My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (71 page)

‘I don’t quite know how to say this,’ I said as we approached the crossroads and started to walk towards Johanneskyrk.

Pause.

‘But it’s . . . Well, I may as well blurt this straight out. I know you were drinking when you looked after Vanja today. And you were yesterday. And I . . . well, I simply can’t tolerate that. It’s no good. You can’t do that.’

Her eyes were on me the whole time we were walking.

‘I don’t want to be checking on you in any way,’ I continued. ‘You can do what you like, of course, as far as I’m concerned. But not if you’re looking after Vanja. I have to set a limit. That’s no good. Do you understand?’

‘No,’ she said, astonished. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never had a drink while looking after Vanja. Never. Nor would it ever occur to me. Where have you got this idea from?’

My insides plummeted. As always when I was in situations where there was a lot at stake, agonising situations, when I went further, or was forced to go further than I wanted, I saw everything around me, also myself, with a special almost hyper-real clarity. The green tin roof of the church tower before us, the black leafless trees in the cemetery we were walking beside, the car, a gleaming blue, gliding up the road on the other side. My own slightly stooped gait, Ingrid’s more energetic walk beside me. Her looking up at me. Bemused, a slight almost imperceptible shadow of reproach.

‘I noticed the levels in the spirits bottles were down. To make sure, I marked the labels yesterday. When I came home I saw that more had gone. I hadn’t drunk any. The only other people who have been there today are you and Linda. I know it wasn’t Linda. That means it has to be you. There’s no other explanation.’

‘There must be,’ she said. ‘Because it wasn’t me. I’m sorry, Karl Ove, but I haven’t been drinking your spirits.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You’re my mother-in-law. I wish you nothing but well. I don’t want this. Not at all. The last thing I want to do is to accuse you of anything. But what can I do when I
know
what happened?’

‘But you can’t know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t do this.’

My stomach ached. I had wandered into a kind of hell.

‘You have to understand, Ingrid,’ I said. ‘Whatever you say, this will have consequences. You’re a fantastic mother-in-law. You do more for Vanja, and you mean more to Vanja than anyone else. And I’m incredibly happy about that. And I want this to continue. We don’t have much family around us, as you know. But if you won’t come clean we can’t trust you. Do you understand? Not that you won’t be able to see Vanja, because you will, whatever happens. But if you won’t come clean, if you don’t agree to put this behind you, you won’t be able to see her on your own. You’ll never be alone with her. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘Yes, I do. It’s a great shame. But that’s the way it’ll have to be. I can’t confess to doing something I haven’t done. Even though I feel like it. I can’t do it.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘We’re not going to get any further with this. I suggest we drop it for a while, and then we can discuss it again and work out what to do.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘But it won’t change anything, you know.’

‘OK.’

We walked down the steps in front of the French school and followed Döbelnsgatan up to Johannesplan, along Malmskillnadsgatan and down David Bagares gata, all the way without saying a word. Me stooped with long strides, her almost jogging beside me. It shouldn’t be like this, she was my mother-in-law; there was no reason in the world for me to correct her, or punish her, except this. It felt unworthy. And even more unworthy when she denied everything.

I put the key into the lock and swung the gate open for her. She smiled and went in.

How could she be so calm, and answer with such confidence?

Could it have been Linda after all?

No, of course it couldn’t.

But was I wrong? Had I made a mistake?

No.

Or?

In the yard the white-clad hairdresser was smoking. I greeted her and she smiled. Ingrid stopped outside the front door, which I unlocked.

‘I’m going now,’ she said as we went up the stairs. ‘We can discuss this later, as you suggested. Perhaps you’ll have found out what happened by then.’

She took her handbag and two of the plastic bags, smiled as usual as she said goodbye, failed to give me a hug though.

Linda came into the hall after she had gone.

‘How did it go? What did she say?’

‘She said she hadn’t been drinking when she’d been with Vanja. Not today, either. And she couldn’t understand how the levels in the bottles had gone down.’

‘If she’s an alcoholic, denial is part of the whole picture.’

