Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘So why do you live here?’ I asked.

He directed a fleeting glance at me.

‘It’s a perfect country if you want to be left in peace,’ he said, letting his eyes roam again. ‘I don’t object to coldness. I don’t want it in my life, but I can easily live my life within it, if you understand the difference. It’s nice to look at. And it’s practical. I despise it, but I also benefit from it. So, shall we go?’

‘Yes, let’s,’ I said, stubbing out the cigarette, drinking the last drop of coffee, unhitching my coat from the chair, putting it on, swinging the rucksack over my shoulder and following him into the concourse. When I was alongside him he turned to me.

‘Can you walk on the other side? I’m a bit hard of hearing in that ear.’

I did as he asked. Noticed his feet were at ten to two, like duck feet. I had always reacted to this. Ballet dancers walk like this. Once I had a girlfriend who was a ballet dancer. It was one of the few things I didn’t like about her, walking with her feet sticking out to the side.

‘Where are your bags?’ he asked.

‘Down below,’ I answered. ‘Then to the right.’

‘Let’s go down then,’ he said, motioning towards a staircase at the end of the station.

As far as I could see, there was no difference between how people behaved here and in Oslo Central Station. At least nothing obvious. The differences he had been talking about seemed minimal, presumably they had been ratcheted up after many years of exile.

‘Looks pretty much like Norway to me,’ I said. ‘Just as much bumping into one another.’

‘Just you wait,’ he said with a glance and a smile. It was a wry smile, a superior-knowledge smile. If there was something I couldn’t bear it was the profession of superior knowledge, in whatever form it came. It asserted I knew less.

‘Look there,’ I said, stopping and pointing to the electronic board above us.

‘What at?’ Geir asked.

‘The arrivals board,’ I said. ‘This is why I came here. For this very reason.’

‘What do you mean?’ Geir asked.

‘Look. Södertälje. Nynäshamn. Gävle. Arboga. Västerås. Örebro. Halmstad. Uppsala. Mora. Göteborg. Malmö. There’s something incredibly exotic about it. About Sweden. The language is almost the same, the towns are almost the same. If you look at Swedish rural districts they’re similar to the districts in Norway. Apart from minor details. And it’s these small divergences, these small differences that are almost familiar, almost the same, yet aren’t, that I find so unbelievably attractive.’

He stared at me in disbelief.

‘You’re crazy!’ he said.

Then he laughed.

We set off again. It was unlike me to say anything like this, out of the blue, but it had felt as if I should make my case, not allow him to dominate.

‘I’ve always felt that attraction,’ I continued. ‘Not for India or Burma or Africa, the big differences, that has never interested me. But Japan, for example. Not Tokyo or the cities, but the rural areas in Japan, the small coastal towns. Have you seen how similar the landscape is to ours in Norway? But the culture, their houses and their customs, are totally alien, totally incomprehensible. Or Maine in the USA? Have you seen the coast there? The terrain is so similar to Sørland, but everything man-made is American. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘No, but I’m listening.’

‘That was all,’ I said.

We descended into the underground hall, also packed with people on the move, went to the luggage lockers and I pulled out two bags. Geir took one and we made our way through the hall to the Metro platforms a few hundred metres away.

Half an hour later we were walking through the centre of a 1950s satellite town, which in the March street-lamp-illuminated darkness appeared to be fully intact. It was called Västertorp. All the buildings were square and made of brick, differing from one another only in size and surrounded on all sides by high-rise blocks. The buildings in the town centre were lower with a variety of shops on the ground floor. Pine trees stood motionless between the blocks. I could see the occasional hill and glimpse the occasional lake between the tree trunks in the light from the many front entrances and windows that seemed to have shot up from the ground. Geir talked without cease, as he had also done on the Metro journey here. For the main part he had been explaining whatever we saw. In between, there had been the sound of the station names, so wonderful and unfamiliar. Slussen, Mariatorget, Zinkensdamm, Hornstull, Liljeholmen, Midsommarkransen, Telefonplan…

‘There it is,’ he said, pointing to one of the houses by the road.

We went in one entrance, up a staircase, through a door. Books lined the wall, a compact row of jackets on clothes hangers, the aroma of someone else’s life.

‘Hi, Christina, aren’t you going to say hello to our Norwegian friend?’ he said, peering into the room on the left. I stepped forward. A woman sitting at a table inside, with a pencil in her hand and paper in front of her, looked up.

‘Hello, Karl Ove,’ she said. ‘ Trevligt to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.’

‘I haven’t heard anything about you, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘Well, apart from the little that’s in Geir’s book.’

She smiled, we shook hands, she began to clear the table and put on some coffee. Geir showed me the flat, it didn’t take long. It consisted of two rooms, both covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. In one, the living room, there was a corner where Christina worked; Geir worked in the second, which was a bedroom. He opened some of the glass cabinets and showed me the books. They were so straight you would have thought he had used a spirit level, and they were organised according to series and authors, not alphabetically.

‘You’re organised, I can see,’ I said.

‘I’m organised in everything,’ he said. ‘Absolutely everything. There’s nothing in my life that I have not planned or allowed for.’

‘That sounds frightening,’ I said and looked at him.

He smiled.

‘For me it’s frightening to meet someone who moves to Stockholm at one day’s notice.’

‘I had to,’ I said.

‘To will is to have to will,’ he said. ‘As the mystic Maximos says in Emperor and Galilean . Or to be precise, “What is the value of living? Everything is sport and mockery. To will is to have to will.” That was the play in which Ibsen tried to be wise. Erudite, at any rate. He makes a stab at a huge damn synthesis there. “I defy necessity! I will not serve it. I am free, free, free.” It’s interesting. “A hell of a good play,” as Beckett says about Waiting for Godot . I was really taken by it when I read it. He communicates with a time that is past. All the learning, which is a prerequisite, has gone. It’s very interesting. Have you read it?’

I shook my head.

‘I haven’t read any of his historical plays.’

‘It was written at a time when everything was being re-evaluated. That’s what he does. Catilina, you know, was a symbol of treachery. But Ibsen gives him a makeover. It’s as though we should have done the same to Quisling almost. He had balls when he was writing it. But all the values he turns round come from antiquity, and that makes it almost impossible for us to understand. We don’t read Cicero, do we… We-ell, writing a play in which he attempts to unite emperors and Galileans! He fails, of course, but at least he fails big time. He’s too symbolic there. But also bold. You can see how much he wants the big time. I don’t think I believe Ibsen when he says he only read the Bible. Schiller gets a look-in here. Die Räuber . The Robbers. There’s also a kind of rebel figure. Like Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist. By the way, there’s a parallel with Bjørnson. Is it Sigurd Slembe , can you remember?’