His working title was Against Better Judgment. It could have been his motto. I poured the coffee into the mugs and handed him his. Outside the window the rooftops and their ridges, red against the sky’s blue, seemed to slant inward, it was something to do with perspective, I was looking at them diagonally from above, and it created an illusion. It had struck me the very first time I had stood here looking out. We were being shown the apartment, and that faint feeling of dizziness it had given me made me certain I wanted to live here. Now I was used to it, but Geir being here made me notice again.
“Anything more from him?” he said.
“From Gunnar?” I said.
He nodded, and flashed me a grin I might have taken to be malicious if I hadn’t known him better.
“No. Enough’s enough, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely,” he said, still grinning.
“You can wipe that smile off your face, then,” I said.
“I’m in a good mood, that’s all. Oh, but you wouldn’t have noticed, would you? Ha ha.”
“My problem’s a bit bigger than that.”
“I know. Your problem is that you’re a bad person.”
“Exactly.”
“And, I should add, one of the few true narcissists.”
“If you say so.”
“There’s no doubt about it. The only reason I point it out is because I’m one too.”
“I’m not sure I follow. You put up with me and all my morbid self-absorption, because you’re just the same, morbidly self-absorbed? Wouldn’t it be more logical for you to hate me for taking up time better spent on yourself?”
“My ego’s big enough for it not to bother me.”
He looked up at me and grinned again as he lifted the mug to his lips.
There was a crash from the living room.
“Njaal, what are you up to in there?” he called.
Njaal’s little voice said something back.
“Do you want to come outside while I have a smoke?” I said. He nodded and we went out onto the balcony. On our way we saw Njaal sitting on the floor surrounded by toys he’d taken out of the round ottoman, it was the lid that had dropped on the floor. We sat down on either side of the little camping table. I lit a cigarette and put my feet up on the railing.
“Do you want something else to think about?” he said.
“That wouldn’t be bad,” I replied.
“I was in town the other day and bought a pair of clogs.”
“I don’t think this is going to be enough to lift me up into the light,” I said.
“The reason I bought them was to annoy my neighbor,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, I’m going to buy some for Christina and Njaal as well.”
“You mean you’re wearing clogs indoors now?” I asked, and looked at him inquiringly.
He nodded.
“It’s a war. As soon as I get home I put them on and jump up and down on the floor for an hour or so.”
“Like Donald Duck, you mean?”
“No, Donald Duck gets mad, that’s all. He’s totally irrational. This is rational. I’m exploiting the advantages of the terrain. I’m higher up than him. My floor is his ceiling.”
“Haven’t you thought about beating him up? Dragging him out into the woods and giving him a good hiding?”
“That would be too brutal, even if it is touch and go. And we could lose the tenancy. I don’t want to risk that. There’s no rule against clogs, though. No one can deny me clogs. If he laid a finger on Christina or Njaal, that’d be different. You’ve got to measure your violence. It’s all about violence against over-violence. I could have shot him, but that would have been excessive. The same goes for beating him up. You’ve got to wait and see how the conflict develops and tailor your violence according to how much is reasonable. That’s Clausewitz. Violence is a means of removing a problem. A practical measure.”
“So you’ve thought about beating him up, then?”
“Of course I have. But this is the best solution. I’m going to be wearing clogs until he gives in. If it takes a year, I’ll wear clogs for a year. If it takes ten, I’ll wear them for ten.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Not in the slightest! I’m involved in a conflict with my downstairs neighbor. He attacked me. I tried to be reasonable, but it didn’t work. So I’m retaliating. I’m not doing anything against the rules, and he’ll discover that soon enough. And then the only way he’ll be able to stop it will be to give in. He knows that. There are three ways he can get out of this. One, he moves out. Two, his wife apologizes to Christina. Three, he never speaks to us again and never so much as looks at us when we meet, i.e., stays well and truly away. If you ask me, my guess is he’ll go with the latter. But we’ll see. For the moment, he’s sticking it out.”
“You make it sound like a normal way of dealing with things,” I said. “But it’s not, is it? No one resolves a conflict by buying themselves a pair of clogs and tramping around in them indoors. And the way you talk about it as well. Exploiting the advantages of the terrain. Anyone would think you were an army unit taking a hill in Vietnam or something. But it’s an apartment in Stockholm we’re talking about.”
“A conflict is a conflict,” he said. “I know this is going to end it. There’s no way he can win. No one can withstand the sound of clogs on a floor. He’ll last a month, maybe two. Then he’ll come creeping and ask what he can do to make me stop. You’ll see. It’ll be problem solved.”
“Not his.”
“No, but his is unsolvable. Mine, on the other hand, isn’t.”
