Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

“We were going to travel south to the sun the winter Grandad died,” Grandma said. “We had bought the tickets and everything.”

I looked at her as I blew out the smoke.

“The night he collapsed in the bathroom, you know … I just heard a crash inside and I got up, and there he was on the floor, telling me to call for an ambulance. When I’d done that I sat holding his hand as we waited for it to come. Then he said, We’ll still go south . And I was thinking, It’s a different south you’re heading for .”

She laughed, but with downcast eyes.

“It’s a different south you’re heading for!” she repeated.

There was a long silence.

“Ohh,” she said then. “Life’s a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn’t pronounce her ‘b’s.’”

We smiled. Yngve shifted his glass, looked down at the table. I didn’t want her thinking about either Grandad’s or Dad’s death, and I tried to change the subject by returning to her previous subject.

“But did you come here when you moved to Kristiansand?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” she replied.

“We were farther down Kuholmsveien. We bought this house after the war. It was a wonderful location, one of the best in Lund because we had a view of course. Of the sea and the town. And so high up that no one can look in. But when we bought the plot there was another house here. Although to call it a house is a bit of an exaggeration. Ha ha ha. It was a real hovel. The people who lived here, two men as far as I remember, yes, it was … you see, they drank. And the first time we came to see the house, I remember it well, there were bottles everywhere. In the hall where we entered, on the stairs, in the living room, in the kitchen. Everywhere! In some places it was so thick with bottles you couldn’t set a foot inside. So we got it quite cheap. We demolished the house and then we built this. There hadn’t been a garden, either, just rock, a hovel on rock, that was what we bought.”

“Did you put a lot of work into the garden?” I asked.

“Oh yes, you can imagine. Oh yes, yes, I did. The plum trees down there, you know, I took them from my parents’ house in Åsgårdstrand. They’re very old. They’re not that common anymore.”

“I remember we used to take bags of the plums home,” Yngve said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do they still bear fruit?” Yngve asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Grandma said. “Perhaps not as much as before, but …” I reached for the bottle, which was nearly half-empty now, and poured myself another glass. Not so strange perhaps that it had not struck my grandmother that the wheel had come full circle with what had gone on here, I mused. Wiped a drop from the bottleneck with my thumb and licked it off while Grandma, on the other side of the table, opened the tobacco pouch and placed a fingerful in the roller machine. However extreme life had been for her over recent years, it barely constituted a tiny part of all the things she had been through. When she had looked at Dad she had seen the baby, the child, the adolescent, the young man; the whole of his character and all of his qualities were contained in that one look, and if he was in such a drunken state that he shat his pants while lying on her sofa, the moment was so brief and she so old that it would not, compared with all the immense span of time together that she had stored, have had enough weight to become the image that counted. The same was true of the house, I assumed. The first house with the bottles became “the house of the bottles” whereas this house was her home, the place where she had spent the last forty years and the fact that it was full of bottles now could never be what the house meant to her.

Or was it just that she was so drunk she couldn’t think straight any longer? In which case she hid it well, for apart from her obvious blossoming there were few signs of drunkenness in her behavior. On the other hand, I was not the right person to judge anyone. Spurred on by the alcohol’s ever brighter light, which was corroding more and more of my thoughts, I had begun to knock back the drinks almost like juice. And the pit was bottomless.

After pouring Sprite into my glass I took the Absolut bottle, which was obscuring my view of Grandma, and stood it on the windowsill.

“What are you doing?!” Yngve asked.

“You’ve put the bottle in the window!” Grandma cried.

Flushed and confused, I snatched the bottle and returned it to the table.

Grandma began to laugh.

“He put the bottle of booze in the window!”

Yngve laughed too.

“Of course. The neighbors have to see us sitting here and drinking,” he said.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“No, you weren’t. You can say that again!” Grandma said, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.

In this house where we had always been so careful to prevent others from prying, where we had always been so careful to be beyond reproach in everything that could be seen, from clothes to garden, from house front to car to children’s behavior, the closest you could come to the absolutely unthinkable was to exhibit a bottle of booze in a brightly lit window. That was why they, and eventually I too, laughed as we did.

The light in the sky above the hill over the road, which could just be glimpsed through the reflection in the kitchen window, with us three resembling underwater figures, was a grayish-blue. This was as dark as the night sky ever got. Yngve had started to slur. To someone who didn’t know him this would have been impossible to detect. But I noticed because he always slipped the same way when he drank, at first a touch unclear, then he slurred more and more, until toward the end, the moment before he passed out, he was almost incomprehensible. In my case the lack of clarity that went hand in hand with drinking was primarily an inner phenomenon, it was only there that it was manifest, and this was a problem because if it was not visible from the outside how utterly plastered I was, since I walked and talked almost as normal, there was no excuse for all the standards that at a later point I might let slip, either in language or behavior. Furthermore, my wild state always became worse for that reason, as my drunkenness was not brought to a halt by sleep or problems of coordination, but simply continued into the beyond, the primitive, and the void. I loved it, I loved the feeling, it was my favorite feeling, but it never led to anything good, and the day after, or the days after, it was as closely associated with boundless excess as with stupidity, which I hated with a passion. But when I was in that state, the future did not exist, nor the past, only the moment and that was why I wanted to be in it so much, for my world, in all its unbearable banality, was radiant.

I turned to look at the wall clock. It was twenty-five to twelve. Then I glanced at Yngve. He looked tired. His eyes were slits and slightly red at the margins. His glass was empty. I hoped he wasn’t thinking of going to bed. I didn’t want to sit there alone with Grandma.

“Do you want some more?” I asked, nodding to the bottle on the table.

“Well, maybe just a drop more,” he said. “But it’ll have to be the last. We need to get up early tomorrow.”

“Oh?” I said. “Why’s that?”

“We have an appointment at nine, don’t you remember?”

I smacked my forehead. I doubted if I had performed this gesture since I left school.

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “All we have to do is turn up.”

Grandma looked at us.

Please don’t let her ask where we’re going! I thought. The words “funeral director” would certainly break the spell. And then we would be sitting here again like a mother who has lost her son and two children who have lost their father.