My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

I left in the afternoon, the sun flooded the heavily forested countryside in Aust-Agder, which received it in its manifold ways: the water in the lakes and rivers glittered, the dense conifers shone, the forest floor blushed, the leaves on the deciduous trees flashed on the few occasions a gust of wind caught them. Amid this interplay of light and color the shadows slowly lengthened and thickened. I stood by

the window in the last carriage for a long time watching features of the countryside that kept disappearing, cast aside as it were, to be replaced by new ones, which always made their appearance in quick succession, a river of stumps and roots, cliffs and uprooted trees, streams and fences, unexpected cultivated hillsides with farmhouses and tractors. The only feature that didn’t change was the rails we followed, and the two shimmering points where the sun was reflected on them all the way. It was a strange phenomenon. They looked like two balls of light, which seemed to be standing still while the train was traveling at more than a hundred kilometers an hour, and the balls of light remained at the same distance from me.

I was also wondering whether to buy myself a porn magazine. I was living in a big town now, I knew no one, all I had to do was take one down from the shelf, place it on the counter, pay, put it in a bag, and go home. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, I was in a nearby tobacconist’s a couple of times, and my eyes roamed down to the women’s blond hair and their big breasts, and the mere sight of their skin, printed on glossy paper, made my throat tighten. But it was always a newspaper that I placed on the counter, and a pouch of tobacco, never any of the magazines. Mostly because I was living with Yngve, it didn’t feel right to have to hide things in his place, but also because I didn’t have the courage to meet the assistant’s eyes as I laid the magazine on the counter.

For the first time in several days it was nice weather. The dense cloud cover over the town was grayish white, and the light in the streets around us was gentle, though not such that it veiled or enhanced, it was more that it allowed whatever there was to appear in its own right. Asphalt: gray and speckled black; walls: green and yellow, dulled by car fumes and street dust; trees: gray and green; the water in the bay by Verftet: gray and shiny. The colors became more vivid as we began to climb the hills on the Sandviken side of town, most of the houses there were timber constructions, and the shiny paint shimmered through the neutral light.

The staircase was steep, the corridor downstairs narrow, with a small basement studio on one side, where someone named Morten lived, a shower and a toilet on the other. I liked the unrefinedness of it and the old walls that vaguely smelled of mold, it had a Dostoyevsky feel, the impoverished young student in the metropolis.

I put up the poster of John Lennon, turned and met the eyes of two twelve-year-old boys, I assembled the coffee machine, inserted the plug in the socket beside the cupboard, turned and found myself looking straight into the eyes of a bearded man in his late twenties. To put an end to this, I pinned a bedsheet over one window, a tablecloth over the other, and

then I sat down on the sofa, strangely restless, it was as though the tempo inside me was greater than that outside.

I played a few records, brewed some tea, and read some pages of Hunger. Outside, it was beginning to rain. In the short pauses between the LP tracks I heard raindrops pitter-pattering against the window just behind my head. Now and then I heard noises from the floor above as dusk fell and the room slowly darkened. The stairs creak...

And, oh, the darkness that was a constant in Bergen! Not linked to night in any way, nor to shadow, nevertheless it was almost always here, this muted darkness suffused with falling rain. Objects and events became so concentrated when it was like this because the sun opened up airspace, and everything that was in it: a father putting shopping bags in the trunk of a car outside Støletorget, while the mother bundled their children onto the backseat, got in at the front, drew the safety belt across her chest and buckled it into place, watching this when the sun was shining and the sky was light and open was one thing, then all their movements seemed to flutter past and vanish the moment they were carried out; however, it was a very different matter watching the same family if it was raining, enveloped by the muted darkness, for then there was something leaden about their movements, it was as if they were statues, these people, transfixed in this moment – which, the very next, they had left anyway. The garbage cans outside the stairs, seeing them in strong sunlight was one thing, they were hardly there, as almost nothing was, but it was quite a different matter in rain-darkened daylight, then they stood like shining pillars of silver, some of them magnificent, others sadder and more wretched, but all there, just then, at that moment.

