My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (72 page)

‘Oh, Karl Ove, I’m so sorry. I didn’t think. I was just overwhelmed. I didn’t mean to. Please, don’t let this come between us.’

I looked at her.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose it makes much difference. In the bigger picture, I mean.’

In the night I was woken by her crying. Sobbing her heart out as only she could. I placed my hand over her neck.

‘What’s up, Linda?’ I whispered. ‘Why are you crying?’

Her shoulders shook.

She turned her face to me.

‘I was only being dutiful!’ she said. ‘That was all it was.’

‘All what was?’ I asked. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘This morning. I went into the chemist and bought the test because I wanted to know. I couldn’t wait! And so after I had the answer I had to go to therapy! It didn’t occur to me that I could come home! I thought I had to go!’

She started sobbing again.

‘I could have come home and told you the fantastic news! Straight away! I didn’t need to go to therapy, did I!’

I stroked her back, ran my hand through her hair.

‘But, Linda love, it’s nothing!’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter! I was a bit put out, that was all. Hell, the only thing that counts is we’re going to have a baby!’

She looked at me and smiled through the tears.

‘Do you mean that?’ she said.

I kissed her.

Her lips tasted of salt.

That November evening I sat on the balcony of our flat in Malmö in the darkness after having taken Vanja to the birthday party, and almost two years had passed. The child, barely conceived back then, had not only been born but was now a year old. We had christened her Heidi, she was a happy blonde girl, more robust than her sister in some ways, just as sensitive in others. During the christening Vanja had shouted No! No! No! so loudly it resounded around the church as the priest was about to splash water over her sister’s head, and it was impossible not to laugh, it was as if she was reacting physically to the holy water, like some tiny vampire or devil. When Heidi was nine months old we moved to Malmö on a kind of impulse, neither of us had been there before, and we didn’t know anyone, but we went there to have a look at a flat and made the decision after being in the town for a total of five hours. This was where we were going to live. The flat was on the top floor of a block in the centre, it was large, 130 square metres, and since it was so high up light flooded in from dawn to dusk. Nothing could have suited us better; our life in Stockholm had become darker and darker until in the end we had no choice but to get out. Away from the crazy Russian, with whom we had been engaged in an unresolvable conflict and who continued to send complaints to the owners of the block, who then summoned us to a meeting, not that that led anywhere, because even though they believed us, which in the end they did, there was nothing they could do. We took matters into our own hands. After a further incident when she had come up to our flat and I, holding Vanja and Heidi in my arms, had told her to leave us in peace, to which she had said she had a man in her flat and was going to tell him to beat me up, we rang the police and reported her for harassment and threatening behaviour. I never thought I would go that far, but I did. The police couldn’t do anything, but that wasn’t important because they set the social services on her, two people who came to inspect her living conditions, and for her there could be no greater humiliation. Oh, how I relished the thought of that! But it didn’t make relations with the neighbours any better. And with two children in the middle of a large city, where the only car-free green zones were parks, where we walked them like dogs, the question was not whether but when we would move. Linda wanted to go to Norway and I didn’t, so the choice was between two towns in Sweden, Gothenburg or Malmö, and since Linda had negative associations with the former, having broken off her studies at Litterær Gestaltning, the writers’ school, after a few weeks because of illness, the matter was decided: we moved to Malmö as we liked the feeling we had in the few hours we were there. Malmö was open, the sky above the town high, the sea close by, there was a long beach only a few minutes from the centre, Copenhagen was three quarters of an hour away, and the atmosphere in the town was laid-back, in holiday mode, quite different from Stockholm’s tough, stern, careerist ambience. The first months in Malmö were wonderful, we went swimming every day, sat on the balcony eating when the children were in bed, buoyed with optimism, closer to each other than we had been for two years. But the darkness crept in there as well, slowly and imperceptibly it filled all the other parts of my life, the novelty wore off, the world slipped away, leaving quivering frustration.

As it did this evening. Linda and Vanja were eating in the kitchen, Heidi slept her fevered sleep in the cot in our bedroom and I was almost suffocated by the thought of the washing-up, the rooms that looked as if they had been systematically ransacked, as though someone had tipped everything from the drawers and cupboards across the floor, by the dirt and sand everywhere and the pile of dirty laundry in the bathroom. By ‘the novel’ I was writing, which was taking me nowhere. I had spent two years on nothing. By the oppressiveness of life in the flat. By our arguments, which were escalating and becoming more and more unmanageable. By the joy that had departed.

