My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (32 page)

‘I think we’re fine,’ she said.

‘Yes, we are fine,’ I said. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘But I’m not sure I agree.’

From London I rang her twice every day, and spent almost all my money on a present for her, it was her thirtieth a few weeks later. At the same time I realised, presumably because I saw our Stockholm life from a distance for the first time, that I would have to knuckle down when I got home, start working harder, for not only had the whole of the long summer disappeared in happiness, and inner and outer extravagance, but September had also passed without my having achieved anything. It was four years since I had made my debut, and a second book was nowhere in sight, apart from the 800 pages with a variety of beginnings I had accumulated since then. I had written my debut novel at night, got up at eight in the evening and worked right through until the next morning, and the freedom that lay in it, in the space the night opened, was perhaps what was necessary to find a way into something new. I had been close in recent weeks in Bergen and the first few in Stockholm, with the story that had aroused my interest about a father who went crabbing one summer’s night with his two sons, one obviously me, I found a dead seagull I showed dad, he told me seagulls had once been angels, and we left in the boat with live crabs crawling inside a bucket on the deck. Geir Gulliksen had said, ‘There’s your opening,’ and he had been right, but I didn’t know where it would lead, and I had been grappling with it for the last few months. I had written about a woman in a maternity ward in the 1940s, the child she gave birth to was Henrik Vankel’s father, and the house waiting for her return with the baby was originally an old hovel, full of bottles, which they had demolished to build a new house. But the story wasn’t genuine, everything sounded false, I was going nowhere. So I tried another tack, in the same house, where two brothers are asleep at night, their father is dead, one lies looking at the other sleeping. That sounded equally false, and my despair grew, would I ever be able to write another novel?

The first Monday after I had returned from London I told Linda we couldn’t meet the next evening because I had to work through the night. Yes, fine, no problem. At nine she texted me, I answered, she sent another message, she was out with Cora, they were at a place nearby having a beer, I texted, have a good time, said I loved her, a couple more texts went to and fro, then all went quiet and I thought she had gone back to her place. But she hadn’t, at around twelve she knocked on my door.

‘Are you here?’ I said. ‘I told you I was going to write.’

‘Yes, but your texts were so warm and loving. I thought you would want me to come.’

‘I have to work,’ I said. ‘I’m serious.’

‘I understand,’ she said, already out of her jacket and shoes. ‘But can’t I sleep here while you’re working?’

‘You know I won’t be able to. I can’t even write with a cat in the room.’

‘You’ve never tried with me in the room. I may have a good effect.’

Even though I was angry I couldn’t bring myself to say no. I had no right to be because what I was implying was that the miserable manuscript I was writing was more important than her. At that moment it was, but I couldn’t say that.

‘OK,’ I said.

We drank tea and smoked in front of the open window, then she undressed and went to bed. The room was small, the desk was barely a metre away, it was impossible to concentrate with her in the room, and the fact that she had come despite knowing I didn’t want her to gave me a feeling of suffocation. But I didn’t want to go to bed either, to let her win, so after half an hour I got up and told her I was going out. This was a demonstration, it was my way of saying I couldn’t put up with this, and so I went into the misty streets of Söder, bought a grilled sausage at a petrol station, sat in the park below the flat and smoked five cigarettes in quick succession while surveying the glittering town beneath me and wondering what the hell was going on. How the hell had I ended up in this situation?

The next night I worked through till the morning, slept all day, spent a couple of hours at hers, came back and wrote all night, slept and was woken by Linda in the afternoon, she wanted to speak. We went for a walk.

‘Don’t you want to be with me any more?’ she asked.

‘Yes, of course I do,’ I said.

‘But we aren’t together. We don’t see each other.’

‘Yes, but I have to work. Surely you understand that.’

‘Well, not that you have to work at night. I love you, so I want to be with you.’

‘But I have to work,’ I repeated.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘If you keep doing this, it’s over.’

‘You can’t mean that.’

She eyed me.

‘I damn well do. Just you try me.’

‘You can’t control me like that,’ I said.

