Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

As I stood there, with pupils running hither and thither outside the window and him sitting behind his desk and telling me this in a loud harsh voice, I was raging inside. But his voice paralysed my fury, it could not find a vent, except in the old despised way it used to do, as tears in my eyes.

He humiliated me, although he was right, it was my responsibility, I couldn’t skip work the way I had skived from gymnas .

All my strength had ebbed away, and all my resolve.

I closed the door behind me, washed my face in the staff toilet, sat down on the sofa without even the energy to pour myself a cup of coffee.

Torill was sitting at the table making some Christmas decorations. She noticed me looking at her.

‘Just have to make sure I can do this before I ask the kids to do it,’ she said.

‘Don’t they teach you that kind of thing at training college?’ I said.

‘That wasn’t the main priority, no. Pedagogics and that kind of useless stuff was more the style,’ she said with a grin.

I sat up.

I could just stop teaching.

Who said I couldn’t?

Who said so?

Everyone said so, but who said I had to listen to them?

No one could stop me handing in my notice, could they? I didn’t even need to hand it in, all I had to do was stay down south after Christmas, just not return. I would be putting the school in a predicament, but who said I couldn’t do that?

The teacher my class had had the year before turned up drunk for classes, was always taking days off and in the end had simply slung his hook and never returned.

Oh, how they had moaned and groaned about him in the months I had been up here.

I got up, the bell rang the next moment, so deeply were the routines ingrained in my body. But the thought of stopping shone bright in me. I wanted to be free, and freedom existed everywhere but here.

After the last lesson that day I rang mum. Caught her as she was about to leave work.

‘Hi, Mum,’ I said. ‘Have you got time for a little chat?’

‘Yes, of course. Has something happened?’

‘No. Nothing has changed here, but the job’s beginning to weigh me down. I can only get out of bed in the morning with the greatest of difficulty. And it struck me today that I could just hand in my notice. I’m not enjoying it at all, you see. I haven’t been trained for this either. So I wondered about studying after Christmas instead. Doing the foundation year.’

‘I can understand you being frustrated and that it’s tough going,’ she said. ‘But I think you should sleep on it before you decide. Christmas is around the corner, and you’ll be able to unwind and relax lying on the sofa here if you like. I think everything will look different then, when you go back up.’

‘But that’s exactly what I don’t want!’

‘Work goes through patches. There was a time when you thought it was a lot of fun. It’s quite normal for you to have a down period now. I’m not going to say whether you should stop or not. That’s up to you to decide. But you don’t need to make up your mind right now, that’s all I’m saying.’

‘I don’t think you understand what I’m telling you. It won’t get any better. It’s just a bloody slog. And for what?’

‘Life is a slog at times,’ she said.

‘That’s what you always say. Your life may be a slog, but does mine have to be?’

‘I was only trying to give you some advice. In my opinion, it’s good advice.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘The odds are I’ll give up the job, but you’re right, I don’t need to make a decision now.’

Usually I took care to make sure the staffroom was empty when I phoned, or that only Nils Erik was there, but this time I had been so upset and desperate that I hadn’t given it a thought. When I opened the door to leave Richard was in the kitchen.

‘Hi, Karl Ove,’ he said. ‘I’m just doing the washing up. Are you on your way home?’

‘Yes,’ I said, turned and left.

Had he heard? Had he been standing there and listening as well ?

I couldn’t believe that.

But then came the last day of school before the holidays, grade books were handed out, coffee was drunk and cakes were eaten, in an hour I would be getting on the bus to Finnsnes and setting off on the long journey down to mum in Førde, where we would stay for a few days before going to Sørbøvåg for Christmas Eve. Richard stopped in front of me.

‘You should know that I consider you’ve done a fantastic job here this term. You’ve been an invaluable member of staff. And you managed the odd spot of bother with aplomb. Now you have to promise me you’ll be back after the Christmas holidays!’

He smiled to soften the impact, to make it seem like a pleasantry.

‘Why would you think I wasn’t coming back?’ I said.

‘You must come back, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy up here in the north, but it is still fantastic. We need you here.’

This was unadulterated flattery, as transparent as glass, but that didn’t stop me puffing out my chest with pride. Because he was right. I had done a good job.

‘Of course I’ll be back,’ I said. ‘Happy Christmas! See you in 1988!’

The next day, in the evening, mum was waiting on the quay as the hurtigrute boat from Bergen docked in Lavik. It was half past eight, pitch black, the crew lowered the gangplank while the roaring propellers churned up the sea. The light from the lamp above the tiny waiting room glimmered in the film of water that lay over the tarmac. I stepped ashore, leaned forward and gave mum a hug, we walked together to the car. Around us doors were being opened and closed, engines started and the express boat was already speeding off down the fjord. The weather was mild, the countryside snowless, the car windscreen dotted with small raindrops which were intermittently swept away by the wipers. The cones of light from the headlamps roamed like two frightened animals in front of us. Trees, houses, petrol stations, rivers, mountains, fjords, whole forests appeared in them. I leaned back in my seat staring. I’d had no idea that I had missed trees until I was sitting there and saw them.

Mum had made a casserole before she left, we ate it, chatted for an hour, then she went to bed. I stayed up to write but didn’t get much done beyond a couple of lines. She had rented the flat furnished, and I felt like a stranger there.

The next day we drove to town to do our final Christmas shopping. The sky was overcast, but the clouds hiding the sun were thin and straggly, my back was cold as I opened the door, stepped out of the building and for the first time in several months saw the burning globe hanging behind the clouds. Even if the colours of our surroundings were reduced to a minimum in which only the pale yellow of the grass and the wan green of the hedges stood out from the grey, to me they seemed to glow. There was no sharpness, there were no marked contrasts, no steep mountain peaks, there was no endless sea. Only lawns, hedges, estate houses, and behind them gentle friendly mountains, all muted by moisture and grey winter light.

In the evening Yngve came. It was his birthday, he was twenty-three, after dinner we ate cake, drank coffee and had a glass of brandy. I gave him a record, mum gave him a book. After mum had gone to bed we sat up and had a couple more glasses of brandy. I asked him to read the latest short story I had written. While he did so I stood outside on the veranda in the drizzle gazing into the distance, I was overjoyed to be home although the few signs of mum and her life that existed in the flat didn’t make the alienness any more homely, as one might imagine, more the contrary, they made the homeliness more alien. Seeing her things there was like seeing them in a museum. But then home was no longer a place. It was mum and Yngve. They were my home.