My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (70 page)

‘Hi, Karl Ove, how was it?’ Linda asked.

They smiled at me.

‘OK,’ I said with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Nothing worth talking about anyway.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea and some cheese?’

‘No, thanks.’

I unwound my scarf as I stood there, hung it in the wardrobe with my jacket, untied my laces and put my shoes on the shelf by the wall. The floor underneath was grey with sand and gravel. I would have to join them for a while so as not to appear totally unsociable, I thought, and went into the living room.

Mikaela was talking about a meeting she’d had with the minister of culture, Leif Pagrotsky. He was a tiny man and had been sitting on a large sofa, she said, with a huge cushion on his lap, which he hugged as he sat there, and even, according to her, sank his teeth into. But she had the greatest respect for him. He had a razor-sharp mind and an enormous capacity for work. I wasn’t sure what qualifications Mikaela had, since I had only met her in contexts like this, but whatever they were they obviously worked well for her: barely thirty years old, she went from one top post to the next. Like so many women I had met she was close to her father, who had something or other to do with literature. With her mother, a demanding lady who lived alone in an apartment in Gothenburg, from what I had gathered, she had a more complicated relationship. Mikaela often changed her partners, and no matter how different they were they had one thing in common: they were always inferior to her. Of all the stories she had told over the three years since I first met her there was one in particular that stood out in my mind. We were sitting in the bar at Folkoperan and she told us about a dream she’d had. She had been to a party and had gone without any trousers on, so she was naked from the waist down, like Donald Duck. It had made her feel uneasy, she said, but that wasn’t all, there had also been something alluring about it, and then she simply lay down on a table with her naked backside in the air. What did we think the dream could mean?

Ye-es, what could it mean?

When she told us this I didn’t think it was true, or that the others around the table knew something I didn’t, because surely what the dream said about her was something she would not want everyone to know? From then on, this trace of naïvety, which had appeared so unexpectedly in her otherwise sophisticated demeanour, led me to view her with affection and wonderment. Was that perhaps the intention? Whatever the reason, she had a high opinion of Linda, turned to her sometimes for advice because, like me, she knew about Linda’s unfailing intuition and taste. That on occasions like this she could become a little too self-centred didn’t strike me as much of a surprise, and it was perfectly forgivable. Besides, what she told us about life in the corridors of power was always interesting, at least for me, so far removed on the periphery. If you switched perspective and took her point of view, she was visiting a close but fragile friend and her taciturn husband, and what option had she but to take the initiative and embrace this small family with some of her happiness and energy? She was Vanja’s godmother and had been at the christening, where she had made such a good impression on my mother that she still asked after her. She had been interested in what mum had to say and went into the kitchen to help with the washing-up when the party was coming to an end, thereby revealing an understanding of the situation, which Linda had never shown in the same way, with all the latent friction that this caused between her and my mother. This is what we have forms for, they help us to co-exist, they are in themselves signs of friendship or goodwill, and with them in place greater personal divergence is tolerated, more idiosyncrasy, which unhappily idiosyncratic individuals never understand since it is in the very nature of idiosyncrasy not to understand. Linda did not want to serve anyone, she wanted to be served, and the consequence of that was she wasn’t served. Whereas Mikaela served, and so she was served. Simple as that. It grieved me that mum was so taken with her, also because there was quite a different richness and unpredictability in Linda’s personality. Sudden precipices, unexpected blasts of wind, enormous walls of resistance. Getting things to run smoothly, working to achieve a lack of resistance, this is the antithesis of art’s essence, it is the antithesis of wisdom, which is based on restricting or being restricted. So the question is: what do you choose? Movement, which is close to life, or the area beyond movement, which is where art is located, but also, in a certain sense, death?

‘I’ll have a cup of tea after all,’ I said.

‘It’s herbal tea,’ Linda said. ‘You don’t want that, do you? But the water’s probably still hot.’

‘No, preferably not,’ I said, and went into the kitchen. While I was waiting for the water to boil I took a pencil, positioned myself on a chair in front of the cupboard and marked all the bottles. A little dot on the labels, nothing more, so small that to see it you had to know it was there.

