My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “I forgot to bring my backpack,” I said.

  “WHAT?” Linda said, staring at me furiously.

  “What did you put in it?” I asked. “Anything important?”

  I thought maybe the book with the poem she was going to read or something vital for the ceremony. But no, only some food and diapers.

  “That’s just perfect,” she said angrily. “Well, no one can rely on you!”

  I was fuming, but the circumstances were a mitigating factor, even I understood that, in forty minutes her father would be buried, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “Give me a cigarette,” she said.

  “I don’t have any,” I said.

  “You’re a smoker. Why don’t you have any cigarettes today of all days?”

  “Because you took them this morning. You put them in your jacket. I imagine they’re still there.”

  “No,” she said, patting her pockets. “Oh, yes, here they…”

  Then she went out and disappeared behind the waiting room while Helena avoided looking at me.

  “I’ll take John and try to get him off to sleep,” I said. She nodded, I pushed the stroller onto the path and walked back and forth with him – peering up from beneath a pile of clothes and blankets – for twenty minutes as the icy wind howled through the thin material of my suit and the slush I was trudging through soaked my flimsy shoes. On my return, with John asleep in the stroller, I was frozen, colder than I had been in years. The first mourners had arrived, I shook their hands, Linda’s husband, I said, yes, we’ve heard about you, they replied. Fifteen of them, plus the children, stood gathered around the coffin later. Mathias laid a scarf on the coffin from the football club his father had played for in his youth, we sat down, a harpist played Bach, Vanja and Heidi stared with big eyes. But they knew they had to be quiet, and when Heidi wanted to say something to me she did so in a whisper. Mathias raised his head now and then, as though gasping for air, his face distorted in sudden grimaces. Linda had tears in her eyes, which occasionally coursed down her cheeks. When the first piece of music came, a dance band tune by Benny Andersson’s Orchestra, grief also overcame me. I hadn’t known him, but I knew his children, it was their grief that touched me. Vanja sat staring intensely at her mother, she had never seen this before, and sent her a smile from time to time, as if to console her. I had told her beforehand that Mommy would cry, and it didn’t matter, that was how it was at funerals, you cried and were sad, you were saying goodbye to someone who would never come back. The priest gave a thumbnail sketch of the deceased’s life, Mathias read out his commemorative speech, bursting into tears at the beginning and end, otherwise his reading was loud and clear. Linda read a poem. “Bridge over Troubled Water” was played. Then Vanja started sobbing. She was inconsolable and clung to Linda. Heidi, who was sitting on my lap, patted her. In the end it became so bad that I took them out and carried them down to the sentry-box house where John was sleeping. When we entered, Vanja immediately wanted to return, she wasn’t crying anymore, she wanted to lay her flowers on the coffin, as we had planned to do. I carried them back, one on each arm, put them down outside, opened the doors, and went in as the ceremony was drawing to a close and the last people were laying flowers on the coffin. Afterwards Linda said it had been so beautiful when the doors opened and we entered with the light behind us, the two small children laid their bouquets on the coffin, the final piece of music was played, everyone paused and bowed by the coffin on their way out, paying their last respects to the deceased.

  At the restaurant to where we repaired after the ceremony, Linda’s cousins told me how it had been when her father came to visit them in the summer, how he had filled their lives for a few days with his manic energy and lust for adventure and took them fishing or for a drive, incapable of standing still for a moment.

  * * *

  The next day we went with the children to the island of Djurgården. While we were at the aquarium there, Mathias came in. He told us he had been to a pub after the funeral to “get smashed out of his head,” as he put it. His eyes were sensitive and kind, his voice was always cheery, he always tried to find something lighthearted to say, and as we were about to leave, he placed a friendly hand on my shoulder. He had lost his father and, sitting there, I thought, it wasn’t the same father that Linda had lost because being a son or a daughter is not the same, and Linda and Mathias were so fundamentally dissimilar, also in grief, that they must have had a different experience of him.

  In the afternoon we packed our things and caught the train to Arlanda Airport. We arrived three hours before the departure. But the children played and were in a good mood the whole time, even though the plane was an hour late and we didn’t take off until half past nine. They fell asleep the minute we were seated on board, and when we landed in Kastrup at half past ten we had a problem: how to manage two suitcases, a backpack, a big bag, and three sleepy children? On top of which, the plane had parked at the farthermost gate, probably a fifteen-minute walk from the arrivals hall. Somehow we managed to get off the plane and into the endlessly long, empty corridor. Linda carried John and held Vanja’s hand, I carried Heidi and managed the two suitcases, the backpack, and the big bag. After roughly a hundred meters Linda said she couldn’t go on, it was too difficult. But you’re only carrying John, I said. Surely you must be able to do that, for Christ’s sake. But no, her arms hurt and she was in pain, she couldn’t do it.

