My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  He’d been only a young man at the time, and Mom’s presence had clearly made an impression on him, because he used the strongest words to describe the way she came across, so cold and inhospitable anyone would think it was a glacier he was describing. There was no warmth in her, and no personality, she took no part in the family’s life together, but would sit on her own in a corner, reading a magazine, occasionally scowling at them as she puffed on her cigarette. She communicated with no one and never had a kind word for any child in her vicinity, which I took to be referring to himself. It went on: she never once invited him to their home after he grew up, and never paid a visit to see his children, and in the company of his own sociable and loving mother she seemed positively miserable. In his words, he had felt sorry for his elder brother having to live with Mom and had always wondered why she turned out the way she had, what could have made her come across so unpleasantly, and he recalled a trip to Vestland to visit her and her family when he was twelve years old. He described her mother, my grandmother, as autistic, racked with all manner of neuroses and feelings of inferiority. He referred to the farm where they lived as wretched and called it a peasant smallholding. When he met my grandmother at the time, when he was twelve, he realized how such an abnormal desire to be someone could arise in her daughter, and how her son, my uncle Kjartan, could end up writing poetry about crows, something he apparently considered as ridiculous as it was inane and shameful. My mother lacked upbringing, had never developed any ability to show empathy or solicitude, to create a loving, caring environment, and this she had passed on to me, who suffered from exactly the same deficiencies.

  He was writing to her to underline the fact that she remained responsible for me, who he referred to as “your friendless son,” now that I was so completely far gone as was the case. He likened me to Dad, stating that I was just as unreliable as he had been and suffered from the same personality disorder. Then he compared me to Mom and declared that I was just as cynical and lacking in empathy as her. But was that anywhere in the book? No, that perspective, which apparently was the true perspective, was totally absent. Mom’s culpability in Dad’s demise was obvious to anyone who cared to see, he believed. Dad never got what he needed from her, which was to say love, intimacy, companionship, warmth. Gunnar had realized this even at the age of twelve, but to his brother, Dad, such an insight had come all too late.

  By way of conclusion he asked her to get me to stop the project and to find me a place in a psychiatric ward somewhere instead. Otherwise, if we went ahead and the book got published, he would take action for damages. He was going to put a stop to this hateful attack on the Knausgaard family, which she was behind, by whatever means might be necessary.

  The letter was signed not in his name, but as my father’s brother.

  * * *

  I lay down on the bed and remained there motionless. Suddenly, this moment was all there was. I can’t recall its exact nature or how it felt, eighteen months having passed since, and I am no longer in the grip of its explosive alarm. I can comprehend it, and even comprehend it well, but I can’t resurrect it. Reading those messages again now, I am filled with the most unpleasant emotions, and they confirm to me something I’ve always known, always felt, but compared to the force by which it became apparent to me at the time, this is merely a shadow. During those days in August 2009 it paralyzed me totally. If I’d had even the slightest inkling that such anger lay in store for me I might have been able to prepare myself for it and thereby have softened the impact, or, and even more probable, simply not written the novel in the first place. But in all the time I’d been working on it I had never, not once, anticipated a reaction remotely like it.

  The phone rang in the hall.

  It had to be Gunnar.

  There was no way I could speak to him. It would be the same as when I’d done something wrong as a boy and heard Dad’s door open downstairs. He’s coming. He’s coming.

  But it could have been Geir Gulliksen or Geir Berdahl too, seeing as how the e-mail had been sent to them as well.

  I jumped to my feet and dashed into the hall. Just as I got there it stopped ringing. I lifted it from the charger and pressed to see incoming calls.

  10, said the display.

  It meant the call was from a hidden number. Geir Angell’s was always a hidden number, so it was probably him. I usually joked about it being only the police and Geir whose numbers couldn’t be seen. But it wasn’t only a joke, because somewhere deep down I was still expecting a call from the police.

  I took the phone with me out onto the balcony and called Geir.

  “Hello, Gunnar speaking,” he said. “Is that my despicable, friendless nephew? How dare you call this number?”

  “Did you just call?” I said.

