Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

I turned and looked at Linda. She was lying on her side, facing me. Her belly was so big it was becoming hard to associate it with the rest of her body even though it too had swollen. Only yesterday she had been standing in front of the mirror laughing at the thickness of her thighs.

The baby was lying with its head resting in the pelvis, and would lie like that through to the birth. In the maternity unit they had said it was quite normal for a baby not to move for long periods. Its heart was beating, and soon, when it felt the time was ripe it would, in cooperation with the body that it had outgrown, start the birth itself.

I got up carefully and went into the kitchen for a glass of water. Outside the entrance to Nalen concert hall there were several groups of older people standing around and chatting. Once a month dance nights were arranged for them, and they came in droves, men and women between the ages of sixty and eighty, all in their finest clothes, and when I saw them lining up, excited and happy, it made my soul ache. One person in particular had made quite an impression on me. Wearing a pale yellow suit, white tennis shoes, and a straw hat, he first appeared, a bit unsteady on his feet, at the intersection by David Bagares gate one evening in September, but it wasn’t so much the clothes that made him stand out from the others, it was more the presence he radiated, for while I perceived the others to be part of a collective, older men out to have a good time with their wives, so alike that the individual left your mind the second your gaze shifted, he was alone here, even when he was outside chatting with others. But the most conspicuous thing about him was the willpower he demonstrated, which in this company was unique. When he strode into the crowded foyer it struck me that he was searching for something, and that he would not find it there, or anywhere else. Time had passed him by, and with it, the world.

Outside, a taxi pulled onto the curb. The nearest group closed their umbrellas and good-humoredly shook the snow off them before getting in. Farther down the street a police car drove up. The blue light was on, but not the siren, and the silence lent the scene a sense of the ominous. After that, another followed. They both slowed as they passed and when I heard them stop outside I put the glass of water down on the kitchen counter and went to the window in the bedroom. The police cars were parked one behind the other by US VIDEO. The first was a standard police car, the second a van. The rear door was being opened as I arrived. Six police officers ran to the shop front and disappeared into the building, two remained in front of the patrol car waiting. A man in his fifties walking past did not so much as cast a glance at the police. I sensed that he had been planning to go in, but had gotten cold feet when he saw the police outside. All day long a regular stream of men went in and out of the door to US VIDEO, and having lived here for close to a year, in nine cases out of ten I could pick out who was about to go in and who would walk by. They invariably had the same body language. They walked along as they normally did, and when they opened the door it was with a movement intended to appear as a natural extension of their last. So intent were they on not looking around that this was what you noticed. Their attempts to appear normal radiated from them. Not only when they entered but also when they reemerged. The door opened and without pausing they seemed to glide out onto the pavement and into this gait that was supposed to give the impression that they were merely continuing a walk started a couple of blocks away. They were men of all ages, from sixteen to seventy or so, and they came from all layers of society. Some seemed to go there as if this was their sole errand, others on their way home from work or early in the morning after a night out. I had not been there myself, but I knew very well what it was like: the long staircase down, the deep, murky basement room with the counter where you paid, the row of black booths with TV monitors, the multitude of films to choose from, all according to your sexual preferences, the black, synthetic leather chairs, the rolls of toilet paper on the adjacent bench.

August Strindberg once claimed in his profound, deranged seriousness that the stars in the sky were peepholes in a wall. Occasionally I was reminded of that when observing the endless stream of souls descending the stairs to masturbate in the darkness of the cellar booths as they watched the illuminated screens. The world around them was closed off, and one of the few ways they could look out was through these boxes. They never told anyone what they saw, it belonged to the unmentionable; it was incompatible with everything a normal life entailed, and most of those who went there were normal men. But it was not the case that the unmentionable was reserved for the world above, it also applied down below, at any rate if one were to judge from their behavior, where no one spoke, no one looked at the others, the solipsistic paths they all trod, from the stairs, to shelves of films, to counter, to booth, and back to the stairs. The fact that there was something essentially laughable about this, this row of men sitting with their pants round their knees, each in his own booth, grunting and groaning and pulling at their penises while watching films of women having intercourse with horses or dogs, or men with lots of other men, could not have escaped their attention, but neither could they acknowledge it, since true laughter and true desire are incompatible, and it was desire that had driven them here. But why here? All the films you could see in US VIDEO were also available on the net, and could therefore be viewed in absolute isolation without the risk of being seen by others. So there must have been something in the unmentionable situation itself that they sought. Either the lowness, the vileness, or the squalidness of it, or the closed-off-ness. I had no idea, this was foreign territory for me, but I couldn’t help thinking about it, for every time I gazed in that direction someone was going down to the cellar.

It was not unusual for the police to show up, but they generally appeared as a result of the demonstrations that were regularly staged outside. They left the place itself alone, to the enormous disgruntlement of the demonstrators. All they could do was stand there with their banners, shout slogans, and boo every time someone went in or came out, under the watchful eye of the police who stood shoulder to shoulder with shields, helmets and batons, keeping them under surveillance.

“What’s that?” Linda asked from behind me.

I turned and looked at her.

“Are you awake?”

“More or less,” she said.

“I can’t get to sleep,” I said. “And there are police cars outside. Go back to sleep.”

She closed her eyes. Down on the street, the door opened. Two policemen came into view. Behind them were two more. They were holding a man between them, so tight that his feet were off the ground. It looked brutal, but presumably it was necessary because the man’s trousers were around his knees. When they came out they let go of him and he fell onto all fours. Two more officers came out. The man got to his feet and pulled up his trousers. One of the officers cuffed his hands behind his back, another escorted him into the car. As the other policemen began to get in, two of the shop employees came onto the street. They stood with their hands in their pockets watching the vehicles starting up, driving down the street, and disappearing from view as their hair slowly went white with the falling snow.

I padded into the living room. The light from the streetlamps hanging from cables above the street shone dimly against the walls and floor. I watched TV for a while. I kept thinking it might worry Linda if she woke up and came in. Any irregularities or any suggestion of excess could remind her of the manic periods her father went through when she was growing up. I switched it off, took one of the art books from the shelf above the sofa instead, and sat flicking through it. It was a book about Constable I had just bought. Mostly oil sketches, studies of clouds, countryside, sea.