Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

There was a group of perhaps ten people in the living room chatting and laughing, squeezed around a table covered with bottles and glasses, cigarette packets and ashtrays. They were all stocky, many had moustaches, age-wise they ranged between twenty and forty.

‘Here come the teachers,’ one of them said.

‘Perhaps we’ll be given detention this evening,’ another said.

Everyone laughed.

‘Hi, folks,’ said Tor Einar.

‘Hi,’ said Nils Erik.

Hege, the only woman there, got up and fetched some chairs from the dining-room table by the window.

‘Sit yourselves down, boys,’ she said. ‘If you need glasses you’ll find them in the kitchen.’

I went in and stood alone staring up at the mountainside behind the house while mixing myself a screwdriver. For a moment I lingered in the doorway observing the people around the table, thinking they looked like trolls sitting there with their variously coloured drinks, depending on what they mixed with their vodka — a variety of juices, Sprite, Coke — with their pouches of tobacco from which they made endless roll-ups and with their moustaches, their dark eyes and the succession of stories, thinking how they came from the four corners of the earth to meet here once a year and act out their exotic natures among their own kind.

However, it was the other way round. They were the rule and I was the exception, the teacher among fishermen. So what was I doing here? Shouldn’t I be at home writing rather than here?

It had been a mistake to go into the kitchen alone. Nils Erik and Tor Einar had already been through the introductory rites, they were now comfortably ensconced alongside the fishermen, and I could have done that too, tagged along behind my colleagues and slipped in without being noticed.

I took a swig and went in.

‘And here we have the writer!’ one of them said. I recognised him at once, he was the fisherman who had dropped by to see me on the first day, Remi.

‘Hi, Remi,’ I said, proffering my hand.

‘Have you been on a name-learning course or what?’ he said, grasping it. Shook it up and down in a way that had not been done since the 1950s.

‘You’re the first fisherman I’ve ever met,’ I said. ‘So of course I remember your name.’

He laughed. I was pleased I’d had a drink before we left. If I hadn’t I would have stood tongue-tied in front of him.

‘The writer?’ Hege said.

‘Yes, he writes, this guy does. I’ve seen it with my own eyes!’

‘I didn’t know that,’ she said. ‘Do you have such fancy ideas?’

I sat down and nodded to her while smiling semi-apologetically and taking the tobacco pouch from my shirt pocket.

For the next hour I said nothing. I rolled cigarettes, smoked, drank, smiled when the others smiled, laughed when they laughed. Looked at Nils Erik, who was pretty drunk and seemed to be in on the jokey tone but wasn’t, he was different, there was something light and Østlandish about him, always on the outside. Not that they rejected him, because they didn’t, it was just that his jokes were of a fundamentally different character, which in this context seemed to expose him. He made puns, they didn’t, adopted a variety of roles, made faces and raised and lowered his voice, they didn’t. When he burst into laughter it was somehow unrestrained, bordering on the hysterical, it struck me; that too was completely different from them.

Tor Einar was more on their level, he knew the appropriate tone and was on nodding terms with everyone there, although he was not one of them either, I could see; he was not an insider, he was more like an ethnological researcher who knows his stuff well enough to be able to mimic it because he likes it so much, and perhaps that was the nub, he liked the tone, whereas for them the tone just came naturally to them. They had never thought about whether they liked it or not.

Tor Einar slapped his thighs when he laughed, which I had only ever seen in films. He would occasionally also rub his hands up and down his thighs when he talked.

The pre-party, as they called it here, pre-loading, excluded discussion. Issues regarding politics, women, music or football were not on the agenda. What they did was tell stories. One story gave way to the next, laughter billowed across the table, and the tales they came up with, they being the trolls they were, all had their origins in the village and the people who lived there, which despite its modest proportions appeared to be an inexhaustible treasure trove of stories. There was the fisherman in his sixties who had been seasick all his life and who only needed to jump on board his trawler to start feeling ill. There was the gang of fishermen who after a good season had hired the suite at the SAS hotel in Tromsø and spent ver-tiginous sums of money in the course of a few intense days of abandon there. One man called Frank, with the fleshy face of a child, was said to have burned his way through twenty thousand kroner, and it took me a while to realise that ‘burned’ meant exactly that, he had set fire to it. Then someone had been drunk shitless in a lift, they said, and again it took me a while to twig that this had to be interpreted literally: he had been so drunk that he had shat himself. Judging by the conversation it had indeed happened in the lift. Frank in particular got so drunk that waking up in his own shit was not an unusual occurrence, from what I could glean. His mother, who was the older teacher at the school, had a hard time, it seemed, because he still lived at home. Hege’s stories were different, but no less bizarre, such as the one about the girlfriend who had been terrified before an exam and whom she had taken into the forest and hit on the head with a bat so that she would have a justifiable reason for being absent. I stared at her. Was she pulling our legs? It didn’t seem like it. She met my gaze and grinned, and then narrowed her eyes to a slit and frowned, opened them again, smiled and looked away. What did that mean? Was it the equivalent of a wink? Or did it mean that I shouldn’t believe everything I heard?

They not only knew one another well, they knew one another inside out.

They had grown up and gone to school together, they worked together, they partied together. They saw one another virtually every day and had done so virtually all their lives. They knew one another’s parents and grandparents, many of them were first or second cousins. One might conclude this was boring, indeed intolerably boring in the long run, because nothing new ever entered their lives, everything that happened, happened among the two hundred and fifty people who lived here and who knew everyone else’s most intimate secrets and quirks. But such did not appear to be the case; quite the contrary, they seemed to be having a whale of a time and if there was anything that marked the atmosphere among them it was their carefree attitude and their joy.

While sitting there I was formulating what I was going to write in the letters I would send south, such as: ‘They all had moustaches! It’s absolutely true! All of them!’ Or: ‘And the music they listened to, do you know what it was? Bonnie Tyler! And Dr Hook! How long ago is it since that music was heard anywhere in the world? What is this godforsaken place I have ended up in?’ And: ‘Here, my friend, the expression “to drink yourself shitless” means just that. Say no more. .’

When at last I got up to go to the toilet I had drunk just over a third of my bottle of vodka and I knocked against the man sitting next to me, who was holding a glass in his hand and spilled some of the contents.

‘So. . rry,’ I said, straightening up and stepping across the living-room floor.

‘One does the talking and the other does the drinking!’ he said behind me and laughed.