Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

Two black shiny taxis raced past towards the centre. Snowflakes swirled up, settling seconds later on my face, which was level with the road. I crossed, jogged the last metres to the front door and let myself in. Luckily, no one was in the front hallway or the stairwell. The flat was silent.

I took off my coat and shoes, walked quietly through the living room and opened the bedroom door. Linda opened her eyes and looked at me in the semi-darkness. She stretched out her arms towards me.

‘Did you have a nice evening?’

‘Yes,’ I said, bending forward to kiss her. ‘Everything OK here?’

‘Mhm. We missed you. Are you coming to bed now?’

‘I’ll grab a bite to eat first. Then I’ll come. OK?’

‘OK.’

Vanja lay in her cot with her backside in the air and her face pressed against the pillow as usual. I smiled as I walked past. I drank a glass of water in the kitchen, stared into the fridge for a while before taking out some margarine and a packet of ham. Took the bread from the cupboard next to it. As I was about to close the door I glanced at the bottles on the top shelf. There was nothing casual about my glance. The bottles were not standing in their usual positions. The half-full bottle of aquavit from Christmas had changed places with the Calvados. The grappa that had been at the back was now to one side near the Dutch gin. Had that been all, I would not have given it a second thought, I would have concluded I must have cleaned the shelf on Saturday, but now that I was looking, the bottles also seemed to be less full. The very same thought had struck me only a week ago, but I had dismissed it. We must have drunk more than I remembered when we’d had people round. Now, on top of everything else, they were in different positions.

I stood for a while rotating the various bottles in my hands wondering what could have happened. The grappa had been almost full, hadn’t it? I had poured three small shots after a dinner we’d had a few weeks ago. Now it was right down by the label. And the aquavit, surely there had been more than a bit at the bottom? And the cognac, surely there had been a bit more as well?

These were bottles I brought back with me when I had been travelling or ones we had been given. We never drank from them, except when we had guests.

Could it be Linda?

Was she having a drink when she was alone here?

On the quiet?

No, no, no, absolutely no chance. She hadn’t had a drop of alcohol since she became pregnant. And as long as she was breastfeeding she wouldn’t touch it.

Was she lying?

Linda?

No, hardly likely. I couldn’t be that blind.

I put the bottles back, exactly as they had been, in positions I would remember. I also tried to memorise more or less how much was left in each of them. Then I closed the cupboard door and sat down to eat.

Probably my memory had been playing tricks on me. Probably we had drunk more than I had realised in recent weeks. I didn’t know exactly how much there was left. Then the bottles had been moved around when I cleaned the cupboard on Saturday. It was quite normal not to remember. Wasn’t it Tolstoy who wrote about this in his diaries, according to Shklovsky? About not being able to remember whether he had dusted the living room or not? If he had, what status did the experience have, and what time did it occupy?

Oh, Russian formalism, where have you been in my life?

I got up and was just about to clear the table when the telephone rang in the living room. Fear gripped my chest. But then I remembered the text message Geir had sent to my mobile. Nothing to be concerned about.

I hurried to the phone and picked it up.

‘Hello, Karl Ove here,’ I said.

The other end of the line was quiet for some seconds. Then a voice said, ‘Are you the person who has lost a mobile phone?’

The voice belonged to a man. He spoke broken Swedish, and if the tone was not aggressive, it was not particularly friendly either.

‘Yes, that’s me. Have you found it?’

‘It was in my fiancée’s bag when she came home. Now would you mind telling me how it ended up there?’

The door opened in front of me. Linda came through and sent me a worried stare. I raised my hand in defence and smiled.

‘I had the phone in my hand on the platform at Rådmannsgatan when someone knocked me from behind and I lost it. I turned to the man who had nudged me and didn’t see where it landed. But I never heard it hit the ground. Then I saw a woman with an open bag over her arm and guessed that it had to be there.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything to her? Why did you want her to contact you?’

‘The train arrived at that moment. And I didn’t have the time. Besides, I wasn’t sure that was where it had landed. I couldn’t go over to a stranger and ask her if I could look in her bag, could I.’

‘Are you Norwegian?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK. I believe you. You can have your phone back. Where do you live?’

‘In the city centre. Regeringsgatan.’

‘Do you know where Banérgatan is?’

‘No.’

‘Östermalm, one street up from Strandgatan, right by Karlaplan. There’s an ICA shop there. Be there at twelve. I’ll be outside. If I’m not, your mobile will be at the cash desk. Just ask the assistant. OK?’

‘Fine. Thanks.’

‘Don’t be so cack-handed next time.’

Then he rang off. Linda, who had sat down on the sofa with a blanket over her lap, raised her eyebrows.

‘What was that about?’ she asked. ‘Who was it, ringing at such a late hour?’

She laughed when I told her what had happened. Not so much at the sequence of events as at the suspicion it had been greeted with. If you wanted to meet a woman whose telephone number you didn’t know, what better way than to drop a phone in her bag and then ring her up?’

