SPRING

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD

With illustrations by Anna Bjerger
Translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey

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Epub ISBN: 9781473524774

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VINTAGE

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London SW1V 2SA

Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Karl Ove Knausgaard has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Harvill Secker in 2018
First published with the title Om våren in Norway by Forlaget Oktober in 2016

This book was published with the financial assistance of NORLA

Excerpt from Private Confessions by Ingmar Bergman, translated by Joan Tate, and song lyrics from London Calling by The Clash written by Joe Strummer and Mick Jones

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

You don’t know what air is, yet you breathe. You don’t know what sleep is, yet you sleep. You don’t know what night is, yet you lie in it. You don’t know what a heart is, yet your own heart beats steadily in your chest, day and night, day and night, day and night.

You are three months old and as if swaddled in routines you lie on a bed of sameness through the days, for you don’t have a cocoon like larvae do, you don’t have a pouch like the kangaroos, you don’t have a den like the badgers or the bears. You have your bottle of milk, you have the changing table with nappies and wet wipes, you have the pram with the pillow and the duvet, you have your parents’ large warm bodies. Surrounded by all this you grow so slowly that no one notices, least of all yourself, for first you grow outwards, by gripping and holding on to the things around you with your hands, your mouth, your eyes, your thoughts, thereby bringing them into being, and only when you have done this for a few years and the world has been constituted do you begin to discover all that grips you, and you grow inwardly too, towards yourself.

What is the world like to a newborn baby?

Light, dark. Cold, warm. Soft, hard.

The whole array of objects in a house, all meaning deriving from the relations within a family, the significance that every person dwells within, all this is invisible, hidden not by the darkness but by the light of the undifferentiated.

Someone once told me that heroin is so fantastic because the feelings it awakens are akin to those we have as children, when everything is taken care of, the feeling of total security we bask in then, which is so fundamentally good. Anyone who has experienced that high wants to experience it again, since they know it exists as a possibility.

The life I live is separated from yours by an abyss. It is full of problems, of conflicts, of duties, of things that have to be taken care of, handled, fixed, of wills that must be satisfied, wills that must be resisted and perhaps wounded, all in a continual stream where almost nothing stands still but everything is in motion and everything has to be parried.

I am forty-six years old and that is my insight, that life is made up of events that have to be parried. And that the moments of happiness in life all have to do with the opposite.

What is the opposite of parrying something?

It isn’t to regress, it isn’t to withdraw into your world of light and dark, warm and cold, soft and hard. Nor is it the light of the undifferentiated, it is neither sleep nor rest. The opposite of parrying is creating, making, adding something that wasn’t there before.

You were not there before.

Love is not a word I often use, it seems too big in relation to the life I live, the world I know. But then I grew up in a culture that was careful with words. My mother has never told me she loves me, and I have never told her I love her. The same goes for my brother. If I were to say to my mother or my brother that I love them, they would be horrified. I would have laid a burden on them, violently upsetting the balance between us, almost as if I had staggered around in a drunken fit during a child’s christening.

When you were born I knew nothing about you, yet I was filled with feelings for you, overwhelming at first, for a birth is overwhelming, even to someone who is merely looking on – it is as if everything in the room grows denser, as if a kind of gravity develops that draws all meaning towards it, so that for a few hours it can only be found there, later becoming more evenly spread out, subjected to the everyday, diluted with the eventlessness of all the hours of the day and yet always there.

I am your father, and you know my face, my voice and my ways of holding you, but beyond that I could be anyone to you, filled with anything. My own father, your grandfather, who is dead, spent his last years with his mother, and their existence was pitiless. He was an alcoholic and had regressed, he no longer had the strength to parry anything, he had let everything slide, just sat there drinking. That he did so in his mother’s home is significant. She had given birth to him, she had cared for him and carried him here and there, made sure he was warm, dry, fed. The bond this created between them was never broken. He tried, I know that, but he couldn’t do it. That’s why he stayed there. There he could let himself go to ruin. No matter how crippled, no matter how hideous, it was also love. Somewhere deep within there was love, unconditional love.

Back then I didn’t have children, so I didn’t understand it. I saw only the hideousness, the unfreedom, the regression. Now I know. Love is many things, most of its forms are fleeting, linked to everything that happens, everything that comes and goes, everything that fills us at first, then empties us out, but unconditional love is constant, it glows faintly throughout one’s whole life, and I want you to know this – that you too were born into that love, and that it will envelop you, no matter what happens, as long as your mother and I are alive.

