Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

He smirked at his own joke. I looked at him without smiling, pulled my hat down over my head, grabbed my gloves. Even though he was right that there was no point going out now, I had an additional reason: the impression of regret and energy I would leave behind me as I jogged out and came into the view of those standing behind the window. The last thing I wanted to give was an impression of slackness. The last thing I wanted was for people to think I was a shirker.

Out of the wet-weather shelter came a small plump figure. I dashed over to the boys who had been wrestling in the snow and were now brushing it off their jeans. The denim material was almost black from where it had melted.

‘Karl Ove!’ he said from behind me, and tugged at my jacket.

He must have run after me.

I turned. ‘What’s up, Jo?’ I said.

He smiled.

‘Can I throw a snowball at you?’

Last week I had given them permission to throw snowballs at me. It had been a big mistake because they thought it was such great fun, especially when they hit my thighs with a couple of stingers, that they refused to stop when I told them. They had reached a kind of amnesty, what had not been allowed was suddenly allowed, and they had a sense of how difficult it would be to punish them if it wasn’t allowed any longer.

‘No, not today,’ I said. ‘Besides, the bell’s about to ring.’

The four boys scowled up at me from under dark woollen hats pulled down over their faces.

‘Are you all right?’ I said.

‘Of course,’ Reidar said. ‘Why wouldn’t we be all right?’

‘Less of that cheek now,’ I said. ‘You should show respect for adults.’

‘You’re not an adult,’ he said. ‘You haven’t even got a driving licence!’

‘No, that’s true,’ I said. ‘But at least I know my times tables. That’s more than you know. And I’m big enough to paddle your bottom three times a day if I have to.’

‘My dad would beat you up if you did,’ he said.

‘Karl Ove, come on,’ Jo said, pulling at my jacket again.

‘I’ve got a dad too, you know,’ I said. ‘He’s much stronger and taller than me. On top of that, he’s got a driving licence.’

I looked down at Jo. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘There’s something I want to show you. It’s something I’ve made.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a secret. No one else must know.’

I looked across. The girls in the seventh class were standing by the wall of the wet-weather shelter. Behind, on the fringes of the football pitch, a group of children were chasing after each other in the dark.

‘The bell’s about to ring, you know,’ I told him.

He took my hand. Didn’t he understand how this looked to his classmates?

‘It’ll be quick,’ he said.

He’d hardly uttered the words before the bell rang.

‘Next break then,’ he said. ‘Will you come with me?’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Off you go now.’

The children on the football pitch had either not heard the bell or they were ignoring it. I walked over to the pitch. Cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted that the bell had rung. They stopped and looked at me. The snow covering the pitch drew it into the surrounding terrain, it was a flat surface in the middle of a slope which, further up, became a mountain, and in all this whiteness, which the sky’s all-pervasive darkness muted to a blue, the pupils resembled tiny animals, rodents of some kind perhaps, it seemed to me, romping around outside the entrances to their ingenious networks of galleries and tunnels in the snow.

I waved to them. They set off at a lope towards me.

‘Didn’t you hear the bell?’ I said.

They shook their heads.

‘Didn’t you think it was time for the bell to ring?’

They shook their heads again.

‘Hurry up now,’ I said. ‘You’re very late.’

They ran past me. As I rounded the corner of the wet-weather shelter the door slammed after the last straggler. I kicked the snow off my shoes against the wall and followed. Opened the door to the staffroom, hung my coat and hat on the hook and went for my books for the lesson. Behind me the toilet door opened. I turned. It was Nils Erik.

‘Have you been in there all this time?’ I said.

‘What kind of question is that?’ he said.

‘I was just surprised,’ I said, scanning the book spines. ‘You were in there a long time. I wasn’t making any insinuations.’

I looked at him and smiled. Picked out a natural science booklet.

‘That’s good to hear,’ he said. ‘Insinuations are such crap. No, it was Torill. She’s so sexy it’s unbelievable. And when she bent forward. . I just had to go in and relieve the emergency that had arisen.’

‘Emergency?’ I said.

‘Yes.’ He laughed. ‘You know. Man sees woman. Man is attracted. Man runs to the loo and tosses himself off.’

‘Oh, that emergency,’ I said, smiled and went to the class.

In the next break Jo ran over to me the second I stepped into the playground.

‘Come with me now!’ he said, taking my hand and dragging me off.

‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘What are you going to show me?’

‘Something I’ve made with Endre,’ he said.

‘Where’s Endre?’

‘I think he’s over there.’

Endre was in the third class, Jo was in the fourth. When they were together they usually kept away from the others.

‘There,’ he said, pointing to a large snowdrift behind the building, out of sight of the rest of the school. ‘We’ve made a snow cave. It’s really big. Do you want to have a look inside?’

Endre saw us coming, crawled in the entrance and disappeared from sight.

‘That’s fantastic,’ I said, and stopped. ‘I think it’s probably too small for me. But you go in.’

He smiled up at me. Then he lay down on his stomach and wriggled in. I took a few steps back and looked across at the other children. Two fourth-year boys came round the corner and headed towards us. Jo stuck his head out of the cave.

‘There’s room for you too, Karl Ove. It’s really big.’

‘I have to keep an eye on everyone, you know,’ I said.

He spotted the two boys.

‘This is our snow cave,’ he said, looking at me. ‘We made it.’

‘Yes, you did,’ I said.

‘Have you made a cave?’ Reidar shouted.

‘It’s ours,’ Jo said. ‘You can’t come in.’

They stopped by the entrance.

‘Let’s have a look,’ Stig said, and tried to crawl past Jo.

‘It’s ours,’ Jo said, looking at me again. ‘Isn’t it, Karl Ove?’

‘You made it,’ I said. ‘But you can’t refuse to let others in. You’d have to stand guard day and night if you did.’

‘But it’s ours!’ he said.

‘It’s on school premises,’ I said. ‘You can’t stop anyone going in.’

Reidar smiled and pushed past Jo. Soon the cave was full of kids. They immediately started planning how they could make it bigger and began to dig a tunnel from the end. Jo tried to take charge, but they ignored him, he had to find his place, which was and would always be at the bottom of the pecking order. I turned and went. I did have a bit of a bad conscience, Jo was as unhappy now as he had been happy a few minutes before, but there was nothing I could do about it, he would have to work out the social game for himself. He would have to learn he would get nowhere by whining or telling tales.

‘Are you hanging around here again?’ I said to the gumchewing seventh-year girls standing inside the wet-weather shelter.

‘It’s snowing and it’s windy,’ Vivian said. ‘Surely you don’t think it’s right we should have to stand outside in this weather, do you?’

‘You don’t have to stand, do you?’ I said. ‘You could run like the other kids.’