My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

The sense of falling snow had stayed with me; as we sat there I imagined it swirling down from on high and landing soundlessly on the roof above us, flake by flake. We talked about Student Radio and the people there, we talked about music and about playing the drums, she wanted me to teach her, I explained to her that I wasn’t really any good at it. She

She stiffened, glanced across at me, almost frightened. Turned, took the lid off the other saucepan and poked a little pin in a potato boiling in the bubbling water. The steam billowed out. “Two more minutes,” she said. I went over to her and wrapped my arms around her, kissed her neck. She turned her head and kissed me. “I had a day like this when I was little,” she said. “When everything was wonderful. Mom took me out. We were going to have a duck day. We saw Donald Duck in the cinema, we fed the ducks in the park, I got a Donald Duck comic book, and finally we went to a restaurant to eat duck.” “Is that true? Wasn’t that a sort of barbaric end to the day?” She laughed. “I love duck. It’s my favorite meal. And it was then, too! But the best part was that it was only Mom and me. All day. I’ve thought about it many times today. I’ve been so happy.”

No one I knew anyway. Life was a game, a pastime, and death: it didn’t exist. We laughed at everything, even at death, and that wasn’t completely wrong, laughter always had the last word, the skull’s grin when one day we lay there with earth in our mouths. But I wanted to believe, I did believe, I would believe.

I undressed, read a few pages of Ulverton, turned off the light, and fell asleep. I awoke in the darkness a few hours later from the most fantastic dream I’d ever had. I sat up and laughed to myself. I had been walking down the road outside our house in Tybakken. Suddenly there was a roar from above the earth. The noise was deafening, I knew there had never been such a roar before, it rolled across the sky like thunder, though infinitely louder. It was God’s voice. I stopped and looked at the sky. And then I was raised up! I was raised up to the sky! What a feeling it was. The roar, the majesty of God’s presence, and then the incredible moment when I was raised up. It was a moment of peace and perfection, joy and happiness. I lay down again.

Okay, so it was only a dream. But the feeling, that was real. I had really felt it. What a shame I had been asleep when I felt it, but now I knew it existed anyway, I thought, closed my eyes and dived into sleep, hoping something even more fantastic was in store for me.

The grass was yellow, the sky gray, and if anything at all glowed it was the brickwork of the buildings, but of rust, the color of perishability and decay. Oh, that filled my soul, this was England; the buildings we saw probably originated from the first period of industrialization, I loved the Empire that had declined but was still proud, and those who grew up in this dismal grayness captivated us all, first the sixties generation, pop, the Beatles and the Kinks, then the seventies heavy rock, all the evil bands from the metalworking towns in the Midlands, filthy rich in their twenties, then punk, in the mountains of uncollected garbage in 1976, then post-punk and goth rock, the enormous seriousness they brought to their music, and then, now, Madchester, raves, colors, and beat. England, I loved England, everything about England. The soccer, what more could you want than a tired old stadium from the beginning of the twentieth century, filled with ten to twelve thousand grim-faced, fiery working-class men, the mist over the heavy muddy field, and tackles so hard they echoed between the advertising billboards? The dark houses with wall-to-wall carpets everywhere, even on the stairs and in pubs.

One thing I had learned when I was working at the first institution: life wasn’t modern. All the variants, all the deformities, all the freaks of nature, all the mental disabilities, all the insanity, all the injuries, all the illnesses, they still existed, they were as present now as they had been in the Middle Ages, but we had hidden them, we had put them in enormous buildings in the forest, created special camps for them, consistently kept them out of sight so as to give the impression the world was hale and hearty, that that was how the world and life were, but they weren’t, life was also grotesque and distorted, sick and crooked, undignified and humiliated. The human race was full of fools, idiots, and freaks, either they were born like this or they became like this, but they were no longer on the streets, they no longer ran around frightening the wits out of people, they were in civilization’s shadow, or night. That was the truth. The snake’s life in the aquarium was another truth. Once upon a time there were no creatures on earth with eyes. Then eyes developed.

She didn’t object when I said I was going to be away for two months, she said nothing when I went out at night and came home plastered at five in the morning, and she never threatened to leave me, even though I had been depressed for two years and obviously hated myself. How could that be? It wasn’t the whole picture. I was good for her, too, she needed me, and we had a good life together in Bergen, both when we were alone and when we were together with others, the circle of family and friends around us, so if I was filled with inner despair, it had nothing to do with life as it unfolded around me, with the trivial incidents that make up all lives and can suddenly shine bright in the dusk of meaninglessness: the door goes, she comes home, bends over and takes off her shoes, looks at me and smiles, her face is magical and childlike. She pours paint from a five-liter can into a small receptacle, climbs up on a chair, and starts painting the molding over the window, wearing a workman’s overalls stained with paint. She snuggles up to me on the sofa, we watch a film, tears run down her cheeks, I laugh at her, and she laughs through her tears. There are thousands of such moments, lost the second they occur, yet still present because they are what form a relationship, the particular way we stayed together, which was the same as everyone’s, though different, it was her and me, no one else, it was us, we dealt with everything that came at us as well as we could, but the darkness in...