My angry outbursts were petty, they flared up over trifles; who cares who washed what when, as you looked back on a life, summed up a life? Linda shifted between her moods, and when she was at her lowest ebb she simply lay on the sofa or in bed, and what at the start of our relationship had aroused tenderness in me now led directly to irritation: was I supposed to do
everything
while she lay there moping? Well, I could, but not without conditions. I did it and had every right to be bad-tempered and grumpy, ironic, sarcastic, occasionally furious. This joylessness spread far beyond me and right into the centre of our life together. Linda said she wanted only one thing, for us all to be a happy family. That was what she wanted, that was what she dreamed about, for us to be one happy, contented family. All I ever dreamed about was for her to do her half of the housework. She said she did, so there we were, with our accusations, our anger and our longings, in the middle of life, of our lives, no one else’s.

How was it possible to waste your life getting het up about housework? How was it
possible
?

I wanted the maximum amount of time for myself, with the fewest disturbances possible. I wanted Linda, who was already at home looking after Heidi, to take care of everything that concerned Vanja so that I could work. She didn’t want to. Or perhaps she did, but she couldn’t cope. All our conflicts and rows were in some form or other about this, the dynamics. If I couldn’t write because of her and her demands, I would leave her, it was as simple as that. And somewhere she knew. She stretched my limits, according to what she needed in her life, but never so far that I reached my snapping point. I was close though. The way I took my revenge was to give her everything she wanted – I took care of the children, I cleaned the floors, I washed the clothes, I did the food shopping, I cooked and I earned all the money so that she had nothing tangible to complain about as far as me and my role in the family were concerned. The only thing I didn’t give her, and it was the only thing she wanted, was my love. That was how I took my revenge. Cold and unmoved, I watched her become more and more desperate until it became untenable and she screamed at me in rage, frustration and yearning. What’s the problem? I asked. Don’t you think I’m doing enough? You’re exhausted, you say. But I can take the children tomorrow. I can take Vanja to the nursery, and then I can go out with Heidi while you sleep and have a rest. Then I can collect Vanja from the nursery in the afternoon and look after them in the evening. That’s OK, isn’t it? Then you’ll be able to rest as you’re so drained. In the end, when she ran out of arguments she would throw objects and smash them. A glass, a plate, whatever came to hand. She was the one who should have been doing these chores for me, so that I could work, but she didn’t. And since her problem was not that she was doing too much, but the fact that there was no love, only spite, moodiness, frustration and bad temper in the man she loved, which she was unable to find a way to articulate, the best revenge for me was to take her at her word. Oh, how I gloated when I caught her in the trap and could stand there agreeing to all her demands! After the eruption, which was inevitable, after we had gone to bed, she would often cry and want to be comforted. That gave me an opportunity to extract further revenge, because I wouldn’t comply.

However, living like this was impossible, nor was it what I wanted, so when my anger, which was hard and implacable, abated, and all that was left was this soul in torment, as though everything I had was going to pieces, we made up, came closer to each other and lived as we once had. Then the whole process started again, it was cyclical, as in nature.

I stubbed out my cigarette, drank the last mouthful of flat Coke and got up, held the railing and stared into the sky, where a light hung motionless somewhere outside town, too low to be a star, too quiet to be a plane.

What on earth . . . ?

I stared for several minutes. Then it suddenly fell to the left, and I realised it was a plane. It was motionless because it was coming down over Øresund and maintaining a course straight for me.

Someone knocked on the window and I turned. It was Vanja, she smiled and waved. I opened the door.

‘Are you going to bed now?’

She nodded.

‘I wanted to say goodnight to you, daddy.’

I bent down and kissed her on the cheek.

‘Goodnight. Sleep tight!’

‘Sleep tight!’

She ran through the hall and into her room, a bundle of energy even after such a long day.

Better do the bloody washing-up then.

Scrape the leftovers into the bin, empty the dregs of milk and water from the glasses, take the apple and carrot peel, the plastic packaging and tea bags from the sinks, clean them and put everything on the drainer, run hot water, squirt some washing-up liquid, rest my forehead against the cupboard and start washing, glass by glass, cup by cup, plate by plate. Rinse. Then, when the stand was full, start drying to make room for more. Afterwards the floor, which had to be scrubbed where Heidi had been sitting. Tie the bin bag and take the lift down to the cellar, walk through the warm labyrinthine corridors to the waste disposal room, which was strewn with filth and slippery, which had pipes hanging from the ceiling like torpedoes, adorned with torn plastic ties and bits of insulation tape, a sign on the door proclaiming
Miljørom
, Milieu Room, a typical Swedish euphemism, throw the bags up into one of the large green rubbish containers, suddenly reminded of Ingrid, who the last time she had been here had found hundreds of small canvasses in one of them and had carried them up to the flat, imagining this would fill us with as much happiness as it did her, the idea that the children would now have enough painting material for several years into the future, close the lid and walk back to the flat, where at that moment Linda was tiptoeing out of the children’s room.

