Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

Nothing, just nothing. Not even darkness.

I lit a cigarette, ran my hand over the wet chair seat a couple of times and sat down. I only had two left. So I would have to go to the newsstand before it closed.

A cat slunk along the fence at the end of the lawn. Its coat was a grizzled gray and it looked old. It stopped with one paw raised, staring into the grass for a while, then went on. I thought about our cat, Nansen, on which Tonje lavished her affections. It was no more than a few months old and slept under her duvet with its head just peeping out.

I hadn’t given Tonje a single thought during the day. Not one. What did that mean? I didn’t want to call her because I had nothing to say, but I would have to for her sake. If I hadn’t thought about her, she would have thought about me, I knew that.

In the air high above the harbor a seagull was flying toward us. It was heading for the veranda, and I felt myself smile, it was Grandma’s seagull on its way for supper. But with me sitting there it didn’t dare approach and landed on the roof instead, where it leaned back and squawked its seagull squawk.

Bit of salmon wouldn’t go amiss, would it?

I stubbed the cigarette out on the veranda, put it in a bottle, stood up, and went to Grandma, who was watching TV.

“Your gull’s here again,” I said. “Shall I give it some salmon?”

“What?” she said, turning toward me.

“The gull’s here,” I said. “Shall I give it some salmon?”

“Oh,” she said. “I can do that.”

She got to her feet and walked with her head hunched into the kitchen. I grabbed the TV remote control and lowered the volume. Then I went into the dining room, which was empty, and sat by the telephone. I dialed home.

“Hello, Tonje here.”

“Hi. Karl Ove here.”

“Oh hi …”

“Hi.”

“How’s it going?”

“Not wonderfully,” I said. “It’s hard going here. I’m in tears almost all the time. But I don’t really know what I’m crying about. Dad being dead, of course, but it’s not just that …”

“I should have gone with you,” she said. “I miss you so much.”

“It’s a house of death,” I said. “We’re wading through his death. He died in the chair in the room next door, it’s still there. And then there’s everything that happened here, I mean, a long time ago, when I was growing up, all that’s here too, and it’s surfacing. Do you understand? I’m somehow very close to everything. To the person I was when I was younger. To the person Dad was. All the feelings from that time are resurfacing.”

“Poor Karl Ove,” she said.

Grandma came through the door in front of me, carrying a dish of cut-up salmon. She didn’t see me. I waited until she was in the other room.

“No, don’t feel sorry for me,” I said. “It’s him we should feel sorry for. His life was so awful at the end you wouldn’t believe it.”

“How’s your grandmother taking it?”

“I don’t quite know. She’s in shock, she seems senile. And she’s so damn thin. They just sat here drinking. Her and him.”

“Her as well. Your grandmother?”

“Absolutely. You wouldn’t believe it. But we’ve decided to clean everything up and have a wake here after the funeral.”

Through the glass door to the veranda I could see Grandma putting down the dish. She stepped back and peered around.

“That sounds like a good idea,” Tonje said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But that’s what we’re going to do now. Clean the whole damn house and then fix it up. Buy tablecloths and flowers and …”

Yngve stuck his head through the door. When he saw I was on the phone he raised his eyebrows and withdrew, just as Grandma came in from the veranda. She stood in front of the window and looked out.

“I was thinking of coming down a day before,” Tonje said. “Then I can give you a hand.”

“The funeral’s on Friday,” I said. “Can you get a day off work?”

“Yes. So, I’ll come in the morning. I miss you so much.”

“What have you been doing today?”

“Mm, nothing special. Had lunch with Mom and Hans. Love from them, they were thinking about you.”

“Mm, that was nice of them,” I said. “What did you have to eat?”

Tonje’s mother was a fantastic cook; meals in her house were an experience, if you were the foodie type. I wasn’t, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about food, I was just as happy to eat fish fingers as baked halibut, sausages as fillet of Beef Wellington, but Tonje was, her eyes lit up when she started talking about food, and she was a talented cook, she enjoyed working in the kitchen; even if it was only pizza she was making, she put her heart and soul into it. She was the most sensuous person I had ever met. And she had moved in with someone who regarded meals, home comforts, and closeness as necessary evils.

“Flounder. So it’s just as well you weren’t there.”

I could hear her grinning.

“But, oh, it was fantastic.”

“That I don’t doubt,” I said. “Were Kjetil and Karin there too?”

“Yes. And Atle.”

A lot had happened in her family, as in all families, but this was not something they talked about, so if it was manifest anywhere, it was in each of them, and the atmospheres they created collectively. One of the things Tonje liked best about me, I suspected, was that I was so fascinated by precisely that, by all the contexts and potential of various relationships, she wasn’t used to that, she never speculated along those lines, so when I opened her eyes to what I saw she was always interested. I had this from my mother, right from the time I went to school I used to carry on long conversations with her about people we had met or known, what they had said, why they might have said it, where they came from, who their parents were, what kind of house they lived in, all woven into questions to do with politics, ethics, morality, psychology, and philosophy, and this conversation, which continued to this day, had given my gaze a direction, I always saw what happened between people and tried to explain it, and for a long time I also believed I was good at reading others, but I was not, wherever I turned I only saw myself, but perhaps that was not what our conversations were about primarily, there was something else, they were about Mom and me, that was how we became close to each other, in language and reflection, that was where we were connected, and that was also where I sought a connection with Tonje. And it was good because she needed it in the same way that I needed her robust sensuousness.

“I miss you,” I said. “But I’m glad you aren’t here.”

“You must promise you won’t exclude me from what’s happening to you now,” she said.

“I won’t,” I said.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too,” I said.

As always when I said this, I wondered if it was actually true. Then the feeling passed. Of course I did, of course I loved her.

“Will you call me tomorrow?”

“Of course. Bye now.”

“Bye. And give my love to Yngve.”

I hung up and went into the kitchen where Yngve was standing over the counter.

“That was Tonje,” I said. “She sends you her love.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Same to her.”

I sat down on the edge of the chair.

“Shall we call it a day?”

“Yes. I couldn’t do much more, anyway.”

“I’ve just got to run down to the newsstand. So we can … well, you know. Is there anything you need?”

“Could you get me a pouch of tobacco? And maybe some chips or something?”

I nodded and got up, went downstairs, put on my coat, which was hanging in the wardrobe, checked that my bank card was in the inside pocket, glanced at myself in the mirror, and left. I looked exhausted. And even though it was quite a few hours since I had been crying you could see it in my eyes. They weren’t red; it was more that they were swollen and watery.