Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

‘Not everyone here has heard of Heidegger,’ Yngve said in an unexpected lull. ‘Surely there must be other topics we can discuss apart from some obscure German philosopher?’

‘Yes, I suppose there are,’ Kjartan said. ‘We can talk about the weather. But what shall we talk about then? The weather is what it always is. The weather is what existence reveals itself through. Just as we reveal ourselves through the mood we are in, through what we feel at any given moment. It’s not possible to imagine a world without weather or ourselves without feelings. But both elements automate das Man. Das Man talks about the weather as though there is nothing special about it, in other words he doesn’t see it, not even Johannes,’ Kjartan said, nodding towards grandad, ‘who spends an hour every day listening to the weather forecast, and always has done, who absorbs all the details, not even Johannes sees the weather, he just sees rain or sun, mist or sleet, but not as such, as something unique, something which reveals itself to us, through which everything else reveals itself in these moments of, well, grace perhaps. Yes, Heidegger is close to God and the divine, but he never fully embraces it, he never goes the whole way, but it’s there, in close attendance, perhaps even as a prerequisite for the thinking. What do you say, Sissel?’

‘Well, what you say sounds quasi-religious,’ she said.

Yngve, who had rolled his eyes when Kjartan had started talking about the weather, speared a piece of salmon with his fork and put it on his plate.

‘Is it going to be lamb ribs and pork belly this year as well?’ Yngve said.

Grandad looked at him.

‘Yes, it is. We’ve dried the lamb in the loft. Kjartan bought the pork yesterday.’

‘I’ve brought some aquavit with me,’ Yngve said. ‘You need that.’

Mum raised a glass of milk to grandma’s mouth. She drank. A white stream ran from the corner of her mouth.

The countryside was like a tub filled to the brim with darkness. The next morning the bottom slowly became visible as the light was poured in and seemingly diluted the darkness. It was impossible, I reflected, to witness this without feeling it involved movement. Wasn’t Lihesten, that immense vertical wall of rock, creeping closer with the daylight? Wasn’t the grey fjord rising from the depths of darkness in which it had been hidden all night? The tall birches on the other side of the meadowland, where the fence to the neighbouring property was, weren’t they advancing metre by metre?

The birches: five or six riders who had kept watch on the house all through the night and now had to pull hard on the reins to curb the restless horses beneath them.

During the morning the mist thickened again. Everything was grey, even the winter-green spruces growing on the ridge beyond the lake were grey, and everything was saturated with dampness. The fine drizzle in the air, the droplets collecting under the branches and falling to the ground with tiny, almost imperceptible, thuds, the moisture in the soil of the meadow that had once been a marsh, the squelch it gave when you trod on it, your shoes sinking in, the mud oozing over them.

At eleven I walked with Yngve to Kjartan’s car, he had borrowed it, we were going to Vågen to buy the last bits and pieces for the Christmas dinner. Sauerkraut, red cabbage, some more beer, nuts and fruit and fizzy drinks to quench the thirst that lamb ribs always produced. And some newspapers, if there were any, I needed them to kill the time until the evening, for childhood Christmases were so deeply rooted in me that I still looked forward to them.

With the wipers swishing to and fro across the windscreen we drove across the yard, through the gate and down to the road in front of the school, where we turned right and set out on the narrow two-kilometre carriageway to Vågen, which had seemed an interminable distance to me as a child. Almost every metre along the road constituted a special place, the most exciting by far, however, was the bit leading to the bridge over the river, where I used to hang over the railings for hours just looking.

By car, it took three, maybe four minutes. If I hadn’t had my previous attachment to the area I wouldn’t have noticed anything. The trees would have been any trees, the farms any farms, the bridge any bridge.

‘Kjartan’s incredible,’ Yngve said. ‘He doesn’t take any account of others at all. Or does he believe everyone’s as interested in what he says as he is?’

‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Speaking for myself, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Do you?’

‘A bit,’ Yngve said. ‘But it’s not as impressive as it sounds. It’s just a question of reading.’

He turned in and parked, we walked towards the co-op shop. A woman in a long raincoat came out of the door clutching a small child. She was startled to see us.

‘Goodness, Yngve! Is that you!’ she said.

Who was she?

They hugged.

‘This is my brother, Karl Ove,’ Yngve said.

‘Ingegerd,’ she said, sticking out a hand.

I smiled. Her child clung to her.

‘You’ve got grandparents here,’ she said. ‘Now I remember. How funny to see you here!’

I wandered across and gazed over Vågen. The water was perfectly still. Some boats were moored to buoys, which glowed red in the middle of the fjord in all the grey. When we were small the Bergen boat used to dock here. Once we had caught it at night, slept on a hard bench, there had been a smell of petrol and coffee and sea, what an adventure it had been. Kommandøren it had been called. Now the hurtigbåt , the express boat, had superseded it. The boat didn’t stop here any more.

‘Are you coming?’ Yngve said from behind me. I turned. The woman and the child were on their way to a car.

‘Who was that?’ I said.

‘Someone I know from Bergen,’ he said. ‘She lives with Helge.’

On our return, the house smelled of green soap. Mum had washed the floors. Now she was turning her attention to the windowsills. Grandma was asleep in the chair nearby. Mum wrung the cloth over the bucket, straightened up and looked at us.

‘Will you put some porridge on?’ she said.

‘Yes, I can do that,’ Yngve said.

‘Are we going to put up the tree soon?’ I said.

‘You can bring it in, if you like,’ she said.

‘Where is it?’

‘Actually, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Ask Kjartan.’

I slipped my feet into a pair of much too small clogs and shuffled over to the other house. Rang the bell, opened the door, shouted hello.

No answer.

I walked carefully up the stairs.

He was leaning back in his Stressless chair and taking in the fjord. He had those big headphones on. Tapping his foot to the music.

Obviously he hadn’t heard me. If I walked into his line of vision I would startle him. There was no other option though. Shouting was no good; the music was so loud I could hear it from where I was standing.

I went back out.

Grandad was walking from the barn to the house. A cat sauntered along behind him.

‘Any luck?’ mum asked when I went back in.

‘He was busy,’ I said. ‘He was listening to music.’

Yngve sighed. ‘I’ll go and see him,’ he said.

Five minutes later he was wrestling with a large straggly Christmas tree in the hallway. We screwed it into the rusty metal stand and then set about hanging decorations on it from a box mum had located in the meantime. After we had eaten I went for a stroll around the farm, over to the old derelict mink sheds, down to the black mere, past the place where the beehives had been. Further on, by the remains of the foundations of the house that had once stood there, I smoked a cigarette. There wasn’t a sound to be heard, nor a soul to be seen. I threw the stub into the wet grass and walked back to the house. My shoes glistened. In the downstairs bathroom mum was helping grandma to take a shower. Yngve sat listening to grandad, who was bent forward on the sofa, his arms resting on his knees and chatting the way he always did.