My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Gunnar’s lawyer, who had stood pensively listening to all this, looked at me in a way I took to indicate sarcasm.

  “All well and good, Knausgaard,” he said. “But the truth is that your father’s demise did not occur in the manner in which you have described. We have witnesses. He drank and had his problems, certainly, but his demise was quiet and uneventful. Moreover, the fact of the matter is that your grandmother did not drink at all. The two years you, in your colorful depiction, would have them living and drinking together exist only in your imagination. He lived with her for three months. The house was not littered with empty bottles. Nor did you wash the house down, as you have written, because your uncle did that. And therefore my question to you is this: Why are you lying about these matters? You, who wish to write about the world the way it is, why should you, of all people, depict a world that never existed? That is the issue facing us today. You can try to hide behind as much existential intellectualism as you like, to my mind it’s pretentious gibberish, so pompous it makes me feel sick just standing here listening to it. However, that is not the matter at hand, at least not today, but from what I can deduce from your self-exalting and conceited claptrap, you consider what you have written to be the truth, this to your mind being the whole point of your despicable and duplicitous novel. Only then it turns out not to be the truth at all. Can you explain that to me?”

  I stared at him stiffly, unable to move.

  “It’s how I remember it,” I said after a while.

  “Not good enough!” the lawyer barked. “You have offended these people, desecrated the memories of two deceased members of your own family. You sold your father and grandmother for blood money. And all you can say is it’s how you remember it? Violating the privacy of your family is a serious enough matter on its own, a criminal offense, but to have lied about your uncle’s mother and his brother exacerbates that offense tenfold. We’re talking about defamation of character, carrying a sentence of up to three years’ imprisonment.”

  He wiped the perspiration from his brow and swept his blond hair from his face in one and the same movement, then looked at me, waiting.

  “But I did wash the house down,” I said. “It’s not true that I can’t manage things like that. I may have exaggerated the chaos inside the house, but it was dreadful. And as for what I’ve written about my father, it’s my own story I’m telling. That can’t be against the law, surely? Can it?”

  I consciously avoided glancing at Gunnar, who sat proudly in the first row, having refused to acknowledge my gesture of reconciliation in the minutes prior to proceedings commencing, when, heroically and forgivingly, I had extended my hand toward him, and crossed the floor back to my seat to await the testimony of the first witness, the Swedish essayist, professor, and member of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl, the man who for many years had announced the winner of the Nobel Prize, known for his literary elegance and incomparable style, classmate of suspected Palme assassin Christer Pettersson, and friend of the wild and fearlessly gifted writer Stig Larsson. I had seen Engdahl at a seminar in Bergen many years before; he had veered off the theme and talked about Carina Rydberg and her novel Den högsta kasten, The Highest Caste, it was at the time when the controversy surrounding that book had been at its peak in Sweden – she had written about actual people, using their full names – and Engdahl had said that, quite apart from the bickering to which it had given rise, the book was first and foremost a brilliant work of literature. I suppose I was hoping he would say the same about my own book. On the other hand, I found myself thinking as I stood there, staring emptily at the washing machine and the soapy water that sloshed against the glass, there was something essentially elitist and superior about the man, he was a literary aristocrat, and how was that going to look in court, with Gunnar coming across as the man in the street, the everyman who quite unwittingly found his life destroyed by his writer nephew? People would think it could happen to them too, and shudder at the thought. I would be made out to be the basest of human beings, a kind of literary vampire, brutal and without consideration, self-seeking and egoistic. Perhaps an aristocrat wouldn’t be the right person to argue in favor of such a practice?

