Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

“Helene was. . well, we were very close when I was growing up. We were together all the time,” Dad said. “Right up to our teenage years. Then she fell ill.”

I took another sip. The couple from earlier appeared from behind the house, the buxom woman in the white dress and the man with the slight paunch. Two other men followed, one of whom I recognized as the man from the kitchen.

“So this is where you are,” said the man with the paunch. “We were wondering. You’re not taking very good care of your guests, I have to say.” He patted my father’s shoulder. “It’s you we want to see, now that we’ve come all this way.”

“That’s my sister,” Bodil whispered to me. “Elisabeth. And her husband, Frank. They live down in Ryen, you know, by the river. He’s an estate agent.”

Had these people my father knew always been around us?

They sat down at the table and things immediately livened up. And what, when I came, had been faces devoid of meaning or substance and which, consequently, I had only regarded in terms of age and type, more or less as if they had been animals, a bestiary of forty-year-olds, with all that that entailed, lifeless eyes, stiff lips, pendulous breasts and quivering paunches, wrinkles and folds, I now saw to be individuals, for I was related to them, the blood that was in their veins was in mine, and who they were suddenly became important.

“We were talking about Helene,” Dad said.

“Helene, yes,” the man called Frank said. “I never met her. But I’ve heard a lot about her. It was a great shame.”

“I sat at her deathbed,” Dad said.

I gaped. What was all this?

“I adored her.”

“She was the most beautiful girl you could ever imagine,” Bodil said to me, still in a whisper.

“And then she died,” Dad said. “Ohh.”

Was he crying?

Yes, he was crying. He was sitting there with his elbows on the table and his hands folded in front of his chest as the tears ran down his cheeks.

“And that was in the spring. It was spring when she died. Everything in flower. Ohh. Ohh.”

Frank lowered his eyes and twirled the glass between his fingers. Unni placed her hand on Dad’s arm. Bodil looked at them.

“You were so close to her,” she said. “You were the most precious thing she had.”

“Ohh. Ohh,” my father cried, closing his eyes and covering his face with his hands.

A gust of wind blew across the yard. The overhanging flaps of the table cloth fluttered. A napkin went flying across the lawn. The foliage above us swished. I lifted my glass and drank, shuddered as the acidic taste hit my palate, and once again recognized that clear, pure sensation that arose with approaching intoxication, and the desire to pursue it that always followed.

Having sat for some months in a basement room in Åkeshov, one of Stockholm’s many satellite towns, writing what I hoped would be my second novel, with the Metro a few meters from the window, such that every afternoon after darkness fell I saw the train cars passing through the woods like a row of illuminated rooms, at the end of 2003 I finally found an office in the center of Stockholm. It was owned by one of Linda’s friends, and it was perfect. In fact it was a studio, with a kitchenette, a small shower and a sofa bed in addition to a desk and bookshelves. I moved my things, that is, a pile of books and the computer between Christmas and the new year, and started work there on the first weekday of the new year. My novel was actually finished, a strange hundred-and-thirty-page affair, a short tale about a father and his two sons who were out fishing for crabs one summer’s night, which led into a long essay about angels, which in turn led into a story about one of the sons, now an adult, and some days he spent on an island where he lived alone and wrote and self-harmed.

The publishing house had said they would publish it, and I was tempted, but also enormously unsure, not least after having had Erik Thure read it. He called me late one evening, both his mood and choice of words peculiar, as though he had had a few drinks so as to be able to say what he had to say, which was simple, it’s no good, it isn’t a novel. You have to tell a story, Karl Ove! he said several times. You have to tell a story! I knew he was right and that was what I started doing on this, my first day of work in 2004, as I sat at my new desk looking at the blank screen. After grafting for half an hour I leaned back and glanced at the poster behind the desk, it was from a Peter Greenaway exhibition I had been to in Barcelona with Tonje many years ago, some time in my former life. It showed four pictures: one of what I had long thought of as a cherub peeing, one of a bird’s wing, one of a 1920s pilot, and one of a corpse’s hand. Then I looked out the window. The sky above the hospital on the other side of the road was cloudless and blue. The low sun glistened on the panes, signs, railings, car hoods. The frozen breath rising from passersby on the pavement made them look as if they were on fire. All tightly wrapped up in warm clothes. Hats, scarves, mittens, thick jackets. Hurried movements, set faces. My eyes wandered across the flooring. It was parquet and relatively new, the reddish-brown tone at odds with the flat’s otherwise fin-de-siècle style. I noticed that the knots and grain, perhaps two meters from the chair where I was sitting, formed an image of Christ wearing a crown of thorns.

This was not something I reacted to, I merely registered it, for images like this are found in all buildings, created by irregularities in the floors, walls, doors, and moldings — here a damp patch in a ceiling looks like a dog running, there a worn-through coat of paint on a doorstep looks like a snow-covered valley with a mountain range in the distance above which clouds appear to be gushing forth — but it must have set something going in me because when I got up ten minutes later and went over to the kettle and filled it with water I suddenly remembered something that had happened one evening a long time ago, deep in my childhood, when I had seen a similar image on the water in a news item about a missing fishing vessel. In the second it took to fill the pot, I saw our living room before me, the teak television cabinet, the shimmer of isolated snowflakes against the darkening hillside outside the window, the sea on the screen, the face that appeared in it. With the images came the atmosphere from that time, of spring, of the housing estate, of the seventies, of family life as it was then. And with the atmosphere, an almost uncontrollable longing.

At that moment the telephone rang. It startled me. Surely no one had my number here.

It rang five times before giving up. The hiss of the kettle boiling grew louder and I thought as so often before that it sounded as if something was approaching.

I unscrewed the lid of the coffee tin, put two spoonfuls in my cup, and poured in the water, which rose up the sides, black and steaming, then I got dressed. Before going out I stood in such a way that I could see the face in the wooden flooring. And it really was Christ. The face half-averted, as though in pain, eyes downcast, the crown of thorns on his head.

The remarkable thing was not that the face should be visible here, nor that I had once seen a face in the sea in the mid-seventies, the remarkable thing was that I had forgotten it and now remembered. Apart from one or two isolated events that Yngve and I had talked about so often they had almost assumed biblical proportions, I remembered hardly anything from my childhood. That is, I remembered hardly any of the events in it. But I did remember the rooms where they took place. I could remember all the places I had been, all the rooms I had been in. Just not what happened there.