Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

I found a hairdresser’s I hadn’t seen when I passed by the first time, in a passage beside the big department store. I just had to take a seat. No wash, my hair was moistened with water from a spray. The hairdresser, an immigrant, a Kurd I guessed, asked how I wanted it, I said short, indicated with my thumb and first finger how short I had in mind, he asked what I did, I said I was a student, he asked where I came from, I said Norway, he asked if I was here on holiday, I said yes, and that was it. My locks fell on the floor around the chair. They were almost completely black. That was strange because when I looked in the mirror I had fair hair. It had always been like that. Even though I knew my hair was dark I couldn’t see it. I saw fair hair, as it had been in my boyhood and teens. Even in photos I saw fair hair. Only when it had been cut and I saw it separately, against white floor tiles for example, as here, could I see it was dark, almost black.

In the street half an hour later, the cold air gathered around my shorn head like a helmet. It was almost four o’clock, the sky almost pitch black. I went into an H&M shop I had spotted earlier to buy a scarf. The men’s department was in the basement. As I was unable to find the scarves after searching around for a while I went to the counter and asked the young girl standing there where they were.

‘ Ursäkta ?’ she said in Swedish.

‘Where do you keep the scarves?’ I repeated in Norwegian.

‘ Jag fattar tyvärr inte vad du säger ,’ she answered, before saying, in English: ‘I’m sorry. What did you say?’

‘The scarves,’ I said in Norwegian, holding my neck. ‘Where are they?’

‘Do you speak English?’ she said. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Scarves,’ I said in English. ‘Do you have any scarves?’

‘Oh, scarves,’ she said. ‘We call them halsduk . No, I’m sorry. It’s not the season for them any more.’

Back in the street, I wondered for a second whether to go into Åhléns, as the large department store was called, to look for a scarf there, but rejected the idea, I had been through enough idiocy for one day, and instead started to walk up the street again, towards the boarding house where I had stayed two years previously, for no other reason than that it was better to walk with a goal than without. On the way I passed a second-hand bookshop. The shelves inside were tall and so close to each other that there was barely room to turn around. After casting an indifferent glance at the spines of the books I was about to leave when I caught sight of a Hölderlin on the top of a pile at the corner of the counter.

‘Is this for sale?’ I asked the assistant, a man of my own age who had already been eyeing me for a while.

‘Of course,’ he said blankly.

Sånger it was called. Was that perhaps a translation of Die vaterländischen Gesänge ?

I flicked through to the colophon page. The year of publication was 2002. So it was quite new. But there was nothing about the title there, so I skimmed through the afterword, stopping at every word in italics. And yes. There it was: Die vaterländischen Gesänge. Hymns of the Fatherland . But why on earth had they translated the title as Sånger ?

It didn’t matter.

‘I’ll take it,’ I said, again in Norwegian. ‘How much do you want for it?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘How much does it cost?’

‘Let me have a look and I’ll check… A hundred and fifty kroner, please.’

I paid, he put the book in a little bag and handed it to me with the receipt, which I shoved into my back pocket before opening the door and leaving with the bag dangling from my hand. Outside it was raining. I stopped, took off the rucksack, stuffed the bag in it, put the rucksack back on and continued along the brightly illuminated shopping street, where the snow which had been falling for several hours had no left no trace other than a grey slushy layer on all surfaces above ground level: roof projections, windowsills, the heads on the statues, floors of verandas, awnings, which sagged making the canvas bulge close to the outer frame, tops of walls, dustbin lids, hydrants. But not the street. It lay black and wet, glistening in the lights from windows and street lamps.

The rain caused some of the gel the hairdresser had rubbed into my hair to run down my forehead. I wiped it away with my hand, wiped it on the thighs of my trousers, spotted a small gateway on the right-hand side of the street and went there to light up. Inside, there was a long garden with at least two different restaurant terraces. With a small pool in the middle. On the wall beside the entrance was the name of the Swedish Writers’ Association. That boded well. The association was one of the places I had intended to ring to enquire about somewhere to live.

I lit the cigarette, took out the book I had bought, leaned back against the wall and somewhat half-heartedly started to flick through it.

