My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (35 page)

One room and a kitchen: that was our arena. We cooked there, we ate, slept, made love, chatted, watched TV, read books, quarrelled and received all our visitors there. It was small and cramped, but it was enough, we managed, we kept our heads above water. But if we wanted children, which we talked about non-stop, we would have to find ourselves a bigger flat. Linda’s mother had one in the city centre, it had only two rooms, but was more than eighty square metres, a football pitch in comparison with what we had now. She no longer used the flat, but she rented it out and said we could have it. Not quite like that, because it wasn’t legal – in Sweden rental contracts are personal and for life – but exchanges are possible: Linda’s mother would take Linda’s and we would take hers.

One day we went to see it.

It was the most bourgeois apartment I had ever seen. An enormous Russian-style stove from the previous century at one end of the room, with a massive marble front; another one, just as tall, slightly less massive, in the bedroom. White, beautifully carved panels on all the walls, stucco work on the ceilings, which were more than four metres tall. Fantastic herringbone parquet floors from the end of the nineteenth century. Her mother’s furniture was in the same style: heavy, artistic, late nineteenth-century.

‘Can we live here?’ I said as we walked round looking.

‘No, of course we can’t,’ Linda said. ‘Shouldn’t we swap with a flat in Skärholmen or somewhere like that? It’s dead here.’

Skärholmen was one of the immigrant-occupied satellite towns, we had been to a market there one Saturday and been struck by the life and the diversity.

‘I agree,’ I said. ‘It would be almost impossible to make this
ours
.’

At the same time the thought of moving in here had some appeal. Spacious, beautiful, central location. Did it matter that we would be lost in the rooms? Or perhaps we could fight them, control them, make the bourgeois style part of us?

I have always wanted the bourgeois lifestyle. Always wanted the properness. Always wanted the stiff forms and strict rules to be there to keep the inner in place, to regulate it, to mould it into something you can live with, not allow it to tear up your life again and again. But whenever I had been in a middle-class setting, for example with my father’s parents or with Tonje’s father, the opposite happened, it was as if it made all the otherness in me visible, all that did not fit, that fell outside the forms and structures, all that I hated about myself.

But here? Linda and I and a child? A new life, a new town, a new flat, a new happiness?

This notion overshadowed the sombre, lifeless first impression the flat had made, we warmed to it and became enthusiastic after making love on the bed; as we lay with a pillow beneath our heads afterwards, smoking, we were in no doubt that our new life would begin here.

At the end of April Geir returned from Iraq, we had dinner at an expensive American restaurant in the Old Town, he was so excited and full of life in a way I had never seen before, and it took several weeks for all his experiences, all the people he had met there, whom gradually I became utterly familiar with, to begin to fade so that other matters could occupy his mind and his conversation. At the beginning of May Linda and I moved our possessions across, with help from Anders, and when we had done that we cleaned the flat. We spent the afternoon and all the evening, and when we still hadn’t finished at eleven, Linda suddenly slumped back against the wall.

‘I’ve had it!’ she called. ‘I can’t do any more!’

‘One more hour,’ I said. ‘An hour and a half tops. You can manage that.’

She had tears in her eyes.

‘Let’s ring mummy,’ she said. ‘We don’t have to finish. She’ll drop by tomorrow and do it. It’s not a problem. I know it isn’t.’

‘Would you let someone clean your apartment?’ I asked. ‘Clean up your mess? You can’t shout for your mother every time you’ve got problems. You’re thirty years old for Christ’s sake!’

She sighed.

‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘I’m just worn out. And she
can
do it. It’s not a problem for her.’

‘But it is for me. And it should be for you too.’

She grabbed a cloth, got up and resumed wiping the bathroom door frame.

‘I can do the rest,’ I said. ‘Off you go, and I’ll follow you later.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I am. It’s fine.’

‘OK.’

