Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

“Well, that’s fine too,” she said.

“Are you coming?” Yngve said, standing in the lower living room with a glass of beer in one hand.

When I went out to the veranda Yngve was sitting on a wooden seat by a matching table.

“Where did you find it?” I said.

“Hidden under here,” he said. “I seemed to remember seeing it at some point.”

I leaned against the railing. The ferry to Denmark was glittering in the distance. It was on its way across. The few small boats I could see all had lanterns lit.

“We’ll have to get hold of one of those electric scythes or whatever they’re called,” I said. “A standard lawn mower won’t be any good here.”

“We’ll find a rental firm in the Yellow Pages on Monday,” he said. Looking at me.

“Did you talk to Tonje?”

I nodded.

“Well, there won’t be many of us,” Yngve said. “Us, Gunnar, Erling, Alf, and Grandma. Sixteen including the children.”

“Nope, it won’t exactly be a state funeral.”

Yngve put his glass down and leaned back in his chair. High above the trees, a bat careered around the gray, shadowy sky.

“Have you thought any more about how we should do it?” he asked.

“The funeral?”

“Yes.”

“No, not really. But I certainly don’t want any damned humanist funeral.”

“Agreed. Church then.”

“Yes, there aren’t any alternatives, are there? But he wasn’t a member of the Church of Norway.”

“Wasn’t he?” Yngve said. “I knew he wasn’t a Christian, but not that he had left the church.”

“Yes, he said so once. I left the church on my sixteenth birthday and then I told him at some dinner he was giving on Elvegata. He was furious. And then Unni said he had left the church, so he couldn’t be angry at me for doing the same.”

“He wouldn’t have liked it,” Yngve said. “He didn’t want anything to do with the church.”

“But he’s dead,” I countered. “And, anyway, I like it. I don’t want to be part of some trumped-up pseudoritual with poetry readings. I want it to be decent. Dignified.”

“I agree,” Yngve said.

I turned around again and surveyed the town, a constant hum in the background, sometimes drowned by the sudden revving of an engine, often from the bridge where kids amused themselves racing up and down at this time of night, also on the long stretch along Dronningens gate.

“I’m off to bed,” Yngve said. He went into the living room without closing the door behind him. I stubbed out my cigarette on the ground and followed. When Grandma realized we were going to bed she struggled to her feet and wanted to find us some bed linen.

“We’ll sort it out,” Yngve said. “No problem. You go to bed as well!”

“Are you sure?” she asked, standing small and bowed in the doorway to the stairs.

“Of course,” Yngve said. “We can manage.”

“Alright then,” she said. “Good night.”

And slowly she made her way downstairs, without a backward glance.

I shuddered with unease.

There was no water on the top floor, so we fetched our toothbrushes from upstairs, cleaned our teeth in the kitchen sink, taking turns to lean forward to the tap and rinse, as though we were children again. On summer holidays.

I wiped the toothpaste off my lips with my hand and dried it on my thigh. It was twenty to eleven. I hadn’t gone to bed so early for several years. But it had been a long day. My body was numb with exhaustion, and my head ached from all the crying. Now, however, that was a distant memory. Maybe I had become immune. Maybe I had already gotten used to this.

Once upstairs, Yngve opened the window, fastened it with the catch, and switched on the small lamp above the bedhead. I did the same on my side, and turned off the ceiling light. There was a stale smell, and it didn’t come from the air but from the furniture and carpets that had been gathering dust for a couple of years, perhaps longer.

Yngve sat on his side of the double bed and undressed. I did the same on mine. Sleeping in one bed was a little too intimate, we hadn’t done that since we were small boys and close, in a very different way, to each other. But at least we each had our own duvet.

“Has it struck you that Dad never had a chance to read your novel?” Yngve said, turning to me.

“No,” I said. “I hadn’t given it a thought.”

I had sent Yngve the manuscript when it was finished, at the beginning of June. The first thing he had said after reading it was that Dad would sue me. In precisely those words. I was in a telephone booth at the airport on my way to Turkey for a holiday with Tonje, unaware of whether he would be furious or supportive, I had no idea if what I had written would have any effect on those close to me. “I haven’t a clue whether it’s good or bad,” he had said. “But Dad’s going to sue you. Of that I am sure.”

“But there’s a sentence in the book that comes up again and again,” I said now. “ My father’s dead . Do you remember it?”