  A door opened in the passage, perhaps it was someone who had booked the washing machines I was now using, and I turned my head to look, but the faint footsteps came to a halt at another door, which whoever it was then opened. I waited a few seconds for them to go inside, then went out. The sounds of the laundry room were cut off abruptly by the heavy slam of the steel door closing behind me. It felt like I was in the depths of some great factory, I thought to myself. I went up the stairs, through the door, and out onto the square, I needed to get some cigarettes. The fruit merchant waved at me, I was probably his best customer. I smiled and waved back, twirling my key strap around my index finger and crossing to the other side of the square, glancing as always at the shoes in the window of the Nilson store as I went by. Lars Norén had written about a Nilson shop in his expansive diaries, which I’d read halfway through the previous summer, he’d expressed astonishment at the fact that a woman – I couldn’t quite remember if it was his daughter or his new girlfriend – could buy her shoes there, apparently Nilson wasn’t good enough for him, he bought his own shoes in a different class of shop altogether, so I understood, though until then I’d always thought of the place as having a certain status. Now it was impossible for me to go past the store without thinking about it, Norén’s cosmopolitan consternation at the provincial footwear habits of others. I glanced at another shop on the other side of the street, as was my habit, since it sold underwear and often displayed posters of scantily clad women in its windows, before pushing open the door of Thomas Tobak and stepping inside, where Thomas himself looked up amiably, before looking down again at a receipt he seemed to be checking.

  “Hello there,” he said.

  “Hello,” I said. “Three packs of Lucky, please.”

  He picked them off the shelf behind him.

  “No papers today?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “A hundred and forty-seven, then,” he said.

  I took my card out of my back pocket.

  “You can use this one,” he said, nodding at a new card reader he’d got, one that read the chip rather than the magnetic stripe, which was good for both of us, since the stripe on my card was rather the worse for wear and he’d had to key in the number manually on more than one occasion. Not that he minded, he always had plenty of time for his customers, no matter how busy he was.

  “Well, that’s something,” I said. “Thanks a lot!”

  “No problem,” he said.

  With the three packs in my hand I went out again, into the pedestrian street that ran down to the first of the canals, then on to Gustav Adolfs torg, teeming with people on Saturday mornings but now almost deserted.

  The children.

  Where were they?

  I stopped.

  They were at the nursery. I’d dropped them off there.

  Or had I?

  What had I done that morning?

  Flustered, I tried to recall some definite occurrence that would confirm to me that I had taken them to the nursery and delivered them there, and then, in the same instant, I remembered we’d gone back for Vanja’s glasses, and everything was all right.

  I started walking again and went around the corner, past the flower stall first, then the fruit stall, still with a vague sense of unease; I hadn’t given the children a thought all morning, and if they’d been anywhere else but at the nursery I would have been grossly neglecting them. The previous summer I’d read about a Danish father who forgot to stop off at the nursery one morning, his child had been asleep in the back when he parked the car, he explained, and he had gone into work oblivious. The child had died in the heat. Something similar could easily happen to me, I’d often thought, and if I happened to be out with only two of them, I could find myself suddenly stricken with terror. Where’s John? Have I fo
rgotten him somewhere? Where is he? Where the hell is he? And then I would realize he was at home with Linda and everything was all right. But even though I’d been through it before, the fear could come back at any time, where is he, with Linda, how can you be sure that wasn’t yesterday, think back!

  I passed the key card over the panel and pushed the door open. A postman was delivering the mail, putting it in the various mailboxes. I nodded and stopped. He dropped a small pile into ours, I waited until he stepped out of the way, then retrieved it, opened the elevator door and flicked through the bundle on my way up. There was a letter from Svea Inkasso, the debt collection company, three bills, a Bamse magazine, and an advertising brochure from Spirit. I opened the door and went inside, dumping it all on top of the pile on the table under the mirror before taking my shoes off and putting them away in the cupboard. I put two of the cigarette packs in the drawer of my desk, took the third out with me onto the balcony and sat down, poured myself a cup of coffee from the vacuum jug, opened the packet, took out a cigarette, and lit up.

  Above me a pigeon cooed, the sound came suddenly and was very close. I looked up, it sounded like it came from inside the roof.

  Uuhh-huu-huuu, it said.

  Uuhh-huu-huuu.

  The bird scratched about up there, presumably it was the sound of its claws against the zinc I could hear, it had tried to change position and now couldn’t get purchase. Oh, its claws, they were so prehistoric, what were they doing on modern metal?

  I poured myself some more coffee.

  The pigeon sailed into the air above me, gliding toward the rooftop on the other side, perhaps two floors down, where it settled on a TV aerial.

  Faintly, as if from the depths of the apartment below, came the sound of a door buzzer. A few seconds passed before I connected it to Geir being due. I got to my feet and went back inside, down the hall, as it buzzed again.

  I picked up the entry phone.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “It’s Gunnar. Is that you, you bastard? I’m here to get you!”

