Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

I craned my neck and looked into the living room. He was still reading.

Was that the last page?

It looked like it.

I forced myself to wait a little longer.

Then I pushed up the long handle and slid open the glass door. Closed it behind me, sat down on the sofa across the table from him. He had placed the sheets of paper in a pile. He was busy rolling a cigarette, oblivious of my presence.

‘Well?’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Well, it’s good.’

‘Sure?’

‘Ye-es. It’s similar to the other ones I’ve read.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’ve done six now. If I can speed up I could have fifteen ready by the time I finish at the school.’

‘What are you going to do then?’ Yngve asked, putting the somewhat crooked roll-up between his lips and lighting up.

‘Send it to a publishing house, of course,’ I said. ‘What do you reckon?’

He looked at me.

‘You don’t think anyone’s going to publish it, do you? In all seriousness? Do you think they will?’

Chilled to the depths of my soul, I met his gaze. All the blood had drained from my head.

He smiled. ‘You did, didn’t you,’ he said.

My eyes glazed over and I had to avert my head.

‘You can send them anyway,’ he said. ‘And see what they say. They might go for them, you never know.’

‘But you said you liked them,’ I protested, getting up. ‘Didn’t you mean what you said?’

‘Yes, I did. But everything is relative. I read it as a story written by my nineteen-year-old brother. And it is good. But I don’t think it’s good enough to be published.’

‘OK,’ I said, going back out onto the veranda. I watched him carry on reading the Fløgstad book mum had given him. The brandy glass resting in his hand. As though what he had said had no special significance.

Bugger him.

What did he know, really? Why should I listen to him ? Kjartan liked it, he was a writer. Or did he also say that based on who I was, his nineteen-year-old nephew, I wrote well considering who I was?

Mum had said she considered me a writer after reading it. You’re a writer, she had said. As though that surprised her, as though she hadn’t known, and she couldn’t have put that on. She meant it.

But for Christ’s sake I was her son.

Surely you don’t think anyone is going to publish it? In all seriousness?

I’ll bloody show him. I’ll bloody show the whole sodding fucking world who I am and what I am made of. I’ll crush every single one of them. I’ll render every single one of them speechless. I will. I will. I bloody well will. I’ll be so big no one is even close. No one. No. One. Never. No bloody chance. I will be the bloody greatest ever. The fucking idiots. I’ll bloody crush every single one of them.

I had to be big. I had to be.

If not, I might as well top myself.

The sight of the pallid winter sun in the damp muted countryside continued to keep me fascinated throughout Christmas, it was as though I hadn’t seen the sun before it was gone again, what energy it brought, how rich the play of light on nature when its rays were filtered through the clouds or the mist or just flooded down from a blue sky, and all the endless nuances that appeared when nature reflected the light back.

Nothing had changed in Sørbørvåg. Grandma’s state hadn’t noticeably worsened, grandad hadn’t noticeably aged and the fervour in Kjartan’s eyes wasn’t noticeably diminished. Since last Christmas he had passed a philosophy exam in Førde, and now it was his lecturer’s name, rather than Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s, that was mentioned, at least they were not referred to as often as before, in that casual confidential way of his. I might have imagined we could talk about literature, but apart from him showing me some poems, hardly a word of which I understood, nothing came of this. He had also acquired an astronomical telescope, it stood on the living-room floor, beside the ceiling-high window, from where he studied the universe at night. He had also developed an interest in ancient Egypt, ensconced in his old leather chair reading about that mysterious culture which was so far removed from ours it seemed almost non-human to me, as if they actually had been gods. But then I knew nothing about it, and just flicked through his books when he wasn’t there and examined the pictures.

On 28 December I went down to Kristiansand, celebrated New Year’s Eve there, Espen had hired a room with some others at the Hotel Caledonien, which had just reopened after the fire, it was heaving with people, everyone was smoking and drinking, and it wasn’t long before two firemen came dashing along the corridor in full kit. I laughed myself silly when I saw them. I had been on my way up to the rooftop with some others, I sat on the edge and dangled my feet over, with the town beneath me and the sky lit up with fireworks. We talked about a crowd of us going to the Roskilde Music Festival in the summer, and with Lars I semi-planned a hitchhiking trip down to Greece afterwards. I managed to include a visit to grandma and grandad as well, nothing had changed there either, with them, the house, everything inside and its smells. It was me who had changed, it was my life that was on a wild trajectory.

On 3 January I caught the plane up to Tromsø, shortly after halfway we flew into a tunnel of darkness, and I knew it wouldn’t end, this was how it would be, pitch black all day for some weeks yet. Then everything would slowly change, soon the darkness would be gone and the light would fill every hour of the day. This was just as wild, I thought, smoking in the narrow seat.

But first came the darkness. Dense and heavy, it lay over the village when I arrived by bus on the morning of 4 January, not open, as it could be when the sky was cloud-free and the stars were shining out in space, but dense and heavy like at the bottom of an abandoned well.

I unlocked the door to my flat, went in, unhitched my rucksack and switched on the light. It was like coming home.

There was my Betty Blue poster, there was the Liverpool FC poster, there was the new landscape poster I had bought in Finnsnes on one of my first days here.

I put the coffee machine on, crouched down by my record collection and began flicking through it. After that I surveyed the tiny library of books I had bought. It all filled me with pleasure.

I went into the kitchen and poured some coffee into a cup. Through the window I saw a little group of kids coming up the hill. In case they were coming to see me I put on Mozart’s Requiem, one of the two classical LPs I possessed, and turned the volume up to full.

There was a ring at the door.

Andrea, Vivian, Live, Stian and Ivar, the tall ninth-year boy, stood outside.

‘Happy New Year,’ I said. ‘Come in.’

From the hall, where they were hanging up their coats, I heard Vivian say: he likes opera!

I smiled to myself, standing with a steaming cup of coffee in my hand as they came in. Stian had been here only once before, right at the start, with Ivar, he had gone through my record collection and asked whether I had any heavy metal. In the few lessons I had with him at school I ignored him as far as I was able, trying not to rise to all the provocation he dished out. I placed no demands on him, he had made up his mind anyway. Tor Einar had them much more than me and had made a stand against them, which didn’t go too well, once he had returned to the staffroom trembling all over, two of them, Stian and Ivar, had knocked him to the ground, Ivar had got him in a stranglehold. They were sent home for a few days because of the incident, but the school was so small, the place so transparent that what would have been a serious matter elsewhere wasn’t so serious here. We were expected to deal with the likes of Stian and Ivar. When they went fishing or hung out with some of the younger men, they were young kids, brats no one bothered about. So Tor Einar could hardly say they had held him by the throat. Not if he wanted to elicit any sympathy or understanding at any rate.