She put on her outdoor clothes and went out in the darkness, I finished the cleaning and it was true what I had said: it didn’t matter to me. The next day we moved my things, that is to say all my books, which had now grown to number two and a half thousand titles, a fact which Anders and Geir, who were helping me with the move, cursed from the bottom of their hearts as we shifted the boxes from the lift into the flat. Geir compared it of course with unloading ammunition cases alongside the US Marines, an activity which for him was only a few weeks ago but for me was as alien as Wells Fargo stagecoaches or bison hunting. When the removal goods were stacked in two enormous piles in the two rooms I started painting the walls while Linda went to Norway to make a radio programme about 17 May. She was going to stay with my mother, whom she had only met once for a few hours in Stockholm. After she was on the train I rang my mother, something was bothering me, all the signs of Tonje’s presence, especially the photograph of the wedding, which was still hanging on the wall when I had been there for Christmas, and the wedding album. I didn’t want Linda to be subjected to that, I didn’t want her to feel she was on the periphery of my life, a replacement, and after a short preamble, catching up on news since we last met, I began to zero in on the topic. I knew it was stupid, and actually humiliating, for Linda, her and me, but I couldn’t stop myself, I couldn’t bear the thought that it might hurt Linda, so in the end I said it. Would she mind taking down the wedding photo, or at least putting it in a more discreet position? Not at all, in fact, it was already down. After all we were no longer married. What about the album then? I asked. You know, of the wedding. You couldn’t tuck it away somewhere, could you? Oh no, Karl Ove, mum said. That’s my photo album. It represents a phase of my life. I don’t want to hide it. Linda will be fine with it; she knows you’ve been married. You’re both adults. OK, I said, you’re right, it’s your photo album. I just don’t want to hurt her. You won’t, mum said, it’ll be fine.

It was a brave decision of Linda’s to stay with her, a reaching out of her hand, and it went fine, we spoke on the phone several times a day, she said she was stunned by the Vestland landscape, all the green and the blue and the white, all the high mountains and the deep fjords, almost completely deserted, the sun shining in the sky all the time, she felt transported into a dream-like state. She phoned from a little boarding house in Balestrand, described the view from her window, the lapping of the waves she could hear when she leaned out, and her voice was laden with the future. Whatever she said, it was us she was talking about, that was my interpretation. The world was so beautiful, that was about us, for we were in it together, indeed, it was almost as if we were the world. I told her how nice the large rooms were now that they were no longer grey but white. I was laden with the future as well. I was looking forward to her returning home to see what I had done, and I was looking forward to living here, in the city centre, and to the child we had decided we would have. We rang off, I went on painting, the following day was 17 May, and in the afternoon Espen and Eirik were going to drop by. They had been to a critics’ seminar at Biskops-Arnö. We went out to eat, I introduced them to Geir, he got on well with Eirik, in the sense that they talked without inhibition about a variety of topics, but Geir didn’t get on so well with Espen. Geir uttered a few truisms, Espen challenged them, and when Geir noticed he froze, and that was that. As usual I tried to mediate – give Espen something with one hand and Geir something with the other – but it was too late, they were never going to be able to talk, like or respect each other. I liked both of them, all three of them in fact, but my life had always been like this, there were heavy bulkheads between the various parts, and I behaved in such different ways with each of them that I felt caught when they came together and I couldn’t behave in one way or the other, but had to keep mixing the styles, in other words behave oddly or keep my mouth shut. I liked Espen a lot precisely because he was Espen, and Geir a lot precisely because he was Geir, and this character trait of mine, actually pleasantness, at least in my eyes, always brought with it a sense of hypocrisy.

Linda had been with my family all day, she told me the following morning; she and mum had gone to Dale where mum’s sister Kjellaug and her husband Magne lived on their farm high above the village and celebrated 17 May in traditional manner. She had been interviewing people, and from what she told me, she found the whole affair truly exotic. The speeches, the costumes, the band, the children’s procession. In the morning they had seen deer on the edge of the forest, and on the way home there were porpoises frolicking in the fjord. Mum had said that was a good omen, they brought luck.

