Read Online My Struggle: Book 3 by Karl Ove Knausgård - Free Book Online Page B

fraction of a second to switch from resting to hunting. But this time it was too late. A sheet of white Eternit cladding left lying on the lawn was the mouse’s salvation as it squeezed itself underneath a second before the cat arrived.
    The animals’ fleet movements seemed to linger on in me; long after I had gone back to bed my heart was still racing. Perhaps because it, too, was a little animal? After a while I changed position again, put the pillow at the foot of the bed, and drew the curtain to one side so that I could look up at the sky bestrewn with stars, so like grains of sand, a beach with a perimeter, invisible to us, against which the sea beat.
    But what actually lay beyond the universe?
    Dag Lothar said there was nothing. Geir said there were burning flames. That was what I believed, too; the image of the sea was more because the starry sky looked the way it did.
    Mom and Dad’s bedroom was quiet again.
    I pulled the curtain to and closed my eyes. Charged with the silence and darkness of the house, I was soon fast asleep.
    When I got up next morning Grandma and Grandad were sitting with Mom in the living room drinking coffee. Dad was walking across the lawn with the sprinkler in his hand. He placed it at the edge of the lawn so that the thin jets of water, which resembled a waving hand, not only fell on the grass but also the vegetable garden below. The sun’s rays, on the other side of the house now, above the forest to the east, flooded into the garden. The air seemed to be as still as it had been the previous day. The sky was hazy; it almost always was in the morning. Yngve was sitting at the breakfast table. The white eggs in the brown egg cups reminded me that it was Sunday. I sat down in my regular place.
    “What happened yesterday?” Yngve asked in a subdued voice. “Why were you grounded?”
    “I broke the TV,” I said.
    He sent me a quizzical look, holding a slice of bread to his mouth.
    “Yes, I put it on for Grandma and Grandad. Then it went
puff.
Haven’t they said anything?”
    Yngve took a large bite from the slice of bread, which he had spread with clove cheese, and shook his head. I sliced the top off the egg with my knife, opened it like a lid, scooped out the soft white with a spoon, reached for the salt shaker, and tapped it with my forefinger so that only a sprinkling came out. Spread margarine onto some bread and poured a glass of milk. Downstairs, Dad opened the door. I ate the white of the egg, poked the spoon into the yolk to see whether it was hard- or soft-boiled.
    “I’ve been grounded for today as well,” I said.
    “The
whole
day? Or just the evening?”
    I shrugged. The egg was hard-boiled, the yellow yolk disintegrated against the edge of the spoon.
    “The whole day, I think,” I said.
    The road outside was empty and gleamed in the sun. But in the ditch beneath the dense branches of the spruces it was dark and shadowy.
    A bicycle came tearing down the hill at full speed. The boy sitting on it, he must have been fifteen, had one hand on the handlebars and the other on the red gasoline canister he had tied to the luggage rack. His hair was black and fluttered in the wind.
    On the stairs came the sound of Dad’s footsteps. I sat up straight in my chair, cast a hurried glance across the table to see if everything was in place. A bit of the hard-boiled egg had ended up on the table. I quickly brushed it off the edge into my waiting hand and immediately put it on the plate. Yngve delayed the moment until it was almost too late to push his chair into the table and sit up straight, but only almost, for when Dad came in his back was erect and his feet were firmly planted on the floor.
    “Pack your swimming trunks, kids,” he said. “We’re off to Hove for the day.”
    “Me, too?” I wanted to ask, but I held back, because he might have forgotten he had grounded me and the question would have jolted his memory. Also, if he remembered but had changed his mind, it would be