Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘Hi!’ he said, and waved with the other.

I smiled.

‘Hi, Benjamin,’ I said, closed the door behind me, lifted Vanja and went back downstairs. It was cold and clear outside, but all the light in the town, from street lamps, shop windows and car lights, seeped upwards and lay like a shimmering dome above the rooftops, through which no starry lustre could penetrate. Of all the heavenly bodies only the moon, hanging, almost full, above the Hilton hotel, was visible.

Vanja clung to me as I hurried down the street, our breath like white smoke around our heads.

‘Maybe Heidi wants my shoes?’ she said.

‘When she’s as big as you she can have them,’ I said.

‘Heidi loves shoes,’ she said.

‘Yes, she does,’ I said.

We continued for a while in silence. By Subway, the big sandwich bar beside the supermarket, I saw the white-haired crazy woman staring through the window. Aggressive and unpredictable, she walked back and forth around our district, more often than not talking to herself, always with her white hair tied in a tight knot, and in the same beige coat, summer and winter alike.

‘Will I have a party when it’s my birthday, daddy?’ Vanja asked.

‘If you want,’ I said.

‘I do,’ she said. ‘I want Heidi and you and mummy to come.’

‘That sounds like a nice little party,’ I said, shifting her from my right to my left arm.

‘Do you know what I want?’

‘No.’

‘A goldfish,’ she said. ‘Can I have one?’

‘We-ell…’ I said. ‘To have a goldfish you have to be able to take care of it properly. Feed it, clean the water and so on. And you have to be a bit bigger than four, I think.’

‘But I can feed it! And Jiro’s got one. He’s smaller than me.’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to see. Birthday presents are supposed to be secret, you know, that’s the whole point about them.’

‘Secret? Like a secret?’

I nodded.

Oh bugger! Oh bugger! said the crazy woman, who was now only a few metres ahead. Warned by the movement, she turned and looked at me. Oh, her eyes were evil.

‘What are those shoes you’re carrying?’ she said behind us. ‘Hey, pappa ! What are those shoes you’re carrying? Let me have a word with you right now!’

And then louder: ‘Bugger! Oh BUGGer!’

‘What did the old lady say?’ Vanja asked.

‘Nothing,’ I answered, squeezing her tighter to me. ‘You’re the best thing I’ve got, Vanja, do you know that? The very, very best.’

‘Better than Heidi?’ she asked.

I smiled.

‘You’re both the best, you and Heidi. Exactly the same.’

‘Heidi’s better,’ she said. Her tone of voice was completely neutral, as if she were stating an incontrovertible fact.

‘What nonsense,’ I said. ‘You little monkey.’

She smiled. I looked past her and into the large almost deserted supermarket, where the goods lay gleaming on each side of the narrow avenues of shelves and counters. Two women sat at their cash desks staring into the middle distance waiting for customers. At the traffic lights across from us a car was revving, and when I turned my head I saw the sound was coming from one of those enormous jeep-like vehicles that had begun to fill our streets in recent years. The tenderness I felt for Vanja was so great it was almost tearing me to pieces. To counteract it, I broke into a jog. Past Ankara, the Turkish restaurant with belly dancing and karaoke on the menu, and its door, where well dressed men from the east often stood in the evenings, smelling of aftershave and cigar smoke, but which was empty now, on past Burger King, where an incredibly fat girl, wearing a hat and fingerless gloves, sat alone on the bench outside devouring a hamburger, then over the crossing, past the Systembolaget and the Handelsbanken, where I stopped as the lights were on red, even though there were no cars in any of the lanes. All this while holding Vanja tight to my chest.

‘Can you see the moon?’ I asked, pointing to the sky as we stood waiting for the lights to change.

‘Mm,’ she said. And then, after a short pause, ‘Have any people been there?’

She knew very well there had, but she also knew that I liked talking about such things.

‘Yes, there have,’ I said. ‘Just after I was born three men flew there. It’s a long way and it took several days. And then they flew around it.’

‘They didn’t fly; they had a spaceship,’ she said.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘They went in a rocket.’

The lights changed to green, and we crossed to the other side, where the square began and we had our flat. A slim man in a leather jacket with hair down his back was standing by a cashpoint. He put out one hand to receive his card; with the other he stroked the hair from his face. It was a feminine gesture, and amusing, as everything else about him, the entire heavy-metal look, was designed to be dark and hard and masculine.

The tiny pile of bank receipts on the ground by his feet blew up in a gust of wind.

I shoved my hand in my pocket and took out a bunch of keys.

‘What’s that?’ Vanja asked, pointing to the two slush machines outside the little Thai takeaway next to our front entrance.

‘Slush ice,’ I said. ‘But you knew that.’

‘I want some!’ she said.

I looked at her.

‘No, you’re not having that. But are you hungry?’

‘Yes.’

‘We can buy some chicken satay if you like. Would you like that?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK,’ I said, put her down on the ground and opened the door to the restaurant, which was not much more than a hole in the wall and filled our veranda, seven floors up, with the smell of noodles and fried chicken every day. They sold two dishes in a box for forty-five kroner, so it was not exactly the first time I was standing at the glass counter and ordering from the young skinny expressionless hard-working Asian girl. Her mouth was always open, her gums visible above her teeth, her eyes always neutral as if they couldn’t make any distinctions. In the kitchen were two equally young men — I had caught only brief glimpses of them — and between them flitted a man in his fifties, his face expressionless as well, though a touch more friendly, at least whenever we bumped into each other in the long labyrinthine corridors beneath the house: he was fetching something from or taking something to a storeroom, I was washing clothes, throwing out rubbish or pushing my bike in or out.

‘Can you carry it?’ I asked Vanja and passed her the hot box which appeared on the counter twenty seconds after the order had been placed. Vanja nodded, I paid, and then we went into the next front hall entrance, where Vanja put down the box on the floor so as to press the button for the lift.

She counted all the floors aloud on the way up. When we were standing outside our flat she handed me the box, opened the door and called for her mother even before she was inside.

‘Shoes first,’ I said, holding her back. At that moment Linda came from the living room. The TV was on, I could hear.

A faint odour of putrescence and something worse rose from the large bag of rubbish and the two small nappy bags in the corner by the folded double buggy. Heidi’s shoes and jacket were on the floor next to it.

Why the HELL hadn’t she put them in the wardrobe?

The hall was awash with clothes, toys, old advertising leaflets, buggies, bags, bottles of water. Hadn’t she been here all afternoon?

But she had plenty of time to lie on the sofa and watch TV.

‘I got a goodie bag even though I didn’t do any fishing!’ Vanja said.

So that was what she considered important, I mused, bending forward to remove her shoes. Her body was twitching with impatience.