My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (37 page)

We caught the train to Moss, Espen picked us up at the station and we drove to their home in Larkollen. Linda had a slight temperature and went to bed, Espen and I walked to a nearby pitch to kick around a football, in the evening we had a barbecue, I sat up with Espen and Anne, later only Espen. Linda was asleep. The next day Espen drove us to the cabin on the island of Jeløya, where we stayed for a week while they travelled to Stockholm and occupied our flat. I got up at around five and worked on my novel, for this was what the manuscript had become, until Linda got up at around ten. We had breakfast, now and then I read bits of what I had written aloud, she invariably said it was very good, we went swimming on a beach a few kilometres away, did some shopping and made lunch, I went fishing in the afternoons while she slept, in the evenings we lit the fire and we talked or read or made love. When the week was up we caught the train from Moss to Oslo and took the Bergen line on to Flåm, whence we went by boat to Balestrand and stayed at Kvikne’s Hotel and then caught the ferry to Fjærland the next day. Where we met Tomas Espedal – he was on a walking trip with a friend, heading for a place he had in Sunnfjord. I hadn’t met him since I lived in Bergen and just the sight of him cheered me up, he was one of the best people I had ever met. Mum was waiting on the quay in Fjærland, and we drove past the glacier, which shone greyish white against the blue sky, through the long tunnel into the long dark narrow valley where so often there were avalanches, and into Skei, where the gentle luxuriant Jølster countryside opened out.

This was the third time Linda and mum had met, and for the rest of the stay I tried, in vain, to bridge the gap I perceived at once. There was always some obstacle, almost nothing seemed to run smoothly. When something did and I saw Linda perk up and react in a way which mum latched on to, I became happy out of all proportion, realised why and longed to move on.

Then Linda started bleeding. She was terrified, truly terrified, wanted to leave at once, rang Stockholm and spoke to the midwife, who couldn’t comment without examining her. That made Linda even more frightened, and my saying it’ll be fine, it’s bound to be fine and it’s nothing did not do a lot to help because how could I know? What authority did I have? She wanted to leave, I said we were staying and in the end, when she agreed, everything became my responsibility, so if things went wrong, or if they had already gone wrong, I was the one who had insisted we shouldn’t bother with an examination, we should wait and see.

Linda’s entire energy was focused on this, I could see it was all she thought about, fear gnawed at her, she no longer spoke when we were eating or were together in the evening, and when she came downstairs after sleeping on the first floor and found mum and me sitting in the garden and chatting she turned and left, her eyes dark with fury, and I understood why: we were talking as though nothing had happened, as though what she felt did not matter. And that was both true and not true. I thought everything would be fine, but I was not sure, and at the same time we were guests there, I hadn’t seen my mother for more than six months, we had a lot to talk about, and what purpose was served by saying nothing, by simply wandering around mute, in constant, agonising, all-encompassing fear? I put my arms around her, I comforted her, tried to tell her that everything was bound to be fine, but she wasn’t receptive and didn’t want to be there. When mum asked her something she barely answered. On our walks through the valley she criticised my mother and everything about her. I defended her, we screamed at each other, she turned and went off on her own, I ran after her, it was a nightmare, but as with all nightmares there was an awakening from this too. But first there was a final scene: mum drove us to Florø, where we would catch the boat. We arrived early, decided to have lunch, found a restaurant on a kind of pontoon, sat down and ordered fish soup. It arrived, and it tasted terrible, of butter and almost nothing else.

‘I can’t eat this,’ Linda said.

‘No, it isn’t very good,’ I said.

‘We’d better tell the waiter and ask him to bring something else,’ Linda said.

I could not imagine anything more embarrassing than sending food back to the kitchen. And this was only Florø, not Stockholm or Paris. At the same time I couldn’t put up with any more moods and so I beckoned to the waitress.

‘I’m afraid this isn’t very good,’ I said. ‘Do you think we could have something else instead?’

The robust middle-aged waitress with badly dyed blonde hair gave me a disapproving glare.

‘There shouldn’t be anything wrong with the food,’ she said. ‘But if you say there is I’ll go and ask the chef.’

We sat around the table, my mother, Linda and I, with three full bowls of soup, saying nothing.

The waitress returned, shaking her head.

‘My apologies,’ she said. ‘The chef says there’s nothing wrong with the soup. It tastes the way it is supposed to.’

