Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

‘How’s it going?’ she said.

‘It’s going fine,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

‘Fine too,’ she said. ‘There’s not so much that’s new here for me as there is for you, I imagine. I attended this school when I was growing up.’

I couldn’t think of a response, and she smiled again before going into the workroom. Beside me sat Jane, she was also from the village, in her early twenties, also large: her upper arms were perhaps twice the size of mine. She had a long straight, almost Roman nose, flat cheeks, thin lips that often sagged at the corners as though she wouldn’t touch what she saw before her with a bargepole. Her eyes were grumpy, indeed her whole bearing was grumpy. But a couple of times I had seen her laugh, and then all of her brightened up, the transformation was total, she could hardly stop laughing once she had started, and it was a pleasure to see her struggling to regain her composure.

In addition to all the young temporary teachers, there was an older lady on the staff, Eva, she was in her late forties, but looked older, she taught needlework and home economy, was small, lean, with a pointed face, thin fair hair and a piercing voice, and at this moment she was sitting in the chair on the other side of the table, knitting. She was sceptical about me, I could see that from the way she looked at and didn’t look at me. And with absolute justification, for what was I doing here actually? What did I want from this job?

When I came in after the English lesson she glanced up at me and I think she knew what feelings were coursing through me.

Of course that was impossible, but it was what I thought anyway.

In the lunch break I went down to the post office at the other end of the village. The mountainsides were bright green in the sunshine. The sea was deep blue. Something about the light or perhaps the cool draught I felt in the air, somehow beneath what the sun heated up, so typical of August, evoked the atmospheres I recognised from when I started school after the holidays: the excitement, the anticipation, the perhaps-something-fantastic-is-going-to-happen-this-year?

On the slope behind the last row of houses there was already a hint of yellow in the green. Of course autumn came earlier here. I nodded to a car driving past. The driver, who looked like a mother, nodded back, and I walked down the gravelled incline to the post office, which was housed in the basement of a block of flats. In the hall were the PO boxes, inside was the office with counters, posters on the walls, stands of postcards and envelopes.

The woman behind the counter was probably about fifty. Permed thinning reddish hair, glasses, a delicate gold necklace. A man with a rollator stood by the small table under the window scraping a scratch card with a coin.

‘Hello,’ I said to the assistant and placed the envelopes on the counter. ‘I just wanted to post these.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘By the way, there’s some mail for you already.’

‘Is there?’ I said. ‘Not bad!’

While she weighed the letters and selected the appropriate stamps I unlocked my box. It was a letter from Line.

I went in and paid, opened the letter and started to read while walking up the gravel road.

She wrote that she was in her room and thinking about me. She liked me a lot, she said, we’d had so much fun together, but she had never actually been in love with me, so now, with us living in two different places, she thought the best and most honest thing to do would be to finish it. She hoped everything would go well for me in my life, urged me to take writing seriously, as she would with her drawing, and also hoped that I would not be angry with her, for our new lives were starting now, we were far apart, tomorrow she would be travelling to the folk high school and by now I had probably arrived in the village where I was going to work, and as long as this felt the way it did and she didn’t love me, anything else but finishing the relationship would be a betrayal of herself. But I was a wonderful person, I should know that, that was not the reason, you can’t control feelings, they are how they are.

I stuffed the letter in my coat pocket.

I hadn’t been in love with Line either, everything she said about me I could have said about her, yet still I felt sad and also a bit angry with her when I read what she had written. I wanted her to love me ! And even though I didn’t want to be with her, and was glad it was over, it should have been me who finished it. Now it was her who had the high ground, who said no to me and who would also probably go through life convinced that I had loved her and had been crushed by her letter.

Oh well.

There was great activity down at the fish-processing plant. Several boats had docked, forklift trucks were plying back and forth across the concrete and into what looked like a dark hall. Men in high rubber boots bustled hither and thither, a group of women wearing open white coats and white caps stood smoking outside the end of the hall, and the air above them was full of flapping, screaming seagulls. I went into the shop and bought some rolls, some mild cheese, a packet of margarine and a litre of milk, said hello to the assistant, who asked whether I had settled in all right, fine, I said, everything was great.

I didn’t have a class in the next slot, so after eating two rolls and putting the rest in the tiny staffroom fridge, I sat down at my workstation to plan the next few days’ teaching. The temporary teachers had been allocated a mentor, who would come to see us once a week so that we could discuss any problems or difficulties we had in our classes. We were also going on a course next week, in Finnsnes, with all the other temporary teachers in the district. For there were many of them; the locals who trained as teachers seldom moved back when the training was over. All sorts of measures had been implemented to remedy this, it was a big problem, of course. Where dad lived now there were huge tax incentives, and that was one of the reasons that he and Unni had moved north. They both worked at a gymnas or, to be more precise, at present only dad was working because Unni was expecting a child. The last time I saw them, a few weeks ago in the terraced house they had bought in Sørland, which was waiting for them after they had completed their contract in the north, her belly had been enormous.

That was where I had got the idea to come up here. We had been sitting on the veranda, dad bare-chested, as brown as a nut, with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, me with a crucifix dangling from one ear and wearing sunglasses, when he had asked me what I was going to do in the autumn. His gaze was anywhere else but on me, also when he asked, his voice was tired and apathetic, a touch slurred from all the beers he had drunk since I arrived, and so I answered in a sort of lackadaisical way, although it hurt me. I shrugged and said I definitely wasn’t going to study or do military service. Work somewhere, I said. In a hospital or something.

He straightened up and stubbed out his cigarette in the large ashtray on the table between us. The air was heavy with pollen, everywhere there was the buzz of bees and wasps in the air. Why don’t you do some teaching, then? he said and slumped back in the chair, perhaps twenty kilos heavier now than the last time I had seen him. You can get a job in Northern Norway any day of the week, you know. As long as you’ve been to gymnas they’ll welcome you with open arms. Maybe, I said. I’ll think about it. You do that, he said. If you want another beer you know where the crate is. OK, why not, I said and went into the living room, which was pitch black after the bright light outside, and into the kitchen, where Unni was reading the paper. She smiled at me. She was wearing khaki shorts and a baggy grey top. I’m going to have another beer, I said. You do that, she said. It’s your summer holiday after all. True, I said. Is there an opener anywhere? Yes, there’s one on the table over there, she said. Are you hungry? Not particularly, I said. It’s so hot, isn’t it. But you’re going to stay the night, aren’t you? she asked. Yes, I said. So we can eat later, she said. I leaned back and took a long swig. I should be doing some work in the garden, she said. But it’s simply too hot. Yes, I said. And my stomach’s beginning to get in the way. Yes, I said. I can see. Don’t you want to go for a swim in the lake? Sounds like there are lots of people down there today. I shook my head. She smiled, I smiled, and then I went back out to dad. You got yourself one, I see, he said. Yes, I said and sat down again. In the old days he would have been working in the garden now. And if not he would have been keenly watching everything going on around him, even if it was only a car stopping and a young man leaning over to a window that was being wound down. But all that had gone. In his eyes was only indifference, apathy. However, the situation was not so black and white because when I observed him, and his eye caught mine, I could sense he was still there, the hardness, the coldness I had grown up with and still feared.