“Do you remember when we saw each other for the first time?” I said, sitting down. “What would you have thought if you’d known you were going to marry and have three children with him? That foolish Norwegian?”
“My heart would have melted,” she said with a smile.
“Come off it,” I said.
“But you’re right about you being ‘that Norwegian.’ Ingmar had talked a lot about you beforehand. Almost all of it was about you and your book, so I was well aware you were coming.”
“But you didn’t want me,” I said.
“Of course I did. Just not at that moment. I was heading somewhere else. If it had happened then, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.”
“No,” I said. “I remember going into the common room, the one with the big fireplace, everyone was there, and I just had to leave. I couldn’t take being in the same room as you or rather I couldn’t stand seeing you talking to others and having a life beyond me.”
“I didn’t even know you!”
“No. But that didn’t matter. So I left and sat on the steps outside the hut where my room was, and prayed to God that you would follow me out. I never pray to God – I haven’t since I was a child – but I did then. Make Linda come to me, I said. Dear God, can you do that? And then the door opened! And you came out! Do you remember?”
She shook her head.
“I thought I was dreaming. You came out, you closed the door behind you, you started to cross the yard, over to where I was sitting. At that moment I believed in God. I thought he had intervened. But then you didn’t turn in my direction, you just kept going, to where you were staying. You said hi. Do you remember?”
“No.”
“You were just going to get something.”
“Oh, Karl Ove,” she said. “Now I’m starting to feel bad!”
“I’m not surprised.”
“If I’d gone over to you, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Because you fell ill? Because you went to the hospital?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I would’ve been there with you. Have you considered that?”
“Maybe. But I didn’t want that. I was a very different person then.”
“You were. When I met you next, in Stockholm, that was my first thought. Your whole personality was different.”
“In what way?”
“There was none of the hardness in you. The performance side of you was gone. Mm, how should I explain it? You’d been tough, cool, self-confident. Yes, you’d had your own very distinctive personality. That was the feeling I had. And when I met you again that was gone.”
“My own what?”
“Your own distinctive personality. You were enough as you were.”
“You didn’t recognize me?”
“No, but I’m not talking about who you actually were. I’m talking about how you appeared to me. I was utterly defenseless against that. As you know.”
“Yes, but that wasn’t what you got. I’m sitting here now with an enormous belly. And those two children in there. It doesn’t feel as if I have anything of my own.”
“I know. It’s better though. It’s so, so much better.”
She fell silent.
I drank up the beer and fetched myself another.
“A penny for your thoughts,” I said. We had switched off the light outside, so she was sitting in near darkness, the glow from the window like a faint stripe across one side of her face.
“I’m thinking about everything I’ve lost,” she said.
“Better to think about everything you’ve gained,” I said.
“There’s so much contempt in you,” she said. “I know you look down on me.”
“Look down on you? I certainly do not!” I said.
“Yes, you do. You think I do too little. I whine all the time. I’m not independent enough. You’re sick of this life of ours. And of me. You never tell me I’m beautiful anymore. Actually I don’t mean anything to you. I’m just someone you live with who happens to be the mother of your children.”
“No, that’s not true,” I said. “But you’re right that sometimes I think you don’t do enough.”
“My friends can’t understand how I manage to achieve all I do. Two children and pregnant with a third. I don’t think you have any idea how much that really is.”
“Your friends don’t know anything. You shouldn’t listen to them. They’re just trying to comfort you. It’s like the time Jörgen came home, you know, you told me about it, when you and Helena were sitting on the sofa drinking tea. ‘Sitting here whining again, are you,’ he said. Do you remember that?”
There was a hint of a smile, but her eyes were cold.
We said nothing for a long time. The faint sound of the sea lapping against the shore hung like a veil over the artificial landscape below us. Muted voices from the balconies beneath and the odd shout or gale of laughter from the restaurants farther down.
I lit a cigarette, took a swig of beer, and grabbed a handful of peanuts from the bowl on the table between us.
This was what she usually said when we had a fight and she tried with her frenzied attacks to rip the heart out of my chest. That I looked down on her and I should leave her and find myself another woman, someone who was nice and independent enough to leave me in peace. That I was staying with her out of pure duty and it wasn’t enough for her. She knew what she was worth and she was worth much more than this.
But this had not been a fight. She hadn’t tried to rip the heart from my chest. She had said what she said calmly and firmly, as if it were a fact of life. And I had only objected as a matter of form.
I knew she would soon get up and go to bed. I felt a kind of panic grip me, the air had to be cleared, Linda placated, the situation could not remain unresolved.
She placed a hand on the railing.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What about?”
“Everything.”
“You shouldn’t be,” she said. “Right now I’m actually enough as I am. But of course this changes. Sometimes being pregnant makes me feel strong and I think I can manage everything alone if need be.”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that,” I said.
“And then it completely goes and I feel I’m utterly dependent on you. Then I get so frightened. Do you understand? I feel I have nothing myself. If you go, everything goes. It’s a terrible feeling. And I see that is precisely what you like least of all. And if you did go, that would be the reason. But I can’t do anything about it.”