Yngve flipped the duvet to the side, swung his legs onto the bed and lay back. Sat up and straightened the pillow.

“Vaguely,” he said, lying back down.

“That’s when Henrik flees. He needs an excuse, and that’s the only one that occurs to him. My father’s dead .”

“That’s right,” Yngve said.

I took off my jeans and socks, and found a comfortable position. At first on my back, with my hands folded over my stomach, until it occurred to me that I was lying like a corpse, and rolled onto my side, horrified, looking straight down at the pile of my clothes on the floor. What a damned mess, I thought, and lowering my feet to the floor, I folded my jeans and T-shirt and laid them on the nearby chair with the socks on top.

Yngve switched off the light on his side.

“Are you going to read?” he asked.

“No, no chance,” I said, fumbling for a pull switch. There wasn’t one as far as I could feel. Was it on the lamp then? Yes, there it was.

I pressed it, hard, because the old mechanism was stiff. The lamps must have been from the 50s. From the days when they moved into the house.

“Good night then,” Yngve said.

“Good night,” I said.

How glad I was that he was here. If I had been alone my head would have been filled with images of Dad as a corpse, I would have thought only of the physicality of death, his body, the fingers and legs, the unseeing eyes, the hair and nails that were still growing. The room where he was lying, perhaps inside a drawer-like thing they always had in morgues in American films. But now the sound of Yngve’s breathing and his many little twitches calmed me. All I had to do was close my eyes and let sleep come.

I woke up a couple of hours later with Yngve standing in the middle of the floor. At first he peered around, irresolute, then grabbed the duvet, rolled it up and carried it through the room and out the door, turned, and came back. As he was about to do the same again I said:

“You’re sleepwalking, Yngve. Lie down and go back to sleep.”

He looked at me.

“I am not sleepwalking,” he said. “The duvet has to cross the threshold three times.”

“Okay,” I said. “If you say so, fine.”

He crossed the floor twice more. Then he lay down and spread the duvet over himself. Tossed his head from side to side, mumbling something or other.

This wasn’t the first time he had sleepwalked. When we were boys Yngve had been notorious for it. Once Mom had found him in the bathtub, naked with the tap running; on another occasion she had just managed to grab him on the road outside the house heading for Rolf’s to ask if he wanted to come and play soccer. He could suddenly throw his duvet out of the window and lie on his bed freezing for the rest of the night without knowing why. Dad also walked in his sleep. Wearing only his underpants, he had once come into my room in the middle of the night, opened a cupboard, peeped in and glanced at me without any sign of recognition in his eyes. Sometimes I had heard him banging around in the living room, moving furniture this way and that. Once he had gone to sleep under the living room table and hit his head so hard when he sat up that it bled. When he wasn’t walking in his sleep, he talked or shouted, and when he wasn’t doing that, he ground his teeth. Mom used to say it was like being married to a merchant seaman. As for me, I had peed in the wardrobe one night, otherwise my nocturnal activities did not amount to any more than talking in my sleep until I reached my teenage years when there was a flurry of activity at certain periods. The summer I was selling cassettes on the streets in Arendal and living in Yngve’s studio, I had taken his pencil case and walked across the lawn naked, standing in front of every window and peering in, until Yngve had managed to get through to me. I denied that I had been sleepwalking, the proof was the pencil case, look here, I had said, here’s my wallet, I was going shopping. How many times had I stood by the window watching the ground disappear or rise, walls fall down or water surge upward! Once I had stood holding the wall, yelling to Tonje that she should make a run for it before the house collapsed. Another time I had got it into my head that she was in the wardrobe and I had thrown out all the clothes while looking for her. If I had to spend the night with anyone else apart from her I would warn them in advance, in case anything happened, and two years before, traveling with Tore, a friend, we had rented what was called a writer’s flat in a large manor house on the outskirts of Kristiansand to write a screenplay, and this precautionary measure had saved the situation: we had beds in the same room and in the middle of the night I had got up, gone over, torn the blanket off him, grabbed his ankles and, as he stared up at me in shock, told him: You’re just a doll . But the most frequently recurring delusion was that an otter or a fox had crawled into the duvet, which I then threw onto the floor and stomped on until I was sure the creature was dead. A year could pass without anything happening, then suddenly I had phases when hardly a night went by without my sleepwalking. I woke up in the loft, in corridors, on lawns, always busy doing something or other that seemed utterly meaningful but which, upon waking, was always utterly meaningless.