Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

He must have noticed I was staring at him because he smiled and turned towards me.

‘I saw something today that might interest you, Karl Ove. There was an ad in Dagbladet for some kind of writing school. In Bergen.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said in as bored a tone as I could manage. Surely he didn’t believe I would fall for such an obvious gesture of appeasement?

At school it was decided that I should have the two school-weary disruptive ninth years, Stian and Ivar, a few times a week. I was to teach them to play an instrument, we borrowed some equipment from the band in the village, Autopilot, so every Tuesday we trudged up to the community centre, switched on the amps and went through the few songs I knew, instrument by instrument. Ivar played bass, he was absolutely hopeless, but I told him to play the same note while watching me, then when I nodded he should change to a sequence he had been practising. Stian played the drums, he was better but wouldn’t listen to instructions, he was too proud for that, while I played the guitar. We could play three songs: ‘Smoke on the Water’, ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Black Magic Woman’. I was used to playing them as instrumentals, I had done that with Jan Vidar, it was second nature to me, a voice on top of this jangling inept talentless performance would only sink it further. We stood on the stage and played with the whole of the spacious but empty community centre before us. Stian and Ivar did as much posing with their instruments as playing. Towards the end of one lesson a fourth year opened the door and stood watching us, wide-eyed. Stian and Ivar tried to conceal the pride they felt by spitting and pretending this was no big deal for them.

At a planning meeting some days later Eva went mad at me. We had been given permission to use equipment belonging to the band her son played in, but we had treated it without due care, a string had been broken and not replaced, a drumstick had snapped and not been replaced, the band had had enough, she said, and moved without pause on to the next item on the agenda, which was the seventh class’s attitude to work, you couldn’t talk to them any more, they didn’t listen to her, they informed her Karl Ove had said something very different, and when she told me to reprimand them I said I would, but I never did, at least not as far as she could see.

I said I didn’t have any discipline problems in my lessons, but I would take the matter up with them. She said this was precisely the problem, I would ‘take it up with them’ but I didn’t treat the matter seriously, and they noticed. There had never been any problems with the seventh class before, they had always been hard-working and bright, now they were cheeky and lazy.

‘Not in my lessons,’ I said, looking at her.

She was so angry her head was trembling.

Richard intervened, he said both of us were right, but I needed to make it abundantly clear to them that this behaviour would not be tolerated and there would be consequences for them if it continued. OK, I said, I’ll do that. When the meeting was over and I was in the vestibule putting on my coat Eva said Grete was wondering what had happened to the bed linen they had lent me in August, did I perhaps imagine I had been given it in perpetuity?

Oh, for Christ’s sake, was she never going to let up?

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It’s not gone anywhere. I can return it tomorrow. It’s not a problem.’

People were so preoccupied with trivialities, they kept searching until they found something and then they went for the jugular instead of keeping sight of the bigger picture, here we all are, humans on one earth, we’re only here for the short term, in the midst of all this wondrous creation, grass and trees, badgers and cats, fish and sea, beneath a star-strewn sky, and you get worked up over a broken guitar string? A snapped drumstick? Some bloody bed linen that hasn’t been returned? Come on, what’s the matter with you lot?

The broken drumstick was the height of pettiness for me. So this was what we were going to discuss, not the results I had achieved with Stian and Ivar?

Why choose the little picture when the bigger one existed?

I hated the little picture, and I wasn’t much good at dealing with trivialities, I had to confess. The HP instalments on the stereo had been passed on to a debt-recovery firm, and the case of the dinner suit I had rented a year before and had not returned because it was ruined — a rocket had torn the trouser leg to ribbons — had gone to court, I had been ordered to pay for it and in addition there had been a hefty fine for not appearing in court! A fine for not appearing! What did they imagine? That I would hop on a plane to Southern Norway all for the sake of a dinner suit?

But that was how it was, everyday life with its endless round of petty demands and obligations, petty conversations and arrangements, surrounded us like a fence. I lived this life, but not when I was drinking, then it was all open spaces and grand gestures, and even though the price was high, the fear afterwards great, I always paid, and only a day or two later again I would feel the itch to cast myself out into it, and sod what people said.

One night when I had been out drinking at a community centre at the other end of the island, Nils Erik was sitting up at home waiting for me.

‘You’ve got an enemy,’ he said.

‘Oh yes?’ I said from the doorway, drunk and weary.

‘I went to bed after you left. Then I was woken up by someone sitting on my bed. It was Vidar. He wanted to know where you were. He had a gun in his lap.’

‘You’re joking!’ I said. ‘Don’t mess about.’

‘It’s true. If I were you I’d lock the door. And then I’d get hold of Hege and tell her.’

‘But there’s never been anything between us!’

‘He doesn’t know that. She’s here two nights a week, minimum. That’s a lot of time to spend with someone.’

‘But for God’s sake I’m not even in the slightest bit interested!’

‘This is serious. He had a gun. I’m not kidding.’

I wasn’t frightened until the day after. I could bump into him at any moment, that was how it felt. That night I locked the door. And the following morning the first thing I did was to visit Hege and tell her what had happened.

‘He lost it,’ she said. ‘He won’t do it again. Were you scared?’

‘Me? No. I wasn’t even there. But Nils Erik was.’

‘It’s just nonsense really. He would never have used it, you know. He just wanted to frighten the living shit out of you.’

‘For what? For chatting to you?’

She nodded.

I was already looking forward to describing what had happened in the letters I wrote. It was as crazy as it was flattering; I lived in a place where people broke in brandishing a gun, and I was important enough for it to be me the nutter was after.

For the next few days I was nervous, not perhaps of being shot at, it was unpleasant enough imagining that he would probably beat me up if he got half a chance.

Did he really have a gun?

That is what I remember. But could it have been true?

Unlikely things happened in the north, things that only a year earlier would have seemed deeply alien, perhaps even impossible, and only a year later had that same deeply alien impossible quality although they seemed absolutely normal, a matter of course, when I lived there.

Nils Erik, who had brought back his diving equipment from home at Christmas and in the spring would go down to the harbour wearing a wetsuit and put on a mask, flippers and an oxygen cylinder, sit on the edge holding a harpoon and slip down into the clear transparent water, a shimmering figure who became fainter and fainter until he disappeared, only to reappear ten minutes later with a fish speared on the harpoon, which he cooked for dinner.