Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

There was a gynaecological chair by one wall. Beside it, several instruments were organised on shelves on top of one other, like in a hi-fi rack. There was a CD player on a shelf on the other side.

‘Did you hear that?’ Linda said.

A low muffled howl came from the other side of the wall.

I turned and looked at her.

‘Don’t cry, Karl Ove,’ she said.

‘I don’t know what else to do,’ I said.

‘It’ll be fine,’ she said.

‘Are you comforting me now?’ I said. ‘How’s that supposed to work?’

She smiled.

Then all went quiet again.

After some minutes there was a knock at the door, a nurse came in, she asked Linda to lie down on the bed and uncover her belly, she listened to it with a stethoscope and smiled.

‘No problems there,’ she said. ‘But we’ll do an ultrasound to make absolutely sure.’

When we left half an hour later Linda was relieved and happy. I was completely drained, and also a little embarrassed that we had bothered them unnecessarily. Judging by all the people going through the doors they had more than enough to deal with already.

Why is it we always believe the worst?

On the other hand, I thought as I lay alongside Linda in bed, with my hand on her belly, in which the baby was now so big it hardly had space to move, the worst could have happened, life could have ceased inside, for that does happen, and as long as the possibility existed, small though it might be, the only correct action was surely to take it seriously and not to allow yourself to be put off by feelings of embarrassment ? Or fear of bothering other people?

The next day I went back to my office and continued to write the history of Ezekiel, which I had started in order to rework the angel material into a story, as Thure Erik had quite rightly suggested, and not just an essayistic account of them as a phenomenon. Ezekiel’s visions were so grandiose and mysterious, and the Lord’s command that he should eat the scroll so as to turn the words into flesh and blood were absolutely irresistible. At the same time Ezekiel himself became visible in the writing, the insane prophet with the doomsday images, surrounded by everyday lives of misery, with all that entailed of doubt and scepticism and sudden shifts between the interior of the visions, where angels are burned and humans slaughtered, and the exterior, where Ezekiel stands with a brick that is meant to represent Jerusalem and draws shapes that are meant to be armies, bulwarks and ramparts, all at the Lord’s instructions, outside his house, before the eyes of the town’s menfolk. The specific details of the resurrection: ‘You dry bones, hear the words of the Lord!’ Then the Lord God says to these bones, ‘See, I shall put my spirit in you and you shall live again. I shall cover you with sinew and flesh and skin.’ And then when it was done: ‘They arose and stood. It was a vast army.’

The army of the dead.

This is what I was doing, I was trying to create a gestalt, although without much success — there were so few props, sandals, camels and sand, not much more, perhaps the odd sparse bush as well — and my knowledge of the culture was close to zero, while Linda waited at home, occupied in a very different way with what was going to happen. The due date passed, nothing happened, I rang her about once an hour, but no, nothing new. We talked of nothing else. Then, a week afterwards, at the end of January while we were watching TV her waters broke. I had always imagined this as a dramatic event, a dam bursting, but it wasn’t like that, quite the contrary, there was so little water Linda was not entirely sure that that was what had happened. She rang the hospital, they were sceptical, there was not usually any doubt about whether waters had broken or not, but in the end they said we should go in, we grabbed the bag, got into a taxi and went to the hospital, which was surrounded by the same high piles of snow and as brightly lit as before. Linda was examined in the gynaecological chair; I looked out of the window, at the motorway, the rushing cars and the orange sky above. A little cry from Linda made me turn my head. It was the rest of her waters.

Since nothing else had happened and contractions had not started for the moment, we were sent home. If the situation stayed the same, they would induce labour with a drip two days later. So at least we had a deadline. Linda was too tense to sleep much when we came home; I slept like a log. The next day we watched a couple of films, went for a long walk in Humlegården, took photos of ourselves with the camera on my outstretched arm, our glowing faces close to each other, the park in the background white with snow. We warmed up one of the many meals Linda’s mother had put in the freezer to be used during the first weeks, and after we had eaten, as I was putting on the coffee, I heard a protracted groan from the living room. I hurried out and found Linda doubled up with both hands on her belly. Ooohh, she said. But the face she lifted to me was smiling.

Slowly she straightened up.

‘Now it’s started,’ she said. ‘Can you write down the time so that we know how long it is between contractions?’

‘Did it hurt?’ I asked.

‘Bit,’ she said. ‘But nothing much.’

I went to collect a pen and a pad. The time was a few minutes past five. The next contractions came exactly twenty-three minutes later. Then half an hour was to pass before the next came. And so it continued all evening, the gap between the contractions varied, while the pain evidently increased. When we went to bed at eleven she screamed when they came. I lay beside her and tried to help, but didn’t know how. She had been given a piece of apparatus known as a TENS by the midwife, which was supposed to ease the pain and consisted of some electrodes you could put on the skin where it hurt. They were connected to a machine which regulated the strength, and we tried this for a while. There was a mass of wires and some buttons I fiddled with, but the sum total of my efforts was to give her a few electric shocks and cause her to scream out in pain and anger, Turn that crap off! No, no, I said, I’ll have another go, there we are, now I think it’s working. Ow, for Christ’s sake! she shouted. Don’t you understand? It’s giving me shocks. Get rid of it! I put it away, tried massaging her instead, covered my hands with the oil I had bought for this purpose, but it was never right for her, either too high or too low or too soft or too hard. One of the things she had been looking forward to was the big bath they had in the ward, which, when it was full of hot water, was supposed to ease the pain before the birth started in earnest, but now the waters had broken she could no longer do that, nor use the bathtub at home. Instead she sat up in it and showered herself with boiling hot water as she groaned and whimpered whenever a new wave of pain washed through her. I stood there, grey with tiredness in the bright light, watching her, with no chance of reaching the place where she was, let alone helping her. We only managed to fall asleep at daybreak, and a couple of hours later we decided to go to hospital, even though there were still six hours to the appointment we had been given, and they had explained in no uncertain terms that the gap between contractions had to be down to three or four minutes if we were planning to go in before. Linda’s contractions came at around every quarter of an hour, but she was in such pain there was no question of reminding her of that. Another taxi, this time in the grey morning light, another trip on the motorway to Danderyd. When Linda was examined they said the cervix was open only three centimetres, that wasn’t much, I gathered, and was surprised after all Linda had been through, I thought it had to be over soon. But no, quite the opposite, actually we ought to go home again, they said; however, they happened to have a room free and we must have looked so tired and bedraggled they let us stay. Get some sleep, they said as they closed the door behind them.