Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

She placed the dish of what I thought was a dressing but which turned out to be a ‘dip’ on a board beside a dish of carrot sticks and one of cucumber sticks. At that moment Vanja came into the room. When she had located us she came over and stood close.

‘I want to go home,’ she said softly.

‘We’ve only just got here!’ I said.

‘We’re going to stay a bit longer,’ Linda said. ‘And look, now you’re all getting some goodies!’ Was she was referring to the vegetables on the board?

She had to be.

They were crazy in this country.

‘I’ll go with you,’ I said to Vanja. ‘Come on.’

‘Will you take Heidi as well?’ Linda asked.

I nodded, and with Vanja at my heels I carried her into the room where the children were. Frida followed holding the board. She placed it on a little table in the middle of the floor.

‘Here’s something to eat,’ she said. ‘Before the cake arrives.’

The children, three girls and a boy, went on playing with the doll’s house. In the other room two boys were running around. Erik was in there, by the stereo system with a CD in his hand.

‘I’ve got a bit of Norwegian jazz here,’ he said. ‘Are you a jazz fan?’

‘We-ell…’ I said.

‘Norway has a great jazz scene,’ he said.

‘Who’s that you have there?’ I asked.

He showed me the cover. It was a band I had never heard of.

‘Great,’ I said.

Vanja was standing behind Heidi trying to lift her. Heidi was protesting.

‘She says no, Vanja,’ I said. ‘Put her down.’

As she carried on I went over to them.

‘Don’t you want a carrot?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Vanja said.

‘But there’s a dip,’ I said. Went over to the table, took a carrot stick and dunked it in the white, presumably cream-based, dip and put it in my mouth.

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘It’s good!’

Why couldn’t they have given them sausages, ice cream and pop? Lollipops? Jelly? Chocolate pudding?

What a stupid, bloody idiotic country this was. All the young women drank water in such vast quantities it was coming out of their ears, they thought it was ‘beneficial’ and ‘healthy’, but all it did was send the graph of incontinent young people soaring. Children ate wholemeal pasta and wholemeal bread and all sorts of weird coarse-grained rice which their stomachs could not digest properly, but that didn’t matter because it was ‘beneficial’, it was ‘healthy’, it was ‘wholesome’. Oh, they were confusing food with the mind, they thought they could eat their way to being better human beings without understanding that food is one thing and the notions food evokes another. And if you said that, if you said anything of that kind, you were either reactionary or just a Norwegian, in other words ten years behind.

‘I don’t want any,’ Vanja said. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘But look here. Have you seen this? It’s a train set. Shall we build it?’

She nodded, and we sat down behind the other children. I began to lay railway track in an arc while helping Vanja to fit her pieces. Heidi had moved into the other room, where she walked alongside the bookcase studying everything in it. Whenever the two boys’ capers became too boisterous she swivelled round and glared at them.

Erik finally put on a CD and turned up the volume. Piano, bass and a myriad of percussion instruments that a certain type of jazz drummer adores — the kind that bangs stones against each other or uses whatever materials happen to be at hand. For me it sometimes meant nothing, and sometimes I found it ridiculous. I hated it when the audience applauded at jazz concerts.

Erik was nodding to the music, then turned, sent me a wink and went into the kitchen. At that moment the doorbell rang. It was Linus and his son Achilles. Linus had a pinch of snus under his top lip, was wearing black trousers, a dark coat and beneath it a white shirt. His fair hair was a touch unkempt, the eyes peering into the flat were honest and naïve.

‘Hello!’ he said. ‘How are you doing?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘And you?’

‘Yep, jogging along.’

Achilles, who was small with large dark eyes, took off his jacket and shoes while staring at the children behind me. Children are like dogs, they always find their own in crowds. Vanja eyed him as well. He was her favourite, he was the one she had chosen to take over the role of Alexander. But after he had removed his outer clothing he went straight over to the other children, and there was nothing Vanja could do to stop him. Linus slipped into the kitchen, and the glint I thought I detected in his eye could only have been his anticipation of a chance to have a chat.

I got up and looked at Heidi. She was sitting beside the yucca plant under the window, taking earth from the pot and making small piles on the floor. I went over to her, lifted her, scraped what I could back with my hands, and went into the kitchen to find a rag. Vanja followed me. Once there, she climbed onto Linda’s lap. In the living room Heidi started to cry. Linda sent me a quizzical look.

‘I’ll see to her,’ I said. ‘Just need something to wipe with.’

People were crowded round the worktop, it looked as if a meal was being prepared, and instead of squeezing through, I went to the toilet, unfurled a hefty handful of toilet paper, moistened it under the tap and went back to the living room to clean up. I lifted Heidi, who was still crying, and carried her to the bathroom to wash her hands. She wriggled and squirmed in my grip.

‘There, there, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Soon be done. Just a bit more, now, OK. There we are!’

As we came out the crying subsided, but she wasn’t entirely happy, didn’t want to be put down, just wanted to be in my arms. Robin stood in the living room with his arms crossed following the movements of his daughter Theresa, who was only a few months older than Heidi, although she could already speak in long sentences.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Writing at the moment, are you?’

‘Yes, a bit,’ I said.

‘Do you write at home?’

‘Yes, I’ve got my own room.’

‘Isn’t that difficult? I mean, don’t you ever feel like watching TV or washing some clothes or something, instead of writing?’

‘It’s fine. I get less time than if I had an office, but…’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said.

He had quite long blond hair that curled at the nape of his neck, clear blue eyes, a flat nose, broad jawbones. He wasn’t strong, nor was he weak. He dressed as if he were in his mid-twenties, even though he was in his late thirties. What went through his mind I had no idea, I didn’t have a clue about what he was thinking, yet there was nothing secretive about him. On the contrary, his face and aura gave the impression of openness. But there was something else nevertheless, I sensed, a shadow of something else. His job was to integrate refugees into the community, he had told me once, and after a few follow-up questions about how many refugees were allowed into the country and so on, I let the matter drop because the opinions and sympathies I had were so far from the norm I assumed he represented that sooner or later they would shine through, whereupon I would come across as the baddie or the idiot, which I saw no reason to encourage.

Vanja, who was sitting on the floor slightly apart from the other children, looked towards us. I put Heidi down, and it was as though Vanja had been waiting for that: she got up at once and came over, took Heidi by the hand and led her to the games shelf, from which she passed her the wooden snail with feelers that whirred when you pulled it along the floor.

‘Look, Heidi!’ she said, taking it out of her hands and putting it on the floor. ‘You pull the string like this. Then it whirrs. See?’