‘Is she asleep?’ I asked.

Linda nodded.

‘What a nice job you’ve done,’ she said. Stopped at the kitchen door. ‘Would you like a glass of wine? The bottle Sissel brought last time she came is still here.’

My first impulse was to say no, I definitely did not want any wine. But, strangely, the short time away from the flat had softened my attitude towards her, so I nodded.

‘Could do,’ I said.

Two weeks later, one afternoon while Heidi and Vanja were running wild around us, jumping on the sofa and screaming, we huddled together examining for the third time in our lives a small blue line on a small white test stick, overcome with emotion. It was John signalling his arrival. He was born late the following summer, gentle and patient from the first moment, always close to laughter, even when the storm around him was at its worst. Often he looked as if he had been dragged through a thicket, covered with scratches from the clawings Heidi gave him whenever she had the chance, usually under the pretext of a hug or an amicable pat on the cheek. What once had irked me, walking through the town with a buggy, was now history, forgotten and outlandish, as I pushed a shabby buggy with three children on board around the streets, often with two or three shopping bags dangling from one hand, deep furrows carved in my brow and down my cheeks, and eyes that burned with a vacant ferocity I had long lost any contact with. I no longer bothered about the potentially feminised nature of what I did; now it was a question of getting the children to wherever we had to go, with no sit-down strikes or refusals to go any further or any other ideas they could dream up to thwart my wishes for an easy morning or afternoon. Once a crowd of Japanese tourists stopped on the other side of the street and pointed at me, as though I were the ringmaster of some circus parade or something. They
pointed
. There you can see a Scandinavian man! Look, and tell your grandchildren what you saw!

I was so proud of the children. Vanja was wild and plucky, you would never think her thin body could have such a huge appetite for activity, that it could devour the physical world so greedily, with its trees, climbing frames, swimming pools and open fields, and her introversion, which had held her back in the first months at the new nursery, had completely gone, so much so that the next ‘progress conversation’ was to focus on the opposite. Now it was not that Vanja hid away or she didn’t want contact with adults or she never took the initiative in games that was the problem; on the contrary, it was perhaps that she took too central a role sometimes, as they deftly put it, and was too keen to be number one. ‘To be frank,’ the nursery head said, ‘she sometimes bullies some of the other children. The positive side of that,’ he continued, ‘is that in order to do so she has to be able to understand the situation and be intelligent enough to exploit it. But we’re working at making her understand that she can’t do that. Have you any idea where she might have picked up this rhyme: naaa-na-na-na-naaa-na? Has she seen it in a film or what? If so, we can show the film here and explain to them what it is.’ After the last meeting, when they had talked about a speech therapist and treated her shyness as a flaw or a defect, I couldn’t care less what they thought about her. She had only just turned four, she would be rid of it in a few months . . . Heidi wasn’t quite as wild, her physical control was of another order, she seemed to be present in her body in quite a different way from Vanja, for whom fiction was simply a variant of reality and who allowed her imagination to run away with her. Vanja would lose her cool and go frantic with despair if she couldn’t master something from the outset and gratefully accept help, whereas Heidi wanted to do everything herself, she would be offended if we offered our help and she would keep going and going until she succeeded. Oh, the triumph on her face then! She climbed to the top of the big tree in the playground before Vanja. The first time she wrapped her arms round the top branch. The second time, driven by tiny-tot hubris, she stood on top. I was sitting on a bench reading a newspaper and heard her scream: she was perched at the end of the branch, with nothing to hold on to, six metres above the ground. One rash move and she would fall. I shinned up and grabbed her, unable to stop laughing, what on earth were you doing
there
? She often did an extra skip when she walked, and that, I thought, was a skip of happiness. She was the only person in the family who was truly happy, it seemed, or who had a sunny disposition. She tolerated everything, apart from being told off. Then her lips quivered, the tears began to well up and it could take an hour to console her. She loved playing with Vanja, she went along with everything, and she adored riding. When she was astride the donkey at the amusement park we went to in the summer her face glowed with pride. But even the sight of Heidi was not enough to change Vanja’s opinion, she didn’t want to ride, she would never ride again, pushed her glasses up her nose, suddenly threw herself in front of John and let out a scream that made everyone around look at us. John liked it though, he shouted back, and then they laughed.