Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

I switched off the hotplate and put the small white mushrooms, which were now streaked with brown, on the dish. It was white with a blue line round and outside that there was a further line, of gold. It wasn’t very attractive, but I had brought it here after Yngve and I had divided the few items dad had left behind. He must have bought them with the money he got when he divorced and mum bought his share of the house in Tveit. He bought all his household requirements in one fell swoop, and something about that, the fact that everything he possessed stemmed from the same period of time, divested it of meaning, it had no aura other than one of recent domesticity and a solitary existence. For me it was different: dad’s goods and chattels which, beyond this crockery service, consisted of one pair of binoculars and one pair of rubber boots, helped to preserve him in my memory. Not in any strong, clear sense, it was more like a regular confirmation that he was also a part of my life. In my mother’s house objects played a very different role. There was, for example, a plastic bucket that they had bought some time in the 1960s when they were students and lived in Oslo, which had been placed too near a fire in the 1970s and had melted on one side into a form, I thought as a boy, that resembled a man’s face, with eyes, a crooked nose and a twisted mouth. This was still the bucket, the one she used when she washed something, and still it was the face I saw when I went to fill it with water and not a bucket. First hot water and then soap were poured onto the poor man’s head. The ladle she stirred porridge with was the same one she had used to stir porridge for as long as I could remember. The brown plates which we ate breakfast from when we were there were the same ones I had eaten breakfast from when I was small, sitting on the kitchen stool with my legs dangling down, in Tybakken in the 1970s. The new items she had bought were added to the rest and belonged to her, unlike dad’s possessions, which were expendable. The priest who buried him mentioned this in his sermon, he said that you have to ground your gaze, ground yourself in the world, by which he meant that my father had not done this, and he was absolutely right. But it was several years before I understood that there were also many good reasons for loosening your grip, not grounding yourself at all, just letting yourself fall and fall until you were ultimately smashed to pieces at the bottom.

What was it about nihilism that could draw minds to it in this way?

In the bedroom Vanja started to wail. I poked my head through the door and saw her standing with her hands around the rails and jumping up and down with frustration as Linda dashed across the floor towards her.

‘Food’s ready,’ I said.

‘Typical!’ she said, lifting Vanja up, lying on the bed with her, raising her sweater on one side and loosening the bra cup. Vanja instantly went quiet.

‘She’ll be back to sleep in a few minutes,’ Linda said.

‘I’ll wait,’ I said, and went back into the kitchen. Closed the window, turned off the fan, took the dishes and carried them into the living room through the hall so as not to disturb Linda and Vanja. Poured some mineral water into a glass and drank it in the middle of the floor while looking around. Some music wouldn’t be a bad idea. I stood in front of the CD racks. Picked out Emmylou Harris’s Anthology, which we had played a lot in recent weeks, and put it on. It was easy to protect yourself against music when you were prepared or just had it on as background, because it was simple, undemanding and sentimental, but when I was not prepared, like now, or was really listening, it hit home with me. My feelings soared and before I knew what was happening my eyes were moist. It was only then that I realised how little I normally felt, how numb I had become. When I was eighteen I was full of such feelings all the time, the world seemed more intense, and that was why I wanted to write, it was the sole reason, I wanted to touch something music touched. The human voice’s lament and sorrow, joy and delight, I wanted to evoke everything the world had bestowed upon us.

How could I forget that?

I put down the CD box and went to the window. What was it that Rilke wrote? That music raised him out of himself, and never returned him to where it had found him, but to a deeper place, somewhere in the unfinished?

It was unlikely he had been thinking about country music…

I smiled. Linda came through the door in front of me.

‘Now she’s asleep,’ she whispered, pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Ah, lovely!’

‘It’s probably a little cold now,’ I said, sitting on the opposite side of the table.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Can I start? I’m famished.’

‘Go on,’ I said, poured a glass of wine and put some potatoes on my plate while she helped herself to meat and vegetables.

She chatted about the projects chosen by colleagues in her class whose names I barely knew despite there being only six of them. It had been different when she started the course, then I met them regularly, up at Filmhuset and in various pubs where they gathered. It was a relatively mature class, many were in their late twenties and already established. One of them, Anders, was in Doktor Kosmos , another, Özz, was a well known stand-up comedian. But when Linda became pregnant with Vanja she took a year off, and then she found herself in a new class which I didn’t feel like getting to know.

The meat was as tender as butter. The red wine tasted of earth and wood. Linda’s eyes glinted in the glow from the candles. I put my knife and fork down on the plate. It was a few minutes to eight o’clock.

‘Do you want me to listen to the documentary now? I asked.

‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ Linda said. ‘You can do it tomorrow, you know.’

‘But I’m curious,’ I said. ‘And it’s not very long, is it?’

She shook her head and got up.

‘I’ll get the player then. Where do you want to sit?’

I shrugged.

‘There perhaps?’ I said, motioning towards the chair by the bookshelves. She took out the DAT player, I fetched a pen and paper, sat down and put on the headset, she raised her eyebrows, I nodded and she pressed play.

After she had cleared the table I sat there alone listening. I already knew her father’s story, but it was something else to hear it from his own mouth. His name was Roland and he was born in 1941 in one of the towns up in Norrland. He grew up without a father, with his mother and two younger siblings. His mother died when he was fifteen and from then on he was responsible for his little brother and sister. They lived alone without any adult support except for a woman who came to clean and cook for them. He went to school for four further years, became what was known in Sweden as a gymnas engineer, started working, played football in his free time, as goalkeeper for his local club, and thrived up there. At a dance he met Ingrid; she was the same age as him, had been to a domestic science college, worked as a secretary in a mining company office and was exceptionally beautiful. They became a couple and got married. Ingrid, however, had acting dreams, and when she was accepted for drama school in Stockholm, Roland abandoned the whole of his former life and moved with her to the capital. The life that awaited her, as an actress at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, had nothing to offer him, there was a gulf between his life as a goalkeeper and gymnas engineer in a provincial Norrland town and the one he had now, as the husband of a beautiful actress on the country’s most important stage. They had two children in quick succession, but that was not enough to keep them together, they soon divorced and straight afterwards he fell ill for the first time. The illness he had was boundless and caused him to fluctuate between manic heights and depressive abysses, and once it had him in its grip it never let go. From then on he was in and out of institutions. When I met him for the first time, in the spring of 2004, he hadn’t worked since the mid-1970s. Linda had not met him for many years. Even though I had seen photographs of him I still wasn’t ready for what was awaiting me when I opened the door and he stood outside. His face was utterly open: it was as though there was nothing between him and the world. He had no protection against it, he was wholly defenceless, and to see that hurt you deep into your soul.