Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

As it did this evening. Linda and Vanja were eating in the kitchen, Heidi slept her fevered sleep in the cot in our bedroom and I was almost suffocated by the thought of the washing-up, the rooms that looked as if they had been systematically ransacked, as though someone had tipped everything from the drawers and cupboards across the floor, by the dirt and sand everywhere and the pile of dirty laundry in the bathroom. By ‘the novel’ I was writing, which was taking me nowhere. I had spent two years on nothing. By the oppressiveness of life in the flat. By our arguments, which were escalating and becoming more and more unmanageable. By the joy that had departed.

My angry outbursts were petty, they flared up over trifles; who cares who washed what when, as you looked back on a life, summed up a life? Linda shifted between her moods, and when she was at her lowest ebb she simply lay on the sofa or in bed, and what at the start of our relationship had aroused tenderness in me now led directly to irritation: was I supposed to do everything while she lay there moping? Well, I could, but not without conditions. I did it and had every right to be bad-tempered and grumpy, ironic, sarcastic, occasionally furious. This joylessness spread far beyond me and right into the centre of our life together. Linda said she wanted only one thing, for us all to be a happy family. That was what she wanted, that was what she dreamed about, for us to be one happy, contented family. All I ever dreamed about was for her to do her half of the housework. She said she did, so there we were, with our accusations, our anger and our longings, in the middle of life, of our lives, no one else’s.

How was it possible to waste your life getting het up about housework? How was it possible ?

I wanted the maximum amount of time for myself, with the fewest disturbances possible. I wanted Linda, who was already at home looking after Heidi, to take care of everything that concerned Vanja so that I could work. She didn’t want to. Or perhaps she did, but she couldn’t cope. All our conflicts and rows were in some form or other about this, the dynamics. If I couldn’t write because of her and her demands, I would leave her, it was as simple as that. And somewhere she knew. She stretched my limits, according to what she needed in her life, but never so far that I reached my snapping point. I was close though. The way I took my revenge was to give her everything she wanted — I took care of the children, I cleaned the floors, I washed the clothes, I did the food shopping, I cooked and I earned all the money so that she had nothing tangible to complain about as far as me and my role in the family were concerned. The only thing I didn’t give her, and it was the only thing she wanted, was my love. That was how I took my revenge. Cold and unmoved, I watched her become more and more desperate until it became untenable and she screamed at me in rage, frustration and yearning. What’s the problem? I asked. Don’t you think I’m doing enough? You’re exhausted, you say. But I can take the children tomorrow. I can take Vanja to the nursery, and then I can go out with Heidi while you sleep and have a rest. Then I can collect Vanja from the nursery in the afternoon and look after them in the evening. That’s OK, isn’t it? Then you’ll be able to rest as you’re so drained. In the end, when she ran out of arguments she would throw objects and smash them. A glass, a plate, whatever came to hand. She was the one who should have been doing these chores for me, so that I could work, but she didn’t. And since her problem was not that she was doing too much, but the fact that there was no love, only spite, moodiness, frustration and bad temper in the man she loved, which she was unable to find a way to articulate, the best revenge for me was to take her at her word. Oh, how I gloated when I caught her in the trap and could stand there agreeing to all her demands! After the eruption, which was inevitable, after we had gone to bed, she would often cry and want to be comforted. That gave me an opportunity to extract further revenge, because I wouldn’t comply.

However, living like this was impossible, nor was it what I wanted, so when my anger, which was hard and implacable, abated, and all that was left was this soul in torment, as though everything I had was going to pieces, we made up, came closer to each other and lived as we once had. Then the whole process started again, it was cyclical, as in nature.

I stubbed out my cigarette, drank the last mouthful of flat Coke and got up, held the railing and stared into the sky, where a light hung motionless somewhere outside town, too low to be a star, too quiet to be a plane.

What on earth…?

I stared for several minutes. Then it suddenly fell to the left, and I realised it was a plane. It was motionless because it was coming down over Øresund and maintaining a course straight for me.

Someone knocked on the window and I turned. It was Vanja, she smiled and waved. I opened the door.

‘Are you going to bed now?’

She nodded.

‘I wanted to say goodnight to you, daddy.’

I bent down and kissed her on the cheek.

‘Goodnight. Sleep tight!’

‘Sleep tight!’

She ran through the hall and into her room, a bundle of energy even after such a long day.

Better do the bloody washing-up then.

Scrape the leftovers into the bin, empty the dregs of milk and water from the glasses, take the apple and carrot peel, the plastic packaging and tea bags from the sinks, clean them and put everything on the drainer, run hot water, squirt some washing-up liquid, rest my forehead against the cupboard and start washing, glass by glass, cup by cup, plate by plate. Rinse. Then, when the stand was full, start drying to make room for more. Afterwards the floor, which had to be scrubbed where Heidi had been sitting. Tie the bin bag and take the lift down to the cellar, walk through the warm labyrinthine corridors to the waste disposal room, which was strewn with filth and slippery, which had pipes hanging from the ceiling like torpedoes, adorned with torn plastic ties and bits of insulation tape, a sign on the door proclaiming Miljørom , Milieu Room, a typical Swedish euphemism, throw the bags up into one of the large green rubbish containers, suddenly reminded of Ingrid, who the last time she had been here had found hundreds of small canvasses in one of them and had carried them up to the flat, imagining this would fill us with as much happiness as it did her, the idea that the children would now have enough painting material for several years into the future, close the lid and walk back to the flat, where at that moment Linda was tiptoeing out of the children’s room.

‘Is she asleep?’ I asked.

Linda nodded.

‘What a nice job you’ve done,’ she said. Stopped at the kitchen door. ‘Would you like a glass of wine? The bottle Sissel brought last time she came is still here.’

My first impulse was to say no, I definitely did not want any wine. But, strangely, the short time away from the flat had softened my attitude towards her, so I nodded.

‘Could do,’ I said.

Two weeks later, one afternoon while Heidi and Vanja were running wild around us, jumping on the sofa and screaming, we huddled together examining for the third time in our lives a small blue line on a small white test stick, overcome with emotion. It was John signalling his arrival. He was born late the following summer, gentle and patient from the first moment, always close to laughter, even when the storm around him was at its worst. Often he looked as if he had been dragged through a thicket, covered with scratches from the clawings Heidi gave him whenever she had the chance, usually under the pretext of a hug or an amicable pat on the cheek. What once had irked me, walking through the town with a buggy, was now history, forgotten and outlandish, as I pushed a shabby buggy with three children on board around the streets, often with two or three shopping bags dangling from one hand, deep furrows carved in my brow and down my cheeks, and eyes that burned with a vacant ferocity I had long lost any contact with. I no longer bothered about the potentially feminised nature of what I did; now it was a question of getting the children to wherever we had to go, with no sit-down strikes or refusals to go any further or any other ideas they could dream up to thwart my wishes for an easy morning or afternoon. Once a crowd of Japanese tourists stopped on the other side of the street and pointed at me, as though I were the ringmaster of some circus parade or something. They pointed . There you can see a Scandinavian man! Look, and tell your grandchildren what you saw!