My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “Yes, that’s fine.”

  The little card reader came abruptly to life and ejected a slow ribbon of paper from its innards. The woman handed me the two popsicles and the ice cream sandwich, then tore off the receipt, I took them over to the children, and when I came back she gave me the coffee in two paper cups with the receipt. I handed one of the cups to Linda, who was opening the wrappers, sat down at the table, and took a sip from the other.

  Gunnar had been angry when Out of the World came out. But that was the first time I’d got anything published, it was completely new, and I guessed it must have been a shock for him to recognize himself in one of the characters, but more than ten years had passed since then, and the fact that my previous novel had been nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize must have altered things a lot; I wasn’t just someone idling away his time with dreams of being a writer, I was an acclaimed author, not only nationally but internationally too, if only moderately so, but what little had been written about my books in the foreign newspapers had almost certainly been mentioned in Fædrelandsvennen: the review in Frankfurter Allgemeine that called the novel a masterpiece, and perhaps the one in The Guardian too, even if that had been more ambivalent. He almost certainly wouldn’t be pleased about me writing about Dad and Grandma, but what I’d written about him could hardly give rise to displeasure, he came out well, was treated respectfully.

  “I think I’m starting to get in a tizzy about going away,” said Linda. “I feel a bit worked up.”

  An elderly man biked past with something flapping against the spokes and a pedal that scraped the chain guard.

  “You mean about the train journey?” I said.

  “Yes. I always get excited about traveling, I have done ever since I was little.”

  “What did you say, Mommy?” said Vanja.

  “I said I’m feeling nervous about going away tomorrow.”

  “Why?” Vanja asked.

  “Yes, why?” I said. “It’s nice to have butterflies.”

  “Just think, I went on my own to Hydra when I was seven,” she said. “It’s not worth thinking about, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “What isn’t what?” said Vanja.

  “I went all on my own to an island in Greece when I was only two years older than you are now. Well, not completely on my own, I went with a family, but my mommy and daddy weren’t with me.”

  “That was in the seventies,” I said. “They had different ideas about raising children then.”

  “It was extreme, even for the seventies,” she said.

  “Have I ever told you about the first time I traveled alone?” I said.

  Linda shook her head.

  “That was in the seventies too. Only I wasn’t as tough as you. I was in the first grade and missed the bus home from school. I stood there crying and the caretaker came over. We had a fantastic caretaker, we used to go and see him sometimes in his workshop. Anyway, he said I could take the next bus that came along. It’d be going in the other direction, but we lived on an island, so it was bound to go past our house sooner or later. I got on and didn’t recognize a soul. Then when we turned left instead of right I got scared and forgot all about what the caretaker had said, or maybe I just didn’t believe him anymore. Eventually, I panicked and pulled the bell cord. The bus stopped, and there I was standing by the side of a road I’d never seen before, most likely miles from home.

  “What did you do?” said Linda.

  “There was another boy who got off at the same place. I told him I was lost, he said I could come home to his place, so I did. It was a dark house right next to the road. His dad called mine, and he came and picked me up.”

  I looked at Vanja.

  “That was your grandfather,” I said.

  “And yours, and yours too,” said Linda to Heidi and John.

  “I know,” said Vanja. “He’s dead.”

  I nodded.

  “He died before I was born,” she said.

  “Mommy’s daddy died too,” said Heidi.

  “He died on New Year’s Eve,” said Vanja.

  “Yes, he did,” I said, and looked at Linda. She smiled.

  “But you met him, Vanja,” she said.

  Vanja nodded gravely.

  “Two times,” she said. “In Stockholm.”

  “I was born in Stockholm,” said Heidi.

  “Yes, you were,” said Linda, and held her tight.

  * * *

  The next morning I woke up at four thirty, switched off the beeping alarm, picked up my pile of clothes, and took them with me from the bedroom into the hall so I wouldn’t wake Linda, picked up the two newspapers that had been dumped on the floor outside the door, put the coffeemaker on, scanned the arts and sports sections, and munched on an apple while waiting for the coffee to be ready. When it was, I drank a cup and smoked a cigarette on the balcony. The sky was a haze, the gray half-light of dawn still lingered between the buildings below, and there was something raw about it; it was mid-August and autumn would soon be here.

