Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

She looked up at me. I sat down on the bed. She put the cup down on the table and lay back. I lay beside her. There was a heaviness in the darkness outside, a kind of body to it that was alien to a midsummer night. A train rattled across the bridge by Ridderfjärden.

‘I was dead,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t that I wanted to leave my life. I had already left it. When the therapist said I was going to be admitted to the clinic I felt relief that someone wanted to take care of me. But when I got there it was all totally impossible. I couldn’t stay. And that was when I began to hatch a plan. My sole chance of getting out was a day permit to fetch clothes and so on from my flat. Someone had to be with me, the only person I could think of was my mother.’

She fell silent.

‘But if I’d really wanted it I would have succeeded. That’s what I think now. I wouldn’t have needed to open the window; I could have thrown myself through it. It wouldn’t exactly have made much of a difference. But the care I took… Yes, if I had really wanted to, with all my heart, it would have worked.’

‘I’m happy it didn’t,’ I said, running my hand through her hair. ‘But are you afraid it will happen again?’

‘Yes.’

There was a silence.

The woman I rented the bedsit from was making a noise on the other side of the door. Someone coughed on the roof terrace above us.

‘I’m not,’ I said.

She turned her face to me.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No. I know you.’

‘Not all of me.’

‘Of course not,’ I said, and kissed her. ‘But it will never happen again, I’m sure of that.’

‘Then I’m sure too,’ she said with a smile, and put her arms around me.

The endless summer nights, so light and open, with us drifting between a selection of bars and cafés in various parts of town in black taxis, alone or with others, the drinking not menacing, not destructive, but a wave raising us higher and higher, it started slowly and darkened imperceptibly, it was as though the sky was attached to the earth, and the light airiness had less and less room, something filled it and held it firm, until at last the night was still, a wall of darkness descended in the evening and rose in the morning, and the light eddying summer night was no longer imaginable, like a dream you try in vain to recapture on waking.

Linda started at the Dramatiska Institut. The introductory course was hard, they were thrown into all kinds of difficult situations. I suppose the idea was that it was best to learn from their experience under pressure as they went along. When she cycled up to the school in the morning I went to the flat to write. I had woven the story of the angels into a story about a woman in a maternity ward in 1944, she had just given birth, her mind drifted hither and thither, but it didn’t work, the text was too remote, the distance too great. Nevertheless I continued, slogged through page after page, it didn’t matter, the most important, no, the only focus in my life was Linda.

One Sunday we were having lunch at an Östermalm café called Oscar near Karlaplan, we were sitting outside, Linda with a blanket over her legs, me eating a club sandwich, Linda a chicken salad, the street was Sunday-still, the bells below us had just pealed for the church service. Three girls sat at a table behind us, two men a little way behind them. Some sparrows were hopping on the tables closest to the road. They seemed quite tame, approached the plates left behind with small hops, nodding their whole heads as they poked their beaks into the food.

Suddenly a shadow plummets through the air, I look up, it is an enormous bird, it screams towards us, brushes the table of small birds, grabs one of them in its claws and soars upward again.

I turned to Linda. She was staring into the air with her mouth agape.

‘Did a bird of prey just take one of the sparrows or was I dreaming?’ I asked.

‘I’ve never seen anything like that before. It was horrible,’ Linda said. ‘In the middle of town? What was it? An eagle? A hawk? Poor little bird!’

‘It must have been a hawk,’ I said, laughing. The sight had excited me. Linda looked at me with smiling eyes.

‘My grandfather on my mum’s side was bald,’ I said. ‘He had only a corona of white hair left. When I was small he used to say the chicken hawk had taken it. Then he demonstrated how the hawk had set its claws in his hair and flown off with it. The proof was the corona that was left. And for a while I believed him. I squinted into the sky looking for it. But I never saw it.’

‘Not until now,’ Linda said.

‘I’m not sure it was the same one,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said with a smile. ‘When I was five I kept a little hamster in a cage. In the summer we went to our summer house, where I used to let it free. I put the cage on the lawn and let it potter around in the grass. One morning while I was on the terrace watching it, a bird of prey dived down, and whoosh, my hamster was on its way up through the air.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Yes.’

‘How terrible!’ I laughed, pushed my plate away, lit a cigarette and leaned back. ‘Grandad had a gun, I remember. Sometimes he used to shoot crows. He injured one of them — that is, he shot off a leg. It survived and it’s still at the farm now. At least, according to Kjartan, it is. A one-legged crow with staring eyes.’

‘Fantastic,’ Linda said.

‘A kind of avian Captain Ahab,’ I said. ‘And grandad patrolling the ground like the great white whale.’

I looked at her.

‘What a shame it is you never met him. You would have liked him.’

‘And you would have liked mine.’

‘You were there when he died, weren’t you?’

She nodded.

‘He had a stroke, and I went up to Norrland. But he died before I arrived.’

She grabbed my cigarette pack, looked at me, I nodded and she took one.

‘But it was my grandma I was close to,’ she said. ‘She used to come down to Stockholm to see us and took charge of everything. The first thing she did was to clean the whole house. She baked and cooked and was with us. She was really strong.’

‘Your mother is too.’

‘Yes. In fact, she is becoming more and more like her. I mean, after she stopped at the Royal Dramatic Theatre and moved into the country it’s as if she’s resumed her life from those days. She grows her own vegetables, makes all her own food, has four freezers full of food and produce she’s bought on offer. And now she doesn’t care what she looks like, at least not compared with how she was before.’

She looked at me.

‘Have I told you about the time my grandma saw red northern lights?’

I shook my head.

‘She saw them when she was out walking. The whole sky was red, the light billowed backwards and forwards, it must have been beautiful, but also a bit doomsday-like. When she came back and told us no one believed her. She barely believed it herself, red northern lights, who’s ever heard of that? Have you?’

‘No.’

‘But then, many, many years later, I was out with my mother in Humlegården late one night. And we saw the same thing! We have the northern lights here now and then, it’s rare, but it does happen. That night they were red! Mummy rang grandma as soon as she was home. Grandma cried. Later I read about it and discovered it was a rare meteorological phenomenon.’

I leaned across the table and kissed her.

‘Would you like a coffee?’

She nodded and I went in and ordered two coffees. When I returned and put her cup in front of her she was looking up at me.

‘I remembered another strange story,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps it isn’t so strange. But it seemed like it was. I was on one of the islands outside Stockholm. Walking in the forest on my own. Above me — and it wasn’t far above either, directly above the trees — I saw an airship gliding through the air. It was quite magical. It came from nowhere and floated above the forest and was gone. An airship!’