  “Well, if you’re going to be like that about it, yes,” he said. “What’s up, are you in a bad mood now?”

  “Bad isn’t the word. Have you read his e-mail?”

  “Of course I have. He has a fine turn of phrase, your uncle, hasn’t he?”

  “He has, yes.”

  “I couldn’t stop laughing.”

  “I bet you couldn’t.”

  “Forget about him. He’s angry with you. It’s not hard to understand. But that’s all it is. It’s not like you’ve done anything wrong.”

  “Obviously I have. And he’s going to take me to court. I don’t doubt him for a second.”

  “But that’ll be excellent! You should hope he does, it’d be the stupidest thing he could do. You’ll be rolling in money! Everyone’ll be wanting your books if it comes to a court case! This is literary history in the making. And you’ll be a millionaire. There’s no better scenario.”

  “I can think of a couple.”

  “Come on! What have you done exactly? You’ve written a book about your life, from where you stand. It’s all about liberty. Liberty’s something you take. If it’s given, then you’re a slave. You wanted to write about your life the way it is. There’s a price for that. That price is what you’re looking at now. You didn’t think about your uncle, which means you’ve been thoughtless. That’s what it costs. Yes, he’s angry with you. Yes, I can understand that. He’s entitled to be angry with you, from where he stands. But that’s where it ends. Do you get what I’m saying? You haven’t written anything bad about him. You’ve written about your own father. That’s your prerogative, your fucking inheritance, that’s what he left you. No one can deny you that. They can be angry with you, they can be seething mad, they can make life difficult for you and your family, but that’s it. You didn’t do anything wrong. You have my complete forgiveness. It’s only a pity I wasn’t a Catholic priest.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you mean yeah? Get a grip, man. You’ll be rich. You should be laughing.”

  “It’s no laughing matter.”

  “Of course it is! And reading that e-mail made me realize where all this is coming from. You’re not the only lunatic in the family. You’re all like that. Your dad, your uncle, you.”

  I said nothing. Predictably, his attempts at cheering me up weren’t helping in the slightest, but I was glad he was trying nevertheless. We talked for an hour or so, about the same thing the whole time, the letters and the new situation they had presented us with. Geir thought I should just go with the flow. Moralizing had never created anything of its own, all it did was reject the created. And the created was the same as life itself. Why reject life?

  Geir was a Nietzschean through and through. He could see things from the outside, that was his strength, but at the same time it meant that outside was where he was. I was in the middle of it all, and if there was anything in which I could find no comfort it was vitalism, because vitalism was the same as transgression, and if this was about anything, it was basically about fear of trangression.

  As we talked, the phone beeped for an incoming call. I ignored it the first time, but when it came again I said to Geir I’d have to hang up and see who it was.

/>   At first the display said simply there was an incoming call. I didn’t take it, it could have been anybody. But then the number appeared. It was from Oslo. For all I knew, Gunnar could have been in Oslo, but the chances were slender, and besides I thought I recognized the first three digits, they belonged to the publisher Oktober.

  I pressed the green key and put the receiver to my ear at the same time as I opened the door and went into the living room.

  “Hello?” I said, going over to the window.

  “Hi, it’s Geir Berdahl.”

  “Hi.”

  “I got the e-mail from your uncle.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He laughed uneasily. I stood at the window and put my forehead against the cool glass.

  “Strong stuff.”

  “Yes.”

  “We need to tackle this properly.”

  “Yes.”

  I went over to the bookshelf and stared at the titles.

  “We need to accommodate your uncle as far as possible. And we need to give ourselves some room to maneuver. We certainly can’t allow him to make this a matter for the courts. I’m assuming it’s not a problem for you to change the names of everyone on your father’s side of the family?”

  “No, not at all,” I said, and went over to the opposite wall, turned and went back. “No, no problem. I offered to do that in the letter I sent him.”

  “Good. Then I can tell him we’re changing the names. And anonymizing what needs to be anonymized, as far as we can.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll get in touch with a law firm we use. Just so that you know. We need to be sure that whatever we do is current and above board, you realize that, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve certainly got his back up, though, haven’t you?”

  “I’ll say.”