‘I’m not controlling you. It’s a reasonable request. We’re in a relationship, and I don’t want to be on my own the whole time.’

‘The whole time?’

‘Yes. I’ll leave you if you don’t stop.’

I sighed.

‘It’s not that bloody important,’ I said. ‘I’ll stop.’

‘Fine,’ she said.

I mentioned this on the telephone to Geir next day, he said, Shit, man, are you out of your mind? You’re a writer, for Christ’s sake! You can’t let someone tell you what to do! No, I said, but that’s not exactly what this is about. It’s what it costs. What what costs? he asked. The relationship, I said. I don’t understand, he said. This is where you have to be hard. You can compromise on anything else, but not this. But I’m soft, as you know, I said. Tall and soft, he said with a laugh. But it’s your life.

September passed, the leaves on the trees turned yellow, turned red and fell off. The blue of the sky deepened, the sun sank, the air was clear and cold. In mid-October Linda gathered all her friends at an Italian restaurant in Söder. She was thirty and filled with an inner light that made her beam and me proud:
I
was in a relationship with her. Proud and grateful, those were my feelings. The town sparkled around us as we walked home, Linda in the white jacket I had given her as a present that morning, and walking there, hand in hand with her, in the midst of this beautiful and, for me, still foreign town, sent wave after wave of pleasure through me. We were still full of ardour and desire, for our lives had turned, not just on the breath of a passing wind, but fundamentally. We planned to have children. We had no sense of anything awaiting us except happiness. At least I didn’t. I never give a thought to issues which are only about life, the way it is lived, inside me and around me and which are not about philosophy, literature, art or politics. I feel, and my feelings determine my actions. The same applies to Linda, perhaps even more so.

At this time I was asked if I would teach at the writers’ school in Bø, this was not my normal fare, but Thure Erik Lund was going to hold a two-week course and had been asked to choose a writer he would like to work with. Linda considered two weeks a long time, she didn’t want me to be away from her for so long, and I thought, yes, it
is
a long time, she
can’t
stay here in Stockholm while I am in Norway. Yet I wanted to accept the offer. My writing wasn’t making progress, I needed to do something different, Thure Erik was one of the writers I admired most. I mentioned this to my mother on the telephone one night, and she said we didn’t have any children, why couldn’t she be alone for a couple of weeks? It’s your job, she said. And she was right. A little step to the side, and everything would be fine. But I hardly ever took that step, Linda and I lived so close together in more ways than one: Linda’s flat in Zinkensdamm was dark and cramped, one and a half rooms was all we had, and it was as if life was slowly swallowing us up. The previous openness had closed in, our lives had been as one for so long they were beginning to stiffen and chafe against each other. There were little episodes, insignificant in themselves, but together they formed a pattern, a new system beginning to settle.

Late one evening while I was accompanying her to drama practice she suddenly turned to me at a petrol station by Slussen, and gave me an earful over some tiny matter, told me to go to hell, I asked her what was up, she didn’t answer and was already ten metres ahead of me. I followed.

One afternoon we were at the food hall, Saluhallen, in Hötorget, to do some shopping for a meal we were going to have with two of her friends, Gilda and Kettil, and I suggested making pancakes. She eyed me with obvious scorn. Pancakes are for children, she said. We’re not having a children’s party. OK, I said, let’s call them crêpes then. Is that good enough for you? She turned her back on me.

We walked round this beautiful town at weekends, everything was great, but then all of a sudden it wasn’t great any more, a darkness opened inside her, and I didn’t know what to do. For the first time since I had come to Stockholm the feeling that I was on my own reappeared.

She fell into a pit that autumn. And she reached out for me. I didn’t understand what was happening. But it was so claustrophobic that I turned away from her, tried to maintain a distance, which she tried to close.

I went to Venice, wrote in a flat my publishing house had at its disposal, Linda was supposed to follow and stay for just under a week, then I would work for a few more days and return. She was so black, she was so heavy, kept saying I didn’t love her, I didn’t really love her, I didn’t want her, I didn’t really want her, this wasn’t working, it would never work, I didn’t want it to, I didn’t want her.

