Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘I don’t know anything about Bjørnson.’

‘I think it’s Sigurd Slembe . The time to act. To act or not to act. It’s classic Hamlet. To be an actor in your own life or a spectator.’

‘And you are?’

‘Good question.’ A silence arose. Then he said, ‘I’m probably a spectator, with elements of choreographed action. But I don’t really know. I think there’s a lot inside me that I can’t see. And so it doesn’t exist. And you?’

‘Spectator.’

‘But you’re here. And yesterday you were in Bergen.’

‘Yes. But this is not the result of any decision. It was forced.’

‘That’s perhaps another way of making a decision, hm? Letting whatever happens do it for you?’

‘Maybe.’

‘That’s strange, that is,’ he said. ‘The more unreflective you are, the more active you are. You know, the boxers I wrote about had an incredible presence. But that meant they weren’t spectators of themselves, so they didn’t remember anything. Not a thing! Share the moment with me here and now. That was their offer. And of course that works for them, they always have to enter the ring again, and if you’ve been given a pasting in the previous fight it’s best if you don’t remember it too well, otherwise you’ve had it. But their presence was absolutely amazing. It filled everything. Vita contemplativa or vita activa , I suppose they’re the two forms, aren’t they? It’s an old problem of course. Besets all spectators. But not actors. It’s a typical spectator problem…’

Behind us, Christina stuck her head through the door.

‘Would you two like some coffee?’

‘Please,’ I said.

We went into the kitchen and sat down round the table. From the window there was a view of the road, which lay deserted under the street lighting. I asked Christina what she had been drawing when we arrived and she said she was making models of shoes for a factory in the far north of the country. The absurdity of sitting in a kitchen in the middle of a Swedish satellite town with two people I didn’t know suddenly struck me. What was I doing? What was I doing here? Christina started making dinner, I sat in the living room with Geir telling him about Tonje, how it had been, what had happened, how my life in Bergen had been. He summarised in a similar way what had happened in his life since he had left Bergen thirteen years before. What caught my attention most was a debate he’d had in Svenska Dagbladet with a Swedish professor who had made him so angry that one morning he had nailed up the last defamatory arguments on the castle door in Uppsala like a second Luther. He had also tried to piss on the door, but Christina had dragged him away.

We had lamb burgers, fried potatoes and Greek salad. I was starving, the plates were empty within seconds and Christina wore a guilty expression. I met her apologies with counter-apologies. She was clearly cut from the same cloth as me. We drank some wine, chatted about the differences between Sweden and Norway, and while I thought to myself, no, Sweden’s not like that, and Norway’s not like that, I nodded and played along. At around eleven I could barely keep my eyes open, Geir brought some bed linen, I would be sleeping on the living-room sofa, and while we stretched out the sheet his face suddenly changed. His face was completely different . Then it changed back, and I had to make an effort to keep it fixed, that was what he looked like, that was him.

It changed again.

I secured the last flap under the mattress and sat down on the sofa. My hands were shaking. What had happened?

He turned to me. His face was once more as it was when I had met him at Central Station.

‘I haven’t said anything about your novel yet,’ he said, taking a seat on the other side of the table. ‘But it made an indelible impression on me. I was deeply shaken after reading it.’

‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

‘Because you went so far. You went so unbelievably far. I was glad you did, I was sitting here, smiling, because you had brought it off. When we met you wanted to be a writer. No one else had had the idea. Only you. And then you achieved it. But that wasn’t why I was shaken. It was because you went so far. Do you really have to go that far, I thought at the time. And it was frightening. Speaking for myself, I can’t go that far.’

‘What do you mean? How do you mean I went so far? It’s just a standard novel.’

‘You say things about yourself it’s unheard of to say. Not least the story of the thirteen-year-old. I’d never have thought you would dare.’

A cold wind seemed to blow through me.

‘I don’t quite understand what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘I made it up. It wasn’t so much of an effort, if that’s what you think.’

He smiled and looked me straight in the eye.

‘You told me about the relationship when we met in Bergen. You’d come from northern Norway the summer before, but you were still full of what had happened up north. That was what you talked about. Your father, and then falling in love when you were sixteen and you had identified with Hamsun’s Lieutenant Glahn, and you said you’d had a relationship with a thirteen-year-old when you were a teacher in northern Norway.’

‘Ha ha,’ I said. ‘That’s not very funny, in case you think it is.’

He wasn’t smiling any more.

‘Are you saying you don’t remember? She was in your class, you had fallen for her hook, line and sinker, I gathered, but everything was a mess; you said, among other things, you’d spoken to her mother at a party — and the scene is precisely in the novel as you’d described it to me. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that though, if you know the desire is mutual, mind you. But how you know that is quite a different matter. That’s the problem. I’ve got an old school pal who impregnated a thirteen-year-old — he was seventeen I should add, while you were eighteen, but what the fuck, that part is irrelevant here. What’s relevant is that you wrote about it.’

He looked at me.

‘What is it? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘You don’t mean it seriously, do you?’ I said. ‘That I said that?’

‘Yes, I do. You did say that. It’s etched into my memory.’

‘But it didn’t happen.’

‘You definitely said that it did.’

It felt like a hand was squeezing my heart. How could he say such a thing? Could I have repressed such a major event? Just shrugged it off and forgotten all about it, and then written it all down without thinking for a moment that it was true?’

No.

No, no, no.

It was unthinkable.

Absolutely, totally unthinkable.

So how could he say such a thing?

He got up.

‘I’m sorry, Karl Ove,’ he said. ‘But you did say it.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘But I don’t have the impression you’re lying.’

He shook his head and smiled.

‘Sleep well then.’

‘Sleep well.’

Listening to the faint sounds of a couple settling down for the night in the bedroom on the other side of the door, I lay with my eyes open, staring into the room. It was filled with the weak moon-like light from the street lamps outside. My mind ran wild trying to find a solution to what Geir had said while my feelings had already condemned me: such a firm grip did they have on my innards that my whole body hurt. Now and then there was a low hum, coming, I supposed, from the Metro a few hundred metres away, in which I sought solace. Beneath it there was a kind of distant roar which, if I hadn’t known better, sounded like the sea. But I was in Stockholm, there had to be a big motorway nearby.

I rejected all of it, that I might have repressed anything so significant was out of the question. Yet there were large holes in my memory. I had drunk a lot in the days I lived in the north, like the young fishermen I hung around with at weekends, a bottle of spirits vanished in the course of an evening, at least one. Entire evenings and nights had disappeared from my memory, and were left like tunnels inside me, full of darkness and winds and my own skirling emotions. What had I done? What had I done? When I started studying in Bergen it continued, whole evenings and nights disappeared, I was on the loose in the town, that was how it felt, I could arrive home with the front of my jacket covered in blood. What had happened? I could arrive home in clothes that weren’t mine. Could wake up on a roof, could wake up under a bush in the park, and once I had woken up in the corridor of an institution. The police had come and taken me away. Questioning followed: someone had broken into a nearby house and stolen money, was it me? I didn’t know, but I said no, no, no. All these holes, all this unthinking darkness over so many years in which some mysterious almost ghostly event could be played out on the periphery of my memory had filled me with guilt, large tracts of guilt, and when Geir told me I had said I’d had a relationship with a thirteen-year-old in northern Norway, I could not, with my hand on my heart, say no, I hadn’t, for there was some doubt, so much had happened, why not this too?