“I know.”
“And you’re longing to get away.”
“I am not. I want to be here. Hand on heart.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I read something in Gombrowicz yesterday that I’ve been thinking about,” I said. “It’s about why we don’t allow ourselves to be surprised by anything, how we can walk round a corner without being curious to know what is waiting for us there. How we can sit in a restaurant and not be curious about the soup we’ve ordered, how it will taste. That’s what my problem is. Do you understand? I take everything for granted. And it’s a poison. I don’t look down on you, I think you’re wonderful, but when I take everything for granted and there’s no reaction it gets on my nerves. That’s what I mean. It gets on my nerves.”
“Do I get on your nerves?”
“Come on, you know. When I’m grouchy and pissed off, of course that’s what happens.”
She got up and went inside. I followed.
“Surely you understand what I mean!” I said. “I’m not making some great statement. I’m just trying to explain something.”
She undressed without looking at me and got into bed. I sat on the edge beside her.
“What do I do that gets on your nerves?” she said after a while.
“It’s not something you do,” I said.
“You have to tell me and I’
ll stop doing it,” she said.
“But it’s nothing specific, don’t you understand?”
“Is it all our life together?”
“Oh, come on! You know what it’s like to feel out of sorts. There’s something inside you. Right? That’s what I was trying to describe. It’s something inside me.”
I stroked her back. She lay perfectly still, looking into the distance.
“What shall we do tomorrow?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m not that keen to spend the whole day here.”
When she lay on her side like that you could see her stomach wasn’t just a stomach, there was something inside, an object, and the biological reality, she, this human female, was duplicating herself piercing the veil of notions that her personality, the woman she was for me, all we had experienced and thought together – cast over everything. As though we lived one life in our language and ideas and another in our bodies.
“No,” she said. “Couldn’t we go on the trip to Las Palmas we’d talked about?”
I nodded and got to my feet.
“Yes, let’s do that. Sleep tight.”
“Don’t stay up too long.”
“No.”
“Sleep tight.”
I walked through the apartment, switched on the balcony light, sat down, and gazed into the distance. I wasn’t thinking about anything special, but I was filled with the emotions aroused by what Linda had said and the way she’d behaved. After a while, maybe twenty minutes or so, I took out Gombrowicz’s diaries again and looked for the passage I had mentioned to Linda.
For some time now (perhaps because my life is so monotonous) I’ve occasionally been seized by curiosity with an intensity I’ve never experienced before – a curiosity as to what might happen the next moment. Right in front of my nose – a wall of darkness out of which at any moment a menacing apparition might reveal itself. Around the corner … what is lurking there? A person? A dog? If it is a dog, what size, what breed? I am sitting at a table and in a minute the soup will be served … but what kind of soup? Art hasn’t yet addressed this basic experience in any comprehensive way, man as an instrument to transform the Unknown into the Known does not figure among art’s greatest heroes.
He wrote that one Wednesday in 1953. I associated it with something I had once read by Deleuze while I was a student in Bergen and it had become a sort of landmark for me, which I came back to again and again: the idea that the world is permanently in the making, that it is constantly evolving around us, but that this ceaseless creation from moment to moment merges into what we already know about the world. Of the two forms of understanding we have developed – science and art – science pertains to certainty and calculation whereas art, by emerging from nothing, pertains to the moment and the uncertainty that lies in its constant creation. No artist had worked more with this than Cézanne, it was his principle and vocation, and the reason for his immense influence on his contemporaries. With a predetermined concept of what space is you can paint various objects without the space being changed, the system is invariable and unshakable, this is how we see, and hence this is how space is. In Cézanne’s paintings the opposite is the case, here it is the objects that make the space, space is something that is made, and its making is relative. Then it is as much about the eye that beholds as what the eye beholds; the convention of space, which is usually invisible, becomes visible.
For fifteen years I had been doing this, seeking out thinkers who confirmed this idea, especially Nietzsche and Heidegger, but also Foucault, who was more preoccupied with social rather than existential structure and thereby deepened the discussion. The problem was that I hadn’t moved any further, hadn’t budged from the spot in the fifteen years that had passed since I studied literature and the history of art in Bergen. Basically it flew in the face of everything. Inception, creation, emergence, the eternally new – just not in me or in my understanding.
I got up and went to the bathroom for a piss. My urine was light-colored, almost completely clear, and I was reminded of my father’s, which I had seen whenever he had forgotten, for some reason or other, to flush in the morning. It had been dark yellow, almost brown. It was frightening. I had connected the color with his mind. And with masculinity. My own pale, almost colorless, urine was feminine, his dark urine masculine. His temper was also masculine. My terror was feminine.
I flushed the toilet and returned to the balcony, stood for a while and gazed across the lawn.
