Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

On the other side of the street was a park called Observatorielunden. The trees appeared to grow from the top of a steep mound there, and since a dim light spread from the row of buildings beneath, it looked as though it were the crowns of the trees that bestowed the darkness. So dense was the canopy that the lights at the top of the observatory, built some time in the 1700s, in the city’s heyday, were not visible. A café was there now, and the first time I went it struck me how much closer to our times the eighteenth century seemed here in Sweden than in Norway, perhaps especially in the countryside where a Norwegian farmhouse from, let’s say 1720, is really ancient while all the splendid buildings in Stockholm from the same period give the impression of being almost contemporary. I recalled my maternal grandmother’s sister Borghild — who lived in a little house above the very farm from which the family originated — sitting on the veranda and telling us that houses had been there from the sixteenth century right through to the 1960s, when they had been demolished to make way for more modern constructions. This sensational revelation contrasted with the everyday experience of coming across a building from that era here. Perhaps this was all about closeness to the family, and hence to me? That the past in Jølster was relevant to me in quite a different way from Stockholm’s past? That must be it, I thought, and closed my eyes briefly to rid myself of the feeling that I was an idiot, which this train of thought had produced, since it was so obviously based on an illusion. I had no history, and so I made myself one, much as a Nazi party might in a satellite suburb.

I continued down the street, rounded the corner and came into Holländergatan. With its deserted sidewalks and two lifeless rows of snowed-in cars, squeezed between two of the city’s most important streets, Sveavägen and Drottninggatan, it had to be the backstreet to end all backstreets. I shifted the bag into my left hand while grabbing my hat with my right and shaking off the snow that had accumulated on it, ducking at the same time to avoid hitting my head on the scaffolding that had been erected over the sidewalk. High above, tarpaulins thrashed in the wind. As I emerged from the tunnel-like structure a man stepped in front of me. He did this in such a way that I was forced to stop.

“Cross over to the other sidewalk,” he said. “There’s a fire here. For all I know, there may be something explosive inside.”

He put a mobile phone to his ear, then lowered it.

“I’m serious,” he said. “Cross over to the other side.”

“Where’s the fire?” I asked.

“There,” he said, pointing to a window ten meters away. The top part was open and smoke was seeping out. I crossed into the street so that I could see better while at least to some degree heeding his strong appeal for me to keep my distance. The room inside was illuminated by two floodlights and full of equipment and cables. Paint buckets, toolboxes, drills, rolls of insulation, two stepladders. Amid all this the smoke curled slowly, groping its way.

“Have you called the fire department?” I asked.

He nodded.

“They’re coming.”

Again he raised his mobile to his ear, only to lower it again the next moment.

I could see the smoke forming new patterns inside and gradually filling the room while the man paced frenetically to and fro on the other side of the street.

“I can’t see any flames,” I said. “Can you?”

“It’s a smoldering fire,” he said.

I stood there for a few minutes but as I was cold and nothing appeared to be happening I continued homeward. By the traffic lights in Sveavägen I heard the sirens of the first fire engines which then came into view at the top of the hill. All around me heads turned. The sirens’ promise of speed stood in strange contrast to the way the large vehicles slowly crept down the hill. At that moment the lights went green and I crossed over to the supermarket.

That night I couldn’t sleep. Usually I fell asleep within minutes, regardless of how tumultuous the day had been, or how unsettling the prospects of the new day, and apart from a period of sleepwalking, I always slept soundly till morning. But that night I already knew as I laid my head on the pillow and closed my eyes that sleep was not going to come. Wide awake, I lay listening to the sounds of the city rising and falling in sync with the human activity outside, and to those emanating from the flats above and below us, which died away bit by bit until only the gurgling of the air-conditioning remained, as my mind darted back and forth. Linda was asleep beside me. I knew that the child she bore inside also influenced her dreams, which were worryingly often about water: enormous waves crashing down on distant beaches she was walking along; the flat flooding with water sometimes completely filling it, either trickling down walls or rising from sinks and toilets; lakes in new places in town, such as under the railway station where her child might be in a left-luggage locker she couldn’t reach, or simply disappeared from her side while she had her hands full of bags. She also had dreams in which the child she gave birth to had an adult face, or it turned out there wasn’t a child at all and all that flowed from her during the birth was water.

My dreams, what were they like?

Not once had I dreamed about the baby! Now and then that would give me a bad conscience since, if you regarded the currents in those parts of your conscious mind without volition as more indicative of the truth than those controlled by volition, which I suppose I did, it became so obvious that the significance of expecting a baby was nothing special for me. On the other hand, nothing was. After the age of twenty I had hardly ever dreamed about anything that had a bearing on my life. It was as though in dreams I had not grown up, I was still a child surrounded by the same people and places I had been surrounded by in childhood. And even though the events that occurred there were new every night, the feeling they left me with was always the same. The constant feeling of humiliation. Often it could take several hours after waking before that feeling had left my body. Moreover, when conscious, I hardly remembered anything from my childhood, and the little I did remember no longer stirred anything in me, which of course created a kind of symmetry between past and present, in a strange system whereby night and dreams were connected with memory, day and consciousness with oblivion.

Only a few years ago it had been different. Until I moved to Stockholm I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if it stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern in which every phenomenon I saw was capable of evoking a memory which unleashed small landslides of feeling in me, some with a known source, others without. The people I encountered came from towns I had been to, they knew other people I had met, it was a network, and it was a tight mesh. But when I moved to Stockholm this flaring up of memories became rarer and rarer, and one day it ceased altogether. That is, I could still remember; what happened was that the memories no longer stirred anything in me. No longing, no wish to return, nothing. Just the memory, and a barely perceptible hint of an aversion to anything that was connected with it.

This thought made me open my eyes. I lay quite still looking at the rice lamp hanging like a miniature moon from the ceiling in the darkness above the bedstead. This really was not anything to regret. For nostalgia is not only shameless, it is also treacherous. What does anyone in their twenties really get out of a longing for their childhood years? For their own youth? It’s like an illness.