Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

“I’ll do it later,” I said.

“But I don’t want to hold you back,” she said. “I’ll be fine here. I promise. Just go. I’ll call you if there is anything.”

“No,” I said, lying down beside her.

“But Karl Ove. .” She smiled.

I liked her saying my name, I always had.

“Now you’re saying what I said while I’m saying what you said. But I know you really mean the opposite.”

“This is getting too complicated for me,” I said. “Hadn’t we better just go to sleep? Then we’ll have breakfast together before I go.”

“Okay,” she said, snuggling up to me. She was as hot as an oven. I ran my hand through her hair and kissed her lightly on the mouth. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back.

“What did you say?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, just took my hand and placed it on her stomach.

“There,” she said. “Did you feel it?”

The skin suddenly bulged beneath my palm.

“Oooh,” I said, lifting it up to see. Whatever was pressing up against the stomach, making it bulge, whether a knee, a foot, an elbow or a hand, was now shifting. It was like watching something move under the surface of otherwise tranquil water. Then it was gone again.

“She’s impatient,” Linda said. “I can feel it.”

“Was that a foot?”

“Mm.”

“It’s as if she was testing to see if she could get out that way,” I said.

Linda smiled.

“Did it hurt?”

She shook her head.

“I can feel it, but it doesn’t hurt. It’s just weird.”

“I can believe that.”

I snuggled up to her and placed my hand on her stomach again. The mailbox in the hall banged. A truck drove past outside, it must have been big, the windows vibrated. I closed my eyes. As all the thoughts and images of consciousness began to move in directions over which I had no control, and I seemed to be lying there watching them, like a kind of lazy sheepdog of the mind, I knew sleep was around the corner. It was just a question of lowering myself into its dark vaults.

I was woken by Linda clattering about in the kitchen. The clock on the mantelpiece said five to eleven. Shit. The workday was gone.

I dressed and went into the kitchen. Steam was hissing from the little coffeepot on the stove. The table was set with food and juice. Two slices of toast lay on a plate. Two more jumped up in the toaster beside them.

“Did you sleep well?” Linda asked.

“Like a log,” I said and sat down. I spread butter over the toast, it melted at once and filled the tiny pores on the surface. Linda took the pot and switched off the burner. Her bulging stomach made it look as if she were constantly leaning back, and if she did something with her hands she seemed to be doing it on the other side of an invisible wall.

The sky outside was gray. But there must have still been some snow on the roofs because the room was lighter than usual.

She poured coffee into the two cups she had set out and placed one in front of me. Her face was swollen.

“Are you feeling worse?”

She nodded.

“I’m all blocked up. And I’ve got a bit of a temperature.”

She sat down heavily, poured milk into her coffee.

“Typical,” she said. “I have to get sick now of all times. When I need my energy most.”

“The birth may hold off,” I said. “Your body won’t make a move until it’s completely ready.”

She glared at me. I swallowed the last morsel and poured juice in my glass. If there was one thing I had learned over recent months it was that everything you heard about pregnant women’s fluctuating and unpredictable moods was true.

“Don’t you understand that this is a disaster?” she said.

I met her gaze. Took a swig of juice.

“Yes, yes, of course,” I said. “But it’ll be alright. Everything will be alright.”

“Of course it will,” she said. “But that’s not what this is about. This is about my not wanting to be sick and feeble when I have to give birth.”

“I understand that,” I said. “But you won’t be. We’re still a few days away.”

We ate in silence.

Then she looked at me again. She had fantastic eyes. They were grayish-green, and occasionally, most often when she was tired, she squinted. The photograph in the poetry collection she had published showed her squinting, and the vulnerability it revealed that the self-confidence in her facial expression countered, but did not override, had once utterly hypnotized me.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just nervous.”

“You don’t need to be,” I said. “You’re as well prepared as it’s possible to be.”

And she really was. She had devoted herself fully to the task at hand; she had read piles of books, bought a kind of meditation cassette she listened to every night, on which a voice mesmerically repeated that pain was not dangerous, that pain was good, that pain was not dangerous, that pain was good, and we had gone to a class together and been shown around the maternity ward where the birth was scheduled to take place. She had prepared herself for every session with the midwife by writing down questions in advance, and she noted down with the same conscientiousness all the curves and measurements she got from her in a diary. She had, furthermore, sent a sheet of her preferences to the maternity ward, as requested, on which she said she was nervous and needed a lot of encouragement, but at the same time she was strong and wanted to give birth without any anesthetics.

This cut me to the quick. I had of course been to the maternity ward, and even though they had tried to create a homey atmosphere, with sofas, carpets, pictures on the walls and CD players in the room where the birth would take place, as well as a TV room and a kitchen where you could cook your own food, and where you had your own room with an en suite after the birth, there was no denying another woman had given birth in the same room shortly before, and even though it had been washed immediately afterward, the bed linen changed and fresh towels put out, this had happened so infinitely many times that a faint metallic smell of blood and intestines hung in the air nonetheless. In the nice, cool room that was to be ours for twenty-four hours after the birth another couple with a newborn had been lying in the same bed. What for us was new and life-changing, was an endless cycle for those employed at the hospital. The midwives always had responsibility for several births happening at the same time, they were forever going in and out of a number of rooms where a variety of women were howling and screaming, yelling and groaning, all according to whichever phase of the birth they were in, and this went on continually, day and night, year in, year out, so if there was one thing they could not do, it was take care of someone with the intensity of expectations that Linda’s letter expressed.

She looked out the window, and I followed her gaze. On the roof of the opposite building, perhaps ten meters from us, was a man with a rope around his waist shoveling snow.

“They’re crazy in this country,” I said.

“Don’t you do that in Norway?”

“No, are you out of your mind?”

The year before I arrived here a boy had been killed by a lump of ice falling from a roof. Since then all roofs were cleared of snow from almost the moment it fell, with dire consequences; when mild weather came virtually all pavements were cordoned off with red-and-white tape for a week. Chaos everywhere.

“But all the fear keeps employment levels high,” I said, before devouring the slice of bread, getting up and drinking the last gulp of coffee. “I’m off now.”

“Okay,” Linda said. “Feel like renting some films on the way back?”

I put the cup down and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.