Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘Well, that would be brilliant,’ I said.

‘We can ask her tomorrow.’

‘I have a feeling she will say yes,’ I said with a smile.

Linda’s mother dropped everything and raced off as soon as one of her children needed help. And if there had been any limits before, they had certainly been removed now that a grandchild had come into the world. She worshipped Vanja and would do anything, absolutely anything for her.

‘Are you happy now?’ Linda asked, stroking my back.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘She’ll be quite a lot bigger,’ she said. ‘Sixteen months. That’s not so small.’

‘Torje was ten months old when he started at nursery,’ I said. ‘And it doesn’t seem to have left any visible scars at least.’

‘And if I am pregnant, the birth will be in October. Then it’ll be good if Vanja has some structure to her day.’

‘I think you are.’

‘I do too. No, I know I am. I’ve known ever since yesterday.’

When we reached the square in front of the Royal Dramatic Theatre and stopped to wait for the lights to change to green it started snowing. The wind gusted round corners and over rooftops, leafless branches swayed, flags flapped wildly. The poor birds on the wing were blown hopelessly off course above us. We walked to the marketplace at the end of Biblioteksgatan, where the hostage drama that shook all of Sweden and gave rise to the concept of the Stockholm syndrome had taken place some time in the innocent 1970s, and we followed one of the backstreets up to NK, where we were going to do our food shopping this evening.

‘You can take her home if you like while I do the shopping,’ I said because I knew how much Linda disliked shops and malls.

‘No, I want to be with you,’ she said.

So we took the lift down to the food section in the basement, bought Italian sausage, tomatoes, onions, leaf parsley and two packets of rigatoni pasta, ice cream and frozen blackberries, took the lift up to the floor where the Systembolaget was and bought a litre carton of white wine for the tomato sauce, a carton of red wine and a small bottle of brandy. On the way I bought the Norwegian newspapers that had just appeared — Aftenposten, Dagbladet, Dagens Næringsliv and Verdens Gang — as well as The Guardian and The Times in case, but it was by no means guaranteed, I had an hour free to read over the weekend.

We arrived home at a few minutes past one. Sorting out the flat, tidying up and cleaning took exactly two hours. On top of that, there was an enormous pile of clothes that had to be washed. But we had plenty of time: Fredrik and Karin wouldn’t be here before six.

Linda sat Vanja in her chair and heated a tin of baby food in the microwave while I picked up all the rubbish bags that had accumulated, not least the one in the bathroom, where the nappies not only filled the bin and forced the lid into a vertical position but also spilled out onto the floor, and carried them to the refuse room on the ground floor. As it was the end of the week, the bulk containers were full to the brim. I opened all the lids and threw the various types of rubbish into their respective places: cardboard there, coloured glass there, clear glass there, plastic there, metal there, the rest to over there. As always I was able to confirm that a lot of drinking went on in this building; much of the cardboard was wine cartons and almost all the glass was wine and spirits. In addition, there were always big piles of illustrated magazines, the cheap newspaper supplements and the thicker, more specialist editions. In particular, fashion, interior design and country houses in this block. In the corner on the shortest wall there was a hole, provisionally nailed up, where some men had sawn through to get to the hairdressing salon next door. I had almost stumbled over them. One of the mornings when I got up at five I had been on my way outside with a cup of coffee in my hand and had heard the ear-piercing alarm in the salon as soon as I entered the hallway. Downstairs there was a security guard with a telephone to her ear. She stopped talking the second I appeared and asked if I lived here. I nodded. She said someone had just broken into the hairdressing salon and the police had been alerted. I went with her to the bicycle room, where the door had been smashed open, and I saw the half-metre-wide hole in the stud wall. I had a few jokes about vain thieves on the tip of my tongue, but I bit it. She was Swedish, either she wouldn’t understand what I said or she wouldn’t get the joke. One of the consequences of living here, I mused as I banged the container lids shut and unlocked the door to have a cigarette outside, was that I simply said less. I had stopped almost all the small talk, chatting to assistants in shops, waiters in cafés, conductors on trains and strangers in chance encounters. This was one of the best parts about returning to Norway: the ease of dealing with people I didn’t know returned and my shoulders dropped. And also all the knowledge you possessed about your compatriots, which overwhelmed me when I stepped into the arrivals hall at Gardermoen, Oslo Airport: he comes from Bergen, she comes from Trondheim, him, he must be from Arendal, and her, wasn’t she from Birkeland? The same applied to all nuances of society. What jobs people did, what their backgrounds were, everything was clear in seconds, while in Sweden it was always hidden from me. A whole world disappeared in this way. What must it be like to live in an African village? Or a Japanese village?

Outside, the wind buffeted me. The snow that had fallen was thick and wound its way across the tarmac in twists and turns, here and there it swirled up in veils, as though this was a mountain plateau I had stepped onto and not an urban backyard near the Baltic. I stood under the porch by the front entrance, where only sporadic, particularly wild, gusts of stinging snow could reach me. The pigeon stood motionless in its corner, totally unaffected by my presence and movements. The café on the other side of the street was packed, I could see, mostly with young people. Occasional passers-by walked, bent double, into the wind. All of them turned their heads towards me.

The break-in I had nearly witnessed was not an isolated example. As the block was in the city centre it was sometimes used by tramps. One morning I came across one in the basement laundry room, at the back, lying asleep by a washing machine, whose heat he had probably sought, like a cat. I had slammed the door, gone upstairs and waited for a few minutes, and when I returned he had left. Also in the basement I had bumped into a tramp one evening at around ten. I wanted something or other from our storage room and there he was, sitting against the wall, bearded with intense eyes, staring at me. I nodded, unlocked our door and left when I had got what I wanted. Of course, you should ring the police, there was an implicit fire risk, but they didn’t bother me, so I let them be.

I stubbed my cigarette out on the wall and like a good tenant took it to the big ashtray, thinking seriously I would have to stop smoking soon. These days my lungs seemed to be burning. And how many years had I woken up in the morning with my throat full of thick mucus? But not today, it was never today, I said to myself half out loud, as I had got into the habit of doing lately, and let myself in.

While I was cleaning the flat I could always hear what Linda was doing with Vanja. She read to her, she found toys for her, which were mostly banged on the floor again and again — several times I was on the point of intervening, but our neighbour obviously wasn’t in, so I let it go — she sang songs to her, she ate ‘between-meals’ with her. Sometimes they came to see me, Vanja dangling from Linda’s arms, sometimes Linda tried to read a newspaper while Vanja was playing on her own, but not many minutes passed before she began to demand Linda’s full attention. Which she always gave her. But I had to be wary about going in and giving my opinion, it didn’t take much for it to be regarded as criticism. Having another child might loosen the tense dynamics. Having two certainly would.