What should we do?

The only time in my life I send back food to the kitchen and they don’t accept what I say. Anywhere else on earth they would have given us an alternative dish, but not on Florø. My face was red with shame and annoyance. If I had been alone I would have eaten the bloody soup, no matter how bad it was. Now I had complained, however embarrassing and unnecessary I thought that was, and they met my complaint with resistance?!

I got to my feet.

‘I’ll go in and have a few words with the chef,’ I said.

‘You do that,’ said the waitress.

I walked along the pontoon and into the kitchen, which was on land, poked my head over a counter and caught the attention, not of a little fatso, as I had imagined, but a tall well-built man of my own age.

‘We ordered fish soup,’ I said. ‘There’s too much butter in it. I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to eat. Do you think we could have something else instead?’

‘It tastes exactly as it is supposed to,’ he said. ‘You ordered fish soup and that’s what you got. Can’t help you there.’

I walked back. Linda and mum looked up at me. I shook my head.

‘Wouldn’t budge,’ I said.

‘Perhaps I should have a go,’ mum said. ‘After all, I’m an elderly lady. That might help a bit.’

If it was against my nature to complain in restaurants it was definitely against hers.

‘You don’t need to,’ I said. ‘We’d better just leave.’

‘I’ll try,’ she said.

A few minutes later she came back. She too shook her head.

‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘I’m hungry but after all this we really can’t eat the soup.’

We got up, put the money on the table and left.

‘We’ll have to eat on the boat,’ I said to Linda, who just nodded, her eyes black.

It arrived with propellers whirling. I loaded the baggage on board, waved to mum and found a seat at the very front.

We each ate a soft vaguely wet pizza, a potato pancake and a yoghurt. Linda lay back and fell asleep. When she woke up everything that had been in her head was gone. Bright and open, she sat beside me chatting away. I studied her, profoundly astonished. Had all of this been about my mother? Or about being in an unfamiliar place? Or about visiting my life before she became a part of it? And not the fear of losing the baby? Because surely that was just as acute now?

We flew home from Bergen, she was examined the following day and everything was in perfect order. The tiny heart was beating, the tiny body was growing and all the tests that could be done gave the right results.

After the examination, which was carried out at a clinic in the Old Town, we went to a nearby cake shop and talked about what happened during the check-up. We always did that. After an hour I took the Metro the whole way out to Åkeshov, where I had been given a new office. In the end I couldn’t stand being in the old one in the tower, and Linda’s author friend, the film director Maria Zennström, had offered me a shabby room for next to nothing out there. It was in the basement of a block of flats, no one was around during the day, I sat all alone between concrete walls and wrote, read or stared into the forest where Metro carriages careered through the trees every five minutes or so. I had read Spengler’s
The Decline of the West
, and while a lot could be said about his theories on civilisation, what he wrote about the Baroque period and his Faustian concept, about the Age of Enlightenment and his concept of the cyclical nature of civilisation, was original and masterful; some of it I put straight into the novel, so to speak, which I had realised would have to have the seventeenth century as a kind of centre. Everything sprang from there, it was when the world separated: on one side there was the old and useless, the whole magical, irrational, dogmatic and authoritarian tradition; on the other what developed into the world we inhabited.

Autumn passed, the belly grew, Linda fiddled around with all sorts of bits and bobs, she seemed to be like a magnet for everything, there were lit candles and hot baths, piles of baby clothes in the cupboard, photo albums were collated and books about pregnancy and the baby’s first year were read. I was so glad to see it, but couldn’t go there myself, not even close, I had to write. I could be together with her, make love to her, talk to her, go for walks with her, but I could not feel or do as she did.

Now and then there were angry outbursts. One morning I spilt water on the kitchen carpet, went off to the Metro without mopping up and when I returned home there was a big yellow stain. I asked what had happened, she looked at me sheepishly, well, she had seen the stain I had left on the carpet when she entered the kitchen and she had been so angry she poured juice over it. But then the water dried out and she realised what she had done.

We had to throw the carpet away.

One evening she gouged the dining-room table she had been given by her mother, part of a small suite she had paid a fortune for, because I had not shown enough interest in the letter Linda was writing to the maternity department. It had been about her wishes and preferences. When she read out a suggestion I nodded, but without the necessary conviction, evidently, for all of a sudden she jabbed her pen into the table and scored the top with as much force as she could apply, again and again. What are you doing? I said. You don’t care, she said. Oh, for Christ’s sake, of course I care. And now you’ve ruined the table.

