Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

The winter came and with it snow whirling in the air above the town. White streets, white roofs, all sounds softened. One evening while we were out wandering aimlessly in all the whiteness and, perhaps from force of habit, approaching the mountain along which Bastugatan ran, she asked me where I was planning to spend Christmas. I said at home, with my mother in Jølster. She wanted to join me. I said that wasn’t appropriate, it was too early. Why was it too early? Surely you know. No, I don’t. Right.

It developed into a row. We sat in the Bishop’s Arms with a beer in front of us without saying a word, incensed. To compensate, my Christmas present to her was a surprise trip; when I returned on the 27th we went to Arlanda Airport and she didn’t know our destination until I gave her the ticket: Paris. We were there for a week. But Linda had an attack of nerves, the city stressed her, she lost her temper over nothing and was constantly unreasonable. When we were eating dinner on the first evening and I was flustered with the waiter because I didn’t know quite how to behave in fine surroundings, she sent me a glare full of disdain. Oh, it was hopeless. What had I got myself caught up in? Where was my life going? I wanted to do some shopping but could see that was not on, she already disliked Paris and hated it now, and as she hated being alone most, I dropped the idea. The days could begin well, such as when we went to the Eiffel Tower, the building with the most intense nineteenth-century aura I had seen, and then collapse into black, unreasonable moods, or they could start badly and end well, such as when we called on a girlfriend of Linda’s who lived in Paris, next to the cemetery where Marcel Proust was buried and which we visited afterwards. And on New Year’s Eve, which we spent in an elegant intimate restaurant thanks to a tip from my Francophile friend in Bergen, Johannes, and were spoilt in every conceivable manner, we sat there glowing as in the old days, that is, six months previously, until, an hour into the New Year, we walked hand in hand along the Seine to our hotel. And whatever it was that oppressed her in Paris, it was gone the instant we arrived at the airport heading for home.

The owner of the flat I was renting was going to sell it, so I moved all my possessions, that is all my books, to a warehouse outside town on one of the first days in January, cleaned up, handed over the keys, and Linda enquired around her friends to see if they knew of an office somewhere, and yes, Cora had heard about some sort of collective for freelancers, they had a place at the top of the palace-like construction towering over the peak of the small mountain on one side of Slussen, only a hundred metres from the flat I’d had, I got a room and started working there during the day. It was a new beginning, I added the last hundred pages to the already long file of beginnings, and recommenced. This time I tackled the little angel theme. I bought one of those cheap art books, full of pictures of angels, and one of them attracted my interest: it was of three angels out walking in the Italian countryside, wearing sixteenth-century clothes. I wrote about someone who saw them walking, a boy who was keeping an eye on some sheep, one had gone missing and while looking for it, through some trees, he saw the angels. It was a rare sight, but not so very unusual, angels were to be found in forests and on the margins of human activity and had been for as long as people could remember. That was as far as I got. What was the story?

This had nothing to do with me, nothing of my life was in it, consciously or unconsciously, and that meant I couldn’t get involved in it, couldn’t drive it forward. I might just as well have been writing about the Phantom and the Skull Cave.

Where was the story?

One meaningless day’s work followed another. I had no alternative but to keep going, there was nothing else. The people I shared office space with were nice enough, but so full of radical-left goodness that I was left speechless when — having used the word ‘negro’ and immediately been corrected in conversation by one of them while waiting for the coffee machine to brew — I discovered that the man who cleaned the offices, the kitchen and the toilet for them was black. They observed solidarity, equality and consideration towards others in their language and spread a kind of net over a reality which continued on its unjust and discriminating path below them. I couldn’t say this. Twice there had been break-ins; one morning when I arrived the police were on the premises asking questions. Computer and photography equipment had been stolen. Since the main front door had not been broken, only the one into our offices, they concluded the culprit had to be someone with a key. Afterwards we sat discussing the matter. I said this was not a hard nut to crack. After all, there were several nameless drug addicts on the floor below. One of them must have got hold of the key. Everyone stared at me. You can’t say that, one of them declared. I looked at him in surprise. That’s prejudice, he said. We don’t know who did it. It could have been anyone. Just because they’re drug addicts and have a troubled past, it doesn’t mean they broke in here! We have to give them a chance! I nodded and said he was right, we couldn’t know for certain. But inwardly I was shaken. I had seen the bunch of them hanging around the staircase before and after the meetings they held, they were the types that would do anything for money, it wasn’t bloody prejudice, it was bleeding obvious.

This was the Sweden Geir had told me about. And now I missed him. This story was grist to the mill. But he was in Baghdad.

During this period I was still getting visits from Norway, one after the other they made their way over to Stockholm, I showed them around, they met Linda, we ate out, drifted, got drunk. One weekend in late winter Thure Erik was supposed to come over, driving the old banger he had once crossed the Sahara in, according to what he told me, never more to return to Norway. He did though, and had written a novel that meant a lot to me, it was entitled Zalep , which I liked so much, the thinking in it was so radical, so different from everything else in Norwegian novels because it was so uncompromising and because the language was so unique, so all of its own. The oddity was how much of the language turned out to be part of his character, or in harmony with it, which I did not pick up the first time I met him, for it was an extremely superficial evening at Kunsternes Hus, but I did on the second, third and fourth times, and not least during the weeks we stayed in two cabins on a wintry and deserted campsite in Telemark with a rushing river nearby and a starry night sky arched above us. He was a large man with enormous fists and a gnarled face, his eyes were alive and always freely revealed his mood. As I admired the novels he wrote I found it difficult to talk to him, everything I said was obviously stupid, could not hold a candle to what he was doing, but there, in Telemark, having breakfast together, trudging the two kilometres to the school together, teaching together, having dinner and drinking coffee or beer together in the evenings, there was nowhere to hide. You had to speak. He told me that the station before Bø was called Juksebø, and we laughed long and hard about that. Bø was the word for a settlement and jukse meant to cheat. I told him my jacket wasn’t a jacket, it was a skinn jacket, punning on the word for leather and make-believe. He laughed even louder, it was as easy as that. His brain raced, everything caught his interest and was refracted in him, which took it further, because everything in him moved towards a horizon beyond, he had such a great thirst for the extreme, and this made the world around him appear in a constantly new light, a thure-erik-lund light, yet it didn’t only apply to him, because the idiosyncratic nature of this was also refracted in him, in a tradition, in his reading.