It may happen that you don’t want anything to do with it. It may happen that you turn away from it. And one day you will understand that it doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t change anything, that unconditional love is the only love that doesn’t bind you but sets you free.

The love that binds one is something else, it is another form of love, less pure, more mixed up with the person who loves, and it has greater force, it can overshadow everything else, even destroy. Then it must be parried.

I don’t know what your life will be like, I don’t know what will happen to us, but I know what your life is like now, and how we are doing now, and since you won’t remember any of it, not the least little thing, I will tell you about one day in our life, the first spring you were with us. You had thin hair, it looked reddish in the light, and it grew unevenly; there was a circle on the back of your head with no hair at all, probably because it was nearly always pressing against something, pillows and rugs, sofas and chairs, but I still found it strange, for surely your hair wasn’t like grass, which grows only where the sun shines and air is flowing?

Your face was round, your mouth was small, but your lips were relatively wide, and your eyes were round and rather large. You slept in a cot at one end of the house, with a mobile of African animals dangling above you, while I slept in a bed next to yours, for it was my job to look after you at night, since your mother was sensitive when it came to sleep, whereas I slept heavily, like a child, no matter what happened around me. Sometimes you would wake at night and scream because you were hungry, but since I didn’t wake up or only heard it as a sound coming from far, far away, you learned the hard way not to expect anything while it was dark, so that after only a few weeks you slept through the night, from when you were put to bed at six in the evening until you woke up at six in the morning.

This morning began like all the others. You woke up in the darkness and started to scream.

What time was it?

I fumbled around for my phone, which should be on the windowsill just above my head.

There it was.

The light from the screen, no larger than my hand, filled nearly the entire dark room with a vague glow.

Twenty to six.

‘Oh, it’s still early, little girl,’ I said and sat up. The movement set off a rustling, wheezing sound in my chest, and I coughed for a while.

You had gone quiet.

I walked the two steps over to the cot and bent over you, placed a hand on either side of your little ribcage and lifted you up, holding you close to my chest and supporting the back of your head and neck with one hand, even though you were already able to hold your head up by yourself.

‘Hi there,’ I said. ‘Did you sleep well?’

You breathed calmly and seemed to press your cheek against my chest.

I carried you down the hall and into the bathroom. Through the window I saw a narrow band of light just above the eastern horizon, reddish against the black sky and the black ground. The house was cold, the night had been starlit and the temperature must have dropped, but fortunately the dryer had been on all night, and some of its heat, which at times seems almost tropical, still lingered in the room.

I laid you down carefully on the changing table, which had been squeezed in between the bath and the sink, coughing again. A glob of mucus came loose in my throat, I spat it into the sink, turned on the tap to wash it down, saw how it clung to the metal wall of the plughole, smooth and sticky, while water ran over it on both sides until it slowly began to slide over to one side and then, abruptly as if acting of its own volition, disappeared down the drain. I glanced briefly at the mirror above the sink, saw my own masklike face staring at me, turned off the tap and bent over you.

You looked up at me. If you were thinking about something, it couldn’t have been put into words or concepts, it couldn’t be anything you formulated to yourself, only something you felt. There he is, is maybe what you felt as you looked at me, and along with the face you recognised came a whole set of other feelings associated with what I usually did with you and in what ways. A great deal must still have been vague and open within you, like the shifting light in the sky, but once in a while everything must have fused together and become definite and unavoidable: those were the basic bodily sensations, the tide of hunger, the tide of thirst, the tide of tiredness, the tide of too hot and too cold. Those were the times you started to cry.

‘What are you thinking?’ I said to distract you a little as I undid the top buttons of your white pyjamas. But you still thrust out your lower lip, and your mouth began to quiver. With my index finger I struck the tail of one of the little wooden aeroplanes hanging above the changing table so that it began revolving. Then I did the same with the next one, and the next after that.

‘Don’t tell me you’re going to fall for that same old trick today too?’ I said.