Hölderlin had long been a familiar name to me. Not that I had read him systematically, not at all, a couple of sporadic poems in Olav Hauge’s collection of translations was the sum total, apart from knowing, in the most superficial of ways, about the fate that befell him, the years of madness in the tower in Tübingen; nevertheless his name had been with me for a long time, roughly since the age of sixteen, when my uncle Kjartan, my mother’s ten-year-younger brother, first started talking about him. He was the only sibling to live in his childhood home, a modest smallholding in Sørbøvåg in Ytre Sogn, with his parents: grandad, my mother’s father, who at that time was approaching eighty but was still active and full of vitality, and grandma, who was in the latter stages of Parkinson’s disease and therefore needed help to do virtually everything. As well as running the smallholding, which, though it was no bigger than five acres, demanded considerable time and energy, and caring for his mother, which, in effect, was a twenty-four-hour job, he also worked as a ship’s plumber at a yard over twenty kilometres away. He was an unusually sensitive man, as delicate as the most delicate of plants, with absolutely no interest in or talent for the practical sides of life, so everything he did, what constituted the basis of his everyday life, he must have had to force himself to do. Day in, day out, month in, month out, year in, year out. Sheer unmitigated willpower. That he had come to this was not necessarily due to the fact that he had never succeeded in breaking out of the conditions he was born into, as one might perhaps imagine, just staying in his familiar environment because it was familiar, it was more likely a consequence of his sensitive nature. For where could a young man with a proclivity for ideals and perfection turn in the mid-1970s? Had he been young in the 1920s, like his father, maybe he would have sought out and felt at home in the vital nature-loving late romantic current that swept through our culture, at least in the nynorsk -writing section of it, the one within which Olav Nygard, Olav Duun, Kristoffer Uppdal and Olav Aukrust wrote and which Olav Hauge was later to carry over into our own age; had he been young in the 1950s it might perhaps have been the notions and theories of cultural radicalism he would have absorbed, unless, that is, its opposite, the slowly dying forces of cultural conservativism had caught hold of him first. His youth, however, had been spent neither in the 1920s nor the 1950s, but in the early 1970s, so he became a member of the (Marxist — Leninist) Communist Workers’ Party and proletarianised himself, as the expression went in those days. Started working as a pipe fitter on ships because he believed in a better world than this. Not only for a few months or years, as was the case for most of his party colleagues, but for nigh on two decades. He was one of the very few who didn’t give up his ideals when times changed, but clung to them even though the cost, both social and private, increased as time passed. Being a communist in a rural community was a different matter from being a communist in an urban setting. In a town you were not alone, there were other, like-minded people, there was a community spirit, in addition to which your convictions were not visible in all contexts. In the country you were ‘the communist’. That was his identity, his life. Being communist at the beginning of the 70s, being borne on the wave, was also quite a different matter from being a communist in the 1980s, when all the rats had long since left the ship. A lonely communist sounds like a paradox, but that was how it was for Kjartan. I remember my father having discussions with him those summers when we visited my grandparents, their loud voices coming from the living room below when we were trying to sleep, and even though I couldn’t articulate it, nor think it, I could sense there was a difference between them, and that the difference was fundamental. For my father the discussions had limited scope, their sole function was to point out to Kjartan how he was deluding himself, for Kjartan they were a question of life and death, all or nothing. Hence the irritation in my father’s voice, the fervour in Kjartan’s. It was also apparent, or so it seemed to me at any rate, that my father’s words were grounded in the real world, that what he said and thought belonged here, was related to us, to our schooldays and football matches, our comics and fishing trips, our snow-shovelling and Saturday porridge, while Kjartan spoke of something else, something related to another place. Of course he could not accept that what he believed in, and in a way had dedicated his life to, had nothing to do with reality, as my father, along with everyone else, asserted on every occasion. That reality was not as Kjartan described it and never would be. That would have implied he was a dreamer. And a dreamer was precisely what he was not! Concrete, material, physical, down-to-earth reality was precisely what he was talking about! The situation was highly ironic. There he was defending theories about sticking together and solidarity, yet he was the one who had been ostracised and stood alone. He was the one who observed the world through idealistic abstract eyes, who had a more refined soul than any of the others, he was the one who lifted and carried, hammered and pounded, welded and screwed, scrabbled and crawled round ship after ship, who milked the cows and fed them, who shovelled muck into the muck cellar and in the spring spread it over the fields, who mowed the grass and dried the hay, maintained buildings and looked after his mother, who needed more and more help as the years passed. That became his life. The fact that communism began to wane at the beginning of the 1980s, and that the intense discussions he’d had on all sides imperceptibly abated until one day they were completely gone might have changed the meaning of it, but not the content. It continued as before, along the same course: up at the crack of dawn to milk and feed