Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

It was her, alone this time.

‘There’s a party in Hellevika next weekend,’ she said. ‘In fact, that was why I came, to tell you. Do you fancy coming? It’s a good way to meet people from round here.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘If I can make it I will.’

‘If?’ she said. ‘You just have to get in a car. Everyone’s going. See you there!’

She winked. Then she turned and walked down the hill to where Hilde was chipping away at the edge of the tarmac with the tip of her shoe.

A little after eight the following morning I left the flat for the first time in more than a day. The sun that hung above the mountains to the east shone directly on the door, and the air that met my face when I closed it behind me was mild and summery. But only a few metres away, where the countryside lay in shadow behind the mountains, it was colder, and the impression I had of small pools existing in the air, like currents and eddies, rapids and waterfalls, seemed strangely uplifting. Ahead of me, atop a small plateau, was the school, and if I wasn’t absolutely dreading going in, I was certainly nervous enough for tiny flashes of apprehension to shoot through me as I approached.

It looked like any other school, a long single-storey edifice on one side, connected to a tunnel-like corridor with a larger newer and taller block housing a woodwork room, gymnasium and small swimming pool. Between the two buildings was the playground, which extended behind them to a full-sized football pitch. On a mound above it, taking pride of place, was what I guessed was the community centre.

Two cars were parked in front of the entrance. A big white jeep and a low black Citroën. The sun gleamed on the row of windows. The door was open. I went into the hall, the yellow lino floor was almost white in the sunshine, which fell in long stripes through the glass door panels. I rounded one corner, there were three doors on the right, two on the left and at the end the hall opened into a large space. A man stopped and looked at me. He had a full beard and a bald patch. Probably in his early thirties.

‘Hello!’ he said.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘And you are. . Karl Ove?’

‘That’s me,’ I said, stopping in front of him.

‘Sture,’ he said.

We shook hands.

‘Karl Ove was a pure guess,’ he said with a smile. ‘But you didn’t look like a Nils Erik.’

‘Nils Erik?’ I said.

‘Yes, we have two teachers from the south this year. You and Nils Erik. The rest of the untrained staff are local people, so I know them.’

‘Are you local?’

‘I certainly am!’

He looked me straight in the eye for a few seconds. I found it unpleasant, what was this, some kind of test, but I didn’t want to be the first to look away and held his gaze.

‘You’re very young,’ he said at length, and looked away towards the door we were standing next to. ‘But we knew that of course. It’ll all be fine! Come on, you have to meet the others.’

He stretched out an arm towards the door. I opened it and entered. It was the staffroom. A kitchenette, armchairs and a sofa, a small room full of papers and a photocopier, an adjacent rectangular room with workstations on both sides.

‘Hi!’ I said.

Six people were sitting around the table. All eyes turned to me.

They nodded and mumbled ‘Hi’ in return. From the kitchenette appeared a small but powerful and energetic man with a red beard.

‘Karl Ove?’ He beamed. After I had nodded and he had shaken my hand, he addressed the others.

‘This is Karl Ove Knausgaard, the young man who has come all the way from Kristiansand to work with us!’ And then he said the names of all those seated, which I had forgotten an instant later. They all had a cup of coffee in their hands or on the table in front of them, and everyone, apart from one elderly lady, was young. In their early twenties or so it seemed.

‘Take a seat, Karl Ove. Coffee?’

‘Please,’ I said and squeezed down at the end of the sofa.

For the next few hours the head teacher, who was called Richard and must have been in his late thirties, told us, the two temporary teachers, about the school. We were shown around the rooms, given keys, allocated workstations and then we went through the timetables and various routines. It was a small school with so few pupils that classes were grouped together for many of the lessons. Torill would be the form teacher for the first and second years, Hege for the third and fourth, me for the fifth, sixth and seventh, Sture for the eighth and ninth. Why precisely I had been made a form teacher I had no idea, and it felt a little uncomfortable, not least because the other temp from Sørland, Nils Erik, was considerably older than me, twenty-four, and planning to embark on teacher training after this year. He was serious about it, this was his future, while I had no such plans: becoming a teacher was the last thing I wanted to do in this life. The other temps came from the local area, knew the ins and outs and ought to have been better suited than me to taking responsibility for a class. Presumably the head teacher had based his decision on my application, and that made me uneasy because I had laid it on in spades.

The head teacher showed us where the syllabuses were and demonstrated the range of teaching aids we had at our disposal. At one o’clock we were finished, and I walked down to the post office, which was at the other end of the village, arranged a PO box number, sent a few letters, did some food shopping, made dinner at home, lay on my bed listening to music for an hour or so, jotted down some key words regarding the ideas I’d had for my classes, but they looked stupid, a bit too obvious, so I screwed up the paper and threw it away.

I had everything under control, everything.

Early that evening I went back up to the school. It was a strange feeling to unlock the door of the main building and walk along the corridors. Everything was empty and still, filled with the grey light that seeped in through the windows. All the shelves and cupboards were empty, the classrooms somehow untouched.

In the staffroom there was a telephone in a small cubicle, I went in and rang mum, she’d also had her first day at a new school today. She was busy unpacking in the new place she was renting, a terraced house some way outside Førde town centre. I told her a bit about what it was like here and how nervous I was about teaching the next day. She said she knew I would make out just fine, and even though her character reference didn’t count for a lot — after all she was my mother — it did help.

When I had finished the call, I went into the photocopier room and made ten copies of the short story I had written. The idea was to send it to people I knew the following day. Then I wandered around all the rooms in the school. In the gymnasium I swung open the panel door to the little equipment room, threw a ball out, had a few kicks at the handball goal at the far end. Switched off the light, went into the swimming pool. The water lay dark and still in the pool. I went up to the woodwork room and on to the natural science room. From the windows you could see across the village lying beneath the mountains, lots of small houses in a variety of colours which appeared to vibrate, and beyond, across the sea, the endless sea, and the sky that rose from it, in the far distance, full of elongated, smoke-like clouds.

Early tomorrow morning the pupils would come, then it was down to business.

I switched the lights off after me, locked the door and walked down the hill with the large key ring jangling in my hand.

On waking next morning I was so nervous I was on the point of throwing up. A cup of coffee was all I could get down me. I walked up to the school half an hour before the first lesson was due to begin, sat in my place flicking through the books we were going to use. The mood among the other teachers walking to and fro between the photocopier, classrooms, kitchenette and sofa suite was light-hearted and cheery. Outside the window the students were beginning to appear in dribs and drabs, coming up the hill. My chest was frozen with terror. My heart was beating as if it was being strangulated. I saw the letters on the page I had opened but couldn’t make any sense of them. After a while I stood up and went into the kitchenette to get myself a cup of coffee. When I turned I met the eyes of Nils Erik. He looked relaxed, leaning back against the sofa, his legs wide apart.