Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

Part of this burden was also what had happened between Tonje and me, and not least what was going to happen.

Had I left her? Was our life together over? Or was this just a break, a few months of separation for both of us to think things through, each from our own angle?

We had been together for eight years, married for six of them. She was still the person I was closest to, it was barely twenty-four hours since we had shared a bed, and if I didn’t turn away now, didn’t look in a different direction, it would remain like that because this, I intuited, was up to me.

What did I want?

I didn’t know.

I was lying on a sofa just outside Stockholm, knowing not a soul, and everything in me was chaos and unrest. The uncertainty penetrated to my core, through to that which defined who I was.

A face appeared in the glass door to the tiny balcony. It disappeared as I stared at it. My heart beat faster. I closed my eyes, and the same face appeared to me there. I saw it from the side, it turned to me and stared right at me. It changed. It changed again. It changed again. I had never seen any of these faces before, but all of them were profoundly realistic and significant. What kind of parade was this? Then the nose became a beak, the eyes predator eyes and suddenly a hawk was sitting inside me and staring.

I turned on my side.

All I wanted was to be a decent person. A good, honest, upright person who could look people in the eye and everyone knew they could trust.

But such was not the case. I was a deserter, and I had done terrible things. And now I had deserted again.

The next morning I was woken by Geir’s high-pitched voice. He sat on the end of the sofa holding a cup of burning hot coffee out for me.

‘Good morning!’ he said. ‘It’s seven o’clock! Don’t tell me you’re a night owl?’

I sat up and scowled at him.

‘I usually get up at one in the afternoon,’ I said. ‘And I can’t talk to anyone for the first hour.’

‘Worse luck you!’ Geir said. ‘Anyway, I’m not a spectator of my own life, that’s simply wrong. I see others, I’m good at that, but I don’t see myself. Not a hope. Besides, spectator is perhaps the wrong word in this context. It’s a kind of euphemism. The real question is whether you are capable of action or not. Do you want the coffee or not?’

‘I always drink tea in the morning,’ I said. ‘But I’ll take it as a favour to you.’

I took the coffee and sipped.

‘ Emperor and Galilean , to finish the conversation,’ he said, ‘failed basically for the same reason that Zarathustra did. But the point is, and I didn’t get round to this yesterday, that what they say can only be said as a result of having failed. That’s important.’

He looked at me as if expecting an answer. I nodded a couple of times, took another sip of coffee.

‘And as far as your novel is concerned, it wasn’t primarily the story about the thirteen-year-old that shook me. It was the fact that you went so far, put so much of yourself into it. That requires courage.’

‘Not for me,’ I said. ‘I don’t give a shit about myself.’

‘And it’s noticeable! But how many are like you?’

I shrugged. I wanted to slump back on the sofa and go on sleeping, but Geir was almost jumping around on the arm.

‘How about a trip to town? So that I can show you around. Stockholm has no soul, but it’s fantastically beautiful. There’s no way of getting away from that.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Though perhaps not right this minute? What is the time actually?’

‘Ten past eight,’ he said, standing up. ‘Get your rags on and we’ll have some breakfast. Christina’s making bacon and eggs.’

No, I didn’t want to get up. And having forced myself to, I didn’t want to leave the flat. What I fancied was occupying the sofa for the rest of the day. After breakfast I tried to delay departure, but Geir’s energy and willpower were of the inflexible variety.

‘Bit of walking’ll do you good,’ he said. ‘In your depressed state staying indoors would be the death of you, surely you understand that. So, up you get! Come on! We’re going now!’

On the way to the Metro station, with him striding out and me lagging behind, he turned to me with a grimace which was probably meant to be a smile.

‘Have you retrieved the events in northern Norway from your subconscious now, or is it still just as black?’ he asked.

‘I sussed out what had happened just before I fell asleep,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind admitting it was a relief. For a while I thought you were right and I had in fact repressed the whole business. It was nothing special.’

‘And what’s the explanation then?’

‘You mixed up three different stories and made one, either then or when you read the book. I had a girlfriend up there, but she was sixteen and I was eighteen. No, hang on, she was fifteen. Or sixteen. I’m not sure. Not thirteen anyway.’