But you did. You stared wide-eyed at all the movement in the air while I took off your pyjamas. As I put them in the laundry basket, steps sounded on the ceiling above us. It must have been your younger sister, since the elder one always slept as long as she could and your brother was probably up already. I loosened the flaps of the nappy and pulled it off. As I carried it over to the waste bin it felt unexpectedly heavy, as nappies often do, since the material creates an expectation of lightness. That weight felt good, it told me that you were all right, that your body was functioning as it should. Everything else seemed to be falling apart, from the fluorescent tube above the stove, which had begun blinking more than a year ago and then gone out completely, and which still remained uselessly in its socket, to the car, which had suddenly begun to vibrate whenever it passed a certain speed and had been collected by a tow truck and taken to a garage – to say nothing of all the food that got mouldy or spoilt, shirt buttons that fell off or zips that got stuck, the dishwasher which had stopped functioning or the kitchen sink drainpipe which had got clogged somewhere in the garden, probably with congealed grease, the plumber said when he came to fix it. But the bodies of the children in our house, so smooth and soft on the outside, and infinitely more complex than any machine or mechanical device on the inside, had always functioned perfectly, had never broken down, had never gone to pieces.

I put on a new nappy, widened the opening of a romper suit with my hands and pulled it over your head. You moved your legs and arms slowly, like a reptile. I lifted you up and carried you into the kitchen just as your younger sister came in, barefoot and narrow-eyed with sleep.

‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘Did you sleep well?’

She nodded. ‘Can I hold her?’

‘Yes, that would be great,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll make her some milk. Here, sit on the bench.’

She sat down on the bench, and I handed you to her. While I filled the bright yellow electric kettle with water, got out the milk formula and the bottle, measured out six spoons and poured them into the lukewarm water, you half sat, half lay in her lap, kicking your feet.

‘She’s pretty happy, I think,’ your sister said, taking your little fists in her own, which suddenly seemed big.

She was nine years old and given to thinking more about others than about herself, a character trait of hers that I had often wondered about, what had caused it. She had a light-filled soul, life flowed through her without encountering many obstacles, and maybe the fact that she didn’t doubt herself, didn’t question herself, somehow meant that what was her self didn’t demand any effort or exertion, leaving plenty of space within her for other people. If I got angry with her and raised my voice even a little she reacted strongly, she began to cry so despairingly that I couldn’t stand it and immediately tried to take it all back, usually in one of the many corners of the house which she sought out to be alone in her misery. But that almost never happened, firstly because she hardly ever did anything wrong, secondly because the consequences were so dire for her.

‘Yes, that’s good,’ I said as I screwed the cap on, bent the soft rubber teat to the side with my thumb so the milk wouldn’t squirt out and shook the bottle. In the eastern sky the red band had grown and the colour seemed to have become diluted, while the sky above it had paled. The ground, which stretched flatly away in every direction, hadn’t begun to reflect the light, nor had the trees in the garden outside; on the contrary they seemed to suck it up, so that the blackness slowly filled with greyish grains, as if swollen with darkness.

‘Do you want to feed her?’ I said.

She nodded. ‘But first I have to go to the loo.’

I took you on my arm and went into the living room, where your brother was lying on the sofa with a Mac in front of him, playing computer games. He was wearing green pyjamas that were too small for him, and his hair was tousled.

‘So this is where you are,’ I said. ‘Have you been up a long time?’

‘Yes,’ he said, gazing at the screen.

‘You know you’re not allowed to play on the computer in the morning?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

He looked up at me and smiled. You peered at the lamp on the bookshelf.

‘But there’s nothing else to do,’ he said.

‘You can read,’ I said.

‘That’s boring,’ he said.

‘Well, you can get dressed then,’ I said and sat down. ‘Or maybe you think that’s boring too?’

‘Yes,’ he said, laughing. ‘Everything is boring!’

I laid you on my lap with the back of your head resting against my knees, which I lifted so that you were almost sitting up, and met your gaze.

You flung out your arms and made a gurgling sound.

‘What did you just think about?’ I said.

You looked eagerly at me.

‘Do you know what we’re doing today?’ I said.

You seemed to want to move your head, but didn’t have full control over it, and it fell a little to the side.

‘We’re going to visit Mummy in Helsingborg,’ I said. ‘We’ll drive there after we’ve taken the others to school.’