  I lit another cigarette to put off starting work for as long as possible, but stubbed it out half-smoked and went inside to the study, switched on the computer, sat down, turned on the lamp attached to the bookshelf with a clamp, and flicked through the stack of CDs on the floor next to me, deciding on Giant Steps by the Boo Radleys, which instantly transported me back to the mood of Bergen in the early 90s. I’d barely played the album since, and for that same reason, not wanting to revive the feelings. I sat for a while debating with myself as to whether to put something else on instead, at the same time opening the manuscript of the second book and scrolling through the document. No, it wouldn’t do. I picked out Josh Rouse’s 1972 instead, it was soft and pleasant, verging on Muzak, and would be a good start to the day.

  An hour later I heard a door open. I turned the music down and and listened. Feet padding through the hall. It had to be John or Heidi. Not that it mattered much; if one of them was up, the other would soon follow.

  I opened the door and went out into the kitchen. John stood with his pillow in his hand and looked up at me. It was twenty to six.

  “It’s still night,” I said. “Go back to bed.”

  “I’m not tired,” he said with a twinge of resentment in his voice, as if I’d accused him of something.

  “Do you want some breakfast then?” I said.

  He nodded. I lifted him up into his chair, got the muesli out of the cupboard and blueberry yogurt from the fridge, poured some into his bowl, and put it on the table in front of him, then handed him a spoon, which fortunately he accepted.

  More padding feet. I turned, and Heidi was standing in the doorway.

  “Morning, Heidi,” I said.

  She didn’t answer, just peered at me with narrow eyes and messed-up hair.

  “I want some too,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Hi, John,” she said.

  “Hi,” said John.

  I put a plate and spoon out for her.

  “Are you all right here on your own for a few minutes?” I said.

  Heidi nodded and started eating. I went into the study again, leaving the door ajar so I could hear them, and tried to get back into it again. It was harder without music, but only a few minutes later I was writing again, about a trip Geir Angell and I had made to Søgne just after his mother’s funeral, when I’d been doing a reading at a rural high school. I had no idea exactly why I was writing about it, apart from the feeling the room had given me then, in the darkness under the glittering stars of winter.

  “Daddy?” said Heidi all of a sudden behind me, and nearly gave me a heart attack.

  “What’s the matter?” I said, swiveling around.

  “John wants out of his chair.”

  I got up and went back into the kitchen, lifted him into the air, and put him down again on the floor. His diaper was so heavy it hung between his legs. I tore open the tapes at the sides and dumped i
t in the bin under the sink, told him to stay put, which he did, went and got a clean one from the bathroom, then put it on him under Heidi’s watchful eye.

  “We want a bath,” said Heidi.

  “Well you can’t have one,” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  “You can’t have one,” I said.

  “What?” she said again. It was a habit she’d got into, saying what to everything, sometimes it made her sound like she was slow-witted. I didn’t care for it.

  “No,” I said. “You’re not taking a bath.”

  She twisted her face angrily at me, then turned to her brother, who was down on all fours immersed in something over by the base of the wall.

  “Come on, John,” she said. “We’ll go and play in the living room!”

  It was five past six. The buses had started running outside. Their dull, heavy sounds were like groans. I went into the bedroom to wake Linda up. Vanja was asleep beside her. She usually came in from their room in the night, sometimes she was already asleep in our bed when we turned in for the night. We’d only just managed to get her to sleep in her own bed when Heidi was born, but Linda felt so sorry for her then that she let her sleep with us instead, and from then on she’d insisted we stay with her until she fell asleep. Only that wasn’t enough, so if she woke up on her own she’d come into our room.

  “It’s ten past six,” I said. “Heidi and John are already up. Can you get up now, do you think, so I can get a bit of work done?”

  “Mm,” she said.

