Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

“Shall I read?” I said.

She nodded. I sat beside her and opened the book. It was about a caterpillar that ate everything in sight. After I had finished reading she crawled forward and grabbed another book from the table. This one was about a mouse called Fredrik who, unlike other mice, didn’t gather food in the summer but preferred to sit around dreaming. They said he was lazy, but when winter came and everything was cold and white, he was the one who gave their lives color and light. That was what he had been gathering, and that was what they needed now, color and light.

Ylva sat next to me perfectly still, looking at the pages with intense concentration, occasionally pointing to things and asking what they were called. It was wonderful sitting with her, but also a bit boring. I wanted to be out on the veranda, alone with a cigarette and a cup of coffee.

On the last page Fredrik was a blushing hero and savior.

“That was uplifting. Wonderful!” I said to Yngve and Kari Anne after finishing the book.

“We had it when we were boys,” Yngve said. “Don’t you remember?”

“Vaguely,” I lied. “Is it actually the same book?”

“No, Mom’s got it.”

Ylva was on her way to the pile of books again. I got up and fetched my cup of coffee from the kitchen table.

“Have you had enough?” Kari Anne said, on her way to the dishwasher with her plate.

“Yes, thanks,” I said. “A nice breakfast.”

I looked at Yngve.

“When shall we make tracks?”

“I’ll have to shower first,” he said. “And do some packing. Half an hour maybe?”

“Okay,” I said. Ylva had accepted that Book Hour was over for today and had gone into the hall, where she sat putting on my shoes. I opened the sliding door to the veranda and went out. The weather was mild and overcast. The seats were covered with fine droplets of dew which I wiped away with my hand before sitting down. Normally I would not have been up so early, my mornings tended to start at around eleven, twelve or one, and everything that my senses were breathing in now reminded me of summer mornings in my childhood when I used to cycle to a gardening job at half past six. The sky was mostly hazy, the road I took empty and gray, the air rushing toward me chilly, and it was almost inconceivable that the heat in the field where later we would be squatting would be baking, or that we would shoot off on bikes to Lake Gjerstad during the lunch break for a dip before work resumed.

I sipped the coffee and lit a cigarette. I can’t say that I enjoyed the taste of the coffee or the feeling of smoke descending into my lungs, I could barely distinguish the two, the point was to do it, it was a routine, and as with all routines, protocol was everything.

How I had hated the smell of smoke when I was a child! Journeys at the back of a boiling car with two parents puffing away at the front. The smoke that filtered from the kitchen through the crack in my bedroom door in the morning, before I had gotten used to it, when it filled my sleeping nostrils and I twitched, the unpleasantness of it, as it had been every day until I started to smoke myself and became immune to the odor.

The exception was the period when Dad had smoked a pipe.

When would that have been?

All the bother of knocking out all the old black tobacco, cleaning the pipe with the flexible white cleaners, tamping in fresh tobacco and sitting there puffing it into life, matchstick in the bowl, puff, another matchstick, puff, puff, and then lean back, cross one leg over the other and smoke. Oddly enough, I associated this with his outdoor phase. Knitted sweaters, anorak, boots, beard, pipe. Long walks inland to pick berries for the winter, sporadic trips to the mountains looking for cloudberries, the berry of all berries, but more often than not into the forest off the roads, with the car left at the edge, everyone with a berry picker in one hand, bucket in the other, combing the countryside for blueberries or lingonberries. Rests in lay-bys beside rivers or on clifftops with a view. Sometimes by a rock face along a river, sometimes on a log inside a pine forest. Slamming on the brakes when there were raspberry bushes by the roadside. Out with the buckets, for this was Norway in the 1970s, families stood on the roadside picking raspberries on weekends, with large, square, plastic cooler bags containing provisions in the trunk. It was also around this time that he used to go fishing, to the far side of the island on his own after school, or with us on the weekend, fishing for the big cod in the waters around here in the winter: 1974 to 1975. Even though neither of my parents had anything to do with the sixty-eighters, after all they had had children when they were twenty and since then had worked, and even though the ideology was alien to my father, he was not untouched by the spirit of the time, it was alive in him as well, and when you saw him sitting there with pipe in hand, bearded and if not long-haired, at least thick-haired, in a knitted sweater and a pair of flared jeans, his bright eyes smiling at you, you could have taken him for one of the softie fathers beginning to emerge and assert themselves at that time, those who were not averse to pushing strollers, changing diapers, sitting on the floor and playing with children. However, nothing could be farther from the truth. The only thing he had in common with them was the pipe.

Oh, Dad, have you died on me now?

From the open window on the floor above came the sound of crying. I craned my neck. Kari Anne was in the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, two glasses on the table, she ran across the floor to the staircase. Ylva, who was pushing a little cart with a doll inside, trundled in the same direction. Seconds later I heard Kari Anne’s consoling voice through the window, and the crying abated. I got up, opened the door, and went in. Ylva was standing by the gate in front of the stairs looking up. The plumbing in the wall gurgled.

“Do you want to sit on my shoulders?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

I squatted down and lifted her onto my shoulders, held her small legs tight with my hands and ran back and forth between the living room and the kitchen a few times, whinnying like a horse. She laughed, and whenever I stopped and bent forward as if I were going to throw her off she screamed. After a couple of minutes I’d had enough, but continued for another two as a matter of form, before crouching down and unsaddling her.

“More!” she said.

“Another time,” I said, looking out of the window, down to the road where a bus pulled in and stopped to let on a meager group of commuters from the flats.

“Now,” she said.

I looked at her and smiled.

“Okay. One more time then,” I said. Up she went again, back and forth again, halt and pretend to throw her off, whinny. Fortunately, Yngve came down just afterward, so stopping seemed natural enough.

“Are you ready?” he said.

His hair was wet, and his cheeks smooth after a shave. In his hand he was holding the old blue-and-red Adidas bag he had had at school.

“Yup,” I said.

“Is Kari Anne upstairs?”

“Yes, Torje woke up.”

“I’ll just have a smoke and then we can go,” Yngve said. “Will you keep an eye on Ylva?”

I nodded. By a stroke of good fortune she seemed to have found something to occupy herself with, so I was able to collapse on the sofa and flick through one of the music magazines there. But I wasn’t up to absorbing record reviews and interviews with bands, so I put it down and instead took his guitar from the stand by the sofa, in front of the amplifier and boxes of LPs. It was a black Fender Telecaster, relatively new, while the tube amplifier was an old Music Man. In addition, he had a Hagström guitar, but that was in his office. I strummed a few chords without thinking, it was the opening of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and I started to sing to myself quietly. I no longer had a guitar, after all these years I hadn’t managed much more than the very basic skills it would take a somewhat talented fourteen-year-old a month to master. But the drum set, which I had paid a pretty krone for five years ago, that at least was in the loft, and now we were back in Bergen perhaps it could be used again.