My Struggle: Book 4

by Karl Ove Knausgård

nothing. Then, with wet hair and my shirt sticking to my back, I sat down and went back to writing. I had the two ten-year-olds walking around in the forest. They were scared of meeting foxes and had cap guns in their hands to frighten them away if they showed up. Suddenly they heard a shot. They ran over to where the sound had come from and saw a garbage dump in the middle of the forest. There were two men lying on the ground shooting at rats. That’s when something seemed to flash through me, an arc of happiness and energy; now I couldn’t write fast enough, the text lagged slightly behind the narrative, it was a wonderful feeling, shiny and glittering.

But one thing did emerge from these pages with greater force than anything else, and that was the description of a book, Ulysses, which in its singularity sounded absolutely fantastic. Before me I saw an enormous tower, glinting with moisture as it were, surrounded by mist and a pallid light from the overcast sun. It was regarded as the major work of modernism, by which I imagined low-slung racing cars, pilots with leather helmets and jackets, zeppelins floating above skyscrapers in glittering but dark metropolises, computers, electronic music. Names such as Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Arnold Schönberg. Elements of earlier, long-gone cultures were assimilated into this world, in my mind’s eye, such as Broch’s Virgil and Joyce’s Ulysses.

The idea he had sown, to work as a teacher in northern Norway, had grown and grown afterward. In fact, there were only advantages: (1) I would be far away, far from everyone and everything I knew, and totally free. (2) I would be earning my own money doing a respectable job. (3) I would be able to write.

I got up and went into the staff room, picked up the coffee thermos, and shook it. It was empty, I filled the pot with water, poured it into the machine, popped a filter paper into the funnel, measured five spoonfuls, and started the whole shebang, lots of spluttering and gurgling, the slow rise of black liquid in the pot, and the bright red eye.

But none of the records was an island, there were connections between them that spread outward: Brian Eno, for example, started in Roxy Music, released solo records, produced U2, and worked with Jon Hassell, David Byrne, David Bowie, and Robert Fripp; Robert Fripp played on Bowie’s Scary Monsters; Bowie produced Lou Reed, who came from Velvet Underground, and Iggy Pop, who came from the Stooges, while David Byrne was in Talking Heads, who on their best record, Remain in Light, used the guitarist Adrian Belew, who in turn played on several of Bowie’s records and was his favorite live guitarist for years. But the ramifications and connections didn’t only exist between the records, they extended right into my own life. The music was linked with almost everything I had done, none of the records came without a memory. Everything that had happened in the past five years rose like steam from a cup when I played a record, not in the form of thoughts or reasoning, but as moods, openings, space. Some general, others specific. If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life’s trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position.

I had to dance, at that moment, even if I was alone. And, toward the end, on top of all this, like a bloody fighter plane above a tiny dancing village, comes Adrian Belew’s overriding guitar, and oh, oh God, I am dancing and happiness fills me to my fingertips and I only wish it could last, that the solo would go on and on, the plane would never land, the sun would never go down, life would never end.

A bewildered flicker appeared in her eyes. But she said nothing apart from yes. I took her hand again, squeezed it hard, and we walked quickly over the last two hundred meters. Hugged her again outside the unmanned reception area, almost suffocating with desire. Down the corridor to the room I shared with three others. Key out, into the lock with trembling hand, a twist, handle down, door open, and in we went. “You back already, Karl Ove?” Jøgge said with a laugh. “Have you brought a visitor with you?” Bjørn said.

In one of the first lessons we’d sat next to each other, and after the homeroom teacher had handed out slips of paper for us to write down three personal qualities we had, Bassen had looked at my answer. Somber, torpid, and serious, I had written. “Are you a complete idiot?” he had said. “You should add lacking in self-knowledge! I’ve never seen anything like it. Somber and torpid, you’ve got to be kidding! Who’s put these ideas in your head?” “So what did you write?” He showed me. Down to earth, honest, horny as hell. “Throw that away. You can’t write that!” Bassen said. I did as I was told. Then on a new piece I wrote, Intelligent, shy, but not really. “That’s better,” he said. “Jesus! Somber and torpid!”

