Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

I nodded.

‘But mum’s enjoying her job,’ I said. ‘There’s not so much new stuff any more.’

Grandma suddenly got up, lifted the curtain and looked out.

‘Thought I heard someone,’ she said.

‘You were just imagining it,’ grandad said. ‘We’re not expecting anyone.’

She sat down again. Ran her hand through her hair, looked at me.

‘Oh yes,’ she said and got to her feet again. ‘We mustn’t forget the Christmas presents!’

She was gone for a moment, and I looked at grandad, who had his eyes on the folded football paper on the table beside him.

‘Here you are,’ grandma said from the hall and came in with two envelopes in her hand. ‘Well, it’s not much, but it’ll help a bit. One for you and one for Yngve. Do you think you can carry them both all the way up to Sørbøvåg?’

She was smiling.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much!’

‘Our pleasure,’ grandma said.

I got up.

‘Have a good Christmas,’ I said.

‘And a good Christmas to you too,’ grandad said.

Grandma walked downstairs with me, gazed into the air while I put on my black jacket and wound the black scarf around my neck.

‘Is it OK if I spend some of my present on the bus fare home?’ I said, looking at her.

‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘The whole idea is for you to buy something nice. Haven’t you got any money?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘I’ll have a look to see if I’ve got some coins somewhere,’ she said, taking her purse from the pocket of the coat hanging in the wardrobe, and passed me two ten-krone coins.

‘Happy Christmas,’ I said.

‘Happy Christmas,’ she said, smiled at me and closed the door.

As soon as I was out of sight of the house I opened the envelope bearing my name. There was a hundred-krone note inside. Perfect. I could nip along and buy two records before going home.

In the shop it struck me that actually I could buy four. Yngve had been given a hundred as well, hadn’t he? Yes, he had.

I could give him the hundred from my own money. It wasn’t as if the note was marked.

We arrived at Sørbøvåg in the evening. Rain, a couple of degrees above freezing, the darkness as solid as a brick wall as we carried our luggage up the road to the illuminated house. The countryside around us was saturated, everywhere water dripped and trickled.

Mum stopped, put down her suitcase and opened the brown wooden door with the grooves and the window at the top. The smell, a touch musty from grandad’s cowshed gear hanging in the hall, wafted towards me, and together with the sight of the door and the white wall at the end of the hall unlocked my whole childhood in an instant.

In those days they would have met us on the drive or at least come out the second the door was opened, but now nothing happened: we deposited our cases on the floor and removed our jackets to the sound of our own breathing and the rustle of our clothes.

‘Right,’ mum said. ‘Shall we go in then?’

Grandad, who was sitting on the sofa, stood up with a smile to greet us.

‘The Norwegian population is going through a growth spurt, I can see!’ he said, looking up at Yngve and me.

We smiled.

Grandma was sitting on a chair in the corner looking at us. Her whole body trembled and shook. She was completely in the grip of the illness now. Jaws, arms, feet, legs, everything twitched.

Mum sat down on a stool beside her and held her hands in hers. Grandma tried to say something, but all that came out was a hoarse whisper.

‘We’ll just carry up our bags,’ Yngve said. ‘We’ll be sleeping upstairs, I suppose?’

‘You can do whatever you like,’ grandad said.

We went up the creaky staircase. Yngve took Kjartan’s old room, I took the former children’s room. Switched on the main light, put my rucksack down by the old cot, drew the curtain and tried to peer through the darkness outside. It was impenetrable, but I sensed the landscape there nevertheless, the wind gusting through seemed to open it up. The windowsill was covered with dead flies. In the corner under the ceiling hung a spider’s web. The room was cold. It smelled old, it smelled of the past.

I switched off the light and went downstairs.

Mum was standing in the middle of the floor. Grandma was watching TV.

‘Shall we make some supper then?’ mum said.

‘OK,’ I said.

It was grandad who did the cooking in this house. He had learned to cook when his mother died, he had been twelve years old and the responsibility had fallen on him. Not many men of his generation had experience of this kind and he was proud that he could cope. But he wasn’t very fussy about washing pots and pans and ladles and so on. The grease that had collected in a thick yellowish-white layer at the bottom of the frying pan appeared to have melted and solidified countless times, the saucepans in the cupboard bore scum marks around the top from boiling fish and there were bits of overcooked potato stuck to the bottom. Otherwise the kitchen wasn’t dirty, a cleaner came twice a week, but it was run-down.

Mum and I scrambled some eggs, made some tea and took in a selection of sliced meats and cheese while Yngve set the table. When supper was ready I went to fetch Kjartan, who had built himself a house beside the old one a few years ago. Light droplets of rain settled on my face as I walked the three metres to his door and rang the bell. I opened the door, went into the hall and shouted up the staircase that supper was ready.

‘OK, OK, I’m coming!’ he called down.

When I went back mum was standing next to grandma in the middle of the floor, holding her arm and guiding her slowly towards the table, where grandad and Yngve were already seated, grandad was telling him all about the various types of salmon breeding. If he had been younger that is what he would have done, he said. One of the neighbours had done it, down below in the fjord there was a small breeding station, he was earning so much money it was as if he had won the lottery.

I sat down and poured myself a cup of tea. Kjartan came into the hallway, closed the door after him, went straight to a chair and sat down.

‘Are you studying political science?’ he asked Yngve.

‘Hi, Kjartan,’ Yngve said. As Kjartan didn’t respond to the discreet reproof, Yngve simply nodded. ‘Or comparative politics, as it’s called in Bergen. But it’s the same thing,’ Yngve said.

Kjartan returned the nod.

‘And you’re at gymnas ?’ he said to me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

I stood up and pulled back a chair for grandma. She slowly lowered herself onto it, mum pushed the chair into the table, sat down on her other side while Kjartan started talking. He didn’t look at us. His hands transported bread and meat, buttered bread and raised it to his mouth, poured tea and milk into a cup and raised it to his mouth, all somehow independently of himself and what he was saying, this long unstoppable stream of words that issued from his lips. Occasionally he corrected himself, he laughed a little, he even peeked up at us, but otherwise it was though he had disappeared in order to let the speaker in him speak.

He talked about Heidegger, held a ten-minute monologue about the great German philosopher and his struggle with him, then stopped in midstream and fell quiet. Mum picked up on something he had said, asked whether that was what he meant, had she understood him correctly? He looked at her, smiled briefly and then continued his monologue. Grandad, who had previously dominated the conversations around this table, said nothing as he ate, stared down at the table in front of him, occasionally glanced around the table, a cheery expression on his face as though he had remembered something and was about to tell us what, but held back and lowered his eyes again.