Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘I know.’

There was a silence.

‘Didn’t we have some meatballs in the fridge?’ I asked. ‘I’m bloody famished.’

She nodded.

I went into the kitchen, shook the meatballs into a frying pan and put the water on for spaghetti. I heard Linda come in behind me.

‘There was nothing wrong this summer,’ I said. ‘I mean with the drinking. You didn’t mind then, did you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘And it was fantastic. I am frightened of crossing lines, but I wasn’t then, not with you, it felt very secure. It never felt as if it was going to tip over and become manic or simply ugly. It felt very safe. And I’ve never felt that before. But now it’s different. We’ve moved on.’

‘Right,’ I said, and turned as the butter began to melt among the meatballs in the pan. ‘Where are we now then?’

She shrugged.

‘I don’t know. But it feels as if we’ve lost something. Something is finished. And I’m frightened the rest will disappear.’

‘But you can’t force me. That’s the best way to make it disappear.’

‘Of course. I know that.’

I sprinkled salt into the water for the spaghetti.

‘Are you going to have some?’ I asked.

She nodded, wiping away tears with her thumbs.

Thure Erik arrived at around two the next day, filled the whole of the tiny flat with his personality the second he stepped inside. We went to some second-hand bookshops, he perused what they had of old natural history, and then we went to Pelikanen, had dinner and drank beer until they closed. I told him about the night on the railway station and my decision to catch the train back to Norway.

‘But I was coming!’ he said. ‘Was I supposed to turn round and go back?’

‘That was exactly what I was thinking about when I woke up,’ I said. ‘Thure Erik Lund is coming. I can’t bloody go home now.’

He laughed, and began to tell me about a relationship that was so stormy that mine and Linda’s seemed like a midsummer comedy by comparison. I drank twenty beers that night, and all I can remember from the last hours is an old drunk with whom Thure Erik had struck up a conversation, who sat down at our table and kept saying I was so good-looking, such a good-looking lad. Thure Erik laughed and nudged me in the shoulder between his attempts to draw the man out about his life. And then I remember us standing outside the flat and him clambering into the back of his car to sleep as light snowflakes swirled around beneath the cold grey sky.

One room and a kitchen: that was our arena. We cooked there, we ate, slept, made love, chatted, watched TV, read books, quarrelled and received all our visitors there. It was small and cramped, but it was enough, we managed, we kept our heads above water. But if we wanted children, which we talked about non-stop, we would have to find ourselves a bigger flat. Linda’s mother had one in the city centre, it had only two rooms, but was more than eighty square metres, a football pitch in comparison with what we had now. She no longer used the flat, but she rented it out and said we could have it. Not quite like that, because it wasn’t legal — in Sweden rental contracts are personal and for life — but exchanges are possible: Linda’s mother would take Linda’s and we would take hers.

One day we went to see it.

It was the most bourgeois apartment I had ever seen. An enormous Russian-style stove from the previous century at one end of the room, with a massive marble front; another one, just as tall, slightly less massive, in the bedroom. White, beautifully carved panels on all the walls, stucco work on the ceilings, which were more than four metres tall. Fantastic herringbone parquet floors from the end of the nineteenth century. Her mother’s furniture was in the same style: heavy, artistic, late nineteenth-century.

‘Can we live here?’ I said as we walked round looking.

‘No, of course we can’t,’ Linda said. ‘Shouldn’t we swap with a flat in Skärholmen or somewhere like that? It’s dead here.’

Skärholmen was one of the immigrant-occupied satellite towns, we had been to a market there one Saturday and been struck by the life and the diversity.

‘I agree,’ I said. ‘It would be almost impossible to make this ours .’

At the same time the thought of moving in here had some appeal. Spacious, beautiful, central location. Did it matter that we would be lost in the rooms? Or perhaps we could fight them, control them, make the bourgeois style part of us?

I have always wanted the bourgeois lifestyle. Always wanted the properness. Always wanted the stiff forms and strict rules to be there to keep the inner in place, to regulate it, to mould it into something you can live with, not allow it to tear up your life again and again. But whenever I had been in a middle-class setting, for example with my father’s parents or with Tonje’s father, the opposite happened, it was as if it made all the otherness in me visible, all that did not fit, that fell outside the forms and structures, all that I hated about myself.

But here? Linda and I and a child? A new life, a new town, a new flat, a new happiness?

This notion overshadowed the sombre, lifeless first impression the flat had made, we warmed to it and became enthusiastic after making love on the bed; as we lay with a pillow beneath our heads afterwards, smoking, we were in no doubt that our new life would begin here.

At the end of April Geir returned from Iraq, we had dinner at an expensive American restaurant in the Old Town, he was so excited and full of life in a way I had never seen before, and it took several weeks for all his experiences, all the people he had met there, whom gradually I became utterly familiar with, to begin to fade so that other matters could occupy his mind and his conversation. At the beginning of May Linda and I moved our possessions across, with help from Anders, and when we had done that we cleaned the flat. We spent the afternoon and all the evening, and when we still hadn’t finished at eleven, Linda suddenly slumped back against the wall.

‘I’ve had it!’ she called. ‘I can’t do any more!’

‘One more hour,’ I said. ‘An hour and a half tops. You can manage that.’

She had tears in her eyes.

‘Let’s ring mummy,’ she said. ‘We don’t have to finish. She’ll drop by tomorrow and do it. It’s not a problem. I know it isn’t.’

‘Would you let someone clean your apartment?’ I asked. ‘Clean up your mess? You can’t shout for your mother every time you’ve got problems. You’re thirty years old for Christ’s sake!’

She sighed.

‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘I’m just worn out. And she can do it. It’s not a problem for her.’

‘But it is for me. And it should be for you too.’

She grabbed a cloth, got up and resumed wiping the bathroom door frame.

‘I can do the rest,’ I said. ‘Off you go, and I’ll follow you later.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I am. It’s fine.’

‘OK.’

She put on her outdoor clothes and went out in the darkness, I finished the cleaning and it was true what I had said: it didn’t matter to me. The next day we moved my things, that is to say all my books, which had now grown to number two and a half thousand titles, a fact which Anders and Geir, who were helping me with the move, cursed from the bottom of their hearts as we shifted the boxes from the lift into the flat. Geir compared it of course with unloading ammunition cases alongside the US Marines, an activity which for him was only a few weeks ago but for me was as alien as Wells Fargo stagecoaches or bison hunting. When the removal goods were stacked in two enormous piles in the two rooms I started painting the walls while Linda went to Norway to make a radio programme about 17 May. She was going to stay with my mother, whom she had only met once for a few hours in Stockholm. After she was on the train I rang my mother, something was bothering me, all the signs of Tonje’s presence, especially the photograph of the wedding, which was still hanging on the wall when I had been there for Christmas, and the wedding album. I didn’t want Linda to be subjected to that, I didn’t want her to feel she was on the periphery of my life, a replacement, and after a short preamble, catching up on news since we last met, I began to zero in on the topic. I knew it was stupid, and actually humiliating, for Linda, her and me, but I couldn’t stop myself, I couldn’t bear the thought that it might hurt Linda, so in the end I said it. Would she mind taking down the wedding photo, or at least putting it in a more discreet position? Not at all, in fact, it was already down. After all we were no longer married. What about the album then? I asked. You know, of the wedding. You couldn’t tuck it away somewhere, could you? Oh no, Karl Ove, mum said. That’s my photo album. It represents a phase of my life. I don’t want to hide it. Linda will be fine with it; she knows you’ve been married. You’re both adults. OK, I said, you’re right, it’s your photo album. I just don’t want to hurt her. You won’t, mum said, it’ll be fine.