Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘Yes,’ I said.

Beneath us the draught from the approaching train blew a plastic bag up from the platform. Like an animal with headlamps as eyes, the train appeared at the other end of the darkness.

‘She was a different class,’ Geir said. ‘World class.’

I hadn’t experienced anything special when she read. But before the reading I had wondered about her: a small plump elderly woman drinking at the bar with a handbag over her arm.

‘ The Butterfly Valley is a sonnet cycle,’ I said, stepping onto the platform as the train came to a halt. ‘It must be the most exacting form of all. The first line of all the sonnets has to form the final, concluding sonnet.’

‘Yes, Hadle has tried to explain it to me several times,’ Geir said. ‘But I never remember.’

‘Italo Calvino does something similar in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller ,’ I said. ‘But it’s not quite as strict of course. The title of each narrative in the end forms its own little narrative. Have you read it?’

The doors opened, we went in and sat opposite each other.

‘Calvino, Borges, Cortázar, you can keep them,’ he said. ‘I don’t like fantasy and I don’t like constructs. For me it’s only people that count.’

‘But what about Christensen?’ I said. ‘You’d have to look far and wide for a writer who uses more constructs. What she does sometimes is more like maths.’

‘Not from what I heard,’ Geir said, and I looked out of the window as the train began to move.

‘What you heard was the voice,’ I said. ‘It overrides all numbers and systems. And it’s the same with Borges as well, at least when he’s at his best.’

‘Makes no difference,’ Geir said.

‘You don’t want to read it?’

‘No.’

‘OK.’

We sat silent for a while, caught in the silence into which all the other passengers had also sunk. Vacant gazes, motionless bodies, the gently vibrating walls and floor of the train.

‘Attending a poetry reading is like being in a hospital,’ he said as we left the next station. ‘Full of neuroses.’

‘Not Christensen though?’

‘No, precisely, that’s what I was saying. She did something else.’

‘Perhaps the tight construct you won’t accept balanced it out? Objectivised it?’

‘Possible,’ he said. ‘But for her the evening would have been a total waste of time.’

‘And the guy with the flat,’ I said. ‘Rataajaama, was that his name?’

The next morning I rang the number I had been given by Raattamaa. No one answered. I rang again and again during the day and the next day. No answer. He never picked up the phone, so on the third day we went to another literary event in which he was supposed to be taking part, sat in a bar across the street and waited until it was over, and when he came out I went over to him, he looked down when he recognised me, sorry, it was too late, the flat had gone. Through Geir Gulliksen I managed to fix up a meeting with two editors at Norstedts. I had lunch with them and they gave me a list of writers I should contact — ‘They’re not necessarily the best, but they’re the nicest’ — and said I could stay in the company’s guest apartment for two weeks. I accepted their offer, and while staying there I received a positive reply from Joar Tiberg, one of whose poems we had published in Vagant , a long one, he knew a girl at Ordfront Magasin who would be away for a month: I could stay there.

At regular intervals I phoned Tonje, told her how I was and what I was doing, and she told me what was happening where she was. Neither of us asked what we were really doing.

I began to run. And I began to write again. Four years had already passed since the first novel, and I had nothing. Lying on the water bed in the conspicuously feminine room I was renting I decided on one of two options. Either I would begin writing about my life the way it was now, like a diary and open to the future, with everything that had happened over recent years as a dark undercurrent — in my mind I called it the Stockholm Diary — or I would continue with the story I had started three days before coming here, about a trip to the skerries one summer’s night when I was twelve, when dad caught crabs and I found a dead seagull. The atmosphere, the heat and the darkness, the crabs and the bonfire, all the screaming gulls defending their nests as Yngve, dad and I walked across the island, it had something, but not perhaps enough to carry a novel.

During the day I read in bed, once in a while Geir came down, then we went out for lunch, and in the evenings I wrote or I ran or I caught the train to Geir and Christina’s, to whom I had become quite attached in the course of these two weeks. Beside the conversation about literature and beside all the political and ideological topics Geir broached, we also talked continually about subjects that were closer to us. In my case the subject was inexhaustible, everything came up, from events in my childhood to my father’s death, from summers in Sørbøvåg to the winter I met Tonje. Geir was shrewd, he was on the outside and saw through everything, time after time. His story, which started to take form later, as though first of all he had to be sure I could be trusted, was the complete antithesis of mine. Whereas he came from a working-class home without any ambitions or as much as a single book on the shelves, I was from a middle-class home, with both my mother and my father having done courses as mature students to get on, and we had the whole of world literature at our fingertips. Whereas he was one of the boys who fought in the playground and was barred and sent to the school psychologist, I was one of the children who always tried to curry favour with the teacher by being as good as possible. Whereas he played with soldiers and dreamed of owning a gun one day, I played football and dreamed of turning professional one day. Whereas I ran for election as a school rep and wrote an essay about the revolution in Nicaragua, he was a member of a Home Guard cadet force and the youth wing of a conservative political party. Whereas I wrote a poem about the amputated hands of children and human cruelty after watching Apocalypse Now, he examined the possibility of becoming an American citizen to enlist in the US Army.

Despite all this, we were able to talk to each other. I understood him, he understood me, and for the first time in my adult life I could say what I thought to someone without reservations.

I decided to go for the crab and the seagull story, wrote twenty pages, wrote thirty, my short runs became longer and longer, and soon I ran all the way round Söder, while the kilos flowed off me and conversations with Tonje became fewer and fewer.

Then I met Linda and the sun rose.

I can’t find a better way to express it. The sun rose in my life. At first, as dawn breaking on the horizon, almost as if to say, this is where you have to look. Then came the first rays of sunshine, everything became clearer, lighter, more alive, and I became happier and happier, and then it hung in the sky of my life and shone and shone and shone.

The first time I set eyes on Linda was in the summer of 1999 at a seminar for new Nordic writers at Biskops-Arnö Folk High School, outside Stockholm. Standing outside a building with the sun on her face. Wearing sunglasses, a white T-shirt with a stripe across the chest and green military fatigues. She was thin and beautiful. She had an aura which was dark, wild, erotic and destructive. I dropped everything I was holding.

When I saw her for the second time six months had passed. She was sitting at a table in an Oslo café and was wearing a leather jacket, blue jeans, black boots and was so fragile, overwrought and confused that all I wanted to do was hold her in my arms. I didn’t.