Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

‘Karl Ove’s in love with Andrea!’ Jørn said loud enough for everyone to hear.

I gave a start. Red-faced, I pretended I hadn’t heard, leaned over her desk and tried to concentrate on the little maths problem.

‘Karl Ove’s in love with Andrea!’ Jørn repeated.

Some of the pupils giggled.

I straightened up and eyed him. ‘Do you know what that’s called?’ I said.

‘What what’s called?’ he said with a grin.

‘When you say that other people feel what you feel? It’s called transference. For example, if you, a sixth year, were in love with one of the girls in the seventh class. Instead of admitting it you say your teacher is.’

‘I’m not in love with anyone ,’ he said.

‘Nor me,’ I said. ‘So shall we do some problem-solving now?’

I leaned forward again. Andrea whisked her hair away from her forehead with one hand.

‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ she whispered.

I ignored her remark, stared at the column of figures she had written and pointed to where she had slipped up.

‘There,’ I said. ‘That’s wrong. Can you see?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But what’s it supposed to be?’

‘I can’t tell you that!’ I said. ‘You have to do the sum. Try again. I’ll be at my desk if you can’t do it.’

‘OK,’ she said, looked up at me and gave a fleeting smile.

My insides trembled.

Was I in love with Andrea?

Was I in love ?

No, no, no.

But I was drawn to her in my thoughts. I was.

When I was at the school during the night, when I stood by the dark motionless water in the swimming pool I imagined she was in the changing room, alone, and that soon I would go in. She covered herself, looked up, I knelt down in front of her, she looked at me, at first with apprehension, then tenderness and openness.

I imagined this and at the same time thought the opposite, that she wasn’t in the changing room, how could I think like that, no one must find out how my mind worked.

My insides trembled, but no one knew because my movements were controlled, what I said was thought through, nothing of what others saw could betray my inner thoughts.

I hardly knew I had these thoughts, they lived in a kind of no-man’s-land, and when they came, in an explosion, I didn’t hold on to them, I let them fall back to whence they had come, and so it was as though they didn’t exist.

But what Jørn had said, that changed everything, because that came from the outside.

Everything that came from the outside was dangerous.

There was something almost morbid about writing alone at night while everyone else was asleep and then teaching the children with the dregs of my strength, and I was becoming more and more worn down, so at the end of February I switched back as the tiny pulse of light in the middle of the day slowly began to widen. It was as if the world was returning. And living together with Nils Erik was good: when the pupils came visiting, from the fourth years to the seventh years, the meetings weren’t so charged — if I didn’t play such a dominant role it didn’t make much difference. It was different with Hege, she invariably came when Nils Erik was out, how she knew I had no idea, nor why she did it. But she liked talking to me, and I liked talking to her, we could sit for hours in the evening despite us being so very different.

The writing on the other hand was going badly, I had reached a point where I kept repeating myself, all of a sudden I was unsure why I was writing at all.

Aschehoug Publishing House had put an advert in Dagbladet , announcing a short-story competition, my enthusiasm was rekindled and I sent in two of my best stories: the one about the refuse dump and the one about the funeral pyres on the plain.

Various community centres on the island took it in turns to organise parties, and at the beginning of March it was Håfjord’s turn. We had pre-drinks in our house, almost all the temporary teachers were there, and after only a few drinks I was floating on air, they made me so happy, these people, and I told them so too, on the way up to the community centre, swinging the bag with the bottle of vodka and the extra pouch of tobacco.

What was special about these parties was that they weren’t restricted to or arranged for particular age groups — desperate twenty-year-olds here, resigned forty-year-olds there — no, everyone came to these community centre parties. Seventy-year-olds sat at the same table as teenagers, fish-processing workers at the same table as school inspectors, and the fact that they had known one another all their lives did not prevent them from letting their hair down, normal social relationships were set aside, you could see a thirteen-year-old smooching with a twenty-year-old, a juiced-up old lady dancing and shaking her dress cancan style while grinning a toothless grin. I loved it, couldn’t help myself, there was a freedom in this I had never encountered anywhere else. Yet you could only love it if you were there, part of the untrammelled euphoria, for with even the tiniest hint of criticism or good taste everything would collapse and become a wild parody or perhaps even a travesty of the human condition. The youths who heated their coffee on a low blue gas flame, the very elderly women who looked at you with mischievous flirty eyes, the bald men dressed in formal suits and ties who one minute were making passes at fifteen-year-olds and the next were hunched over a ditch beneath the glittering community centre spewing, women staggering and men crying, all wrapped up as it were, in a long stream of badly performed 1960s and 70s hits by bands that no one but people up here cared about any longer, and a cloud of smoke that was so dense that if you hadn’t known better you might have assumed came from a blaze in the cellar.

For me this was alien and exotic. I had grown up where almost no one drank or at least was ever visibly the worse for wear. There was a neighbour who drank himself silly once or twice every six months, this was a sensation and caused quite a stir. There was an old alcoholic who cycled to the shop every day to buy his brown bottles of beer. And that was it. Mum and dad never drank, apart from a couple of bottles of beer or a glass of red wine with their food. Grandma and grandad in Sørbøvåg didn’t drink, grandma and grandad in Kristiansand didn’t drink, none of my uncles and aunts drank, and if they did, never in front of me. It was only two and a half years ago that I had seen my father drunk for the first time.

Why didn’t they drink? Why didn’t everyone drink? Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person is rendered attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgement are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful.

Why say no to this?

I plunged into the party on this March evening, I was in my element, I even went over to Richard, who was sitting in a late 1970s suit a size too small for him, with his wife, to say how much I liked him, he had kept a tight rein on me, he was right to do so, and everything had gone well, hadn’t it? It was going well, wasn’t it?

Yes, I was doing fine.

He didn’t like me, but he couldn’t say that, all he could do was force a goatish smile. I was in the ascendancy, I was the shining star, he was just the head teacher at a small school, of course I could spare a moment for a cosy chat with him.

I saw Vivian and Andrea’s mothers, they were friends and were sitting at a table smoking, I sat down beside them, I wanted to have a chat about their daughters, they had such fantastic girls, they were so lively and pretty and would do well in life, I was sure of that.