My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (36 page)

It struck me that Eirik might be close by and bowed my head even lower, this was almost the worst thought, that someone I knew would see me like this.

We went up the stairs, into the flat. Fresh coat of paint, everything in its place: this was our home.

She didn’t even grace it with a glance.

I stopped in the middle of the floor.

She had hit out at me in her anger, the way a boxer hits a punchbag. As though I were an object. As though I had no feelings, yes, as though I had no inner life, as though I were just this empty body that wandered around in her life.

I knew she was pregnant, of that I was absolutely certain, and I had been from the moment we made love. That’s it, I had thought, now we are going to have a baby.

And so it was.

Suddenly, while I was standing there everything inside me opened. My defences fell. I had no resistance to muster. I started crying. The type of crying where I lose control of everything and everything is distorted to the point of being grotesque.

Linda stopped, turned and looked at me.

She had never seen me cry before. I hadn’t done it since dad died, and that would soon be five years ago.

She looked terrified.

I turned away, I didn’t want her to see, that made the humiliation ten times worse, it wasn’t just that I wasn’t a person, I wasn’t a man either.

But turning away didn’t help. It didn’t help to cover my face with my hands. It didn’t help to walk towards the hall. It was so overwhelming, I was sobbing with such abandon, all the sluices were open.

‘But Karl Ove,’ she said behind me. ‘Nice Karl Ove. I don’t mean anything. I was just so disappointed. It doesn’t matter though. It doesn’t matter. Dear Karl Ove. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.’

Well, I didn’t want to either, of course. The last thing I wanted was her to see me crying.

But I couldn’t help myself.

She tried to put her arms around me, but I pushed her away. I tried to draw breath. It became a pathetic trembling sob.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.’

‘I’m sorry too,’ she said.

‘Well, here we are again,’ I said, smiling through the tears.

Her eyes were also full of tears, and she was smiling as well.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

I went to the bathroom, another sob shook me, another tremble as I took a deep breath, but then, after I had washed my face with cold water a few times, it relented.

Linda was still standing in the hall when I came out.

‘Is that better?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That was plain ridiculous. It must be the drinking from last night. Suddenly my defences were gone. Everything seemed so desperate.’

‘It doesn’t matter that you cried,’ she said.

‘Not to you it doesn’t, no. But I don’t like it. I’d rather you hadn’t seen. But you did. Now you know. That’s the way I am.’

‘Yes, you’re a good person.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘That’s enough. Let’s move on. What do you think of the flat?’

She smiled.

‘Fantastic.’

‘Good.’

We hugged each other.

‘Linda,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you going to check?’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK. Just hold me a bit longer.’

I did.

‘Now?’ I asked.

She laughed.

‘OK.’

Then she went into the bathroom and came out again with the white test stick in her hand.

‘It’ll take a few more minutes,’ she said.

‘What do you reckon?’

‘I don’t know.’

She went into the kitchen and I followed. She stared at the white stick.

‘Anything happening?’

‘No, nothing. Oh, perhaps it’s nothing. I was so sure there was something.’

‘Well, there have been signs. You’ve been sick. Tired. How many more do you need?’

‘One.’

‘Look there. That’s blue, isn’t it?’

She didn’t say anything.

Then she looked up at me. Her eyes were dark and serious, like an animal’s.

‘Yes, it is.’

We couldn’t wait the three obligatory months before we told anyone. Three weeks later Linda called her mother, who burst into tears of joy at the other end. My mother’s reaction was more reserved, she said it was nice, lovely, but a little later it came out, she also wondered if we were ready for it. Linda had her training, I had my writing. Time will tell, I said, we’ll find out in January. I knew mum always was slow to assimilate change, she had to give it some thought first, and then she moved and adapted to the new situation. Yngve, whom I called as soon as mum had rung off, said, Oh, that’s good news. Yes, I said, standing and smoking in the backyard. When’s it due? Yngve asked. In January, I said. Congratulations, he said. Thanks, I replied. Karl Ove, he said, I’m a bit caught up here actually, I’m at a football match with Ylva. Can we talk later? Course, I said, and we rang off.