  “Come in,” I said, and pressed the button until I heard the door open downstairs, then hung up, opened the door, and stood waiting at the elevator.

  Geir emerged shoving a big black suitcase in front of him. Njaal came out behind him, hugging his leg; the look he gave me was partly suspicious, partly curious. Geir put his hand out without smiling, then looked up at me.

  “Hi,” he said hurriedly, as if he’d lost his breath, already leaving the greeting behind.

  “So you found it all right?” I said.

  “I have been here before, in case you’d forgotten,” he said, bundling past me into the hall, where he put the suitcase down and bent down to help Njaal off with his shoes.

  “How could I forget?” I said.

  He looked up and smiled.

  “Relax, it’s going to be all right.”

  “What is?”

  “Whatever’s worrying you.”

  He bent down again and took his sandals off.

  “Where are Heidi and Vanja?” said Njaal.

  “At the dagis,” I said. “They’ll be home again soon. You can play with their toys while you’re waiting.”

  He stepped cautiously toward their room.

  “Good to see you,” I said as Geir straightened up.

  “I’m sure,” he said. “You’ll be saving a fortune on your phone bill now.”

  “You think I call too often, is that it?”

  “Often?” he said. “It’s all I do! Get up, brush my teeth, talk to you, have some lunch, talk to you, have some dinner, talk to you, brush my teeth, go to bed. I wonder what’s going to happen tomorrow, I think to myself. Who knows, maybe Karl Ove might call?”

  “Do you want some coffee or something?” I said.

  “You bet I do.”

  He followed me into the kitchen, angling his head slightly upward, the way he often did when we hadn’t seen each other for a long time, a wide, sardonic smile on his face, as if to say, I know you.

  And in a way, he did.

  * * *

  When we moved to Malmö I had been afraid Geir and I would lose touch. That’s what distance does; when the time between conversations gets longer, intimacy diminishes, the little things connected to one’s daily life lose their place, it seems odd to talk about a shirt you just bought or to mention you’re thinking of leaving the dishes until morning when you haven’t spoken to a person for two weeks or a month, that absence would seem instead to call for more important topics, and once they begin to determine the conversation there’s no turning back, because then it’s two diplomats exchanging information about their respective realms in a conversation that needs to be started up from scratch, in a sense, every time, which gradually becomes tedious, and eventually it’s easier not to bother phoning at all, in which case it’s even harder the next time, and then suddenly it’s been half a year of silence. But that didn’t happen. Far from it, we were in touch even more after I moved away, we talked more often on the phone, and for a lot longer, to the extent that sometimes I found myself wondering if it was normal, which filled me with a vague sense of unease because I didn’t want not to be normal. A typical day would be me phoning him first at nine in the morning, when we would talk for anything from twenty minutes to an hour and a half, then I’d call him again in the afternoon, when I’d read him what I’d written during the day, and he would comment on it. He never criticized but would discuss what I’d written in such a way as to open it up, presenting other perspectives and possibilities, which I would often make use of in what I wrote the day after. Occasionally, we spoke in the evenings too, though I tried to keep it to a minimum, sensing that Linda perhaps found all this talking to Geir rather excessive. But I had no friends in Malmö, no other writers I saw, and the only space I had in which to talk about the things that interested and occupied me was this, and since it had been going on for several years I saw no need to be any different to what I was, no need to pretend I was any smarter than I was or say anything else other than what I actually thought. Many of the ideas and conceptions I discussed either directly or indirectly in the book had come from Geir, just as we also talked about the directions in which they took me. He was an influence, my thoughts were increasingly similar to his, and the only redeeming aspect of this, because that was the way I looked at it, was that I allowed the thoughts I so shamelessly appropriated from him to find resonance in what belonged to me, my own story and biography, as well as the fact that I likewise played a part in his work and development, though not as significantly and in a quite different way that was less threatening to his own integrity. Six years previously he had traveled to Baghdad and stayed there before, during, and after the American invasion of Iraq. His intention was to write a book about war, and he had entered the country as a human shield, a cover that gave him enormous freedom and allowed him to interview all kinds of people who in one way or another were affected by the war. He had spent the six years since his return writing that book, a process that slowly but surely was approaching its conclusion.