My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (26 page)

I was aware of her the whole time.

What she said, how she spoke, but most of all her presence, her body in the room.

Why I don’t know. Perhaps the state I was in made me more receptive to what she had or the person she was.

She introduced herself. Linda Boström. Her debut had been a collection of poems called
Gör mig behaglig för såret
, she lived in Stockholm and was twenty-five years old.

The course lasted five days. I circled round her the whole time. In the evenings I got drunk, as drunk as I could, I hardly slept. One night I followed Arve into a crypt-like cellar, down there he danced round and round, it was impossible to communicate with him, and when we left and I realised he was beyond reach I cried. He saw. You’re crying, he said. Yes, I said. But you’ll have forgotten by tomorrow. One night I didn’t sleep a wink. When the last ones left for bed at five, I went out for a long walk in the forest, the sun was up, I saw deer leaping between the old deciduous trees and was happy in a mysterious way I didn’t recognise. The writing I did during the course was unusually good, it was as if I was in touch with a spring, something all of my own and yet foreign to me gushed up, clear and fresh. Or perhaps it was just the euphoria that caused me to misinterpret. We had classes together, I sat beside Linda, she asked me if I remembered the scene in
Blade Runner
where the light through the window fades. I said I did, and that the moment when the owl turns is the most beautiful in the whole film. She looked at me. A questioning look, not acknowledgement. The course directors went through the texts we had written. They came to mine. Lemhagen started to talk about it, and it was as though what he said elevated itself higher and higher, I had never heard anyone talk about a text in that way, elevate what was actually the bare essence, and he didn’t deal with characters or themes or what lay on the surface, he dealt with the metaphors and the unseen function they performed, bringing everything together, uniting them in an almost organic fashion. I had never known that was what I did, but now he said it I knew, and for me it was trees and leaves, grass and clouds and a glowing sun, that was all, I understood everything in the light of this, also Lemhagen’s interpretation.

He looked at me.

‘What this reminds me of, above all else, is Tor Ulven’s prose. Are you familiar with his work, Karl Ove?’

I nodded and looked down.

No one was allowed to see the blood foaming in my veins, trumpets blaring and knights galloping in my insides. Tor Ulven, that was the summit.

Oh, but I knew he was mistaken, he was exaggerating, he was Swedish and probably didn’t understand the finer points of the Norwegian language very well. But the mere mention of Ulven’s name . . .
Wasn’t
I a pulp fiction writer?
Was
there anything in my writing that had
resonances
of Tor Ulven?

My blood roared, my elation rushed screaming along my nerve channels.

I looked down, wishing intensely that he would stop and go on to the next person, and when he did I slumped back with relief.

That night all the drinking continued in my room, Linda said we could smoke if we took down the fire alarm, I did, we drank, I played Wilco’s
Summerteeth
, she didn’t seem to be interested in it, from what I could see, I showed her a Roman cookery book I had bought on an excursion to Uppsala the day before, so wonderful to cook the way the Romans did, I thought, but she didn’t agree, quite the contrary, she turned abruptly away from me and her eyes sought something else. People began to drift off to their rooms, I hoped Linda would not follow suit, but then she was gone too, and I went into the forest again, roamed around until seven, and when I returned an angry man came running after me. ‘Knausgaard, are you Knausgaard?’ he shouted. ‘Yes, I am,’ I said. He stopped in front of me and began to tear me off a strip. Fire alarm, dangerous, irresponsible, he yelled. I said yes, I’m sorry, wasn’t thinking, apologies. He stood glowering at me with fury in his eyes, I swayed to and fro, I couldn’t care less, went to my room, slept for two hours. When I appeared for breakfast Lemhagen came over to me, he apologised profusely for what had happened, the caretaker had gone too far, it wouldn’t happen again.

I understood nothing. Was
he
apologising to me?

What had happened fitted all too well, in my view, with the person I had become in the course of these days: a sixteen-year-old. My feelings were the feelings of a sixteen-year-old, my actions the actions of a sixteen-year-old. All of a sudden I was as unsure of myself as I had ever been. Everyone assembled in one room, we were going to read our texts, one after the other, the idea being that all of us together would form a choir with individual voices chiming in. Lemhagen pointed to someone; he started reading. Then he pointed to me. I looked at him, disconcerted.