  I switched on the computer on the desk, logged on to my e-mail, and without expecting anything checked to see if any new messages had come in during the night. Fortunately, the only thing in the in-box was the Agderposten’s daily news update which I’d been receiving every morning ever since the time I tried to access their archive to see if I could find anything in it about Dad. There’d been some technical glitch that meant I never got in, but they’d got my address and I’d never quite managed to remove my name from their mailing list. Still, it could be quite nice too, scanning its small-town news stories in the mornings. I deleted it and Googled myself, finding nothing new, surfed around a bit, and then, without Linda having stirred in the slightest, went back into the study again, closed the door behind me, put some music on, and tried to get back into it again. But the little break had been enough to put me off. When I got started in the mornings, my mind was as yet undisturbed by anything else, and the transition from sleep to text was smooth and fluid. As the day progressed I had to expend more energy to surmount an increasing resistance, and by the time the afternoon came around, the only thing I could do to eliminate it was sleep and start again.

  It took nearly an hour to get into the swing of things again. Not long afterward, Linda knocked on the door wanting to know if there were any clean socks anywhere or if they could just have bare feet in their sandals. I swiveled around and gave her my coldest look. She closed the door hard again. I was seething. Their voices came from the hall, Vanja and Heidi shouting at each other. I sensed she was having problems getting them to cooperate and felt guilty enough to go out and see if I could help, though not guilty enough to look her in the eye. I stood behind Vanja, gripped her foot, and thrust it into her sandal.

  “Ai!” she cried. Ow!

  Always, always a Swedish ai!, never a Norwegian au!

  I pushed the little straps through, bent them back and pressed them tight against the Velcro or whatever it was.

  “Have they got sunscreen on?” I asked.

  “I don’t think they’ll need any today,” Linda replied.

  “Are their teeth brushed?”

  “John’s are. Heidi’s and Vanja’s aren’t. We haven’t got that far yet.”

  I tore open the bathroom door, stuck the two toothbrushes under the running tap, squeezed the toothpaste on, and went out again, handed one to Linda and stood in front of Heidi with the other.

  “Open your mouth,” I said.

  She pressed her lips together.

  Sometimes it was for fun, but not this time; the look she gave me was narrow and rebellious.

  “Is it because I’ve been in a bad mood?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Well, I’m not anymore,” I said. “Do you think you could open your mouth now?”

  She didn’t.

  “You don’t want me to use force, do you?”

  “What?”

  “Use force. To make you brush your teeth, even though you don’t want to.”

  “What?”

  “I’m finished!” said Vanja, and flashed her sister a cheeky smile. John stood trying to open the front door, he was on tiptoes and had managed to get his fingers on the handle, but couldn’t quite get the grip to pull it down.

  “Mommy has to do it,” said Heidi.

  “OK,” I said, handing the toothbrush to Linda, for whom Heidi immediately opened her mouth and bared her teeth.

  “Have a nice time,” I said.

  No one answered.

  “You could at least say goodbye,” I said, looking at Linda.

  “Bye then,” she said. “But I’m coming back before I go.”

  “OK,” I said, and returned to the study. I sat there motionless in the chair and waited until I heard them get into the elevator, then the elevator as it began its descent through the building, before clicking on the minimized document that within a second unfolded on the screen in front of me.

  Linda came back half an hour later. I went out to to say hello, she wanted us to sit with a coffee on the balcony, and we sat there for ten minutes each smoking a cigarette and hardly exchanging a word.

  “Have a nice time all of you while I’m gone,” she said when eventually she stood with her suitcase in front of her in the hall.

  “I’m sure we will,” I said.

  “I’ll give you a call before their bedtime tonight, is that OK?”

  “Of course. Take it easy up there. And say hello to Helena and…”

  “Fredrik. I will.”

  We kissed each other, she closed the door behind her and I went and checked my e-mails, one from Play.com, otherwise nothing, before going back into the study, where I sat down and started writing again. I spent half an hour talking to Geir Angell on the phone, ate a packet of cold fish cakes for lunch, made a fresh pot of coffee, and then when I came back in from the balcony there was an e-mail from Gunnar.

