My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (33 page)

But I didn’t. I had two different sets of feelings for her. One said you have to get out, she wants too much from you, you’re going to lose all your freedom, waste all your time on her, and what will happen to all you hold dear, your independence and your writing? The other set said, you love her, she gives you something others can’t and she knows who you are. Exactly who you are. Both sets were equally right, but they were incompatible, one excluded the other.

On this day thoughts of leaving were uppermost in my mind.

When Geir and I were in the Metro carriage coming out of Västertorp, she rang. Asked if I wanted to eat with her in the evening, she had bought crabs, my favourite food. I said yes, we would have to talk anyway.

I rang the doorbell even though I had a key, she opened and studied me with a careful smile.

‘Hi,’ she said.

She was wearing the white blouse I liked so much.

‘Hi,’ I said.

One hand moved forward as though intending to embrace me, but it stopped and she took a step back instead.

‘Come in,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ I replied. Hung my jacket on the hook, body angled slightly away from her. As I turned she reached up and we gave each other a hug.

‘Are you hungry?’ she asked.

‘Yes, quite,’ I said.

‘Then let’s eat straight away.’

I followed her to the table, which was under the window on the other side of the room from the bed. She had laid a white cloth. Between the two plates and glasses, plus two bottles of beer, there was a candlestick with three candles, and three small flames flickered in the draught. A dish of crabs, a basket of white bread, butter, lemon and mayonnaise as well.

‘I’m not so skilled with crabs, it transpired,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know how to open them. Perhaps you do?’

‘Sort of,’ I said.

I broke off the legs, opened the shells and removed the stomachs while she flipped off the bottle tops.

‘What have you been doing today?’ I said, passing her a shell which was almost completely full.

‘I couldn’t even think of going to class, so I rang Mikaela and had lunch with her.’

‘Did you tell her what happened?’

She nodded.

‘That you slapped me?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Not much. She listened.’

She looked at me.

‘Can you forgive me?’

‘Of course. I just don’t understand why you did it. How can you lose control of yourself like that? I assume you hadn’t intended to do it? I mean, on reflection?’

‘Karl Ove,’ she said.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘I’m very sorry. Terribly sorry. But it was what you said that hit me so hard. Before I met you I hadn’t even dared imagine that I might have children one day. I didn’t dare. Even when I fell in love with you I didn’t. And then you said what you said. It was you who brought up the subject, do you remember? The very first morning. I want to have children with you. And I was so happy. I was so utterly, insanely happy. Just the fact that there was a possibility. It was you who gave me that possibility. And then . . . yesterday . . . well, it was like you were withdrawing the possibility. You said perhaps we should put off having children. That hit me so hard, it was so crushing, and then . . . well . . . I completely lost control.’

Her eyes were moist as she held the crab shell over the slice of bread and tried to lever out the firm flesh along the edge with the knife.

‘Do you understand?’ she said.

I nodded.

‘Of course I do. But you can’t do as you please, however strong your emotions are. That’s no good. I mean, for Christ’s sake. That just won’t do. I can’t live like that. The feeling that you might turn on me and start slapping me. It won’t do, I can’t live with that. We’re supposed to be together, aren’t we. We can’t be enemies, I couldn’t stand that, I don’t have the energy. It’s no good, Linda.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll pull myself together. I promise you.’

We sat quietly for a while, eating. The moment one of us changed the topic of conversation to something more usual and humdrum, what had happened would also be over.

I wanted to and didn’t want to.

The crab meat on the bread was both smooth and uneven, reddish-brown like the leaves on the field, and the salty, almost bitter taste of sea, softened by the sweetness of the mayonnaise, yet sharpened by the lemon juice, overtook all my senses for a few seconds.

‘Is it good?’ she asked with a smile.

‘Yes, it’s really good,’ I replied.

What I had said to her on the first morning we had woken up together had not been just something I said but something I felt with all my heart and soul. I wanted to have children with her. I had never felt that before. And this feeling made me certain it was right, that this was right.

But at any price?

My mother came to Stockholm, I introduced her to Linda at a restaurant, it seemed to go well, Linda shone, shy and extrovert at the same time, while I watched mum and her reactions. She was staying in my flat, I said goodnight to her at the gate, she went in and I jogged back to Linda’s flat, which was ten minutes away. The next day, when I collected her to have breakfast at a café, mum told me she hadn’t been able to put the light on in the hallway and so it had taken her almost an hour to get into the flat.

