Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

The next time I met them was here, and all her fluster and unease was completely gone. And Vidar was back into his routines.

Now he was standing with his hands on his hips for a moment contemplating his handiwork. The sound of a train approaching carried from the other side of the ridge, faded, returned a few seconds later on the other side, louder and fuller, as Linda came walking up the slope towards us.

‘Food’s ready!’ she shouted, on catching sight of us.

Early next morning Vidar drove us to the railway station. We arrived just before the train was about to depart, so I had no chance to buy a ticket. Ingrid, who had joined us to look after Vanja for the next three days, had a monthly ticket while Linda had enough left on her strip for the return to Stockholm. I sat down by the window and took out my pile of newspapers, which I still hadn’t managed to read. Ingrid took care of Vanja, Linda sat looking out of the window. The conductor didn’t come until several stations after we had changed trains at Södertälje. Ingrid showed her card, Linda passed him her strip and I dug in my pocket for loose change. When he turned to me, Ingrid said, ‘He got on at Haninge.’

What?

Was she fiddling the fare on my behalf?

What the hell was she doing?

I met the conductor’s eyes.

‘To Stockholm,’ I said. ‘From Haninge. How much is that?’

I couldn’t say that actually I had got on at Gnesta. How would that make Ingrid feel? Nevertheless, I always made it a rule to pay for myself; if I was in a shop for example and was given too much change, I always pointed this out to the assistant. Fare dodging was the last thing I would do.

The conductor passed me the ticket and my change, I thanked him and he merged into the throng of early-morning commuters.

I was furious, but I continued reading and said nothing. After we had arrived at Stockholm Central and I had lifted the buggy onto the platform I offered to take her suitcase to the office so that she wouldn’t have to drag it up to ours first of all, then back down to the office, which is where she usually stayed when she visited us in the afternoon. She was pleased. I said goodbye to them in the concourse, made my exit by the airport trains, walked to the marketplace with the fortress-like trade union building, hurried up Dalagatan, one hand pulling the roller suitcase, the other holding the bag containing my computer, and unlocked the office door five minutes later.

The place had already become full of memories. The period when I wrote A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven flooded towards me from all sides. Oh, how happy I had been then.

I made room for Ingrid’s suitcase in the cupboard under the sink, I didn’t want to have to look at it while I was working, then I went to the toilet for a pee.

And what did I see there? Ingrid’s shampoo and hair conditioner. And what was that at the bottom of the rubbish bag? Ingrid’s Q-tips and dental floss.

What the HELL! I shouted, grabbing the two bottles and throwing them in the kitchen bin. That bloody DOES it, I yelled, snatched at the bag in the wastepaper basket, bent over and took the little clump of hair from the plug hole, it was hers, for Christ’s sake, this was my office, the only place I had that was all mine, where I was completely alone, and even there she came with all her bits and bobs and all her odds and ends, even there I was invaded, I thought, slung her hair as hard as I could into the bag, crumpled it up and stuffed it deep, deep, down in the rubbish bin under the worktop in the kitchen.

Well, screw that.

Then I switched on the computer and sat down at the desk. Waited impatiently for it to boot up. On the wood floor there was the thorn-crowned Jesus Christ. On the wall behind the sofa hung the poster of Balke’s night scene. Over the desk Thomas’s two photos. On the wall behind me the dissected whale and the almost photographically precise drawings of beetles from the same eighteenth-century expedition.

I couldn’t write here. That is, I couldn’t write anything new.

But that wasn’t what I was going to do this week. On Saturday morning I would be giving a lecture about my ‘authorship’ in Bærum of all places, and that was what I would be working on for the next three days. It was a meaningless job, but I had accepted it ages ago. The enquiry had come the same day it became clear that my book had been nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. They wrote that it was a tradition for the Norwegian nominee to go and talk about their book or their authorship, and as my defences had been low at that point, I said yes.

And now here I was.

Ladies and gentlemen. I don’t give a shit about you, I don’t give a shit about the book I’ve written, I don’t give a shit if it wins a prize or not, all I want is to write more. So what am I doing here? I allowed myself to feel flattered, I had a moment of weakness, I have lots of them, but now this is the end of feeling flattered and having moments of weakness. To mark the occasion in a suitably unambiguous way I’ve brought along a few newspapers with me. I’m going to place them on the floor in front of the rostrum and have a shit. I’ve saved it up for a few days so that I can make the point with force. So here we go. Right. Oooh. There we are. Now I’ll just wipe my arse and that’s that. May I now pass over to the second nominee, Stein Mehren? Thank you.

I erased that, went to the kitchenette, filled the kettle, poked a spoon into the jar of freeze-dried coffee, loosened some clumps and sprinkled them into the cup, which I filled with boiling water straight afterwards. Then it was on with my outdoor clothes and out to the bench opposite the hospital across the street, where I smoked three cigarettes in quick succession while observing people and cars passing by. The sky was a dreary grey, the air cold and raw and the snow by the kerb dark with exhaust fumes.

I took out my mobile and tapped to and fro until I had written a verse I could send to Geir.

Geir, Geir, I have to say

That stiffy of yours has had its day

But fret you not

A child you begot

A girl who never says no to a lay

Then I went indoors and sat down in front of the computer again. The aversion I felt, along with the fact that there were three whole days until I had to be finished, made it difficult, if not impossible to motivate myself. What should I say? Blah, blah, blah, Out of the World , blah, blah, blah, A Time for Everything , blah, blah, blah, happy and proud.

The mobile in my jacket pocket went off. I grabbed it and clicked on Geir’s message.

Quite right, died in a car accident this morning. Didn’t know it was already news. You can have my porn mags. I won’t need them any longer. I’m stiffer now than I’ve ever been. Fine epitaph, by the way. But surely you can do better than that?

Certainly can , I wrote back. What about this?

Here lies Geir in his final abode

He was driving his Saab when it left the road

His eyes were extinguished, his heart beat on

Yet nobody knew he’d actually gone

Though his bones were smashed, his ribcage crushed

Talk of his death was always hushed

Till the coffin was lowered and all went black

As his soul took flight, that wonderful hack!

It wasn’t outrageously funny, but at least it helped to pass the time. And gave Geir a cheap laugh in his university office. After I had sent it I went to the supermarket and did some food shopping. Ate, slept for an hour on the sofa. Finished reading the first volume of The Brothers Karamazov , started the second, and when I had finished that it was completely dark outside and the house was filled with its early-evening sounds. I felt as I had in my childhood, when I also used to lie on my bed reading for several hours at a stretch, my head somehow cold, as though rising from a sleep, a cold sleep, in the afterglow of which my surroundings appeared hard and inhospitable. I rinsed my hands in hot water, dried them thoroughly, switched off the computer and put it in my bag, knotted a scarf around my neck, pulled a hat over my head, put on a coat and shoes, locked the door behind me, put on gloves and went into the street. I had just over half an hour before I was due to meet Geir at Pelikanen, so there was plenty of time.