Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

Thomas said they would invite Linda and me to dinner one evening, I said that would be very nice, got up and took my bag, he got up as well and we shook hands, and since it did not appear that he had seen the envelope containing the money I told him, there’s the money for the photos, he nodded and thanked me as though I had forced him to express this gratitude, and slightly ashamed I went up the stairs and out into the Old Town’s wintry streets.

That was almost two months ago now. I wasn’t much bothered by the fact that no invitation had appeared yet; one of the first things I had heard about Thomas was that he was very forgetful. I am too, so I didn’t hold that against him.

When he sat down at a table at the very back of the room it was as a thin well-dressed man wearing a Lenin mask. I took the yellow Tiedemanns pouch of tobacco from my bag, rolled a cigarette with fingertips that were for some reason so sweaty that shreds kept getting stuck to them, swallowed long gulps of beer, lit the roll-up and through the window saw Geir’s figure passing by in the street.

He spotted me as soon as he came in the door, but still surveyed the room as he walked towards the table, as though searching for other options. Not unlike a fox, one might imagine, incapable of selecting a place where there weren’t several exits.

‘Why don’t you answer your bloody phone?’ he said, stretching out his hand and meeting my eyes for a fleeting instant. I got up, shook hands and then sat down again.

‘Thought we said seven o’clock,’ I said. ‘It’s gone half past now.’

‘Why do you think I wanted to call you? To tell you to mind the gap between the train and the platform?’

‘I lost my mobile at the Metro station,’ I said.

‘Lost it?’ he queried.

‘Yes, someone knocked my elbow and sent it flying. I reckon it must have landed in a bag because I never heard it hit the ground. And a woman was passing with an open bag at precisely that moment.’

‘You’re unbelievable,’ he said. ‘I assume you didn’t ask her if you could have it back?’

‘No-o. Because, firstly, the train arrived at that precise moment and, secondly, I wasn’t sure that was what had happened. And you can’t just ask women if you can have a rummage through their handbags.’

‘Have you ordered?’ he asked.

I shook my head. He took hold of the menu and looked around for a waiter.

‘She’s over there by the pillar,’ I said. ‘What are you going to have?’

‘What do you reckon?’

‘Pork and onion sauce maybe?’

‘Yes, maybe.’

Whenever I met Geir there was always a distance, it was as though he couldn’t absorb the fact that I was there, so he tried to keep me at arm’s length. He didn’t meet my eyes, he didn’t pursue my topics of conversation, he seemed to throttle them by turning his attention to something else, he could be sarcastic and his whole being radiated arrogance. Sometimes that put me out, and when I was put out, I said nothing, which he could easily find it in himself to criticise. ‘My God, you’re hard graft today, you are,’ ‘Are you going to sit there gaping into eternity all evening?’ or ‘Well, you were fun this evening, Karl Ove.’ It was a kind of preliminary psychological skirmish he orchestrated inside himself, for after a while, perhaps half an hour, perhaps an hour, perhaps only five minutes, he changed, cast his defences aside and seemed to attune to the situation, become attentive, considerate and present, and the laughter, hitherto cold and hard, was warm and sincere, in a transformation that also encompassed his voice and eyes. When we spoke on the telephone there were no defences, then we chatted on an equal footing from the moment the receiver was lifted. He knew more about me than anyone else, in the same way that probably, but it was by no means certain, I knew more about him than anyone else.

The difference between us, which had diminished over the years but was never completely erased because it had nothing to do with opinions or attitudes, it was basic character, buried deep in the forever un-influence-able, manifested itself in all its clarity in a present Geir gave me after I had finished writing A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven . It was a knife, the model that US Marines use, which couldn’t be used for much else apart from killing someone. He didn’t do this as a joke, it was simply the finest object he could imagine. I was pleased, but the knife, so intimidating with its polished steel, sharp blade and deep indentations to enable blood to flow, remained in its box behind some books on an office shelf. He may have realised how alien this object was to me because when A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven came out a few months later, he gave me another present, a replica edition of an eighteenth-century Encyclopaedia Britannica — profoundly fascinating for all the objects and phenomena it did not describe since they did not yet exist — which of course was more up my street.

He took out a polysleeve containing a few sheets of paper and passed it to me.

‘It’s just three pages,’ he said. ‘Could you read it and tell me if it’s better?’

I nodded, pulled the sheets from the sleeve, stubbed out my cigar-ette and began to read. It was the opening of the essay I had been looking for when I went through his manuscript. It was based on Karl Jaspers’ concept of Grenzsituationen , border situations. The point where life is lived at maximum intensity, the antithesis of everyday life in other words, close to death.

‘This is good,’ I said when I had finished.

‘Sure?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Good,’ he said, replacing the papers in the sleeve and dropping it in the bag on the chair beside him. ‘You’ll get more to read later.’

‘I’m sure I will.’

He pulled his chair closer, rested his elbows on the table and folded his hands. I lit another cigarette.

‘Your journalist rang me today, by the way,’ he said.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘Oh, that Aftenposten guy.’

Since the journalist was writing a portrait he had asked if he could talk to a couple of my friends. I had given him Tore’s number, who was a bit of a loose cannon in that respect, likely to say anything at all about me, and Geir’s, as he knew more about my present situation.

‘What did you say then?’ I asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing? Why not?’

‘Well, what should I have said? If I’d told him the truth about you, he would have either not understood it or totally distorted it. So I said as little as possible.’

‘What was the point of that?’

‘How should I know? It was you who gave him my number…’

‘Yes, so that you could say something. Anything, I told you, it doesn’t matter what they print.’

Geir eyed me.

‘You don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘Well, actually, I did say one thing about you. Perhaps the most important, in fact.’

‘And that was?’

‘That you have high morals. Do you know what the idiot answered? “Everyone has.” Can you imagine that? That’s exactly what they don’t have. Next to no one has high morals or even knows what they are.’

‘That just means he has a different interpretation of morals from you.’

‘Yes, but he was only after a bit of scandal. A few anecdotes about how drunk you once were and stuff like that.’

‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘We’ll see tomorrow. It can’t be that awful. This is Aftenposten after all.’

Geir, sitting on the other side of the table, shook his head. Then his eyes went in search of the waitress, who came over at once.

‘Pork and onion sauce, please,’ he said in Swedish. ‘And a pale Staropramen.’