Yes, Bergen. The incredible power that lay in all the various housefronts squeezed together everywhere. The head rush you had as you slogged your way uphill and saw this, at your feet, could be wonderful. But it was also good to lock yourself in your room after a walk through the town, it was like being in the eye of a storm, sheltered from prying eyes, the only place where I was totally at peace. This afternoon I had run out of tobacco, but I had known it would happen and had saved all the stubs from recent days. After putting on the coffee machine, I took the scissors from the drawer and set about snipping the ash off the stubs. When I had done that I opened them up and sprinkled the bone-dry tobacco into the pouch, which in the end was half full. My fingertips were black and reeked of smoke, I rinsed them under the tap, and then I cut a slice of raw potato and put it into the pouch; soon the tobacco would have absorbed the moisture and be like new again.

My stomach constricted as I crossed the street and went back to my room. I felt as if I could throw up at any time. And that was after everything had gone well. However, saying a few words on the phone was not the same as sitting face-to-face, with nothing to say and your guts on fire.

That is, it did happen once in a while, maybe once every six months, when I could be overcome by the hilarity of something and just laugh and laugh, but that was always unpleasant because I completely lost control of myself then, I was unable to regain my composure, and I didn’t like showing that side of me to others. So basically I was able to laugh, I had the capacity, but in my everyday life, in social situations, when I was with people around a table chatting, I never laughed. I had lost that ability. To make up for this, I smiled a lot, I might also emit some laughter-like sounds, so I don’t think anyone noticed or found it conspicuous. But I knew: I never laughed. As a result, I became especially conscious of laughter as such, as a phenomenon, I noticed how it occurred, how it sounded, what it was. People laughed almost all the time, they said something, laughed, others said something, everyone laughed. It lubricated conversations or gave them a shot of something else, which didn’t have so much to do with what was being said as with being together with others. People meeting. In this situation everyone laughed, each in their own way, of course, and sometimes because of something genuinely funny, in which case the laughter lasted longer and could at times completely take over, but also for no apparent reason at all, just as a token of friendliness or openness. It could conceal insecurity, I knew that well, but it could also be strong and generous, a helping hand. When...

“How’s it going?” I said. “With my driving? Or are we past that stage?” “I don’t know,” I said. “There’s so much that’s new,” she said. “New room, new subject, new books, new people. Well, not that I’ve studied any other subject before,” she added with a giggle. Our eyes met, and I recognized that happy-go-lucky expression in her eyes that I had fallen for the first time I saw it. “I said I’d be a bundle of nerves!” she said. “I am, too,” I said. “Skål,” she said, and we clinked glasses. She leaned to the side and took a packet of cigarettes from her bag. “Well, how are we going to do this?” she said. “Shall we start again? I come in, you’re sitting here, we give each other a hug, you ask how it’s going, I answer, and then I ask you how it’s going. A much better start!”

I tried to keep my eyes off her, but couldn’t stop myself, she was so beautiful sitting there looking down at the table with the lit cigarette in her hand. She glanced up and met my gaze. We smiled. The warmth in her eyes. The light around her. At the same time there was that slightly awkward insecurity that came over her when the moment was past and she watched her hand flicking the ash from her cigarette into the ashtray. I knew where the feeling came from, I recognized it in myself, she was wary of herself and the position she was in.

So as I walked down the steps toward the town center on this Wednesday at the end of August I had a place in my heart for everything I beheld. A slab of stone worn smooth in a flight of steps: fantastic. A swaybacked roof side by side with an austere perpendicular brick building: so beautiful. A limp hot-dog wrapper on a drain grille, which the wind lifts a couple of meters and then drops again, this time on the pavement flecked with white stepped-on chewing gum: incredible. A lean old man hobbling along in a shabby suit carrying a bag bulging with bottles in one hand: what a sight. The world extended its hand, and I took it. All the way through the town center and up the hills on the other side, straight into my room, where I immediately sat down to write my poem.

There were only two generations between us, yet I knew nothing of how she had spent her life, not really, not essentially, I knew nothing of her relationship with objects and animals, life and death. When Grandma and I looked at each other it was from either side of a chasm. For her, family was the central point in her life, in other words, her family, the one that came from the farm where she grew up, and then her children. I had the impression that Grandpa’s family, which had moved inland from the islands a generation earlier, was not important.

