Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘Hi!’ I said.

She mumbled something or other, but not until she had passed. The Russian woman was our neighbour from hell. For the first seven months we lived in the block her apartment was empty. But then one night at half past one we were awakened by a racket in the corridor — it was her front door being slammed shut — and straight afterwards music was played so loud we could not hear each other speak. Euro disco, with a bass and bass drum that made the floor vibrate and the windowpanes rattle. It was as though we had our stereo on at full blast. Linda, who was eight months’ pregnant, had problems sleeping anyway, but even I who was usually able to remain comatose through any sort of noise could forget all about sleeping. Between the songs we heard her shouting and yelling beneath us. We got up and went into the living room. Should we ring the hotline that had been set up for situations like this? I didn’t want to. That was too Swedish for me. Shouldn’t we just go downstairs and ring the bell and complain? Fine, but then I would have to do it. And I did, I rang, and when that didn’t help I knocked, but no one came. Another half an hour in the living room. Perhaps it would stop of its own accord? But in the end Linda was so furious that she went down herself, and then all of a sudden the woman opened the door. And was full of understanding! She stepped forward and laid a hand on Linda’s stomach, and there’s you expecting a baby, she said in her Russian-sounding Swedish, I’m so sorry, apologies, but my husband has left me and I don’t know what to do, do you understand? Music and a bit of wine, it helps me in cold, cold Sweden. But you’re going to have a baby and you need your sleep, don’t you, my dear.

Happy to have made progress, Linda came back up and told me what was said before we went into the bedroom and got into bed. Ten minutes later, just after I had fallen asleep, the infernal racket started again. The same music at the same crazy volume, with the same hollering between the songs.

We got up and went into the living room. It was getting on for half past three. What should we do? Linda wanted to ring the hotline, but I didn’t, because even if in principle this was supposed to be anonymous, in the sense that the house-disturbance patrol was not allowed to say who had rung to complain, it was obvious the Russian woman would know, and with her as unstable as she evidently was, it would be asking for trouble later. So Linda suggested we should wait until it was all over this once and then write a friendly letter the day after in which it would emerge that we were understanding and tolerant, but this kind of volume late at night was in fact unacceptable. Linda lay down on the sofa, breathing heavily with her huge belly in the air, I went to bed, and an hour later, at almost five o’clock, the music finally stopped. The next day Linda wrote the letter, popped it through her letter box before going out in the morning, and everything was quiet until about six in the evening, when there was a terrible hammering and banging on our door. I went to open. It was the Russian woman. Her gritted alcohol-ravaged face was white with fury. In her hand she was clasping Linda’s letter.

‘What the hell is this!’ she shouted. ‘How dare you! In my own home! You’re not bloody telling me what to do in my own home!’

‘It’s a friendly letter—’ I said.

‘I don’t want to speak to you!’ she said. ‘I want to speak to the person in charge here!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re not the man in your own home. You’re chased out when you want to smoke. You stand in the yard, you’re a laughing stock. Do you think I haven’t seen you? It’s her I want to talk to.’

She took a few steps forward and tried to pass me. She stank of alcohol.

My heart was pounding. Fury was the one emotion I was really afraid of. I never managed to ward off the feeling of weakness that flooded through my body in these circumstances. My legs went weak, my arms went weak and my voice trembled. But she didn’t need to notice.

‘You’ll have to speak to me,’ I said, advancing towards her.

‘No!’ she said. ‘She’s the one who wrote this letter. It’s her I want to talk to.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You were playing unbelievably loud music late last night. It was impossible for us to sleep. You can’t do that. And you’ve got to understand.’

‘Don’t you tell me what to do!’

‘Well, it’s not me,’ I said. ‘We’ve got something called house rules. Everyone who lives in this place has to abide by them.’

‘Do you know how much rent I pay?’ she said. ‘Fifteen thousand kroner! And I’ve lived here for eight years. No one has ever complained before. Then you come along. You snobby little snobs. “Actually, I’m preeegnant.”’

As she said the latter she mimicked a snob, pursed her lips and stuck her nose in the air. Her hair was unkempt, her skin pale, cheeks plump, eyes staring.

She regarded me with that fiery gaze of hers. I looked down. She turned and went downstairs.

I closed the door and turned to face Linda, who was leaning against the hall wall.

‘Well, that was a clever move,’ I said.

‘You mean the letter?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now we’re really in for it.’

‘You mean it’s my fault? It’s her, not me who’s gone completely off her rocker. That’s nothing to do with me.’

‘Relax,’ I said. ‘You and I are not at daggers drawn.’

In the flat below the music blared out, as loud as the previous night. Linda looked at me.

‘Shall we go out?’ she said.

‘I don’t really like the idea that we’re being driven out,’ I said.

‘But it’s impossible to stay here.’

‘True.’

As we were putting on our coats the music stopped. Perhaps it was too loud even for her. But we went out nevertheless, down to the harbour by Nybroplan, where the lights glittered on black water and great layers of brash ice collected in front of the bows of the Djurgården ferry as it slowly approached. The Royal Dramatic Theatre stood like a castle on the other side of the road. It was one of my favourite buildings in Stockholm. Not because it was beautiful, for it was not, but because it exuded its own special atmosphere, as did the area around it. Perhaps it was simply that the colour of the stone was so light, almost white, and the surface area so vast that the entire building shone, even on the darkest of rainy days. With the constant wind coming off the sea and the flags fluttering outside the entrance there was an openness about the space it stood in, and the oppressive monument-like status that buildings often have about them was not present. Was it not like a small mountain by the sea?

We walked hand in hand down Strandgatan. The surface of the water out to the island of Skeppsholmen was wreathed in darkness. Moreover, when only a few lights were on in the houses it created a singular rhythm in the town, it was as if it came to an end, merged into the periphery and nature, only to pick up again on the other side of the water where the Old Town, Slussen and all the sheer cliffs towards Södermalm lay glittering and twinkling in the murmuring wind and sea.

Linda told me some anecdotes about the Royal Dramatic Theatre, where she had practically grown up. While her mother had worked there she had sole responsibility for Linda and her brother, so they had often been with her to rehearsals and performances. For me this was mythological, for Linda trivial, something she preferred not to talk about and quite definitely would not have done now had I not asked her directly. She knew everything about actors, their vanity and their tendency to burn themselves out, their angst and their intrigues, she laughed and said that the best of them were often the most stupid, the ones who understood least, that an intellectual actor was a contradiction in terms, but even though she despised the play-acting, despised their gesticulations and pomposity, their cheap, hollow, volatile lives and feelings, there was little to which she gave higher priority than their stage performances when they were at their best. She spoke, for example, with passion about Bergman’s production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt , which she had seen countless times as she was working in the theatre wardrobe at that time, the fantastical and fairytale-like elements in it, and also the baroque and burlesque aspects. Or Wilson’s production of Strindberg’s A Dream Play at Stockholm City Theatre, where she worked on the dramaturgy, which of course was purer and more stylised but equally magical. She had wanted to be an actress herself once, reached the final round of auditions for the Theatre School two years in a row, but when they didn’t take her the last time, that was fine, they would never take her, so she turned her attentions in a different direction, applied for the writer’s course at Biskops-Arnö, and made her debut there with the poems she had written the year after.