When we were together I always left early so that he wouldn’t discover how boring I really was. There was a kind of fever in me, two conflicting emotions, such as on the spring morning when we ditched school and went by moped back to his place and listened to records on the lawn. It was fantastic, yet I had to cut it short, something told me I wasn’t worthy or couldn’t fulfill his expectations. So I lay on his lawn with my eyes closed, like a cat on hot bricks, listening to Talk Talk, whom we had discovered at the same time. “It’s your life,” they sang, and everything should have been great, it was spring, I was sixteen years old, had ditched school for the first time, and was lying on the grass with my new friend. But it wasn’t great, it was unbearable. He probably thought I feared a reprimand for skipping school and that was why I got up to go. How could he have known that it was because it was much too good? Because I liked him too much.

The bus indicated it was going to Kjevik, and at that moment a plane flying low thundered over us, touched down, and screamed along the runway at a speed that made it seem as if we were standing still. Flashing lights, roaring engine. We were living in the future.

We went into the living room. I sat down in the wicker chair, Yngve sat beside Mom on the sofa. Outside, two bats flitted to and fro, disappearing completely in the darkness of the mountains across the river, then reappearing against the lighter sky. Yngve poured coffee from the thermos.

Then it was as though a dam had burst. Everything suddenly flowed into the same channel, into the same valley, which was soon full of something that excluded everything else.

I thought about what she was like when she turned serious. Then it was as if she was on my home ground, and I felt I was an enormous black cloud wrapped around her, always greater than her. But only when she was serious, not otherwise.

When I was with Hanne I laughed almost all the time. Her little nose! She was more girl than woman in the same way that I was more boy than man. I used to say she was like a cat. And it was true there was something feline about her, in her movements, but also a kind of softness that wanted to be close to you. I could hear her laughter, and I smoked and peered up at the stars. Then I heard the deep growl of the bus approaching between the houses, flicked the cigarette into the road, stood up, counted the coins in my pocket, and handed them to the driver when I stepped on board. Oh, the muted lights in buses at night and the muted sounds. The few passengers, all in their own worlds. The countryside gliding past in the darkness. The drone of the engine. Sitting there and thinking about the best that you know, that which is dearest to your heart, wanting only to be there, out of this world, in transit from one place to another, isn’t it only then you are really present in this world? Isn’t it only then you really experience the world?

Oh, this is the song about the young man who loves a young woman. Has he the right to use such a word as “love”? He knows nothing about life, he knows nothing about her, he knows nothing about himself. All he knows is that he has never felt anything with such force and clarity before. Everything hurts, but nothing is as good. Oh, this is the song about being sixteen years old and sitting on...

that life, that which is now so vast and so all-embracing, will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity that doesn’...

I understand why he noted down the names of everyone he met and spoke to in the course of a day, why he registered all the quarrels and all the reconciliations, but I don’t understand why he documented how much he drank. It is as if he was logging his own demise.

I sat on the same seat, in the left-hand corner at the back, seen from the front, and I behaved in the same way: spoke up during lessons, discussed what teachers said, got into fights with other pupils over political or religious issues. When the breaks came everyone in the class joined the crowd they belonged to or the friends they had from before, and I invested all the physical and mental strength I possessed into avoiding the humiliation it was to be left standing somewhere on your own.

Or I acted as if I was searching for someone. Up and down the stairs, through the long corridors, sometimes to Gimlehallen or over to the business school, in pursuit of a fictional person whom I searched for high and low. But usually I stood smoking by the entrance, because that act by its very nature determined where I should be, where I was entitled to be, where there were also others, my “friends” to those who wondered.

My fear of being seen as friendless was not without some justification. One day there was a new note on the notice board. A student who had recently moved to the town and didn’t know anyone at the school wanted someone to be friends with, if anyone was interested they could meet him by the flagpole at twelve the next day. The area around the flagpole at twelve the next day was packed with pupils. Everyone wanted to observe this friendless creature, who naturally enough didn’t show up. Had it been a hoax? Or had this friendless creature got cold feet when he saw the crowd? I suffered with him, whoever he was.