A few months earlier Geir and Christina had moved out of their two-room apartment in Västertorp to a four-room in the same neighborhood. Even as they were moving in, their downstairs neighbor had complained about the disturbance as they lugged their furniture and boxes up the stairs. He complained about their hammering when they were hanging their pictures on the wall. They told him they would try to move in as quietly as they could, but that it was impossible for them not to make some noise. A few weeks after, he complained about doors being slammed and Njaal running across the floor. Geir fitted rubber strips around the doors and cupboard doors, and put more mats down on the floors. The neighbor wrote a formal complaint to the landlord. Besides the noise from the apartment, there was the noise in the stairwell whenever they went in and out, and the stroller inside the street door. Geir responded in a letter to the effect that they were as considerate as they could be. They never played music, never held parties, and went to bed every night at ten. The noise their neighbor was complaining about was the same as that made by any normal family with children, and there was nothing to be done about it. His letter, as I understood it, only made the neighbor even more furious, he had even confronted Geir one time in the basement. The situation reminded me of when Linda and I lived in Stockholm and had a neighbor who likewise complained about everything we did and behaved threateningly toward us. We too had tried to accommodate her demands, but they had been too unreasonable for it to work. We solved the issue by moving out. I still felt the panic grab hold of me if one of the children was noisy, if they happened to kick a radiator, for instance, or thump around on the floor. A chill of anxiety would run through me, and I’d be there like a shot to make them stop. Our neighbors here had never complained, it was the fear of our Stockholm neighbor that still lived inside me, three years after we moved away. I’d spoken to Christina about it, and her reaction was the same as mine, to try to eliminate the cause and tiptoe around. Geir was made of sterner stuff. He didn’t internalize, he retaliated. He had resorted to buying the clogs now, he told me, because of something that had only just happened. Christina had been out on the balcony with Njaal and had gone in again for a moment when she heard shouting from the balcony below. What’s going on up there? It turned out Njaal had opened the lid of the parasol stand, which had been full of water, and some of the water had dripped down onto the neighbors below. Christina had no idea what had happ
ened, and said they hadn’t been doing anything. Whereupon the wife had shouted to her husband that the bitch was being cheeky. As soon as Geir heard about this he got in the car, drove into town, and bought the clogs he’d been tramping about in ever since, from when he got up in the morning until he went to bed at night.
“It sounds like you’re enjoying yourself while you’re at it,” I said.
“Not the actual going around in clogs. They’re a bit clunky for my liking. But the thought of it driving him mad down there without him being able to do a thing about it, that’s different. That gives me pleasure, yes.”
“I’d prefer if it didn’t,” I said.
He laughed.
“A few weeks and I can take them off again.”
“You’re not solving anything. He’s just going to find something else to rile you with.”
“If he does, I’ll step things up. It’s a war. The point being that the enemy has to be made to understand you’re always going to be ready to go a step further than him. And when he does, that’s when you’ve won.”
“But there’s a difference between major and minor conflicts, isn’t there?”
“That’s where you’re wrong. The principle’s exactly the same. As soon as he realizes he’s not going to get anywhere with me, and that I’m willing to take it further than he is, no matter what he decides to do, then he’ll surrender. Wait and see.”
“I will,” I said.
“Your strategy, putting up with everything and hoping it’ll all go away, doesn’t work with that kind of person.”
“That’s what you say,” I said. “But I’m still not sure you know what you’re doing.”
Njaal opened the door and stepped outside.
“It’s high,” he said.
“Yes, very high up,” said Geir.
Njaal got down on his knees and peered through the gap between the concrete floor and the railing.
“There’s something there!” he exclaimed.
“Is it that paintbrush?” I said. “Vanja dropped that. There are some lighters down there too, I think. Ones I’ve dropped.”
“Can I throw something down?” he asked, and looked up at his father.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Njaal,” Geir said.
“How about we go out to the garden?” I said. “Let him run around a bit? I don’t need to pick the kids up for another couple of hours yet. We could go in your car.”
* * *
An hour and a half later we sat chatting on a couple of chairs by the hedge, in a hum of wasps and bumblebees as we watched Njaal run around on the grass. We had a paddling pool, but he didn’t want to go in. Now and again he came up to guzzle some fruit juice, in that unrestrained, greedy way in which children drink, and then he’d be gone again, on his way across the grass in the direction of something else that had caught his attention. When we bought the place it had been one of the neatest of all the cabins. Two years on, and everything about it had fallen into decline. But in the frenzied flourish of summer it wasn’t hard to call the garden lush instead of neglected. And anyway, this wasn’t a day to worry about it.
There was a sound of lawn mowers, and two gardens from ours two families stood nattering away in their Skåne dialects, but apart from that the place was quiet. I tried to explain to Geir how I felt, to define the emotion so he could understand, and ended up calling it terror. I could easily see how superficial it all seemed to anyone on the outside. It wasn’t in the least bit likely that Gunnar was going to call or turn up; he had severed all contact with me, any correspondence went between him and the publisher, with me copied in. Maybe he was afraid of me and hadn’t the guts for a direct confrontation? Judging from what he’d said about me, this was wholly unlikely. In his eyes I was a sixteen-year-old layabout with no self-knowledge, a money-grubber inflamed with hatred. It was far more likely he was avoiding me because I was a disgrace. A third and final possibility was because he didn’t think I was responsible for my own actions, I was a Knausgaard, after all, and this was his way of going easy on me. At one point this had been what I’d thought, and it still made me feel strangely warm, but I had long since realized it was a kind of wishful thinking.