No, I didn’t look down on her, she was wrong there. But she demanded so much of me, so unutterably more than any other person ever had, and she didn’t realize. Sometimes it was so exasperating that it threw me into a state akin to insanity. I became so angry that nothing else existed apart from anger, without my being able to give vent to it, I held it inside me, and the way I was then, when my fury engulfed me and was absorbed into my body, when my movements rumbled with rage, could of course be confused with contempt. No, it was contempt. For a while it was, but the moment would pass and then something else was waiting. Was this something else the true state of affairs? Did we actually get along? Did I really love her? Christ, no, everything shifted and changed and ebbed and flowed, one thing was no truer than anything else. We got along fine and we got along badly, I loved her and I didn’t love her.
The night before our wedding I asked her to wash the kitchen floor. I had already washed every single one of the other one hundred and thirty square meters. On her knees with a rag in her hand, she looked up at me and said this was not how it was supposed to be, that she had to wash the kitchen floor the day before her own wedding. No one else would put up with it, she said. It was unfair, she said. I answered that it was our floor and we were the ones who had to wash it, wedding or no wedding. I said nothing about this being only the second time she had washed a floor in the five years we had been together. If I had she would have lost her temper, would have said she had done all sorts of other things, she was the one who held the family together and she did more than anyone else she knew. I would have replied that she was living a lie, and then it would have gone on and on, so I said nothing. The following day I said Yes to her and she said Yes to me and we gazed at each other with tears in our eyes.
It is through feelings we connect with one another and it is the feelings which are good and bad, not the days.
I seemed to sense something behind me and turned at once, but the room was empty.
May as well go to bed, I thought.
Sink into a world that was beyond the world, the wonderful void.
* * *
I woke up in a bad mood. I always did, but as long as I had the critical first half an hour in peace, got a cup of coffee down me, and smoked a cigarette, it passed of its own accord. It was half past five. I pulled on the T-shirt and trousers I had worn the day before, walked barefoot into the living room, where Vanja and Heidi were sitting with bowls of muesli in front of them, Heidi on a high chair, Vanja on a normal one, which made her so low her chin barely reached over the table. Linda stood at the counter slicing an apple. Without saying a word I poured water into the kettle, sprinkled instant coffee into a cup, poured milk and muesli into a bowl, took it with me to the balcony, closed the door and sat down to eat, with my back to them. The sky was gray, more fog than mist, the air cold. After I had gulped down the breakfast mixture I went back in, filled my cup with boiling water, got my cigarettes and lighter from the shelf in the hall, and went back out. My body was cold, my joints were cold, my soul was cold. Behind me someone banged on the window, I turned, it was Vanja, and she pushed the glass door open.
“Go back in,” I said. “I’ll be along soon.”
She squeezed through, stood by the railing, and looked across the empty lawn.
“Go back in, I said.”
“No,” she said with a pout. “Why is no one out?”
“Because you get up so early. No one else gets up at this hour. It’s still nighttime.”
“It
’s morning,” she said.
“OK, OK,” I said. “But it’s very early morning. You’ll realize how early it is when you’re an adult. Where are your glasses by the way?”
“Inside.”
“Go and put them on. Then you can both watch a movie.”
She did as I said, and soon they were on their chairs in front of the laptop. Where movies were concerned they were insatiable, they could sit without moving for hours devouring whatever was on the screen. When Vanja was eighteen months old she watched her first movie from beginning to end. I remembered that because we traveled to Gotland the day after, it was the summer of 2005, the movie she saw was Pippi on the Run. I watched it with her, dropping off now and then, so it took on a dream-like quality, and ever since, as we had seen it many, many times, I connected it with a kind of dreaminess, the way all the impressions from those days, when we lived in the apartment in Regeringsgatan, came back to me in all their detail. Watching films with her, I always had my eye on the background in the picture, the houses, the forest, the road, the beach, and I found just enough of interest in it to watch a ninety-minute children’s movie without getting bored. If it was a film from the seventies, such as Karlsson on the Roof or Elvis! Elvis!, my interest increased because the times, which were discernible in everything, were the first I could remember, they were when I grew up, they were my whole world, and now they were gone. The seventies, that sad, unsophisticated, restaurant-less, impoverished decade with rest stops and gravel roads, VW Beetles and the Citroën DS, one TV channel and one radio channel, when everything was state-owned and almost nothing commercial, when the shops closed at four and the banks at three and no one who earned money from sports was allowed to participate in the Olympics, those times were gone, and, seeing how the world had moved on, it was incredible to think that once upon a time all this existed. Even a tiny glimpse of that world filled me with pleasure and sadness. Pleasure that I had been alive then, sadness that it had disappeared. The beginning of Karlsson on the Roof, where Svante is playing in Tegnér Park in Stockholm, muddied the waters because I walked through this park almost every day and recognized all the houses and streets, they were the same, yet they weren’t, they were no longer in the 1970s but the 2000s, and the question I was unable to answer was: where had the seventies gone? In my head, apparently, in the heads of all the others who had once been alive then, but only there? What was time in a film? What was time in a photograph? It became even more puzzling when we watched Elvis! Elvis! because Linda’s mother had been in that film, she played the teacher, a woman in her midthirties, and it was impossible, absolutely impossible, to connect the woman in the film with the woman who was our children’s grandmother. Her appearance was different, her body language was different, even the sound of her voice was different. Was it the same woman?
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 107