‘You said you were in love with one of your students.’

‘I could not have said that.’

‘You bloody well did. I’ve got the memory of an elephant.’

We stopped by the barriers, I bought a ticket and then we walked down the long concrete tunnel to the platform.

‘There was one girl in love with me, I remember. That must be what you can remember. And so you’ve mixed her up with the girlfriend I had and was actually in love with.’

‘It may have been like that,’ he said. ‘But that’s not what you told me.’

‘Pack it in now, for Christ’s sake. I haven’t come to Stockholm to find more problems. The whole point was to get away from them.’

‘You’ve come to the right man then,’ he said. ‘I won’t say another word.’

We caught the Metro to town, emerged from one station after the other all day, each time a new urban landscape revealed itself, all very beautiful. But I couldn’t fit it all together: in the four to five days we wandered around from early morning to late afternoon Stockholm was no more than unconnected fragments for me. We walked side by side, he pointed left and we went left, right and we went right, all the while talking in loud enthusiastic tones about what we saw and all his associations. Now and then I got tired of the unequal power distance, with him deciding everything, and then I said no, we won’t go right, we’re going left, and he smiled and said, OK, if that makes you happy, or fine, if that makes you feel better. We had lunch at a new place every day. In Norway I was used to something on bread, I dined out maybe twice a year; Geir and Christina did it every day, often both lunch and dinner, compared with Norway it cost nothing, and the choice was enormous. My instinct was the student cafés — in other words, those places that most resembled what I knew from Bergen — but Geir refused, he wasn’t twenty any more, as he put it, and wanted nothing to do with youth culture. In the afternoons and evenings he forced me to contact all the Swedes I knew, all the Swedes I had dealt with during my time at Vagant , all the Swedes my editor knew, because he said it was nigh on impossible to find a place to live in this town, everything worked through contacts. I didn’t want to, I wanted to sleep, lounge about, but he kept nudging me, this had to be done, there was no way out. We went to a big poetry slam — Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Russian writers reading their works, among them Steffen Sørum, who opened by saying ‘Hello, Stockholm!’ as though he was some sodding rock star, and I blushed on behalf of our country. Inger Christensen read. A Russian staggered drunkenly around the stage shouting that no one liked poetry — YOU ALL HATE POETRY! he yelled — while his Swedish translator, a bashful man with a little rucksack on his back, tried to calm him down and finally, as the Russian paced the stage in silence, managed to read some poems. It ended with a warm reconciliation when the Russian first poked the translator in the back and then hugged him. Ingmar Lemhagen was in the audience, he knew everyone, and through him I managed to slip backstage and asked all the Swedish writers if they knew of anywhere to stay. Raattamaa had a flat, he said, I could move in next week in fact, no problem. We went out with them, first to Malmen, where the Swedish poet Marie Silkeberg leaned over to me and asked why especially she should read my novel, and the best reply that occurred to me was that perhaps it was the kind of book you were simply drawn into, to which she responded with a fleeting smile and subsequently, not so fast that it was offensive, nor so slowly that it was without significance, glanced round for someone else to talk to. She was a poet; I was a writer of light fiction. Afterwards everyone went back to hers for drinks. Geir was, unlike me, full of contempt for poets and poetry, he viewed them with hatred in his eyes and he ended up at odds with Silkeberg merely by implying that such a large flat in such a central location must have cost quite a packet. As we walked down towards Slussen in the early morning he spoke about the cultural middle class, all the privileges they had, how literature was merely a ticket into society, and he spoke about their manifold ideologies. He talked about their so-called solidarity with the worse off, their flirtations with the working class and their undermining of such entities as quality, and what a catastrophe it was that quality was subordinate to politics and ideology, not only in literature, but also in universities, and its logical conclusion, in the whole of society. I couldn’t relate any of this to the reality I knew, I contradicted him occasionally, saying he was paranoid, that he was making sweeping statements, there was always a person behind an ideology, and sometimes I just let him prattle away. However, he said, as we were going through the station barriers and boarding the escalator, Inger Christensen was unique. She was utterly fantastic. In a league of her own. Although everyone says so, and you know what I think of consensuses, she was.