We talked about it. Which is to say, Geir talked and I listened. I’d heard everything before and was convinced I’d thought every thought that could possibly be conceived on the matter, when all of a sudden Geir asked:
“How old is he, anyway?”
“About fifty-five, I think.”
“And here you are. Gray hair. Gray beard. Forty years old. You’re about the same age. You shouldn’t put up with someone your own age treating you like that.”
“That never occurred to me.”
“What?”
“That we’re the same age.”
How odd that this should be such a liberating thought. Most of what Geir had said had already occurred to me and I’d thought about it myself, but not that. Gunnar and I were the same age. He wasn’t above me. One thing was recognizing this, another was understanding it.
“He saw you when you were in diapers, that’s the problem here. You’re always going to be a kid to him. But it doesn’t mean you have to be a kid in your own eyes when you’re dealing with him.”
“He’s my dad, isn’t he?”
“I know that. But you’re more than just feelings and irrationality. You’re thoughts as well, and rationality. Let them take over. It’ll all sort itself out then.”
“You make it sound like I’ve got a choice.”
“And?”
I raised my hand in the air.
“Enough for now. How are things, anyway?”
He laughed. “Oh no, you don’t.”
“All right, so it was an abrupt change of subject. But only so you’d take the hint. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”
“What?”
“Social interaction. The conversation has to move on at some point. It’s the normal procedure, so I’m told.”
“I think we’ve gone beyond polite convention, don’t you?”
“Certainly not. How are things, anyway?”
“Let me see,” he said. “I sit in my room and write…”
He looked up at me.
“Same as usual in other words. There you go. Should we talk about Gunnar again?”
* * *
An hour later, as I carried the two chairs into the open shed at the side of the little cabin, I felt a sense of relief. Maybe things weren’t that bad after all. Maybe it wasn’t the end of the world. I put the glasses and cups on the counter in the kitchen, heard Njaal running on the gravel outside the gate, locked the door and went out through the garden, breaking into a trot so as to catch up with them. We’d left the car in the parking area a hundred meters away. Every garden I passed was immaculate, with little ponds and sculptures, hedges straight and trimmed to perfection, lawns like billiard tables. The people who owned them moved out here in May and stayed until September, most were retired, and to them gardening was a lifestyle. I found it all so ghastly. I hated the place, really hated it. Being here was like being on display, viewed not as the person you were, whoever that was, but as the person you looked like you were. The fact that I knew the rules of such places from my own childhood did nothing to improve matters, for how on earth had I got myself into buying a property, however small, in the midst of this inferno? How could I have been so oblivious to myself?
I caught up with Geir and Njaal just before the barrier where the parking area began.
“The next novel I write starts here,” I said. “Have I told you that? The last world war never happened and Nazism spread peacefully through Europe. The main character grows up here. All through his childhood and youth he’s been thinking about Africa. That’s the first sentence: ‘In all the time I was growing up I read about Africa. It filled me with a yearning so great it was almost unbearable.’ Something like that. I read this article once in Dagens Nyheter about the Nazis’ plans for the world. They
mapped out this gigantic port on the coast of North Africa. The rest of the continent was just darkness, nothing there. That would be a good framework for a novel. A world planned and ordered down to the minutest detail, everything in it utterly controlled in all its aesthetics, and then this other world in which everything is unknown, unpredictable and improvised, where things happen and are then just gone again. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
He nodded.
“I see you needing a hideaway from what you’ve got going. It’s an escape attempt, pure and simple.”
“You’re probably right. But I mean it, seriously. Africa is something else entirely. I saw that when I went there, and I’ve seen it in lots of documentaries, too. What we haven’t understood yet is that Africa is our utopia, not this.”
Geir opened the car door, and Njaal climbed onto the backseat. I waited until Geir got him strapped in, then got in the passenger side. A couple of other car doors were opened and closed a bit farther away, it reminded me of a parking lot next to a marina or a landing stage, people lugging cooler bags back and forth, and camping chairs, people in shorts and skirts, their tanned skins, their lazy movements, the extravagance of the great blue sky and the serene surroundings, broken by such trivial occurrences, objects lifted and carried, doors slamming shut, the mutter of voices.
“We should stop all development aid to Africa. Stop all trade and pull out completely, let them get on with it. The way it is now all we’re doing is carrying on the colonial relationship, which says we’re better than them, look at the way they do things, they can’t govern themselves, can’t keep anything in order, they can’t even manage to organize schools. It’s a mess. They’ve got wars, child soldiers. All that shit. No, cut them off, leave them all to it. Close the continent. I hate that underlying thought that runs through everything we do in the world, the idea that everyone’s got to be like us. That’s the real hell. The bigger the differences, the better, as far as I’m concerned. African cultures are so glaringly different from our own. They’re the utopia, not us.”
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 22