Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

But a novel about sandals and camels, that was no good.

Once I had written in a notebook, ‘The Bible enacted in Norway’ and ‘Abraham in the Setesdal Hills’. It was an idiotic thought, both too small and too large for a novel, but now that it was suddenly back in my mind I needed it in a completely different way and thought, to hell with it, I’ll start and see what happens. I had Cain hitting a rock with a sledgehammer in a Scandinavian landscape at dusk. Asked Linda if I could read it to her, she said yes, of course, I said, but it’s so unbelievably stupid, you know, she said, that’s often when you’re good, well, I said, but not this time. Come on, read it! she said from the chair. I read it. She kept saying, that’s fantastic, that’s absolutely fantastic, you have to go on, and I did, kept writing until the day of Vanja’s christening in May, which was held at my mother’s in Jølster. When we returned we went to Idö in the archipelago outside Västervik, where Vidar, Ingrid’s partner, had a summer house. While Linda and Ingrid were together with Vanja I sat writing, it was June, the novel had to be done and dusted in six weeks, but even though the Cain and Abel story was ready it was still too little. I lied to my editor for the first time, said I only had some fine-tuning to do, while in fact I launched into a story I knew would become the real novel. I wrote like a madman, this was never ever going to work, I had lunch and dinner with Linda and the others, watched the European football championships with her in the evenings, otherwise I was in a small room hammering away at the keyboard. After we came home from Idö I realised that this was all or nothing, I told Linda I was moving into the office, I would have to write day and night. You can’t do that, she said, that’s not on, you’ve got a family, or have you forgotten? It’s summer, or have you forgotten? Am I supposed to look after your daughter on my own? Yes, I said. That’s the way it is. No, it isn’t, she said, I won’t let you. OK, I said, but I’ll do it anyway. And I did. I was totally manic. I wrote all the time, sleeping two or three hours a day, the only thing that had any meaning was the novel I was writing. Linda went to her mother’s and called me several times a day. She was so angry that she screamed , actually screamed down the phone. I just held it away from my ear and kept writing. She said she would leave me. Go, I said. I don’t care, I have to write. And it was true. She would have to go if that was what she wanted. She said, I will. You’ll never see us again. Fine, I said. I wrote twenty pages a day. I didn’t see any letters or words, any sentences or shapes, just countryside and people, and Linda rang and screamed, said I was a sugar daddy, said I was a bastard, said I was an unfeeling monster, said I was the worst person in the world and that she cursed the day she had met me. Fine, I said, leave me then, I don’t care, and I meant it, I didn’t care, no one was going to stand in the way of this, she slammed down the phone, she rang two minutes later and continued to swear at me, I was on my own now, she would bring up Vanja alone, fine by me, I said, she cried, she begged, she pleaded, what I was doing to her was the worst thing anyone could do, leaving her alone. But I didn’t care, I wrote night and day, and then out of the blue she rang and said she was coming home the following day, would I go to the station and meet them?

Yes, I would.

At the station she came towards me with Vanja asleep in the buggy, gave a terse greeting and asked how things were, fine, I said, she said she was sorry about everything. Two weeks later I rang to say the novel was finished, by some miracle on the exact day I had been given as a deadline by the publishing house, 1 August, and when I went home she was standing in the hallway with a glass of Prosecco for me, my favourite music playing in the living room and my favourite meal on the table. I had finished, the novel was written, but I was not finished with what I had experienced, that is, the place where I felt I had been. We went to Oslo, I went to the press conference, got so drunk at the dinner afterwards that I was flat on my belly spewing up in the hotel room all morning and only just managed to make it to the airport, where a delay was the last straw for Linda, at the airline counter she gave the staff a piece of her mind, I hid my head in my hands, were we back there again? The plane went to Bringelandsåsen, where mum was waiting for us, for the whole of the next week we went on long walks beneath the beautiful mountains, and everything was great, everything was as it should be, yet not good enough, I longed to be back where I had been, I ached for it, to the maniacal, the lonely, the happy place.

