Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘Well, that’s enough now,’ I said, as I put them in the basket. ‘If you take the basket of bread, the butter and the mayonnaise we can join the others.’

‘Oh, how wonderful!’ Helena said as I put the dish on the table.

‘You’ve done us proud, Karl Ove,’ Linda said.

‘Help yourselves,’ I said. Poured what was left of the champagne and opened a bottle of white wine, then sat down and put one of the lobster halves on my plate. Cracked the large claw with the pliers from the seafood set I had been given as a present by Gunnar and Tove some time ago. The meat that grew in such tasty profusion around the tiny flat white cartilage, or whatever it was. The space between the flesh and the outer shell where there was often water: What kind of feeling would that have been when the lobster was walking around on the seabed?

‘Now we’re having a grand time!’ I said in Norwegian dialect, and raised my glass. ‘ Skål! ’

Geir smiled. The others ignored what they didn’t understand and raised their glasses.

‘ Skål! And thank you for inviting us!’ Anders said.

More often than not it was me who cooked when we had guests. Not so much because I liked doing it but because it gave me something to hide behind. I could stay in the kitchen when they arrived, poke my head in and say hello, carry on cooking in the kitchen, hidden, until the food was ready to serve and I had to appear. But even then I could hide behind something: a glass had to be filled with wine, another with water, I could take care of that and the instant the first course was finished I could clear the table and set it for the next.

That is what I did on this evening as well. As fascinated as I was by Anders, I was unable to talk to him. I liked Helena, but I couldn’t talk to her. I could talk to Linda, but now we were responsible for making sure the others were having a good time and therefore we couldn’t have a conversation. I could also talk to Geir, but when he was with others another side of his personality took over; he was talking to Anders about criminal acquaintances, they laughed and carried on, he entertained Helena with his shocking honesty, she reacted with a mixture of gasps and laughter. Beneath this there were also other tensions. Linda and Geir were like two magnets, they repelled each other. Helena was never quite happy with Anders when they were out, it was not uncommon for him to make comments with which she disagreed or which she considered foolish; this tension affected me. Christina could go for long periods without speaking, this too affected me, why was it, wasn’t she having a good time, was it us, Geir or herself?

There were almost no similarities between us, there were constant undercurrents of sympathies and antipathies beneath the surface, that is beneath what was said and done, but despite that, or perhaps because of it, it was a memorable evening, most of all because we suddenly reached a point where it felt as if no one had anything to lose and we could tell any story from our lives, even one we usually kept to ourselves.

The conversation stuttered into life, as most do between people who don’t know each other but about each other.

I raised the thick smooth flesh from the shell, divided it, forked a mouthful, ran it through the mayonnaise and lifted it to my lips.

Outside there was an enormous bang, like an exploding bomb. The windowpanes rattled.

‘That one wasn’t legal,’ Anders said.

‘Ah yes, you’re an expert on that, I gather,’ Geir said.

‘We’ve brought a sky lantern with us,’ Helena said. ‘You light it and then the lantern fills with hot air and just climbs into the sky. Higher and higher. And there’s no bang. It rises without a sound. It’s fantastic.’

‘Is it safe to let it off in a town?’ Linda asked. ‘I mean, what if it lands on a roof and it’s alight?’

‘Anything goes on New Year’s Eve,’ Anders said.

There was a silence. I wondered if I should tell them about the time a friend and I collected all the burned-out rockets on the first of January, removed all the powder, tamped it into a cartridge case and lit it. The image was still vivid in my brain: Geir Håkon turning towards me, his face black with soot. The horror that struck me when I realised that dad could have heard the bang and that the soot might not come off completely and that dad would be able to see. But the story didn’t have a point, I thought, so I got up and poured more wine, met Helena’s smiling gaze, sat down, glanced over at Geir, who had launched into the differences between Sweden and Norway, a theme he resorted to when conversation round the table was flagging. It was one on which everyone had something to say.

‘But why compare Sweden and Norway?’ Anders asked after a while. ‘Nothing happens here. It’s cold and horrible as well.’

‘Anders wants to go back to Spain,’ Helena said.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ Anders retorted. ‘We should have moved. All of us. What actually keeps us here? Is there anything?’

‘What is it about Spain then?’ Linda asked.

He opened his palms.

‘You can do what you like. No one bothers. And it’s so lovely and hot. There are some wonderful towns down there. Sevilla. Valencia. Barcelona. Madrid.’

He looked at me.

‘And there’s a slight difference in the level of football. The two of us should go down and see El Clásico . Stay overnight. I can fix the tickets. No problem. What do you say?’

‘Sounds good to me,’ I said.

‘Sounds good to me,’ he snorted. ‘Let’s go, man.’

Linda looked at me and smiled. ‘You go, I’d be pleased for you,’ her look said. But there were other looks and moods, I knew, which would appear sooner or later. You go and enjoy yourself while I sit at home alone, they said. You only think about yourself. If you go anywhere it should be with me. All of this was in her eyes. A boundless love and a boundless anxiety. Fighting for domination all the time. Something new had appeared in recent months, it was tied up with the imminent arrival of the baby, and lay inside her, a mutedness. The anxiety was delicate, ethereal, flickering through her consciousness like the northern lights across a winter’s sky or lightning across an August sky, and the darkness that accompanied it was weightless too, in the sense that it was an absence of light, and absence has no weight. What filled her now was something else, I thought it had something to do with earth, it was earthy, a taking root. At the same time I considered it a stupid mythologising thought.

Nevertheless. Earth.

‘When is El Clásico then?’ I asked, leaning across the table to fill Anders’ glass.

‘I don’t know. But we don’t have to go and see that match. Any of them will do. I just want to see Barcelona.’

I filled my glass and poked out the meat from the back of the claw.

‘Yes, that would be good,’ I said. ‘But at any rate we’ll have to wait for a week after the birth. After all, we’re not men from the 1950s.’

‘I am,’ Geir said.

‘Me too,’ Anders said. ‘Or at least on the fringes. If I could have done it, I would have paced the corridor during the birth.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ Geir asked.

Anders looked at him, and they laughed.

‘Has everyone got something to drink?’ I asked. After they had nodded and thanked me, I collected their plates and carried them into the kitchen. Christina followed me with the two serving platters.

‘Can I help you with anything?’ she asked.

I shook my head and briefly met her eyes before looking down.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But thank you for offering.’

She went back, I filled a pan with water and put it on the stove. Outside, rockets were making fizzing sounds and exploding. The little patch of sky I could see was occasionally illuminated with glittering lights, which showered across it and extinguished themselves as they fell. From the living room came laughter.