One evening I got so mad at her that I threw a glass at the stove with all my might. Strangely enough, it didn’t break. Typical, I thought afterwards, I couldn’t even perform the classic act of smashing a glass during a row.

We went to the antenatal classes together, the room was packed and the audience sensitive to every word spoken from the rostrum; if there was anything remotely controversial from a biological point of view, a low sucking of breath ran through the rows, for this was taking place in a country where gender was a social construct, and for the body, outside what everyone agreed was common sense, there was no place. Instinct, came a voice from the rostrum. No, no, no! the angry women in the room whispered. How could you say such a thing! I saw a woman sobbing on a bench – her husband was ten minutes late for the course – and I thought, I am not alone. When he did finally arrive she pummelled his stomach with her fists while he, as carefully as he could, tried to get her out of this state and into a more controlled and dignified one.

This was how we lived, in abrupt mood swings between being calm and peaceful, optimistic and affectionate and sudden explosions of fury. Every morning I caught the Metro to Åkeshov, and the moment I walked down into the underground everything that had gone on at home was eradicated from my mind. I looked at the crowd in the subterranean station, inhaled the atmosphere, got on the train and read, looked at the suburban houses we glided past after we had left the tunnels, read, surveyed the town as we crossed the big bridge, read, loved, really loved, all the stops at the small stations, got off at Åkeshov, almost the only passenger travelling in this direction to work, walked roughly a kilometre to the office and worked all day. Soon the manuscript would amount to a hundred pages, and it was becoming stranger and stranger; after the introduction about crabbing it shifted into a purely essayistic style, and presented some theories about the divine that I had never considered before, but in some peculiar manner, from the premises they set, in their way, they were right. I had come across a Russian Orthodox bookshop, it really was a find, all manner of remarkable writings were there, I bought them, took notes and could barely restrain my glee when yet another element of the pseudo-theory fell into place, until I went home in the afternoon, when the life awaiting me there slowly returned as the train approached the station in Hötorget. Now and then I went to town earlier, when we had to go for a check-up at the Mother Care Centre, as it was called in Swedish, where I sat on a chair watching Linda being examined, blood pressure and blood samples, listening for the heartbeat and measuring the belly, which was growing as it should, everything was in order, all the test results were excellent, for if there was one thing Linda had it was physical strength and rude health, which I told her as often as I could. Compared with the body’s weight and certainties, worry was nothing, a buzzing fly, a swirling feather, a cloud of dust.

We went to Ikea and bought a baby-changing table, which we loaded with piles of cloths and towels, and on the wall above I stuck a sequence of postcards of seals, whales, fish, turtles, lions, monkeys and the Beatles during their psychedelic period, so that the baby could see what a wonderful world it had been born into. Yngve and Kari Anne sent us their baby cast-offs, but the buggy he had promised was a little time in coming, to Linda’s increasing annoyance. One evening she exploded: the buggy was never going to come, we couldn’t rely on that brother of mine, we should have bought our own, which she had said from day one. There were still two months to the due date. I called Yngve, dropped a hint about the buggy and mumbled something about the irrationality of pregnant women, he said it was on its way, I said I knew it was, but nevertheless I had to ask. How I hated doing it. How I hated going against my nature to satisfy her. But, I told myself, there was a purpose, there was a goal, and as long as that remained uppermost in my mind I would just have to put up with all the creeping and crawling. The buggy didn’t arrive. Another outburst. We bought some contraption to put in the bathtub for when the baby had to be bathed, we bought bodices and tiny shoes, rompers and a sleeping bag for the buggy. We borrowed a cradle from Helena with a little duvet and pillow, which Linda regarded with moist eyes. And we discussed a name. Almost every night we sat talking about it, batting an enormous variety of names to and fro, always with a shortlist of four or five, always changing it. One night Linda suggested Vanja, and with that we had the name for a girl. We were suddenly decided. We liked the Russianness of it and its associations, something strong and wild, and Vanja was derived from Ivan, which was the same as Johannes in Norwegian, which was Linda’s father’s name. If it was a boy he would be Bjørn.