Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

I stopped for a moment on the steps. It struck me that there were a lot of things to ask Grandma. We had been too circumspect so far. When, for example, had the ambulance come? How quickly? Had there still been a life to save when they arrived? Had it been an emergency call?

Up the drive it must have come, lights flashing, siren blaring. The driver and doctor jumped out and dashed up the steps with the equipment to the door, which must have been locked. This door was always locked. Had she had the presence of mind to come down and unlock it before they arrived? Or did they stand here ringing the bell? What did she say to them when they came in? He’s over there? And did she lead them to the living room? Was he sitting in the chair? Was he lying on the floor? Did they try to revive him? Heart massage, oxygen, mouth-to-mouth? Or did they immediately confirm that he was dead, beyond help, and lay him on the stretcher and take him away, after exchanging a few words with her? How much had she understood? What did she say? And when did this happen: in the morning, in the middle of the day, or in the evening?

Surely we couldn’t leave Kristiansand without knowing the circumstances of his death, could we?

I set off with a sigh. Above me the entire sky had opened. What a few hours earlier had been plain, dense cloud cover now took on landscapelike formations, a chasm with long flat stretches, steep walls, and sudden pinnacles, in some places white and substantial like snow, in others gray and as hard as rock, while the huge surfaces illuminated by the sunset did not shine or gleam or have a reddish glow, as they could, rather they seemed as if they had been dipped in some liquid. They hung over the town, muted red, dark-pink, surrounded by every conceivable nuance of gray. The setting was wild and beautiful. Actually everyone should be in the streets, I thought, cars should be stopping, doors should be opened and drivers and passengers emerging with heads raised and eyes sparkling with curiosity and a craving for beauty, for what was it that was going on above our heads?

However, a few glances at most were cast upward, perhaps followed by isolated comments about how beautiful the evening was, for sights like this were not exceptional, on the contrary, hardly a day passed without the sky being filled with fantastic cloud formations, each and every one illuminated in unique, never-to-be-repeated ways, and since what you see every day is what you never see, we lived our lives under the constantly changing sky without sparing it a glance or a thought. And why should we? If the various formations had had some meaning , if, for example, there had been concealed signs and messages for us which it was important we decode correctly, unceasing attention to what was happening would have been inescapable and understandable. But this was not the case of course, the various cloud shapes and hues meant nothing , what they looked like at any given juncture was based on chance, so if there was anything the clouds suggested it was meaninglessness in its purest form.

I entered the main road, which was deserted of people and traffic, and followed it to the intersection, where the Sunday atmosphere also prevailed. An elderly couple was walking on the opposite sidewalk, a few cars passed slowly on their way to the bridge, the traffic lights didn’t change to red for anyone. A black Golf was parked by the bus stop beside the newsstand, and the driver, a young man in shorts, clambered out, wallet in hand and darted into the shop, leaving the car idling. I met him in the doorway as he was coming out, this time holding an ice cream. Wasn’t that a bit infantile? Leaving the car running to buy an ice cream ?

The sportily dressed shop assistant from the previous day had been replaced by a girl in her early twenties. She was plump with black hair, and from her facial features, about which there was something Persian, I guessed she came from Iran or Iraq. Despite the round cheeks and full figure, she was attractive. She didn’t so much as give me a glance. Her attention was held by a magazine on the counter in front of her. I slid open the fridge door and took out three half-liter bottles of Sprite, scanned the shelves for chips, found them, grabbed two bags and put them on the counter.

“And a pouch of Tiedemanns Gul with papers,” I said.

She turned and reached down for the tobacco from the shelf behind her.

“Rizla?” she inquired, still without meeting my eyes.

“Yes, please,” I answered.

She put the orange cigarette papers under the fold of the yellow tobacco pouch and put it on the counter while entering the prices on the till with her other hand.

“One hundred and fifty-seven kroner fifty,” she said in broad Kristiansand dialect.

I passed her two hundred-notes. She entered the amount and selected the change from the drawer that slid out. Even though I had my hand outstretched she placed it on the counter.

Why? Was there something about me, something she had noticed and didn’t like? Or was she just slow on the uptake? It is quite usual for shop assistants to register eye contact at some point during a transaction, isn’t it? And if you have your hand outstretched, surely it is bordering on an insult to put the money anywhere else? At least demonstratively.

I looked at her.

“Could I have a bag as well?”

“Of course,” she said, crouching down and pulling a white plastic bag from under the counter.

“Here you are.”

