My Struggle: Book One (60 page)

The worst part of all this, however, I was thinking, as I walked along the avenue towards Lund, past the flow of afternoon traffic, past tree after tree whose trunks were blackened with asphalt dust and car exhaust, so hard and rocklike compared to the expanse of light, green leaves on the branches above, was that at that time I actually regarded myself as a sound judge of
character. I had a gift, or so I had deluded myself into thinking, it was something I was good at. Understanding others. While I myself was more of a mystery.

How stupid can you get.

I laughed and glanced up immediately to check whether any of the people sitting in cars in the road alongside had seen me. They hadn't. Everyone was wrapped up in their own thoughts. I might have become smarter over those twelve years, but I still could not pretend. Nor could I lie, nor could I play roles. For that reason I had been only too happy to let Yngve deal with Grandma. But now I would have to stand on my own two feet.

I stopped to light a cigarette. Moving on, I somehow felt heartened. Was it the once white but now polluted houses on my left that had done that? Or was it the trees in the avenue? These motionless, foliage-laden, air-bathing beings with their boundless abundance of leaves? For whenever I caught sight of them I was filled with happiness.

I took an especially deep breath and flicked the silver-gray cigarette ash off as I walked. The unabsorbed memories evoked by my surroundings on the way to the chapel with Yngve now hit me with full force. I recognized them from two periods: the first, when I had been visiting Grandma and Grandad in Kristiansand as a boy and every tiny detail of the town had seemed like an adventure, the second, when I lived here as a teenager. I had been away for a number of years now, and ever since I arrived I had noticed how the stream of impressions the place left you with was partly tied to the first world of memories, partly to the second, and thus existed in three separate time zones at once. I saw the pharmacy and remembered when Yngve and I had been there with Grandma; the snow drifts had been high outside, it was snowing, she was wearing a fur hat and coat, in line, white-coated pharmacists were shuttling back and forth. Now and then she turned her head to see what we were doing. After the first searching glances, when her eyes were, if not cold, then at least neutral, she smiled, and they filled with warmth, as if at the wave of a magic wand. I saw the hill going up towards Lund Bridge and remembered that in the afternoon Grandad used to come cycling from that direction.
How different he seemed outdoors. As though the slight wobble, caused by the incline, said something not only about the bike he was riding but also the person he was: one moment any elderly Kristiansander in coat and beret, the next Grandad. I saw the rooftops in the residential area stretching down the road and remembered how I used to walk among them as a sixteen-year-old, bursting with emotions. When everything I saw, even a rusty, crooked rotary dryer in a back garden, even rotten apples on the ground beneath a tree, even a boat wrapped in a tarpaulin, with the wet bow protruding and the yellow, flattened grass beneath, was ablaze with beauty. I saw the grass-covered hill behind the buildings on the other side and remembered a blue sky and a cold winter's day when we had been sledding with Grandma. There was such a sparkling reflection of sun on snow that the light resembled that in the high mountains, and the town below us seemed so strangely open that everything that happened, people and cars passing in the streets, the man shovelling snow from the assembly room forecourt across the road, the other children sledging, did not appear to be attached anywhere, they were just floating beneath the sky. All of this was alive in me as I walked, and it made me acutely aware of my surroundings, but it was only the surface, only the uppermost layer of my consciousness, for Dad was dead, and the grief this stirred shone through everything I thought and felt, retracting the surface, in a sense. He also existed in these memories, but he was not important there, oddly enough, the thought of him evoked nothing. Dad walking on the sidewalk a few meters in front of me, once at the beginning of the seventies, we had been to the newsstand and bought pipe cleaners and were going to Grandma and Grandad's, the way he lifted his chin and raised his head while smiling to himself, the pleasure I felt at that, or Dad in the bank, the way he held his wallet in one hand, ran the other through his hair, catching a reflection of himself in the glass in front of the teller's window, or Dad on his way out of town: in none of these memories did I perceive him as important. That is, I did when I was experiencing them, but not at the moment of thinking about them. It was different now that he was dead. In death he was everything, of course, but death was also everything, for while I was
walking, in the light drizzle, I seemed to find myself in a zone. What lay outside it meant nothing. I saw, I thought, and then what I saw and thought were withdrawn: it didn't count. Nothing counted. Just Dad, the fact that he was dead, that was all that counted.

All the time I was walking, the brown envelope, which contained the possessions he had on him when he died, was on my mind. I stopped outside the market across the road from the pharmacy, I turned to the wall and took it out. I looked at my father's name. It seemed alien. I had expected Knausgaard. But it was correct enough; this laughably pompous name was the one he had had when he died.

An elderly woman with a shopping bag in one hand and a small white dog in the other looked at me as she came out of the door. I took a few steps closer to the wall and shook the contents into my hand. His ring, a necklace, a few coins, and a pin. That was all. In themselves, as everyday as objects can be. But the fact that he had been wearing them, that the ring was on his finger, the chain around his neck when he died, gave them a special aura. Death and gold. I turned them over in my hand, one by one, and they filled me with disquiet. I stood there and was frightened of death in the same way that I had been when I was a child. Not of dying myself but of the dead.

I put the items back in the envelope, put the envelope back in my pocket, ran across the road between two cars, went to the newsstand and bought a newspaper and a Lion bar, which I ate while walking the last few hundred meters to the house.

