Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

“I can’t tell you,” I said.

And it was true. If I told her that I was going to send photos of the eight most attractive girls in Tveit to a pal in Tromøya she would expect to be among them. She was not, and I could not tell her that.

“You’re not having a photo of Inger until you tell me what you’re going to do with it,” she said.

“But I can’t,” I said. “Can’t you just give me a photo? It’s not for me if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Who’s it for then?”

“I can’t say.”

She got up. I could see she was furious. All her movements were truncated, clipped as it were, as if she no longer wanted to give me the pleasure of seeing them unfold freely and thereby let me share their fullness.

“You’re in love with Inger, aren’t you,” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“Karl Ove! Aren’t you? I’ve heard lots of people say you are.”

“Let’s forget about the photo,” I said. “Forget it.”

“So you are?”

“No,” I said. “Perhaps I was when I first moved here, right at the beginning, but I am not any longer.”

“What do you want the photo for then?”

“I can’t tell you.”

She started to cry.

“You are,’ she said. “You’re in love with Inger. I know you are. I know.”

If Susanne knew, it suddenly struck me, then Inger must know as well.

A sort of light flashed in my head. If she knew, then it might not be so difficult to get off with Inger. At a school party, for example, I could go over and ask her to dance and she would know what was what, would know she was not just one among many. She might even begin to show some interest in me. Sobbing, Susanne went to her desk at the other end of the room and pulled out a drawer.

“Here’s your photo,” she said. “Take it, and I never want to see you here again.”

She held one hand in front of her face and handed me the photo of Inger with the other. Her shoulders were quivering.

“It’s not for me,” I said. “I promise. It’s not me who wants it.”

“You sack of shit,” she said. “Get out of here!”

I took the photo.

“Is it over then?” I asked.

Two years had passed since that freezing cold, windblown New Year’s Eve when I lay on my bed reading while waiting for the night’s festivities to begin. Susanne had found someone else just a few months later. His name was Terje; he was small, plump, with a perm and an idiotic moustache. To me it was incredible that she could allow someone like him to take my place. All right, he was eighteen years old and, fair enough, he did have a car which they drove around in after school and on the weekends, but nevertheless: him instead of me? A short, fat dolt with a moustache? In that case, it definitely didn’t matter about Susanne. That was what I had thought, and that was what I still thought, lying on the bed. However, now I was no longer a child, now I was sixteen years old, now I wasn’t at Ve Middle School but Kristiansand Cathedral School.

From outside came the grating, unlubricated sound of the garage door being opened. The thud as it fell into position, the car being started straight afterward, its engine idling briefly. I went to the window and waited until the two red lights vanished around the bend. Then I went downstairs to the kitchen and boiled some water, took some of the Christmas fare, ham, brawn, lamb sausage, liver paté, cut a few slices of bread, fetched the newspaper from the living room, spread it out over the table and sat down to read it as I ate. It was pitch-black outside now. Inside it was nice and cozy with the red cloth on the table and the small candles flickering on the windowsill. When the water was boiling I warmed the teapot, dropped a couple of fingerfuls of tea leaves, and poured on the steaming hot water, calling: “Mom, do you want any tea?”

No answer.

I sat down and kept eating. After a while I picked up the teapot and poured. Dark brown, almost like wood, the tea rose inside the white cup. A few leaves swirled and floated up, the others lay like a black mat at the bottom. I added milk, three teaspoons of sugar, stirred, waited until the leaves had settled on the bottom, and drank.

Mmm.

Down on the road a snowplow raced past with lights flashing. Then the front door was opened. I heard the sound of shoes being kicked against the step and turned in time to see Mom, wearing Dad’s capacious lambskin jacket, come in the door with an armful of wood.

Why was she wearing his clothes? That wasn’t like her.

She went into the living room without a glance in my direction. She had snow in her hair and on her lapels. A loud thud in the wood basket.

“Would you like some tea?” I asked when she came back.

“Yes, please,” she said. “I’ll just get my things off first.”

I stood up and found her a cup, placed it on the other side of the table and poured.

“Where have you been?” I asked as she sat down.

“Out fetching wood, that’s all,” she said.

“But before that? I’ve been sitting here for a while. It doesn’t take twenty minutes to fetch wood, does it.”

“Oh, I was changing a lightbulb on the Christmas tree. So now it works.”

I turned and looked through the window in the other room. The spruce tree at the end of our plot glittered in the darkness.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.

“No, everything’s ready now. I just need to iron a blouse. And then there’s nothing to do until the food has to be cooked. But Dad’ll do that.”

“Could you iron my shirt while you’re at it?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Just put it on the ironing table.”

After eating I went up to my room, switched on the amplifier, plugged in the guitar, and sat down to play a little. I loved the smell the amplifier gave off when it got warm, I could play for that reason alone, almost. I also loved all the accessories guitar-playing involved, the fuzz box, the chorus pedal, the leads, the plugs, the plectrums, and the small packets of strings, the bottleneck, the capo, the lined guitar case and all its small compartments. I loved the brand names: Gibson, Fender, Hagstrøm, Rickenbacker, Marshall, Music Man, Vox, and Roland. I went into music shops with Jan Vidar and inspected the guitars with the air of a cognoscente. For my own guitar, a cheap Stratocaster imitation I had bought with my confirmation money, I had ordered new pick-ups, state of the art I was told, and a new pick guard from one of Jan Vidar’s mail order catalogues. All that was great. The playing, on the other hand, was not so great. Even though I had been playing regularly and tenaciously for a year and a half, I had made very little progress. I knew all the chords and had practiced all the scales ad infinitum, but I never managed to free myself from them, never managed to play , there was no rapport between my mind and my fingers, my fingers didn’t seem to belong to me, but to the scales, which they could play with ease, and what then emerged from the amplifier had nothing to do with music. I could spend a day or two learning a solo note by note, and then I could play it, but no more than that, it always stopped there. It was the same for Jan Vidar. But he was even more ambitious than me, he really practiced a lot, he did virtually nothing else at times, but his amplifier too produced nothing more than scales and copies of solos. He filed his nails so that they would be better for playing with, he let the nail of his right thumb grow so that he could use it as a pick, he bought a kind of training apparatus for his fingers which he was always flexing to strengthen them, he rebuilt his guitar, and with his father, who was an electrical engineer in Kjevik, he experimented with a kind of homemade guitar synthesizer. I often took my guitar to his place, the case dangling from one hand, while I steered my bike with the other, and even though what we played in his room didn’t sound brilliant, it was still okay because I at least felt like a musician when I was carrying the case, it looked really cool, and if we were not yet where we would like to be, things might well change one day. We didn’t know what the future might hold; no one could know how much practice was necessary for the situation to ease. A month? Six months? A year? In the meantime we kept playing. We also managed to get a sort of band up and running; one Jan Henrik in the seventh class could play a bit of guitar, and even though he wore yachting shoes and posh clothes and used hair cream we asked him if he wanted to play bass with us. He did, and I, being the worst guitarist, had to start playing drums. The summer we were about to begin the ninth class, Jan Vidar’s father drove us up to Evje where we picked up a cheap drum kit we had pooled together to buy, and we were all set. We spoke to the headmaster, were given permission to use a classroom, and once a week we assembled the drums and amplifiers and away we went.