‘Possible,’ I said. ‘But what the hell can we do? She just says no, I didn’t do it. I say yes, you did, and she says no, I didn’t. I can’t
prove
anything. It’s not as if we have CCTV in the kitchen.’

‘As long as
we
know, it doesn’t matter much. If she wants to play games she’ll have to take the consequences.’

‘Which are?’

‘We-ell. We can’t leave her alone with Vanja.’

‘Oh, fucking hell,’ I said. ‘What a pile of shit. Fancy having to walk around with my mother-in-law and insist that she’s been drinking. What is this?!’

‘I’m glad you did. She’ll probably admit to it in the end.’

‘I don’t think she will.’

How quickly a life sets new roots. How quickly you move from being a stranger in a town to being absorbed into it. Three years ago I had been living in Bergen, at that time I knew nothing about Stockholm and knew no one there. Then I went to Stockholm, the unknown, populated by foreigners, and gradually, day by day, though imperceptibly, I began to thread my life into theirs until now they were inseparable. If I had gone to London, which I might well have done, the same would have happened there, just with different people. It was that arbitrary, and so momentous.

Ingrid rang Linda the next day and admitted everything. She added she didn’t think it was that serious herself, but since we did, she would implement the necessary measures to ensure it would never be a problem for anyone again. She already had an appointment to see an alcohol therapist and had decided to spend more time concentrating on herself and her own needs, as she thought that was where part of the problem lay, with the enormous pressure she put on herself.

Linda was desperate after the conversation because, as she said, her mother was so optimistic and keen it wasn’t possible to have proper communication with her, it was as though she had lost her grip on reality and had started to live in a kind of light, carefree future world.

‘I can’t talk to her!
I have no real
contact
with her. It’s just platitudes and words and how fantastic this and that is. You, for example, had praise heaped on you for the way you handled the situation. I’m fantastic and everything is wonderfully brilliant. But it comes one day after we told her we don’t want her to drink while she’s looking after Vanja. I’m seriously worried about her, Karl Ove. It’s as if she’s suffering, but she doesn’t know she is, if you get me. She represses
everything
. She deserves to enjoy her twilight years. She shouldn’t have to be tormented and suffer and drink to drown her sorrows. But what can I do? She obviously doesn’t want any help. She won’t even admit there are problems in her life.’

‘But you’re her daughter,’ I said. ‘It’s no wonder she doesn’t want you to help her. Or admit something is not as it should be. Her entire life has been orientated towards helping others. You, your brother, your father, her neighbours. If all of you were to help her, everything would unravel.’

‘I’m sure you’re right. But I just want contact with her, do you understand?’

‘Yes, I do.’

Five days later I received an email with the
Aftenposten
interview attached. Reading it just made me sad. It was hopeless. I had no one to blame but myself, yet I wrote a long reply to the journalist in which I tried to expand on my side of the matter, that is give it the semblance of seriousness it had in my mind, which of course led to my faring even worse. The journalist rang me straight afterwards, suggested adding my email to the interview on the website, which suggestion I rejected, this wasn’t the point. All I could do was give the newspaper a miss that day and stop thinking about how I came across as stupid. So I was stupid, OK, I would have to live with it. Close-up interviews also included photos of the featured person’s private life, and as I didn’t have any I asked my mother to send me some. Since they hadn’t arrived by the deadline and the journalist was asking for them I rang Yngve, who scanned some and emailed them through while mum’s photos came a week later, carefully glued onto thick card with detailed information underneath in her handwriting. I could see how proud she was and despair rose inside me like a wall. Most of all I felt like disappearing into the depths of a forest somewhere, building myself a log cabin and staying there, far from civilisation and gazing into a fire. People, who needs people?

‘A young Sørlander with nicotine-stained fingers and faintly discoloured teeth,’ he had written. The sentence was indelibly etched in my brain.

But I got what I deserved. Had I not myself written up an interview with Jan Kjærstad many years ago entitled ‘The Man Without a Chin’? And
that
without appreciating what an insult it was . . .

Ha ha ha!

