Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

Oh, I knew it was stupid, but I did it anyway, there was nothing stupid about my fear, it was just unbearable. Another even greater fear I had at that time was the one I had experienced on discovering that my dick was bent upright when I had an erection. I was deformed, it was misshapen, and ignorant as I was, I didn’t know if there was anything you could do about it, have an operation or whatever options there had been then. At night I got out of bed, went to the bathroom and made myself erect to see if it had changed. But no, it never had. It was nearly touching my bloody stomach! And wasn’t it crooked as well? It was as crooked and distorted as a fucking tree root in the forest. That meant I would never be able to go to bed with anyone. Since that was the only thing I really wanted, or dreamt about, my despair knew no bounds. It did enter my head of course that I could pull it down. And I did try, I pushed it down as far as it would go, until it ached. It was straighter. But it hurt. And you couldn’t have sex with a girl with your hand on your dick like that, could you? What the hell should I do? Was there anything I could do? This preyed on my mind. Every time I had a hard-on, I was desperate. If I was making out with a girl on a sofa, and perhaps got my hand up her sweater, and my dick was as stiff as a ramrod against my trouser leg, I knew that was the closest I would get, and it would always be the closest I would get. It was worse than impotence because this not only rendered me incapable of action, but it was also grotesque. But could I pray to God for this to stop? Yes, in the end I could, and did, too. Dear God, I prayed. Dear God, let my sexual organ straighten when it fills with blood. I will only pray for this once. So please be kind and let my wish come true.

When I started at gymnas all the first-years were assembled one morning on the stage at Gimle Hall, I no longer remember the occasion, but one of the teachers, a notorious nudist from Kristiansand, who was said to have painted his house wearing no more than a tie, and was generally scruffy, dressed in a provincial bohemian manner, had curly, unkempt, white hair, anyway he read us a poem, walking along the rows on the stage proclaiming and, to general laughter, suddenly singing the praises of the upright erection.

I didn’t laugh. I think my jaw fell when I heard that. With mouth agape and eyes vacant I sat there as the insight slowly sank in. All erect dicks are bent. Or, if not all, then at least enough of them to be eulogized in a poem.

Where did the grotesqueness come from? Only two years earlier, when we moved here, I had been a small thirteen-year-old with smooth skin, unable to articulate my “r”s and more than happy to swim, cycle, and play soccer in the new place where, so far at least, no one had it in for me. Quite the opposite, in fact, during the first few days at school everyone wanted to talk to me, a new pupil was a rare phenomenon there, everyone wondered of course who I was, what I could do. In the afternoons and on weekends girls sometimes cycled all the way from Hamresanden to meet me. I could be playing soccer with Per, Trygve, Tom, and William when, who was that cycling along the road, two girls, what did they want? Our house was the last; beyond it there was just forest, then two farms, then forest, forest and more forest. They jumped off their bikes on the hill, glanced across at us, disappeared behind the trees. Cycled down again, stopped, looked.

“What are they doing?” Trygve asked.

“They’ve come to see Karl Ove,” Per said.

“You’re kidding,” Trygve said. “They can’t have cycled all the way from Hamresanden for that . That’s got to be ten kilometers!”

“What else would they come up here for? They certainly didn’t come here to see you,” Per said. “You’ve always been here, haven’t you.”

We stood watching them scramble through the bushes. One was wearing a pink jacket, the other light blue. Long hair.

“Come on,” Trygve said. “Let’s play.”

And we continued to play on the tongue of land extending into the river where Per’s and Tom’s father had knocked together two goals. The girls stopped when they came to the swathe of rushes about a hundred meters away. I knew who they were, they were nothing special, so I ignored them, and after standing there in the reeds for ten minutes, like some strange birds, they walked back and cycled home. Another time, a few weeks later, three girls came up to us while we were working in the large warehouse at the parquet factory. We were stacking short planks onto pallets, each layer separated by stays, it was piecework, and once I had learned to throw an armful at a time, so that they fell into place, there was a bit of money in it. We could come and go as we pleased, we often popped in on the way home from school and did one stack, then went home and had a bite to eat, went back and stayed for the rest of the evening. We were so hungry for money we could have worked every evening and every weekend, but often there wasn’t anything to do, either because we had filled the warehouse or because the factory workers had done the work during their normal hours. Per’s father worked in the office, so it was either through Per or William, whose father was employed as a truck driver for the firm, that the eagerly awaited announcement came: there is work. It was on one such evening that the three girls came to see us in the warehouse. They lived in Hamresanden too. This time I had been warned, a rumor had been circulating that one of the girls in the seventh class was interested in me, and there she was, considerably bolder than the two wading birds in the rushes, for Line, that was her name, came straight over to me and rested her arms on the frame around the stack, stood there confidently chewing gum, watching what I was doing while her two friends kept in the background. On hearing that she was interested, I had thought that I should strike while the iron was hot, for even though she was only in the seventh class, her sister was a model, and even if she hadn’t gotten that far herself yet, she was going to be good. That was what everyone said about her, she was going to be good, that was what everyone praised, her potential. She was slim and long-legged, had long, dark hair, was pale with high cheekbones and a disproportionately large mouth. This lanky, slightly gangly and calflike quality of hers made me skeptical. But her hips were nice. And her mouth and eyes too. Another factor to count against her was that she could not say her “r”s, and there was something a tad stupid or scatterbrained about her. She was known for it. At the same time she was popular in her class, the girls there all wanted to be with her.

“Hi,” she said. “I’ve come to visit you. Does that make you happy?”

“There you go,” I said. Turned aside, balanced a pile of planks on my forearm, hurled them into the frame where they clattered into place, pushed in the ones sticking out, grabbed another armful.

“How much do you earn an hour?” she asked.

“It’s piecework,” I said. “We get twenty kroner for a stack of doubles, forty for a stack of fours.”

“I see,” she said.

Per and Trygve, who were in the parallel class to hers, and had repeatedly expressed their disapproval of her and her crowd, were working a few meters away. It struck me that they looked like dwarfs. Short, bent forward, grimfaced, they stood in the middle of the enormous factory floor with pallets up to the roof on all sides, working.

“Do you like me?” she asked.

“Well, what’s not to like?” I said. The moment I had seen her coming through the gates I had decided to go for it, but now, with her standing there and an open road ahead, I still couldn’t do it, I still couldn’t come up with the goods. In a way I didn’t quite understand, yet sensed nonetheless, she was far more sophisticated than I was. Okay, she may have been a bit dim, but she was sophisticated. And it was this sophistication that I could not handle.