Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll pull myself together. I promise you.’

We sat quietly for a while, eating. The moment one of us changed the topic of conversation to something more usual and humdrum, what had happened would also be over.

I wanted to and didn’t want to.

The crab meat on the bread was both smooth and uneven, reddish-brown like the leaves on the field, and the salty, almost bitter taste of sea, softened by the sweetness of the mayonnaise, yet sharpened by the lemon juice, overtook all my senses for a few seconds.

‘Is it good?’ she asked with a smile.

‘Yes, it’s really good,’ I replied.

What I had said to her on the first morning we had woken up together had not been just something I said but something I felt with all my heart and soul. I wanted to have children with her. I had never felt that before. And this feeling made me certain it was right, that this was right.

But at any price?

My mother came to Stockholm, I introduced her to Linda at a restaurant, it seemed to go well, Linda shone, shy and extrovert at the same time, while I watched mum and her reactions. She was staying in my flat, I said goodnight to her at the gate, she went in and I jogged back to Linda’s flat, which was ten minutes away. The next day, when I collected her to have breakfast at a café, mum told me she hadn’t been able to put the light on in the hallway and so it had taken her almost an hour to get into the flat.

‘The light turned itself off while I was on the stairs,’ she said. ‘Automatically. I couldn’t see a metre in front of me.’

‘That’s the Swedes saving energy,’ I said. ‘They never leave a room without switching off the light. And in communal areas there are automatic time switches. But why didn’t you turn it back on, if I might ask?’

‘It was too dark to see the switches.’

‘But the switches are luminous.’

‘So that was what was shining!’ she said. ‘I thought they were the fire alarms or something.’

‘What about your lighter?’ I said.

‘Yes, I remembered that eventually. I was so desperate that I fumbled my way downstairs to have a cigarette and that was when I found it. So then I went back up, flicked it on, opened the door and went in.’

‘That’s so typical of you,’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But this is a different country, that’s why. The little details are different.’

‘What do you think about Linda?’

‘She’s a lovely girl,’ she said.

‘Yes, isn’t she,’ I said.

She didn’t have to say that, of course. Well, I wasn’t in any doubt that she would like Linda, it was more that I had just been in such a long, established relationship. Married even. Tonje had been part of the family, it was as simple as that. Even though the relationship was over, the feelings they had for her were not. Yngve was sorry she was no longer around, and perhaps mum was too. At the end of the summer, after Tonje and I had divided all our possessions without any trauma — we were good to each other — the only time a semblance of sorrow came over me was when I was in the cellar fetching something and was suddenly brought up with a sob — we’d had a life together, now it was over. After the days there, which passed without any conflict, I went to mum’s place in Jølster with our cat, which she was going to keep. I told her about Linda then. It was obvious she wasn’t best pleased, but she didn’t say anything. Half an hour later a sentence crossed her lips which caused me to take stock of her. It was so unlike mum to say that sort of thing. She said I couldn’t see other people. I was completely blind, I saw only myself everywhere. Your father, she said, he looked straight into people. He saw immediately who they were. You’ve never done that. No, I said, perhaps I haven’t.

I’m sure she was right, but that wasn’t so important, the significant issue was partly that she had ranked dad, that terrible human being, above me, and partly that she had done it because she was angry with me. And that was new, mum was never angry with me.

At that time Linda and I were still in the glow zone, and she must have seen that I was glowing with love and joie de vivre .

In Stockholm a little more than six months later everything was different. I was full of grudges, the relationship was so claustrophobic and dark that I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t, I was too weak, I thought about her, I pitied her, without me she would be lost, I was too weak, I loved her.

Then came the lunches at Filmhuset, where we sat chatting about everything under the sun, gesticulating enthusiastically, or at home in the flat or at cafés, there was so much to say, there was so much to cover, not just my life and hers, as it had been, but also our lives, as they were now, with all the people who populated them. Before, I had always been deep inside myself, observing people from there, like from the back of a garden. Linda brought me out, right to the edge of myself, where everything was near and everything seemed stronger. Then came the films at Cinemateket, the nights out on the town, the weekends with her mother in Gnesta, the stillness of the forest, in which she sometimes looked like a little girl and showed how vulnerable she was. Then there was the trip to Venice, she shouted that I didn’t love her, she kept shouting it again and again. In the evenings we got drunk and made love with a wildness that was new and alien and also frightening, not at the time, but the next day, when I reflected on it, it was as though we wanted to hurt each other. After she had left I could hardly be bothered to go out, I tried to write in the loft of the flat, I could barely drag myself the few hundred metres to the grocer’s and back. The walls were cold, the alleyways empty, the canals full of coffin-like gondolas. What I saw was dead, what I wrote of no value.

One day, sitting like this, alone in the cold Italian apartment, I happened to recall what Stig Sæterbakken had said the evening I got together with Linda. That in his next novel he would try to write a little more like me.

Suddenly my face burned with shame.

The comment had been sarcastic and I hadn’t understood.

I thought he had MEANT it.

Oh, how conceited do you have to be to believe that sort of comment? How utterly stupid can you be? Were there no limits?

I got up quickly, hurried down the stairs, put on my clothes and dashed round the alleyways along the canals for an hour trying to find the beauty in the filthy deep green water, the ancient stone walls, the splendour in the whole of this crooked and crumbling world, to stem the enormous bitterness against myself that the recognition of Sæterbakken’s sarcasm caused to flood over me time and time again.

In a large piazza I entered without warning I sat down and ordered a coffee, lit a cigarette and considered at length that perhaps this was not a matter of much import.

I raised the tiny cup to my lips with my index and middle fingers, which seemed monstrously large by comparison, leaned back in the chair and peered up at the sky. I never paid any attention to it inside the labyrinthine network of streets and canals, it was a bit like wandering through underground passages. When the narrow streets opened up into piazzas, and the sky stretched across the rooftops and church spires it always came as a surprise. That was how it was, yes: the sky did exist! The sun did exist! It felt as though I also became more open, lighter in colour and weight.

For all I knew, Sæterbakken might have thought my enthusiastic response was also sarcastic.

Later that autumn the temperature plummeted, all the water and the canals in Stockholm froze, one Sunday we walked on the ice from Söder to Stockholm Old Town, I hobbled along like the hunchback of Notre Dame, she laughed and took photos of me, I took photos of her, everything was sharp and clear, including my feelings for her. We clicked on the photos and looked at them in a café, ran home to make love, rented two films, bought a pizza, lay in bed all evening. It was one of the days I will always remember, perhaps precisely because it comprised normal frivolous activities that became overlaid with gold.