Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘The question is whether it was God,’ Geir said. ‘The feeling of being seen, of being forced to your knees by something that can see you. We just have a different name for it. The superego or shame or whatever. That was why God was a stronger reality for some than others.’

‘So the urge to give yourself to baser feelings and wallow in pleasure and vice would be the devil?’

‘Exactly.’

‘That’s never attracted me. Apart from when I drink, that is. Then everything goes overboard. What I want to do is travel, see, read and write. To be free. Completely free. And I had a chance to be free on the island because the reality was that I had finished with Tonje. I could have travelled anywhere I wanted — Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Munich. But instead I headed out there, where there wasn’t a soul. I didn’t understand myself, I had no idea who I was, so what I resorted to, all these ideas about being a good person, was simply all I had. I didn’t watch TV, I didn’t read newspapers, and all I ate was crispbread and soup. When I indulged myself out there it was with fishcakes and cauliflower. And oranges. I started doing press-ups and sit-ups. Can you imagine? How desperate do you have to be to start doing press-ups to solve your problems?’

‘This is all about purity, nothing less. Through and through. Asceticism. Don’t be corrupted by TV or the newspapers, eat as little as possible. Did you drink coffee?’

‘Yes, I drank coffee. But it’s true what you said about purity. There is something almost fascist about it all.’

‘Hauge wrote that Hitler was a great man.’

‘He wasn’t so old then. But the worst of it is that I can understand: that need to rid yourself of all the banality and small-mindedness rotting inside you, all the trivia that can make you angry or unhappy, that can create a desire for something pure and great into which you can dissolve and disappear. It’s getting rid of all the shit, isn’t it? One people, one blood, one earth. Now precisely this has been discredited once and for all. But what lies behind it, I don’t have any problem understanding that. And as sensitive to social pressure, as governed by what others think of me as I am, God knows what I would have done if I’d lived through the 1940s.’

‘Ha ha ha! Relax. You don’t do what everyone else does now, so you probably wouldn’t have then.’

‘But when I moved to Stockholm and fell in love with Linda, everything changed. It was as though I had been raised above trivia, none of it mattered, everything was good and there were no problems anywhere. I don’t know how to explain… It was as though my inner strength was so great everything outside it was crushed. I was invulnerable, do you understand? Filled with light. Everything was light! I could even read Hölderlin! It was an utterly fantastic time. I’ve never been happier. I was bursting with happiness.’

‘I can remember. You were up in Bastugatan and positively glowing. You were almost luminous. You played Manu Chao again and again. It was barely possible to talk to you. You were running over with happiness. Sitting in bed like some bloody lotus flower, beaming all over your face.’

‘The point is that all this is about perspectives. Seen in one way, everything offers pleasure. Seen in another, just sorrow and misery. Do you think I cared about all the rubbish TV and the press stuff us with while I sat up there being happy? Do you think I was ashamed of anything at all? I was tolerant of everything. I couldn’t bloody lose. That was what I told you when you were so terribly depressed and beyond yourself the following autumn. It was all about perspective. Nothing in your world had changed or become an urgent problem except for the way you saw it. But of course you didn’t listen to me; you went to Iraq instead.’

‘The last thing you want to hear when you’re in the darkness of depression is the babbling of some happy tosser. But I was happy when I returned. It got me out of it.’

‘Yes, and now the roles are reversed again. Now I’m sitting here and complaining about the wretchedness of life.’

‘I think it’s the natural order,’ he said. ‘Have you started doing press-ups again?’

‘Yes.’

He smiled. I smiled too.

‘What the hell am I going to do?’ I said.

We left Pelikanen an hour later, took the same Metro train to Slussen, where Geir changed to the red line. He placed his hand on my shoulder, told me to take care and say hello to Linda and Vanja. I slumped back into the seat after he had gone, wishing I could sit there for hour after hour and travel through the night, not like now, having to stand up and get off at Hötorget, only three stations along.

The carriage was nearly empty. A young man with a guitar case on his back stood holding the pole by the door, thin as a toothpick with curly black hair falling from under his hat. Two girls of around sixteen on the seat at the back were showing each other text messages. An elderly man in a black coat, rust-red scarf and the kind of grey woollen almost square hat worn in the 1970s sat on the opposite side. Facing him was a small dumpy woman with South American features in a large Puffa jacket, cheap dark blue jeans, suede boots with an edge of synthetic wool at the top.

I had forgotten the telephone business until Geir reminded me just before we left. He handed me his mobile and said I should ring my phone, which I did, but no one answered. We agreed he would write a text asking her to ring my home number and send it in half an hour, by which time I should be at home.

Perhaps she might think this was some kind of pick-up? I had intentionally put the phone in her bag so that I could ring her later?

At T-Centralen Metro station the place was heaving. Mostly young people, a few boisterous gangs, a number of loners with small headsets over their ears, some with sports bags between their feet.

They probably all slept at home.

The idea came from nowhere and tingled.

This was my life. This was what my life was.

I had to pull myself together. Chin up.

A train passed on the parallel track, for a few seconds I saw straight into an aquarium-like carriage with passengers sitting immersed in their own thoughts, then they were propelled upwards on their path while we were hurled down a tunnel where there was nothing to see but the reflection of the carriage and my vacant face. I stood up and went to the door as the train slowed. Crossed the platform and took the escalator up to Tunnelgatan. The fat blonde woman in her thirties who had long been anonymous to me until Linda had greeted her once and said she had been at Biskops-Arnö with her sat in the ticket office window. As our eyes met she looked down. Fine by me, I thought, pushing the barrier aside with my thigh and leaping up the last steps.

Whenever I climbed the long staircase up to Malmskillnadsgatan it went through my mind that my homeward route was probably the same one that Olaf Palme’s murderer had followed. I remembered every detail of the day when the murder had been made public. What I had been doing, what I had been thinking. It had been a Saturday. Mum had been ill and I had caught the bus to town with Jan Vidar. We had been seventeen years old. If the Palme murder had not taken place the day would have vanished, as all the others had. All the hours, all the minutes, all the conversations, all the thoughts, all the events. Into a pool of oblivion with everything else. And then the little that was left would have to represent the whole. How ironic was it that the only reason it remained was that it stood out from the rest?

In the KGB restaurant a few long-haired men sat by the window drinking. Otherwise it appeared to be empty. But perhaps all the action was in the cellar this evening.