Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

I placed two black cast-iron pots on hotplates and turned the temperature setting to maximum. Opened the window, and the voices of passing pedestrians below rose in volume at once. Went into the living room, put on some music, the latest Cardigans’ CD, good background ambience.

‘I won’t even ask if you need help,’ Anders said.

‘Such nice manners,’ Helena said, turning to me. ‘ Do you need any help?’

‘No, no, everything’s fine.’

I stood behind Linda and rested my hands on her shoulders.

‘How nice,’ she said.

Silence. I thought I should wait until the conversation got going again.

‘I had lunch with a few people at Filmhuset just before Christmas,’ Linda said after a while. ‘One of them had just seen an albino snake. Think it was a python or a boa constrictor, one of the two. Completely white with a yellow pattern. Then someone else said she used to have a boa. At home in her flat, as a pet. An enormous snake. Then one day she had a shock because it was lying beside her in bed, stretched out to its full length. She had always seen it coiled up, you see, but now it was as straight as a ruler. She was petrified, and so she rang Skansen Zoo to talk to someone who dealt with snakes. Do you know what he said? Well, good job she rang. In the nick of time. Because big snakes stretch out like that when they’re measuring up their prey. To see if they can swallow it.’

‘Ugh, oh, Christ!’ I said. ‘Ugh, shit!’

The others laughed.

‘Karl Ove’s afraid of snakes,’ Linda said.

‘That’s the nastiest story I’ve ever heard!’

Linda turned to me.

‘He dreams about snakes. He can hurl the duvet on the floor and trample on it in the middle of the night. Once he sat up and leaped out of bed. Stood absolutely still, as if paralysed, and stared. What is it, Karl Ove? You’re dreaming. Come to bed, I said. There’s a slange there, he said. A snake in Norwegian. There isn’t an orm , I said. A snake in Swedish. Come to bed. And then he said, full of contempt, “When you say orm it doesn’t sound quite so dangerous!”’

They laughed. Geir explained to Anders and Helena the difference between orm and slange in Norwegian — the former was a worm. I said that I knew what was coming, the Freudian interpretation of dreaming about snakes, and I didn’t want to hear, and so I went back into the kitchen. The water was boiling, and I added the tagliatelle. The oil in the two pots was spitting in the heat. I sliced some garlic and put it in, took the mussels from the sink, dropped them in and placed the lid on top. Soon it began to rumble and roar. I poured in white wine, chopped some parsley and sprinkled it in, took the mussels off the hotplate after a few minutes, put the tagliatelle in a colander, fetched the pesto and everything was ready.

‘Oh, how lovely that looks,’ Helena said as I entered with the plates.

‘It’s not exactly difficult,’ I said. ‘I found the recipe in Jamie Oliver’s cookery book. But it’s good.’

‘It smells fantastic,’ Christina said.

‘Is there anything you can’t do?’ Anders said, staring at me.

I looked down, forked out the soft content of a mussel, it was dark brown with an orange stripe along the top, and when I bit, it crunched like sand between your teeth.

‘Has Linda told you about our pinnekjøtt meal?’ I asked, looking up at him.

‘ Pinnekjøtt ? What’s that?’

‘Traditional Norwegian Christmas food,’ Geir said.

‘Sheep’s ribs,’ I said. ‘You salt them and hang them up to dry for a few months. My mother posted me some.’

‘Mutton in the post?’ Anders queried. ‘Is that another Norwegian tradition?’

‘How else would I get it? Anyway, my mother salts them and hangs them up in our loft at home. It tastes fantastic. She promised to send me some for Christmas. We were going to have them on Christmas Eve, Linda hasn’t tried them, and for me it is unthinkable to celebrate Christmas without ribs, but they didn’t arrive until the 27th. So I unpacked them, we decided to have another Christmas dinner that evening, and in the afternoon I went to work steaming the meat. We set the table, white cloth and candles and aquavit and everything. But the meat never cooked, we didn’t have a pot you could close tightly enough, so all that happened was that the whole flat reeked of sheep. In the end Linda and I went to bed.’

‘Then he woke me up at one!’ Linda said. ‘And we sat here, on our own, in the middle of the night eating Norwegian Christmas food.’

‘That was great, wasn’t it?’ I said.

‘Yes, it was,’ she said with a smile.

‘ Was it good?’ Helena asked.

‘Yes. It might not have looked good, but it was.’

‘I thought you were going to tell us a story about something you couldn’t do,’ Anders said. ‘But this was nothing short of an idyll.’

‘Cut the man a bit of slack,’ Geir said. ‘He’s made a career of telling people what a failure he is. One wretched tragic episode after another. Shame and remorse all down the line. This is a party! Let him talk about how clever he is for a change!’

‘I’d like you to talk about a defeat, Anders,’ Helena said.

‘Remember who you’re talking to!’ Anders said. ‘You’re talking to someone who was rich once. I mean really rich. I had two cars, an apartment in Östermalm, an account heaving with money. I could go on holiday anywhere I wanted, when I wanted. I even had some horses! And what am I doing now? Making ends meet with a bacon snacks factory in Dalarne! But I don’t sit around bloody moaning like you do!’

‘Like who do?’ Helena asked.

‘Like you and Linda, for example! I come home and you’re sitting there with your cups of tea on the sofa whinging about everything under the sun. Every conceivable and inconceivable feeling you have to struggle with all the time. It’s not that complicated. Either things go well or they don’t. And that’s good too, because if they don’t then they can only go better.’

‘The strange thing about you is that you never want to know where you are,’ Helena said. ‘But it’s not a question of a lack of insight. It’s that you don’t want to see. Sometimes I envy you. I really do. I struggle so much trying to understand who I am and why what happens to me actually happens.’

‘Your story’s not so different from Anders’, is it?’ Geir said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you also had everything. You were employed at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, you got the main roles in big productions, great film roles, and then you dropped everything and left. And that was also a pretty optimistic act, if you ask me. To marry an American New Age guru and go to Hawaii.’

‘Well, it wasn’t a great career move,’ Helena said. ‘You’re right about that. But I followed my heart. And I don’t regret anything. Nothing, really!’

She smiled and looked around.

‘And Christina has the same story,’ Geir said.

‘What’s your story then?’ Anders asked, looking at Christina.

She smiled and raised her head, swallowing the food she had in her mouth.

‘I was at the top almost before I had begun. I had my own clothes brand and was chosen as the best designer one year. I was selected to represent Sweden at the London Fashion Fair. I was in Paris with a collection—’

‘A TV crew came to our house,’ Geir said. ‘And Christina’s face was on some enormous drapes, no, enormous bloody sails at the front of the Culture House. There was a six-page feature article about her in Dagens Nyheter … We were at receptions where the women serving were dressed as elves. Champagne flowing everywhere. We were so unbelievably happy.’