I sat down beside her on the sofa. She snuggled up to me.

‘Now Vanja’s on the waiting list for the nursery,’ she said. ‘I rang them today.’

‘Did you? That’s great!’

‘I have mixed feelings, I must confess,’ she said. ‘She’s so small. But maybe we can send her for half a day to start with?’

‘Of course.’

‘Little Vanja.’

I looked at her. It was as though her face was tired from the sleep she had just woken up from. Narrow eyes, doughy skin. Surely she couldn’t be drinking on the sly? With the immense affection she had for Vanja and the seriousness she brought to the maternal role?

No, definitely not. How could I even think it?

‘There’s something mysterious going on in the kitchen cupboard,’ I said. ‘Whenever I see the bottles there seems to be less in them. Have you noticed?’

She smiled.

‘No, but we’re probably drinking more than you realise.’

‘Seems so,’ I said.

I laid my forehead against hers. Her eyes, which looked straight into mine, filled me to the brim. In this short second they were all I saw, they shone with her life, the way she lived it inside her.

‘I miss you,’ she said.

‘I’m here,’ I said. ‘What is it? Do you want all of me?’

‘Yes, that’s what I want,’ she said, taking my hands and drawing me down onto the sofa.

Next morning I got up at half past four as usual, worked on editing the translated collection of short stories until seven and had breakfast with Linda and Vanja without saying a word. At eight Ingrid came to collect Vanja. Linda went to her course and I sat reading the online newspapers for half an hour before starting to answer the emails that had accumulated. Then I showered, dressed and went out. The sky was blue, the low sun shone across the town and although it was still cold, the light presaged a sense of spring, even deep down in the shadowy street I followed on the way towards Stureplan. Obviously I was not the only person to feel this; whereas the previous day people had walked with lowered heads and stooped shoulders, now they lifted their faces and in the eyes they viewed the world with there was both curiosity and happiness. Was this open cheery town the same as the enclosed depressed one we were walking around yesterday? While the muted winter light that had forced its way through the clouds seemed to draw all the colours and flat surfaces towards one another and minimise the differences between them with its greyness and frailty, this clear, direct sunlight emphasised them. Around me the town exploded with colour. Not the warm biological colours of the summer but the mineral colours of the winter, cold and synthetic. Red brick, yellow brick, dark green car bonnets, blue signs, an orange jacket, a purple scarf, grey-black tarmac, verdigris metal and shiny chrome. Sparkling windows, glowing walls and glinting gutters on one side of a building; black windows, dark walls, toned down almost invisible gutters on the other. In Birger Jarlsgatan the snow lay heaped along the side of the street, sometimes gleaming, sometimes grey and mute, all depending on how the sunlight fell. Towards Stureplan and into Hedengrens bookshop, where a young man was unlocking the door as I arrived. I went down to the basement, drifted between shelves and collected a pile of books which I sat down to flick through. I bought a biography of Ezra Pound because I was interested in his theory about money and hoped it would be included, a book about science in China from 1550 to 1900, a book about the economic history of the world written by a certain Rondo Cameron, and a book about native Americans which described all the tribes existing before the Europeans arrived, a magnificent work of 600 pages. In addition, I found a book about Rousseau by Starobinski, and a book about Gerhard Richter, Doubt and Belief in Painting, which I bought. I knew nothing about Pound, economics, science, China or Rousseau, nor whether I was interested, but I was about to write a novel soon, and I had to start somewhere. I had been thinking about the Indians for a long time. Some months ago I had seen a picture of some Indians in a canoe. They were paddling across a lake, in the bow was a man dressed like a bird with its wings outstretched. The picture penetrated all the layers of conceptions I had about Indians, everything I had read in books and comics and seen in films, straight through to reality: they had existed. They had indeed lived their lives with their totem poles, spears and bows and arrows, alone on an enormous continent, blissfully unaware that lives other than theirs were not only possible but also existed. It was a fantastic thought. The romance this picture evoked, with its wildness, this birdman and this untouched nature therefore evolved from reality and not vice versa, which was otherwise always the case. It was shocking. I can’t explain it in any other way. I was shocked. And I knew I would have to write about it. Not about the picture itself but what it contained. Then all the counter-arguments seeped through. They might have existed once, but they didn’t any more, they and their culture had long since been wiped out. Why write about it then? Their time was gone and it would never return. If I created a new world in which elements of their culture were to be found, it would just be literature, just fiction, and worthless. However, I could counter that Dante, for example, had written just fiction, that Cervantes had written just fiction and that Melville had written just fiction. It was irrefutable that being human would not be the same if these three works had not existed. So why not write just fiction? The truth did not, of course, have a one-to-one relationship with reality. Good arguments, but they didn’t help, just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous, I reacted in a physical way. Had no idea why. But I did. The Indians would have to wait. I was aware I might not always feel like this.