Even after all that had happened, there were still echoes of the smell I remembered from childhood. As a young boy I had already wondered at the phenomenon: how every house I had been in, all the neighbors' and the family's houses, had a specific smell all of their own which never changed. All except for ours. It didn't have a specific smell. It didn't smell of anything. Whenever Grandma and Grandad came they brought the smell of their house with them; I remembered one particular occasion when Grandma had surprised us with a visit, I knew nothing about it, and when I came home from school
and detected the aroma in the hall I thought I was imagining things, because there was no other evidence to support it. No car in the drive, no clothes or shoes in the hall. Just the aroma. But it wasn't my imagination: when I went upstairs Grandma was sitting in full regalia in the kitchen, she had caught the bus, she wanted to surprise us; so unlike her. It was odd that, twenty years later, after so much had changed, the smell in the house should be the same. It is conceivable that it was all to do with habit, using the same soaps, the same detergents, the same perfumes and aftershave lotions, cooking the same food in the same way, coming home from the same job and doing the same things in the afternoons and evenings. If you worked on cars, there would be traces of oil and white spirit, metal and exhaust fumes in the smell, if you collected old books, there would be traces of yellowing paper and old leather in the smell, but in a house where all previous habits had stopped, where people had died off, and those left were too old to do what they used to do, what about the smell in these houses, how could it be unchanged? Were the walls impregnated with forty years of living, was that what I could smell every time I stepped inside?

Instead of going to see her right away, I opened the cellar door and ventured down the narrow staircase. The cold, dark air that met me was like a concentrate of the usual air in the house, just as I remembered it. This was where they had stored the crates of apples, pears, and plums in the autumn, and combined with the stench of old brick and earth their exhalations lay like a sub-smell in the house, to which all the others were added and with which they contrasted. I had not been down there more than three or four times; like the rooms in the loft, this had been a forbidden area for us. But how often had I stood in the hall watching Grandma come up from the cellar with bags full of juicy, yellow plums or slightly wrinkled and wonderfully succulent red apples for us?

The only light came from a small porthole in the wall. Since the garden was lower than the house entrance you could see straight into it. It was a disorientating perspective, the sense of spatial connection was broken, for a brief moment the ground seemed to have disappeared beneath me. Then, as
I grabbed the banister, everything became clear to me again: I was here, the window was there, the garden there, the house entrance there.

I stood staring out of the window without registering anything or thinking of anything in particular. Then I turned and went up to the hall, hung my jacket on one of the clothes hangers in the wardrobe, and glanced at myself in the mirror by the stairs. Tiredness lay like a membrane over my eyes. When I ascended the stairs it was with heavy footfalls so that Grandma would hear me coming.

She was sitting as she had when we left her a few hours before, at the kitchen table. In front of her was a cup of coffee, an ashtray, and a plate full of crumbs from the roll she had eaten.

When I entered she glanced up at me in her alert, birdlike way.

“Ah, it's you,” she said. “Did everything go alright?”

She had probably forgotten where I had been, though I could not be sure, and I answered with the gravity that such an occasion demanded.

“Yes,” I nodded. “It went well.”

“That's good,” she said, looking down. I stepped into the room and put the newspaper I had bought on the table.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” I answered.

“The pot's on the stove.”

Something in her tone made me look at her. She had never spoken to me like that before. The strange thing was that it didn't change her as much as it changed me. That was how she must have spoken to Dad of late. She had addressed him not me. And that was not how she would have addressed Dad if Grandad had been alive. This was the tone between mother and son when no one else was there.

I didn't think that she had mistaken me for Dad, only that she was talking out of habit, like a ship continuing to glide through the water after the engines had been switched off. It chilled me inside. But I couldn't let that affect me, so I helped myself to a cup from the cupboard, went over to the
stove, felt the coffeepot with my finger. It was a long time since it had been warm.

Grandma whistled and drummed her fingers on the table. She had done that for as long as I could remember. There was something good about seeing it, for so much had changed about her otherwise.

I had seen photos of her from the 1930s, and she had been attractive, not strikingly so, but enough to mark her out, in the typical way for that era: dark, dramatic eyes, small mouth, short hair. When, toward the end of the fifties, as a mother of three, she had been photographed in front of some tourist sights on their travels, all of those characteristics were still there, if in a softer, less distinct yet not undefined way, and you could still use the word “attractive” to describe her. When I was growing up, and she was in her late sixties, early seventies, I couldn't see any of this of course, she was just “Grandma,” I knew nothing about her characteristic traits, the things that told you who she was. An older woman, middle class, who was well-conserved and dressed elegantly, that must have been the impression she gave at the end of the seventies, when she took the unusual step of catching a bus to visit us and sat in our kitchen in Tybakken. Lively, mentally alert, vigorous. Right up until a couple of years ago that was how she was. Then something happened to her, and it was not old age that had her in its grip, nor illness, it was something else. Her detachment had nothing to do with the gentle otherworldliness or contentedness of old people, her detachment was as hard and lean as the body in which it resided.

I saw that, but there was nothing I could do, I could not build a bridge, could not help or console her, I could only watch, and every minute I spent with her I was tense. The only thing that helped was to keep moving and not to let any of what was present, in either her or the house, find a foothold.

With her hand, she wiped a flake of tobacco off her lap. Then looked at me.

“Shall I make you a cup as well?” I offered.

“Was there anything wrong with the coffee?” she said.

“It wasn't that hot,” I said, taking the pot to the sink. “I'll put some fresh on.”

“Wasn't that hot, did you say?”

Was she reproving me?

No. For then she laughed and brushed a crumb from her lap.

“I think my brain's unravelling,” she said. “I was sure I‘d only just made it.”

“It wasn't
that
cold,” I said, turning on the tap. “It's just that I like my coffee boiling hot.”

I rinsed out the dregs and sprayed the bottom of the sink with the water until it had all gone down the drain. Then I filled the pot, which was almost completely black on the inside and covered with greasy fingerprints on the outside.