‘But I do!’ I said as we walked in the autumn chill in Murano with eyes hidden behind sunglasses. However, when she said I didn’t really love her, I didn’t really want to be with her, I wanted to be alone all the time, on my own, it became a little truer.

Where did her despair come from?

Had I brought it with me?

Was
I cold?

Did
I only think of myself?

I no longer knew what it would be like when my working day was over and I went to her place. Would she be happy, would it be a nice evening? Would she be angry about something, if for example we no longer made love every night, and so I didn’t love her as much as before? Would we sit in bed watching TV? Go for a walk to Långholmen? And once there, would I be devoured by her demands to have all of me, making me keep her at a distance and have thoughts shooting to and fro in my brain that this had to come to an end, it wasn’t working, thus rendering any conversation or attempts to get closer impossible, which of course she noticed and took as proof of her main thesis, that I didn’t want her?

Or would we simply have a good time together?

I became more and more closed, and the more closed I became the more she attacked me. And the more she attacked me, the more aware I became of her mood swings. Like a meteorologist of the mind I followed her, not so much consciously as with my emotions, which, almost uncannily fine-tuned, tracked her various moods. If she was angry her presence was all that existed in me. It was like having a bloody great dog in the room growling, and I had to take care of it. Sometimes, when we were sitting and chatting, I could feel her strength, the depth of her experience, and I felt inferior. Sometimes when she approached me and I held her, or when I lay embracing her, or when we chatted and she was all insecurity and unease, I felt so much stronger that everything else became irrelevant. These fluctuations, without anything to hold on to, and the constant threat of some kind of outburst, followed by the unfailing reconciliation and smoothing of feathers, continued unabated, there was no let-up, and the feeling that I was alone, also with her, grew stronger and stronger.

In the short time we had known each other we had never done anything half-heartedly, and this was no exception.

One evening we’d had a row and after we had made up, we began to talk about children. We had decided to have a child while Linda was at the Dramatiska Institut, she could drop out for six months, and then I could take over while she finished her training. For it to work she would have to stop the medication, so she had to set this up; the doctors were reluctant, but the therapist supported her and, when it came to the crunch, the final decision was hers.

We discussed this nearly every day.

Now I said perhaps we should postpone it.

Apart from the light from the television, which was on in the corner, with the sound turned down, the flat was in total darkness. The autumnal darkness was like an ocean outside the windows.

‘Perhaps we should put it off for a while,’ I said.

‘What did you say?’ Linda said, staring at me.

‘We can wait a bit, see how things go. You can finish your course . . .’

She got up and slapped my face with the palm of her hand as hard as she could.

‘Never!’ she shouted.

‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Have you gone mad?
Hitting me like that!
’

My cheek stung. She had hit me really hard.

‘I’m off,’ I said. ‘And I’m never coming back. So you can forget that.’

I turned and went into the hall, took my coat from the hook.

Behind me she was crying, bitter tears.

‘Don’t go, Karl Ove,’ she said. ‘Don’t leave me now.’

I turned.

‘Do you think you can do as you like? Is that what you think?’

‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘But stay. Just tonight.’

I stood motionless in the darkness by the door and looked at her, vacillating.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay here tonight. But then I’m going.’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

At seven next morning I woke and left the flat without breakfast, went to my earlier flat, which I still had. Took a cup of coffee with me to the roof terrace, sat smoking and looking out over the town wondering what to do next.

I couldn’t stay with her. It was impossible.

I rang Geir on my mobile, did he feel like a trip to Djurgården, it was quite important, I had to talk to someone. Yes, he did, just had to finish off a few jobs first, we could meet by the bridge outside the Nordic Museum, and then walk right to the end, where there was a restaurant in which we could have lunch. And that was what we did, we walked under the masonry-grey sky, between the leafless trees, on a path gaily strewn with yellow, red and brown leaves. I said nothing about what had happened, it was too humiliating, I couldn’t tell anyone she had slapped me because what would that make me? I said only that we had quarrelled and that I didn’t know what to do any more. He said I should listen to my heart. I said I didn’t know what I felt. He said he was sure I did.