When we returned to Sweden, Linda started her second year at the Dramatiska Institut while I stayed at home looking after Vanja. She was pumped full of milk in the morning, I dropped by the DI at lunch, where she was pumped full again, and in the afternoon Linda cycled back as fast as she could. I couldn’t complain, everything was good, the book received good reviews, the rights were bought by foreign publishers, and while that went on I was pushing a buggy around the fine city of Stockholm with a daughter I loved above all else, while my true love was on her course, pining to be with us.

Autumn passed into winter, life with baby food and baby clothes, baby cries and baby vomit, utterly wasted mornings and empty afternoons began to take their toll, but I couldn’t complain, couldn’t say anything, I just had to keep my mouth shut and do what I had to do. In the block of flats the minor harassment continued, the events of New Year’s Eve had not changed the Russian’s attitude towards us. Any idea that she would no longer do her utmost to torment us proved to be naïve, the opposite occurred, the frequency increased. If, one morning, we switched on the bedroom radio, if I dropped a book on the floor, if I hammered a nail into the wall, the pipes reverberated straight afterwards. Once I left an Ikea bag of clean clothes in the cellar and someone had put it under the sink, loosened the down pipe so that all the water that ran through the plug — and it was mostly dirty water — ended up in the bag. One morning towards the end of the winter Linda received a phone call from the company that owned the block, they had received a letter of complaint about us, a whole list of serious points, would we be so kind as to explain them? First of all, we played loud music at unsociable hours. Secondly, we left bags of rubbish in the corridor outside our door. Thirdly, the buggy was always there. Fourthly, we smoked in the backyard and dropped cigarette ends everywhere. Fifthly, we left clothes in the cellar, didn’t clean up after us and washed at times other than those allocated to us. What could we say? That a neighbour had it in for us? It was our word against hers. And besides she was not the only person to sign the complaint, her girlfriend on the floor above had also signed. Furthermore, some of the points were factually correct. Since everyone else in the block put rubbish bags outside the door at night, we did too. Nor could we deny it; the two busybodies had taken a photo of our door with the bag outside. And we put the buggy outside the door as well, that was correct, did they imagine we would carry the baby and everything she needed from the cellar several times a day? It was quite possible that we forgot our washing times, but didn’t everyone? Well, we should be more attentive. They would let it go this once, but if there were any more complaints our contract would be reviewed. In Sweden you have a rental contract for life, they are hard to get, and for one like ours, in a city-centre location, you had to either work your way up over a long life or buy it for up to a million on the black market. We had got ours through Linda’s mother. If we lost this contract it would be like losing the only asset we had of any value. All we could do, from now on, was make sure that everything we did was by the book. For Swedes this is in their blood. Swedes who don’t pay their bills on the dot don’t exist because unless they pay, they get a reprimand, and if they get a reprimand, however small the sum involved, they cannot get a bank loan, they cannot get a mobile phone subscription and they cannot rent a car. For me, someone who was not so punctilious and who was used to incurring a couple of debts every six months, this was of course a different matter. I only appreciated the gravity of this a few years later when I needed a loan and was refused point blank. A loan, you ! But the Swedes, they clenched their teeth, they had order in their lives and were contemptuous of those who didn’t. Oh, how I hated this shitty little country. And how smug they were! The way everything was in Sweden was normality; anything different was abnormal. And this at the same time as embracing all the multicultural and minority issues! The poor black people who came from Ghana or Ethiopia to the Swedish basement laundry room! Having to book a slot two weeks in advance and then getting your ears chewed off if you left a sock in the tumble drier. Or being subjected to a man appearing at the door with one of those bloody Ikea bags in his hand and sarcastically asking if by any chance it was yours! Sweden hasn’t had a war on its soil since the seventeenth century and how often did it cross my mind that someone ought to invade Sweden, bomb its buildings, starve the country, shoot down its men, rape its women, and then have some faraway country, Chile or Bolivia for example, embrace its refugees with kindness, tell them they love Scandinavia and dump them in a ghetto outside one of the cities there. Just to see what they would say.