No, bugger it, this wasn’t worth the worry. I had to refuse everything from now on, endure the last months as a house husband with Vanja and then resume work in April. Hard, methodical, keeping an eye open for anything that imparted joy, energy and light. Cherish what I had, ignore everything else.

At that moment Vanja woke in the bedroom. I picked her up, held her against my chest and walked around for a few minutes until she had stopped crying and was ready for some food. I heated a potato and some peas in the microwave, mashed them with a little butter, hunted for something meaty in the fridge, found a bowl containing two fish fingers, heated them as well, and put this in front of her. She was hungry, and since I could see her from the living room, I went in, checked my emails again and answered a couple while keeping an ear open for any sounds of disgruntlement.

‘Have you eaten everything?!’ I said when I went back. She smiled with pleasure and threw her cup of water on the floor. I lifted her up and she made a grab for the wisps of beard on my chin and stuck a finger in my mouth. I laughed, tossed her up in the air a few times, fetched a nappy from the bathroom and changed her, put her on the floor and went to throw the old one in the bin under the sink. On my return she was standing in the middle of the floor and swaying. She started to walk towards me.

‘One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six!’ I counted. ‘A new record!’

She noticed that something extraordinary had happened because she was beaming over all her face. Perhaps she was full of the sensational feeling of walking.

I put on her outdoor clothes and carried her to the buggy in the bike room. The day was bright and spring-like, even though the sun wasn’t shining. The tarmac was dry. I texted Linda about our child’s first long walk. ‘Fantastic!’ she texted back. ‘Home at half past twelve. Love you both!’

I went into the supermarket down in the Metro station by Stureplan, bought a grilled chicken, a lettuce, some tomatoes, a cucumber, black olives, two red onions and a fresh baguette, popped into Hedengrens on the way back and found a book about Nazi Germany, the first two volumes of
Das Kapital
, Orwell’s
1984
, which I had never managed to read, a collection of essays by the same author, a book about Céline by Ekerwald and the latest Don DeLillo until Vanja brought my browsing to an end and I had to go and pay. The DeLillo I regretted buying the instant I was outside because even though I had been a fan of his, especially the novels
The Names
and
White Noise
, I hadn’t been able to read more than half of
Underworld
, and since the next book had been terrible it was evident that he was in decline. I was on the point of going back and exchanging it, there were a couple of other books I had seen and fancied, for example, the latest Esterházy novel,
Celestial Harmonies
, which was about his father. But I preferred not to read novels in Swedish, it was too close to my own language, it constantly threatened to leach in and destroy it, so if the title was available in Norwegian I read it in Norwegian, also because I read too little in my mother tongue. Besides I was strapped for time if I was going to make lunch before Linda got home. And Vanja obviously felt that I had already looked at enough books in the shop.

Upstairs in the kitchen I made a chicken salad, sliced some bread and set the table, all while Vanja sat on the floor banging small wooden balls through holes in a board with a tiny mallet, down a slide and onto the floor.

Five minutes later she had to stop because the Russian woman started hammering on the radiators. I hated the sound, hated waiting for it, although her reaction wasn’t always unjustified now, the banging could drive anyone insane, so I took the toy off Vanja, put her in the chair instead, tied a bib around her neck and was giving her some bread and butter when Linda came in the door.

‘Hi!’ she said, coming over to hug me.

‘Hi?’ I said.

‘I went to the chemist this morning,’ she said, looking at me with a sparkle in her eyes.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘I bought a pregnancy test.’

‘Yes? What are you actually telling me?’

‘We’re going to have another child, Karl Ove!’

‘Are we really?’

There were tears in my eyes.

She nodded. Her eyes were moist too.

‘I’m so happy,’ I said.

‘Yes, I couldn’t talk about anything else in therapy. Haven’t thought about anything else all day. It’s fantastic.’

‘Did you tell your therapist before you told me?’

‘Yes, and?’

‘What have you got between your ears? Do you imagine it’s only your child? You can’t tell other people before you tell me! Is there something wrong with you or what?’