Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘Lamb meatballs and chicken salad?’

I turned. A young man with pimples, a chef’s hat and an apron stood behind the counter looking around with a plate in each hand.

‘Yes, here,’ I said.

I put the plates on the tray and carried it through the room to our table, where Linda was sitting with Vanja on her lap.

‘Did she wake up?’ I asked.

Linda nodded.

‘I can take her,’ I said. ‘Then you can eat.’

‘Thanks,’ she said.

The offer didn’t spring from altruism but self-interest. Linda often suffered from low blood glucose and became more and more irritable the longer it lasted. Having lived with her for close on three years I picked up the signals long before she herself was aware of them, the secret lay in details, a sudden move, a hint of black in her gaze, a touch of curtness in her responses. Then all you had to do was put food in front of her and it passed. Before coming to Sweden I had never even heard of this phenomenon, had no idea low blood glucose existed and was perplexed the first time I noticed the condition in Linda, why did she snap at the waitress? Why did she give a brief nod and look away when I asked her about it? Geir thought this phenomenon, which was widespread and well documented, was caused by the fact that all Swedes went to nursery schools and were given mellanmål , ‘between-meals’, all through the day. I was used to people getting moody because something had gone wrong or somebody had made an offensive remark or suchlike, in other words for more or less objective reasons, and I knew the moods of younger children were affected by whether they were hungry or not. I clearly had a lot to learn about the ways of the human mind. Or was it the Swedish mind? The female mind? The cultural middle-class mind?

I lifted Vanja and went to fetch one of the children’s chairs inside the door by the entrance. With my daughter in one hand and the chair in the other I went back, took off her hat, romper suit and shoes and put her down. Her hair was unkempt, her face sleepy, but there was a glint in her eyes that offered hope of a quiet half an hour.

I cut off some bits of the meatballs and put them on the table in front of her. She tried to knock them away with a sweep of her arm, but the edge of the plastic table prevented her. Before she had time to pick them up and throw them one by one, I put them back on my plate. I leaned over and rummaged through the bag to see if there was something that might keep her occupied for a few minutes.

A tin lunch box, would that do the trick?

I removed the biscuits and put them on the edge of the table, then placed the box in front of her, took out my keys and dropped them in.

Objects that rattled and you could take out and put down were just what she needed. Satisfied with my solution, I sat at the table and began to eat.

The room around us was filled with the buzz of voices, the clink of cutlery and occasional muted laughter. In the short time that had elapsed since we arrived, the café had become almost full to the rafters. Djurgården was always crowded at the weekends and had been so for more than a hundred years. Not only were the parks spacious and beautiful, with more trees than park in some places, there were also lots of museums here. The Thielska Gallery, with its death mask of Nietzsche and paintings by Munch, Strindberg and Hill; Waldemarsudde, the former residence of Prince Eugen, also an artist, the Nordic Museum, the Biological Museum, Skansen of course, with its zoo of Nordic animals and buildings from the whole of Sweden’s history, all brought to light in the fantastic period at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, a strange mix of middle-class respectability, national romanticism, health fanaticism and decadence. The sole remnant was health fanaticism; Sweden had distanced itself from the rest, particularly national romanticism; now the ideal was not human uniqueness but equality, and not cultural uniqueness but multicultural society, hence all the museums here were museums of museums. This was especially true of the Biological Museum, which had stood unaltered since it was built some time at the beginning of the previous century and had the same display as then, various stuffed animals in a pseudo-natural environment against backgrounds painted by the great animal and bird artist Bruno Liljefors. In those days there were still enormous tracts of the planet untouched by humans, so its re-creation was not prompted by any necessity other than to provide knowledge; and the view it offered of our civilisation, namely that everything had to be translated into human terms, was occasioned not by need but by desire, by thirst; and the fact that this desire and thirst for knowledge, which was meant to expand the world, at one and the same time made it smaller, also physically, where what then had only just been started, and was therefore striking, had now been completed, made me want to cry every time I was there. The crowds of people walking along the canals and on the gravel paths, across the lawns and through the copses of trees at the weekend were in principle the same as at the end of the nineteenth century, and this reinforced the feeling: we were like them, just more lost.

A man of my age stood before me. There was something familiar about him, although I was unable to put my finger on what. He had a strong jutting chin and had shaved his head to hide the fact that he was beginning to go bald. His earlobes were podgy and there was a vaguely pink glow to his face.

‘Is that chair free?’ he asked.

‘Yes, help yourself,’ I said.

He carefully lifted it and carried it to the table adjacent to ours, where two women and a man in their sixties were sitting with a woman in her thirties and what had to be her two small children. A family outing with grandparents.

Vanja unleashed one of her dreadful screams, which she had started to do in recent weeks. She launched it from the bottom of her lungs. It went right through my nervous system and was unbearable. I looked at her. Both the tin box and the keys were on the floor beside the chair. I picked them up and placed them in front of her. She grabbed them and threw them down again. It could have been a game had it not been for the ensuing scream.

‘Don’t scream, Vanja,’ I said. ‘Please.’

I forked the last bit of potato, yellow against the white plate, and raised it to my mouth. While I was chewing I gathered the remaining pieces of meat on my plate, loaded them onto my fork with the knife, together with some onion rings from the salad, swallowed and lifted it to my mouth. The man who had taken the chair was on his way to the counter with the older man, whom I guessed to be his wife’s father, since none of his facial features were recognisable in the older man’s more ordinary face.

Where had I seen him before?

Vanja screamed again.

She was just impatient, no reason to get excited, I thought, as anger mounted in my chest.

I placed the cutlery on my plate and got up, looked at Linda, who would soon have finished as well.

‘I’ll take her for a little walk,’ I said, ‘just through the cloisters. Would you like a coffee afterwards or shall we have one elsewhere?’

‘We can have one somewhere else,’ she said. ‘Or stay here.’

I rolled my eyes and leaned forward to pick up Vanja.

‘Don’t you roll your eyes at me,’ Linda said.

‘But I asked you a simple question,’ I said. ‘A yes-or-no question. Do you want to, or don’t you? And you can’t even answer.’

Without waiting for her response, I put Vanja down on the floor, took her hands and started to walk, with her leading the way.

‘What do you want then?’ Linda asked behind me. I pretended to be too busy with Vanja to hear. She moved one leg in front of the other, more in enthusiasm than pursuit of a particular destination, until we reached the steps, where I carefully let go of her hands. For a moment she stood upright and swayed. Then she went down on her knees and crawled up the three steps. Set off at full speed for the front door like a little puppy. When it was opened, she sat back on her haunches and peered up at the newcomers with saucer eyes. They were two elderly women. The one at the back stopped and smiled at her. Vanja cast down her eyes.