Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘How’s your mother?’ she asked. ‘Is she OK?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ I said. ‘She’ll soon have finished her dissertation, from what I understand.’

I wiped some soup off my chin with the serviette.

‘But she won’t let me read it,’ I added with a smile.

‘I take my hat off to her,’ Vidar said. ‘There aren’t many sixty-year-olds with enough curiosity left to study at university, that’s for sure.’

‘I think she probably has mixed feelings about that,’ I said. ‘She’s always wanted to, you see, and she does it when her career’s almost over.’

‘Nevertheless,’ Ingrid said. ‘It’s not easy what she’s done. She’s tough, your mother is.’

I smiled again. The distance between Sweden and Norway was much greater than they imagined, and for a moment I saw my mother through Swedish eyes.

‘Yes, perhaps she is,’ I said.

‘Send her our regards,’ Vidar said. ‘And the rest of the family as well, by the way. I liked them so much.’

‘Vidar has been talking about them ever since we were there for the christening,’ Ingrid said.

‘There were some real characters!’ Vidar said. ‘Kjartan, the poet. He was an interesting and unusual man. And what were they called, the people from Ålesund, the child psychologists?’

‘Ingunn and Mård?’

‘Exactly. So nice! And Magne, wasn’t that his name? Your cousin Jon Olav’s dad? The director of development?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said.

‘A man with authority,’ Vidar said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And your father’s brother. The teacher from Trondheim. He was a fine man too. Is he like your father?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘He’s probably the least like him, I would say. He’s always kept his distance, and I think that was a smart move.’

There was a pause. The slurping of soup, Vanja banging her cup on the table, her gurgles of laughter.

‘They still talk about both of you,’ I said, looking at Ingrid. ‘Especially the food you made!’

‘It’s so different in Norway,’ Linda said. ‘It really is. Particularly on 17 May. People were wearing traditional costumes and medals on their chests.’

She laughed.

‘At first I thought it was meant to be ironic, but no, it wasn’t. It was quite genuine. The medals were worn with dignity. No Swedes would do that, that’s for certain.’

‘I’m sure they were proud,’ I said.

‘Yes, precisely. But you wouldn’t catch a Swede admitting that, nowhere, not even to themselves.’

I angled the bowl to spoon up the last remnants of the soup as I looked out of the window, at the rectangular snow-covered meadow beneath the grey sky, the line of black deciduous trees on the edge of the forest behind, broken here and there with luxuriant green spruces. The dark dry twig-strewn forest floor in which they grew.

‘Henrik Ibsen was obsessed with medals,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t a decoration for which he was not willing to grovel. He wrote letters to every conceivable king or regent to get them. And then he wore them at home in his living room. Strutted round with his little chest plastered with them. Heh heh heh. He also had a mirror in his top hat. So he sat in his café surreptitiously staring at himself.’

‘Did Ibsen do that?’ Ingrid asked.

‘He did,’ I said. ‘He was extremely vain. And isn’t that a much more fantastic form of excess than Strindberg’s? With him it was all about alchemy, madness, absinthe and women’s hats, which is just the typical artist myth. But with Ibsen it was bourgeois vanity taken to an extreme. He was a great deal madder than Strindberg.’

‘While we’re on the subject,’ Vidar said, ‘have you heard the latest about Arne’s book? The publishers have withdrawn it.’

‘And they were probably right,’ I said. ‘There were so many errors.’

‘Yes, I suppose there were,’ Vidar said. ‘But the publishers should have helped him with them. After all, he’d been ill. He couldn’t draw a line between his own fantasies, wishful thinking and reality.’

‘So in your opinion he really thought he was writing the truth?’

‘Oh yes, no doubt about it. He’s a good man. But there is something of the pathological liar in him. He eventually begins to believe his own stories.’

‘How is he taking it?’

‘I don’t know. Right now that’s not the first thing you talk about with Arne.’

‘Of course,’ I said with a smile. I drank the last drop of folkøl , ate a roll and leaned back in my chair. I knew there was no question of me being allowed to help with the washing-up or anything like that, so I didn’t even bother to offer my services.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’ Linda suggested, looking at me. ‘Then Vanja might go to sleep.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘She could stay here with me,’ Ingrid said, ‘if you want to be on your own.’

‘No, it’s all right, thanks. We’ll take her with us. Come here, my little troll, we’re off now,’ she said, lifted Vanja and went to wash her mouth and hands while I put on my outdoor clothes and prepared the buggy.

We took the path leading down to the lake. A cold wind blew across the fields. On the other side some crows or magpies were hopping around. Up above them, among the trees, large motionless cows stood staring into the distance. Some of the trees were oaks, and they were old, from the eighteenth century, I would have thought, perhaps even older, what did I know? Behind them ran a railway line, and a roar came every time a train passed and resounded across the countryside whenever a train passed. The path ended by a beautiful small brick house. In it lived an old priest — the father of Lars Ohly, chairman of the left-wing Swedish Vänster party — who was said to have once been a Nazi. Whether that was true or not I had no idea, rumours of that nature sprang up so easily around famous figures. But now and then he hobbled around, hunchbacked and stooped.

Once in Venice I had seen an old man whose head was so bowed it was horizontal. His neck was at ninety degrees to his shoulders. All he could see was the ground in front of his feet. It took him an eternity to shuffle across the piazza. It was in Arsenale, next to a church where a choir was practising, I was sitting in a café smoking, unable to take my eyes off him from the moment I spotted him. It was an evening at the beginning of December. Apart from the two of us and the three waiters standing with their arms crossed by the entrance, there wasn’t a person in the vicinity. Mist hung above the roofs. The cobblestones and all the old stone buildings, which were covered in moisture, glinted in the light from the lamps. He stopped by a door, produced a key, and he tipped his whole body backwards so that he could see where, roughly, the lock was. His fingers groped their way to the keyhole. The deformity meant that none of his body’s movements seemed to belong to him, or rather the unmoving downward-facing head became the focus of attention, which as a result became a kind of centrepiece, a part of the body, though independent of it, where all the decisions were taken and all the movements were decided.

He opened the door and went in. From behind, it looked as if his head was missing. And then, with an unexpectedly violent movement which I would have considered impossible, he slammed the door.

It was eerie, eerie.

A red estate car came up the hill a few hundred metres in front of us. The snow swirled after it in the undertow. We moved to the side as it approached. The rear seats had been taken out and two white dogs ran around barking in the freed space.

‘Did you see them?’ I said. ‘They looked like huskies. But they can’t be, can they?’