I lit another cigarette and noticed I was not completely satisfied with their reactions. We were going to have a BABY, for Christ’s sake! This was an ENORMOUS event!

But something had happened when I moved to Sweden. We had as much contact as before, it wasn’t that, yet something was different, and I pondered on whether the change had taken place in me or them. I was further away from them, and my life, so fundamentally changed from one moment to the next, with new places, new people and new emotions, I couldn’t communicate this with the same natural ease as before, when we had lived in the same environment, in the continuity that began in Tybakken and continued first with Tveit and then Bergen.

No, I was probably reading too much into it, I thought. Yngve’s reaction had not been so different from the one seven years earlier when I had rung to tell him that the novel I was writing had been accepted. Is that right? had been his laconic response. Mm, that’s good. For me it had been the greatest thing that had ever happened, I had been stunned by the news and assumed everyone in my circle would be as well.

Naturally enough, it hadn’t been like that.

And it is never easy to confront life-changing news, especially when you are deeply embroiled in the everyday and the banal, which we always are. They absorb almost everything, make almost everything small, apart from the few events that are so immense they lay waste to all the everyday trivia around you. Big news is like that and it is not possible to live inside it.

I stubbed out my cigarette and went upstairs to Linda, who looked at me with raised eyebrows as I entered.

‘What did they say?’ she asked.

‘They were incredibly happy,’ I said. ‘Best wishes and congratul-ations.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Mummy was out of herself with joy. However, she gets excited about absolutely everything.’

Yngve rang later that evening; we could have all the baby clothes and gear we wanted. Buggy, changing mat, rompers, bodices, bibs, pants, sweaters and shoes, they had kept the lot. Linda was touched when I passed that on, and I laughed at her, her sensitivities had changed over the last few weeks and reacted to the strangest things. She laughed as well. Her mother often dropped by, bringing the most sensational meals, which we put in the freezer, several bin bags of baby clothes she had been given by her partner’s children and boxes of toys. She bought us a washing machine; Vidar, her partner, plumbed it in.

Linda continued with her course, I continued in my collective office at the tower, started reading the Bible, found a Catholic bookshop and bought all the angel-related literature I could get my hands on, read Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, Basilius and Hieronymus, Hobbes and Burton. I bought Spengler and a biography of Isaac Newton, reference works about the Enlightenment and Baroque periods, which lay in piles around where I was writing and trying to get all these different systems and schools of thought to tie up in some way or other, or to push something, I didn’t know what, in the same direction.

Linda was happy, but there were always these feelings of abyss inside her which made her afraid of everything. Would she be able to take care of the baby when it came? And would it come? She could lose it – that happened – and nothing I said or did could stem the fear that was roaming loose inside her, out of her control, but fortunately that too passed.

At the end of June we went on holiday to Norway, first of all to Tromøya, where we spent a couple of days, then to Espen and Anne’s in Larkollen, who had lent us a cabin to stay in, and finally to mum’s in Jølster. Neither of us had a driving licence, so I dragged our cases round onto planes, trains, buses and taxis with Linda, who couldn’t carry anything heavier than an apple, by my side. Arvid met us in Arendal, he was a few years older than me, from Tromøya, and initially he was one of Yngve’s friends, but we saw quite a bit of one another in Bergen, where he had also studied, and not so many months ago he had visited us in Stockholm. Now he wanted to drive us back to his place. I knew Linda was tired and wanted to go to the cabin we had rented, and to get the point across I told Arvid straight away Linda was expecting a baby.

This came as a bolt from the blue in the sunlit Arendal street.

‘Oh, congratulations!’ Arvid said.

‘So it would be best if we went to the cabin first, to have a rest . . .’

‘We can arrange that,’ Arvid said. ‘I’ll drive you there. Then I can pick you up by boat later.’

It was a log cabin, low quality, I regretted it the moment I saw it. The idea had been I would show her where I came from. That was nice for me. This was not.