‘Shall I read now? While he’s reading?’ I asked.

Everyone laughed. I blushed scarlet. But as we got going I could hear how good my text was, so much better than the others, rooted in something quite different and more vital.

When we were outside on the gravel talking, I said that to Arve.

He just smiled, said nothing.

Every evening two or three people read to the others. I looked forward to my turn, Linda would be there, I would show her who I was. I read well, I usually got applause. But not this time, from the very first sentence I began to doubt the text, it was ridiculous and I felt myself becoming smaller and smaller, until, flushed with shame, I sat down. Then it was Arve’s turn.

Something happened when he read. He had us all spellbound. He was a magician.

‘That was in
cred
ible!’ Linda said to me after he had finished.

I nodded and smiled.

‘Yes, he really is good.’

Furious and desperate, I left, got a beer and sat down on the staircase outside the room. I thought, Linda, now leave the room and come here. Do you hear me! Leave and come here. Follow me. If you do that, if you come here now, we belong together. And that’s it.

I stared at the door.

It opened.

It was Linda!

My heart pounded.

It was Linda! It was Linda!

She walked across the square, and I trembled with happiness.

Then she turned off and walked towards the other building, raising her hand in greeting to me.

The next day everyone went for a walk in the forest, and I was beside Linda, first in the line, and those behind us fell away and I was alone with her in the forest. She twisted a blade of grass and occasionally glanced at me with a smile. I was unable to say anything. Nothing. I looked down, I looked through the forest, I looked at her.

Her eyes sparkled. There was nothing of the dark deep-set, alluring eyes now, she was all lightness and coquettishness, twisting and twirling the grass, smiling, looking at me, looking down.

What was this?

What did it mean?

I asked if we should exchange books, she said, yes, of course. She came over while I lay on the grass peering up at the clouds, passed me her book.
Biskops-Arnö, 01.07.99, To Karl Ove
, it said on the title page. I ran in and fetched a copy of mine, already dedicated, and passed it to her. After she had gone I went to my room and settled down to read. I ached with desire for her as I was reading, every word came from her, was her.

In the midst of all this, my unbridled yearning for her and my descent into teenager-hood, I saw everything differently. All the greenery that grew, I saw how wild and chaotic it was, yet how plain and clear the shapes were, and it evoked a sense of ecstasy in me, the old oak trees, the wind blowing through the foliage, the sun, the endless blue sky.

I didn’t sleep, barely ate, and I drank every night, nonetheless I was not tired or hungry and had no difficulty participating in the course. The conversation with Arve continued unabated, that is I continued to talk about myself to him, and as time progressed, more and more about Linda. He saw me, and he saw the others on the course, and then we talked about literature. My way of talking changed, I became freer and freer in my thoughts the more I was with him, and I considered it a gift. Between the lessons we lay on the lawn outside the buildings and chatted, then the others were there, and I became jealous of him, I saw the impact his words had on others, and I longed to have the same impact myself.

One evening, sitting on the grass drinking and chatting with everyone, he told us about an interview he’d had with Svein Jarvoll for
Vagant
, how everything had opened the evening they spoke, how precise everything that was said had been and how in some way it had opened the way for something extraordinary.

I talked about an interview I’d done with Rune Christiansen for
Vagant
in which the same thing had happened, I had been nervous before I met him, I knew nothing about poetry, but then there had been great openness, what it hadn’t been possible to talk about, we were suddenly talking about. It was a really good interview, I concluded.

Arve laughed.

He could disqualify everything I said simply by laughing. Everyone present knew Arve had right on his side, all the authority was gathered there, in the hypnotic focal point formed by his face on that evening. Linda was with us, she saw that too.

Arve touched on boxing, Mike Tyson, his last fight when he bit off Holyfield’s ear.

I said it wasn’t so hard to understand, Tyson needed a way out, he knew he was going to lose, so he bit off an ear, it brought the fight to an end without him losing face. Arve laughed again and said he doubted that. That would have been a rational act. But there wasn’t a single ounce of rationality in Tyson. And then he discussed the scene in a way that made me think about
Apocalypse Now,
where they cut off the bull’s head. The darkness and the blood and the trance. Perhaps my thoughts were led in this direction because earlier in the day Arve had been talking about the determination the Vietnamese showed when they chopped off the arms of children who had been vaccinated, how this was impossible to confront or could only be confronted with a determination that was willing to go to the same lengths.

