Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

Now I was the same age myself.

‘Karl Ove?’

I looked up. Nora Simonhjell stood in front of me with a smile on her face.

‘Hi, Nora! What are you doing here? Do you work here?’

‘Yes. I saw you were coming. Thought I would find you here. Nice to see you!’

I got up and gave her a hug.

‘Grab a seat!’ I said.

‘You’re looking so good!’ she said. ‘Tell me what’s new in your life.’

I gave her the edited highlights. Three children, four years in Stockholm, two in Malmö. Everything OK. She — I had first met her at a department party at Bergen University the night they were celebrating having finished their main subject, and then bumped into her in Volda where she taught and I wrote my first novel, which she read and was the first to comment on — had lived for a while in Oslo, worked in a bookshop and at Morgenbladet , published her second collection of poems and got a job here. I told her Kristiansand had been a nightmare for me. But a lot must have changed in the intervening twenty years. And it was one thing to go to a gymnas and another to be employed at a university.

She loved it, she said. Seemed happy. She had hung up her quill, but not for good, you never knew what might happen. A friend came over, she was American, we talked a little about the differences between the old country and her new one, then went up to the auditorium. The talk was due to start in ten minutes. My stomach hurt, my whole body did in fact, everything ached. And my hands, which had been trembling subconsciously all day, now really were trembling. I sat down at the desk, flicked through the books, looked up at the entrance. Two people in the hall. Me and the lecturer. Was it going to be that kind of day?

The first time I read in public, a few weeks after my debut novel had come out, was in Kristiansand. There were four people in the audience. One of them, I saw to my great satisfaction, was my old history teacher, now the headmaster, Rosenvold. I went over to chat with him afterwards. It turned out that he had almost no memory of me, but he had come to listen to and meet the second of the evening’s debutants, Bjarte Breiteig.

So much for the homecoming. So much for revenge over the past.

‘We-ell, I think we can begin then, can’t we?’ the lecturer said.

I looked along the rows of chairs. Seven people sitting there.

Nora said she was impressed when it was over, an hour later. I smiled and thanked her for her kind words, but I hated myself and my whole being, I couldn’t get away fast enough. Fortunately, Geir had turned up twenty minutes before we had arranged. He was standing in the middle of the large foyer when I came downstairs. I hadn’t seen him for more than a year.

‘I didn’t think you could lose any more hair,’ I said. ‘But I was wrong.’

We shook hands.

‘Your teeth have gone so yellow the dogs are going to flock round you in town,’ he said. ‘They’ll think you’re their king. How was it?’

‘Seven people came.’

‘Ha ha ha!’

‘Never mind. Otherwise, it went well. Shall we go? Have you got your car outside?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

Considering he had buried his mother the day before, he was in an astonishingly good mood.

‘Last time I came here it was on an exercise with the Home Guard cadets,’ he said as we crossed the square. ‘We were given our kit near here. But there was none of this here then, of course.’

He pressed the remote key, and twenty metres away a red Saab flashed. There was a child’s car seat in the back, for his son, Njaal, who was born the day after Heidi and whom I was godfather to.

‘Do you want to drive?’ he asked with a smile.

I couldn’t think of a quick retort and just smiled. Opened the door and got in, pushed the seat back, put on the seat belt and looked at him.

‘Aren’t we going?’

‘Where to?’

‘Town, I suppose. What else is there to do?’

He turned the key, reversed and pulled onto the road.

‘You seem a bit dejected,’ he said. ‘Didn’t it go particularly well?’

‘It went fine. And I’m not going to burden you with what isn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, you know…’ I said. ‘There are small problems and then there are big problems.’

‘Mum’s burial yesterday does not belong to the category “problem”,’ he said. ‘What has happened has happened. Come on now. What’s eating you?’

We drove into the short tunnel and emerged on the plain by Kongsgård, which, flooded with the sharp winter light, seemed almost beautiful.

‘I spoke to Linda earlier,’ I said. ‘She had a hard morning, well, you know what I mean. Tempers and chaos. Then Vanja said we were always angry. And she’s bloody right. I can see it as soon as I’m away. In fact, I feel like going back right this minute and sorting it out. That’s what’s eating me.’

‘Nothing new then,’ Geir said.

‘No.’

