Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

Did that happen?

Did he have any diving equipment?

Did he harpoon fish for dinner after school?

I have never been back, but I do sometimes have nightmares about it, really terrible nightmares which consist of me driving into the village again after all these years, nothing else. That is obviously bad enough.

Why?

Did terrible things happen there? Did I do something I shouldn’t have done? Something awful? I mean beyond staggering around drunk and out of control at night?

I once wrote a novel that took place there. I wrote it without a second thought. I paid no regard to the relationship between fiction and reality, for a world opened up when I wrote, it meant everything to me for a while, and it consisted partly of descriptions of real buildings and people, for the school in the book is the school as it was when I worked there, and partly of fictional ones, and it was only when the novel had been written and published that I began to wonder how it would be received up there in the north, by those who knew the world I described and who could see what was reality and what wasn’t. I used to lie awake at night in fear. The story had not been plucked out of the air. On the contrary, it had been in the air. I worked as a teacher for a year in the north, and when occasionally I was able to relish the thought of going to work in the morning it was because she was there.

She: Andrea.

A gaze, a hand cupping her forehead, a little foot bobbing up and down, a child who was a woman who was a child whom I liked to be in the same room with so much.

That was how it was during the months where day was night, and that was how it was when the light unveiled the room in the mornings, at first cold and shimmery, then, slowly and imperceptibly, full of warmth. The snow on the road disappeared, the enormous piles of snow dwindled, patches of shale began to peep through on the football pitch, and from all the roofs and raised surfaces water dripped and gurgled.

It was as though the light rose in the people living there too. Everywhere there was a mood of gaiety and expectation.

In one lesson Andrea and Vivian presented me with a diploma. They had chosen me as the school’s sexiest teacher.

I hung the diploma on the classroom wall and said that the competition might not have been that fierce.

They laughed.

A few days later, with the sun shining from the middle of the endlessly blue sky, I told them to go outside and write down what they saw. They could go wherever they wanted, write whatever they wanted, the sole conditions I set were that they should write down what they saw and it had to be at least two pages.

Some went down to the shop, others sat against the wall outside the school in the sun. I went behind the school building and smoked a cigarette, gazed across the football pitch, which was now almost completely free of snow, and at the glittering fjord beyond. Did the rounds of the pupils and asked how it was going. They squinted up at me.

‘It’s going fine,’ Andrea said.

‘Here comes Karl Ove,’ Vivian said slowly to show me that this was what she was writing as her pen moved across the page of her notebook. ‘He’s really sexy.’

Andrea looked away when she said that.

‘That’s what Andrea thinks anyway!’ Vivian said.

‘Don’t be so daft,’ Andrea said.

Both looked up at me and smiled. They had tied their jackets around their waists and were sitting there in T-shirts with their arms bare.

I was overcome by the same feelings that had filled me in the spring I was in the seventh class myself. When we ran after girls, held them tight, pulled up their T-shirts and fondled their breasts. The girls had screamed but never loud enough for a teacher to hear.

I was overcome by the same feelings, but everything else was different: I wasn’t thirteen, I was eighteen and not their classmate but their teacher.

They couldn’t see my feelings. They couldn’t know anything about what stirred inside me. I was their young teacher, and I smiled at them.

‘I’m going to read out what you’ve written in the class,’ I said. ‘So you might want to choose your material with a little more prudence?’

‘Prudence?’ Vivian said. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Look it up when you get inside,’ I said.

‘Typical of you,’ Andrea said. ‘We always have to look words up. Look it up, look it up! Can’t you just tell us?’

‘He doesn’t know himself,’ Vivian said.

‘Five more minutes,’ I said. ‘Then you have to go back inside.’

I walked towards the entrance, heard them laughing behind me, I felt such warmth for them, not only for them though, for all the pupils and all the people in the village, in fact, for everyone in the world.

It was that kind of day.

Eleven years later I was sitting in the study of our first flat in Bergen answering emails when the phone rang.

‘Hello, Karl Ove speaking,’ I said.

‘Hi, this is Vivian.’

‘Vivian?’

The moment she said her name everything went cold and black inside me.

‘Yes. Don’t you remember me? You were our teacher.’

There wasn’t a hint of accusation in her voice. I rubbed my hand, which was clammy, on my thigh.

‘Of course I remember you!’ I said. ‘How are things?’

‘Fantastic! I’m here with Andrea. We read about you in the paper, and then we saw you were going to give a reading in Tromsø. And so we thought perhaps we could meet you.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘That would be nice.’

‘We’ve read your book. It was brilliant!’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes! Andrea does too.’

To avoid going into detail about what was actually in the book, to nip that discussion in the bud, I asked what they were doing now.

‘I’m working at the fish-processing factory. No great surprises there. And Andrea’s studying in Tromsø.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘It’ll be great fun to meet you again. Should we arrange a time and place now?’

She suggested a café close to where I was going to read, some hours before. I said OK, see you then, and we rang off. A few weeks later I opened the café door and saw them sitting at the back of the room, they laughed when they spotted me, said I hadn’t changed at all. But you have, I said, and indeed they had, for although their faces were the same, and the way they behaved, they were adults now and the zone of ambivalence they had lived in then was completely gone. The woman in them held undisputed sway now.

I took off my coat, went over to the counter and ordered a coffee. I was nervous, they had both read the novel and would probably have recognised themselves in it. I decided to take the bull by the horns. Sat down, lit a cigarette, so you’ve read the novel, I said. Yes, they both replied, and nodded. It’s not you I was writing about, you know, although I’m sure there are similarities, I said. Enormous similarities, Andrea added. But don’t worry about it, it’s just funny, that’s all.

They told me about everything that had happened in the village since I was there, and it was not so little. The biggest sensation was a sex scandal at the school, which had led to a conviction and prison, and the village had been split into two camps. Otherwise lots of the same teachers were still at the school. Vivian often met the people she had known then, as well as the fishermen who had been my age at the time, of course. Andrea lived in Tromsø, where she was a student, and went home during the holidays and for the odd weekend.

I treated them as if they were still thirteen years old, the mould was already set, I couldn’t change that, and when I left an hour later it struck me how stupid that was, especially with regard to Andrea.