  The subject line said “Verbal rape.”

  Opening it was out of the question.

  I stood up and went through the apartment, grabbing the phone on the way, sat down on the balcony, and called Geir Angell again.

  “That wouldn’t be you again, would it?” he said.

  “I just got an e-mail,” I said.

  “From your uncle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he doesn’t like you?”

  “Don’t know, I haven’t read it. I’m too scared.”

  “How bad can it be? Get in the game. Stop being an ostrich.”

  “The subject line says ‘Verbal rape.’”

  “Like I said.”

  “I’ll have to read it,” I said. “Might as well get it over with. Listen, I’ll send it on to you, you can read it as well, and I’ll call you back right after. OK?”

  “Sure.”

  We hung up and I lit a cigarette and stared out across the rooftops. My heart was beating so fast it felt like it was trying to get out.

  Verbal rape.

  I swallowed a mouthful of coffee. I thought about going for a walk somewhere and leaving it for a bit, sitting in a park maybe, or looking in the shops. But I knew the thought of what the e-mail might contain wouldn’t let go of me, that I wouldn’t be able to relax whatever I did.

  I got to my feet and went into the bedroom, clicked on his message even before sitting down, and read it through as fast as I could, as if the dread consisted in the encounter between my eyes and his words on the screen, rather than in what they said.

  I�
�d imagined all kinds of things, but not this.

  It was as if he were standing there screaming. It was my mother who was behind the novel, he wrote. She hated the Knausgaards, and always had. For all those years, she had indoctrinated me with her hatred, brainwashed me, until eventually I had lost contact with the real world completely and written this despicable, immoral, and self-centered shambles of a book so I could get back at the family and line my pockets. It was an act far worse than anything I believed my father had ever done to me when I was growing up. The source of all my books was my mother, all of them carried the mark of her hidden revenge motives. They were riddled with untruths, mean-spirited depictions, and an outlook on human nature he found completely alien to the family. I needed therapy.

  He wrote that he was holding the publishing director personally responsible and would be taking action for damages if the manuscript came out. He left his e-mail unsigned.

  Having read the e-mail, I barely managed to get to my feet again. I couldn’t think straight. All I knew, as I typed Geir Angell’s address and forwarded the e-mail to him, was that I had to talk to someone. I went through the apartment again. I stood in front of the window in the living room and glanced down at the square below, went into the kitchen and stared out at the rooftops, went into the children’s room, glanced around, Heidi and Vanja’s bunk beds, John’s crib, turned and went out again, into the bathroom, turned on the tap and washed my hands, went into the living room, opened the door of the long balcony, the sun was shining and it was hot, I gripped the railing and leaned forward to look down on all the people below as they passed along the sidewalk, let go and went back inside, paced the floor, and then I made a decision, there was a document attached to the e-mail, I might as well read that too, it certainly couldn’t get any worse.

  It was a letter addressed to Sissel Norunn Hatløy, my mother. In it, he informed her that he had now read “the author’s” latest manuscript. It was such that he had no words to describe what he thought of me. But he did so anyway. A concentration of the most negative characteristics imaginable. I glorified myself, I was a helpless wretch, a base individual. The strange thing, Gunnar wrote, was that the people I was attacking were the Knausgaards, whereas she, my mother, was completely untarnished. Not a single word against her had the author written. Why? His own picture of her was rather different, he wrote: she had neglected Yngve and me entirely when we were growing up, all she had been interested in was herself and what he called her quasi-philosophical ego, which I was now perpetuating. Not a thought for other people, only herself. No empathy, no feelings of solicitude, only self-infatuation. She ought to have been a pillar for my father when we needed her most, but she hadn’t. He called it neglect. That was the essence, the important thing. I had never understood that because she had brainwashed me. I believed everything she said, and because she hated the Knausgaards I hated them too. Then he went on to describe the way he remembered her when she first came into their family.