Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

I was so proud of the children. Vanja was wild and plucky, you would never think her thin body could have such a huge appetite for activity, that it could devour the physical world so greedily, with its trees, climbing frames, swimming pools and open fields, and her introversion, which had held her back in the first months at the new nursery, had completely gone, so much so that the next ‘progress conversation’ was to focus on the opposite. Now it was not that Vanja hid away or she didn’t want contact with adults or she never took the initiative in games that was the problem; on the contrary, it was perhaps that she took too central a role sometimes, as they deftly put it, and was too keen to be number one. ‘To be frank,’ the nursery head said, ‘she sometimes bullies some of the other children. The positive side of that,’ he continued, ‘is that in order to do so she has to be able to understand the situation and be intelligent enough to exploit it. But we’re working at making her understand that she can’t do that. Have you any idea where she might have picked up this rhyme: naaa-na-na-na-naaa-na? Has she seen it in a film or what? If so, we can show the film here and explain to them what it is.’ After the last meeting, when they had talked about a speech therapist and treated her shyness as a flaw or a defect, I couldn’t care less what they thought about her. She had only just turned four, she would be rid of it in a few months… Heidi wasn’t quite as wild, her physical control was of another order, she seemed to be present in her body in quite a different way from Vanja, for whom fiction was simply a variant of reality and who allowed her imagination to run away with her. Vanja would lose her cool and go frantic with despair if she couldn’t master something from the outset and gratefully accept help, whereas Heidi wanted to do everything herself, she would be offended if we offered our help and she would keep going and going until she succeeded. Oh, the triumph on her face then! She climbed to the top of the big tree in the playground before Vanja. The first time she wrapped her arms round the top branch. The second time, driven by tiny-tot hubris, she stood on top. I was sitting on a bench reading a newspaper and heard her scream: she was perched at the end of the branch, with nothing to hold on to, six metres above the ground. One rash move and she would fall. I shinned up and grabbed her, unable to stop laughing, what on earth were you doing there ? She often did an extra skip when she walked, and that, I thought, was a skip of happiness. She was the only person in the family who was truly happy, it seemed, or who had a sunny disposition. She tolerated everything, apart from being told off. Then her lips quivered, the tears began to well up and it could take an hour to console her. She loved playing with Vanja, she went along with everything, and she adored riding. When she was astride the donkey at the amusement park we went to in the summer her face glowed with pride. But even the sight of Heidi was not enough to change Vanja’s opinion, she didn’t want to ride, she would never ride again, pushed her glasses up her nose, suddenly threw herself in front of John and let out a scream that made everyone around look at us. John liked it though, he shouted back, and then they laughed.

The sun was already low over the pine trees in the west. The sky was the same deep blue colour I remembered from my childhood and loved. Something eased inside me, soared upwards. But I couldn’t make any use of it. The past was nothing.

Linda lifted Heidi off the stupid donkey. She waved goodbye to the animal and to the woman selling the tickets.

‘There we are,’ I said. ‘Now it’s straight home.’

The car was on its own in the large gravelled car park now. I sat down on the kerbstone nearby with Heidi on my lap, changing her nappy. Then I strapped in John on the front seat while Linda did the same for the girls in the back.

We had rented a big red VW. It was only the fourth time I had driven since I got my licence, so everything connected with it gave me pleasure. Starting up, changing gear, accelerating, reversing, steering. It was all fun. I had never thought I would ever drive a car, it wasn’t part of my self-image, so my pleasure was all the greater when I found myself driving homewards on the motorway at 150 kph, in the regular almost drowsy rhythm that set in, indicating to pull out, overtaking, indicating to pull in, surrounded by countryside initially dominated by forest, then after a long gradual incline up an enormous hill, by cornfields as far as the eye could see, low farm buildings, magnificent coppices and small forests of deciduous trees, with the sea as a constant blue border in the west.

‘Look!’ I said as we reached the summit, and the Skåne countryside lay beneath us. ‘So unbelievably beautiful!’

Golden cornfields, green beech forests, blue sea. All seemingly intensified and shimmering in the light from the setting sun.

No one answered.

I knew John was asleep. But those at the back, had they also nodded off?

I turned to look over my shoulder.

Yes, indeed. Three girls lay there with mouths agape and eyes closed.

Happiness exploded inside me.

It lasted for one second, two seconds, maybe three. Then came the shadow that always followed, this happiness’s dark train.

I tapped my hand against the steering wheel and sang along to the music. It was Coldplay’s latest CD, one I couldn’t stand but which I had found was perfect for driving. Once I’d had the exact same feeling as now. When I was sixteen, in love, on my way through Denmark early one summer morning, heading for Nykøbing to a football training camp, all the others in the car apart from the driver and me at the front were asleep. He was playing the Brothers in Arms CD by Dire Straits, which had come out that spring, and with Sting’s The Dream of a Blue Turtle and Talk Talk’s It’s My Life formed the soundtrack to all the fantastic experiences I’d had over the past months. The flat landscape, the sun rising, the stillness outside, the sleeping passengers, reinforced by a happiness that was so strong I remembered it twenty-five years later. But this happiness hadn’t had a shadow, it had been pure, undiluted, unadulterated. Then life lay at my feet. Anything could happen. Anything was possible. It wasn’t like that any longer. A lot had happened, and what had happened laid the ground for what could happen.

Not only were the opportunities fewer; the emotions I experienced were weaker. Life was less intense. And I knew I was halfway, perhaps more than halfway. When John was as old as I was now I would be eighty. And with one foot in the grave, if not both feet. In ten years I would be fifty. In twenty, sixty.

Was it strange that a shadow hung over happiness?

I indicated to pull out and overtook a juggernaut. I was so inexperienced that I felt uneasy when the car was buffeted by the turbulence. But I wasn’t afraid, I had only been afraid once for as long as I had been driving, and that was on the day of my driving test. It took place early one midwinter morning, it was pitch black outside, I had never driven in the darkness. The rain was pelting down, and I had never driven in the pouring rain. And the examiner was an unfriendly-looking man with an unfriendly presence. Naturally, I had the compulsory safety check off by heart. The first thing he said was that we would skip the check. Just clean the condensation off the windows and we’ll say that’s fine. I didn’t know how to do that out of the sequence I had drilled into myself, and by the time I had worked it out after two minutes’ fumbling around on the dashboard, I had forgotten to switch on the ignition for the demist to work, which caused the examiner to scrutinise me, ask, ‘You do know how to drive, do you?’ and with a shake of the head to turn the key for me. After such an incredibly bad start I wasn’t helped by the fact that my legs were wildly out of control, they were shaking and trembling, and my coordination was conspicuous by its absence, so we kangaroo-jumped rather than glided into the traffic. Pitch black. Morning rush hour. Pouring rain. After a hundred metres the examiner asked me what my day job was. I said I was a writer. Then he became really interested. He was an artist himself, he told me. He’d had an exhibition and so on. He asked me what I wrote. I had just started to tell him about A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven when he gave me the name of the town I should head for. In front of us was an enormous motorway junction. I couldn’t see a sign with the name. He asked if the book had come out in Swedish. I nodded. There! There was the sign. But over on the far lane! So I steered towards it and accelerated, and he jumped on the brakes, bringing us to a sudden halt.