Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

Yngve looked down at me as he replaced the receiver.

“He was at his cabin. But he’s going to make a few calls, and he’ll find out. He’ll call back later.”

“Good,” I said.

I went into the kitchen and filled a bucket with hot water, poured in some green soap, found a cloth, went into the living room and stood for a while not quite knowing where to begin. There was no point starting on the floor until we had thrown out the furniture that had to be thrown out, and then in the days to come there would still be some to-ing and fro-ing. Cleaning the window and door frames, doors, sills, bookshelves, chairs and tables was too little and too fiddly, I wanted something that would make a difference. The bathroom and toilet downstairs were best, where every centimeter had to be scrubbed. It was also the logical next step as I had already done the laundry room in the cellar and it was opposite the bathroom. And I could be alone there.

A movement to my left caused me to turn my head. An enormous seagull was standing outside the window and staring in. It banged its beak against the glass, twice. Waited.

“Seen this?” I called to Yngve in the kitchen. “There’s a huge seagull here knocking on the glass with its beak.”

I heard Grandma getting up.

“We’ll have to find it some food,” she said.

I went to the doorway. Yngve was emptying the wall cupboards; he had piled up the glasses and plates on the counter beneath. Grandma was standing beside him.

“Have you two seen the seagull?” I said.

“Film or play?” Yngve said.

He smiled.

“He usually comes here,” Grandma said. “He wants some food. There. He can have that.”

She put the rissole on a small dish, stood over it, bowed and lean, a lock of black hair hanging over her eyes, and quickly cut up the meat that was half-covered with dried gravy.

I followed her into the living room.

“Does it usually come here?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Almost every day. And has been doing for more than a year now. I always give him something, you know. He’s understood that. So he comes here.”

“Are you sure it’s the same one?”

“Of course I am. I recognize him. And he recognizes me.”

When she opened the veranda door the gull hopped onto the floor and went to the dish she put out, completely fearless. I stood in the doorway and watched it grab the bits with its beak and throw its head back when it had a good hold. Grandma stood close by, looking across the town.

“Told you,” she said.

The telephone rang. I stepped back to make sure it was Yngve who answered. The conversation was brief. As he hung up Grandma walked past and the seagull hopped onto the railing where it waited a few seconds before spreading its large wings and launching itself. A couple of flaps and it was high above the lawn. I watched it glide down to the harbor. Yngve stopped behind me. I closed the door and faced him.

“He’s dead, no question,” he said. “He’s in the hospital cellar. We can see him on Monday afternoon if we wish. And I’ve got the telephone number of the doctor who was here.”

“Seeing is believing,” I said.

“Well, we will now,” he said.

Ten minutes later I put a bucket of steaming water, a bottle of Klorin and a bottle of Jif down on the floor by the bath. I shook the garbage bag open, then started clearing everything from the bathroom. First of all, the stuff on the floor: dried-up bits of old soap, sticky shampoo bottles, empty toilet paper rolls, the brown-stained toilet brush, medical packaging — silver paper and plastic, a few loose pills, a sock or two, the odd hair curler. After finishing this, I emptied everything from the wall cupboard, apart from two expensive-looking bottles of perfume. Blades, safety razors, hairpins, several bars of soap, old, desiccated creams and ointments, a hair net, aftershave, deodorants, eyeliners, lipstick, some small cracked powder puffs, not sure what they were used for, but it must have been something to do with makeup, and hair, both short, curly ones and longer, straighter ones, nail scissors, Band-Aids, dental floss, and combs. Once the cupboard was empty, a yellow-brown, thickish residue was left on the shelf that I decided to wash last of all. The wall tiles beside the toilet seat, on which the toilet paper holder was fixed, were covered with light brown stains and the floor beneath was sticky, and these seemed to me to be most in need of attention, so I squirted a line of Jif over the tiles and began to scrub them, methodically, from the ceiling right down to the floor. First, the right-hand wall, then the mirror wall, then the bathtub wall and then finally around the door. I rubbed every single tile clean; it must have taken me an hour and a half. Every so often it went through my mind that this was where my grandfather had collapsed, one autumn night six years ago, and he had called Grandma, who had called for an ambulance and sat here holding his hand until it came. It was the first time it had struck me that everything had been as it always was, right up until that moment. He had been suffering massive internal bleeding over a long period, it transpired when he was in the hospital. Only a few more days and he would have died, there was almost no blood left in him. He must have known something was wrong, but had been reluctant to go to the doctor with it. Then he collapsed on the bathroom floor, close to death, and although they caught him in time at the hospital, and initially he was saved, he was so weakened that he gradually wasted away and, eventually, died.

When I was a boy I had been afraid of this downstairs bathroom. The cistern, which must have been from the 1950s, the type with a metal lever and a small black ball on the side, always got stuck and kept flushing long after anyone had used it, and the noise, issuing from the darkness of the floor no one used, empty, with its clean, blue wall-to-wall carpeting, its wardrobe with neatly hung coats and jackets, its shelf for my grandparents’ hats and another for their shoes, which in my imagination represented beings, everything did then, and its yawning staircase to the floor above, always frightened me to such a degree that I had to use all my powers of persuasion to defy my fears and enter the bathroom. I knew no one was there, I knew the flushing water was only flushing water, that the coats were only coats, shoes only shoes, stairs only stairs, but I suppose the certainty only magnified the terror, because I didn’t want to be alone with all of it, that was what frightened me, a feeling which the dead non-beings intensified. I could still recognize that way of perceiving the world. The toilet seat looked like a being, and the sink, and the bath, and the garbage bag, that greedy, black stomach on the floor.

This particular evening, however, my unease with it rose again because my grandfather had collapsed here and because Dad had died upstairs in the living room yesterday, so the deadness of these non-beings combined with the deadness of the two of them, of my father and his father.

So how could I keep this feeling at arm’s length?

Oh, all I had to do was clean. Scour and scrub and rub and wipe. See how each tile became clean and shiny. Imagine that all that had been destroyed here would be restored. All. Everything. And that I would never, never ever ever, end up where he had ended up.

After I had washed the walls and floor, I poured the water down the toilet, pulled off the yellow gloves and turned them inside out and hung them over the rim of the empty red bucket while making a mental note that I had to buy a toilet brush as soon as possible. Unless there was one in the other bathroom, that is. I looked. Yes, there was. I would have to use that for now, whatever its state, and then buy another one on Monday. On my way across the floor to the stairs I stopped. The door to Grandma’s room was ajar, and for some reason I went over, opened it, and peeped in.