Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

Now and then there were angry outbursts. One morning I spilt water on the kitchen carpet, went off to the Metro without mopping up and when I returned home there was a big yellow stain. I asked what had happened, she looked at me sheepishly, well, she had seen the stain I had left on the carpet when she entered the kitchen and she had been so angry she poured juice over it. But then the water dried out and she realised what she had done.

We had to throw the carpet away.

One evening she gouged the dining-room table she had been given by her mother, part of a small suite she had paid a fortune for, because I had not shown enough interest in the letter Linda was writing to the maternity department. It had been about her wishes and preferences. When she read out a suggestion I nodded, but without the necessary conviction, evidently, for all of a sudden she jabbed her pen into the table and scored the top with as much force as she could apply, again and again. What are you doing? I said. You don’t care, she said. Oh, for Christ’s sake, of course I care. And now you’ve ruined the table.

One evening I got so mad at her that I threw a glass at the stove with all my might. Strangely enough, it didn’t break. Typical, I thought afterwards, I couldn’t even perform the classic act of smashing a glass during a row.

We went to the antenatal classes together, the room was packed and the audience sensitive to every word spoken from the rostrum; if there was anything remotely controversial from a biological point of view, a low sucking of breath ran through the rows, for this was taking place in a country where gender was a social construct, and for the body, outside what everyone agreed was common sense, there was no place. Instinct, came a voice from the rostrum. No, no, no! the angry women in the room whispered. How could you say such a thing! I saw a woman sobbing on a bench — her husband was ten minutes late for the course — and I thought, I am not alone. When he did finally arrive she pummelled his stomach with her fists while he, as carefully as he could, tried to get her out of this state and into a more controlled and dignified one.

This was how we lived, in abrupt mood swings between being calm and peaceful, optimistic and affectionate and sudden explosions of fury. Every morning I caught the Metro to Åkeshov, and the moment I walked down into the underground everything that had gone on at home was eradicated from my mind. I looked at the crowd in the subterranean station, inhaled the atmosphere, got on the train and read, looked at the suburban houses we glided past after we had left the tunnels, read, surveyed the town as we crossed the big bridge, read, loved, really loved, all the stops at the small stations, got off at Åkeshov, almost the only passenger travelling in this direction to work, walked roughly a kilometre to the office and worked all day. Soon the manuscript would amount to a hundred pages, and it was becoming stranger and stranger; after the introduction about crabbing it shifted into a purely essayistic style, and presented some theories about the divine that I had never considered before, but in some peculiar manner, from the premises they set, in their way, they were right. I had come across a Russian Orthodox bookshop, it really was a find, all manner of remarkable writings were there, I bought them, took notes and could barely restrain my glee when yet another element of the pseudo-theory fell into place, until I went home in the afternoon, when the life awaiting me there slowly returned as the train approached the station in Hötorget. Now and then I went to town earlier, when we had to go for a check-up at the Mother Care Centre, as it was called in Swedish, where I sat on a chair watching Linda being examined, blood pressure and blood samples, listening for the heartbeat and measuring the belly, which was growing as it should, everything was in order, all the test results were excellent, for if there was one thing Linda had it was physical strength and rude health, which I told her as often as I could. Compared with the body’s weight and certainties, worry was nothing, a buzzing fly, a swirling feather, a cloud of dust.

We went to Ikea and bought a baby-changing table, which we loaded with piles of cloths and towels, and on the wall above I stuck a sequence of postcards of seals, whales, fish, turtles, lions, monkeys and the Beatles during their psychedelic period, so that the baby could see what a wonderful world it had been born into. Yngve and Kari Anne sent us their baby cast-offs, but the buggy he had promised was a little time in coming, to Linda’s increasing annoyance. One evening she exploded: the buggy was never going to come, we couldn’t rely on that brother of mine, we should have bought our own, which she had said from day one. There were still two months to the due date. I called Yngve, dropped a hint about the buggy and mumbled something about the irrationality of pregnant women, he said it was on its way, I said I knew it was, but nevertheless I had to ask. How I hated doing it. How I hated going against my nature to satisfy her. But, I told myself, there was a purpose, there was a goal, and as long as that remained uppermost in my mind I would just have to put up with all the creeping and crawling. The buggy didn’t arrive. Another outburst. We bought some contraption to put in the bathtub for when the baby had to be bathed, we bought bodices and tiny shoes, rompers and a sleeping bag for the buggy. We borrowed a cradle from Helena with a little duvet and pillow, which Linda regarded with moist eyes. And we discussed a name. Almost every night we sat talking about it, batting an enormous variety of names to and fro, always with a shortlist of four or five, always changing it. One night Linda suggested Vanja, and with that we had the name for a girl. We were suddenly decided. We liked the Russianness of it and its associations, something strong and wild, and Vanja was derived from Ivan, which was the same as Johannes in Norwegian, which was Linda’s father’s name. If it was a boy he would be Bjørn.

One morning, going down the stairs to the Metro platform under Sveavägen, I found my eyes drawn towards two men brawling. Their aggression alongside all the weary passengers was dreadful, they shouted, no, screeched at each other, my heart beat faster and then they pounced on each other with such ferocity as a train drew in to the platform. One of them wrestled himself free to get space to kick the other. I went closer. They were locked in combat again. I thought, I will have to intervene. The boxer incident, when I hadn’t dared to kick in the door, and the boat incident, when I hadn’t dared to ask Arvid to slow down, as well as Linda’s concern about my failure to act, had played on my mind so much that now there was no doubt in my mind. I could not stand by and watch. I had to intervene. The very thought made my knees go weak and my arms tremble. Nonetheless, I put down my bag, this was a test, I thought, shit, now I would have to give a shit, and went straight over to the two brawlers and wrapped my arms around the closest one. I squeezed as hard as I could. As I did, another man stepped forward between them, and a third, and the fight was over. I picked up my bag, got into the train on the other side and sat there until we got to Åskehov, drained, with my heart pounding in my chest. No one could claim I had been slow to act, nor that I had been very smart, they could have had knives, anything, and the fight had absolutely nothing to do with me.

What was odd about these months was the way in which we came closer to each other and grew apart. Linda did not bear grudges, and after something had happened, it had happened, it was over. For me it was different. I held grudges, and every single one of these incidents over the last year lay somehow stored inside me. At the same time I understood what had happened, the sparks of anger that had begun to fly in our lives that first autumn, they were linked with what had been lost in our relationship, Linda was afraid of losing the rest, she was trying to bind me and my shying away from these bonds increased the distance, and that was precisely what she feared. When she became pregnant everything changed, now there was a horizon beyond the one the two of us formed, something greater than us, and it was there the whole time, in my thoughts and hers. Her unease may have been great, but even in its midst there was always a wholeness and security in her. Everything would fall into place, it would be fine, I knew it would.