My Struggle: Book One (59 page)

I was surprised by the genuine tone. During the prom period I had had a party at home and he had come, turned nasty, and kicked a hole in our bathroom door. Afterward he had refused to pay and there had been nothing I could do. Another time he had been driving a prom bus, with Bjørn I think it must have been and me sitting on the roof, we were going to the recreation center, and all of a sudden, on the hill after the Timenes intersection, he stamped on the accelerator and we had to spreadeagle and hold on tight to the bars, he was doing at least seventy, probably eighty, and just laughed when we arrived, even when we gave him a hard time.

So why the friendly overtures now?

I met his gaze. His face was perhaps a bit more fleshy, otherwise he hadn't changed at all. But there was something stiff about his features, a kind of fixedness, which the smile reinforced rather than softened.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“Working in the North Sea.”

“Ah,” I said. “So you're earning tons of money!”

“Yep. And I get lots of time off. So that's good. And you?”

While he was talking to me he looked at the shop assistant and pointed to a grilled sausage and hoisted one finger in the air.

“Still studying,” I said.

“What subject?”

“Literature.”

“Mm, you always did like that,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Do you see anything of Espen? Or Trond? Or Gisle?”

He shrugged.

“Trond lives in town so I see him now and then. Espen when he comes home for Christmas. And you? Do you have any contact with any of the others?”

“Just Bassen.”

The assistant put the sausage in a bun and placed it on a napkin.

“Ketchup and mustard?” he asked.

“Yes, please, both. And onions.”

“Raw or fried?”

“Fried. No, raw.”

“Raw?”

“Yes.”

After the order had been completed and he had the sausage in his hand, he turned back to me.

“Nice to see you again, Karl Ove,” he said. “You haven't changed!”

“Nor you,” I said.

He opened his mouth, bit off a chunk of the sausage and passed the assistant a fifty-krone note. There was a moment of embarrassment as he waited for his change because we had already concluded the conversation. He mustered a faint smile.

“Okay,” he said as he closed his hand around the coins he was given. “See you around maybe!”

“Yeah, see you around,” I said. I bought some tobacco and stood in front of the newspaper stand pretending I was interested, because I didn't want to bump into him again outside. Yngve came to pay and did so with a thousand-krone note. I looked away as he drew it from his wallet, didn't want to show that I knew it was Dad's money, just mumbled something about going out, and headed for the door.

The smell of gasoline and concrete, in the half-light beneath a gas station roof, is there anything more charged with associations? Engines, speed, future.

But also hot dogs and CDs by Celine Dion and Eric Clapton.

I opened the car door and got in. Yngve came soon after, started up, and we left without a word.

Up and down the garden I walked, cutting the grass. The machine we had hired consisted of a device you strapped to your back and a rod with a rotating blade on the end. I felt like a kind of robot as I walked around, wearing large, yellow ear protectors and attached, as it were, to roaring, vibrating machinery and methodically cutting down all the sapling trees, all the flowers and all the grass I came across. I was crying nonstop. Sob after sob surged through me as I worked, I didn't fight it any longer, I just let the tears come. At twelve Yngve called me from the veranda, and I went in to eat with them, he had set out tea and rolls, as Grandma had always done, heated on a gridiron over a burner so that the usually soft crust went crispy and sprinkled crumbs as you sank your teeth in, but I wasn't hungry and soon left to continue my work. It was liberating to be outside and alone, satisfying too, because you could see the results so quickly. The sky had closed over, the grayish-white clouds lay like a lid beneath, with the effect that the dark surface of the sea contrasted with greater clarity, and the town, which under an open sky was a small, insignificant cluster of houses, a speck of dust on the ground, was
lent greater weight and solidity. This is where I was, this is what I saw. Mostly my gaze was focused on the rotating blade and the grass falling like soldiers being mown down, more yellow and gray than green, mixed with the red of foxtail grass and the yellow of black-eyed Susan, but occasionally I did raise my eyes to the massive, light-gray sky roof and the massive, dark-grey sea floor, to the jumble of hoods and hulls, masts and bows, containers and rusting junk by the quay, and to the town vibrating like a machine with its colors and activity, as tears flowed down my cheeks without cease, for Dad, who had grown up here, he was dead. Or perhaps that was not why I was crying, perhaps it was for quite different reasons, perhaps it was all the grief and misery I had accumulated over the last fifteen years that had now been released. It didn't matter, nothing mattered, I just walked around the garden cutting the grass that had grown too tall.

At a quarter past three I turned off the infernal machine, stowed it in the shed under the veranda, and went in for a shower before leaving. Went to get clothes, towel, and shampoo from the loft, laid them on the toilet seat, locked the door, undressed, clambered into the bathtub, adjusted the shower head away from me, and started the water. When it had run warm I twisted the shower head back and the hot water streamed down over me. Usually this was followed by a good feeling, but not this time, not here, so after I had hastily washed my hair and rinsed it, I turned off the water and got out, dried myself, and got dressed. Smoked a cigarette on the steps waiting for Yngve to come down. I was dreading the next stage, and as he unlocked the car, I could see from his face across the roof that he was too.

The chapel was adjacent to the gymnas I attended, located diagonally behind the large sports hall, and we drove the same route I had walked for the six months I had lived in Grandma's and Grandad's flat on Elvegata, but the sight of familiar places evoked nothing in me, and perhaps I was seeing them for the first time as they actually were, meaningless, devoid of atmosphere. A picket fence here, a white nineteenth-century house there, a few trees, some bushes, a bit of grass, a road barrier, a sign. Statutory cloud movement in the heavens.
Statutory human movement on earth. The wind lifting branches, making the thousands of leaves shake in patterns that are as unpredictable as they are inevitable.

