Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

In mid-December Yngve and the children came to visit. With them they brought the long-awaited buggy. They stayed for a few days. Linda was friendly on the first day and a few hours into the second, but then she turned her back, assumed the hostile air that could drive me insane. Not when it was only me subjected to it because I was used to this and knew how to counter it, but when others were. Then I had to step in, try to mollify Linda, try to mollify Yngve and keep channels open. Six weeks left to the big day, she wanted peace and quiet and considered she was entitled to that, and perhaps she was, what did I know, but surely it didn’t mean you no longer needed to be amiable with your guests? Being hospitable, having people over to stay for as long as they liked, was important to me, and I didn’t understand how it was possible for Linda to behave as she was doing. Or, yes, I did: she would soon be giving birth and she didn’t want crowds of people in the house, also, she and Yngve were light years apart. Yngve had had a good close relationship with Tonje, he didn’t have the same with Linda, she noticed that of course, but why the hell did she have to act on it? Why couldn’t she hide all her emotions and play the game? Be friendly to my family? Wasn’t I friendly to hers? Had I ever said they came round too much and endlessly stuck their noses into matters that did not concern them? Linda’s family and friends were with us a thousand times more than mine, the ratio was a thousand to one, and yet, even though the disparity was immense, she could not and would not adapt, she turned her back. Why? Because she was acting on emotions. But emotions are there to be repressed.

I said nothing, held all my reproaches and my anger in check, and when Yngve and the children had left and Linda was happy, light-hearted and excited again, I didn’t punish her by keeping my distance and being sullen, which would have been my natural response, no, on the contrary, I dropped the matter, let unreasonable bygones be unreasonable bygones, and the run-up to Christmas and the days afterwards were wonderful.

On the last evening of 2003, with me running to and fro in the kitchen and sorting out the food while Geir sat in a chair chatting away and watching, there was no longer a trace of the life I had left in Bergen. Everything I had around me now was somehow connected with two people I hadn’t actually known at all then. Mostly Linda, of course, with whom I now shared all of my life, but also Geir. I had been influenced by him, and not in a small way either, and that could be an unpleasant thought, that I was so easy to influence, that my views could so easily be affected by others. Occasionally I mused that he was like one of those childhood friends you weren’t allowed to play with. Keep your distance from him, Karl Ove, he’s a bad influence.

I placed the last half-lobster on the dish, put down the knife and wiped the sweat from my forehead.

‘There we are,’ I said. ‘Just the garnish left.’

‘If only people knew what you do,’ Geir said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The general perception of writers’ lives is that they are exciting and desirable. But you generally spend most of your time cooking and cleaning.’

‘True enough,’ I said. ‘But now look how well it’s turned out!’

I cut the lemons into four and placed them between the lobsters, tore off some sprigs of parsley and laid them alongside.

‘People like scandalous writers, you see. You should go to the Theatercafé with a harem of young women running round you. That’s what’s expected. Not standing here and languishing over your bloody buckets of water… The biggest disappointment in Norwegian literature must be Tor Ulven, by the way. He didn’t even go out! Ha ha ha!’

His laughter was infectious. I laughed as well.

‘And on top of all that he committed suicide!’ he added. ‘Ha ha ha!’

‘Ha ha ha!’

‘Ha ha ha! But you have to say Ibsen was also a disappointment. Though not the top hat with the mirror, by the way. That deserves respect. And the live scorpion he kept on his desk. Bjørnson wasn’t a disappointment. And definitely not Hamsun. In fact, you can divide up Norwegian literature like this. And I’m afraid you don’t come out very well.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But at least it’s clean here. There we are. Now there’s just the bread left.’

‘Incidentally, you should write that essay on Olav H. Hauge you’ve been talking about. Soon.’

‘The bad man of Hardanger?’ I said, taking a loaf of bread out of its brown paper bag.

‘Yes, that one.’

‘I’ll do it one day,’ I said, rinsing the knife under a jet of hot water and drying it on the kitchen cloth before cutting. ‘In fact, I do think about it now and then. Him lying naked in the coal cellar after smashing all the furniture in the living room. Or the village boys throwing stones at him. Hell, there were some years when he must have been completely off his trolley.’

‘Not least the little matter of him writing that Hitler was a great man, and then removing what he had written during the war from his diary,’ Geir said.

‘Yes, not least,’ I said. ‘But the most significant part of the whole diary is what he writes when his periods of illness begin. You can read how everything starts going faster and faster as his inhibitions disappear. Suddenly there he is, writing what he really thinks about writers and their books. Normally he’s so punctilious about saying something nice about everyone. Polite and considerate and friendly and nice. And then there’s the breakdown. It’s strange that no one has written about it, isn’t it. I mean the way his judgements of Jan Erik Vold changed so radically.’

‘No one dares write about it of course,’ Geir said. ‘It’s crazy. They hardly dare poke a finger in the periods when he lost it.’

‘There is a reason for it,’ I said, putting the slices of bread in the basket and starting on the next loaf.

‘And that would be?’

‘Decency. Manners. Consideration.’

‘Ah, think I can feel a sleep coming on. It just got so boring in here.’

‘I’m serious. I mean it.’

‘Of course you do. Listen to me. It is in the diary, is it?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘And you can’t understand Hauge without it?’

‘No.’

‘And you consider Hauge a great poet?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what conclusion do you draw from that? That we should ignore an important part of a great poet and diarist’s life for the sake of decency? Forget the unpleasantness?’

‘What does it matter whether Hauge believed powers from outer space shone lights on him or not? I mean, as far as the poems themselves are concerned. Besides, who knows where his brutish directness stopped and his sensitive politeness started? I mean, where do you really draw the line?’

‘What? Which bat has taken up residency in your belfry now? You’re the one who told me about Hauge’s more eccentric side, and in fact you were obsessed by it! You said the image of the wise man of Hardanger cannot go uncontested when you know that he was mad and anything but wise for protracted periods. Or, to be more precise, that the wisdom, whatever that might be, cannot be understood without the misery in his life.’

‘No bats without fire, as the Chinese say,’ I responded. ‘Perhaps our laughing at Tor Ulven has had some influence here. My conscience was pricking me.’

‘Ha ha ha! Is that so? You can’t be that sensitive and cautious. He is dead after all. And I don’t think he was much of a party animal, was he? He drove cranes, didn’t he? Ha ha ha!’

I cut the last slices and laughed, though not without a tinge of unease.