Her family was the center of her existence, and the soil. Kjartan would sometimes say that the soil was her religion, that they were soil

worshippers in Jølster, where she came from, a kind of ancient heathendom they had clad in the language and rites of Christianity. Look at Astrup’s pictures, he would say, all the fires they lit on Midsummer Eve, that’s Jølster folk for you, they dance around the flames as though they were their gods. Kjartan would laugh when he said such things, and it was not without disdain, yet there was always some ambivalence because Kjartan had a lot of her in him: the serious attitude to life and the deep sense of duty were in Kjartan, too, and if she worshipped and cultivated the soil, Kjartan worshipped and cultivated nature, the presence of the universe in the form of birds and animals, mountains and skies. He would deny that any such connection existed between him and his mother, after all he was a communist, an atheist, a ship’s pipefitter. However, all you had to do was look them in the eye to banish any lingering doubts. They had the same brown eyes, the same wary gaze. Now there was nothing left of her life, disease had consumed her, eaten up her body, leaving only shaking a...

Upstairs in the bedroom, I lay in the darkness for a long time before I fell asleep. The darkness linked the little space inside with the enormous space outside. The old wooden bed was like a little boat, or that was how it felt. Now and then a tree whooshed and the rain on

the leaves pitter-pattered against the window. When it stopped, there would be a whoosh somewhere else, from some other trees nearby, as though tonight the wind had strategically deployed its energies and was riding across the countryside in several units. The feeling I had when I arrived here was that life was over. Not in the sense that the house stood under the sign of death, more that what was going to happen had happened.

This information was unsettling, in a way, most of all because I hadn’t known anything about it and would never have guessed. Were there more such pockets of drama in the lives of my closest family? But the information in itself, what it said about Grandpa, I couldn’t get to tally because if there was one characteristic I associated with Grandpa it was his joie de vivre. Then again I had never thought of him as an independent person with an independent life, he had always been simply “Grandpa,” in the same way that Grandma had always been “Grandma.” A whoosh went through the old birch again, and a little cascade of droplets hit the wall, as though it were a dog shaking off the rain. Darkness. Silence. The beat of my pulse. Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

Unlike with Grandpa it wasn’t death I heard but life. My heart was young and strong, it would beat away through my twenties, it would beat away through my thirties, it would beat away through my forties, and it would beat away through my fifties. If I got to Grandpa’s age, and he was eighty, I had used only a quarter of my life so far. Almost everything lay before me, bathed in the hopeful light of uncertainty and opportunity, and my heart, this loyal muscle, would take me through it whole and unscathed, ever stronger, ever wiser, ever richer in life lived. Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

Wave upon wave of heat rose to my head, which I lowered, and into my face. I walked past an old fire station, it was made of wood and painted white, beneath it the town’s myriad colors vibrated, I walked along the very highest line of houses until I slowly began to descend and was back outside my place. That is where he lives, I thought. The brother who believes he’s a writer. And when I opened the door and went into my room it was as though I was still in the street looking at myself, the conceited idiot who closed the curtains and kept out the world. * * *

Mind-boggling the brutal honesty of KOK's self-observation.

Ingvild took an early taxi home, Yngve stayed and it was painful to see that he didn’t appreciate her more, that he was happy to see her go. If it had been me I would have flung my arms around her. I had worshipped her. I had given her everything I had. Yngve didn’t do that. Did he care about her at all? He must. But he was older, more experienced, a different light burned in him than my stupid naïve one. And what I also saw was that he gave Ingvild space, a larger space than she occupied, which I couldn’t have done, never in this world, because we were in the same space, she and I, the space of uncertainty and hesitation, half groping and half clutching. She needed him as much as I did.

I had no idea what to write. The coffee was ready, I drank a cup, smoked a cigarette, stared at the image of myself in the window. Turned and looked at the bookshelves. They wouldn’t have a photography book of scantily clad or naked women here, would…?