‘I want to visit Mummy too,’ your brother said, curling up next to us. You kept staring at me with wide-open eyes. We would sit like this a couple of times a day, it was a sort of exercise we did, and it had come about through fear, for when you were newborn I couldn’t quite connect with you. The first month of your life you slept nearly the entire time, and when you weren’t sleeping, you usually looked away. It was a trait I didn’t recognise from your siblings; on the contrary I seemed to remember that they had met my gaze with open, curious eyes. I couldn’t forget that contact, since it was as if I saw them then, the person they were, they seemed to emerge through their eyes. If their inner world was like a forest of undifferentiated sensations, these moments were like a glade within it, a sudden clearing. In your eyes I didn’t see that, you were never quite present in your gaze, and it made me afraid. I thought something was wrong. I thought you might have brain damage or that you were autistic. I spoke to no one about this, for I believe that something becomes true if it is spoken. If it isn’t spoken, it is as if it doesn’t quite exist. And if it doesn’t quite exist, it hasn’t become fixed, and if it hasn’t become fixed, it can still go away.

In other words, I shut my eyes against anything unpleasant. This was more than unpleasant, it was fateful.

You didn’t look at us.

It lasted for a month. Then slowly you emerged, you became more and more present in the room and not just within yourself. And when I saw that, that you were emerging through your eyes, and that gradually there was even joy in them, my anxiety vanished. You were born a month early, and maybe that was why, maybe you needed those extra weeks to yourself. But the fright it gave me made me take extra care to speak to you, look at you, chat with you, fool around with you.

I had been afraid you might be brain damaged or autistic because your mother had been given some powerful medication at one time while she was expecting you. She had been in extreme distress, and the medication, which helped her, was adjusted to you too, so there was no real danger, but to be on the safe side you were delivered in a special ward and monitored for the first week. There were no signs that anything was wrong, you were perfectly sound and healthy, but still, that you avoided our gaze and preferred to look away when we tried to make eye contact was something I couldn’t help worrying about.

On the other hand I knew how robust and strong infants are and how much it takes to disrupt their physiological life course. That the mother’s varying states of mind might affect them, for instance, as they lay bobbing in the lukewarm water of the womb, I didn’t believe in the slightest. Although they live in symbiosis with her, they are also autonomous, in the sense that the genetic codes determining their growth are fixed from the moment of conception. People understood this in earlier times, I have sometimes thought. The old concept of fate expresses this too: that so much of what will happen has already been decided when the child is born.

‘All of us are going to visit Mummy soon,’ I said. ‘But today you have to go to school.’

‘What if I don’t want to?’ he said.

‘Then I guess I’ll have to carry you,’ I said.

Just then your sister came in and sat down next to us, gentle and still a little sleepy in her movements.

‘When you get home, Grandma will be here,’ I said.

‘She will?’ your sister said.

‘Yes!’ your brother said, looking expectantly at me. ‘Can I sleep in her bed?’

‘I should think so,’ I said. ‘But tonight is Walpurgis night, remember? So you’re probably going to stay up later than usual.’

‘Is Grandma going to join us?’

‘That I don’t know,’ I said and stood up. ‘Could you hold her for a while? So I can go and have some coffee?’

Your sister nodded, and I laid you in the crook of her arm and handed her the bottle, which she immediately put in your mouth.

‘You can come and get me if you need any help,’ I said, looking at your brother. ‘Can you handle that?’

‘Of course,’ your sister said, too focused on her task to look up at me.

‘Come and get me if you need me,’ I said again and went out into the kitchen, made myself a cup of coffee, carried it with me into the hall, stuck my feet in my shoes and opened the door. The cool spring air settled over my face like a film. The sun had come up over the horizon. The blazing orange light, so clear and concentrated in the sky above, was dispersed by the sun’s tremendous distance and seemed to have dissolved into the air down here, which was bright and light and fell over every surface, where it was reflected in soft colours, except where the rays of the sun shone directly, as on the top of the apple tree, where the half-unfurled leaves sparkled like little mirrors.

I walked across the yard to the house on the other side which I used as an office, and where I could smoke. It had been a workshop when we bought the property, and although I had covered every wall with books it still bore signs of its former use – in some indefinable way it seemed to have been fitted out to accommodate crude mechanical operations, connecting it to outdoor activities, rather like a garage, which neither the rugs on the floors nor the pictures on the walls could do more than gloss over.