I pushed the letter aside. My chest was riven with despair. I could have slept with her. She had been willing! She wrote that she was in love with me, that she loved me, of course she would have said yes. She knew where we were heading and what I was thinking, of that I was sure. Bloody Jøgge! Those fucking dickheads!

Outside it was dark, autumn was wrapping its hand around the world, and I loved it. The darkness, the rain, the sudden cracks in the past that opened when the smell of damp grass and soil rose up at me from a ditch somewhere or when car headlights illuminated a house, all somehow caught and enhanced by the music in the Walkman I always carried with me. I listened to This Mortal Coil and thought about when we used to play in the dark in Tybakken, a feeling of happiness grew in me, but not a happiness of the bright, weightless, carefree kind, this happiness was rooted in something else, and when it met the melancholic beauty of the music and the world that was dying around me, it was like sorrow, beautiful sorrow, romantic sorrow, beauty and pain in one impossible mix, and from there sprang a wild longing to live more. To leave this, to find life where it was really lived, in the streets of cities, beneath skyscrapers, at glittering parties with beautiful people in unfamiliar apartments. To find the one great love and all the restlessness that involved, and then the acceptance, the relief, the ecstasy.

I loved her, why would I say I never wanted to see her again? Regret exploded inside me. I had to get it back. I rested the book on the sofa arm and sat up. Should I write another letter and say I didn’t mean what I had written in the previous one? That I wanted to see her despite what I had written. It would look absolutely idiotic. I had to ring her. Before I had time to change my mind, I went into the room where the telephone was and dialed her number.

But now, perusing the first few pages of this trilogy, I realized that I hadn’t understood a thing. This was deep, and it was painful. The opening, with the föhn wind, was fantastic. Did evil come from outside? Like a wind dragging people along with it? Or did it come from inside? I gazed at the square outside the church, where there were already yellow and orange leaves on the ground. In the street behind, people were walking under umbrellas. Could I become evil? Find myself borne along by a wind of inhumanity and torture someone? Or was I evil?

Torture wasn’t so relevant really, not now, I thought, and continued to read. But this was a book you had barely glanced at before you raised your eyes again. The torture was extreme, the annihilation of the Jews extreme. But it was carried out by regular people! Why did they do it? Didn’t they know it was wrong? Yes, of course they did. Was this what they wanted, in their heart of hearts? While they were walking around in their elegant little picture-perfect towns, making sure that everyone was doing what they should and believing that they were so utterly good, was evil what they really wanted if they got the chance? Without realizing it themselves? Was it just something they carried within them, an evil without form, as it were, which emerged when the opportunity arose?

to be explored further in Vol 6

Oh, how stupid it was that they went around believing in a god and a heaven. It was so conceited! So unbelievably conceited! Why would God have selected them, people who were so preoccupied with ensuring everyone did the right thing all the time? Those petty-minded fools, why would God bother about them of all people? I almost laughed out loud in the library, but managed at the last moment to stifle it to a giggle. Looking around me, I saw that no one had noticed. Then, to disguise the fact that I had been looking around, I gazed out through the window again, with my head slightly tilted, so that it resembled an active decision, as if I was searching for something.

“He showed me one this summer. I understood nothing. Someone was walking on the edge of heaven. What does that mean?” She looked at me and smiled. “Well, what could it mean?” “Haven’t got the foggiest,” I said. “Something philosophical?” “Yes, but the philosophy he reads is about life. And everyone knows something about that.” “Why can’t he just write it as it is, straight?” “Some do,” she said. “But there are things you can’t say straight.” “Such as?” She sighed and stroked the cat on the head, which he immediately raised, his eyes closed in ecstasy. “When I was a student I studied a Danish philosopher called Løgstrup. He’s very taken by the philosopher who means so much to Kjartan: Heidegger.” “Yes, I remember the name,” I said with a laugh. “He uses a concept Heidegger writes about,” Mom continued. “Fürsorge. Care. It’s at the heart of nursing science of course. Nursing is about caring for people. But what actually is care? And how do we provide care? It’s about being human with another human. But what is it to be human?” “I suppose that will depend on who you ask?” I said. “Yes, exactly,” she said with a nod. “But is there a feature that is common to us all? It’s a philosophical question. And it’s important for the job I do, too.” “I understand that,” I said. “But I don’t understand why he walked on the edge of heaven for that.” “Are we meant to understand?”

