Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

The only light came from a small porthole in the wall. Since the garden was lower than the house entrance you could see straight into it. It was a disorientating perspective, the sense of spatial connection was broken, for a brief moment the ground seemed to have disappeared beneath me. Then, as I grabbed the banister, everything became clear to me again: I was here, the window was there, the garden there, the house entrance there.

I stood staring out of the window without registering anything or thinking of anything in particular. Then I turned and went up to the hall, hung my jacket on one of the clothes hangers in the wardrobe, and glanced at myself in the mirror by the stairs. Tiredness lay like a membrane over my eyes. When I ascended the stairs it was with heavy footfalls so that Grandma would hear me coming.

She was sitting as she had when we left her a few hours before, at the kitchen table. In front of her was a cup of coffee, an ashtray, and a plate full of crumbs from the roll she had eaten.

When I entered she glanced up at me in her alert, birdlike way.

“Ah, it’s you,” she said. “Did everything go alright?”

She had probably forgotten where I had been, though I could not be sure, and I answered with the gravity that such an occasion demanded.

“Yes,” I nodded. “It went well.”

“That’s good,” she said, looking down. I stepped into the room and put the newspaper I had bought on the table.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” I answered.

“The pot’s on the stove.”

Something in her tone made me look at her. She had never spoken to me like that before. The strange thing was that it didn’t change her as much as it changed me. That was how she must have spoken to Dad of late. She had addressed him not me. And that was not how she would have addressed Dad if Grandad had been alive. This was the tone between mother and son when no one else was there.

I didn’t think that she had mistaken me for Dad, only that she was talking out of habit, like a ship continuing to glide through the water after the engines had been switched off. It chilled me inside. But I couldn’t let that affect me, so I helped myself to a cup from the cupboard, went over to the stove, felt the coffeepot with my finger. It was a long time since it had been warm.

Grandma whistled and drummed her fingers on the table. She had done that for as long as I could remember. There was something good about seeing it, for so much had changed about her otherwise.

I had seen photos of her from the 1930s, and she had been attractive, not strikingly so, but enough to mark her out, in the typical way for that era: dark, dramatic eyes, small mouth, short hair. When, toward the end of the fifties, as a mother of three, she had been photographed in front of some tourist sights on their travels, all of those characteristics were still there, if in a softer, less distinct yet not undefined way, and you could still use the word “attractive” to describe her. When I was growing up, and she was in her late sixties, early seventies, I couldn’t see any of this of course, she was just “Grandma,” I knew nothing about her characteristic traits, the things that told you who she was. An older woman, middle class, who was well-conserved and dressed elegantly, that must have been the impression she gave at the end of the seventies, when she took the unusual step of catching a bus to visit us and sat in our kitchen in Tybakken. Lively, mentally alert, vigorous. Right up until a couple of years ago that was how she was. Then something happened to her, and it was not old age that had her in its grip, nor illness, it was something else. Her detachment had nothing to do with the gentle otherworldliness or contentedness of old people, her detachment was as hard and lean as the body in which it resided.

I saw that, but there was nothing I could do, I could not build a bridge, could not help or console her, I could only watch, and every minute I spent with her I was tense. The only thing that helped was to keep moving and not to let any of what was present, in either her or the house, find a foothold.

With her hand, she wiped a flake of tobacco off her lap. Then looked at me.

“Shall I make you a cup as well?” I offered.

“Was there anything wrong with the coffee?” she said.

“It wasn’t that hot,” I said, taking the pot to the sink. “I’ll put some fresh on.”

“Wasn’t that hot, did you say?”

Was she reproving me?

No. For then she laughed and brushed a crumb from her lap.

“I think my brain’s unravelling,” she said. “I was sure I‘d only just made it.”

“It wasn’t that cold,” I said, turning on the tap. “It’s just that I like my coffee boiling hot.”

I rinsed out the dregs and sprayed the bottom of the sink with the water until it had all gone down the drain. Then I filled the pot, which was almost completely black on the inside and covered with greasy fingerprints on the outside.

“Unravelling” was our family euphemism for senility. Grandad’s brother, Leif, his brain “unravelled” when, on several occasions, he wandered from the old people’s home to his childhood home, where he hadn’t lived for sixty years, and stood shouting and banging on the door all through the night. His second brother, Alf, his mind had started unravelling in recent years; it was most obvious in his merging of the present and the past. And Grandad’s mind also started unravelling at the end of his life when he sat up at night fiddling with an enormous collection of keys, no one knew he had them, let alone why. It was in the family; their mother’s mind unravelled eventually, if we were to believe what my father had said. Apparently the last thing she did was climb into the loft instead of going down into the cellar when she had heard a siren; according to my father, she fell down the steep loft staircase in her house and died. Whether that was true or not, I don’t know, my father could serve up all manner of lies. My intuition told me it wasn’t, but there was no way of finding out.

I carried the pot to the stove and put it on the burner. The ticking of the safety device filled the kitchen. Then the damp pot began to crackle. I stood with folded arms, peering at the top of the steep hill outside the window, at the imposing white house. It struck me that I had stared at that house all my life without ever seeing anyone in or around it.

“Where’s Yngve then?” Grandma asked.

“He had to go back to Stavanger today,” I said, addressing her. “To his family. He’ll be back for the f … for Friday.”

“Yes, that was it.” She nodded to herself. “He had to go back to Stavanger.”

As she grasped the pouch of tobacco and the small, red-and-white roller machine, she said, without looking up: “But you’re staying here?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be here all the time.”

I was happy that she so clearly wanted me to be here, even though I gathered that it was not me especially that she wanted here, anyone would do.

She cranked the handle of the machine with surprising vigor, flipped out the freshly filled cigarette and lit it, brushing a few flakes from her lap again and sat staring into space.

“I thought I would carry on cleaning,” I said. “And then I’ll have to work a bit later this evening and make a few phone calls.”

“That’s fine,” she said and looked up at me. “But you aren’t so busy that you don’t have time to sit here for a while, are you?”

“Not at all, no,” I answered.

The coffeepot hissed. I pressed it down harder on the burner, the steam hissed louder, and I removed it, sprinkled in some coffee, stirred with a fork, banged hard, once, on the stovetop and placed it on the table.