Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

The snow on the pavement was yellowish-brown with a fine-grained consistency like semolina, which meant it slipped when you stepped on it. I walked up Rådmannsgatan towards the Metro station, where it crossed Sveavägen. It was half past six. The streets around me were as good as deserted, permeated with that elusive darkness that is only found in the gleam of electric light and which here was reflected from every window, every street lamp, across snow and tarmac, stairs and railings, parked cars and bicycles, façades, window ledges, street signs and lamp posts. I could equally well have been someone else, I thought as I walked, there was nothing in me now that felt precious enough for it not to be taken for something else. I passed Drottninggatan, which at its lower end was teeming with dark beetle-like people, descended the steps beside Observatorielunden Park, along the part of the street where there was the repugnant sign outside the Chinese restaurant exhorting us to ‘guzzle’, and down the stair shaft to the underground. There were perhaps thirty to forty people on the two platforms, most on their way home from work judging by the bags they were carrying. I stood where there was most space, placed my bag on the floor between my legs, leaned against the wall with one shoulder, took out my mobile and rang Yngve.

‘Hello?’ he said.

‘Hi, Karl Ove here,’ I said.

‘I could see that,’ he said.

‘You rang?’ I said.

‘On Saturday, yes,’ he said.

‘I was going to call back, but things got a bit hectic. We had people round and then I forgot.’

‘No problem,’ Yngve said. ‘It wasn’t anything special.’

‘Has the kitchen arrived yet?’

‘Yes, it came today in fact. It’s right beside me. And I’ve bought a new car.’

‘Have you!’

‘I had to. It’s a Citroën XM, not very old. It was a hearse.’

‘You’re joking!’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Are you going to drive around in a hearse?’

‘It’s been modified, of course. There isn’t any room for coffins in it now. It looks quite normal.’

‘Nevertheless. Just the fact that there have been bodies in it… That’s the creepiest thing I’ve heard in a long while.’

Yngve snorted.

‘You’re so sensitive,’ he said. ‘It’s a very normal car. And I could afford it.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said.

There was a silence.

‘Any other news?’ I asked.

‘Nothing special. How about you?’

‘No, nothing. I was at Linda’s mother’s yesterday.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Yuh.’

‘And Vanja? Has she started walking yet?’

‘A couple of steps. But it’s more falling than walking, to tell the truth,’ I said.

He chuckled at the other end.

‘How are Tore and Ylva?’

‘They’re fine,’ he said. ‘Tore’s written you a letter, by the way. From school. Have you received it?’

‘No.’

‘He didn’t want to tell me what he’d written. But you’ll find out.’

‘Right.’

From the tunnel the headlights of a train came into view. A light wind swept across the platform. People began to move towards the edge.

‘The train’s coming,’ I said. ‘Talk to you soon.’

The train braked slowly in front of me. I lifted my bag and took a few steps forward.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Take care.’

‘And you.’

The doors opened and passengers began to spill out. As I lowered my hand with the mobile someone nudged my elbow from behind and sent the phone flying into the crowd by the door — I didn’t see where, I had automatically turned to the person who had knocked me.

Where was it?

There was no clink as it hit the ground. Perhaps it had hit a foot? I crouched down and searched the platform in front of me. No telephone anywhere. Had someone kicked it further away? No, I would have noticed, I thought, standing up, and I craned my head towards those heading for the exit. Could it have fallen into someone’s bag? There was a woman walking with an open handbag hanging from her arm. Could it have landed in there? No, that sort of thing doesn’t happen.

Does it?

I began to walk after her. Could I gently tap her on the shoulder and ask to see in her bag, I’ve lost a phone, you see, and think it might have ended up there.

No, I couldn’t.

The warning signal that the doors were closing sounded. The next train wouldn’t be here for another ten minutes, I was already late, and my mobile was an old model, I had time to think before jumping through the doors, which were already half-closed. Dazed, I sat down on a seat beside a goth-clad twenty-year-old as the station lights flashed through the carriage and were suddenly replaced by pitch darkness.

Fifteen minutes later I got off at Skanstull, withdrew some cash from the ATM outside, crossed the road and went into Pelikanen. It was a classic beer hall, with benches and tables along the walls, chairs and tables close together on the black and white chequered floor, brown wooden wall panels, paintings on the plaster above them and on the ceiling, a few broad supporting pillars, also clad with brown panelling at the bottom and surrounded by benches, and a long wide bar at the end. The waiters were almost all old and wore black clothes and white aprons. There was no music, but the noise level was loud nevertheless, the buzz of voices and laughter and the clinking of cutlery and glasses lay like cloud cover above the tables, unnoticed when you had been there a while, but conspicuous and also often intrusive when you opened the door and came in from the street, when it sounded like thunder. Among the clientele there was still the odd drunk who might conceivably have been drinking here since the 1960s, the odd elderly man who had his dinner here, but they were dying out, the predominant types were, as everywhere else in Södermalm, men and women from the culture-creating middle classes. They were not too young, not too old, not too attractive, not too ugly, and they were never too drunk. Cultural correspondents, postgraduates, humanities students, employees from publishing houses, backroom staff for radio and television, the occasional actor or writer, but rarely any high-profile figures.

I stopped a few metres inside the door and scanned the clientele as I loosened my scarf and unbuttoned my jacket. Glasses sparkled, bald heads gleamed, white teeth flashed. Beer in front of all of them, an ochre colour against the brown tabletops. But I couldn’t see Geir.

I walked over to one of the cloth-covered tables and sat down with my back to the wall. Five seconds later a waitress arrived and passed me a thick imitation-leather menu.

‘There are two of us,’ I said. ‘So I’ll wait before ordering food. But could I have a Staropramen in the meantime?’

‘Of course,’ the waitress said, a woman of about sixty with a large fleshy face and big auburn hair. ‘Pale or dark?’

‘Pale, thanks.’

Oh, how nice it was here. The typical pure beer hall style led my mind elsewhere, to more classical periods, not that the place came across as museum-like for that reason, there was nothing forced about the atmosphere, people came here to drink beer and chat the way they had done ever since the 1930s. This was one of Stockholm’s great virtues — there were so many places from different epochs which were still in operation without their making a great song and dance about it. Van der Nootska Palace from the seventeenth century, for example, where Bellman was supposed to have got drunk for the first time, when the place was already a hundred years old — sometimes I had lunch there, I first went the day after Foreign Minister Anna Lindh had been murdered, and the mood in the town was strangely muted and wary — and then there was the eighteenth-century restaurant Den Gyldene Freden in the Old Town, the nineteenth-century Tennstopet and Berns Salonger, where the Red Room described by Strindberg was to be found, not to mention the beautiful art nouveau Gondolen bar, which stood, unaltered from the 1920s, on top of the Katharina Lift with a panorama of the whole town, where you felt as though you were on board an airship, or perhaps in the lounge of an Atlantic liner.