I put it in a bag and went down the spiral staircase and into the toilet. A picture by Raphael stood out at once, two women in front of a well, one naked, the other dressed, the naked one was strikingly beautiful, she was looking enigmatically to the side, her small breasts were pert, a strip of cloth covered her nether region, but her thighs were visible and I got a hard-on, I flipped through, stared at a picture by Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618), one of the two naked women was the red-haired, pale freckly type with a small chin and a full body, then there was Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485), where one breast was bared, and Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), in which the woman in the foreground had one hand resting between her legs while she gazed straight at the observer with a provocative, self-assured expression on her face. I studied her naked breasts for a long time, her broad hips and small feet, but there was more to see of course, and I went on to Bartholomeus Spranger’s Vulcan and Maia (1585), in which the woman, with her hands on a strong bearded man, thrusts her hips forward with a lustful glint in her eye. Her breasts were supple, her skin was all white, her face almost childish. She was good. The next was Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), the woman in the foreground had her back to us, one breast was revealed, thrust right forward, because she had a sword to her throat, and the whole of her bottom was visible, perfectly...

When I sat in the reading room, which was old and had a kind of somber atmosphere, and read Blanchot in the afternoon, a completely new feeling arose in me, something I had never felt before, a sort of extreme excitement, as though I found myself in the proximity of something unique, mixed with an equally extreme impatience, I had to go there, and these two feelings were so incompatible that I wanted to jump up and run and shout and sit perfectly still and read on all at the same time. What was strange was that the restlessness began to course through me at the moment when I read something good that I had understood and absorbed, it was as though it was simply impossible to bear. Often I stood up and took a break then, and while I walked along the corridors and up the stairs to the first floor of the canteen, the excitement and the impatience mingled with the dropped jaw of my consciousness, which was to do with my pursuing these paths alone, and so on, my soul in an inexplicable turmoil, I bought myself a coffee and sat down at a table and tried to appear as calm as possible. There was also something panicked about my desire to acquire knowledge, in sudden terrible insights I saw that actually I didn’t know anything and it was urgent, I didn’t have a second to lose. It was almost impossible to adapt this urgency to the slowness that reading required.

We hung up, I walked home in the gathering dusk, lay on my bed reading Mark Twain, whom Ragnar Hovland had talked about, fell back into reality now and again, into the darkness surrounding the meager light from the reading lamp, the material of the light-blue pillow, the thought of Grandma, the first person close to me who had died. It was impossible to understand. But she was at peace now. She had been tormented, now she had peace. I read on, the thought of her lay constantly in the shadows of my consciousness, now and then it stepped out, she was dead, she was no more, Grandma, dear Grandma. I hadn’t known her, but what is there to know? I had known who she was, who she was to me, ever since I had been a small boy. And that was what filled my mind now, her gentle presence, her eyes. How heartbreaking it must have been for her to depart this world, solely because her body no longer obeyed her, it refused her the most elementary support.

GROWING WILD Your eyes are gone from the day you’re gently faded out My thoughts like mirrors I lose control Feel you within Soft nights fall over me My eyes are plunged in darkness I want to fly Want to believe in miracles Feel you within I shy from light and darkness Who knows what you see Who knows what will happen Silence, silence

growing wild The days crumble, disappear Leaving no trace I am always awake, waiting Feel you within feel you within I shy from light and darkness Who knows what you see Who knows what will happen Silence, silence growing wild

I introduced Gunvor to Yngve and Asbjørn and his other friends, who in a way had become mine, too, or not friends exactly but at any rate people I was often with, by dint of being Yngve’s younger brother, my safeguard in Bergen, and she was a great hit with them. That wasn’t so strange, it was impossible not to like Gunvor, she always laughed at what others said, was sociable and affable, didn’t take herself seriously, but nor was she frivolous, she worked hard at what she did and was no stranger to high seriousness, she also had a strong work ethic, you had to work, you had to go to lectures, you had to read, only then did you deserve time off. But this sense of moral duty, which I also knew and regarded as an enemy, something I had to oppose, something that stood for the opposite of what I wanted to be, this sense of moral duty didn’t weigh heavy on her, it didn’t affect her personality, it was more like a kind of guiding line, thin and straight and strong, a sinew in her soul, not visible but important, it gave her strength and security, meant that she never doubted that where she was and what she was doing were right. When I was with her it was as though something was being drawn out of me. The darkness became lighter, the crippled straighter, and the strange thing was that it didn’t come from outside, it wasn’t that she lit the darkness, no, it was something that happened inside me because I saw myself with her eyes, and not just my own, and in her eyes there was noth...

