Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

It struck me that Eirik might be close by and bowed my head even lower, this was almost the worst thought, that someone I knew would see me like this.

We went up the stairs, into the flat. Fresh coat of paint, everything in its place: this was our home.

She didn’t even grace it with a glance.

I stopped in the middle of the floor.

She had hit out at me in her anger, the way a boxer hits a punchbag. As though I were an object. As though I had no feelings, yes, as though I had no inner life, as though I were just this empty body that wandered around in her life.

I knew she was pregnant, of that I was absolutely certain, and I had been from the moment we made love. That’s it, I had thought, now we are going to have a baby.

And so it was.

Suddenly, while I was standing there everything inside me opened. My defences fell. I had no resistance to muster. I started crying. The type of crying where I lose control of everything and everything is distorted to the point of being grotesque.

Linda stopped, turned and looked at me.

She had never seen me cry before. I hadn’t done it since dad died, and that would soon be five years ago.

She looked terrified.

I turned away, I didn’t want her to see, that made the humiliation ten times worse, it wasn’t just that I wasn’t a person, I wasn’t a man either.

But turning away didn’t help. It didn’t help to cover my face with my hands. It didn’t help to walk towards the hall. It was so overwhelming, I was sobbing with such abandon, all the sluices were open.

‘But Karl Ove,’ she said behind me. ‘Nice Karl Ove. I don’t mean anything. I was just so disappointed. It doesn’t matter though. It doesn’t matter. Dear Karl Ove. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.’

Well, I didn’t want to either, of course. The last thing I wanted was her to see me crying.

But I couldn’t help myself.

She tried to put her arms around me, but I pushed her away. I tried to draw breath. It became a pathetic trembling sob.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.’

‘I’m sorry too,’ she said.

‘Well, here we are again,’ I said, smiling through the tears.

Her eyes were also full of tears, and she was smiling as well.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

I went to the bathroom, another sob shook me, another tremble as I took a deep breath, but then, after I had washed my face with cold water a few times, it relented.

Linda was still standing in the hall when I came out.

‘Is that better?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That was plain ridiculous. It must be the drinking from last night. Suddenly my defences were gone. Everything seemed so desperate.’

‘It doesn’t matter that you cried,’ she said.

‘Not to you it doesn’t, no. But I don’t like it. I’d rather you hadn’t seen. But you did. Now you know. That’s the way I am.’

‘Yes, you’re a good person.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘That’s enough. Let’s move on. What do you think of the flat?’

She smiled.

‘Fantastic.’

‘Good.’

We hugged each other.

‘Linda,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you going to check?’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK. Just hold me a bit longer.’

I did.

‘Now?’ I asked.

She laughed.

‘OK.’

Then she went into the bathroom and came out again with the white test stick in her hand.

‘It’ll take a few more minutes,’ she said.

‘What do you reckon?’

‘I don’t know.’

She went into the kitchen and I followed. She stared at the white stick.

‘Anything happening?’

‘No, nothing. Oh, perhaps it’s nothing. I was so sure there was something.’

‘Well, there have been signs. You’ve been sick. Tired. How many more do you need?’

‘One.’

‘Look there. That’s blue, isn’t it?’

She didn’t say anything.

Then she looked up at me. Her eyes were dark and serious, like an animal’s.

‘Yes, it is.’

We couldn’t wait the three obligatory months before we told anyone. Three weeks later Linda called her mother, who burst into tears of joy at the other end. My mother’s reaction was more reserved, she said it was nice, lovely, but a little later it came out, she also wondered if we were ready for it. Linda had her training, I had my writing. Time will tell, I said, we’ll find out in January. I knew mum always was slow to assimilate change, she had to give it some thought first, and then she moved and adapted to the new situation. Yngve, whom I called as soon as mum had rung off, said, Oh, that’s good news. Yes, I said, standing and smoking in the backyard. When’s it due? Yngve asked. In January, I said. Congratulations, he said. Thanks, I replied. Karl Ove, he said, I’m a bit caught up here actually, I’m at a football match with Ylva. Can we talk later? Course, I said, and we rang off.

I lit another cigarette and noticed I was not completely satisfied with their reactions. We were going to have a BABY, for Christ’s sake! This was an ENORMOUS event!

But something had happened when I moved to Sweden. We had as much contact as before, it wasn’t that, yet something was different, and I pondered on whether the change had taken place in me or them. I was further away from them, and my life, so fundamentally changed from one moment to the next, with new places, new people and new emotions, I couldn’t communicate this with the same natural ease as before, when we had lived in the same environment, in the continuity that began in Tybakken and continued first with Tveit and then Bergen.

No, I was probably reading too much into it, I thought. Yngve’s reaction had not been so different from the one seven years earlier when I had rung to tell him that the novel I was writing had been accepted. Is that right? had been his laconic response. Mm, that’s good. For me it had been the greatest thing that had ever happened, I had been stunned by the news and assumed everyone in my circle would be as well.

Naturally enough, it hadn’t been like that.

And it is never easy to confront life-changing news, especially when you are deeply embroiled in the everyday and the banal, which we always are. They absorb almost everything, make almost everything small, apart from the few events that are so immense they lay waste to all the everyday trivia around you. Big news is like that and it is not possible to live inside it.

I stubbed out my cigarette and went upstairs to Linda, who looked at me with raised eyebrows as I entered.

‘What did they say?’ she asked.

‘They were incredibly happy,’ I said. ‘Best wishes and congratul-ations.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Mummy was out of herself with joy. However, she gets excited about absolutely everything.’

Yngve rang later that evening; we could have all the baby clothes and gear we wanted. Buggy, changing mat, rompers, bodices, bibs, pants, sweaters and shoes, they had kept the lot. Linda was touched when I passed that on, and I laughed at her, her sensitivities had changed over the last few weeks and reacted to the strangest things. She laughed as well. Her mother often dropped by, bringing the most sensational meals, which we put in the freezer, several bin bags of baby clothes she had been given by her partner’s children and boxes of toys. She bought us a washing machine; Vidar, her partner, plumbed it in.

Linda continued with her course, I continued in my collective office at the tower, started reading the Bible, found a Catholic bookshop and bought all the angel-related literature I could get my hands on, read Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, Basilius and Hieronymus, Hobbes and Burton. I bought Spengler and a biography of Isaac Newton, reference works about the Enlightenment and Baroque periods, which lay in piles around where I was writing and trying to get all these different systems and schools of thought to tie up in some way or other, or to push something, I didn’t know what, in the same direction.