Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

When I woke up I couldn’t remember a thing at first. I didn’t know where I was or what time of day it was. Fear pumped through me.

The light outside told me nothing, it could equally well have been morning as night.

But nothing had happened, had it?

Oh yes, it had. I had run after Hugo and had been thrown to the ground time after time.

I had tried to kiss Vibeke when we were dancing and she had averted her face.

And the girl standing by the entrance, the one with the cheeky expression, I had stopped and exchanged a few words with her, and then I had kissed her.

How old would she have been?

She had told me. She was in the seventh year.

Oh God, was that possible?

Please be kind to me.

Oh no, oh no.

I was a teacher, for goodness’ sake. What if this got out? Teacher kisses thirteen-year-old at party?

God almighty.

I covered my face with my hands. Heard music downstairs, scrambled out of bed, couldn’t stay there being tortured by the awfulness of my deeds. No, I had to be active, move on, talk to someone who would say it didn’t matter, that kind of thing happened.

But it didn’t.

It happened only to me.

Why did I have to kiss her? It had just been a spontaneous action, something I did on bloody impulse, it meant nothing.

Who would believe that?

As I left my bedroom I had to support myself on the wall, I was still drunk. Downstairs, Nils Erik was at the stove frying fish tongues. He turned when I entered the room. He was wearing a checked shirt and a pair of those green hiking pants with loads of pockets.

‘So you’re honouring me with your presence?’ he said with a smile.

‘I’m still drunk,’ I said.

‘I can believe that,’ he said.

I sat down at the kitchen table, rested my head on my hand.

‘Richard was not best pleased today,’ he said. He slipped the spatula under the fried tongues and transferred them to a plate, filled the pan with more tongues coated in white flour. They hissed.

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I said you were ill.’

‘Which was true.’

‘Yes, but he was angry. He was.’

‘I don’t give a shit about him. There’s only a month left now. What’s he going to do? Give me the boot? Besides, I haven’t been ill once all damn year. So it’s no big deal.’

‘Would you like some cod tongues?’

I shook my head and got up.

‘Think I’ll have a bath.’

But it was unbearable lying in hot water staring at the ceiling, it didn’t fill me with peace, on the contrary, it gave all my painful thoughts ample room to spread, so I got out after a few minutes, dried myself, put on my tracksuit, which was the only clean clothing I could find, and lay down on the sofa with Felix Krull instead.

For a few minutes at a time I succeeded in engrossing myself totally in the book. Then the dreadful thoughts returned like an electric shock and everything became distorted. Again I had to force myself back into the confidence trickster’s world, where I could stay for several minutes until another shock reopened the sores.

Nils Erik came in and put on a record. It was half past five. He stood for a moment gazing across the fjord, then he sat down with a newspaper. His presence helped, what I had done didn’t seem so terrible when there was a friendly person in the room.

I read aloud a passage describing Krull’s view of the Jews.

‘He wasn’t so high-minded, this Thomas Mann,’ I said. ‘That’s pure anti-Semitism!’

Nils Erik looked at me.

‘You don’t think it’s ironic then?’

‘Ironic? No, do you?’

‘He’s famous for being ironic.’

‘So he doesn’t really mean it. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said, because I hated it when Nils Erik thought he knew better than me. Which he often did.

The image of the seventh year with her tousled hair and cheeky expression was clear in my mind’s eye again. And my lips closing on hers.

Why had I done it? Oh why, oh why!

‘What’s up?’ Nils Erik said.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You went like this,’ he said, and raised his head, narrowed his eyes and pinched his lips together hard.

‘Nothing in particular,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about something.’

But nothing happened. I went to school the next day and no one there said anything about what had happened, everyone behaved as they normally did, even my pupils, who I thought might have heard about it, some of them probably knew her.

But no.

Could it simply pass, just like that?

The only place it existed was in me. And if I let it stay where it was, there was no problem, it would slowly lose its power and in the end vanish, as sooner or later all the other shameful things I had done had vanished.

Towards the end of May a letter from the akademi arrived in my post box, I tore open the envelope and read it standing outside the post office. I had been accepted. I lit a cigarette and started to walk back towards the school, I would ring mum and tell her, she would be pleased. And then I would ring Yngve because it meant I would be moving to Bergen that autumn. In a strange way I had expected to be accepted because although I knew what I had written might not have been that good and consequently they ought to have rejected me, it was me, however, who had done the writing and that, I felt, they would not be able to ignore.

May passed, June began and it was as though everything was dissolving into light. The sun no longer set, it wandered across the sky all day and night, and I had never seen anything like the light it cast over the wild terrain then. The light was reddish and full, it was as if it belonged to the ground and the mountains, it was them that were shining, as if after a catastrophe. On a couple of nights Nils Erik and I drove along the deserted coastal roads, and we seemed to be on a different planet, so alien was everything. Through sleeping villages, everywhere the reddish gleam and the strange shadows. The people were transformed too, out at night, couples walking, cars driving past, whole flocks of young people rowing out to the islands for picnics.

I received another letter from Ingvild. She said she had rolled up her trousers to her knees and was sitting with her feet in Sogne fjord while she was writing. I loved Sogne fjord, the feeling the surface gave of the enormous depth, the immense chains of mountains with the snowy peaks towering above it. All clear and still, green and cool. Ingvild, who was moving in these surroundings and who affected me in so many ways, wrote more about herself this time. But it wasn’t much. The tone approached self-irony, she was in defensive mode. Against what? She wrote that she had been an exchange student in the US for a year, that was why she was still in the third class. So we were the same age, I reflected. She was going back there in the summer for a holiday with her host family, they were going to cross the country in a camper van. She would write more from the States. In the autumn she would be going to Bergen to study.

The last day of school came. I wrote HAVE A GOOD SUMMER! on the board, handed out the grade books to my pupils, wished them luck for the rest of their lives, ate cake with the teachers in the staffroom, shook everyone’s hand and thanked them for the past year. As I walked downhill on my way home I was, as I had expected, neither happy nor relieved because I had been waiting for this day for more than six months, just empty inside.

In the afternoon Tor Einar dropped round. He had brought with him some gull eggs and a crate of Mack beer.

‘It’s a scandal you haven’t eaten seagull eggs before,’ he said. ‘There are two dishes which are the essence of Northern Norway. Mølje and seagull eggs. You can’t leave before you have tried them.’