We drove home alongside the big silent deep lake where Borghild told us fishermen used to sweep the waters with cocks; wherever the cocks crowed they got out their fishing tackle. Outside, it was pitch-black. Apart from the road and the trees or the water beside them, which all lay beneath the yellow light of the streetlamps, only the snow-clad mountain peaks were visible. It was a starry sky, everything felt open and spacious. The bus back to Bergen left at four in the morning, we stayed awake till then, and were waiting at the stop, stamping our feet to keep warm, when it arrived, thundering around the bends above us. We slept leaning against each other for the four and a half hours the journey lasted, surrounded by the thrum of the heater, the drone of the engine, the occasional cough from other passengers, the door opening and closing, all in a distant dream, the characteristic sounds of vehicles boarding ferries, the silence afterward, when the monotony of the road takes over.

Hans had played in bands all his life from what I could understand. He wrote in the student newspaper Studvest, made programs for Student Radio, was interested in politics, against the EU, wrote in Nynorsk, was confident but not in the least bit boastful, that lay as far from his character as it was possible to be. He had a strong sense of irony, liked to make jokes, often with a dangerous sting in the tail, but his presence was usually so friendly that the danger was somehow neutralized. I really liked him, he was a good person. Whether he liked me or not was a different matter. The little I said came from the bottom of a deep well, dark and somehow quaking.

He was studying History, he said when I met him afterward. Though mostly he was playing with his band. And you? he said. Have you made your debut yet? No, I said, I can’t say I have, everything went to pot. But now I’m playing in a band, too. The Kafkatrakterne. He laughed at that and disappeared into the enormous space that had arisen between us now that we were no longer neighbors.

Even then I had felt I was being false, someone who carried thoughts no one else had and which no one must ever know. What emerged from this was myself, this was what was me. In other words, that which in me knew something the others didn’t, that which in me I could never share with anyone else. And the loneliness, which I still felt, was something I had clung to ever since, as it was all I had. So long as I had that no one could harm me, for what they harmed then was something else. No one could take loneliness away from me. The world was a space I moved in, where anything could happen, but in the space I had inside me, which was me, everything was always the same. All my strength lay there. The only person who could find his way in was Dad, and he did, too, when I was dreaming and he seemed to be in my soul and shouting at me. For everyone else I was unreachable. Well, in my thoughts they could reach me, anyone at all could stir them up, but what were thoughts worth? What was consciousness other than the surface of the soul’s ocean? Other than small, brightly colored boats, floating plastic bottles, and driftwood, waves and currents, whatever the day might bring, over a depth of several thousand meters. Or depth was the wrong word. What was consciousness other than the cone of light from a torch in the middle of a dark forest? I closed my eyes and rolled over onto my side. In six or seven hours she would come to me and I longed to feel her body against mine, after holdin...

I couldn’t describe a forest, neither seen from above nor from within. No, the composure he possessed I didn’t have in me, and the self-assurance and serenity, which all great prose writers had, I couldn’t even achieve as a pastiche. Such was my experience of reading Naipaul, like reading almost all the other good writers, enjoyment and jealousy, happiness and despair, in equal portions.

Tramping around in there, back and forth between the kitchen and the lounge, the washroom and the ward, it was as though nothing else existed, the whole unit with its harsh light and linoleum floor, its rank odors and heaps of frustration and compulsions was an existence all of its own, which I descended into, it engulfed me, crossing the threshold to the corridor was like stepping into a zone. It wasn’t without problems, but the problems were bound to the life there, the people there, both the caregivers and the residents. It had something to do with the fact that we were locked in, that we moved in such restricted space, where every little displacement in one direction or another had an immeasurable effect, while the slow advance of time and the lack of anything to distract us lulled life there into a kind of calm, a kind of standstill.