I was behaving like the father of a teenager and felt somewhat stupid standing there, yet I couldn’t see what else I could do. I didn’t want the woman who was looking after my child and the person who had most to do with her apart from Linda and me to drink alcohol when she was with her.

Then I popped a tea bag in the cup and poured water on it. I looked down at Nalen, where the cooks were hosing the floor and the dishwashers were steaming. From the departure sounds in the living room I gathered Mikaela was on her way home. I went into the hall and said goodbye to her. Then I sat down in front of the computer, accessed the Net, checked my emails, nothing, went onto a few websites and googled myself. There were over 29,000 hits. The figure rose and sank like a kind of index. I surfed and clicked at random. Steered clear of interviews and reviews, clicked on some of the blogs. Someone wrote that my books weren’t even worth wiping your arse with. Elsewhere I found the homepage of a small publishing house or journal. My name appeared in a caption under a picture of Ole Robert Sunde which said he was telling anyone who would listen how bad Knausgaard’s last book was. Then I stumbled on the documents of a boundary dispute between neighbours in which a relative had clearly been involved. The cause was a garage wall a few metres too short or too long.

‘What are you doing?’ Linda asked behind me.

‘Googling myself. It’s a bloody Pandora’s box. You wouldn’t believe what people come out with.’

‘You shouldn’t do it,’ she said. ‘Come here and sit down.’

‘Coming,’ I said. ‘Just got a couple of things to check.’

The next morning I left for the office when Ingrid came to pick up Vanja at eight. Sat there until three writing the speech, was back home by half past three. Linda was in the bath, she was going out for a meal with Christina. I went into the kitchen and monitored the bottles. Two of them had been drunk from.

I went in to Linda and sat on the toilet seat lid.

‘Hi,’ she said with a smile. ‘I bought myself a bath bomb today.’

The bathtub was full of lather. When she raised an arm to sit up there was a ribbon of foam hanging from it.

‘I can see,’ I said. ‘There’s something we have to talk about.’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s your mother. Remember what I told you about how the levels in the bottles of booze were falling very noticeably of late?’

She nodded.

‘I marked the bottles yesterday. So that I could be sure. And they’ve gone down again. If it’s not you it has to be your mother.’

‘Mummy?’

‘Yes, she drinks when she’s here with Vanja. She’s been doing it all week, and I don’t think there are any grounds for believing it’s just started.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Ye-es, as sure as I can be.’

‘What shall we do?’

‘Tell her we know what’s going on. And for us it’s unacceptable.’

‘Right.’

She fell silent.

‘When are they coming back?’ I asked after a while.

She looked at me.

‘Around five,’ she said.

‘What do you suggest?’ I asked.

‘We’ll have to tell her. Simply give her an ultimatum. If she does it again she can’t be left alone with Vanja.’

‘Mm,’ I said.

‘This must have been going on for several years,’ she said, apparently engrossed in her own thoughts. ‘It would explain a great deal. She’s been so incredibly scratchy. It’s next to impossible to have any real communication.’

I got up.

‘It might not,’ I said. ‘Maybe it has something to do with Vidar and her. Perhaps she’s stuck in a cul-de-sac out there. And she’s unhappy.’

‘But you don’t start drinking because you’re unhappy when you’re over sixty,’ she said. ‘Must be a way of coping. Must have been going on for a long time.’

‘They’ll be here in about half an hour,’ I said. ‘Shall we let it go and tackle it later, or shall we go for it right away? Get it over and done with?’

‘I don’t suppose there’s anything to wait for,’ she said. ‘But how shall we put it to her? I can’t do it on my own. She’ll only deny it and somehow make it all about me. Shall we do it together?’

‘Bit like a family meeting, you mean?’

Linda shrugged and turned her palms face up in the foam-filled bath.

‘Well,
I
don’t know,’ she said.

‘It’s too complicated. And it’s two against one. Like some tribunal. I can do it. I’ll go out with her and talk to her.’

‘Do you want to do that?’

‘Want? It’s the last thing I’d want to do on this earth! She’s my mother-in-law for Christ’s sake. All I want is some decency, dignity and peace and quiet.’

‘I’m pleased you’ll do it,’ she said.