  I went into the kitchen and stood there looking at the row of cupboard’s above the sink. I went into the kitchen and stood there looking at the row of cupboards above the sink, one of them was open, one of the shelves, the one where we kept the glasses, was nearly empty. They must have been in the dishwasher.

  “He might just want to put the wind up you a bit,” he said.

  “He has.”

  “All right, Karl Ove. Keep working at this as best you can. I’ll call back once I’ve spoken to the lawyers.”

  “OK.”

  “Bye for now.”

  “Bye,” I said, and hung up. I went back into the living room, then through the hall to the bathroom, where I turned on a tap and rinsed my hands in hot water. I went outside onto the balcony, but realized I couldn’t sit there and smoke on my own, it would be too empty and still, so I went and got the phone I’d put down on the kitchen counter and called Linda.

  “Hi!” she said.

  “You sound happy,” I said, going back into the living room and stepping up to the window. “Have you arrived?”

  “No, I’m still on the train. I slept for a bit. Now I’m reading. What about you?”

  “Not so good, I’m afraid. I got an e-mail from Gunnar. He’s seething. Out of his mind with rage, pretty much.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “What does he say?”

  “You can read it when you get back. He wants to stop the book getting published, and if he can’t he says he’ll take us to court.”

  “You’re joking?”

  “I’m afraid not. It’s about as bad as you can imagine.”

  “I can tell from your voice. Do you want me to come home again? I will if you want.”

  “No, no. No. Definitely not. Don’t even think about it. You deserve this little break on your own. Everything’s fine here. It’s just the shock, that’s all. It’ll pass. I spoke to Geir Berdahl from

  Oktober, they’re getting the lawyers in and trying to patch things up as best they can. I’m in good hands. Everything’s fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK.”

  “I just wanted you to know, that’s all. Apart from that, everything’s fine. I’ll give you a call tonight, we can talk about it some more then if you want. Is that OK?”

  It was OK. Linda had never met Gunnar, but she’d heard a lot about him. And it had left an impression on her that he’d stood there in the garden at Mom’s without wanting to come in and meet the children or Linda herself. He was also the only one of those invited who hadn’t come to Vanja’s christening. Neither of these occurrences had seemed odd to me at the time; in the garden he was in a hurry, and as for the christening he simply hadn’t been able to come. Now I saw things in a different light, the light of hatred in which he had written his letter. That hatred couldn’t have arisen only now, suddenly, merely as a result of the book I had written, it must have been there long before, latent through all those years. I had felt it, had always felt it, and yet always thought it was my own paranoid unease. I didn’t think anyone liked me, but that couldn’t have been true, not really, he was my father’s brother, why wouldn’t he like me? If I did something he didn’t approve of, wouldn’t he give me the benefit of the doubt? That was how I looked at it, to combat what I told myself was all in my head, but now, in the tone of his letter, all semblance of such thinking vanished. That was how it was, and it had been like that for a long time, perhaps always. In his view, my writing the book confirmed to him what he had always thought about me. I had a small, though in my own view excessively large ego. I was unreliable and deceitful. I’d always felt it whenever I was with them, that I was deceitful. How did it come to that? If ever there was a thing I disliked and didn’t want in my life it was deceit. Deceit could only make others, and thereby myself, look upon me as deceitful.

  Why?

  There was a simple answer. I had something to hide from them. A part of me I couldn’t show or use in their company. And this fact, that there was something I had to avoid at all cost, made my behavior seem furtive in some way, thereby damaging my entire person and character. I tried to be like them when we were together, to talk like them, to be among them in their way, but in recognizing that I wasn’t like that at all, like them, among them in their way, he saw through me. The betrayal started there.