“Not everyone here has heard of Heidegger,” Yngve said in an unexpected lull. “Surely there must be other topics we can discuss apart from some obscure German philosopher.” “Yes, I suppose there are,” Kjartan said. “We can talk about the weather. But what shall we talk about then? The weather is what it always is. The weather is what existence reveals itself through. Just as we reveal ourselves through the mood we are in, through what we feel at any given moment. It’s not possible to imagine a world without weather or ourselves without feelings. But both elements automate das Man. Das Man talks about the weather as though there is nothing special about it, in other words he doesn’t see it, not even Johannes,” Kjartan said, nodding toward Grandpa, “who spends an hour every day listening to the weather forecast, and always has done, who absorbs all the details, not even Johannes sees the weather, he just sees rain or sun, mist or sleet, but not as such, as something unique, something which reveals itself to us, through which everything else reveals itself in these moments of, well, grace perhaps. Yes, Heidegger is close to God and the divine, but he never fully embraces it, he never goes the whole way, but it’s there, in close attendance, perhaps even as a prerequisite for the thinking. What do you say, Sissel?”

The countryside was like a tub filled to the brim with darkness. The next morning the bottom slowly became visible as the light was poured in and seemingly diluted the darkness. It was impossible, I reflected, to witness this without feeling it involved movement. Wasn’t Lihesten, that immense vertical wall of rock, creeping closer with the daylight? Wasn’t the gray fjord rising from the depths of darkness in which it had been hidden all night? The tall birches on the other side of the meadowland, where the fence to the neighboring property was, weren’t they advancing meter by meter? The birches: five or six riders who had kept watch on the house all through the night and now had to pull hard on the reins to curb the restless horses beneath them.

During the morning the mist thickened again. Everything was gray, even the winter-green spruces growing on the ridge beyond the lake were gray, and everything was saturated with dampness. The fine drizzle in the air, the droplets collecting under the branches and falling to the ground with tiny, almost imperceptible, thuds, the moisture in the soil of the meadow that had once been a marsh, the squelch it gave when you stepped on it, your shoes sinking in, the mud oozing over them.

With the wipers swishing back and forth across the windshield, we drove across the yard, through the gate, and down to the road in front of the school, where we turned right and set out on the narrow two-kilometer carriageway to Vågen, which had seemed an interminable distance to me as a child. Almost every meter along the road constituted a special place, the most exciting by far however was the bit leading to the bridge over the river, where I used to hang over the railings for hours just looking.

“Are you in love?” He eyeballed me. Such a direct question could go either way; he didn’t always want to talk about things like this. But he was in love of course, he glowed in that peculiarly introverted way at any mention of her and probably wanted to talk about her all the time, at least if he was like me he would, and he was. “Yes, basically,” he said. “That’s what it boils down to! To so few words! To one word, in fact!”

When I left it was too late to go to school, so I caught the bus home. The sun was cold and hung low in the sky, the ground was bare and damp. I was happy but not unreservedly so, because chatting with Unni, being open and honest with her, felt like betrayal. Whom I was betraying I wasn’t quite sure.

After frying some eggs and meatballs for dinner, drinking a cup of coffee, and smoking a cigarette, I sat down in the living room with a history book and started to read. The countryside had not yet emerged from the strange interlude between winter and spring when the fields are bare and wet, the sky is gray and the trees leafless, nothing in themselves, everything charged with what will be. Perhaps it has already started to happen, unseen in the darkness, for isn’t the air slowly warming up in the forest? Isn’t there scattered birdsong coming from the trees after these long months of silence, which had been broken only by the occasional hoarse screams of a crow or a magpie? Had spring not stolen in, like someone wanting to surprise his friends? Wasn’t it there, ready any day now to explode into a blaze of green, spewing out its leaves and insects everywhere?

