Welcome to America Read online

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  A family on the brink of silence

  Ellen has stopped talking. She thinks she may have killed her dad. Her brother’s barricaded himself in his room. Their mother, a successful actress, carries on as normal. We’re a family of light! she insists. But darkness seeps in everywhere and in their separate worlds each of them longs for togetherness. Welcome to America is an exquisite portrait of a sensitive, strong-willed child in the throes of trauma, a family on the brink of implosion, and the love that threatens to tear them apart.

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  Praise for Welcome to America

  ‘Knausgård’s story of a family in crisis is shocking and imaginative. Everything is written in beautiful and sparse prose which suggests that, after all, from darkness comes light.’

  JURY, AUGUST PRIZE

  ‘Knausgård’s artistry is masterful.’

  Bookslut

  ‘Welcome to America presents itself as an étude in the musical sense of the term: a basic theme that varies to infinity, acquiring with each new variation a new unprecedented facet. A triumph.’

  Le Monde

  ‘The incandescent Welcome to America allows one to discover the author’s vibrant and powerful universe.’

  Lire

  ‘Gets you in the gut. A delirious dance.’

  L’Alsace Quotidien

  ‘A tender novel about a mute girl: gentle, sensitive, minimal, concise, subtle, and brutal. This is writing as self-defense and liberation.’

  VOLKER WEIDERMANN, Spiegel

  ‘A daring and disturbing novel. One will not soon forget the eleven-year-old narrator and her silence.’

  MDR Kultur

  ‘In her slim book, Boström Knausgård conjures a constellation reminiscent of a psychological thriller. Welcome to America is a book that masterfully describes the many nuances of inner darkness.’

  Austria Presse Agentur

  ‘A short, very lyrical novel. The scenes succeed in their great universality, closely observed, wisely questioned.’

  Brigitte Woman

  ‘Outstanding psychological chamber play. Linda Boström Knausgård has an incredible ability to give voice to the young narrator’s haunting thoughts and she does it through such dense prose that is both simple and powerful, both tangible and poetic.’

  Politiken

  ‘Boström Knausgård has her own poetic language. The imagery is just as natural and brilliant as it is mad and askew.’

  Dagbladet

  ‘A great book! Linda Boström Knausgård certainly does not shy away from the dark and horrible in her family dramas. Her prose is beautiful, clear, and precise. I really love this novel.’

  Aftonbladet

  ‘A book cannot, like a person, be accomplished. But Linda Boström Knausgård manages to get very close. She keeps her balance perfectly: she never judges, never justifies. She just narrates, with perfection.’

  Sydsvenskan

  ‘Linda Boström Knausgård erases herself from her own writing. What remains is the girl who communicates directly with the reader in a remarkably strong voice, despite her being so quiet.’

  Svenska Dagbladet

  ‘Hers is a way of writing that takes risks, without considering the consequences, heading straight for the unknown. Reading her novella is like experiencing a condensed depiction of decay, a decay that also carries a light so strong that it is like standing in the middle of a ray of sunshine.’

  Jönköpings-Posten

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  LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD (Sweden) is an author and poet, as well as a producer of documentaries for Swedish radio. Her first novel, The Helios Disaster, was awarded the Mare Kandre Prize and shortlisted for the Swedish Radio Novel Award 2014. Welcome to America, her second novel, has been awarded the prestigious Swedish August Prize and nominated for the Svenska Dagbladet Literary Prize.

  MARTIN AITKEN is a full-time translator of Scandinavian literature. Working mainly from Danish and more recently Norwegian, he has translated the works of writers such as Kim Leine, Helle Helle, Peter Høeg, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. His recent translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. Welcome to America is his first book from Swedish.

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  AUTHOR

  ‘Silence, or not speaking, is a theme I recognize from my own childhood. To speak and then suddenly not speak―I’ve experienced that. As a child I fantasized about not speaking when I was angry at my mother: “I won’t say a word, not a word!” But I didn’t have the strength that Ellen in the book has. I held out two or three days at most, and it felt good. But then life carried on. After I coined the phrase “It’s a long time already since I stopped talking” the story just fell into place.’

  TRANSLATOR

  ‘Boström Knausgård’s high-tension prose crackles with electricity. Strobe-like, her sentences illuminate the shadowlands of grief and insecurity as she sensitively probes the emotions of childhood vulnerability, loneliness, and longing. Her uncomplicated sentence structures and straightforward lexis belie great richnesses of meaning. The task is to carry that over into an English that retains the delicate hues of Scandinavian simplicity without compromising its own forms of expression. For this is a remarkable portrait that continues to shower its sparks long after reading.’

  PUBLISHER

  ‘Boström Knausgård’s writing is hypnotic: personal, tight, and otherworldly. It comes from a place deep inside the belly of adolescence, and screams―albeit melodically, gorgeously―about the painful passage out of it that is more commonly known as growing up. This book is a door that opens onto an extraordinary female mind.’

