Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

“I’ve been here before,” Yngve declared.

“Really?” I said.

“A confirmation ceremony. You were there too, weren’t you?”

“I don’t remember one,” I said.

“But I do,” Yngve said, leaning forward to be able to see farther ahead.

“Is it behind the parking lot?”

“Has to be, I suppose,” I answered.

“We’re early,” Yngve said. “It’s only a quarter to.”

I scrambled out of the car and closed the door. A lawn mower came toward us on the other side of the stone wall, pushed by a man with a bare chest. After the machine had passed, no more than five meters away, I saw that he was wearing a silver chain around his neck with what looked like a razor blade suspended from it. To the east, above the church, the sky had darkened. Yngve lit a cigarette and took a few steps across the parking lot.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “We’re here anyway.”

I glanced at the chapel. A lamp was lit over the entrance, barely visible in the daylight. A red car was parked nearby.

My heart beat faster.

“Yes we are,” I said.

Some birds circled high above us, under the sky, which was still a pale gray. The Dutch painter Ruisdael always painted birds high in his skies, to create depth, it was almost his signature, at any rate I had seen it in picture after picture in the book I had about him.

The undersides of the trees beyond were black.

“What’s the time now?” I asked.

Yngve jerked his arm forward so that his jacket sleeve slid back and he could see his watch.

“Five to. Shall we go in?”

I nodded.

When we were ten meters from the chapel, the door opened. A young man in a dark suit looked at us. His face was tanned, his hair blond.

“Knausgaard?” he said.

We nodded.

We shook hands in turn. The skin around his nostrils was red and inflamed. The blue eyes absent.

“Shall we go in?” he suggested.

We nodded again. Entered a hall at first, where he stopped.

“It’s in there,” he explained. “But before we go in I should perhaps prepare you a little. This is not a very pleasant sight, there was a lot of blood, you see, so … well, we did what we could, but it’s still visible.”

The blood?

He looked at us.

I shivered.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes,” Yngve said.

He opened the door and we followed him into a larger room. Dad was lying on a bier in the middle. His eyes were closed, his features composed.

Oh God.

I stood beside Yngve, in front of my father. His cheeks were crimson, saturated with blood. It must have got caught in the pores when they tried to wipe it away. And the nose, it was broken. But even though I saw this, I still didn’t see it, for all the detail disappeared into something other and something greater, into both the aura he gave off, which was death and which I had never been close to before, and also what he was to me, a father and all the life that lay therein.

It was only when I was back in Grandma’s house, after seeing Yngve off for Stavanger, that the matter of the blood came back to me. How could it have ended like that? Grandma said she had found him dead in the chair, and on the basis of this information it would have been natural to assume his heart had given out while he was sitting there, probably while he was sleeping. The funeral director, however, had said there was not only blood but a great deal of it. And Dad’s nose had been broken. So, some form of mortal combat must have taken place? Had he got up, in pain, and fallen against the chimney breast? To the floor? But if so, why wasn’t there any blood on the wall or the floor? And how come Grandma hadn’t said anything about the blood? Because something must have happened, he could not have died peacefully in his sleep, not with all that blood there. Had she washed it off and then forgotten to say? Why would she? She hadn’t washed anything else, it didn’t seem to be one of her drives. It was just as strange that I had forgotten so quickly. Or, perhaps not so strange, there had been so many other things I had to attend to. Nevertheless I would have to call Yngve as soon as I got back to Grandma’s. We needed to get hold of the doctor who had organized the transfer of the body. He would be able to explain what had happened.

I walked as fast as I could up the gentle slope, along a green wire fence with a dense hedge on the other side, as though I could not arrive soon enough, while another impulse was also working inside me, to drag out the time I was on my own for as long as possible, maybe even find a café and read a newspaper. It was one thing to stay at Grandma’s with Yngve and quite another to be there alone. Yngve knew how to handle her. But that light, bantering tone of theirs, which Erling and Gunnar also shared, had never been part of my nature, to put it mildly, and during the year at school in Kristiansand when I had spent a lot of time with them, since I lived nearby, my manner had seemed uncongenial to them, there had been something about me they didn’t want to know, which suspicion was confirmed after a few months when one evening my mother told me Grandma had called to say I shouldn’t go over there so often. I could handle most rejection, but not this, they were my grandparents, and the fact that not even they wanted to have anything to do with me was so shattering that I couldn’t restrain myself and burst into tears, right in front of my mother. She was upset, but what could she do? At the time I didn’t understand any of this and simply believed they didn’t like me; however, since then I have begun to sense what it was that made my presence uncongenial. I was unable to dissemble, unable to play a role, and the scholarly earnestness I brought into the house was impossible to keep at arm’s length in the long run, sooner or later even they would have to engage with it, and the disequilibrium it led to, as their banter never demanded anything at all of me, that was what must have made them call my mother in the end. My presence always made demands on them, either in concrete ways, such as food, for if I went there after school and before soccer practice, I would otherwise have had to last until eight or nine at night without eating, or money because only the afternoon buses were free for schoolchildren, and often I could not pay for the ticket. As far as both food and money were concerned, they didn’t mind, in essence, giving me either, but what provoked them was, I assume, the fact that I had to have both, and as such they had no choice: food and bus money were no longer gifts from their hearts but something else, and this other thing impinged on our relationship, created a knot between us, of which they did not approve. I couldn’t understand it then, but I do now. My manner, my getting close to them with my life and thoughts, was part of the same pattern. This closeness they couldn’t and presumably wouldn’t give me; that too was something I took from them. The irony was that during these visits I always considered them, always said what I thought they wanted to hear; even the most personal things I said because I thought it would be good for them to hear, not because I needed to say them.

The worst part of all this, however, I was thinking, as I walked along the avenue towards Lund, past the flow of afternoon traffic, past tree after tree whose trunks were blackened with asphalt dust and car exhaust, so hard and rocklike compared to the expanse of light, green leaves on the branches above, was that at that time I actually regarded myself as a sound judge of character. I had a gift, or so I had deluded myself into thinking, it was something I was good at. Understanding others. While I myself was more of a mystery.