The river flowed past, shiny and black, it had flooded the soccer field, only the two homemade goals were visible. The air over the valley had thickened with the dusk. Lights shone in the houses across the valley. Droplets of rain ran down the pane in front of us.

She sat down in the wicker chair, swept the hair hanging over her forehead to one side, and raised the cup of lukewarm tea to her mouth. Her lips were perhaps her finest feature, they formed a gentle curve and at the top seemed to crimp as though not wishing to adapt to the otherwise clean lines of her face. Unless it was her eyes, which I sometimes imagined were yellow, because there was something feline about her face, but of course they weren’t. They were gray-green.

But this was my chance, so I ran forward, I went to kick it away and just as I did, it exploded. It was a bizarre feeling, my calf went all hot, and looking down I saw my trousers in tatters. Blood was flowing. There was even a big hole in my shoe! I refused to go to the emergency room, someone washed the blood off with a cloth and wound a bandage around my leg, I shouted that I was Hamsun’s Lieutenant Glahn and had shot myself in the foot so that Hanne would realize how much I loved her, jumped around in tattered trousers and with the bandage soaked in blood,

We don’t live our lives alone, but that doesn’t mean we see those alongside whom we live our lives. When Dad moved to northern Norway and was no longer physically in front of me with his body and his voice, his temper and his eyes, in a way he disappeared from my life, in the sense that he was reduced to a kind of discomfort I occasionally felt when he called or when something reminded me of him, then a kind of zone within me was activated, and in that zone lay all my feelings for him, but he was not there.

Later, in his notebooks, I read about the Christmas when he called from the Canary Islands and the weeks that followed. Here he stands before me as he was, in midlife, and perhaps that is why reading them is so painful for me, he wasn’t only much more than my feelings for him but infinitely more, a complete and living person in the midst of his life.

We finished our wine and went for a look round. I lost sight of Bjørn fairly soon and cruised around on my own. By the door to the big hall, on a sudden impulse, I looked in. What’s going on in here? I asked a small bald man with glasses. It’s a conference, he answered. Who for? I said. Biologists, he said. Okay, I said. Interesting! He withdrew, I went in, people were gathered around the small tables, but far fewer than earlier in the week. On one of them lay a little green and white card. I went over and inspected it. It was a name tag. I pinned it to my lapel and walked toward the big door. It opened onto a conference hall, rows of seats in a wide, gradually ascending semicircle around a speaker’s podium. A man was talking below. Stills were being shown on a screen behind him. The room was slightly more than half full. I walked down past a few rows, entered one, people stood up just as in the cinema, and I sat down, crossed my legs, and concentrated on the speaker. Now, I said to myself in a low voice. Imagine that. Fascinating! After twenty minutes, during which I spent as much time looking at the other people in the audience as the speaker, whose grating microphone voice filled the whole auditorium and hung like a constant annoying thought in the background, I got up and went back to the disco.

The days became shorter, and they became shorter quickly, as though they were racing toward the darkness. The first snow arrived in mid-October, went after a few days, but the next time it fell, at the beginning of November, it came with a vengeance, day after day it tumbled down, and soon everything was packed in thick white cushions of snow, apart from the sea, which with its dark, clean surface and terrible depths lay nearby like an alien and menacing presence, like a murderer who has moved into a neighboring house and whose unheeded knife glints on the kitchen table. The snow and the darkness changed the area beyond all recognition. When I first came, the sky had been high and luminous, the sea vast, and the countryside open, nothing seemed to hold together the village with its random huddle of houses, it barely existed in its own right. Nothing stopped there, that was the feeling. Then came the snow and the darkness. The sky fell, it lay like a lid over the rooftops. The sea disappeared, its blackness merged with the blackness of the sky, no horizon was visible any longer. Even the mountains disappeared and with them the sensation of finding yourself in wide-open country. What remained were the houses, which were lit day and night, always surrounded by darkness, and now the houses and the lights were the focal point to which everything gravitated.