  “Help!” she shouted in a loud voice. “Help us!”

  “Shhh,” I said. “You can’t shout for help here, you know that.”

  A couple ahead of us turned and looked at us. I shook my head in an attempt to signal that it was nothing serious. If one of us had been having a heart attack I could have understood her calling for help. But just because she had her hands full? For God’s sake. For God’s sake.

  I spotted a couple of trolleys.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, placed the cases on the bottom of one, put Heidi on top, and set off without waiting for Linda. “Help.” If we had got lost in the mountains or a boat had capsized at sea I might have shouted for help. But at a bloody airport?

  I turned, grinned, and waited for them. The rest of the trip was fine, the children were cheery despite being tired, problems only came up at the taxi rank, Linda shouted at the poor taxi driver, who became so angry that he threw our luggage down on the road and yelled back. A kind, friendly driver came to our rescue as I was wishing the ground would swallow me up, the mortification and shame of it. He asked if we’d had a long journey, yes, said Linda, were we tired, yes, said Linda, I was in torment where I sat, watching the lights sweep across the hood as we approached Triangeln Mall in Malmö and could finally get out, take the elevator, put the children to bed, and then ourselves. The last thing I did was to put Heidi’s dinosaur egg in a bowl of water. So that it would have cracked and a little dinosaur would have emerged by the time she woke the following morning.

  * * *

  August 27, 2011. 8:06. I am sitting in an annex on the island of Møn, in Denmark, I have to appear onstage this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon, and I drove here from Glemmingebro last night. Linda’s mother is at home with us helping out, she has been there all month. After I’ve finished here I’ll go sit in my study in Malmö and finish the novel. On Friday I am going to the literature festival in Louisiana, outside Copenhagen, with Linda. Some aspects of her life are changing. She has started to come to terms with them. She goes for a long walk every morning, she’s stopped smoking, she doesn’t drink alcohol anymore, not even a glass of wine with food, she eats healthily, and for more than a month she hasn’t been either up in the skies or down in the dumps, but present, inside herself, as it were.

  Last night I woke to her screams.

  “Help,” she shouted, in a loud drawn-out cry, as though danger were looming.

  I was awake at once, put my arm around her, and told her it was only a bad dream. She mumbled that she knew and fell asleep again. It was half past three, I we
nt down to the kitchen and made some coffee, went up to the loft in the other house and started writing. I had written the passage about her father’s funeral straight after it happened and had promptly forgotten it. I remembered it then because she had called for help at the airport and was doing so again now. At the time I had taken it literally, she wanted help carrying John, but when I reread the passage it was impossible not to think of something else, something greater, a cry from her inner being, to me, I had to go to her rescue. I had to put everything aside, she was in distress, I had to help.

  I hadn’t done that, I had lost my temper and was embarrassed.

  When she screamed in the night I thought I should help her. I hope I can, I hope I am good enough. I hope I have learned.

  * * *

  August 28, 2011. 4:56. Pitch black outside. The house where I am writing is by the sea, and the first thing I did when I woke an hour ago was listen to the faint crash of the breakers below. Last night I was woken by thunder and lightning so violent that the whole countryside was lit up by the quivering electrical discharges. Lightning flashed right outside the window, the sound of thunder came with the light – immense explosions. The rain followed, also violent, torrents fell everywhere. When I spoke to the hosts later that morning they told me water had flooded in over their kitchen floor. At just before two we drove to the venue where the performance was to take place, and at several points the road was submerged to a depth of between half a meter and a meter. The countryside around was absolutely drenched. I can’t remember any thunderstorms from my youth or from later life being as intense or wild as this. When we moved to Malmö the late-summer leaden horizon could be permeated by sudden angled shafts of light and the sky would rumble and boom. Presumably the simple explanation is that atmospheric conditions are different here. Surely thunderstorms couldn’t be increasing in frequency and intensity with every year that passes, could they?

