Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

When I woke up in the russ van on 17 May and saw I was surrounded by festively dressed people on all sides I was frightened. But not even that mattered, I just had to drink a couple more beers and the fear was gone, and we would go out and sell more russ newspapers so that we had the money for more beer, and when it was midnight I was as free as could be after several days’ drinking, running through the streets and shouting, chatting to strangers, joking with some, harassing others, happy but also extremely tired, and it was in this state, racing back and forth through the procession, streets on both sides packed with people, all wearing their best clothes, suits and national costumes and Norwegian flags everywhere, that I suddenly heard someone shout my name.

It was grandma and grandad.

I pulled up in front of them with a grin on my face. Gunnar’s son was there too, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if I was the first drunk he had ever seen. They stared at me through icy eyes, but it didn’t matter, I laughed and carried on, there were two days left to the exams and I didn’t want them to end. The final party was held at the Fun Senter, and the atmosphere was on the wane, however much I tried to resist it, and I and two others caught a taxi to Bassen’s late at night. He wasn’t at home, the house was empty, and we leaned a ladder against the first floor where there was a window ajar. Once inside we sat on the living-room carpet and smoked hash from perforated Coke cans. When Bassen turned up the following morning, he was furious, naturally enough, but not so much so that we couldn’t catch a couple of hours of shut-eye, but we all knew that the fun was definitively over. I was still drunk when I woke up, but this time there was no hair of the dog, and I was already beginning to sink deeper and deeper into myself on the bus home, it was terrible, everything was terrible. Mum said nothing about having thrown me out, we barely spoke, I lay in the bath with a layer of scum on the surface of the water. I was tired and went to bed early, we had the Norwegian exam the following day, but I couldn’t sleep. My hands were trembling, but that wasn’t all that trembled, the flex on the lamp writhed back and forth like a snake whenever I looked at it. The floor sloped, the walls leaned, I sweated and tossed and turned with my head full of extraneous images. It was dreadful, a night of hell, but then morning came and I got up, dressed and caught the bus to school. I was unable to concentrate, every twenty minutes I signalled to the invigilator, who accompanied me to the toilet, where I washed my face.

Of all the things I had done and that would come back to haunt me during these days the encounter with my grandparents was the worst. But surely they couldn’t know that I had drunk so much, could they? Surely they couldn’t know that I had not only been drinking but also smoking hash, could they? No, they couldn’t. And in my diary for the beginning of June that year I wrote that the months I had been a russ , celebrating the end of school, were the happiest in my life. I used those words: the happiest in my life.

Why did I write that?

Oh, I was so happy. I laughed and was free and friends with everyone.

At the end of June I left home, mum drove me to a flat at the hospital, I worked there for a month, was together with Line, drank wine in the evenings and at the weekends, smoked hash whenever I could get my hands on it. Espen rejected it point blank, it was filth, he said, and he continued to insist the story about the man he had found dead on the night before 17 May was true. One afternoon he rang up to say there had been an article in the newspaper about a man discovered floating in the harbour. ‘That’s him!’ Espen said. I didn’t know if he really meant it or was just trying to get as much mileage from the joke as he could. He said he had a vague memory, as if in a dream, of him dumping the body overboard. Why would you have done that? I said. I was drunk, he answered. No one else but you saw any dead man. It’s just a fantasy. No, he said, it’s true. What about the man sitting with us in the boat? Don’t you remember him? Yes, I do. You saw him then? Yes. He was dead. Now, come on, Espen, if he’d been dead why would you have heaved him over the side and then run to get us? I don’t know.

The month had been packed with such incidents, I wasn’t sure whether they had happened or not, and this combined with the feeling I had that everything was possible, that there were no limits and the enormous tracts of time of which I remembered nothing caused me to begin to lose sight of myself. It was as though I had disappeared. In part I liked this, in part I didn’t. The routines at the hospital, where I was mostly responsible for setting and clearing the tables at mealtimes and otherwise helping with anything of a practical nature, neutralised this feeling but didn’t erase it because in the evening I always went out, drank with the people I met, it was summer and there was always someone around I knew. One evening we were refused admission to Kjelleren, so Bjørn and I climbed up on the roof of the block behind, ran all the way across the rooftops, found a skylight, crawled in, went down to Kjelleren, which was absolutely empty, it must have taken us an hour. We went up a few floors, entered a flat, someone woke up and shouted at us, we said we had gone in the wrong door, walked amid gales of laughter to Tresse, a square in the centre of town where Bjørn’s dad had a flat and we could sleep. In the morning I rang the hospital and said I was ill, they probably didn’t believe me, but what could they do?

That night I drank with a radio technician, Paul, who had driven us to an Imperium concert in Oslo, and on the way home, in the middle of the night in Telemark, at twenty degrees below, the car skidded, left the road doing a hundred kilometres an hour, brushed against a lamp post, flew through the air and landed in a ditch. We’re going to die, I thought, and the idea of it didn’t bother me in the slightest. We didn’t die, the car was a write-off but we were in good shape. It was a great story, one we could tell others, also the sequel, the old house where we knocked on the door, the rifle standing in the hallway, the feeling of being in another, nastier world than our own, and the incredible cold outside as we hitched for more than two hours wearing trainers and suit jackets. We sat talking about that at Kjelleren, Paul and I and his girlfriend, she was wonderful, perhaps twenty-three, twenty-four, I had secretly had my eye on her for ages, and when she suggested taking a taxi back to hers to smoke some dope, of course I said yes, we smoked, and when I smoked I sometimes became so unbelievably horny, and sitting next to her on the sofa it hit me at once, I grabbed her, she laughed and wriggled away, saying she loved Paul, and then she put her hand between my legs and laughed even more and said you’ve grown up. Downstairs in Kjelleren she had been quiet most of the time, Paul had smiled at us, he trusted her, which he was right to do.

At work the next day they said nothing, but I noticed of course, I wasn’t someone they were interested in keeping however much effort I made to mollify them. I was employed for only a month, and when the time was up, I went back to our house, which was no longer ours, mum had sold it, for the next two days we packed everything into boxes, and then a big removal van came and took the lot.

Except for one thing, and that was the cat.

What should we do with the cat?

Mefisto?

Mum couldn’t have the cat where she was going to live, and I definitely couldn’t take him to Northern Norway.

We would have to have him put down.

He wound around our legs, mum put a tin of liver paste in his carrier, he ran in, mum closed the door, put the carrier on the passenger seat and drove to the vet in town.