The next day I gathered a few of us together to play football, Ingmar Lemhagen found us a ball, we played for an hour, afterwards I sat down on the grass beside Linda with a Coke in my hand, and she said I had a footballer’s gait. She had a brother who played football and hockey, and we had more or less the same way of standing and walking. But Arve, she said, have you seen how he walks? No, I said. He walks like a ballet dancer, she said. Light and ethereal. Haven’t you noticed? No, I said, and smiled at her. She responded with a fleeting smile and got up. I lay full-length and stared up at the white clouds drifting slowly past, far into the blue expanse of sky.

After dinner I went for another long walk in the forest. Stopped in front of an oak and stared up into the foliage for a long time. Pulled off an acorn and walked on, turning it round and round in my hands, studying it from all angles. All the small, regular patterns in the tiny, gnarled basket-like section in which the nut rested. Along the smooth surface, the lighter stripes in the dark green. The perfect form. Could be an airship, could be an egg. It’s oval, I mused with a smile. All the leaves were identical, they were spat out every spring, in grotesque quantities, the trees were factories, producing beautiful and intricately patterned leaves from sunlight and water. Once the thought was there the monotony was almost unbearable to think about. All this came from some texts I had read by Francis Ponge early in the summer – they had been recommended to me by Rune Christiansen – and his view had changed trees and leaves for me for ever. They surged forth from a well, the well of life, which was inexhaustible.

Oh, the instinctiveness of it.

It was frightening to walk there, surrounded by the blind potency of everything that grew, under the light of the sun which shone and shone, also blindly.

It was a strident tone that resonated in me. At the same time there was another tone in me, one of yearning, and this yearning no longer had an abstract goal, as had been the case over recent years, no, this was palpable and specific, she was moving around below, only a few kilometres away, at this very moment.

What sort of madness was this? I thought as I walked. I was married, we were fine, soon we would be buying a flat together. Then I came here and wanted to wreck everything?

I did.

I wandered beneath the sun-dappled shade from the trees, surrounded by the warm fragrances of the forest, thinking that I was in the middle of my life. Not life as an age, not halfway along life’s path, but
in the middle of my existence
.

My heart trembled.

The last night came. We were assembled in the largest room, wine and beer had been set out, it was a kind of end-of-course party. I suddenly found myself beside Linda, she was opening a bottle of wine and placed her hand over mine, gently stroking it while looking into my eyes. It was obvious, it was decided, she wanted me. I thought about that for the rest of the evening as I slowly drank myself more and more senseless. I was getting together with Linda. Didn’t need to return to Bergen, could just leave everything there and stay here with her.

At three in the morning, when I was as drunk as I had seldom been, I left with her. I said there was something I had to tell her. And then I told her. Exactly what I felt and what I had planned.

She said, ‘I like you well enough. You’re a great guy. But I’m not interested in you. I’m sorry. But your friend, he’s really fantastic. I’m interested in him. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

I turned and crossed the square, aware that behind me she was walking in the opposite direction, back to the party. A crowd of people had gathered around the front door beneath the trees. Arve wasn’t there, so I went back, found him, told him what Linda had said to me, that she was interested in him, now they could be together. But I’m not interested in her, you see, he said. I’ve
got
a wonderful girlfriend. Shame for you, though, he said, I said it wasn’t a shame for me, and crossed the square again, as though in a tunnel where nothing existed except myself, passed the crowd standing outside the house, through the hallway and into my room where the screen of my computer was lit. I pulled out the plug, switched it off, went into the bathroom, grabbed the glass on the sink and hurled it at the wall with all the strength I could muster. I waited to hear if there was any reaction. Then I took the biggest shard I could find and started cutting my face. I did it methodically, making the cuts as deep as I could, and covered my whole face. The chin, cheeks, forehead, nose, underneath the chin. At regular intervals I wiped away the blood with a towel. Kept cutting. Wiped the blood away. By the time I was satisfied with my handiwork there was hardly room for one more cut, and I went to bed.