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  LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD

  WELCOME TO AMERICA

  Translated from the Swedish

  by Martin Aitken

  WORLD EDITIONS

  New York, London, Amsterdam

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  Published in the USA in 2019 by World Editions LLC, New York

  Published in the UK in 2019 by World Editions Ltd., London

  World Editions

  New York/London/Amsterdam

  Copyright © Linda Boström Knausgård, 2016

  English translation copyright © Martin Aitken, 2019

  Cover image © Dana Menussi/Getty

  Author portrait © Christina Ottosson Öygarden

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed therein are those of the characters and should not be confused with those of the author.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available

  ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-041-2

  ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-049-8

  First published as Välkommen till Amerika in Sweden in 2016 by Modernista. Published by agreement with Copenhagen Literary Agency ApS, Copenhagen.

  The cost of this translation was defrayed by a subsidy from the Swedish Arts Council, gratefully acknowledged.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Twitter: @WorldEdBooks

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  www.worldeditions.org

  Book Club Discussion Guides are available on our website.

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  It’s
a long time already since I stopped talking. They’re used to it now. My mum, my brother. My dad’s dead, so I don’t know what he’d have to say about it. Maybe that it was genetic. The genes come down hard in our family. Hard and without mercy. The direct lines of descendancy. Maybe the silence was always inside me. I used to say things that weren’t true. I said the sun was out when it was raining. That the porridge we ate was green like the grass and tasted like soil. I said school was like walking into pitch darkness every day. Like having to hold on to a handrail until it was time to go home. What did I do when school was over? I certainly didn’t play with my brother, he locked himself away in his room with his music. He nailed the door shut. He pissed in bottles he kept. It was what they were for.

  The silence makes no difference. You mustn’t believe otherwise. You mustn’t believe the sun will rise in the morning, because you can’t ever be sure it will. I haven’t used the notebook my mum gave me. In case there’s something you want to communicate, she said. The notebook was a kind of consent. She was accepting my silence. Leaving me alone. At some point it would cease. Most likely it would cease.

  I passed my hand over the windowsill and drew outlines in the dust that stuck to my palm. A spruce tree and a Father Christmas. It was all I could think of. Thoughts come so slowly and express themselves so simply: pellets, bread slice, pond.

  Did I say we lived in an apartment? There was no contact with nature, apart from the park where I saw my first flasher. I was sitting on top of the climbing frame and the man stood below and exposed himself completely. He took off his pants altogether. His thing was stiff and purple. I stared and noted the colour.

  I had friends, but they don’t come round anymore. They found other apartments to visit once the silence began. Before that, there were always kids at ours. My mum was bonkers. At ours you could shoot pucks against the double doors. We built a skateboard ramp up against the bookshelves, and the apartment was so big we could roller-skate in it. It made marks in the parquet, but the important thing was for the children to play. The place is quiet now. That’s one difference anyway.

  I stopped talking when growing began to take up too much space inside me. I was sure I couldn’t do both, grow and talk at the same time. I think perhaps I was the sort of person who liked to take charge, and it felt good to give that up. There were so many to keep track of. So many dreams to fulfil. Wish something of me, I could say. But I could never make any wish come true. Not really.

  I could have talked about my mum. But I said nothing. I didn’t want her glitzy smiles. Her perfect hair. Her wanting me to be a beautiful girl. To her, beauty was something on its own. An important property that had to be cultivated like a flower. You had to sow the seed and make sure to water it so you could watch it grow. I could have been like her. Dark, with a kind of sparkle that went without saying. But somehow I fell short. I was no force of nature, the way she was. I was infected by doubt. It was everywhere. It ran through the marrow of my spine and spread from there. I felt doubt assail me. Days and nights, sunsets awash with doubt.

  I wrote nothing in my notebook, but I always knew where it was. I moved it from the top cupboard to under the pillow, then back to the cupboard again. Sometimes I hid it behind the toilet in case I needed to write something there.

  My dad’s dead. Did I mention that? It’s my fault. I prayed out loud to God for him to die and he did. One morning he was lying there motionless in his bed. That was the power there was in me speaking. Maybe what I said about growing wasn’t right. Maybe I stopped talking because my wish came true. You think you want your wishes to come true. But you don’t. You should never ask for what you want. It disturbs the order of things. The way you really want them. You want to be disappointed. You want to be hurt and have to struggle to get over it. You want the wrong presents on your birthday. You might think you want what you wish for, but you don’t.

  The days and nights are the same. The silence softens the edges so everything is like a kind of mist. We can call them half-days. We can call them what we like.

  Before, I would often go with my mum to the theatre. I don’t do that anymore. I hear her go out and I hear her come back. The last time I saw her perform she was a fallen Statue of Liberty wishing the immigrants welcome to America. She was bald, with a shard of mirror stuck on her brow. She’d lost her torch. I loved it. The way they’d made her up. The way she shone and shone on the stage. Welcome to America. Welcome to America.