  Last night’s performance went well. There were two hundred people in the audience and I spoke for two hours, first with the interviewer, who asked his questions, then with the audience, who asked theirs. My strategy in such situations is simple: I try to be as present as possible at the moment, by which I mean not repeat myself. I try to answer all the questions as if it were the first time they had been asked, to exercise no self-criticism at all, only to say what occurs to me on the spot. Afterwards I can’t remember what I’ve said, and I want to be alone because, in a sense, I have been on display up there, everyone has seen me, not just for a second but for more than two hours, and I have taken great risks by not pretending. It is odd that it should be so painful, but it is. When they laugh at something I say or when there is a kind of sigh, which means that I am confirming something they have thought themselves, it hurts me because I am fooling them, that is the feeling I have, they are falling for my tricks. Linda once called me an itinerant purveyor of earnestness, and that is an apt image. Mathias, who turned up at the Culture House in Stockholm when I was there two weeks ago, told his mother afterwards that I had been fantastic and that he had never seen me so warm or sincere before. And this is exactly the point. When I am with Mathias or Linda or anyone else I am close to, I am the antithesis of warm and sincere. It is therefore as though I can only be warm and sincere in front of a group of strangers and not with kith and kin. That is why what I do is a kind of trick. When I am sitting on the stage talking to an audience there is a great distance. I can manage that and appear close and warm. When I am sitting at a table afterwards and eating with the event organizers the distance to them is not as great, but inside me I feel it is. I say nothing and seem dismissive and cold, not open or warm, as before onstage. It is as though having a name enables me to be who I actually am and how I actually feel, but only in staged settings, not in normal social situations. That is why I feel so false afterwards, even though I have really been more genuine. The smiles, the friendliness, the admiration I encounter when I sign books is unbearable, not because it isn’t well meant or honest, but because it is on false premises. Deep down, I have to reject it. At the same time, when the wind changes, when my star is on the wane and I have become yesterday’s news, I assume I will miss the buzz when I enter a room – all the eyes surreptitiously turning to me and the waves of applause washing over me.

