My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Author:Karl Ove Knausgaard [Knausgaard, Karl Ove]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935744528
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

From the open window on the floor above came the sound of crying. I craned my neck. Kari Anne was in the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, two glasses on the table, she ran across the floor to the staircase. Ylva, who was pushing a little cart with a doll inside, trundled in the same direction. Seconds later I heard Kari Anne’s consoling voice through the window, and the crying abated. I got up, opened the door, and went in. Ylva was standing by the gate in front of the stairs looking up. The plumbing in the wall gurgled.

“Do you want to sit on my shoulders?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

I squatted down and lifted her onto my shoulders, held her small legs tight with my hands and ran back and forth between the living room and the kitchen a few times, whinnying like a horse. She laughed, and whenever I stopped and bent forward as if I were going to throw her off she screamed. After a couple of minutes I’d had enough, but continued for another two as a matter of form, before crouching down and unsaddling her.

“More!” she said.

“Another time,” I said, looking out of the window, down to the road where a bus pulled in and stopped to let on a meager group of commuters from the flats.

“Now,” she said.

I looked at her and smiled.

“Okay. One more time then,” I said. Up she went again, back and forth again, halt and pretend to throw her off, whinny. Fortunately, Yngve came down just afterward, so stopping seemed natural enough.

“Are you ready?” he said.

His hair was wet, and his cheeks smooth after a shave. In his hand he was holding the old blue-and-red Adidas bag he had had at school.

“Yup,” I said.

“Is Kari Anne upstairs?”

“Yes, Torje woke up.”

“I’ll just have a smoke and then we can go,” Yngve said. “Will you keep an eye on Ylva?”

I nodded. By a stroke of good fortune she seemed to have found something to occupy herself with, so I was able to collapse on the sofa and flick through one of the music magazines there. But I wasn’t up to absorbing record reviews and interviews with bands, so I put it down and instead took his guitar from the stand by the sofa, in front of the amplifier and boxes of LPs. It was a black Fender Telecaster, relatively new, while the tube amplifier was an old Music Man. In addition, he had a Hagström guitar, but that was in his office. I strummed a few chords without thinking, it was the opening of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and I started to sing to myself quietly. I no longer had a guitar, after all these years I hadn’t managed much more than the very basic skills it would take a somewhat talented fourteen-year-old a month to master. But the drum set, which I had paid a pretty krone for five years ago, that at least was in the loft, and now we were back in Bergen perhaps it could be used again.

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