‘I must say you’re taking this well though,’ I said.

‘This is almost the only time when I’m calm, when something unforeseen happens, some crisis or other. It’s a hangover from childhood. Then it was the normal situation. I’m used to it. But I’m angry too, just so that you know. It’s now that we need her. She has to be someone for our children. They have almost no family, as you know. She can’t let us down now. She can’t, even if I have to make sure she doesn’t myself.’

‘Children?’ I said. ‘Do you know something I don’t?’

She smiled and shook her head.

‘No, but perhaps I can feel something.’

I went out, closed the door behind me and stood in front of the living-room window. Heard the water draining down the bath plughole, looked at the torch flickering outside the café across the narrow street, the dark figures with white mask-like faces walking past. On the floor above a neighbour was playing a guitar. Linda came into the hall with a red towel wrapped round her head like a turban and disappeared behind the open cupboard door. I went to check my emails. One from Tore, one from Gina Winje. I started a reply to her, then deleted it. Went into the kitchen, put on the coffee machine and drank a glass of water. Linda was standing in front of the hall mirror putting on her make-up.

‘When’s Christina coming?’ I asked.

‘At six. But I might as well get ready now while we’re alone. How was it today by the way? Did you get anything done?’

‘Bit. Have to do the rest tomorrow evening and on Friday.’

‘Are you going on Saturday?’ she asked, leaning her head back and running the little brush across one eyelash.

‘Yes.’

Outside the lift started. There weren’t many residents in the building so the chances were it would be them. Yes, it was. The lift stopped, the door opened into the corridor, followed immediately by the sound of a buggy being reversed.

Ingrid opened the door and came into the hall, which was soon filled with her energetic-frenetic presence.

‘Vanja fell asleep on the way,’ she said. ‘The little darling was worn out, poor thing. But she’s done a lot today! We were at the children’s museum. I bought a season ticket which you can have . . . so you’ve got free entrance for the whole of the rest of the year . . .’

She put down all the bags she was carrying, pulled a wallet from her jacket and took out a yellow card, which she passed to Linda.

‘And then we also bought a new jumpsuit, identical to the old one, which was a bit too small for her – hope that’s not a problem?’

She looked at me. I shook my head.

‘And a new pair of gloves while we were at it.’

She searched through the bags and took out a pair of red gloves.

‘They’ve got hooks you can attach to the sleeve. They’re nice and warm, and big.’

She looked at Linda.

‘Are you going out? Oh yes, you’re off with Christina tonight.’ She looked at me. ‘So you and Geir will have to think of something. But I won’t hold you up. I’m leaving now.’

She turned to Vanja, who was lying in the buggy behind her with her hat down over her eyes.

‘She’ll probably sleep for another hour. She didn’t sleep much this morning, you see. Shall I put her in the living room?’

‘I can do that,’ I said. ‘Are you going back to Gnesta, or what?’

She looked at me with raised eyebrows.

‘No. I’m going to the theatre with Barbro. I had planned to borrow your office for another night. I thought . . . I told Linda. Do you need it?’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I was just wondering. I wanted to have a chat with you actually. There’s something I have to say.’

The large eyes behind the thick glasses examined me with unease.

‘Fancy coming for a walk with me?’ I said.

‘All right,’ she said.

‘Let’s go right away then. This won’t take long.’

I loosened the nuts on the screws holding the double doors together, pulled the bolt fixing them to the floor, opened them and pushed in the buggy. While I was doing this Ingrid went into the kitchen for a glass of water. Then I got ready, stood a few metres away and waited, lost in my own thoughts. Linda had gone into the living room.

‘You’re not splitting up, are you?’ she said as I closed the door behind us. ‘Please don’t say you’re splitting up . . .’

Her face was white as she said it.

‘No, we’re not. My God, no. No, we’re not. I want to talk to you about something completely different.’

‘Ooof, I’m so relieved.’

We went into the backyard, through the gateway and into David Bagares gata, which we followed up to Malmskillnadsgatan. I said nothing, I didn’t know how to articulate this, how to start. She didn’t say anything either, glanced at me a couple of times, in anticipation or surprise.