Snowflakes were whirling through the darkness. She walked fifty meters down the road with her head lowered, beneath the light of the streetlamps. I wrapped my scarf around my mouth and set off. She went into her parents’ house, banged the snow off her boots, then closed the door behind her.

It had been a stupid offer to make, I thought as I went back into the staff room a few minutes later. Now I would have to dig in the snow with the ten-year-olds for the rest of the breaks. On the other hand, Jo’s face had lit up, I remembered, and I closed the toilet door behind me, unzipped, and began to pee. I aimed the jet at the porcelain so that the teachers who were still in the toilet wouldn’t hear the splashing sound. While I washed my hands I stared at my reflection in the mirror. The singular feeling that arose when you looked at your own eyes, which so purely and unambiguously expressed your inner state, of being both inside and outside, filled me to the hilt for a few intense seconds, but was forgotten the moment I left the room, in the same way that a towel on a hook or a bar of soap in the small hollow in the sink also were, all these trivialities that have no existence beyond the moment, but hang or lie undisturbed in dark, empty rooms until the door is opened the next time and another person grasps the soap, dries his hands on the towel, and examines his soul in the mirror.

There was a pause. The windows reflected the light from the lamps and between them the vague outlines of the furniture in a room that seemed to be underwater.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard that said here before. I can’t imagine it. It must be the very first time.” “There’s one fisherman who’s been seasick all his life,” I said. “That’s almost the same.” “No, it isn’t,” she said. “But now I do have to go.” I followed her into the hall. “Okay, Frøken, I wish you good night,” I said. I stood waiting in silence while she put on her outdoor gear. Smiled when she had finished. Only her nose was protruding from between her scarf and hat. She said goodbye and went out into the darkness.

I had always liked darkness. When I was small I was afraid of it if I was alone, but when I was with others I loved it and the change to the world it brought. Running around in the forest or between houses was different in the darkness, the world was enchanted, and we, we were breathless adventurers with blinking eyes and pounding hearts. When I was older there was little I liked better than to stay up at night, the silence and the darkness had an allure, they carried a promise of something immense. And autumn was my favorite season, wandering along the road by the river in the dark and the rain, not much could beat that.

But this darkness was different. This darkness rendered everything lifeless. It was static, it was the same whether you were awake or asleep, and it became harder and harder to motivate yourself to get up in the morning. I succeeded, and five minutes later I was standing in front of my desk again, but what happened there was also rendered lifeless. It felt as though I was getting nothing back from what I was doing. However much effort I put in, nothing came back. Everything vanished, everything dissolved into the great darkness in which we lived. I might as well say this as that, do this as that, nothing made any difference.

All the drinking reinforced my unease, and since nothing of what I did gave me anything back, I became more and more worn down, it was as though I was being drained, I became emptier and emptier, and soon I would be walking around like a shadow, a ghost, as empty and dark as the sky and the sea around me.

He was only sixteen but already the tallest person in the village. His height was so conspicuous that he probably never thought about anything else. Seeing him beside the three seventh-grade girls was painful, anything that was small and delicate caused him difficulty: letters, numbers, conversation, ball games, girls. In most ways he was a child, he burst into loud guffaws at the most basic, the most stupid things, blushed to the roots when he was corrected, and only really felt at ease with Stian, who controlled him as you would a dog. He had lost his father when he was small, and on the few occasions he had come to talk to me that had been the topic. It had all happened in the 1970s, a fishing boat sank without a trace, the whole of Norway talked about it for some days, but then it faded into oblivion except for Ivar, his mother, and the rest of the family. Barely a year after the accident they had moved up to Håfjord, where his mother had relatives. That was his story, his fate, the father who died when he was small.

When I was at the school during the night, when I stood by the dark, motionless water in the swimming pool, I imagined she was in the changing room, alone, and that soon I would go in. She covered herself, looked up, I knelt down in front of her, she looked at me, at first with apprehension, then tenderness and openness.