  Another strong feeling I had afterwards was that I had betrayed the novel by talking about it in public. It isn’t public yet, it is still just mine, it is a place where I go and where I am every day, a part of me, my inner being, which, as soon as the book is published, becomes part of external reality and no longer a place where I go or am. Talking so much about it as I did yesterday doesn’t feel good. The familiarity between me and the novel was broken in a way. And when I spoke about it, it sounded better, more interesting and important than it is. The Mein Kampf essay became more important when I spoke about it, in particular, it sounded good, four hundred pages about prewar Vienna, Weimar between the wars, how times and psychology, art and politics are closely linked, and the formula for all things human, I-you-we-they-it, this was easy to talk about and had an aura of significance in that context. I talked about it because they had made an effort to attend, and it didn’t feel as if I could just sit there talking about myself and my life, I had to turn the occasion into something relevant for them, to create a “we,” and that was what I did. To survive the moment and reap a short-term gain, I betrayed the novel. Everything is mixed as I sit here. Good and bad, false and genuine, literature and reality, private and public. As if that weren’t enough, someone has sent me a copy of Weekendavisen, in which the fourth book, which has just come out here, is reviewed. I skim-read it when I came home. Bo Bjørnvig had written it. He said that for the first time in the series I hadn’t been quite honest, and this was noticeable throughout the novel. A slightly false note, he said. I hadn’t thought about the novel since I wrote it, but when I read that comment, it came back, and I knew that what Bjørnvig wrote was true. I had not been honest in that book. I wrote it when the pressure was at its peak, at that time the first two books were out and the debate about them was raging in the media, every single day there were several articles about them, everyone had an opinion, a newspaper like Morgenbladet ran its entire front page and several other pages inside on the immorality of what I had done and had published not only my father’s name but also a photograph of a rhododendron bush he had planted and my grandparents’ house. That house isn’t in the novel, I located the action somewhere completely different, and their names are not in the novel either, but in this article everything became public. Other newspapers called all the characters from the novel they could track down. I spoke to Jan Vidar: as he came out of his house he had walked slap bang into two journalists who wanted to interview him about me. I spoke to Mathias: he had come home from nursery school in Stockholm with his son and was cooking when there was a ring at the door, two journalists from Norway who wanted to have a chat about me. Mathias, who wasn’t even in the novel, said no, thank you, he didn’t want a chat. As soon as he had shut the door he called his mother and warned her. There were journalists heading her way. And sure enough, not long afterwards there was a ring at her door. She didn’t open up. They left but returned later that evening after she had gone to bed. They wouldn’t give in, and she didn’t dare go to the bathroom for fear that they would realize she was home and keep ringing. They called her ex-husband, Vidar, who is more than seventy years old and still lives in a house in the forest, and asked him what he thought about me and the way I had written about his former wife. They called my mother, Yngve, Tonje, and Tore, and, where I’d grown up, four of my old friends from school talked in the local paper about what I had been like and what we had done. They called all my ex-girlfriends, and my old teachers, one of them, the only man I had mentioned by name, Jan Berg, appeared on television and talked about how it felt to be described as “evil” in the hit novel of the autumn. Every single day there was something about the books in the papers, and my photo was everywhere. My
entire private life had been turned upside down; there were no limits anymore: when I was at the Litteraturhus in Oslo a Dagbladet journalist ran after me and kept asking the same question, had I had sex with an underage girl? That was Book 4 he was referring to, which I was writing then, and the question, which was actually like asking me if I was a sex offender, was posed because I had mentioned a conversation with Geir about this in Book 2, and I had said Book 4 would deal with my time in northern Norway. Personally, I saw or heard nothing of what was in the papers, nothing of what was said on the radio or TV, I found out secondhand, and I heard about all the journalists who had been buzzing around everywhere. They bombarded me with e-mails at the beginning, but that stopped fairly soon, then I seemed to find myself in the eye of the storm. Verdens Gang had interviewed the people working in the Chinese takeaway beside the entrance to our apartment, I heard, and those working in the café I frequented, and the mayor of Malmö, and the owners of our apartment, whom they asked how much I paid in rent. In this climate, with all the stones of my life apparently being turned over, I sat writing about the year I had worked as a teacher in northern Norway. It was a little place where everyone knew everyone, and it had been such a sensitive situation because I went there as a teacher, and it was one thing writing about life in the family or in my closest circle and quite another writing about the children I met at school. Of course they had shown me a kind of total, unconscious trust then, although it wasn’t actually shown to me but to my teacher persona, unaware that the teacher would one day write about them and their lives. Parents confided in me about their children and thus indirectly also about themselves. When I wrote the first two novels publication wasn’t in my mind; usually what I wrote and thought stayed in the novel, even when I had written something outrageous – when the novel came out it was as though the outrageous passages didn’t exist, as though I hadn’t written them. In my debut novel I wrote about a man of twenty-six sleeping with a girl of thirteen, she was his pupil. No one took any notice. It was a risqué topic, but the novel made it innocuous. The novel sold seventy thousand copies in total, quite a large readership, but it still didn’t exist, it remained with the readers. When I reached that point in the novel, it must have been the summer of 1997, I was living in a mountain farmhouse in Jølster, writing a film script with Tore. I told him what I had written and what I was thinking of writing about. I asked him for his opinion. This was a major challenge to conventional morality, I spent two weeks thinking about it, can I write about this, and if so, why am I writing about it? Tore thought I should. I came to the same conclusion, and I wrote it, uneasy and fearful, it was as though I were doing something evil. If I had been completely innocent, if this had been a theme I had plucked from the air, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But then there would have been no point writing, it would have been something I had made up, a