Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

‘A plastic bag in the hall?’ she said. ‘I chucked it away.’

‘Chucked it away? Are you crazy? There was three thousand kroner in it!’

And it wasn’t even mine, it was Rune’s. In fact, he should have had more than that because I had spent quite a chunk of his money during the last few days there.

‘You had money in it?’ mum said. ‘And you left it on the floor? How was I supposed to know?’

‘Where did you throw it?’

‘In the barrel. Where we burn paper.’

‘Have you burned it? How could you? Have you burned the money?’

I shook my hands in the air. Then I dashed into the hall, slipped on a pair of shoes and ran up the slope.

There was the bag.

But was the money in it?

I snatched at it and peered inside.

Oh, thank God. There it was.

I took the bag, emptied the money onto the floor of my room, counted it, there was a bit more than three thousand two hundred kroner, put it in a drawer and went down to the living room.

‘Find it, did you?’ mum said.

I nodded. Put on a record, ran my eye along a bookshelf, eventually picked out Hamsun’s Pan , sat down on the sofa and began to read.

There was a week left before school began and I decided to spend it writing some reviews, went down to town, dropped in on Steinar Vindsland, it was good I came, he said, he had been trying to get hold of me, had rung a couple of times without any luck.

‘Thing is I’m finishing here. I’ve got a new job on Fædrelandsvennen . You can probably carry on here, but I can’t guarantee it, after all it was me who hired you.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said.

‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I have an offer for you. I’ll be responsible for the young adults and music sections. Would you fancy writing for Fevennen ? It won’t be record reviews, Sigbjørn Nedland does that, as I’m sure you know. But material for young adults, and then perhaps reviews of gigs and interviews with bands.’

‘Yes, I would,’ I said.

‘Great,’ he said. ‘See you!’

Nye Sørlandet was a sinking ship, that was common knowledge, so this was good news. Fædrelandsvennen was a paper everybody read. If I wrote something there everyone would see it.

I went to Platebørsen and bought five LPs to celebrate my promotion, which was how I considered it. I had taken the money from the plastic bag, the odd couple of hundred kroner wouldn’t make any difference anyway, somehow I would have to find the money to pay Rune.

When I returned home Yngve rang, eager to know what had happened on the last evening. Cecilie had been so strange and secretive and was writing a letter to me.

I told him.

‘So you’re going out with Cecilie?’

‘Yes, that’s about the size of it.’

‘Isn’t that a bit weird?’

‘Yes. Does it matter?’

‘No. . I don’t suppose it does.’

‘Good!’

But it made no sense to me. Two days later the letter arrived. She was confused, it had been like a dream, she wrote, and she ought not to tell me, but when she had left me that evening tears had been streaming down her cheeks. On the Friday I went to see her, we were alone, we had to edge our way forward. We talked about what had actually taken place. She said she had been so intrigued by me after all the things that Kristin had told her and the photos she had seen. She had wondered whether perhaps something might happen, and after she had seen me she wanted something to happen, but it couldn’t, after all we were just the younger siblings. I said I had felt the same. She said Yngve had looked at us one evening, first of all at her, then at me, then at her again. It had been in the air. Yes, I said, and I ached. We didn’t know each other, didn’t know what it was, but then it happened again, suddenly we were embracing, kissing each other and then we went to bed. .

But we didn’t make love. I thought she was so young, we didn’t know each other and I ought to tread carefully. .

No, that was not the real reason.

The real reason was that I came before anything had happened.

I was so ashamed that I lay totally still so as not give myself away.

And not only then, it happened every time we lay together in the ensuing weeks.

At the first editorial meeting I attended at Fædrelandsvennen I suggested writing an article about the Sissel Kyrkjebø phenomenon. She was eulogised by all the newspapers, had sold an unimaginable number of records, but why actually? I asked.

‘Good idea. Go for it,’ Steinar said.

‘Why does Sissel sell?’ I called the article. ‘Savour the name,’ I wrote. ‘Sissel Kyrkjebø. .’ And then I made fun of all the associations you could make, with Christianity, the farming community and nationalism, she was even wearing national costume on the LP cover, wasn’t she? She stood for everything I disliked, it was false, manipulative, clichéd, a dreadful picture postcard of the world, who could bear the beauty of it, and on top of everything in such an undemanding form?

There were lots of letters to the editor over the following days. One opened with the words ‘Karl Ove Knausgaard. Savour the name,’ then feasted on its associations with the sterility of rocks ( knaus) and the scant yield of a farm ( gård ). Fædrelandsvennen was a popular newspaper, it was loyal to its readers, the qualities that I preferred — innovation, the avant-garde, provocation — were not for the likes of them, and in the months that followed there was a conspicuously large number of glowing articles about Sissel Kyrkjebø.

I loved it, finally my name had been raised above the anonymous ranks of the crowd, not much, though not so little either.

The weekend after the article appeared Yngve came to visit, and as usual we dropped in on grandma and grandad. On this occasion Gunnar was there. He rose to his feet and stared straight at me as we entered the kitchen.

‘Well, here he is, the world champion,’ he said.

I smiled at him inanely.

‘Who do you think you are?’ he said. ‘Do you realise what an idiot you’ve made of yourself? No, you don’t, do you. You think you’re something special.’

‘What do you mean?’ I mumbled, even though I knew all too well what he was talking about.

‘What makes you think that you of all people are right and everybody else is wrong? You, a seventeen-year-old schoolboy! You don’t know anything. Yet you assume the lofty position of an arbiter of taste. Oh, it’s so pathetic!’

I said nothing, studied the floor. Yngve did the same.

‘Sissel Kyrkjebø is a popular artist loved by everyone. And she gets good reviews. Then you come along and say everyone’s wrong! You! No!’ he said, and shook his head. ‘No, no, no!’

I had never seen him so angry or het up before, and I was shaken.

‘Well, I was actually on my way,’ he said. ‘Nice to see you, Yngve. You’re still in Bergen, are you?’

‘Yes, for the time being,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to China in the autumn.’

‘There you go,’ Gunnar said. ‘Off to see the world!’

Then he left, and we turned to grandma and grandad, who had been sitting at the kitchen table minding their own business during this little interlude.

‘I agree with you anyway,’ Yngve said as we got into the car to go home. ‘I think what you wrote was perfectly reasonable.’

‘Yes, of course it is,’ I said, laughing, there was something exhilarating about all this.

Cecilie and I talked for hours on the telephone. She trained hard, was enormously disciplined and determined, things came to her easily and she was open to life. But there was also something closed inside her, or silent, I didn’t know quite what, but I noticed it. At the weekend I hitch-hiked to hers, unless she came to mine. I preferred to be there because I too was treated like a son of the house, though not with the same acceptance as Yngve, I sensed, we were younger and siblings of the other two, something to do with that meant we weren’t taken as seriously, I felt, as though we were imitations, as though we weren’t ourselves or people in our own right.