The house was on a hill, from his backyard there was a view of the fjord, the sky was blue and the wind whispered through the trees on the slope beneath us, as always in the afternoon. They had a cat and he told me about the time she had given birth to kittens. She had been much too small, or there was something else wrong, because one afternoon Ellen had come home and the young mother had killed all her young. There had been nothing short of a bloodbath in the house. Jan Vidar laughed as he told me, I was shaken, I imagined how it must have been, all the squeaking and snarling and crawling on the carpet. The next day I woke to an empty house and caught the bus down to Kristiansand, filled with the old feeling of panic, it was such a fantastic day, not a cloud to be seen anywhere, and I didn’t leave town, I stayed in the hot, narrow streets sweating while everyone else was sailing their boats around the islands, swimming and drinking beer and having a good time. I had never managed that, I had never been invited, and you don’t do that kind of thing on your own. What was a record shop on a baking hot day in Kristiansand? What was the library, who was that sitting there gawping?

This was my great idea. And actually it could be right, at least, there was nothing to disprove it. But if it was, then everything was meaningless. We were completely dependent on there not being another world, on this being the only one, for what we were doing here to be meaningful. So it was important therefore to keep making literature. But if there was another world, a greater context, literature was simply nonsense, babble in the universe.

But it didn’t matter. It had never been my intention to become an academic. I wanted to write, that was all I wanted, and I couldn’t understand those who didn’t, how they could be happy with an ordinary job, whatever it was, whether teacher, camera operator, bureaucrat, academic, farmer, TV host, journalist, designer, publicist, fisherman, truck driver, gardener, nurse, or astronomer. How could that be enough? I understood it was the norm, most people had ordinary jobs, some put all their energy into them, others didn’t, but to me it seemed pointless. If I were to take such a job my life would feel meaningless however good I was at it and however high I rose. It would never be enough. I mentioned this to Gunvor a couple of times, and she was in total agreement, only in reverse: she understood how I felt but was unable to identify with it herself.

A terrible thought occurred to me as I was on my way home that night: was he actually me? Would I become like him? An ex-student drifting around for years taking shifts until it is too late, all the options are gone and this becomes life? Would I be stuck there, forty years old, telling the young students who come and go on temp contracts, actually I was going to be a writer? Would you like to read a short story? It was rejected, but that’s only because the publishers are so damned conventional and don’t dare take a risk with someone who takes risks. They wouldn’t recognize a genius if they had one stuffed up their backside. Look, by pure chance, I happen to have a copy in my bag. Yes, it’s about my life and you’ll probably recognize the odd detail about the institution I describe, but it’s not this one, actually. What was it you were studying again? Philosophy? Yes, I had a sniff at that, too. But then I went for Literature. I wrote about Joyce, you know. Something about intertextuality and the like. I was told it was brilliant. But I don’t know. Feels a bit dated in some ways, yet there’s something universal about literature which … well, shines through its epoch. But take it and tell me what you think during the shift tomorrow. Okay?

I paid, he took out the suitcases and passed them to me, I walked through the gates and up the path to the house. The door to the basement apartment opened, there was Gunvor, beaming. We embraced, I could feel how I had missed her. She had been here a week and showed me around our apartment, it was large and impersonally furnished, but it was ours, this was where we would live for the next six months. We went to bed and afterward we wanted to take a shower, but the water smelled like rotten eggs, I couldn’t stand it, she said all the water smelled like this, it came from the volcanic soil, the terrible smell was sulfur.

but first of all, he said in English, first we have to smoke. The joint made the rounds, he took out his guitar, Eric, as my American friend was called, took out his, and I was given a bucket to use as drums. It was a very ordinary bucket, red with a white handle, I turned it upside down, put it between my legs and started tapping and thumping on the bucket while the other two picked out a bluesy tune on their guitars and the baby screamed its lungs out next door. Gunvor laughed so much she cried when I told her.

drunk. In our case, the cows had to be seen to, so after a whiskey in the kitchen with the farmer I followed him into the cowshed. While he staggered around with the muckrake groping for the cow fodder and straw bales, he told me to brush their teeth, a suggestion he found so amusing that he had to sit down so as not to topple over with laughter.

