Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

“Yep,” I said.

“The boys and Tove are at the cabin. I just dropped by to say hello. And to leave the trailer. But I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Then we can take it from there. It’s terrible. But that’s life. You two will manage.”

“Course we will,” Yngve said. “You parked behind me, didn’t you? So you’ll have to pull out first.”

Grandma had watched us for the first few seconds when Gunnar arrived, and smiled at him, but then she went back inside her shell, and sat staring ahead as if she were all alone.

Yngve started down the stairs. I was thinking I ought to stay with her.

“You’ll have to come with us as well, Karl Ove,” Gunnar said. “We have to push it up the slope and it’s pretty heavy.”

I followed him down.

“Has she said anything?” he asked.

“Grandma?” I said.

“Yes. About what happened?”

“Hardly anything. Just that she found him in the chair.”

“With her it was always your father,” he said. “She’s in shock now.”

“What can we do?” I asked.

“What is there to do? Time will help. But as soon as the funeral is over she should go into a home. You can see for yourselves the state she’s in. She needs professional care. As soon as the funeral’s over she has to go.”

He turned and placed his foot on the step, squinted up at the bright sky. Yngve was already in the car.

Gunnar addressed me again.

“We’d arranged some home-help for her, you know, they turned up every day and took care of her. Then your father came and sent them packing. Closed the door and locked himself in with her. Even I wasn’t allowed in. But Mother called once, he had broken his leg and was lying on the living-room floor. He’d crapped his pants. Can you imagine? He’d been lying on the floor drinking. And she had served him. ‘This is no good,’ I told him before the ambulance arrived. ‘This is beneath your dignity. Now you pull yourself together.’ And do you know what your father said? ‘Are you going to push me even deeper into the shit, Gunnar? Is that why you’ve come, to push me even deeper into the shit?”

Gunnar shook his head.

“That’s my mother, you know, sitting up there now. Whom we’ve been trying to help all these years. He destroyed everything. This house, her, himself. Everything. Everything.”

He quickly laid his hand on my shoulder.

“But I know you’re good kids.”

I cried, and he looked away.

“Well, now we’d better get the trailer in position,” he said and went down to the car, slowly reversed downhill to the left, hooted his horn when the way was clear, and Yngve reversed. Then Gunnar drove forward, got out of the car, and unhooked the trailer. I joined them, grabbed the bar, and began to pull it up the hill while Yngve and Gunnar pushed.

“It’ll be fine here,” Gunnar said, after we had maneuvred it a fair way into the garden, and I dropped the end on the ground.

Grandma was watching us from the first-floor window.

While we collected the bottles, put them in plastic bags, and carried them down to the car, she sat in the kitchen. She watched as I poured beer and spirits from the half-full bottles down the sink, but said nothing. Perhaps she was relieved they were going, perhaps she wasn’t really assimilating anything. The car was full, and Yngve went upstairs to tell her we were going to the shop. She got to her feet and joined us in the hall, we assumed she wanted to see us off, but when she came out, she walked straight down the steps to the car, put her fingers on the door handle, opened the door, and was about to get in.

“Grandma?” Yngve said.

She stopped.

“We were thinking of going alone. Someone has to be here to keep an eye on the house. It’s best if you stay, I think.”

“Do you think so?” she said, stepping back.

“Yes,” Yngve said.

“Alright then,” she said. “I’ll stay here.”

Yngve reversed down the drive, and Grandma went back indoors.

“What a nightmare,” I said.

Yngve stared past me, then signaled left and slowly nosed out.

“She’s clearly in shock,” I said. “I wonder whether I should phone Tonje’s father and sound him out. I’m sure he could prescribe something to sedate her.”

“She’s already taking medicine,” Yngve said. “There’s a whole trayful on the kitchen shelf.”

He stared past me once again, this time up Kuholmsveien as three cars came down. Then he looked at me.

“But you can tell Tonje’s father anyway. Then he can decide.”

“I’ll call when we get back,” I said.

The last car, one of those ugly new bubbles, drove past. Raindrops landed on the windshield, and I remembered the previous rain which had started, then had second thoughts and left it at that.

This time it continued. When Yngve signaled to pull out and drove down the slope, he had the windshield wipers on.

Summer rain.

Oh, the raindrops that fall on the dry, hot tarmac, and then evaporate, or are absorbed by the dust, yet still perform their part of the job, for when the next drops fall the tarmac is cooler, the dust damper, and so dark patches spread, and join, and the tarmac is wet and black. Oh, the hot summer air that is suddenly cooled, making the rain that falls on your face warmer than your face itself, and you lean back to enjoy the feeling it gives you. The leaves on the trees that quiver at the light touch, the faint, almost imperceptible drumming of the rain falling at all levels: on the scarred rock face by the road and the blades of grass in the ditch below, the roof tiles on the other side and the saddle of the bike locked to the fence, the hammock in the garden beyond and the road signs, the curbside gutter and the hoods and roofs of the parked cars.

We stopped at the lights, the rain had just gotten heavier, the drops that were falling now were large, heavy, and profuse. The whole area around the Rundingen intersection had been changed in the course of seconds. The dark sky made all the lights clearer while the rain that fell, and which was even bouncing off the tarmac, blurred them. Cars had their windshield wipers on, pedestrians ran for cover with newspapers spread above their heads or hoods flipped up, unless they had an umbrella with them and could continue as though nothing had happened.

The lights changed, and we headed down towards the bridge, past the old music shop, which had been shut for ages, where Jan Vidar and I had gone on our fixed route every Saturday morning, visiting all the music shops in town, and across Lund Bridge. That was where my first childhood memory originated. I had been walking over the bridge with Grandma, and there I had seen a very old man with a white beard and white hair, he walked with a stick and his back was bowed. I stopped to watch him, Grandma dragged me on. In my father’s office there had been a poster up on the wall, and once when I was there with Dad and a neighbor, Ola Jan, who taught at the same school as Dad, Roligheden School, he taught Norwegian too, I pointed to the poster and said I had seen the man in the picture. For it was the selfsame gray-haired, gray-bearded and bowed man. I didn’t find it at all surprising that he was on a poster in my father’s office, I was four years old and nothing in the world was incomprehensible, everything was connected with everything else. But Dad and Ola Jan laughed. They laughed, and said it was impossible. That’s Ibsen, they said. He died nearly a hundred years ago. But I was sure it was the same man, and I said so. They shook their heads, and now Dad was not laughing when I pointed to Ibsen and said I had seen him, he shooed me out.

The water under the bridge was gray and full of rings from the rain lashing the surface. There was also a tinge of green in it though, as always where the water from the Otra met the sea. How often had I stood there watching the currents? Sometimes it flooded forth like a river, eddying round and forming small whirlpools. Sometimes it formed white froth around the pillars.