kind of thematic detail, calculated, a provocation, and therefore artistically dead. Precisely because it pained me justified my writing about it. The more painful it was, the more justified it was. It wasn’t that I had slept with a thirteen-year-old pupil at that time, but I had articulated the thought, not just once but many times, and I had been filled with a desire that was strong and so secret that I managed to repress it completely as soon as I left. While I was writing the novel, it came back, I remembered, and I knew that the right thing would be to complete the thought and enact it in reality, which wasn’t reality but fiction, because that is what writing a novel is, all the tendencies there are, wishes, desires, possibilities, and impossibilities crystallize in one point, an image, an act, where everything that is immanent, hidden, and veiled, reveals itself. So I did, I wrote about my alter ego, the teacher Henrik Vankel who had sex with one of his pupils, thirteen-year-old Miriam. Up to that moment I had written perhaps two hundred pages about his life in Kristiansand, much the same as my own biography, but it was only when I reached this point, the scene where they were lying together, that it became a novel and I became a novelist because there, through a simple act that never took place, I succeeded in expressing something that was true and that I had never even been able to think, on the contrary I had relegated it to the depths from which it came. This truth is the novel’s truth. The novel is a place where that which cannot be thought elsewhere can be thought and where the reality we find ourselves in, which sometimes runs counter to the reality we talk about, can be manifest in images. The novel can describe the world as it is, as opposed to the world it ought to be. Everyone who has read Out of the World will understand that the emotions, urges, and desires that it contains are not something the author has made up but are something inside him. But the agreement between the author and the reader, the novel’s pact, is that this conclusion should not be drawn, and if it is, only in secret. It should never be spoken aloud. The term “novel” is the guarantee of that. Only in this way can what is not said but which is true still be said. That is the pact, the author is free to say whatever he or she wants because the author knows that what he or she says will never, or at least should never, be linked with the author, with his or her private person. It is a necessary pact that the books, which provoked such a sensation and such anger, broke. I wrote them because my commitment to the novel wasn’t enough for me, I wanted to go a step further and commit to reality, because the contravention of the norms that had allowed me to write a novel for the first time, when I expressed what was true through the novel, was at an end for me, it was empty, a gesture, it meant nothing or I couldn’t make it mean anything, I felt that I could write anything at all. To be able to write anything at all is death for an author. An author can only write something specific, and what determines this something specific is, to be precise, commitment. My commitment was to reality, what I wrote about had really happened and it had happened as described. What the “I” of the novel felt was what the author of the novel felt, so the private space was nullified, and I personally had to answer for everything written there. Doing this was no problem in Book 1 and Book 2 because once I had broken down the barrier between my “I” and my author’s “I,” the barrier was down for good, and the relevant rules, that events should have happened and have been experienced in reality, were easy to follow. The books had come out to an unexpectedly warm reception from the public. And this meant that they had a life of their own and became real, beyond my control, and this was new because before I had been able to write whatever I liked, controversial or not, without it becoming real. It had always stayed in the novel. Now it didn’t, it lived outside, in reality, with my photo attached, which increasingly began to resemble a logo. Nevertheless I was still able to write the third book without deviating from the categorical demand for truth because the distance from the events it portrayed, in my childhood, was so great. We, that is, the publishing house and I, still changed some names and deleted some features that might have caused offense, but not many. My mother hasn’t read it yet, but she has found out quite a bit anyway; her private role as a mother has been discussed in public because of the book, as though she represented wives and mothers and as though people other than herself or her closest family were entitled to criticize what she did or didn’t do. But Book 4 was different. I feared I might have started something that had got out of hand. I anonymized the village where I worked, calling it Håfjord instead of Fjordgård, as it was actually called, which the newspapers were not slow to pick up on. I gave different names to all the pupils and teachers and I also furnished them with made-up characteristics or idiosyncrasies, all to escape the commitment to reality I could no longer fulfill. In this book, therefore, I committed neither to the novel nor to reality. For this reason it became a strange book, in which I do the opposite of what an author should, I cover over the truth. In Out of the World, which deals with the same theme, I wrote the truth by committing to the novel; in the first two books I wrote the truth by committing to reality. In Book 3 this link is weaker, only to fall away entirely in Book 4. However, everything I said about myself was true. The passages that
seem most authentic because they are raw are nonetheless a kind of masquerade because I knew exactly what was going on when I was there, but not when I wrote about it. And there was one thing I wrote in the book that I had never told anyone, and this was that I hadn’t masturbated, not a single time, until I was nineteen. I hadn’t told anyone about the ignominy and the constant humiliation of premature ejaculation either, as it is so dreadfully tritely called. One doesn’t talk about that sort of thing. But what was really dangerous, the feelings I had for a thirteen-year-old girl when I was eighteen, I didn’t examine in sufficient depth, the mere mention of it meant I had to be so incredibly careful with all the rest, all those fathers and mothers, sons and daughters I had mixed with while I ached with desire in an inner world that was thoroughly sexualized. The publishing house was careful too, it was not unusual for the editor, Therese, to call me to discuss whether a character was anonymous enough or whether this or that character ought not to make such and such an utterance in such and such a way. The lawyers also read the manuscript and suggested changes. The public had me and the publisher in its grip, and the novel became a hostage to reality. This is not an excuse, and this is not my way of saying Book 4 is a poor novel, it is still full of the terrible banality and vigor of youth, it is a comedy of immaturity, and despite being conventional it is inimitable, for the simple reason that it arose under precisely the conditions it did. But it is not the truth.