Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

My life in Bergen was more or less becalmed for four years, nothing happened, I wanted to write, but couldn’t, and that was about it. Yngve was collecting points from his university courses and living the life he wanted, at least that was how it looked from the outside, but at some stage that too stagnated, he was never going to finish his dissertation, he wasn’t working very hard at it, perhaps because he was living off past achievements, perhaps because there was so much else going on in his life. After his dissertation, which dealt with the film star system, was finally delivered he was briefly unemployed while I was working on student radio, as alternative military service, and slowly moving into a different milieu from his, not to mention meeting Tonje with whom I got together that winter, head over heels in love. My life had taken a radical new turn, although I hardly understood it myself, I was stuck in the image I had developed during the first years in Bergen when Yngve suddenly left town, he had been offered a job as cultural consultant on Balestrand Council, that may not have been precisely what he had had in mind, but there was no one above him in the administration, so in practice he was the cultural head, and there was a jazz festival in Balestrand, which he would be in charge of and soon his friend Arvid followed him, he too was employed by the council. He met Kari Anne, whom he knew superficially from Bergen, she was working as a teacher there, they got together and had a child, Ylva, and moved to Stavanger a year later where Yngve plunged headfirst into an unfamiliar profession for him, graphic design. I was pleased he did that, but was also uneasy: a poster for the Hundvåg Days and a flyer for a local festival, was that enough?

We never touched, we didn’t even shake hands when we met, and we rarely looked each other in the eye.

All of this existed inside me as we stood there on the veranda outside Grandma’s house on this mild summer evening in 1998, I had my back to the garden, he was in a deckchair by the wall. It was impossible to determine from his expression whether he was thinking about what I had just said, that I would take charge of all this, also the garden, or whether he was indifferent.

I turned and stubbed out my cigarette against the underside of the wrought-iron fence. Flakes of ash and sparks showered down on the concrete.

“Are there any ashtrays out here?” I said.

“Not that I know of,” he said. “Use a bottle.”

I did as he said and flicked the butt down the neck of a green Heineken bottle. If I suggested that we should hold the funeral here, which I was pretty certain he would say was impossible, the difference between us, which I did not want to be visible, would become obvious. He would be the realistic, practical person; I would be the idealistic, emotion-driven one. Dad was father to both of us, but not in the same way, and my wanting to use the funeral as a kind of resurrection could, along with my tendency to cry all the time whereas Yngve had not yet shed a tear, be interpreted as evidence that my relationship was more heartfelt and, I suspected, as a covert criticism of Yngve’s attitude. I did not perceive it as such, I did fear the possibility that it might be understood in that light, though. At the same time the proposal would cause a clash of wills. Over a bagatelle, it was true, but in this situation I did not want there to be anything between us.

A thin wisp of smoke rose from the bottle by the wall. So the cigarette could not have been completely extinguished. I looked around for something to put over the top. The plate Grandma had used to feed the seagull perhaps? There were still two scraps of rissole on it, and some thick gravy, but that would have to do, I thought, balancing it carefully.

“What are you doing?” Yngve said, looking at me.

“Making a little sculpture,” I said. “It’s called Beer and Rissole in the Garden . Or Des boulettes et de la bière dans le jardin .”

I straightened up and took a step back.

“The pièce de résistance is the smoke spiraling up,” I said. “In a way, this makes it environmentally interactive. It’s not your everyday sculpture. And the leftovers represent decay, of course. That, too, is interactive, a process, something in flux. Or flux itself. A counterpoint to stasis. And the beer bottle is empty, it no longer has any function, for what is a container that does not contain anything? It is nothing. But nothing has a form, don’t you see? The form is what I’m trying to emphasize here.”

“Aha,” he said.

I took another cigarette from the packet on the fence, although I didn’t feel like one, and lit up.

“Yngve,” I said.

“Yes?” he said.

“I’ve been thinking about something. Quite a lot, in fact. About whether we should hold the wake here. In this house. We can get the house into shape in a week, if we get going. I have this sense that he ruined everything here, and we’re not obliged to put up with that. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Of course,” Yngve said. “But do you think we can do it? I have to go back to Stavanger on Monday night. And I can’t make it back before Thursday. Wednesday at a pinch, but probably Thursday.”

“That’s alright,” I said. “Are you with me on this?”

“Yep. The question, however, is how Gunnar will take the news.”

“It’s none of his business. He’s our father.”

We finished smoking without a word. Beneath us the evening had begun to soften the landscape; its sharp edges, which also included human activity, were gradually being toned down. A few small boats were on their way into the bay, and I thought of the smells on board: plastic, salt, gasoline; they made up such an important part of my childhood. A passenger plane flew in over the town so low that I could see Braathen’s SAFE logo. It vanished from sight leaving behind a low rumble. In the garden some birds were twittering under cover of the leaves of an apple tree.

Yngve drained his glass and got to his feet.

“One more shift,” he said. “And we can call it a day.”

He looked at me.

“Have you made any progress downstairs?”

“I’ve done all the laundry area, and the bathroom walls.”

“Great,” he said.

I followed him in. Hearing the loud but muffled sounds of the television, I remembered that Grandma was indoors. I couldn’t do anything for her, no one could, but I thought that it might be a tiny relief for her to see us, and to be reminded that we were there, so I went over and stood beside her chair.

“Anything you need?” I said.

She glanced up at me.

“Ah, it’s you,” she said. “Where’s Yngve?”

“He’s in the kitchen.”

“Mm,” she said, returning her gaze to the television. Her vivacity had not gone, but it had changed with her scrawny figure, or was apparent in a different way, tied to her movements, not to her personality as before. Before, she had been lively, cheerful, sociable, never short of a response, often with a wink, to clarify when she was being ironical. Now there was a somberness inside her. Her soul was somber. I could see that; it struck you straightaway. But had the somberness always been there? Had she always been filled with it?

Her arms were stretched along the seat rests, with her hands gripping the ends as if she were traveling at breakneck speed.

“I’m going down to clean the bathroom,” I said.

She turned her head to me.

“Ah, it’s you,” she said.

“Yes,” I answered. “I’m going down to clean the bathroom. Is there anything you need?”

“No, thank you, Karl Ove,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, about to go.

“You don’t happen to take a little dram in the evening, do you?” she asked. “You and Yngve?”