She slept for a couple of hours, we walked out on the mole, and Arvid arrived, skimming across the water in his boat. We would go to the island of Hisøya, where Arvid lived. Passed small white houses on rocks, reddish in the afternoon sun, surrounded by green trees, in the midst of the blue arch of sea and sky, and I thought to myself, my God, this is wonderful here. And then the wind that came with the sunset every afternoon. It made the landscape alien, I could see that now, and I had seen it when I was growing up here. Alien because what unified all the elements of the landscape fell apart like a rock struck by a sledgehammer when the wind gusted in.

We went ashore, up to the house and sat around a table in the garden. Linda was shut inside herself in a way that appeared unfriendly, and I suffered, we sat there with his family and friends, it was the first time they had met her, of course I wanted to show them what a wonderful partner I had, and then she was so unwilling. I held her arm under the table and squeezed it. She looked at me without a smile. I felt like shouting she should pull herself together. I knew how charming she could be, how talented she was at exactly this, sitting around a table with other people and chatting, telling stories and laughing. On the other hand, I remembered how I used to be when I was with some of Linda’s friends I didn’t know so well. Silent, stiff and shy, someone who could go through an entire dinner without saying more than what was absolutely necessary.

What was she thinking?

What had put her out?

Arvid? The slightly boastful manner that could occasionally steal over him?

Anna?

Atle?

Or was it me?

Had I said something during the afternoon?

Or was it inside her? Something which had nothing to do with this at all?

After eating we went for a boat ride, around Hisøya and out to Mærdø, and as we came into open water Arvid hit the accelerator. The swift slim boat skimmed across the surface, the waves were crashing into and bouncing off the bows. Linda’s face was white, she was three months pregnant, perhaps these violent movements would be enough to cause her to lose the baby, that was what she was thinking, I could see.

‘Tell him to slow down!’ she hissed. ‘This is dangerous for me!’

I looked at Arvid, who sat behind the wheel with a smile on his face, his eyes scrunched up against the fresh salty air streaming towards us. I didn’t think this was dangerous and could not bring myself to interfere and tell Arvid to slow down, it was too stupid. At the same time Linda sat there burning with fear and anger. For her sake surely I could step in, even if I made a fool of myself?

‘It’s fine,’ I said to Linda. ‘It’s not dangerous.’

‘Karl Ove!’ she hissed. ‘Tell him to slow down. This is extremely dangerous. Don’t you understand?’

I straightened up and moved closer to Arvid. The island of Mærdø was approaching at a furious pace. He looked at me and smiled.

‘She runs well, doesn’t she.’

I nodded and smiled back. I was on the point of asking him to slow down, but I held back, sat down beside Linda.

‘It’s not dangerous,’ I said.

She said nothing, sat there with her arms wrapped around her, face tense and white.

We strolled around Mærdø, a rug was spread out on a field, coffee was drunk, biscuits were eaten and then we went back to the boat. On the way along the quay I sidled up to Arvid.

‘Linda was a bit scared when you throttled up. She’s pregnant, you know, so the movements . . . well, you understand. Could you take it a bit easier going back?’

‘No problem,’ he said.

He piloted the boat all the way to Hove at a snail’s pace. I wondered if he was trying to tell us something or was being especially considerate. Whatever it was, it was embarrassing. Both the fact that I had spoken to him and that I hadn’t been able to intervene on the way there. Surely it should have been the easiest thing in the world to do, shouldn’t it, to tell someone to slow down, my girlfriend was pregnant?

Especially because Linda’s fears and unease came from a different source than most people’s. It was barely three years since she had been discharged after suffering from manic depression for two years. Having a baby after that kind of experience was not without its risks. She had no idea how she would react. Perhaps she would be plunged into a further bout of manic depression? Maybe so serious that she would be readmitted to hospital. And what would happen to the child then? However, she was out of it and anchored in the world in quite a different way from how she had been before the breakdown and, having seen her every day for almost a year, I knew she would be fine. I viewed what had happened as a crisis. It had been lengthy and all-embracing, but it was over. She was healthy; the mood swings that still existed in her life were all within normal behaviour.