Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

I stuffed Bassen’s letter in my pocket and hurried up the hill. Nils Erik was supposed to be picking me up in half an hour and before that I had to have something to eat.

A couple of hours later we were driving along the main street of Finnsnes. Coming here from Oslo and Tromsø, I had regarded Finnsnes as a crummy little hole, but now, only five days later, coming from Håfjord it seemed like a large, complex, almost sophisticated place, rich with possibilities.

Nils Erik parked in the supermarket car park and then we walked off to find a Vinmonopol. I bought a bottle of Koskenkorva vodka for the party, four bottles of white wine and half a bottle of whisky to take home with me; Nils Erik bought three bottles of red wine, which came as no surprise, he was the red-wine type, not a beer and spirits man. After we had stowed the bottles in the boot I took him along to an electrical goods shop that also sold stereos. Mine wasn’t good enough, I had thought that for quite a while, and now that I had a steady job I decided to do something about it.

In the shop they had only racks, they weren’t the best, but I could buy a decent stereo later, I reckoned, and looked around for an assistant.

A man was standing behind the counter with his back to us, opening a large cardboard box with a small paperknife. I walked over.

‘I need some help,’ I said.

He turned to face me.

‘Just a moment,’ he said.

I went back to the wall of stereo racks. Waved to Nils Erik, who was flicking through a stand full of records.

‘Which one would you buy?’ I said.

‘None of them,’ he said. ‘Racks are shit.’

‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘But this is probably all they’ve got. And I only want it for while I’m up here.’

He looked at me.

‘Are you shitting money? Or is Knausgaard a family of shipowners? You never told me!’

‘You can get one on HP. Look, 3,499 kroner for that one. That’s only a few hundred a month.’

The assistant straightened up and looked around for me. A thin man with a bit of a gut, metal-rimmed glasses and a comb-over.

I pointed to the Hitachi rack.

‘I’d like that one,’ I said. ‘I can buy it on HP, can’t I?’

‘As long as you’ve got a job, you can,’ he said.

‘I’m working as a teacher in Håfjord,’ I said.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll have to fill in a few forms, so if you come over to the counter with me. .’

While I stood writing he went to the storeroom and fetched the stereo system.

‘Is this such a good idea?’ Nils Erik said. ‘With HP you pay almost double in the end. And the monthly instalments are painful. Our salary isn’t that good, either.’

I glared at him. ‘Are you my mum or what?’

‘OK, OK, it’s your business,’ he said and went back to the records.

‘Yes, it is.’

At that moment the assistant returned from the storeroom with a large cardboard box in his arms. He handed it to me, I held it while he checked the papers and my ID, and when he was satisfied, I carried it to the car and placed it on the rear seat.

The next and final item on the agenda was the supermarket. Each trundling a trolley in front of us, we walked around plucking goods that weren’t available in the village shop from the shelves. My first target was two packets of cigarettes. At the back of the shop, next to the fruit counter, while Nils Erik was over by the pasta, I put the packets in my jacket, one in each pocket, then went on filling the trolley with food as normal. I always stole cigarettes when I shopped in supermarkets, and it was completely foolproof, I had never been caught. Stealing was closely related to freedom for me, about not giving a shit, doing what you wanted, not what you were supposed to do. It was a rebellious, nonconformist act while, as it were, pushing my personality towards one of the places where I wanted it to be. I stole, I was someone who stole.

It always went well, nevertheless I was nervous as I pushed my trolley towards the little island where the cashier sat. But there was nothing unusual about her expression and there were no men discreetly approaching from any direction, so I placed the items on the conveyor belt one by one with my sweaty hands, paid, packed them into a bag and walked, quickly but not conspicuously so, out of the shop, then I stopped, lit up and waited for Nils Erik, who arrived at my side a minute later carrying two bulging plastic bags.

The first kilometres were driven in silence. I was still annoyed with him for his moralising tone in the shop where I had bought the stereo. I hated it when people interfered in what I was doing, regardless of whether it was my mother, my brother, my teacher or my best friend: I didn’t want to know. No one had any business telling me what to do.

He cast intermittent glances at me as he drove. The countryside around us had levelled out. Low trees, heather, moss, brooks, shallow, completely black tracts of water and, in the distance, chains of tall rugged peaks. He had filled the tank just outside Finnsnes, there was still a smell of petrol in the car, it made me feel slightly nauseous.

He glanced at me again.

‘Could you put some music on? There are some cassettes in the glove compartment.’

I opened it and transferred the pile of cassettes to my lap.

Sam Cooke. Otis Redding. James Brown. Prince. Marvin Gaye. UB40. Smokey Robinson. Stevie Wonder. Terence Trent D’Arby.

‘You’re a soul man, are you?’ I said.

‘Soul and funk.’

I inserted the only cassette I had heard before: Prince, Parade . Leaned back in the seat and gazed up at the mountains, which, at the bottom, were covered with a green tangled carpet of bushes and small trees, further up with moss and heather, also green.

‘By the way, why did you steal the cigarettes?’ Nils Erik said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me. You can do what you like as far as I’m concerned. I’m just curious, that’s all.’

‘Did you see?’ I said.

He nodded.

‘You have got the money, after all,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t as if you took them out of sheer deprivation, was it.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘What if you’d been caught? How would that have looked? As a teacher, I mean.’

‘Was I caught?’

‘No.’

‘No? So then it’s purely hypothetical,’ I said.

‘We don’t have to talk about it,’ he said.

‘I don’t mind talking about it,’ I said. ‘Talk away.’

He gave a short laugh.

The ensuing silence was long but not unpleasant, the road was straight, the mountains were beautiful, the music was good, Nils Erik an outdoor type I didn’t much care for.

But then my attitude changed. It was as though I had gone so far in one direction and now I was beginning to return because there was something unresolved here. Nils Erik, he hadn’t done anything to me, didn’t wish me any harm, he was curious, that was all, and perhaps a bit pushy, and out here, where I didn’t know anyone, perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing.

I hummed along to ‘Sometimes it Snows in April’.

‘Have you heard Prince’s latest?’ I said. ‘ Lovesexy .’

He shook his head.

‘But if he comes to Norway or Sweden in the summer I’ll go and see him. His concerts are fantastic these days. I talked to someone who had seen him on the Sign o’ the Times tour. They said it was the best concert they’d ever seen.’

‘I fancy it too,’ I said. ‘But it’s good, the new one, that is. Not as good as Sign o’ the Times but. . As a matter of fact I reviewed it when it came out for Fædrelandsvennen and almost made a huge blunder.’

I looked at him.

‘I’d read in some English music mag that he was illiterate, and I was going to write that, you know. I was on the point of pitching the whole article that way, that Prince couldn’t read, but luckily it struck me as a bit odd and I dropped the idea. Afterwards I realised it was probably music that he couldn’t read. But I don’t know. And it’s not good, all the vague information you accumulate, the stuff you carry around with you that’s not remotely true. If you say anything, it’s a bit embarrassing, but if you actually write it and it’s in the newspaper the day after, that’s worse.’