“Thank you,” I said, gathering the items and leaving. The desire to sleep with her, which manifested itself more as a kind of physical openness and gentleness than lust’s more usual form, which of course is rougher, more acute, a kind of contraction of the senses, lasted all the way back to the house, but it was not in complete control because grief lay all around it, with its hazy, gray sky, which I suspected could overwhelm me again at any moment.

They were sitting in the living room watching TV. Yngve was in Dad’s chair. He turned his head when I came in and got up.

“We thought we would have a little drink,” he said to Grandma. “Since we’ve been slogging away all day. Would you like one as well?”

“That would be nice,” said Grandma.

“I’ll mix you one,” Yngve said. “Then perhaps we can sit in the kitchen?”

“Fine,” Grandma said.

Did she walk a touch faster across the floor than she had before? Had a little light lit her otherwise dark eyes?

Yes, indeed.

I put one bag of chips on the counter, emptied the contents of the second into a bowl, which I placed on the table while Yngve took a bottle of Absolut Blue from the cupboard — it had been among the food items when we were pouring all the alcohol we could find down the sink and we missed it — three glasses from the shelves above the counter, a carton of juice from the fridge and started mixing drinks. Grandma sat in her place watching him.

“So you like a bit of a stiffener in the evenings as well,” she said.

“Yes,” Yngve said. “We’ve been at it all day. It’s good to relax a bit too!”

He smiled and gave her a glass. So, there we were, sitting around the table, all three of us, drinking. Outside, it had begun to get dark. There was no doubt that the alcohol was doing Grandma some good. Her eyes soon had their previous glint back, some color came into her wan, pale cheeks, her movements were gentler, and after she had finished the first drink and Yngve had given her a second it was as though she was able to unburden herself, for soon she was chatting away and laughing like in the old days. During the first half-hour I sat as if paralyzed, rigid with unease, because she was like a vampire that had finally gotten a taste of blood, I saw, that was how it was: life was returning to her, filling her limb by limb. It was terrible, terrible. But then I felt the effect of the alcohol, my thoughts mellowed, my mind opened, and her sitting here, drinking and laughing, after having found her son dead in the living room no longer seemed creepy, there was no problem, she clearly needed it; after spending the whole day sitting motionless on the kitchen chair, interrupted only by her wanderings through the house, restless and confused, ever silent, she livened up, and it was good to see. And, as for us, we really needed it too. So there we sat, with Grandma telling stories, us laughing, Yngve adding his bit, and us laughing some more. They had always found a wavelength with their sense for wordplay but seldom better than on this evening. Every so often Grandma wiped tears of laughter from her eyes, every so often I met Yngve’s gaze, and the pleasure I saw there, which at first contained an element of apology, was soon back to its initial state. This was a magic potion we were drinking. The shiny liquid that tasted so strong, even diluted with orange juice, changed the conditions of our presence there, by shutting out our awareness of recent events and thus opening the way for the people we normally were, what we normally thought, as if illuminated from below, for what we were and thought suddenly shone through with a luster and warmth and no longer stood in our way. Grandma still smelled of pee, her dress was still covered with grease and food stains, she was still frighteningly thin, she had still lived the last few months in a rat’s nest with her son, our father, who had still died here of alcohol abuse and was still barely cold. But her eyes, they were gleaming. Her mouth, smiling. And her hands, which so far had remained motionless in her lap, unless they had been busy with her perpetual smoking, were beginning to gesticulate now. She was transforming before our very eyes into the person she had been, easy, razor-sharp, never far from a smile and laughter. We had heard the stories she told, but that was the point of them, at least for me, because hearing them took me back to the grandmother she had been, to the life that had been lived here. None of these stories was amusing in itself; it was the way Grandma told them that elevated the anecdotes to stories, and the fact that she found them amusing. She always had an eye for the drollness of everyday life and laughed just as much every time. Her sons were part of it, inasmuch as they kept telling her snippets from their lives, she laughed and, if they were to her taste, assimilated them and included them in her repertoire. Her sons, especially Erling and Gunnar, were also partial to wordplay. Wasn’t it Gunnar they had sent to the shop to buy elbow grease? And an overhead cable? Wasn’t it Yngve they had tricked into thinking that “exhaust pipe” and “carburettor” were the filthiest words in existence, and had made him promise he would never use them? Dad would also participate in these shenanigans, but I never associated it with him; when he did I generally reacted with surprise. The very idea that he would indulge in storytelling and laugh the way Grandma did was inconceivable.