Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

From the staffroom I watched him steadily and methodically clearing the playground of snow, it took him perhaps a quarter of an hour, before he turned and drove back down to the village.

On my way home from school the following afternoon I caught a glimpse of Vivian’s twenty-year-old boyfriend. She was in his car, so overcome by her triumph that she didn’t know where to look as they drove past and our eyes met. He was a puny-looking fair-haired man who — I could see when I met them by the shop shortly afterwards — laughed a lot. He had been unemployed and had moved here when he was offered a job as a crewman on one of the boats. Nothing of the Vivian we saw in the lessons, her childish questions, the teasing and giggling, was on show here, it had to be stowed away, and it was strange to see, she had sat in the front seat of the car like royalty, with a hard-won stateliness that threatened to crack at any moment, held together only by the fragile bonds of vanity, such that the child she also was could reappear at any moment or even take total control. One giggle, one gesture, one blush and there you were. Her boyfriend was not the world’s brightest, to put it mildly, so in this way they were well matched. In class her behaviour changed, she became more self-important, she no longer liked all the childishness the others exhibited. But she was easily led, it didn’t take many comments before she lost the stateliness she had worn around her like a cloak only a few minutes earlier. That didn’t mean that she was really unchanged, really untouched by what was going on around her, only that everything in her was still fluid. She might refuse to laugh at my jokes and say I was stupid, then burst into laughter anyway, and after that she might look at me with a different nuance in her eyes, and this nuance, which was quite new and also present in Andrea’s eyes, although not so clearly, I had to protect myself against, for what it did, insidiously, was to draw me closer to them. Through this look the distance between me and them narrowed, and it wasn’t because I had approached them, quite the contrary, I saw that in this look, which was completely open, half knowing, half unknowing.

Or was I imagining all of this? For when I had seen them in other contexts, such as in Torill’s or Nils Erik’s lessons, or in the shop with their mothers, it was as if this side of them had never existed. They toed the line, and if they didn’t, they tried to rebel with defiance, sulks or protests, and not, as they occasionally did in my lessons, with charged looks.

This wasn’t something I spent tracts of time mulling over, more impressions that blew through me, tiny gusts of pleasure and fear while I was writing during the January and February nights. Nor did I have any concrete basis for these impressions, nothing had been said or done, it was all about moods and feelings triggered by something as intangible as a gaze or a certain way of moving.

As I plodded through the village on my way to the first lesson my feelings were ambivalent — I liked being at school yet I didn’t. Now and then I felt a slight flutter in my chest at the thought that I would be seeing her again the following day.

No one knew, and I hardly knew myself.

One Friday at the beginning of February all these small impressions, which in themselves were insignificant and vague, and as such unexacting, were suddenly intensified. I had as usual got up late in the evening, written through the night, and as the clock passed five in the morning I’d had enough and went out into the darkness. Through the still sleeping village, up to the school, where after a stroll through the teaching block I sat down on the sofa with a book until tiredness overcame me and I leaned back with eyes closed and the book resting on my chest.

The door opened. I sat up with a start, ran a hand through my hair while staring straight into Richard’s eyes with what must have been a guilty expression on my face.

‘Have you spent the night here?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I came here early to do some preparation. And then I dozed off.’

He scrutinised me carefully.

‘I’ll make some extra strong coffee,’ he said at length. ‘That’ll wake you up.’

‘Make it strong enough for a horseshoe to stand upright in,’ I said and got to my feet.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Who said that?’

‘Lucky Luke, I think.’

He sniggered and poured water into the machine while I sat down at my desk. It was several months since I had prepared a lesson in any other way than with a quick glance at a textbook shortly before I walked into the class. I had ditched most of my alternative teaching methods, now the majority of my lessons consisted of going through whatever topic had to be dealt with, after which I gave them some exercises. The aim was to get through the syllabus in all subjects. Whether they absorbed everything or not no longer bothered me. The main thing was the framework this approach gave and, with it, the distance.

‘Coffee’s ready if you want any,’ Richard said, heading for the vestibule with a cup in his hand, probably on the way to his office.

‘Thank you very much,’ I said.

When the bell rang half an hour later, I was standing by the window in the classroom watching the pupils coming up the hill. Tiredness lay in me like stagnant water. We had maths for the first two lessons, incomparably the most boring subject. It was February, incomparably the most boring month.

‘Open your books and make a start,’ I said after they had trickled into the room and found their places. In maths we were joined by the fifth and sixth years, so there were eight pupils in all.

‘Same as always then. You do the sums, and if you run into any problems, I’ll come and help. Then we’ll go through the new material on the board at the beginning of the next lesson.’

No one objected, they slipped acquiescently from the state they arrived in at school to the state the solving of the mathematical problems demanded. Live put her hand up before she had even glanced at the book.

I went over to her and leaned forward.

‘Try on your own first,’ I said. ‘Have a go.’

‘But I can’t do this, I know. It’s so difficult.’

‘Maybe it’ll be easy. You don’t know until you’ve tried. Give it ten minutes, then I’ll come back and see how you’re doing. OK?’

‘OK,’ she said.

Jørn, the sharp little sixth year, waved me over.

‘I did some of the exercises at home,’ he said when I was by his desk. ‘But then I got stuck. Can you help me?’

‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘I’m not that great at maths myself.’

He looked up at me and smiled. He thought I was joking, but I wasn’t; after the syllabus for the seventh class I started having problems. I could even get into difficulties before then too, suddenly forgetting how to divide two big numbers, and I had to wriggle my way out by asking pupils how to do it. Not that I didn’t know of course, it was just that I couldn’t remember.

‘But this one doesn’t look too bad,’ I said.

He followed carefully while I explained it to him. Then he took over, I left him and went to the window.

He was a determined character, but his attitude to school was either/or, on or off. Maths he liked, so there was no problem. In some subjects though he switched off completely.

Live put up her hand again.

‘I can’t do it,’ she said. ‘And I mean it.’

I showed her. She nodded, but her eyes were vacant.

‘Can you do the rest yourself now?’ I said.

She nodded.

I felt sorry for her, almost every lesson held a humiliation of some kind, but what could I do?

I sat down behind my desk, scanned the class and looked up at the clock, which had barely moved. After a while Andrea put up her hand. I met her eyes, smiled and stood up.