Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s good you told me. It’s good to know.’

‘But we’re still friends.’

‘Of course we are,’ she said. ‘You can fall in love with whoever you like. We’re not in a relationship.’

‘No.’

‘But I am a bit sad nevertheless. It was so wonderful in the cabin. With you.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you’d better get back to your French.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Bye. Thanks for ringing.’

‘Bye.’

I rang off.

Now it was ruined. That was what I wanted. And now it had happened.

In the first break the next day I jogged up to the petrol station over the E18 to buy the latest Nye Sørlandet . Grabbed a copy from the stand and thumbed through the pages at the back.

My cheeks burned when I spotted a photo of myself.

There was a big spread, almost a page, and the photo took up two-thirds of the space. I was sitting and looking straight at the reader with three records fanned out in front of me.

I skimmed through the text. It said I was a young man who was passionate about music and that I was critical about society’s marginalisation of rock. Personally, I liked British indie bands best, but I promised to be open to all genres, even the Top Twenty.

I hadn’t said that, not in so many words, well, I probably hadn’t said it at all, now that I thought about it, but I had meant it and Steinar Vindsland had understood.

The photo was brilliant.

I paid, folded the newspaper and walked back down to the school with it in my hand. In the classroom, which was filling up, I placed it on my desk, leaned back in my chair, tipping it against the wall as I usually did, and watched the others.

I doubted any of them read Nye Sørlandet , except on rare occasions, hardly anyone did. The only newspaper that was any good was Fædrelandsvennen . So having it there spread out on my desk might therefore cause a few eyebrows to be raised. Why have you brought Nye Sørlandet with you to school?

They would imagine I had brought it from home! To show off!

I rocked forward again and folded the newspaper. No, I hadn’t brought it from home to show off. I had bought it at the petrol station and where else would you go with it? That was why I had it with me.

But what the hell. Shouldn’t I just say?

Straight out?

As long as it didn’t seem as if I was bragging?

But it wasn’t bragging, it was true, I was a record reviewer now, and today there was an interview with me in the newspaper I had bought at the petrol station opposite the school.

There was no point hiding it either.

‘Hi, Lars,’ I said. He was the least dangerous boy in the class. He turned to me. I held up the newspaper.

‘I’m the record reviewer,’ I said. ‘Do you want to see?’

He got up and came over; I opened it at the right page.

‘Not bloody bad,’ he said, straightening up. ‘Hey! Karl Ove’s in the paper!’ he shouted across the room.

It was more than I could have hoped for, the very next moment he was standing with a crowd around him, all staring at the photo of me and reading the article.

In the evening I browsed through my old music magazines and studied the record reviews and articles. There were three kinds of writer, I concluded. There were the witty, smart, often malicious writers like Kjetil Rolness, Torgrim Eggen, Finn Bjelke and Herman Willis. There were the serious, ponderous types like Øivind Hånes, Jan Arne Handorff, Arvid Skancke-Knutsen and Ivar Orvedal. And then there were the knowledgeable, clear-headed writers who went straight to the point, like Tore Olsen, Tom Skjeklesæther, Geir Rakvaag, Gerd Johansen and Willy B.

It was as though I knew them all. I really liked Jan Arne Handorff. I understood virtually nothing of what he wrote but sensed his passion, somewhere deep in the wilderness of all those foreign-sounding words, while every second reader’s letter accused him of being incomprehensible, although he didn’t seem to care, he steered a straight line, further and further into the impenetrable night. I also had huge respect for those who could puncture opponents with a killer comment. I adopted it, to deal with my opponents. Its sole importance was that it worked. And many reviewers were vicious. When a band changed direction and became more commercial, such as Simple Minds was doing for example, taking the easy route, they didn’t think twice about confronting the band and asking for an explanation. Why? You were so good, you had everything, so why sell out? Playing at stadiums? What are you doing? What is in your heads? And if the band wouldn’t respond, often they didn’t, Norway was not exactly the most important country for groups on the up, they still peppered them with caustic remarks.

I had written only three record reviews, the ones Steinar Vindsland had read. In them I had tried to be impartial while also being hard, and I had dismissed one record with a couple of sarcastic comments at the end. That was the new Stones’ single, I had never liked them, they were terrible, apart from the Some Girls LP, which wasn’t bad. Now they were over forty and as pathetic as it was possible to be.

I had it in me. I just had to let it out.

Outside it was dark, autumn was wrapping its hand around the world, and I loved it. The darkness, the rain, the sudden cracks in the past that opened when the smell of damp grass and soil rose up at me from a ditch somewhere or when car headlights illuminated a house, all somehow caught and enhanced by the music in the Walkman I always carried with me. I listened to This Mortal Coil and thought about when we used to play in the dark in Tybakken, a feeling of happiness grew in me, but not a happiness of the bright weightless carefree kind, this happiness was rooted in something else, and when it met the melancholic beauty of the music and the world that was dying around me, it was like sorrow, beautiful sorrow, romantic sorrow, beauty and pain in one impossible mix, and from there sprang a wild longing to live more. To leave this, to find life where it was really lived, in the streets of cities, beneath skyscrapers, at glittering parties with beautiful people in unfamiliar apartments. To find the one great love and all the restlessness that involved, and then the acceptance, the relief, the ecstasy.

Discard her, find a new one, discard her. Rise and be ruthless, a seducer of women, a man they all wanted but none could have. I put the music magazines in a heap on the bottom of my bookshelves and went downstairs. Mum was sitting and talking on the telephone in the clothes room, the door was open, she smiled at me. I stood still for a few seconds to hear who she was talking to.

One of her sisters.

In the kitchen I took a slice of bread, ate it leaning against the worktop and drank a glass of milk. Went back upstairs and started a letter to Hanne. I wrote that I thought it was best if we never saw each other again.

It felt good to write that, for some reason I wanted to avenge myself on her, to hurt her, to make her think of me as someone she had lost.

I put the letter into an envelope and dropped it into my school bag, where it lay until I bought some stamps after school the following day.

I posted it before catching the bus, convinced this was the right course of action.

In the evening, lying on the sofa and reading a book I had borrowed from the school library — Bjørneboe’s Ere the Cock Crows — it suddenly struck me what I had done.

I loved her, why would I say I never wanted to meet her again?

Regret exploded inside me.

I had to get it back.

I rested the book on the sofa arm and sat up. Should I write another letter and say I didn’t mean what I had written in the previous one? That I wanted to see her despite what I had written.