Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

There seemed to be something of the bank teller about her. Not the gentleness, though, nor the whiteness. Her thighs, which seemed to spread outward in the fabric when pressed down against the seat, how white would they be in the dark late one night in a hotel room somewhere?

I tried to swallow, but my mouth was so dry that the little saliva I could muster was not enough to cover the distance to my throat. Another passenger stopped by our row, a middle-aged man, sallow, stern and thin, dressed in a gray suit, he occupied the aisle seat without a sideways glance at either her or me. Boarding completed , a voice said in the intercom. I leaned forward to look at the sky above the airport. To the west the bank of cloud had split open, and a strip of low forest was lit up by the sun, a shiny, almost glistening green. The engines were started. The window vibrated faintly. The woman beside me had marked her page with a finger and was staring ahead.

Dad had always had a fear of flying. They were the only times in my childhood that I could recall him drinking. As a rule, he avoided flying, we traveled by car if we were going anywhere, regardless of how far it was, but sometimes he had to, and then it was a case of knocking back whatever alcoholic drinks were available at the airport café. There were several other things he avoided as well, but which I had never considered, had never seen, because what a person does always overshadows what he does not do, and what Dad didn’t do was not so conspicuous, also because there was nothing at all neurotic about him. But he never went to the barber’s; he always cut his own hair. He never traveled by bus. He hardly ever did his shopping at the local shop, but always at the large supermarkets outside town. All these were scenarios where he might have come into contact with people, or have been seen by them, and even though he was a teacher by profession and so stood in front of a class every day, occasionally summoned parents to meetings, and also spoke to his colleagues in the staff room every day, he still consistently avoided these social situations. What was it they had in common? That he might be assimilated into a community with no more than chance as its basis? That he might be seen in a way over which he had no control? That he felt vulnerable sitting on the bus, in the barber’s chair, by the supermarket till? That was all quite possible. But when I was there I didn’t notice. It was only many, many years later that it struck me I had never seen Dad on a bus. And that he had never taken part in any of the social events that sprang up around Yngve’s and my activities. Once he attended an end-of-term show, sat close to the wall to see the play we had rehearsed, in which I performed the main role, but unfortunately I had not studied it hard enough, after the previous year’s success I was suffering from child hubris, I didn’t need to learn all the lines, everything would be fine, I had thought, but standing there, affected I suppose by my father’s presence, I could barely remember a line, and our teacher prompted me all the way through a long play about a town of which I was supposed to be the mayor. In the car on the way home he said he had never been so embarrassed in his life and he would never attend any of my end-of-term shows again. That was a promise he kept. Nor did he go to any of the countless soccer matches I played in as I was growing up, he was never one of the parents who drove to away games, never one of the parents who watched home matches, and I didn’t react to that either, I didn’t even consider it unusual, for that was the way he was, my father, and many other fathers like him, this was the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, when being a father had a different and, at least on a practical level, a less comprehensive significance than today.

No, that’s not true, he did watch me once.

It was during the winter, when I was in the ninth class. He drove me to the shale pitch in Kjevik, he was going onto Kristiansand, we had a practice match against some team from up country. We sat in the car, as silent as ever, him with one hand on the steering wheel, the other resting on the door, I with both mine in my lap. Then I had a sudden inspiration and asked him if he wanted to see the match. No, he couldn’t, he had to get to Kristiansand, didn’t he. Well, I hadn’t expected him to say yes, I said. There was no disappointment in my comment, no sense that I really wanted him to see this match, which was of no importance anyway, it was merely a statement, I really hadn’t believed he would want to. When the second half was nearing the end I spotted his car by the sideline, behind the tall piles of snow. Could vaguely make out his dark figure behind the windshield. With only a few minutes left of the match I received a perfectly weighted pass from Harald on the wing, all I had to do was stick out my foot, which I did, but it was my left foot, I didn’t have much feel with that one, the ball skidded off, and the shot missed. In the car on the way home he commented on it. You didn’t jump on your chance, he said. You had a great chance there. I didn’t think you’d mess that up. Oh well, I said. But we won anyway. What was the score? 2–1, I said, glancing at him, because I wanted him to ask who had scored the two goals. Which, mercifully, he did. Did you score? he asked. Yes, I said. Both of them.

With my forehead resting against the window, the plane stationary at the end of the runway, revving its engines in earnest now, I began to cry. The tears came from nowhere, I knew that as they ran down, this is idiotic, I thought, it’s sentimental, it’s stupid. But it didn’t help, I found myself caught in soft, vague, boundless emotions, and couldn’t extricate myself until a few minutes later when the plane took off and, with a roar, started to climb. Then, my mind clear again at last, I lowered my head to my T-shirt and wiped my eyes with a corner I held between thumb and index finger, and sat for a long time peering out, until I could no longer feel my neighbor’s eyes on me. I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. But it was not over. I sensed that it had only just begun.

No sooner had the plane straightened after the ascent than it lowered its nose and started the approach. The stewardesses raced up and down the aisle with their trolleys, trying to serve everyone tea and coffee. The scenery beneath, first just isolated tableaux visible through rare openings in the cloud cover, was rugged and beautiful with its green islands and blue sea, its steep rock faces and snowy white plains, but gradually it was erased or toned down, as the clouds vanished, until the flat Rogaland terrain was all you could see. My insides were in turmoil. Memories I didn’t know I had flowed through me, whirling and chaotic, as I tried to extricate myself, because I didn’t want to sit there crying, constantly analyzing everything, with little actual success though. I saw him in my mind’s eye, when we went skiing together once, in Hove, gliding in and out of the trees, and in every clearing we could see the sea, gray and heavy and vast, and smell it too, the aroma of salt and seaweed that seemed to lie pressed up against the aroma of snow and spruce, Dad ten meters in front of me, perhaps twenty, because despite the fact that his equipment was new, from the Rottefella bindings to the Splitkein skis to the blue anorak, he couldn’t ski, he staggered forward almost like a senile old man, with no balance, no flow, no pace, and if there was one thing I did not want it was to be associated with that figure, which was why I always hung back, with my head full of notions about myself and my style, which, what did I know, would perhaps take me far one day. I was embarrassed by him. At that time I had no idea that he had bought all this skiing equipment and driven us to the far side of Tromøya in an attempt to get close to me, but now, sitting there with closed eyes and pretending to sleep while the announcement to fasten seat belts and straighten seat backs was broadcast over the speakers, the thought of it threatened to send me into another bout of crying, and when yet again I leaned forward and propped my head against the side of the aircraft to hide, it was half-hearted, since my fellow passengers must already have known from takeoff that they had ended up next to a young man in tears. My throat ached, and I had no control, everything flowed through me, I was wide open, but not to the outside world, I could hardly see it anymore, but to the inside world, where emotions had taken over. The only thing I could do to salvage the last scraps of dignity was to stop myself from making noise. Not a sob, not a sigh, not a moan, not a groan. Just tears in full flow, and a face distorted into a grimace every time the thought that Dad was dead reached a new climax.