Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

Even though I was angry I couldn’t bring myself to say no. I had no right to be because what I was implying was that the miserable manuscript I was writing was more important than her. At that moment it was, but I couldn’t say that.

‘OK,’ I said.

We drank tea and smoked in front of the open window, then she undressed and went to bed. The room was small, the desk was barely a metre away, it was impossible to concentrate with her in the room, and the fact that she had come despite knowing I didn’t want her to gave me a feeling of suffocation. But I didn’t want to go to bed either, to let her win, so after half an hour I got up and told her I was going out. This was a demonstration, it was my way of saying I couldn’t put up with this, and so I went into the misty streets of Söder, bought a grilled sausage at a petrol station, sat in the park below the flat and smoked five cigarettes in quick succession while surveying the glittering town beneath me and wondering what the hell was going on. How the hell had I ended up in this situation?

The next night I worked through till the morning, slept all day, spent a couple of hours at hers, came back and wrote all night, slept and was woken by Linda in the afternoon, she wanted to speak. We went for a walk.

‘Don’t you want to be with me any more?’ she asked.

‘Yes, of course I do,’ I said.

‘But we aren’t together. We don’t see each other.’

‘Yes, but I have to work. Surely you understand that.’

‘Well, not that you have to work at night. I love you, so I want to be with you.’

‘But I have to work,’ I repeated.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘If you keep doing this, it’s over.’

‘You can’t mean that.’

She eyed me.

‘I damn well do. Just you try me.’

‘You can’t control me like that,’ I said.

‘I’m not controlling you. It’s a reasonable request. We’re in a relationship, and I don’t want to be on my own the whole time.’

‘The whole time?’

‘Yes. I’ll leave you if you don’t stop.’

I sighed.

‘It’s not that bloody important,’ I said. ‘I’ll stop.’

‘Fine,’ she said.

I mentioned this on the telephone to Geir next day, he said, Shit, man, are you out of your mind? You’re a writer, for Christ’s sake! You can’t let someone tell you what to do! No, I said, but that’s not exactly what this is about. It’s what it costs. What what costs? he asked. The relationship, I said. I don’t understand, he said. This is where you have to be hard. You can compromise on anything else, but not this. But I’m soft, as you know, I said. Tall and soft, he said with a laugh. But it’s your life.

September passed, the leaves on the trees turned yellow, turned red and fell off. The blue of the sky deepened, the sun sank, the air was clear and cold. In mid-October Linda gathered all her friends at an Italian restaurant in Söder. She was thirty and filled with an inner light that made her beam and me proud: I was in a relationship with her. Proud and grateful, those were my feelings. The town sparkled around us as we walked home, Linda in the white jacket I had given her as a present that morning, and walking there, hand in hand with her, in the midst of this beautiful and, for me, still foreign town, sent wave after wave of pleasure through me. We were still full of ardour and desire, for our lives had turned, not just on the breath of a passing wind, but fundamentally. We planned to have children. We had no sense of anything awaiting us except happiness. At least I didn’t. I never give a thought to issues which are only about life, the way it is lived, inside me and around me and which are not about philosophy, literature, art or politics. I feel, and my feelings determine my actions. The same applies to Linda, perhaps even more so.

At this time I was asked if I would teach at the writers’ school in Bø, this was not my normal fare, but Thure Erik Lund was going to hold a two-week course and had been asked to choose a writer he would like to work with. Linda considered two weeks a long time, she didn’t want me to be away from her for so long, and I thought, yes, it is a long time, she can’t stay here in Stockholm while I am in Norway. Yet I wanted to accept the offer. My writing wasn’t making progress, I needed to do something different, Thure Erik was one of the writers I admired most. I mentioned this to my mother on the telephone one night, and she said we didn’t have any children, why couldn’t she be alone for a couple of weeks? It’s your job, she said. And she was right. A little step to the side, and everything would be fine. But I hardly ever took that step, Linda and I lived so close together in more ways than one: Linda’s flat in Zinkensdamm was dark and cramped, one and a half rooms was all we had, and it was as if life was slowly swallowing us up. The previous openness had closed in, our lives had been as one for so long they were beginning to stiffen and chafe against each other. There were little episodes, insignificant in themselves, but together they formed a pattern, a new system beginning to settle.

Late one evening while I was accompanying her to drama practice she suddenly turned to me at a petrol station by Slussen, and gave me an earful over some tiny matter, told me to go to hell, I asked her what was up, she didn’t answer and was already ten metres ahead of me. I followed.

One afternoon we were at the food hall, Saluhallen, in Hötorget, to do some shopping for a meal we were going to have with two of her friends, Gilda and Kettil, and I suggested making pancakes. She eyed me with obvious scorn. Pancakes are for children, she said. We’re not having a children’s party. OK, I said, let’s call them crêpes then. Is that good enough for you? She turned her back on me.

We walked round this beautiful town at weekends, everything was great, but then all of a sudden it wasn’t great any more, a darkness opened inside her, and I didn’t know what to do. For the first time since I had come to Stockholm the feeling that I was on my own reappeared.

She fell into a pit that autumn. And she reached out for me. I didn’t understand what was happening. But it was so claustrophobic that I turned away from her, tried to maintain a distance, which she tried to close.

I went to Venice, wrote in a flat my publishing house had at its disposal, Linda was supposed to follow and stay for just under a week, then I would work for a few more days and return. She was so black, she was so heavy, kept saying I didn’t love her, I didn’t really love her, I didn’t want her, I didn’t really want her, this wasn’t working, it would never work, I didn’t want it to, I didn’t want her.

‘But I do!’ I said as we walked in the autumn chill in Murano with eyes hidden behind sunglasses. However, when she said I didn’t really love her, I didn’t really want to be with her, I wanted to be alone all the time, on my own, it became a little truer.

Where did her despair come from?

Had I brought it with me?

Was I cold?

Did I only think of myself?

I no longer knew what it would be like when my working day was over and I went to her place. Would she be happy, would it be a nice evening? Would she be angry about something, if for example we no longer made love every night, and so I didn’t love her as much as before? Would we sit in bed watching TV? Go for a walk to Långholmen? And once there, would I be devoured by her demands to have all of me, making me keep her at a distance and have thoughts shooting to and fro in my brain that this had to come to an end, it wasn’t working, thus rendering any conversation or attempts to get closer impossible, which of course she noticed and took as proof of her main thesis, that I didn’t want her?