Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

She looked at me.

‘Are you interested in anything else apart from driving cars?’

‘No,’ I said and took a swig of beer. ‘What are you interested in?’

‘Politics,’ she said. ‘I’m passionately interested in politics.’

‘What kind? Local politics? Foreign affairs?’

‘Just politics. Politics in general.’

‘Are you flirting with my cousin while your bloke is asleep?’ Jon Olav said.

‘I’m not flirting,’ she said. ‘We’re talking about politics. And then perhaps we’ll end up talking about emotions, if I know me.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ I said.

‘I have a wretched emotional life. What about you?’

‘It’s pretty poor, actually. Yes, if I’m honest. I never usually talk about it. But there’s something about you that gives me the courage.’

‘Ironic girls tend to have that effect. That’s my experience. In the end people get so sick of irony they’ll do anything to stop it. Since I started being ironic I’ve been told quite a few intimate details.’

The music in the room was switched off.

Jon Olav turned to me.

‘Shall we go then?’

‘OK,’ I said, and looked at her as I got up. ‘Drive home fast!’

‘I’ll drive like a bat out of hell,’ she said.

When I woke up the next morning she was on my mind. Jon Olav, who had slept at our place, went home to Dale in the morning. He was the only connection I had with her, and before he left I made him promise to send me her address when he got home even though something told me he would only do so with a heavy heart, after all she was going out with someone he knew.

It felt completely meaningless going back to Håfjord, but on the other hand there were only three more months until it finished for ever and I could spend the whole of the rest of my life in familiar surroundings, if that was what I wanted.

The letter from Jon Olav lay in my post box a few days after I returned. She lived in Kaupanger, he wrote, and was in the third class at gymnas in Sogndal.

Kaupanger, I thought, that must be a fantastic place.

I spent more than a week on the letter to her. She knew nothing about me, had no idea what my name was and had no doubt forgotten me the moment she left the disco that night. So I didn’t immediately reveal my identity, I touched on car driving a couple of times so that she could, if she remembered, work out who I was. I didn’t give an address; if she wanted to answer the letter she would have to make an effort to get hold of it, and in that way, I thought, I would have a deeper impact on her consciousness.

That same week I prepared my application for the writing course at the akademi in Bergen. They wanted twenty pages of prose or poetry and I enclosed the first twenty pages of my novel in the envelope, wrote a short letter of introduction and sent it off.

Now the mornings were light when I woke and went downstairs for a shower and breakfast, outside the house gulls were screaming, and if we opened the kitchen window we could also hear the waves lapping and gurgling over the pebbles beneath. At school the younger children were running around in sweaters and trainers in the breaks, the older ones sat on the ground leaning back against the wall with their faces to the sun. Everything that had happened in the darkness, when life had closed itself around me and even the tiniest details had become charged with tension and destiny, seemed incredible now, for out in the open, beneath this slow deluge of light, I saw it as it was.

How was it?

It was nothing special. It was how it was.

Oh I still cast glances at Liv when I had the opportunity and could do so unobserved, and in English classes a shiver could still go through me when I saw Camilla’s shapely body sitting there, but the mounds and curves, all the softness and grace they possessed, no longer had a disorientating effect, I was no longer fascinated. I saw, and I liked what I saw, but it was not part of me. With Andrea it was different, she was special, but if I was happy when she looked up at me from the corner of her eyes in the way she did, I didn’t let it show, no one could see what I felt, not even her.

What was it I felt?

Well, it was nothing. A tenderness, that was all, something light and sparkling that whistled past and was gone, it had no right to exist.

One day a letter from Kaupanger arrived.

I couldn’t read it standing in the post office or sitting at home or lying in bed, the conditions had to be perfect, so I put it aside, ate with Nils Erik, had a smoke, drank a cup of coffee, then I took the letter with me to the beach, sat on a rock and opened it.

A strong smell of salt and decay rose from around me. The air was still and warmed by the sun, but every so often a gust swept in from the fjord taking everything with it, which then had to be painstakingly built up again. The mountaintops on the other side of the fjord were still white, but if I turned and looked towards the village there was a faint green glimmer on the ground, and although all the low trees and bushes were still leafless they didn’t appear to be dead, as in winter, they stood as though they could sense life was on its way back.

I opened the letter and began to read.

She wrote nothing about herself. Nonetheless she began to take shape within me, I could sense who she was, this is different, I thought. This is quite, quite different.

When I folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope it was as though I was a new person. I walked slowly back to the house. She had an aura around her, and every sentence, no matter how tentative and probing, was testimony to that.

I considered getting on a bus the next morning, catching the boat to Tromsø, flying to Bergen, taking the boat to Sogndal and then simply standing in front of her and declaring that the two of us belonged together.

I couldn’t of course, that would have ruined everything, but that was what I wanted to do.

Instead I sat down and wrote another letter. Any hint of emotion or openness was stifled at birth, this was going to be an eloquent calculating letter that would press all the buttons I had at my disposal, make her laugh, make her reflect, arouse a desire in her to want to know me.

Writing was, after all, something I could do.

On 17 May I sat reading at home the whole day. There was an expectation that teachers would take part in the Constitution Day procession and the subsequent activities, but it was not compulsory, so when the meagre procession passed by on the road outside I was sitting on the sofa and watched it through the window, heard the pathetic flutes and the scattered cheers, lay back and continued reading The Lord of the Rings , which I had read only two years before but had already completely forgotten. I couldn’t get enough of the battle between light and darkness, good and evil, and when the little man not only resisted the superior powers but also showed himself to be the greatest hero of them all, there were tears in my eyes. Oh, how good it was. I had a shower, donned a white shirt and black trousers, put a bottle of vodka into a bag and walked up to Henning’s, where there was a whole gang of people drinking. There was a party on Fugleøya, we drove there a few hours later, one minute I was standing in the car park chatting, the next I was on the dance floor rubbing up against someone or other, or up on an embankment scrapping with Hugo, trying to prove that I wasn’t the weakling everyone took me for. He laughed and threw me to the ground, I jumped up and he threw me to the ground again. He was much smaller than me, so it was humiliating, I ran after him and said he wouldn’t be able to do it again, but he’d had enough and came over, wrapped his arms around me and threw me to the ground with such force that he knocked the air out of my lungs. And that was how they left me, gasping for air like a fish. I took the nearly empty vodka bottle with me and sat on a little mound beside the car park. The light hovered above the countryside. There was something sickly about it, it seemed to me, and I don’t remember anything until I was trying to prise open a door surrounded by young fishermen, I must have told them I had some experience in such matters, presumably I had given the impression that a locked door was no problem for me, I could do a bit of everything, had done a bit of everything, but now, trying all the keys I had found in the drawer downstairs, and then a screwdriver and various other tools, it began to dawn on them that we were not going to get into the locked bedsit in the house Nils Erik and I were renting, and one after the other they trooped back down to the sitting room, which was already bathed in sunlight.