Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

‘I thought that was what newspapers were all about,’ Nils Erik said, smiling, his eyes on the road.

‘You can say that again,’ I said.

Further ahead lay the road to Håfjord, a thin grey line leading to a small black gap in the mountain.

‘By the way, I got a long letter from my girlfriend on Tuesday,’ I said.

‘Oh yes?’ he said.

‘Yes. Well, girlfriend may be stretching it. We were together during the summer. Her name was Line. .’

‘ Was ? Did she die this week?’

‘For me, yes. That was the point. She finished it. Wrote that I was a nice person blah blah blah, but she’d never been in love with me and it was the right time to finish now because I was moving up here.’

‘So you’re footloose and fancy free,’ Nils Erik said.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘That’s what I was about to say.’

A car emerged from the tunnel, it was small and black like a dung beetle, but soon it grew in size, it was going at a considerable speed.

The driver raised a hand as he passed, Nils Erik responded, slowed down and turned into the last short stretch before the village.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Everyone knows who we are while we don’t know anyone.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’ve ended up in an incredibly intimidating place.’

He twisted one of the levers by the steering wheel for full beam and flicked the other up to activate the windscreen wipers. Drops of water splashed on the bonnet, windscreen and roof. The drone of the engine rebounded off the rock face, it surrounded us like a kind of shell, which vanished the moment we exited the tunnel, and the blue fjord spread out before us.

‘Are you a free man then?’ I said.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I’m very free in fact. I haven’t had a girlfriend for several years.’

Was he gay?

Oh, no, don’t say he was one of them?!

He was in fact a bit odd. And those rosy cheeks. .

‘There’s not much of a selection up here,’ he said. ‘But nor is there much competition. So I reckon they cancel each other out.’

He laughed.

Not much of a selection . What was that supposed to mean? There weren’t many other gays here?

My insides chilled as I stared across the matt blue surface of the sea.

‘Torill is a cheery type,’ he said.

Torill!

False alarm!

I looked at him again. Even though his eyes were on the road some of his attention was on me.

‘But she’s old,’ I said.

‘Old? Not at all!’ he said. ‘If I had to guess I would say twenty-eight. Maybe thirty. It’s possible. But, first off, she’s not old! And, second off, she’s sexy. Yes, very sexy.’

‘Well, you could have fooled me,’ I said.

‘I’m not eighteen years old, Karl Ove. I’m twenty-four. So twenty-eight is not old. Or unattainable.’ He chuckled. ‘The fact that she may be unattainable for me is quite a different matter.’

We drove slowly down the narrow road squeezed under the mountainside. The local motorists drove just as fast here as anywhere else, but not Nils Erik, he was the cautious sensible type, I had begun to realise.

‘And you?’ he said. ‘Have you got your eye on anyone?’

I smiled. ‘In fact, there was a girl on the bus when I was coming here. She’s at the gymnas in Finnsnes. Lives in Hellevika.’

‘Aha!’

‘We’ll have to see. Nothing else I’m aware of.’

‘Vibeke’s a jolly girl,’ he said.

‘Do you mean fat?’

‘No, but you know. . she’s nice, she is. Bit chubby maybe, but what does that matter? And Hege, she’s. . well, high maintenance, I reckon. But attractive. Isn’t she?’

‘You’re game for anything, are you?’ I said.

‘Women are women, that’s my motto.’

Then the village lay beneath us. Nils Erik pulled up outside my flat, carried in the shopping bags while I took the big cardboard box containing the stereo, then he said bye and drove off to his place. I set up the stereo, put on Sulk by the Associates, an utterly insane LP I listened to stretched out on the sofa. After a while I began to write some letters, kept them brief as I had a lot of them to do, what was important right now was not what I wrote but the short story I enclosed with all of them.

In one of the breaks next day Sture came over to me.

‘Can I have a word with you?’ he said, scratching his bald pate.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘I’d just like to give you a bit of advice,’ he said. ‘About the third and fourth years. I heard you covered the whole cosmos with them yesterday. .’

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘They’re very small, you know. It might not be a bad idea to start at the other end. Make a map of the school here, for example. And then one of the village. And then one of the island. Do you see what I mean? Start with the known and work outwards, to Norway, Europe and the world. And then you can tackle the cosmos. If you’re still here, of course!’

He grinned and winked at me so as to appear more of a friend and less of an authority figure. But this was not advice; this was a rebuke. When I met his eyes, my blood was boiling.

‘I’ll give that some thought,’ I said, then turned and went.

I was furious while being embarrassed at the same time because I could see he was right. They were so small, probably they hadn’t understood a thing, and what had been exciting for me when I was ten was not necessarily exciting for them.

In the staffroom I didn’t want to talk to anyone, so I sat down at my workstation and pretended I was reading until the bell rang and I could go out to my pupils.

It was strange, I thought, standing by the desk and waiting for them to saunter in, it was strange that I should feel more at home among the pupils than among the teachers in the staffroom.

But where were they?

I walked over to the window. There wasn’t a soul in the area between the two buildings. Were they on the football pitch perhaps?

I looked up at the clock. It was already five minutes since the bell had rung. Something must have happened, I thought, and walked down the corridor to the door. Sture came striding along from the other end. He opened the door and went out, I followed and saw him break into a run.

There was a fight. Two of the boys had their arms wrapped round each other, one was thrown to the ground, he got back to his feet. Around them stood a cluster of pupils watching. They were completely silent. Behind them lay the village, behind that the mountains and the sea.

I broke into a run as well, mostly for appearance’s sake because I knew Sture would sort this out and I was glad.

The two boys fighting were Stian and Kai Roald. Stian was stronger, it was him who had thrown Kai Roald to the ground, but Kai Roald wouldn’t give in and flew at him again.

Both stopped the moment Sture reached them. He grabbed Stian by the back of his jacket and held him at arm’s length while he bawled him out. Stian hung his head like a dog. He wouldn’t have done that with me, that was for certain.

I came to a halt in front of them.

Kai Roald was looking at the ground. The knees and tops of his trousers were filthy. His eyes were wet with tears.

‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Are you fighting?’

‘Oh, shut up,’ he said.

I placed my hand on his shoulder. He wrenched himself away.

‘Come on, let’s go in,’ I said, then looked at the others in the class. ‘And you lot! What are you doing out here? You haven’t even been fighting!’

Kai Roald peered up at me as if he had been expecting a punishment but now he could see there wasn’t going to be one.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go. Kai Roald, you go to the washroom and clean yourself up. You look a sight.’