  I stood for a moment with the phone in my hand, staring through the living-room window at the buildings outside. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t watch a film. I couldn’t go out and meet someone either, not knowing anyone in Malmö well enough. All I could do was talk to someone on the phone. It wouldn’t help, but it would make the moment tolerable, the mere fact of there being someone outside all this who would talk to me about it. So in the two hours that remained of the day, before I had to pick up the children from the nursery, I was on the phone. I talked to Geir Gulliksen about what to do, I talked to Espen, who told me I musn’t change a word of the manuscript, not to give in to pressure, but to dig in and endure, I talked to Tore, who knew what it was like writing about things in a way that approached actual biography and how that could be taken by family, and I talked to Yngve. He was distraught, he’d always got on well with Gunnar and there was no way he wanted to get caught in the crossfire. I told him it was my novel, I was the one who had written it, and that he had nothing at all to do with it, which Gunnar would surely understand. The way I saw it, Gunnar had always liked Yngve, always gone out of his way to keep in touch with him. Finally, I called Mom, she was on her way home from work and hadn’t seen his e-mail, but would open it as soon as she got in. By then it was ten to three. I put my white sneakers on, got the keys from the cupboard, took the trash bag with me and went down into the basement, where I tossed it in one of the big garbage containers, went out through the back door, and followed one of the streets that ran behind the building in the direction of the nursery, the way I always did when I was feeling down and didn’t want to be seen by anyone. I recognized the feeling I got when I emerged under the warm, deep-blue sky of August and walked along the exhaust-filled Föreningsgatan, past the cluster of figures who always stoo
d smoking on the corner by the traffic lights, crossed over, went down the little stump of cobbled street up to the next junction with its row of young deciduous trees, dark green and shaded by the tall line of buildings, it was the same feeling I’d had the days after Dad had died, and the days after getting the phone call with its accusation of rape, the way the surroundings seemed almost to be erased, as if I’d wandered inside a zone so charged with force it extinguished everything else in its vicinity. I saw everything, I saw the cars, I saw the Lidl supermarket, I saw the pedestrians and the cyclists, registered what they were wearing, mostly shorts and T-shirts, skirts and dresses, but here and there a nice shirt and trousers, I saw the Montessori school on the other side of the crossing, the African hair salon, the Polish food store, and the row of little antique shops as I walked past, I saw the owner of one sitting on a chair on the sidewalk, as so often before, his old golden retriever dozing next to him, but none of it mattered, it was without substance and possessed no weight. And in this way I saw my own children too, as they came to greet me in the nursery’s backyard. I bent down, I held them tight, because it was what I had to do, but not even that had substance enough for me to extract myself from my mood.

  Two of the staff were sitting on a bench chatting while kids ran about playing all around them. The yard was asphalt with at one end a windowless wall maybe six stories high that looked mostly like the wall of a fortress and blocked out the sun for the better part of the day. Up against the wall was the sandpit and next to it a three-meter-tall playhouse. The storeroom on the other side was full of tricycles, bikes with training wheels, buckets and spades, balls and hockey sticks, as well as a miscellany of plastic toys that at the end of the day lay strewn across the entire area. The parents took turns putting in a week’s work every six months, besides taking care of administrative duties and the day-to-day cleaning. I had done my best to avoid any position of responsibility, had never involved myself in the committee, for instance, never been in charge of human resources, recruitment or finance, always making sure to take on the most practical and least prestigious job of all, as part of the cleaning group. It was wholly manual work and it meant cleaning the entire nursery maybe five or six weekends spread over six months. Besides that, I cleaned on the days when the daily cleaning roster said it was my turn. Still, it suited me OK, requiring nothing more than the time it took, so when I was finished that was it. The only drawback was that every time I let myself in to clean on a Sunday evening I felt the strong urge to do a good job, which meant I always ended up spending a lot more time on it than was necessary. Most likely that was the reason I was asked to take charge of the cleaning group after my first six-month stint. I said yes, and from then on was charged with organizing the spring clean as well as drawing up rosters and keeping supplies of everything we needed, which didn’t bother me that much, but when the year came to an end and jobs were to be redelegated at the annual meeting, I asked to go back to being an ordinary cleaner again. There was something about the prominence of being in charge that I didn’t care for, as well as the fact that it also involved having to pass on any complaints about the cleaning from the staff to the parents who had been sloppy, which happened on occasion, and I could stand there wanting the floor to swallow me up, full of shame at having to inform them, because they were adults, and who was I to tell them they hadn’t done their job properly and would have to do it again? I could do it once, twice in a pinch, but that was it.