‘The light turned itself off while I was on the stairs,’ she said. ‘Automatically. I couldn’t see a metre in front of me.’

‘That’s the Swedes saving energy,’ I said. ‘They never leave a room without switching off the light. And in communal areas there are automatic time switches. But why didn’t you turn it back on, if I might ask?’

‘It was too dark to see the switches.’

‘But the switches are luminous.’

‘So
that
was what was shining!’ she said. ‘I thought they were the fire alarms or something.’

‘What about your lighter?’ I said.

‘Yes, I remembered that eventually. I was so desperate that I fumbled my way downstairs to have a cigarette and that was when I found it. So then I went back up, flicked it on, opened the door and went in.’

‘That’s so typical of you,’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But this is a different country, that’s why. The little details are different.’

‘What do you think about Linda?’

‘She’s a lovely girl,’ she said.

‘Yes, isn’t she,’ I said.

She didn’t have to say that, of course. Well, I wasn’t in any doubt that she would like Linda, it was more that I had just been in such a long, established relationship. Married even. Tonje had been part of the family, it was as simple as that. Even though the relationship was over, the feelings they had for her were not. Yngve was sorry she was no longer around, and perhaps mum was too. At the end of the summer, after Tonje and I had divided all our possessions without any trauma – we were good to each other – the only time a semblance of sorrow came over me was when I was in the cellar fetching something and was suddenly brought up with a sob – we’d had a life together, now it was over. After the days there, which passed without any conflict, I went to mum’s place in Jølster with our cat, which she was going to keep. I told her about Linda then. It was obvious she wasn’t best pleased, but she didn’t say anything. Half an hour later a sentence crossed her lips which caused me to take stock of her. It was so unlike mum to say that sort of thing. She said I couldn’t see other people. I was completely blind, I saw only myself everywhere. Your father, she said, he looked straight into people. He saw immediately who they were. You’ve never done that. No, I said, perhaps I haven’t.

I’m sure she was right, but that wasn’t so important, the significant issue was partly that she had ranked dad, that terrible human being, above me, and partly that she had done it because she was angry with me. And that was new, mum was never angry with me.

At that time Linda and I were still in the glow zone, and she must have seen that I was glowing with love and
joie de vivre
.

In Stockholm a little more than six months later everything was different. I was full of grudges, the relationship was so claustrophobic and dark that I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t, I was too weak, I thought about her, I pitied her, without me she would be lost, I was too weak, I loved her.

Then came the lunches at Filmhuset, where we sat chatting about everything under the sun, gesticulating enthusiastically, or at home in the flat or at cafés, there was so much to say, there was so much to cover, not just my life and hers, as it had been, but also our lives, as they were now, with all the people who populated them. Before, I had always been deep inside myself, observing people from there, like from the back of a garden. Linda brought me out, right to the edge of myself, where everything was near and everything seemed stronger. Then came the films at Cinemateket, the nights out on the town, the weekends with her mother in Gnesta, the stillness of the forest, in which she sometimes looked like a little girl and showed how vulnerable she was. Then there was the trip to Venice, she
shouted
that I didn’t love her, she kept shouting it again and again. In the evenings we got drunk and made love with a wildness that was new and alien and also frightening, not at the time, but the next day, when I reflected on it, it was as though we wanted to hurt each other. After she had left I could hardly be bothered to go out, I tried to write in the loft of the flat, I could barely drag myself the few hundred metres to the grocer’s and back. The walls were cold, the alleyways empty, the canals full of coffin-like gondolas. What I saw was dead, what I wrote of no value.

One day, sitting like this, alone in the cold Italian apartment, I happened to recall what Stig Sæterbakken had said the evening I got together with Linda. That in his next novel he would try to write a little more like me.

Suddenly my face burned with shame.

The comment had been sarcastic and I hadn’t understood.

I thought he had MEANT it.

Oh, how conceited do you have to be to believe that sort of comment? How utterly stupid can you be? Were there no limits?

