My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgård

Author:Karl Ove Knausgård
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Contemporary, Biography
ISBN: 9781935744528
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Published: 2009-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I met Yngve’s eyes.

“You were going to bed?” he said.

“Yes, we’d been watching TV all evening,” she said. “And he didn’t move when I got up to go downstairs.”

“Was it dark outside? Do you remember?” Yngve asked.

“Yes, I think so,” she said.

I was close to retching.

“But when you called Gunnar,” Yngve said, “that was in the morning, wasn’t it? Can you remember?”

“It might have been in the morning,” she said. “Now that you say so. Yes, it was. I went upstairs and there he was, in the chair. In there.”

She got to her feet and left the kitchen. We followed. She stopped halfway into the living room and pointed to the chair in front of the television.

“That’s where he was sitting,” she said. “That’s where he died.”

She covered her face with her hands for an instant. Then she walked quickly back to the kitchen.

Nothing could bridge this. It was impossible to deal with. I could fill the bucket with water and start washing, and I could clean the whole damned house, but it would not help an iota, of course it wouldn’t, nor would the idea that we should reclaim the house and hold the funeral here, there was nothing I could do that would help, there was nowhere I could escape to, nothing that could protect me from this.

“We need to talk,” Yngve said. “Shall we go onto the veranda?” I nodded and followed him down into the second living room and onto the veranda. There was not a breath of air. The sky was as gray as before but a touch lighter above the town. The sound of a car in a low gear rose from the narrow alley below the house. Yngve stood with both hands around the railing staring out to the fjord. I sat down on the faded sun-lounger, got up the next moment, collected some bottles and put them by the wall, cast around for a bag but couldn’t see one.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Yngve asked at length and straightened up.

“I think so,” I said.

“Grandma is the only person to have seen him,” he said. “She’s the only witness. Gunnar didn’t see him. She called him in the morning, and he called an ambulance. But he didn’t see him.”

“No,” I said.

“For all we know he might have been alive. How would Grandma know? She finds him on the sofa, he doesn’t answer when she speaks to him, she calls Gunnar, and then the ambulance arrives, the house is full of doctors and medical staff, they carry him out on a stretcher and are gone, and that’s that. But suppose he wasn’t dead? Suppose he was only dead drunk? Or was in some kind of coma?”

“Yes,” I said. “When we turned up she said she’d found him in the morning. Now she said she found him in the evening. And that’s it.”

“And she’s going senile. She keeps asking the same questions. How much did she understand when the place was full of paramedics?

“And then there’s the medication she’s taking,” I said.

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