Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

The waitress came with a tray of full glasses in her hand, put one down on a hastily lobbed beer mat, smiled and continued towards the many noisy tables, where she, perhaps once every second, was greeted with some witty comment.

I raised the glass to my mouth and felt the froth touch my lips, the cold slightly bitter liquid fill my mouth — which was so unprepared for all this taste that a shiver ran through me — and slip down my throat.

Ahh.

When you visualised the future and conjured up a world in which urban life had spread everywhere and man had achieved his long-desired symbiosis with the machine, you never took account of the simplest elements, beer for example, so golden and flavoursome and robust, made from grain in the field and hops in the meadow, or bread, or beetroot with its sweet but dark earthy taste, all this which we had always eaten and drunk at tables made of wood, inside windows through which beams of sunlight fell. What did people do in those seventeenth-century palaces, with their liveried servants, high-heeled shoes and powdered wigs pulled down over skulls full of seventeenth-century thoughts, what else if not drink beer and wine, eat bread and meat and piss and shit? The same applied to the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Conceptions of humanity changed constantly, conceptions of the world and nature too, all manner of strange ideas and beliefs emerged and vanished, useful and useless objects were discovered, science penetrated ever deeper into the world’s mysteries, machines grew in number, speeds increased and ever greater areas of old lifestyles were abandoned, but no one dreamed of discarding beer or changing it. Malt, hops, water. Field, meadow, stream. And basically that was how it was with everything. We were rooted in the archaic past, nothing radical about us, our bodies or needs had not changed since the first human saw the light of day somewhere in Africa 40,000 years ago or however long Homo sapiens had existed. But we imagined it was different, and so strong was our imaginative power we not only believed that but we also organised ourselves accordingly, as we sat getting drunk in our cafés and darkened clubs, and dancing our dances that presumably were even more clumsy than those performed, shall we say, 25,000 years ago in the glow of a fire somewhere along the Mediterranean coast.

How could the notion that we were modern even arise when people were dropping all around us, infected with illnesses for which there were no remedies? Who can be modern with a brain tumour? How could we believe we were modern if we knew that everyone would soon be lying somewhere in the ground and rotting?

I raised my glass to my mouth again and took long deep draughts.

How I loved drinking. I barely had half a glass before my brain would start toying with the thought of really going for it this time. Just sit there knocking them back. But should I?

No, I shouldn’t.

The few minutes I was there a regular stream of people came through the door. Most of them did as I had done, they stopped a few metres inside and studied the clientele while fumbling with their coats.

At the back of the last crowd I recognised a face. Yes, it was Thomas!

I waved to him, and he came over.

‘Hi, Thomas,’ I said.

‘Hi, Karl Ove,’ he said, shaking hands. ‘It’s been a long time.’

‘Yes, it has. Everything OK with you?’

‘Yes, pretty good. How about you?’

‘Yup, everything’s fine.’

‘I’m meeting some people here. They’re over there in the corner. Join us if you want.’

‘Thanks, but I’m waiting for Geir.’

‘Right! Yes, I think he said he was meeting you. I talked to him yesterday. I’ll come over and say hello afterwards if that’s OK.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘See you.’

Thomas was one of Geir’s friends, and the one I indisputably liked best. He was in his early fifties, bore a striking resemblance to Lenin, everything from the beard and the bald patch to the Mongolian eyes matched to a T, and he was a photographer. He’d had three books published, the first pictures of coastal rangers, the second pictures of boxers — it was in this setting he had met Geir — and the last a series of pictures of animals, objects, landscapes and people over whom there hung a dark shadow and where the emptiness in and around them was the most striking feature. Thomas was friendly and undemanding in social contexts — there was, as it were, nothing to lose when you spoke to him, perhaps because he didn’t take himself very seriously, although he was self-confident, or possibly that was the reason why. He cared about others, that was the impression he gave. However, in his work he was extremely stringent and demanding, always aiming for perfection, with photos orientated towards stylisation rather than improvisation. The ones I liked best were those occupying the middle ground: improvised stylisation, chance frozen in time. They were brilliant. Some of the boxing photos reminded me of ancient Greek sculptures in the balance of the bodies and the fact that they were caught in activities outside the ring; others possessed a great sombreness, and violence, of course. I had bought two of his photos in the winter, they were going to be presents for Yngve’s fortieth birthday. I had sat in Thomas’s lab flicking through the series that made up his last book, humming and hawing for a long time, but in the end I chose two. When I gave them to Yngve I could see from his face he didn’t really like them, so I said he could choose two others, and I would keep the first two, which are now hanging in my office. They were brilliant but also sinister, for what they exuded was death, so I could well understand that Yngve didn’t want them in his living room, even though of course I was a little offended. More than a little, actually. When I went to pick up the photos Yngve had finally chosen and I knocked on the door of the cellar, with massive sixteenth-century stone walls, in the Old Town, where Thomas had his lab, his colleague, an unkempt somewhat shabbily dressed man in his sixties, opened the door. Thomas wasn’t there, but I could go down and wait if I wanted. It was Anders Petersen, the photographer Thomas shared his lab with, who for me was best known as the creator of the photo on Tom Waits’ record Rain Dogs , but who’d had a name since the 70s, when he broke through with Café Lehmitz . His work was raw, intimate, chaotic and as close to real life as you could get. He sat down on the sofa in the room above the labs, asked if I wanted some coffee, I didn’t, and he resumed his activity, leafing through a pile of contact prints and humming. I didn’t want to get in the way or appear intrusive, so I stood in front of a board covered with photos and looked at them for a while, not untouched by his aura, which might have dissolved if there had been more people in the room, but there were just the two of us, and I was aware of every movement. He radiated naïvety, but not as though from inexperience; quite the contrary, he gave every impression of having experienced a great deal, it was more as if all the experiences were there but he hadn’t drawn the consequences, as though they had left him unaffected, so to speak. That probably was not the case, but it was the feeling I had when meeting his gaze and watching him sit there working. Thomas returned a few minutes later and seemed glad to see me, the way he undoubtedly was with everyone. He grabbed some coffee, we sat down on a sofa by the stairs, he produced the photos, scrutinised them carefully one last time, put them in their plastic covers, which he placed in an envelope, while I passed the envelope of money to him across the table so discreetly that I wasn’t even sure he had noticed. There was something about private cash transactions that embarrassed me, the natural balance was upset in some way, or even rendered null and void, without my quite knowing what it was all about. I put the photos in my bag, we chatted about this and that; apart from Geir, we had another connection, Marie, the woman he lived with, who was a poet, she had taught Linda at Biskops-Arnö many years ago and now she was a kind of mentor to Linda’s friend Cora. She was a good poet, classical in a way; truth and beauty were not irreconcilable entities in her poems, and meaning was not just something to do with language. She had translated some Jon Fosse plays into Swedish and was working now on poems by Steinar Opstad, among other things. I had only met her a couple of times, but to me she seemed to have many sides, there was a wealth of nuance in her personality, and you intuited a psychological depth with no apparent signs of neuroticism, the constant companion of sensitivity of course, at least not obtrusively. But when she stood opposite me that was not what engaged my mind, for in her right eye the pupil seemed to have detached itself and slipped down, it lay somewhere between the iris and the white of the eye, and this was so fundamentally alarming that it completely dominated my first impression of her.