Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

What was the point of sitting there and saying hi, hi, erm, erm, how are you?

I closed my eyes and tried to picture her.

Had I felt anything for her?

No.

Or yes, I liked her and perhaps I felt some tenderness for her, after all that had happened, but there was no more to it than that. The rest I had put behind me, quite definitely.

Best like that.

I got up, stuffed my trunks, a towel and some shampoo in a bag, put on my jacket and walked to Medborgarplatsen, into Forsgrénska Badet, which was almost empty at this time of day, changed, entered the swimming hall, onto the block and dived in. I swam a thousand metres beneath the pale March light that fell in through the large window at the end, to and fro, up and down, under the water, over the water, without thinking about anything but the number of metres, the number of minutes, all while trying to perform the strokes as perfectly as possible.

Afterwards I went to the sauna, thought about the time I tried to write short stories based on small ideas, like a man with a prosthetic limb in the swimming pool changing room, without knowing what, why or how.

What had been the big idea?

A man tied to a chair in a room, in a flat, somewhere in Bergen, in the end shot through the head, dead, but still alive in the text, an ego that lasted well into its funeral and the grave.

Gesticulating, that was what I had been doing.

And for so long.

I wiped the sweat from my brow with the towel, looked down at the rolls of fat sagging from my stomach. Pale and fat and stupid.

But in Stockholm!

I got up, went to the showers and stood under one.

I knew no one here. I was utterly free.

If I left Tonje, if this was the path I was to take, I could stay here for a month or two, perhaps all summer, and then go to… well, wherever I felt like going. Buenos Aires. Tokyo. New York. Go down to South Africa and take the train to Lake Victoria. Or Moscow, why not? That would be fantastic.

I closed my eyes and soaped my hair. Rinsed it, went in and opened my locker, dressed.

I was free if I wanted to be.

I didn’t need to write any more.

I put the towel and my wet shorts in the bag, went out into the grey chilly day, to Saluhallen, the food hall, where I had a ciabatta roll leaning against a counter. Went home, tried to write a little while hoping that Geir would come earlier than he had said. Went to bed and watched TV, an American soap, fell asleep.

When I woke it was dark outside. Someone was knocking at the door.

I opened up, it was Geir, we shook hands.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘How was it?’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Where shall we go?’

Geir shrugged while walking round and inspecting all the ornaments inside, stopping in front of the bookshelves and turning.

‘Isn’t it strange that you find the same books everywhere you go? I mean, she’s around twenty-five, isn’t she? Works at Ordfront , lives in Söder? But these are the books she’s got and no others.’

‘Yes, very strange,’ I said. ‘Where shall we go? Guldapan? Kvarnen? Pelikanen?’

‘Not Kvarnen at any rate. Guldapan maybe? Are you hungry?’

I nodded.

‘Let’s go there. The food’s not bad. Good chicken.’

Outside, it felt as if it could start snowing at any moment. Cold and raw and damp.

‘Come on then,’ Geir said as we strode along. ‘Good in what way?’

‘We met, chatted and left. That’s pretty much how it was.’

‘Was she how you remembered her?’

‘We-ell, bit different maybe.’

‘In what way?’

‘How many times are you going to ask that?’

‘I really mean it. What did you feel when you saw her?’

‘Less than I thought I would.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Why? What sort of sodding question is that? How can I know? I feel what I feel. It’s not possible to identify every tiny fluctuation of the soul, if that’s what you believe.’

‘Isn’t that what you make your living from?’

‘No. I make my living from all the embarrassing situations I have been put in. That’s different.’

‘So there are fluctuations then?’ he said.

‘Here we are,’ I said. ‘We’re eating, isn’t that what you said?’

I opened the door and went in. The bar was in the first room, the dining room in the second.

‘Why not?’ Geir said, and walked through the café. I followed. We sat down, read the menus and ordered chicken and a beer when the waiter came.

‘Did I tell you I’ve been here with Arve?’ I said.

‘No.’

‘When we came to Stockholm we ended up here. Well, first of all we were up at what I gather now must have been Stureplan. Arve went in and asked if they knew where writers drank in Stockholm. They just laughed at him and answered in English. So we wandered round for a while, it was terrible actually, for I held Arve in great esteem, he was an intellectual, was at Vagant from the very start, and then we met at the airport and I couldn’t say a word. Next to nothing. Landed at Arlanda, couldn’t speak. Came into Stockholm, found the accommodation, said nothing. Went out to eat, nada . Not a word. My only chance, I knew, was to drink my way through the sound barrier. So I did. A beer in Drottninggatan, where we asked someone where it was good to go out, they said Söder, Guldapan, and so we took a taxi here. I drank spirits and started to open up. A few words here and there. Arve leaned over to me and said, that girl’s looking at you. Do you want me to go so that you can be alone with her? Which girl? I asked, that one, Arve said, and I looked at her, and shit, she was so good-looking! But it was Arve’s offer that had the most impact. Wasn’t it a bit odd?’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘We got rat-arsed. So there was no longer any need to talk. We wandered round the streets here, it was getting light, I had barely a thought in my head, then we found a beer hall and went in, there was a great atmosphere, and I was out of my head, chucking beer down while Arve talked about his child. Suddenly he was in tears. I hadn’t even been listening. And then, there he was, with his hands in front of his face and his shoulders shaking. He was sobbing his heart out, I thought from somewhere deep inside me. Then they closed, we took a taxi to somewhere further up, they didn’t let us in and we found a large open area with a kiosk at the end, it might have been Kungsträdgården, could well have been. There were some chairs which had chains attached to them. We lifted them above our heads and hurled them at the wall, ran wild, completely out of our heads. Strange that the police didn’t come. But they didn’t. So we took a taxi to our lodgings. The following morning we woke up two hours after the train had departed. But we didn’t give a shit anyway, so it didn’t matter. We made our way to the station, caught the next train and I talked all the way back. I was unstoppable. It was as if everything that had been inside me for the last year came out. Something about Arve made it possible. I don’t know quite what it was, or is. A kind of enormous tolerance in him. Nevertheless, he got the whole story. Dad dying, the hell it had been, the debut and everything that came with it, and after I had told him that, I just went on. I remember us waiting for a taxi at the station, not a soul around, just Arve and me, him looking at me, me talking and talking. Childhood, teenage years, I didn’t leave a stone unturned. Just me, nothing else. Me, me, me. I ladled it all over him. Something about him made that possible, he understood everything I said and thought, I had never experienced that with anyone else before. There were always limitations, attitudes, assertion needs that halted what was being said at a certain point, or led it in a certain direction, so that what you said was always reshaped into something else, it could never exist in its own right. But Arve, it seemed to me on that day, was a truly open person, as well being curious and constantly striving to understand what he saw. But there was no ulterior motive about his openness, it was not a damned psychologist’s openness, nor was there any ulterior motive about the curiosity. He had a shrewd eye for the world, so it appeared, and like all those who have accumulated experience, by and large what remained was laughter. Laughter was really the only appropriate way to confront human behaviour and notions.