Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

So the room buzzed and hummed with freezer chests and cabinets, so the earth cellar was full of vegetables, fruit, jars of jam and pickle, so we were served with incredible food every time we came, largely meals that used to be eaten in this country a generation or two ago, but also Italian, French and Asian meals, all of which had one feature in common: they were rustic in some way.

When we were preparing for Vanja’s christening, Ingrid wanted to help with the cooking. The event was to take place in Jølster, at my mother’s, and as Ingrid knew neither the kitchen nor the shops she suggested making the food at home and bringing it with her. To me that sounded like an absolutely absurd idea, transporting food more than a thousand kilometres for a small gathering, but she insisted, said it was easiest, so that was how it was left. As a consequence, Ingrid and Vidar, in addition to the usual luggage, had had three full freezer bags with them when they arrived at Bringelandsåsen Airport outside Førde one day at the end of May the previous year. There were to be two celebrations, first my mother’s sixtieth birthday on the Friday, then Vanja’s christening on the Sunday. Linda and I had arrived a few days earlier, not without some turmoil, because mum had been renovating the living room for the festivities and still hadn’t finished tidying up, so it looked like a building site, which disappointed and enraged Linda. When she saw the state of the place she knew it would take me at least three days to sort it out. I understood her anger, if not the vehemence, but could not accept it. We went for a walk with Vanja in the valley, and Linda was cursing my mother — this was not the situation we had been led to expect; had she known we would never have had the christening here, we would have had it at home in Stockholm.

‘Sissel is mean-spirited, unwelcoming, cold and closed,’ Linda shouted in the green sun-drenched valley. ‘That’s the truth about her. You say I can’t see my mother as she is, you say a gift is never a gift and that she makes me dependent on her, and you may be right, you may be, but you can’t see your bloody mother, either.’

My stomach churned with despair, as always when I had to counter her fury, which I considered completely unreasonable, close on insane in fact, with arguments and objectivity.

We were almost running down the valley road as we pushed the buggy with Vanja asleep inside.

‘It’s our daughter being christened,’ I said. ‘Of course the house has to be done up! Mum works, as you know, unlike your mother, that’s why she hasn’t been able to finish. She can’t spend all her time on us and what we’re doing. She has her own life.’

‘You’re blind,’ Linda said. ‘You always have to work when we come here, she exploits the situation, and we can never be alone when we’re here.’

‘But we’re always alone!’ I said. ‘We have nothing else but time alone. It’s the only sodding thing we do have!’

‘She never gives us any space,’ Linda said.

‘She what?!’ I said. ‘Space? If anyone gives us space it’s her. It’s your mother who doesn’t give us space. Not one bloody centimetre. Do you remember when Vanja was born? You said you didn’t want anyone there for the first few days, you wanted us to be alone with her?’

Linda didn’t answer; she just glared.

‘Mum wanted to come, of course. Yngve too. But then I rang and said they couldn’t come for the first two weeks, any time afterwards though. And what happened? Who comes in the door, at your invitation? Your mother. And what did you say? “It’s only mummy!” Bloody hell! Yes, those were your precise words. The “only” says everything. You don’t see her. You’re so used to her coming and helping you that you don’t notice. She can come, my mother can’t.’

‘But your mother never came to see Vanja. Months went by.’

‘And why do you think that was? I told her not to!’

‘Love, Karl Ove, is stronger than any sense of rejection.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said.

And then we were silent.

‘Yesterday, for example,’ Linda said, ‘she sat with us until we went to bed.’

‘And?’

‘Would mummy have done that?’

‘No, she’d go to bed at eight, she would, if she thought you wanted her to. And she does everything when we’re there, that’s true enough. But it doesn’t damn well mean it’s nature’s order. I’ve helped mum with bits and bobs ever since I left home. Painted the house, cut the grass and cleaned. Is there anything wrong with that now? Being helpful, is there anything wrong with that? Eh? And this time it’s not even her I’m helping but us! It’s our christening. Don’t you understand?’

‘You don’t understand what this is about,’ Linda said. ‘We haven’t come here for you to work and me to take Vanja around on my own. That’s what we’ve left behind. And your mother isn’t as innocent as you make out. She’s given this some thought and counted on it.’

Oh, fucking hell, I thought as we walked along the road in silence after the last word had been spoken. What a total fucking mess this was. How the hell did I end up in this shit?

The sun burned in the clear blue sky above us. The cliffs rose steeply on both sides of the river, which, swollen with melt water, roared down towards Lake Jølstravannet, so glassy-smooth and silent between the mountains. At the top of one an arm of the Jostedal glacier glistened. The air was pure and sharp, the meadows above and beneath us green and full of bell-jingling sheep, the upper reaches of the mountains bluish, dotted with large flecks of white snow. It was so beautiful it hurt. We walked with Vanja asleep in the buggy arguing about whether I should spend a few days fixing up my mother’s house or not.

Linda’s unreasonableness knew no bounds. There was no point at which she thought, no, now I’ve gone too far.

What was going through her head?

Oh, I knew. She was all alone with Vanja during the day, from when I went to my office until I returned, she felt lonely, and she had been looking forward so much to these two weeks. Some quiet days with her little family gathered around her, that was what she had been looking forward to. I, for my part, never looked forward to anything except the moment the office door closed behind me and I was alone and able to write. Especially now that after six years of failure I had finally got somewhere and I felt it wouldn’t stop here, there was more. This was what I longed for, this filled my thoughts, not Linda and Vanja and the christening in Jølster, which I took as it came. If it was good, fine, then it was good. If it wasn’t good, well then it wasn’t good. The difference did not matter much to me. I should have been able to categorise the row in this way, but I couldn’t, my feelings were too strong, they had me under their control.

Friday came, I had sat up all night writing a speech for my mother’s birthday and I was tired as we drove through the vertiginous countryside of fjords, mountains, rivers and farms up to Loen in Nordfjord, where she had rented an old manor-style building belonging to the Nurses’ Association as the venue for the celebrations. The others went up to the Briksdal glacier; Linda and I stayed in our room with Vanja to have a little sleep. The beauty of the scenery around us was stupendous and alarming. All this blue, all this green, all this white, all this depth and all this space. I hadn’t always experienced it in this way; before, I remembered, the scenery was routine, almost inconsequential, something you had to pass through to get from one place to another.

There was the sound of a rushing river. A tractor driving in a field nearby. The drone rising and falling in volume. Now and then voices from the front of the building. Linda lay asleep beside me with Vanja on her chest. For her our row was long forgotten. It was just me who could be gruff and sullen for several weeks, just me who could nourish resentment for several years. Against no one else but her though. Linda was the only person I argued with, she was the only person I held grudges against. If my mother, my brother or my friends said something offensive, I let it go. Nothing of what they said touched me or mattered very much to me, not really. I assumed it was part of my life as an adult that I had succeeded in muting all the overtones and undertones of my character, which at first had been explosive, and I would therefore live the rest of my life in peace and tranquillity, and solve any cohabitation problems with irony, sarcasm and the sulky silence I had honed to perfection after the three lengthy relationships I’d had. But with Linda it was as though I had been cast back to the time when my feelings swung from wild elation to wild fury to the pits of despair and desperation, the time when I lived in a series of all-decisive moments, and the intensity was so great that sometimes life felt almost unlivable, and when nothing could give me any peace of mind except books, with their different places, different times and different people, where I was no one and no one was me.