Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

I put the pot on the table, opened the cupboard door again and took out three cups. I knew that Grandma took sugar lumps, and opened the long cupboard on the other wall where the food was. Two half loaves of bread, blue with mold, three spaghetti TV dinners that should have been in the freezer, bottles of spirits, the same cheap brand.

Never mind, I thought, and sat down again, lifted the pot of coffee, and poured. It hadn’t brewed properly, from the spout came a light-brown stream, full of tiny coffee grains. I removed the lid and poured it back.

“It’s good you’re here,” Grandma said.

I started to cry. I took a deep breath, carefully though, and laid my head in my hands, rubbed from side to side, as though I were tired, not as though I were crying. But Grandma didn’t notice anything anyway; again she seemed to have disappeared inside herself. This time it lasted perhaps five minutes. Yngve and I said nothing, drank coffee, staring into space.

“Oh dear,” she said then. “Life’s a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn’t pronounce her “b’s.”

She grabbed the red rolling machine, opened the pouch of tobacco, Petterøe’s Menthol, pressed the tobacco into the gap, inserted an empty casing into the small tube at the end, clicked the lid into place, and pushed it through hard.

“Think we ought to get the bags,” Yngve said, and looked at Grandma. “Where can we sleep?”

“The big bedroom downstairs is empty,” she said. “You can sleep there.”

We got up.

“We’ll just go down to the car then,” Yngve said.

“Will you?” she said.

I stopped by the door and turned to him.

“Have you seen inside?” I said.

He nodded.

On the way downstairs a huge surge of tears overcame me. This time there was no question of trying to hide it. My whole chest trembled and shook, I couldn’t draw breath, deep sobs rolled through me, and my face contorted, I was completely out of control.

“Ooooooooh,” I said. “Ooooooooh.”

I sensed Yngve behind me and forced myself to continue down the stairs, through the hall, out to the car, and into the narrow lawn between the house and the neighbor’s fence. I raised my head and gazed up at the sky, tried to take deep, regular breaths, and after a few attempts the trembling eased.

When I returned Yngve was standing behind the open car trunk. My suitcase was on the ground beside him. I grabbed the handle and carried it up the steps, deposited it in the hall and turned to Yngve, who was right behind me with a backpack on and a bag in his hand. After being in the fresh air the stench indoors seemed stronger. I breathed through my mouth.

“Are we supposed to sleep in there?” I said, motioning to the door of the bedroom my grandparents had used for the last few decades.

“We’d better check it out,” Yngve said.

I opened the door and peeped in. The room was ravaged, clothes, shoes, belts, bags, hairbrushes, curlers, and cosmetics were everywhere, on the bed, on the floor, on the dressing tables and covered with dust and dust balls, but it had not been defiled in the way the upstairs living room was.

“What do you think?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Where do you think he slept?”

He opened the adjacent door, to what once had been Erling’s room, and went in. I followed.

The floor was littered with garbage and clothes. There was a table that looked as if it had been smashed to pieces lying under the window. Papers and unopened letters stacked in heaps. Something that might have been vomit had dried as an uneven yellowish-red patch on the floor, just under the bed. The clothes were stained with feces and dark patches that must have been old blood. One of the garments was black with excrement on the inside. Everything stank of pee.

Yngve stepped over to the window and opened it.

“Looks as if drug addicts have been living here,” I said. “Place looks like a damn junkie’s.”

“It does,” Yngve said.

Strangely enough, the dressing table by the wall between the bed and the door had not been touched. There were photographs of Dad and Erling wearing black graduation caps. Without his beard Dad bore a striking resemblance to Yngve. Same mouth, same setting round the eyes.

“What the hell shall we do?” I said.

Yngve didn’t answer, just studied the room.

“We’d better clean it up,” he said.

I nodded and left the room. Opened the door to the laundry room, which was in a wing parallel to the staircase, next to the garage. Inhaling the air inside, I began to cough. In the middle of the floor was a pile of clothes as tall as I was, it almost reached the ceiling. That was where the rotting smell must have come from. I switched on the light. Towels, sheets, tablecloths, trousers, sweaters, dresses, underwear, they had thrown it all in here. The lowest layers were not only mildewed, they were decomposing. I squatted down and prodded with my finger. It was soft and sticky.

“Yngve!” I called.

He came and stood in the doorway.

“Look at this,” I said. “This is where the stench is coming from.”

Footsteps sounded on the stairs. I stood up.

“We’d better go out,” I said. “So she doesn’t think we’re prying.”

When she came down we were standing in front of the bags in the middle of the floor.

“Is it alright for you in there?” she said, opening the door and peering in. “We’ll have to clear up a bit and it’ll be fine.”

“We were thinking about the room in the loft,” Yngve said. “What would you say to that?”

“I suppose it’s a possibility,” she said. “But I haven’t been up there for a long time.”

“We’ll go up and have a look,” Yngve said.

The loft room, which had been my grandparents’ bedroom once upon a time but which for as long as we could remember had been reserved for guests, was the only one in the house he hadn’t touched. Everything in it was as before. There was dust on the floor, and the duvets had a slightly stale odor, but it was no worse than what you find in a mountain cabin you haven’t entered since the previous summer, and after the nightmare downstairs this was a relief. We unloaded our bags on the floor, I hung my suit on a cupboard door and Yngve stood with his arms propped against the window frame, looking out at the town.

“We can start by getting rid of all the bottles, can’t we,” he said. “To a supermarket for the deposit. That way we can get out a little.”

“Right,” I said.

After going down to the kitchen we heard the sound of a car in the drive. It was Gunnar. We stood waiting for him to come up.

“There you are!” he said with a smile. “Long time, no see, eh!”

His face was suntanned, hair blond, body sinewy and strong. He wore well.

“It’s good to have the boys here, I imagine,” he said to Grandma. Then he turned to us again.

“It’s terrible, what happened here,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I suppose you’ve had a look around? So you’ve seen what he got up to. .”

“Yes,” Yngve said.

Gunnar shook his head, jaws clenched.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “But he was your father. I’m sorry that things went as they did for him. But you probably knew which way the wind was blowing.”

“We’re going to clean the whole house,” I said. “We’ll deal with everything from now on.”

“That’s good. I got rid of the worst in the kitchen early this morning and threw out some trash, but there’s quite a bit left, of course.”

There was a flicker of a smile.

“I’ve got a trailer outside,” he continued. “Could you move your car, Yngve? Then we can put it on the lawn beside the garage. We can’t have the furniture here, can we? And all the clothes and everything. We’ll drive it over to the dump. Isn’t that the best idea?”