I sat down in the chair in the corner. A pile of envelopes containing bills lay on the table next to it, they were my bad conscience, I never seemed to get around to paying them, and when I finally did it was always so late that reminders and debt collection notices had already been sent. It was so simple, all you had to do was pay, I had money, and yet it was only through huge exertion that I managed to get it done. On top of the pile lay a bill from Kronofogden, the Swedish Enforcement Authority, it was a serious matter, if the bill wasn’t paid they would come knocking on our door. It had happened once while we were living in Malmö and once more since we moved here.

Oh!

I took the envelope, opened it, placed the bill on the table in front of me, turned on the Mac, went to the bank’s home page, pulled the card case out of my back pocket and also placed it on the table while I looked around for the card reader. There it lay, on top of a book by William Blake on the bookshelf right next to where I was sitting. I inserted the card, typed the password, entered the code on the bank’s home page, and was redirected to the page where bills were paid.

That done, I took a sip of coffee and got the pack of cigarettes that was on the shelf below Blake, on top of a book by Sven Nykvist called Vördnad för ljuset (In Reverence of the Light) and one by Klaus Mann which I had never read. I had had these books for so long, and they had been standing in the same place for so many years, that I felt a familiarity with them more akin to the feeling one has for flowers in one’s garden than for books. In both cases I contented myself with merely looking at them – there stood the lilies, there the Icelandic sagas, there stood the snowdrops, there Jayne Anne Phillips – and if I pulled out one of the books and began to read, it was like bringing the flowers inside and setting them in a vase.

Once I had been sitting at my desk working, I remembered now, when suddenly there was a thump behind me. I spun round. A book lay on the floor, it must have fallen from the bookshelf. But how? It had been standing on a perfectly flat shelf, held in place by other books. Curious, I got up and walked over to the shelf.

Could it have been an animal? A mouse or a rat?

No. For in the space left by the book that had fallen, there lay a creeper. It had grown along the outside wall of the house and up to the roof, where it had found a passage beneath the tiles and into the structure of the roof itself, between beams and boards, from which it had crept down along the inside wall of the room, encountered the bookshelf and pressed itself against the book, which was Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho, and infinitely slowly pushed it along, millimetre by millimetre, until the day the book suddenly reached the point where gravity sucked it down and it fell to the floor two metres below with a loud thump.

I still found it incredible. And a little frightening, the blind force of growth; later, when I had got rid of the creepers and pulled them away from the wall like rope, fathom after fathom, I discovered that the parts that had grown below the roof were completely white, like everything that lives in darkness.

I leaned forward and tapped the little cap of ash on the cigarette against the rim of a cup. From where I was sitting I could see the other house, both the windows of the living room and the door, and imagine that I had some sort of oversight over what was going on in there. The minutes I managed to steal in this way, by letting your siblings look after you, felt exactly like that, stolen, unjustified. I knew it would be fine, that nothing dangerous would happen, so it was rather the feeling that it would look bad to others that bothered me as I leaned back in the chair, inhaled carefully so as not to set off another coughing fit, blew the smoke out and took another sip of coffee. What would happen if someone came here now and found me sitting in here smoking while I let young children look after a nearly newborn baby? What they would think?

Last summer, half a year before you were born, I had been summoned to a meeting with the Child Protection Service. It was a routine meeting, they always arranged one when it happened, the thing that had happened here, but it didn’t leave me unaffected, and not just because it was humiliating to sit in an office answering questions from two young women, both of them in their twenties, about my children and about our life, but also because it was shameful, since it meant that we as a family had approached the zone where third parties had the right to get involved, had the right to give advice, even had the right to enter our lives and take over. Though it would never come to that, ultimately that was still what was at stake, that was the worst possible outcome of this meeting.

For this reason I didn’t go as myself, I didn’t go in there unwashed, with my hair messy and wearing the same clothes I had been using for weeks, as I normally did, it would be taking too great a risk, for then they would think I let the kids go unwashed too, with messy hair and clothes they had worn for weeks. No, that morning I showered, washed my hair, brushed my teeth, dressed in clean, presentable clothes, got in the car and drove to town.

It had been a marvellous summer, day after day of tall blue skies, still air, blazing sun, and this day was no different. As I parked the car, sunlight flooded the town, flashing off bonnets and roofs, windows and facades all around me, and though it was still early there were plenty of people in the streets, dressed in shorts and T-shirts, sleeveless tops and skirts, sandals and trainers. Even the air in the shade above the pavement outside the functionalist building where the meeting was to take place, right by the square, was warm and close.