Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

This was the third time Linda and mum had met, and for the rest of the stay I tried, in vain, to bridge the gap I perceived at once. There was always some obstacle, almost nothing seemed to run smoothly. When something did and I saw Linda perk up and react in a way which mum latched on to, I became happy out of all proportion, realised why and longed to move on.

Then Linda started bleeding. She was terrified, truly terrified, wanted to leave at once, rang Stockholm and spoke to the midwife, who couldn’t comment without examining her. That made Linda even more frightened, and my saying it’ll be fine, it’s bound to be fine and it’s nothing did not do a lot to help because how could I know? What authority did I have? She wanted to leave, I said we were staying and in the end, when she agreed, everything became my responsibility, so if things went wrong, or if they had already gone wrong, I was the one who had insisted we shouldn’t bother with an examination, we should wait and see.

Linda’s entire energy was focused on this, I could see it was all she thought about, fear gnawed at her, she no longer spoke when we were eating or were together in the evening, and when she came downstairs after sleeping on the first floor and found mum and me sitting in the garden and chatting she turned and left, her eyes dark with fury, and I understood why: we were talking as though nothing had happened, as though what she felt did not matter. And that was both true and not true. I thought everything would be fine, but I was not sure, and at the same time we were guests there, I hadn’t seen my mother for more than six months, we had a lot to talk about, and what purpose was served by saying nothing, by simply wandering around mute, in constant, agonising, all-encompassing fear? I put my arms around her, I comforted her, tried to tell her that everything was bound to be fine, but she wasn’t receptive and didn’t want to be there. When mum asked her something she barely answered. On our walks through the valley she criticised my mother and everything about her. I defended her, we screamed at each other, she turned and went off on her own, I ran after her, it was a nightmare, but as with all nightmares there was an awakening from this too. But first there was a final scene: mum drove us to Florø, where we would catch the boat. We arrived early, decided to have lunch, found a restaurant on a kind of pontoon, sat down and ordered fish soup. It arrived, and it tasted terrible, of butter and almost nothing else.

‘I can’t eat this,’ Linda said.

‘No, it isn’t very good,’ I said.

‘We’d better tell the waiter and ask him to bring something else,’ Linda said.

I could not imagine anything more embarrassing than sending food back to the kitchen. And this was only Florø, not Stockholm or Paris. At the same time I couldn’t put up with any more moods and so I beckoned to the waitress.

‘I’m afraid this isn’t very good,’ I said. ‘Do you think we could have something else instead?’

The robust middle-aged waitress with badly dyed blonde hair gave me a disapproving glare.

‘There shouldn’t be anything wrong with the food,’ she said. ‘But if you say there is I’ll go and ask the chef.’

We sat around the table, my mother, Linda and I, with three full bowls of soup, saying nothing.

The waitress returned, shaking her head.

‘My apologies,’ she said. ‘The chef says there’s nothing wrong with the soup. It tastes the way it is supposed to.’

What should we do?

The only time in my life I send back food to the kitchen and they don’t accept what I say. Anywhere else on earth they would have given us an alternative dish, but not on Florø. My face was red with shame and annoyance. If I had been alone I would have eaten the bloody soup, no matter how bad it was. Now I had complained, however embarrassing and unnecessary I thought that was, and they met my complaint with resistance?!

I got to my feet.

‘I’ll go in and have a few words with the chef,’ I said.

‘You do that,’ said the waitress.

I walked along the pontoon and into the kitchen, which was on land, poked my head over a counter and caught the attention, not of a little fatso, as I had imagined, but a tall well-built man of my own age.

‘We ordered fish soup,’ I said. ‘There’s too much butter in it. I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to eat. Do you think we could have something else instead?’

‘It tastes exactly as it is supposed to,’ he said. ‘You ordered fish soup and that’s what you got. Can’t help you there.’

I walked back. Linda and mum looked up at me. I shook my head.

‘Wouldn’t budge,’ I said.

‘Perhaps I should have a go,’ mum said. ‘After all, I’m an elderly lady. That might help a bit.’

If it was against my nature to complain in restaurants it was definitely against hers.

‘You don’t need to,’ I said. ‘We’d better just leave.’

‘I’ll try,’ she said.

A few minutes later she came back. She too shook her head.

‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘I’m hungry but after all this we really can’t eat the soup.’

We got up, put the money on the table and left.

‘We’ll have to eat on the boat,’ I said to Linda, who just nodded, her eyes black.

It arrived with propellers whirling. I loaded the baggage on board, waved to mum and found a seat at the very front.

We each ate a soft vaguely wet pizza, a potato pancake and a yoghurt. Linda lay back and fell asleep. When she woke up everything that had been in her head was gone. Bright and open, she sat beside me chatting away. I studied her, profoundly astonished. Had all of this been about my mother? Or about being in an unfamiliar place? Or about visiting my life before she became a part of it? And not the fear of losing the baby? Because surely that was just as acute now?

We flew home from Bergen, she was examined the following day and everything was in perfect order. The tiny heart was beating, the tiny body was growing and all the tests that could be done gave the right results.

After the examination, which was carried out at a clinic in the Old Town, we went to a nearby cake shop and talked about what happened during the check-up. We always did that. After an hour I took the Metro the whole way out to Åkeshov, where I had been given a new office. In the end I couldn’t stand being in the old one in the tower, and Linda’s author friend, the film director Maria Zennström, had offered me a shabby room for next to nothing out there. It was in the basement of a block of flats, no one was around during the day, I sat all alone between concrete walls and wrote, read or stared into the forest where Metro carriages careered through the trees every five minutes or so. I had read Spengler’s The Decline of the West , and while a lot could be said about his theories on civilisation, what he wrote about the Baroque period and his Faustian concept, about the Age of Enlightenment and his concept of the cyclical nature of civilisation, was original and masterful; some of it I put straight into the novel, so to speak, which I had realised would have to have the seventeenth century as a kind of centre. Everything sprang from there, it was when the world separated: on one side there was the old and useless, the whole magical, irrational, dogmatic and authoritarian tradition; on the other what developed into the world we inhabited.

Autumn passed, the belly grew, Linda fiddled around with all sorts of bits and bobs, she seemed to be like a magnet for everything, there were lit candles and hot baths, piles of baby clothes in the cupboard, photo albums were collated and books about pregnancy and the baby’s first year were read. I was so glad to see it, but couldn’t go there myself, not even close, I had to write. I could be together with her, make love to her, talk to her, go for walks with her, but I could not feel or do as she did.