The wind was blowing outside. In Iceland the wind always blew, it gusted off the sea day and night. Once I was on my way to Nordens Hus to read some Norwegian newspapers when I saw an old lady blown over. I wrote three short stories and filled a whole notebook with comments on them and what I wanted to achieve in my writing. At night I dreamed about Dad, more frightened asleep than ever I was awake. Gunvor’s girlfriends were boring, I avoided them as much as I could. A Swedish student, maybe ten years older than Gunvor and me, invited Einar and us to dinner, he was friendly, shy, had a big heart, lived in a fantastic apartment and served a gourmet dinner he must have spent all day preparing. We invited him back to our place, I found a recipe for lamb which looked delicious and we had lamb, Gunvor’s farm had given us a bag of lamb and a bag of horsemeat. They looked the same, I took a risk, I made a mistake, and I didn’t even get close to the picture of the meal the recipe showed with the bone of meat elegantly arranged with mushrooms, onions, and carrots, the meat slid off the bones, so what they got, our guests that Saturday evening, gathered around the table in our little kitchen, was horsemeat soup. Oh, it tasted absolutely dreadful, salty and horrible. But the Swede, Carl, nodded and smiled and said what I had made was very good. Einar, who was Icelandic enough to know this was horsemeat, said nothing, just smiled his inscrutable though not unfriendly smile. I began to...

I did. I stayed close to him amid the crowd of musicians and artists walking through the town, down to the harbor, where Björk had her apartment. It was on two floors with a broad staircase in the middle and was soon full. Björk herself sat on the floor by a ghetto blaster, surrounded by CDs, playing one song after the other. I was so tired that I could hardly stand. I slumped at the top of the staircase, leaned my head against the balusters, and closed my eyes. But I didn’t sleep, something was rising from within, from my stomach and up through my chest, soon it would be in my throat, I jumped to my feet, took the steps to the first floor, ran to the bathroom, opened the door, bent down over the toilet bowl, and spewed up a magnificent yellow and orange cascade that splashed everywhere.

We went to an art museum together, the walls and floor were completely white, and with the sun flooding in through large skylights the light inside was almost aflame. Through the windows I could see the sea, blue with white crests of waves and breakers, a large white-clad mountain rose in the distance. In these surroundings, in this bright white room on the edge of the world, the art was lost.

The mist drifted in great sheets above the dense dark green, bordering on black, spruce trees on the hillside across the mere. It was nine o’clock, Mom asked if I would mind scattering spruce sprigs over the road by the gate. This was an old custom. I went down in the rain, laid sprigs over the gravel, looked up at the house, the windows aglow in the gray morning. I cried. Not because of death and its coldness but life and its warmth. I cried because of the goodness that existed. I cried because of the light in the mist, I cried because of the living people in the dead man’s house, and I thought, I can’t waste my life.

We carried the coffin over. We sang, we sounded so strangely fragile in the enormous space. Beneath us lay the fjord, gray and heavy; on the opposite side, the mountain plunged vertically into the sea, wrapped in mist and cloud. The priest threw earth onto the coffin. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. For a moment Mom stood alone in front of the open grave. She bowed her head, a fresh wave of sobs went through me, the last, for as we left to go to the community center, where hot meat broth was being served, the mood lightened, it was over, now life would continue without him.

The curtains were drawn, we sat drinking coffee in the semidarkness, Gunvor kept the conversation going and I saw how much Kjartan liked her and somehow became lighter in her company. But not by much, the heaviness in him was still palpable. As we left I wondered if gravitational force had a stronger effect on him or the earth had a stronger pull, and that was why his movements were so slow, he had to tug his foot free from the ground, yank the hand holding his coffee cup from the table. Kjartan, the man who wrote so much about air and skies, light and suns, the man who lived in the weightless realm of the spirit. A few weeks later he was readmitted.