  I felt an urge to write those exact words in my notebook. But I stopped myself. You’ve got to be strict. You can’t just follow the impulses that criss-cross the mind in their little tunnels of light. I could see my thoughts. They were everywhere. They passed into my body, darting about my heart, toying with it, forcing themselves upon it. I could do nothing about my thoughts.

  I sang in the school choir. The music teacher’s name was Hildegard. She was from Austria. If only I could sing like you, she wrote in a book I was given as a prize on the last day of term. She did sing dreadfully. Her voice was a screech. But she knew all the parts. I sang on my own that day in the church. The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway, there’s never been such a day in Beverly Hills, L.A. But it’s December the twenty-fourth, and I am longing to be up north. I was so nervous I was shaking, but it went down well. And my mum said everyone was always nervous.

  My dad spoke to me in a dream. Cat got your tongue? he said. No, daddy. But the words are so heavy. So heavy to fling about.

  What more did he say? You’re my lovely girl. You were never any trouble. No, daddy, I said. I was never any trouble.

  He needed reassuring. Even though he was dead. In that respect, there’s no difference between the living and the dead.

  I tried to keep him away. Ignored his questions. But he was everywhere, the same as when he was alive. To the fatherland, he’d say, filling up his glass. To the old woman who has no teeth.

  It was all so easy. My mum says it was denial. That I wanted life to pass by me, instead of standing there getting drenched in it like everyone else. She thought less of me now, but that was hardly surprising. I thought less of her, too. We were standing on each side of a trench, measuring out a distance between us. Or perhaps we were measuring each other. Measuring each other with our eyes. Who was the stronger? Who was weak? Who would come creeping in the night, sobbing and reaching out to be held?

  Nevertheless, she’d been loath to make an issue of it. That’s what she told my teacher at school, who after a week was in tears. It’s a whim, she said. She’s full of them. Don’t make a thing about it. Leave her alone. She’ll grow out of it again. There’s nothing the matter with her.

  Along with speech went the light. It no longer danced on the walls where we lived. We’re a family of light, my mum would say, though my dad lay in bed staring at the wall when he was alive. What light, my eyes would ask. What light are you talking about? Maybe we’d always measured each other. Maybe the question of who was strong and who was weak had been there from the start.

  I was afraid of my brother. Always had been. All the time, he was there, his hands and his rage. My grandma up north sent me a box of raisins. He snatched it from my hand. I lost my temper and picked up a knife. But what was I going to do with a knife? He stood there laughing at me as he filled his face.

  I kept a stash in the bathroom, of books, sandwiches, fruit. All hidden away on the top shelf, behind the toilet paper we bought in bulk. As soon as my mum went out and shut the door behind her, my brother would turn on me and I would flee to the bathroom. And there I would sit for hours on end. I read books, or at least tried to make the words stick, but usually the fear meant my eyes just skated about on the page, and I could never remember what they saw. Of course, he would eventually tire of keeping me prisoner, and there was a tacit understanding that at some point he would stop and let me out.

  And then we could play together. We played pir
ates, or pretended we were blind. He only let me play if he could pull my nails out. I closed my eyes and held out my hands. They lay like little windows in his palm when it was done.

  Love between siblings. Was that what it was like? He was moody and I was mild. That was how we’d dealt the cards. You can always pass, no matter how good a hand you’ve got, my dad always said. If you’re good enough you can.

  I was good. I could be cagey, then lay down a hand of aces when the others were naive enough to fall for it. Card games, pucks flying through the air. The theatre was there always, like a great sky. Was that what I missed the most?

  Maybe I just can’t get away from my mum the way I’d like. She’s too big, too buoyant, too omnipotent by half. But I try. I see her diamond rings all sticky with dough. I see the strength of her. How wonderful it was to clutch her tight when I was little. Am I grown up now?

  I’ve only just turned eleven. It’s fair to say the day was a joke, the birthday song—Long may she live!—and the presents tossed at me like I was a dog.

  Did I want to live? my mum asked me when the cake was eaten. Did I? Her eyes bored into mine.

  I’m falling away, were the words that came to me. Words spoken only as thoughts. Repeated over and over again. I’m falling away, I’m falling away from all that is living.

  And my sleep at nights. As if I were crossing the sea on stilts. Striding high above the waters, the curve of the earth in front of my eyes.

  It could have been worse.

  The room is quiet around me. The walls are bare after I pulled down the posters. I sit in the windowsill, looking down at the only tree in the courtyard. A chestnut tree. Music seeps through the wall. My brother’s room is next door. Mine is what used to be the maid’s room, though spacious like every other in this apartment. The staff here had plenty of room in the old days. There’s an entrance from the yard, a secret staircase, a narrow spiral of cast-iron leading to the kitchen. The door is never locked. My mum doesn’t care to lock doors. She feels so easily shut in. Sometimes I’m scared I’ll talk in my sleep. That someone will hear me and hold it against me at some future time. I see my mum’s triumphant face. It wouldn’t be right.