Boyhood Island by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Author:Karl Ove Knausgaard [Knausgaard, Karl Ove]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-374-71114-6
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2009-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

There are two pictures of the kitten. In one he’s standing in front of the television with a raised paw, trying to catch a swimmer. In the other he’s lying on the sofa beside Yngve and me. He has a blue bow tie around his neck.

Who put the bow tie on?

It must have been Mom. That was the sort of thing she would do, I know that, but during the months I have been writing this, in the spate of memories about events and people who have been roused to life, she is almost completely absent, it is as if she hadn’t been there, indeed as if she were one of the false memories you have, one you have been told, not one you have experienced.

How can that be?

For if there was someone there, at the bottom of the well that is my childhood, it was her, my mother, Mom. She was the one who made all our meals and gathered us around her in the kitchen every evening. She was the one who went shopping, knitted or sewed our clothes; she was the one who repaired them when they fell apart. She was the one who supplied the bandage when we had fallen and grazed our knees; she was the one who drove me to the hospital when I broke my collarbone and to the doctor’s when I, somewhat less heroically, had scabies. She was the one who was out of her mind with worry when a young girl died from meningitis and at the same time I got a cold and a bit of a stiff neck. I was bundled straight into the car, off to Kokke-plassen, her foot flat on the accelerator, concern flashing from her eyes. She was the one who read to us, she was the one who washed our hair when we were in the bath, and she was the one who laid out our pajamas afterward. She was the one who drove us to soccer practice in the evening, the one who went to parents’ meetings and sat with other parents at our end-of-term parties and took pictures of us. She was the one who stuck the photos in our albums afterward. She was the one who baked cakes for our birthdays and cakes for Christmas and buns for Shrovetide.

All the things mothers do for their sons, she did for us. If I was ill and in bed with a temperature she was the one who came in with a cold compress and placed it on my forehead, she was the one who put the thermometer up my backside to take my temperature, she was the one who came in with water, juice, grapes, cookies, and she was the one who got up in the night and came in wearing her nightgown to see how I was.

She was always there, I know she was, but I just can’t remember it.

I have no memories of her reading to me and I can’t remember her putting a single bandage on my knees or being present at a single end-of-term event.

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