Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘I love you,’ she said.

I leaned forward and kissed her.

‘Sleep tight,’ I said, got up and left the room. Found the books I had packed, couldn’t face Dostoevsky, too difficult to get into at this moment, instead took a biography about Rimbaud which I had long thought I should read and reclined with it in my hand on the sofa under the window. What excited my interest was his Africa connection. That, and the times in which he lived. I wasn’t so bothered about his poetry, except for what it could say about his unusual, unique character.

In the kitchen Ingrid was chatting to Vanja while she worked. She was so good with her, managing to turn even the worst chore into an exciting adventure, not least because she put aside her own needs when they were together. Everything was about Vanja and her experiences. But there was no sense of it being a sacrifice, the pleasure she reaped from it seemed to be deeply heartfelt.

I doubted there was a woman more different from my mother than Ingrid. Mum put aside her own needs as well, but the distance to Vanja and what they did together was so much greater, and she obviously didn’t derive the same pleasure from it. Once when I had been to a play area with them her faraway look had caused me to ask if she was bored; she was, she said, and she always had been, also when we were young.

If she wanted, Ingrid could capture any child’s attention, there was something in her nature that facilitated immediate contact. She had a powerful aura; she couldn’t enter a room without making a difference. She took it captive. My mother could sit in a room without anyone knowing she was there. Ingrid had once been an actress on the country’s most important stage, lived a big life, an active life. My mother observed, deliberated, read, wrote, reflected and lived a contemplative life. Ingrid loved to cook; my mother did it because it was necessary.

Vidar walked past the bedroom window, a trifle stooped in his blue overalls, taking careful steps so as not to go flying on the path. A moment later he came into view through the living-room window, on his way to the garage. In the kitchen Vanja was standing and supporting herself on the cupboard while Ingrid lifted a steaming hot pan of potatoes from the stove. I got up and went into the hall, put on my jacket, hat and boots, opened the door and sat down on the chair by the wall to have a smoke. Vidar came out of the garage with a bucket in one hand.

‘Could you give me a hand afterwards, do you reckon?’ he said. ‘In about ten minutes?’

‘Course,’ I said.

He nodded, and continued round the corner of the house. I stared into the distance. The light beneath the sky was losing its lustre. The approaching darkness was unevenly distributed across the landscape, the already dark areas were sucking it in more and more greedily, such as the trees at the edge of the forest, the trunks and branches were completely black now. The weak February light faded without a fight, without resistance, not even a last flicker could it rouse, just a slow, imperceptible decline until everything was darkness and night.

A sudden feeling of happiness gripped me.

It was the light over the field, the chill in the air, the silence in the trees. The darkness that was waiting. It was a February afternoon breathing its atmosphere into me, and it evoked memories of all the other February afternoons I had experienced or rather the resonance of them, for the memories themselves had long faded. It was so immensely rich and replete because all of life was gathered there. It seemed to slice through the years; the special light spread out like ripples in my memory.

The feeling of happiness segued into an equally strong feeling of sorrow. I stubbed out my cigarette in the snow and threw it towards the barrel underneath the downpipe, told myself I had to get rid of the butts before we left and walked up to the back of the house, where Vidar was in the hut above the earth cellar screwing a lid onto a freezer cabinet.

‘We have to carry this over to the cabin,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit slippery, but if we take care it should be all right.’

I nodded. A crow cawed behind us. I turned round, stared at the line of trees on the other side, but couldn’t see where the sound had come from. Today all their movements in the snow were visible. Their tracks followed the paths from the front door of the house and up to all the small outhouses. The rest was white and untouched.

Vidar started on the third screw. His fingers were supple and well coordinated. He did all the small repairs, the smaller the better, by the looks of things. Personally, I lost patience with anything I couldn’t grip with the whole of my hand. Assembling Ikea furniture drove me mad.

As he worked his lips parted. The bared crooked teeth together with his narrow eyes and the triangular-shaped face that emphasised his goatee made him look like a fox.

The bucket he had fetched, which was full of sand, was next to him, pale red against the grey concrete floor.

‘Were you going to sand the paths?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Would you like to do it?’

‘No problem,’ I said.

I lifted the bucket, grabbed a handful of sand and sprinkled it over the footprints as I walked down. Ingrid came out of the house, taking her usual short hurried steps through the snow, dressed in an open green windcheater, heading towards the earth cellar. Even at such an insignificant moment there was an aura of intensity about her. Linda must be up, I thought. Unless Vanja had gone to sleep with her.

There were still a few apples hanging from the two trees below the path. Their skins were wrinkled and covered with black spots, and the colour that was still intact, a muted dark red and green, seemed to have grown into them and was enhanced by the surrounding black leafless branches. If you viewed them with the meadow and forest as a background, where there was no colour, they glowed. If you viewed them with the red huts behind, the colours were matt and hardly visible.

Ingrid came out of the earth cellar with two 1.5-litre bottles of mineral water in her hands and three cans of beer squeezed under her arm, she put down one bottle in the snow so as to slip the hook into the eye of the door lock, the cap and the label so yellow against the white snow, picked it up again and shuffled back to the house. I had reached the shed and sprinkled the remaining sand on the way back. As I put the bucket down on the ground I suddenly remembered who the man I had seen in the café the previous day looked like. Tarjei Vesaas! He had been the spitting image. The same square chin, the same gentle eyes, the same bald patch. But his complexion had been different, conspicuously pink and baby-soft. It was as though Vesaas’s cranium had been recreated, or the same code had been reused in one of nature’s many caprices, but with different skin stretched over.

‘There we are,’ Vidar said, putting the little screwdriver on the lathe behind him. ‘Let’s do it then. I’ll tip it this way and then you lift the other end, OK?’

‘OK,’ I said.

I lifted, and saw that when the weight shifted towards Vidar his body seemed to tense. I would have liked to take the bulk of the weight, because it wasn’t heavy, but that was clearly not possible. We walked down the little hill taking tiny steps, then we turned and walked side by side up the gentle slope to the hut, where we at first put it down in the middle of the floor, then coaxed it into position in the corner.

‘Thank you,’ Vidar said. ‘It’s great to get this done.’

Since he had no one to help him, little jobs of this kind were often waiting for me when we came.

‘My pleasure,’ I said.

He put in the plug and immediately the freezer started humming. There were two other similar-looking cabinets in there, as well as two big chest freezers. All of them full of food. Elk meat and venison, veal and lamb. Pike and perch and salmon. Vegetables and berries. All manner of home-made meals. This was an attitude to food and money completely alien to us. In addition to being as self-sufficient as possible, Ingrid always bought in huge quantities of items that were on offer, turned every krone over twice and made it a point of honour. It was all about exploiting resources. For example, she had an arrangement with a supermarket to take fruit off their hands if they were going to throw it out, to make juice or jam or cakes or whatever occurred to her to do with it. Now and then she would say what she had paid for the meat during the meal we were eating, the point of which was to underline the difference between the value of the meal before and after she had applied her culinary arts. The cheaper, the better. However, she was by no means a greedy person; she showered us with every possible, and impossible, present, regardless of her own financial position. What was at the bottom was something else, perhaps a housewife’s pride and honour, because she had been to a home economics school, and after her acting career was over she had obviously reverted to the life she’d once had.