Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

I got up.

“Your shirt’s hanging over the cupboard in the other room,” Mom said.

I took it up to my room with me and changed. Black cotton trousers, wide at the thigh, narrow at the calf, and with side pockets, white shirt, black suit jacket. I rolled up the studded belt I had planned to wear and put it in the bag, for though they might not actually forbid me to wear it, they would notice, and I didn’t want to go through all that now. I added a pair of black Doc Martens, an extra shirt, two packs of Pall Mall mild, some chewing gum, and pastilles. When I was finished I stood in front of the mirror. It was five past seven. I should have been on my way, but had to wait for Gunnar for as long as possible because if he hadn’t come there was a risk I would meet him on the road. With two bags of beer in my hands that was not a great idea.

Apart from the wind, and the trees at the forest edge, which you could just make out on the periphery of the light from the house, nothing stirred.

If they weren’t here within five minutes, I would have to go anyway.

I put on my outdoor clothes, stood at the window for a moment straining to hear the drone of a car engine while staring down at the place where the headlights would come into view first, then turned, switched off the light, and went downstairs.

Dad was in the kitchen pouring water into a large pan. He looked up as I went in.

“Are you going?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Have a nice evening,” he said.

At the bottom of the hill, where the morning’s tracks had been covered over by the wind and snow, I stood stock-still and listened for a few seconds. When I was sure there were no cars coming I went up the slope and into the trees. The bags were where I had left them, covered with a thin layer of snow that slid down the smooth plastic when I picked them up. With one in each hand I walked back down, stopped behind a tree to listen, and when there was still nothing to be heard, I struggled over the bank of snow at the roadside and loped down to the bend. Not many people lived out here, and through-traffic used the road on the other side of the river, so if a car did come there was a good chance it would be Gunnar’s. I walked up the hill, around the bend where William’s family lived. Their house was set back a bit, right up against the forest that rose steeply behind it. The blue shimmer from the television flickered through the living room. The house was a seventies’ build, the plot unworked, full of stones, uncovered rock, with a broken swing, a pile of wood under a tarpaulin, a wrecked car, and some tires. I didn’t understand why they lived like that. Didn’t they want to live like normal people? Or couldn’t they? Didn’t it matter to them? Or did they in fact think that they were living like normal people? The father was kind and gentle, the mother always angry, the three children always dressed in clothes that were either too big or too small.

One morning on my way to school I had seen the father and daughter clambering up a pile of rocks on the other side of the road, both bleeding from the forehead, the girl with a white scarf drenched with blood tied around her head. There had been something animal-like about them, I remember thinking, because they didn’t say anything, didn’t shout, just calmly climbed up the rocks. At the bottom, with its hood against a tree, was their truck. Beneath the trees flowed the dark, lustrous river. I had asked them if I could help, the father had told me they didn’t need any help; they were fine, he had called from the slope, and even though the sight was so unexpected that it was almost impossible to drag yourself away, it also felt wrong to stand there watching, so I continued on my way to the bus stop. On turning, the one time I had allowed myself to do so, I saw them hobbling along the road, he was dressed in overalls as always, with his arm around his daughter’s fragile eleven-year-old body.

We used to tease her and William, it was easy to make them lose their tempers and easy to put them in their place, words and ideas were not their strong suits, but I didn’t realize this had any impact on them until one ordinary boring summer’s day Per and I had rung William’s doorbell to get him to come out and play soccer and their mother had come onto the veranda and given us an earful, especially me, because I thought I was superior to everyone else, and her son and daughter in particular. I answered her back, it turned out she was not very adept with words either, but her anger on the other hand was not to be quelled, so all I gained was Per’s laughing admiration for my wit, which was forgotten a few hours later. But the people living on the bend did not forget. The father was too kind to intervene, but the mother. . her eyes darkened every time she saw me. To me they were people I could lord it over, nothing more. If William came to school wearing trousers at half-mast he had made a monumental blunder; if he misused a word, there was no reason he shouldn’t hear about it. That was only the truth, wasn’t it? And it was up to him to stop our fun or find a way to overcome it. I was not exactly invulnerable, my weaknesses were there for all to see and exploit, and the fact that they didn’t, because they didn’t have enough insight to be able to see them, was surely not my problem. The conditions were the same for all. At school William hung out with a crowd who smoked in the wet weather shed, the ones who rode mopeds from the age of thirteen, who began to drop out of school when they were fourteen, who had fights and drank, and they too made fun of William, but in a way he could tolerate, because there was always something he could compare himself with, there were always ways of getting his own back. With us, that is, those who lived in the houses up here, it was different, here it was sarcasm, irony, and the killer remark that held sway, things which could drive him insane as it all was beyond his reach. But he needed us more than we needed him, and he kept coming back. For me this was a question of freedom. When I moved there, no one knew me, and although I was basically the same person as before it gave me the chance to do things I had never done. There was, for example, an old-fashioned village shop by the bus stop in which goods were bought and sold over the counter, and that was owned by two sisters aged around seventy. They were nice, and particularly slow off the mark. If you asked them for something on one of the top shelves they turned their backs to you for a minute or two, and this was your chance to stuff as much chocolate and as many sweets as you could in your jacket. Not to mention the opportunities if you asked them for something from the cellar. In Tromøya I would never have dreamed of doing such a thing, but here I didn’t hesitate, here I was not only a person who stole chocolate and sweets from old ladies but also a person who enticed others into doing the same. They were a year younger than me and had hardly been out of the local area; compared to them I felt like a man of the world. They had all scrumped strawberries, for example, but I introduced a touch of refinement and got them to take plates, spoons, milk, and sugar into the strawberry field.

Down in the factory building we had to fill in lists of the work we had done and were paid accordingly, and apparently it had never even occurred to them that the system could be abused and it was possible to cheat. But that was where we came in. The most important change in my behavior, however, was linguistic; I had discovered the edge that words gave you to bully others. I taunted and harassed, manipulated and ridiculed, and never, not once, did it strike them that the basis of this power I had was so insecure that one single well-directed blow could have knocked it flying. I had a speech impediment, you see! I couldn’t say my “r”s. After having been shown up by me it would have been enough for them to mimic me and I would have been crushed. But they never did.