“You can drive in here,” I said as we passed the school and saw the church behind the stone wall in front of us. “It's in there.”

“I've been here before,” Yngve declared.

“Really?” I said.

“A confirmation ceremony. You were there too, weren't you?”

“I don't remember one,” I said.

“But I do,” Yngve said, leaning forward to be able to see farther ahead.

“Is it behind the parking lot?”

“Has to be, I suppose,” I answered.

“We're early,” Yngve said. “It's only a quarter to.”

I scrambled out of the car and closed the door. A lawn mower came toward us on the other side of the stone wall, pushed by a man with a bare chest. After the machine had passed, no more than five meters away, I saw that he was wearing a silver chain around his neck with what looked like a razor blade suspended from it. To the east, above the church, the sky had darkened. Yngve lit a cigarette and took a few steps across the parking lot.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “We're here anyway.”

I glanced at the chapel. A lamp was lit over the entrance, barely visible in the daylight. A red car was parked nearby.

My heart beat faster.

“Yes we are,” I said.

Some birds circled high above us, under the sky, which was still a pale gray. The Dutch painter Ruisdael always painted birds high in his skies, to create depth, it was almost his signature, at any rate I had seen it in picture after picture in the book I had about him.

The undersides of the trees beyond were black.

“What's the time now?” I asked.

Yngve jerked his arm forward so that his jacket sleeve slid back and he could see his watch.

“Five to. Shall we go in?”

I nodded.

When we were ten meters from the chapel, the door opened. A young man in a dark suit looked at us. His face was tanned, his hair blond.

“Knausgaard?” he said.

We nodded.

We shook hands in turn. The skin around his nostrils was red and inflamed. The blue eyes absent.

“Shall we go in?” he suggested.

We nodded again. Entered a hall at first, where he stopped.

“It's in there,” he explained. “But before we go in I should perhaps prepare you a little. This is not a very pleasant sight, there was a lot of blood, you see, so … well, we did what we could, but it's still visible.”

The blood?

He looked at us.

I shivered.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes,” Yngve said.

He opened the door and we followed him into a larger room. Dad was lying on a bier in the middle. His eyes were closed, his features composed.

Oh God.

I stood beside Yngve, in front of my father. His cheeks were crimson, saturated with blood. It must have got caught in the pores when they tried to wipe it away. And the nose, it was broken. But even though I saw this, I still didn't see it, for all the detail disappeared into something other and something greater, into both the aura he gave off, which was death and which I had never been close to before, and also what he was to me, a father and all the life that lay therein.

It was only when I was back in Grandma's house, after seeing Yngve off for Stavanger, that the matter of the blood came back to me. How could it have ended like that? Grandma said she had found him dead in the chair, and on the basis of this information it would have been natural to assume his heart had given out while he was sitting there, probably while he was sleeping. The funeral director, however, had said there was not only blood but a great deal of it. And Dad's nose had been broken. So, some form of mortal combat must have taken place? Had he got up, in pain, and fallen against the chimney breast? To the floor? But if so, why wasn't there any blood on the wall or the floor? And how come Grandma hadn't said anything about the blood? Because
something
must have happened, he could
not
have died peacefully in his sleep, not with all that blood there. Had she washed it off and then forgotten to say? Why would she? She hadn't washed anything else, it didn't seem to be one of her drives. It was just as strange that I had forgotten so quickly. Or, perhaps not so strange, there had been so many other things I had to attend to. Nevertheless I would have to call Yngve as soon as I got back to Grandma's. We needed to get hold of the doctor who had organized the transfer of the body. He would be able to explain what had happened.

I walked as fast as I could up the gentle slope, along a green wire fence with a dense hedge on the other side, as though I could not arrive soon enough, while another impulse was also working inside me, to drag out the time I was on my own for as long as possible, maybe even find a café and read a newspaper. It was one thing to stay at Grandma's with Yngve and quite another to be there alone. Yngve knew how to handle her. But that light, bantering tone of theirs, which Erling and Gunnar also shared, had never been part of my nature, to put it mildly, and during the year at school in Kristiansand when I had spent a lot of time with them, since I lived nearby, my manner had seemed uncongenial to them, there had been something about me they didn't want to know, which suspicion was confirmed after a few months when one evening my mother told me Grandma had called to say I shouldn't go over there so often. I could handle most rejection, but not this,
they were my grandparents, and the fact that not even they wanted to have anything to do with me was so shattering that I couldn't restrain myself and burst into tears, right in front of my mother. She was upset, but what could she do? At the time I didn't understand any of this and simply believed they didn't like me; however, since then I have begun to sense what it was that made my presence uncongenial. I was unable to dissemble, unable to play a role, and the scholarly earnestness I brought into the house was impossible to keep at arm's length in the long run, sooner or later even they would have to engage with it, and the disequilibrium it led to, as their banter never demanded anything at all of me, that was what must have made them call my mother in the end. My presence always made demands on them, either in concrete ways, such as food, for if I went there after school and before soccer practice, I would otherwise have had to last until eight or nine at night without eating, or money because only the afternoon buses were free for schoolchildren, and often I could not pay for the ticket. As far as both food and money were concerned, they didn't mind, in essence, giving me either, but what provoked them was, I assume, the fact that I had to have both, and as such they had no choice: food and bus money were no longer gifts from their hearts but something else, and this other thing impinged on our relationship, created a knot between us, of which they did not approve. I couldn't understand it then, but I do now. My manner, my getting close to them with my life and thoughts, was part of the same pattern. This closeness they couldn't and presumably wouldn't give me; that too was something I took from them. The irony was that during these visits I always considered them, always said what I thought they wanted to hear; even the most personal things I said because I thought it would be good for them to hear, not because I needed to say them.