the cows, catch the bus to the shipyard, work all day, come home and see to his parents, walk his mother around the living room, if she was capable of it, or sit bending and massaging her legs, help her to the toilet, maybe get her clothes ready for the following day, do whatever had to be done outdoors, whether it be bringing in the cows and milking them or something else, then back to his place, have supper and sleep until the next morning — unless grandma was taken so ill that grandad had to fetch him in the course of the night. This was Kjartan’s life, as it appeared from the outside. When his communist phase started I was only a couple of years old, and when it ended, at least the active, rhetorical part, I had just finished first school, so all of it was no more than a vague backdrop to the image I had of him when I turned sixteen and started taking an interest in who people ‘were’. More significant by far for my image of him was the fact that he wrote poetry. Not because I was fond of poetry, but because it ‘said’ more about him. You didn’t write poems if you didn’t have to, that is, unless you were a poet. He didn’t talk to us about it, but made no secret of it either. At any rate, we knew about it. One year some poems were published by Dag og Tid , another year in Klassekampen , small simple pictures of an industrial worker’s reality which despite their modest proportions had gained a certain prestige in the Hatløy family, where books enjoyed great popularity. When he had a poem published on the back page of the literary journal Vinduet beside a small photograph of himself, and then a few years later his poems covered two whole pages of the same publication he was, in our eyes, a fully blown poet. It was at this time he started reading philosophy. Of an evening he sat in the house high above the fjord fighting his way through Heidegger’s incredibly intricate German in Sein und Zeit — presumably word by word, because to my knowledge he had not read or spoken German since his schooldays — and the poets Heidegger wrote about, especially Hölderlin and the pre-Socratic writers he referred to, and Nietzsche. Nietzsche. He later described reading Heidegger as like a homecoming. It is no exaggeration to say that it filled him to the brim. And that it was a kind of religious experience. An awakening, a conversion, an old world was filled with new meaning. At that time my father had left the family, so Yngve, my mother and I had begun to celebrate Christmas at our grandparents’ where Kjartan, now in his mid-thirties, still lived and worked. The four or five Christmas Eves we were there are without doubt the most memorable I have experienced. Grandma was ill and sat huddled at the table, shivering. Her hands shook, her arms shook, her head, her feet. Now and then she had bouts of cramp and had to be taken to a chair where her legs had to be practically forced into a bent position and then massaged. But her mind was clear, her eyes were clear; she saw us and she was happy to see us. Grandad, small and rotund and lively, told us stories whenever he could, and when he laughed, as he always did at his own stories, the tears rolled down his cheeks. But this didn’t happen as often as it could have done because Kjartan was there, and Kjartan had sat for a whole year reading Heidegger, had been filled with Heidegger amid the grinding pointless working life of his without a soul to share it with, because no one within a radius of several kilometres had even heard of Heidegger, and no one wanted to either, although I had an inkling he had tried various people, he must have done, so taken with him was he, but it led nowhere, no one understood, no one wanted to understand, he was on his own with this, and then in we walked, his sister Sissel, who was a nursing teacher, interested in politics, literature and philosophy, her son Yngve, who went to university, something Kjartan had always dreamed of doing, more and more so in recent years, and her son Karl Ove. I was seventeen years old, at gymnas , and even though I didn’t understand a word of his poems he knew I read books. That was enough for him. We came in the door and his sluice gates opened. All the thoughts that had accumulated over the last year came flooding out. It didn’t matter that we didn’t understand, it didn’t matter that it was Christmas Eve, that the mutton ribs, potatoes, mashed swede, Christmas ale and aquavit were on the table; he talked about Heidegger from within, without a single communicative link to the outside world, it was Dasein and Das Man , it was Trakl and Hölderlin, the great poet Hölderlin, it was Heraclitus and Socrates, Nietzsche and Plato, it was the birds in the trees and the waves in the fjord, it was man’s Dasein and the advent of existence, it was the sun in the sky and the rain in the air, the cat’s eyes and the plummeting waterfall. With his hair sticking out in all directions, his suit askew and his tie full of stains he sat there talking, his eyes aglow, they were really glowing, and I will always remember it, for it was pitch dark outside, the rain was beating against the windows, it was Christmas Eve in Norway 1986, our Christmas Eve, the presents were under the tree, everyone was dressed up, and the sole topic of conversation was Heidegger. Grandma was shivering, grandad gnawing at a bone, mum listening attentively, Yngve had stopped listening. As for me, I was indifferent to everything, and above all happy it was Christmas. But even though I didn’t understand a word of what Kjartan said, and nothing of what he wrote, nor anything of the poems he praised with such passion, I did understand intuitively that he was right, that there was such a thing as a supreme philosophy and a supreme poetry, and that even if you didn’t understand it, were unable to partake in it, you only had yourself to blame. Since then, whenever I have thought about the supreme, I have thought about Hölderlin, and when I’ve thought about Hölderlin it has always been associated with mountains and fjords, night and rain, the sky and the earth and my uncle’s glowing eyes.