Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

Grandad was not interested in the garden at all, and when Grandma and Dad or Grandma and Gunnar, or Grandma and Grandad’s brother Alf discussed various plants, flowers, or trees, our family had quite a passion for anything that grew, he preferred to take out a newspaper and flick through it, unless, of course, it was a pools coupon and the week’s league tables he was consulting. I always thought it was so strange that a man whose job was about figures also spent his free time with figures and not, for example, doing gardening or carpentry or other hobbies that exercised the whole body. But no, it was figures at work, tables and figures in his leisure time. The only other thing I knew he liked was politics. If the conversation moved that way he always livened up, he had strong opinions, but his eagerness to debate was stronger, so if anyone contradicted him he appreciated that. At any rate, his eyes expressed nothing but kindness the few times Mom had presented her left-wing views, even though his voice grew louder and sharper. Grandma, for her part, always asked him to talk about something else, or calm down, on such occasions. She often made a sarcastic comment and could also be quite caustic, but he took it, and if we were present she would send us a wink so that we understood that it wasn’t meant that seriously. She laughed easily and loved to recount all the amusing incidents she had experienced or had heard. All the funny remarks Yngve had made when he was little she remembered, those two were especially close, he had lived there for six months when he was a young boy, and had been there a lot later too. She also told us about the strange things Erling had experienced at his school in Trondheim, but her richest store was the stories from the 1930s when she had worked as a chauffeur for an elderly, presumably senile, capitalist’s wife.

Now they were in their seventies, my grandma a few years older than my grandad, but both were hale and hearty, and they still traveled abroad in the winter, as they always had.

No one had spoken for some seconds. I strained to come up with something to say. Looked out of the window to make the silence less obtrusive.

“How’s it going at the Cathedral School?” Grandad eventually asked. “Has Stray had anything sensible to say?”

Stray was our French teacher. He was a small, squat, bald, energetic man of around seventy who owned a house close to my grandfather’s office. As far as I had gleaned they had been at loggerheads over something, perhaps a boundary issue; I didn’t quite know whether it had gone to court, or even whether the matter had been settled, but at any rate they no longer greeted each other, and hadn’t for many a year.

“Well,” I said. “He just calls me ‘the brat in the corner.’”

“Yes, I’m sure he does,” Grandad says. “And old Nygaard?”

I shrugged.

“Fine, I suppose. Keeps doing the same old stuff. He’s old-school, that one. How do you know him, by the way?”

“Through Alf,” Grandad said.

“Oh of course,” I said.

Grandad got up and walked over to the window, stood with his hands behind his back peering out. Apart from the sparse light that came through the windows, it was completely dark on this side of the house.

“Can you see anything, Father?” Grandma asked, with a wink at me.

“This place is very nicely situated,” Grandad said.

At that moment Mom came into the living room carrying four cups. He turned to her.

“I was just telling Karl Ove that this house is very nicely situated!”

Mom stopped, as if unable to say anything while walking.

“Yes, we’re very happy with the location,” she said. Stood there with the cups in her hands, looking at Grandad with a tiny smile playing on her lips. There was something. . yes, approaching a flush on her face. Not that she was blushing or she was embarrassed, it wasn’t that. It was more that she wasn’t hiding behind anything. She never did. Whenever she spoke it was always straight from the heart, never for the sake of speaking.

“The house is so old,” she said. “These walls have years in them. That’s both good and bad. But it’s a nice place to live.”

Grandad nodded and continued to stare out into the darkness. Mom went to the table to set the cups down.

“What has become of my host then?” Grandma asked.

“I’m here,” Dad said.

Everyone turned. He was standing by the laid table in the dining room, stooping beneath the ceiling beams, with a bottle of wine, which he had obviously been studying, in his hands.

How had he got in there?

I hadn’t heard a sound. And if there was one thing I was aware of in this house it was his movements.

“Will you get some more wood in before you go, Karl Ove?” he said.

“Okay,” I answered, got up, and went into the hall, booted up, and opened the front door. The wind blasted my face. But at least it had stopped snowing. I crossed the yard and went into the woodshed under the barn. The light from the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling glared against the rough brick walls. The floor was almost completely covered with bark and wood chips. An ax was lodged in the chopping block. In one corner lay the orange-and-black chain saw my father had bought when we moved here. There had been a tree on the property he wanted to fell. When he was ready to set to work he couldn’t get the saw to start. He eyed it for a long time, cursed it, and went to call the shop where he had bought it to complain. “What was wrong?” I asked on his return. “Nothing,” he replied, “it was just something they had forgotten to tell me.” It must have been a safety device of some kind, I inferred, to prevent children from using them. But now he had it started, and after felling the tree he spent the entire afternoon cutting it up. He liked the work, I could see that. Once it was done though, he had no further use for the saw, and since then it had been lying on the floor in here.

I loaded myself up with as many logs as I could carry, kicked open the door, and staggered back across the yard — the thought of how impressed they would be uppermost in my mind — levered off my boots and walked leaning backward slightly, almost collapsing under the weight, into the living room.

“Look at him!” said Grandma as I came in. “That’s quite a load you’ve got there!”

I halted in front of the wood basket.

“Hang on a sec, I’ll give you a hand,” Dad said and came toward me, took the top logs, and put them in the basket. His lips were drawn, his eyes cold. I knelt down and let the rest tumble in.

“Now we’ve got enough wood until summer,” he said.

I straightened up, picked some splinters of wood off my shirt, and sat in the chair while Dad crouched down, opened the stove door and pushed in a couple of logs. He was wearing a dark suit and a dark-red tie, black shoes, and a white shirt, which contrasted with his ice-blue eyes, black beard, and lightly tanned complexion. He spent the whole of the summer in the sun whenever he could, by August his skin was usually very dark, but this winter he must have gone to a tanning salon, it struck me now, unless he had eventually had so much sun that the tan had become permanent.

Around his eyes the skin had begun to crack, the way dry leather does, and form fine, closely set wrinkles.

He looked at his watch.

“Gunnar will have to get a move on if we’re going to eat before midnight,” he said.

“It’s the weather,” Grandma said. “He’ll be driving carefully tonight.”

Dad turned to me.

“Isn’t it time you were on your way?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I was going to say hello to Gunnar and Tove first.”

Dad gave a snort.

“Off you go and enjoy yourself. You don’t have to sit here with us, you know.”