Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

No, this was not good.

It certainly was not.

Tonje told me once about a man she had met at a restaurant, it was late, he came over to their table, drunk but harmless, or so they had thought, since he had told them he had come straight from the maternity ward, his partner had given birth to their first baby that day, and now he was on the town celebrating. But then he had started to make advances, he became more and more insistent and in the end suggested they should go back to his… Tonje was shaken deep into her soul, full of disgust, though also fascination, I suspected, because how was it possible, what was he thinking of?

I couldn’t imagine a greater act of betrayal. But wasn’t it what I was doing when I sought the eyes of all these women?

My thoughts inevitably went back to Linda sitting at home and washing and dressing Vanja, their eyes, Vanja’s inquisitive or happy or sleepy eyes, Linda’s beautiful eyes. I had never ever wanted anyone more than her, and now I had not only her but also her child. Why couldn’t I be content with that? Why couldn’t I stop writing for a year and be a father to Vanja while Linda completed her training? I loved them; they loved me. So why didn’t all the rest stop plaguing and harrying me?

I had to apply myself harder. Forget everything around me and just concentrate on Vanja during the day. Give Linda all she needed. Be a good person. For Christ’s sake, being a good person, was that beyond me?

I had reached the new Sony shop and was considering going into the Akademi bookshop on the corner, buying a few books and settling down in the café there when I spotted Lars Norén across the street. He had a Nike carrier bag in his hand and was walking in the direction I had just come from. The first time I saw him was a few weeks after we had moved into our flat here, it was in Humlegården, the mist was hanging over the trees, and towards us walked a hobbit-like man dressed all in black. I met his gaze, it was as black as the night, and my spine ran cold, what kind of person was this? A troll?

‘Did you see him ?’ I said to Linda.

‘That was Lars Norén,’ she said.

‘Was that Lars Norén?’ I said.

Linda’s mother, who was an actress, had worked with him in a play at the Royal Dramatic Theatre a long time ago, and Linda’s best friend, Helena, also an actress, had done as well. Linda told me he had chatted to Helena, in a friendly way, and described how her precise words had appeared later in the play, put into the mouth of the character she was playing. Linda was always pestering me to read Chaos Is the Neighbour of God and Night Is the Mother of Day , which she said was quite fantastic, but I never did, my list of books to read was as long as my arm, and for the time being I had to make do with an occasional sighting, for he appeared on the street at regular intervals, and when we went to our favourite café, Saturnus, he was not infrequently there being interviewed or just talking to someone. He wasn’t the only writer I bumped into; in the bakery close to ours I once saw Kristian Petri, whom I was on the point of saying hello to, unaccustomed as I was to meeting faces I had seen before, and on another occasion Peter Englund was in the same place, while Lars Jakobson, who wrote the fantastic In the Red Queen’s Castle , once came into Café Dello Sport while we were there, and Stig Larsson, whom I had been addicted to when I was in my twenties and whose book Watch Over Mine had hit me like a clenched fist, I saw on the terrace at Sturehof. He was reading a book, and my heart beat so fast it was as if I had seen a corpse. Another time I saw him at Pelikanen, where I was with some people who knew the crowd he was with, and I shook his hand, dry as a bundle of withered straw as he gave me an apathetic smile. I saw Aris Fioteros at Forum Culture House one night, Katarina Frostenson was also there, and I met Ann Jäderlund at a party in Södermalm. I had read all these authors when I was in Bergen, back then they were no more than foreign names living in a foreign country, and seeing them now in the flesh they were shrouded in the aura of that time, which gave me a strong historical sense of the present, they wrote in our era and filled it with moods on which generations to come would base their understanding of us. Stockholm at the beginning of the millennium, that was the feeling I had when I saw them, and it was a good uplifting feeling. I didn’t care that many of these writers had had their heyday in the 80s and 90s and had long been pushed aside, it wasn’t reality I wanted but enchantment. Of the young writers I had read there was only Jerker Virdborg I liked; his novel Black Crab had something that raised it above the mist of morals and politics others were cloaked in. Not that it was a fantastic novel, but he was searching for something different. That was the sole obligation literature had, in all other respects it was free, but not in this, and when writers disregarded this they did not deserve to be met with anything but contempt.

How I hated their journals. Their articles. Gassilewski, Raattamaa, Halberg. What terrible writers they were.

No, not the Akademi bookshop.

I stopped by the zebra crossing. On the other side, in the passage leading to the old, traditional NK department store, there was a little café, and I decided to head for it. Even though I often went there the flow of customers was so great and the surroundings so anonymous that you were invisible nevertheless.

There was one free table by the railings of the staircase leading down to the DIY shop in the cellar. I hung my jacket on the back of the chair, put the book on the table, front cover down, spine facing away, so that no one could see what I was reading, and joined the queue by the counter. The three people working there, two women and a man, looked like sisters and a brother. The oldest of them, now standing by the hissing coffee machine, had the appearance and radiance of someone you normally only ever saw in magazines, and her photo-like appearance almost cancelled out any lust I felt as I watched her flit about behind the counter, as though the world I moved in was incommensurable with hers, and I suppose it was. We didn’t have a thing in common, apart from the gaze.

Hell. There I go again.

Wasn’t I supposed to be stopping all this?

I took out a crumpled hundred-krone note from my pocket and smoothed it in my hand. Scanned the other customers, who were almost all sitting on a chair with their gleaming carrier bags on another. Shiny boots and shoes, elegant suits and coats, the odd fur collar, the odd gold necklace, old skin and old eyes in their old mascaraed sockets. Coffee was drunk, Danish pastries consumed. I would have given a fortune to know what the people sitting there were thinking. What the world looked like to them. Imagine if it was radically different from what I saw. If it was full of pleasure at the dark leather of the sofa, the black surface of the coffee and its bitter taste, not to mention the yellow eye of custard in the centre of the puff pastry’s winding and cracked terrain. What if the whole of this world sang inside them? What if they were full to bursting with the many delights the day had bestowed on them? Their carrier bags, for example, the ingenious and extravagant handles of string some of them were fitted with instead of the small cardboard handles stuck on the bags in the supermarkets. And the logos which someone with all their specialist knowledge and expertise had spent days and weeks designing, the meetings with feedback from other departments, more work refining the design, perhaps they had shown samples to friends and family, lain awake at night, for there was always someone who would not have liked it, despite all the meticulous care and ingenuity that had gone into it, until the day it became a reality, and now lay, for example, in the lap of that woman in her fifties with the stiff hair dyed a golden tint.