I got up quickly, hurried down the stairs, put on my clothes and dashed round the alleyways along the canals for an hour trying to find the beauty in the filthy deep green water, the ancient stone walls, the splendour in the whole of this crooked and crumbling world, to stem the enormous bitterness against myself that the recognition of Sæterbakken’s sarcasm caused to flood over me time and time again.

In a large piazza I entered without warning I sat down and ordered a coffee, lit a cigarette and considered at length that perhaps this was not a matter of much import.

I raised the tiny cup to my lips with my index and middle fingers, which seemed monstrously large by comparison, leaned back in the chair and peered up at the sky. I never paid any attention to it inside the labyrinthine network of streets and canals, it was a bit like wandering through underground passages. When the narrow streets opened up into piazzas, and the sky stretched across the rooftops and church spires it always came as a surprise. That was how it was, yes: the sky did exist! The sun did exist! It felt as though I also became more open, lighter in colour and weight.

For all I knew, Sæterbakken might have thought my enthusiastic response was
also
sarcastic.

Later that autumn the temperature plummeted, all the water and the canals in Stockholm froze, one Sunday we walked on the ice from Söder to Stockholm Old Town, I hobbled along like the hunchback of Notre Dame, she laughed and took photos of me, I took photos of her, everything was sharp and clear, including my feelings for her. We clicked on the photos and looked at them in a café, ran home to make love, rented two films, bought a pizza, lay in bed all evening. It was one of the days I will always remember, perhaps precisely because it comprised normal frivolous activities that became overlaid with gold.

The winter came and with it snow whirling in the air above the town. White streets, white roofs, all sounds softened. One evening while we were out wandering aimlessly in all the whiteness and, perhaps from force of habit, approaching the mountain along which Bastugatan ran, she asked me where I was planning to spend Christmas. I said at home, with my mother in Jølster. She wanted to join me. I said that wasn’t appropriate, it was too early. Why was it too early? Surely you know. No, I don’t. Right.

It developed into a row. We sat in the Bishop’s Arms with a beer in front of us without saying a word, incensed. To compensate, my Christmas present to her was a surprise trip; when I returned on the 27th we went to Arlanda Airport and she didn’t know our destination until I gave her the ticket: Paris. We were there for a week. But Linda had an attack of nerves, the city stressed her, she lost her temper over nothing and was constantly unreasonable. When we were eating dinner on the first evening and I was flustered with the waiter because I didn’t know quite how to behave in fine surroundings, she sent me a glare full of disdain. Oh, it was hopeless. What had I got myself caught up in? Where was my life going? I wanted to do some shopping but could see that was not on, she already disliked Paris and hated it now, and as she hated being alone most, I dropped the idea. The days could begin well, such as when we went to the Eiffel Tower, the building with the most intense nineteenth-century aura I had seen, and then collapse into black, unreasonable moods, or they could start badly and end well, such as when we called on a girlfriend of Linda’s who lived in Paris, next to the cemetery where Marcel Proust was buried and which we visited afterwards. And on New Year’s Eve, which we spent in an elegant intimate restaurant thanks to a tip from my Francophile friend in Bergen, Johannes, and were spoilt in every conceivable manner, we sat there glowing as in the old days, that is, six months previously, until, an hour into the New Year, we walked hand in hand along the Seine to our hotel. And whatever it was that oppressed her in Paris, it was gone the instant we arrived at the airport heading for home.

The owner of the flat I was renting was going to sell it, so I moved all my possessions, that is all my books, to a warehouse outside town on one of the first days in January, cleaned up, handed over the keys, and Linda enquired around her friends to see if they knew of an office somewhere, and yes, Cora had heard about some sort of collective for freelancers, they had a place at the top of the palace-like construction towering over the peak of the small mountain on one side of Slussen, only a hundred metres from the flat I’d had, I got a room and started working there during the day. It was a new beginning, I added the last hundred pages to the already long file of beginnings, and recommenced. This time I tackled the little angel theme. I bought one of those cheap art books, full of pictures of angels, and one of them attracted my interest: it was of three angels out walking in the Italian countryside, wearing sixteenth-century clothes. I wrote about someone who saw them walking, a boy who was keeping an eye on some sheep, one had gone missing and while looking for it, through some trees, he saw the angels. It was a rare sight, but not so very unusual, angels were to be found in forests and on the margins of human activity and had been for as long as people could remember. That was as far as I got. What was the story?