There weren’t often porpoises in the fjord, I had seen them only a couple of times, the first time close up, in a boat with grandad, it had been misty and perfectly still, and then they swam up, at first it was only a noise, like the bow of a yacht ploughing through the water, and then there they were, smooth, glistening, dark grey bodies. Up and down, up and down, they swam. Grandma had said, like mum, that they brought good luck. Linda was excited but tired at the same time, which she had been throughout the trip, and going round all the hairpin bends had made her carsick, so she had gone to bed early, she told me. The previous evening she had been up with grandma’s youngest sister, Alvdis, ten years older than mum, and her husband Anfinn, a small but powerful man with a cheery disposition and a strong personality, whom Linda loved, and the feeling appeared to be mutual because he had taken out all his souvenirs from the time when he used to go whaling, and talked about his experiences from those days, probably further motivated by the microphone Linda held between them. They made pancakes with penguin eggs, he told her with a laugh, although she was a little concerned about the recording. Anfinn spoke in broad Jølster dialect, which would doubtless be incomprehensible to Swedes.

Espen left in the morning, but Eirik stayed and went to town while I put the final books on shelves and got rid of the last boxes, so that everything would be finished for when Linda came back the next morning. That evening we went out again and afterwards we sat at home drinking duty-free spirits through the night. Linda and I kept texting each other because she had felt sick, she had been tired, surely that could mean only one thing, couldn’t it? The texts became more passionate and loving the later it got, but in the end she wrote goodnight, my prince, perhaps tomorrow is going to be a big day!

When I went to bed at seven the clear flame of alcohol was burning in me so strongly that I could no longer see my surroundings, it was as if my inner self was everything, the way it was when I drank myself senseless. Yet I had enough presence of mind to set the clock for nine. I had to collect Linda off the train.

At nine I was still drunk. It was only by mobilising all the willpower I possessed that I managed to stagger to my feet. I dragged myself into the bathroom, showered, put on some clean clothes, shouted to Eirik that I was going, he was lying on the sofa fully dressed, and forced himself up and said he was going out for breakfast, I said we could meet at around twelve in the restaurant where we had been the previous day, he nodded, I swayed down the stairs and made it to the street, where the sun was glaringly bright and the tarmac smelt of spring.

I stopped on the way to buy a Coke, guzzled it down and bought another. Inspected my face in a shop window. It didn’t look good. Narrow red eyes. Tired features.

I would have given everything I had to postpone the meeting by three hours. But that was impossible, her train would be arriving at the station in thirteen minutes and I would have to get my skates on.

As she came down the platform she was happy and light of foot, she looked around for me with a smile on her lips, I waved, she waved back and walked towards me trundling her suitcase after her with one hand.

She looked at me.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘What’s up? Are you drunk?’ she asked.

I stepped forward and put my arms around her.

‘Hi,’ I repeated. ‘It got a bit late last night, but nothing special. I was at home with Eirik.’

‘You reek of alcohol,’ she said, wriggling free. ‘How could you do that to me? Today of all days?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But it’s no big deal, is it?’

She didn’t answer, began to walk. Didn’t say a word as we left the station. On the escalator up to Klarabergsviadukten she started to swear at me. She shook the door of the chemist at the top, but it was Sunday and closed. We continued down to the chemist on the other side of NK. She was furious the whole way. I walked beside her like a dog. The second chemist was open. I’m so bloody sick of you, she said. I don’t understand why I live with you. You only think about yourself. Doesn’t what we said yesterday mean anything? she said, and then it was her turn, she wanted a pregnancy test, was given one, paid for it, we left, up Regeringsgatan, she continued to hurl abuse at me, it came in one long stream, passers-by sent us looks, but she didn’t care, her fury, which I had always feared, had her in its grip. I felt like asking her to stop, asking her to be nice, I had apologised, and it wasn’t as though I had done anything, there was no connection between our texts and the fact that I had been drinking with a guest from Norway, nor between the fact that I had got drunk and the pregnancy test she was holding in her hand, but she didn’t see it like that, for her this was all the same, she was a romantic, she had a dream about the two of us, about love and our child, and my behaviour smashed that dream, or reminded her that it was a dream. I was a bad person, an irresponsible person, how could I even imagine becoming a father? How could I subject her to this? I walked beside her, burning with shame because people were looking at us, burning with guilt because I had been drinking and burning with terror because, in her unbridled rage, she went straight for me and the person I was. This was humiliating, but for as long as she was in the right, for as long as what she said was true – that this was the day we might find out if we were going to have a child and I had met her off the train drunk – I couldn’t ask her to stop or tell her to go to hell. She was right, or she was within her rights, I would have to bow my head and put up with this.