone I knew and I assumed it had to be only a question of time before they came here. And now there was a story that would lure them out.
I dressed the children, put John in the stroller, checked on Linda, who was dozing, said we were off, leaned over and kissed her on the brow, rushed back to the children, opened the elevator door, pushed the stroller in, and pressed the cellar button. If there were journalists outside I would meet them with the children, and there was a rear entrance to the building they wouldn’t know about, I thought, pushed the stroller along the corridors, dragged it backward up the steps, opened the door, went out, followed Föreningsgatan, and took the backstreets up to the nursery school.
On the way home I stopped before the market square and scrutinized the area around the entrance. No one resembling a journalist there. I felt a little stupid. I wasn’t so important that they would keep a watch on the apartment building where I lived.
I had become paranoid, I mused, walked over to the fruit stall and bought a couple of kilos of grapes and some apples, took the elevator up, sliced an apple for Linda, put it in a bowl with some grapes, and took them in to her. She sat up.
“How’s it all going?” she said.
Oh, how happy that question made me.
“Fine,” I said. “Eat now and rest a bit, then let’s go out for a walk, shall we?”
“OK.”
“I’ll just give Geir a call first.”
“Angell or Gulliksen?”
“Angell,” I said, taking the phone with me onto the balcony and calling him.
“Do you know what’s in Dagbladet today?” he said.
“No,” I said. “Damned if I want to know either.”
“It says you can get ten years in jail.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, you can say that again. First Aftenposten’s reviewer wants to have you imprisoned and now Dagbladet.”
“Right now I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “Being in prison, I mean.”
“I thought you already were.”
“Ha ha.”
“How’s it going down there actually?”
“In fact, better. Linda’s a bit better. Not much, but the little bit suggests it’s on the turn.”
“Poor Linda,” Geir said.
“Yes,” I said. “She’s been through hell.”
I hung up. When I returned to the bedroom Linda was in the shower. I lay down on the bed. She came in, took some clothes from the cupboard, and dressed. We walked in the park, it was raining, we sat on the stone wall beneath the dripping trees without saying anything, and then we headed for home and had lunch. She filled the dishwasher, turned in, and lay listening to music, I wrote a few lines about Olav Duun. After half an hour I got up and went in to see Linda.
“Would you like some water or anything?” I said.
She turned her head slowly and looked at me.
“No, thank you,” she said.
“What’s the music?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a clatter in the kitchen.
“It’s good you’re listening to music,” I said. “A few days ago you weren’t up to it. You’re making progress. Slowly but…”
I smiled. She looked at me.
“It’s all going to be fine,” I said.
She looked at me.
“I love you,” I said.
She looked at me. Everything I said and did disappeared into that look.
She turned her head back and stared at the ceiling.
“I’ll go and do a bit more writing,” I said. “Back soon.”
* * *
My mother traveled home, Ingrid traveled home, it was summer. Linda got up several times a day, read books, managed to do more with the children, and almost imperceptibly slipped back into a life she shared with us, and even if there was still something dejected and gloomy about her, there was a big difference, she was no longer outside the family, for which she had a few moments at the end of the day, but inside it. I went online and searched for a holiday home in Österlen. We had to get out of the apartment, we wouldn’t manage a long journey though, so Österlen was perfect, it was only an hour away by car.
I found a vacancy and phoned the owner of the house, transferred some money into her account, rented a car for a week, and then we packed it to the gills and drove to the east coast. The town was called Hammar, the house stood beneath a steep hill; on the side away from us, out of sight, lay the sea. We parked the car outside the house, met the owner, who showed us the three small rooms we would be staying in, I unloaded the luggage, and then we climbed up the hill to have a look around. The sun was out and the sky was a cloudless blue. The hill was green, and from the top of it the sea that stretched out below us was glittering and misty. We clambered down the steep, thirty-meter-high, sandy slope. Linda didn’
t want to at first, but I held her hand and led her down. We sat next to each other on the beach, it stretched for kilometers in both directions, while the children paddled in the water, there wasn’t a soul around.
Linda was silent, but she was here, she had walked here. The hill was too steep for the children and Linda to climb back up, so we trudged along the beach until the incline was gentle enough and then along a path up the grassy slope, climbed over a fence, and reached the top again. The countryside beneath us was completely flat, full of fields and farms as far as the eye could see. Seeing this and driving through it made me feel happy. Over the past year we had been here quite often, renting a car over the weekend, at first driving around, then we had started going to viewings. We were looking for a place that we could use on weekends and during school holidays. I loved this countryside, not just what was here with the rolling fields and long low houses, but also farther inland, the forests and lakes. It wasn’t mine, it didn’t exist in me, and perhaps that was the reason for the attraction.
We walked back down and had something to eat, the children were in bed, and Linda and I sat outside as the dusk thickened around us, and crows occupied a tree only a stone’s throw away, they came flying in from all sides, there must have been more than a hundred of them, the whole tree was black, the air was filled with their shrill cries.
* * *
We went to the beach the next day and were there for a couple of hours before we drove to Simrishamn and had lunch. Beside the restaurant there was a real estate agent’s, we went in and were given a brochure of all the houses that were for sale in the district. On the way home we drove to one, it was nice, but it stood alone in the middle of a plain and made a cold, desolate impression. Once home, we had a barbecue and then watched the World Cup before going to bed. This became the pattern for the week. Beach, town, viewing, barbecue, football.
On the third day, on our way to Simrishamn, Linda started laughing in the backseat.
I turned around quickly.
“Long time since I’ve heard that sound,” I said.
On the fourth day, on our way home in the afternoon, we drove to a house in a village a few kilometers inland. As we came onto the road where it was supposed to be, I decided this place wouldn’t work, it was obviously a residential area and we wanted a holiday home, alone and free, nothing that could remotely remind us of our subdivision hell.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 126