We drove onto the E18, pulled up in front of the toll booths, where Geir opened his window and threw coins into the grey metal cone, and went past Oddernes Church, behind it the chapel where dad had been buried, and Kristiansand Cathedral School, where I had spent three years.

‘This place is packed with meaning for me,’ I said. ‘My grandparents are buried here. And dad…’

‘He’s in some warehouse here, isn’t he?’

‘Correct. How could we not have got the job done properly, eh?! Heh heh heh.’

‘Sometimes blood is thinner than water. Heh heh heh.’

‘Ha ha ha! Seriously, though, I’ll get this sorted out soon, get him under the ground. I have to.’

‘Ten years in a warehouse has never hurt anyone,’ Geir said.

‘Yes, it has. But no one who’s been cremated.’

‘Ha ha ha!’

Silence. We drove past the fire station into the tunnel.

‘How was the funeral yesterday?’ I asked.

‘It was wonderful,’ he said. ‘Lots of people came. The church was packed. Loads of relatives and family friends I haven’t seen for years, in fact, ever since I was a boy. It was great. Dad and Odd Steinar cried. They were devastated.’

‘And you?’ I said.

He glanced at me.

‘I didn’t cry,’ he said. ‘Dad and Odd Steinar hugged. I sat beside them on my own.’

‘Doesn’t that bother you?’

‘No, why should it? I feel what I feel. They feel what they feel.’

‘Turn left here,’ I said.

‘Left? Over there?’

‘Yes.’

We came into the centre of town and drove down Festningsgaten.

‘There’s a multi-storey car park to the right soon,’ I said. ‘Shall we go there?’

‘OK.’

‘What do you reckon your father thinks about that?’ I asked.

‘About me not grieving?’

‘Yes.’

‘He won’t give it a thought. “That’s the way Geir is,” he’ll think. That’s what he’s always done. He’s always accepted me exactly as I am. Did I tell you about the time he picked me up from a party once? I was sixteen and had to throw up; he stopped the car, I spewed, he drove on, didn’t say a word. Total confidence. So, if I don’t cry at mum’s funeral or I don’t put my arm round him, it doesn’t mean anything to him. He feels what he feels, others feel what they feel.’

‘He sounds like a nice man.’

Geir looked at me.

‘Yes, he is a nice man. And he’s a good father. But we live on different planets. Was that where you meant? Over there?’

‘Yes.’

We drove down into the underground garage and parked. Wandered round town, Geir wanted to go to some record shops and look for blues CDs, his new obsession, and then we went to the two big bookshops before looking for somewhere to eat. The choice fell on Peppes Pizza, beside the library. Geir seemed unmoved by what had happened in his life during the last week, and while we sat eating and chatting I wondered whether it was because he was in fact unmoved, and if so, why, or whether it was because he needed to hide his feelings. During my early days in Stockholm he had written some short stories, I read them, they were characterised above all else by a great distance to the events they described, and I remembered I told him it was as though a huge sunken ship had to be raised. Lying deep in his consciousness. He didn’t care about this any more, it wasn’t important for him, which of course did not mean it was without significance. He didn’t acknowledge it, and lived accordingly. But what status did it have? Was it repressed? Rationalised out of existence? Or was it, as he said, yesterday’s news? The distance he kept from his family was related: he held everything in the past at arm’s length. Their lives, which from what he said consisted of a regular series of everyday events, whose high points were trips to out-of-town shopping centres and Sunday lunch at some roadside inn, and topics of which conversation rarely rose beyond food and the weather, drove him crazy with restlessness, also because, I assumed, what he did had no place in them. They weren’t in the slightest bit interested in what he did. If the relationship was going to work he had to meet them on their terms, but he didn’t want to. At the same time he would often praise their warmth, their concern for their immediate world, hugs, embraces, but he invariably did that after having talked about what he couldn’t stand about them, like a kind of penance, and not without jibes at my expense, for while I had everything he didn’t have in the family, intellectual curiosity and constant conversation, which he called middle-class values, we didn’t have the warmth and closeness that he saw as typical of the working class from which he came, nor the desire to create cosy atmospheres so disdained in academic circles, inasmuch as the taste with which it was expressed was regarded as basic, simple even. Geir loathed the middle classes and middle-class values, but was quite aware they were the ones he himself had embraced in his university career with all that that entailed, and somewhere there he was caught like a fly in a spider’s web.