Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Three

I had gone into the old gymnasium, which during the day was used as a dining hall where we could tuck into our lunch boxes in the breaks. I had gone in, and when Lise, who was sitting at a very full table, saw me coming she had said, “Yuk, he’s so revolting! I get the heebie-jeebies whenever I see him!”

“Well, I don’t agree,” Mariann added after she had told me. “I don’t think you’re a jessie, either.”

“Jessie?” I said.

“Yes, that’s what everyone says.”

“What?”

“Didn’t you know?”

“No.”

And as if there had been some secret pact not to call me a jessie to my face, before I had been properly but discreetly informed, after the conversation with Mariann it began to be used against me, spreading with the speed of sound. Suddenly I was the jessie. Everyone called me that. The girls in the class, the girls from other classes, some of the boys in the class, boys from other classes, in fact, even on the soccer team they would call me that. One day John turned to me in training and said, “What a damned jessie you are.” Even younger kids, fourth-years on the estate, had picked it up and would shout it after me. “Jessie, jessie, jessie,” I heard all around me. A sentence had been passed, and it could not have been worse. If I was arguing with someone, for example Kristin Tamara, she swept away all the arguments and crushed me totally by just saying: “You’re such a jessie. You jessie. Hey, Jessie! Come here, Jessie.” This got me down, I thought of almost nothing else, it was like a black wall in my consciousness and impossible to escape. It was the worst; there was nothing I could do.

It wasn’t as if I could behave in a less effeminate way for a couple of days and then everyone would say, “Oh, you aren’t a jessie after all!” No, this went deeper, and it would be there forever. They had something on me and they used it for all it was worth. Apart from Lars, he just said I shouldn’t take any notice, and for that I was grateful, one of my first thoughts when this all started was that Lars would no longer want to be seen with me, suddenly he had a lot to lose. But it didn’t bother him. Neither Geir nor Dag Magne nor Dag Lothar said it. And of course none of the teachers or parents. But everyone else did. The term undermined any other qualities I had, it made no difference what I could or couldn’t do, I was a jessie.

In a biology lesson, as we were about to focus on human reproduction, as Fru Sørsdal called it, Jostein from the parallel class, our goalkeeper, came into the class and sat down at a free table. At first he wasn’t noticed, the lesson began, Fru Sørsdal talked about homosexuality, and Jostein said, Karl Ove knows all about that! He’s one himself! You should ask him to tell you. The laughter that followed was desultory, he had gone too far and was at once ejected, but a seed was sown. Was I perhaps homosexual as well? Was that what was wrong with me? I began to ponder on that. I was a jessie, perhaps even a homo, and, if so, all hope was lost. Then there would be nothing to live for. Dark times, they had never been as dark as now.

I said nothing to Mom, of course, but after a few weeks I plucked up courage and told Yngve. He was on his way up the hill to the shop when I caught him.

“Are you in a hurry or what?” I said.

“Pretty much,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

“I’ve got a problem,” I said.

“Oh, yes?” he said.

“They’re calling me names,” I said.

He glanced at me as though he didn’t really want to know.

“What names?”

“Yeah …,” I said. “Well, it’s …”

He stopped.

“ What are they calling you? Tell me!”

“Well, they call me a jessie,” I said. “I’m the jessie.”

Yngve laughed.

How could he laugh ?

“That’s no big deal, Karl Ove,” he said.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Of course it is! Don’t you understand?”

“Think about David Bowie,” he said. “He’s androgynous. It’s a good thing in rock, you see. David Sylvian as well.”

“Androgynous?” I said, so disappointed that he hadn’t understood a thing.

“Yes, ambiguous sexual identity. A bit woman, a bit man.”

He looked at me.

“It’ll pass, Karl Ove.”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” I said, turning and walking back home while Yngve continued up the hill.

I was right, it never stopped, but somehow I became accustomed to it, that was how it was, I was the jessie, and even if thoughts about it tormented me in a way I had not experienced before, and the shadows it cast were long, there was enough happening around me, most of such an intensity it nullified everything else while this carried on.

We drifted around, that was what we did. Actually I always had but whereas the point for Geir and me during all these years had been to seek out secret places, places for ourselves, the opposite was now the case, with Lars we sought places where something might happen. We hitchhiked everywhere, to Hove if there was something going on there, over to Skilsø, to the east of the island, hanging around outside B-Max in the hope that something might happen, someone might come, hanging out around the Fina station, drifting around town, cycling up to the new sports hall even though we weren’t going to do any training, up to the parish hall where Ten Sing had their rehearsals, because at the sports hall there were girls, at Ten Sing there were girls, and that was all we talked and thought about. Girls, girls, girls. Who had big breasts and who had small ones. Who might become attractive and who was attractive. Who had the nicest butt. Who had the best legs. Who had the nicest eyes. Who we might have a chance with. Who was unattainable.

One dark winter evening we caught the bus to Hastensund, where there was a girl who went to Ten Sing, she had blonde hair, was a bit on the chubby side, but was stunningly beautiful, we were interested in her even if she was a year older, we knocked at the door, and then we sat there in her room, chatting shyly about this and that, burning with lust, and on the bus home we were so full of emotion we could barely utter a word.

One weekend Mom visited Dad in Kristiansand and Lars stayed over with me, we ate potato chips, drank Coke, ate ice cream, and watched TV, it was in the spring, the night before the first of May, the TV was showing a rock concert that night to keep Oslo kids indoors who might otherwise be wandering the streets and throwing stones. We didn’t have any porn magazines, I didn’t dare keep any in the house despite the fact that we were on our own, so we had to make do with Insect Summer by Knut Faldbakken, the passage I had read so many times the book automatically opened at the right page. We decided we couldn’t be alone, we had to invite some girls, and Lars suggested Bente.

“Bente?” I said. “Which Bente?”

“The one who lives up here,” Lars said. “She’s lovely.”

“ Bente? ” I almost shrieked. “But she’s younger than us!”

I had seen her all my life, she had always been smaller, never a girl I had considered. But now she had developed, Lars declared, he had seen, she had breasts and everything. And she was a beauty. A real beauty!

I hadn’t noticed, but now that he said it …

We threw on our jackets and ran up the hill and rang her doorbell. She was surprised to see us, but down to our house, no, she couldn’t do that, not tonight.

OK, we said, another time then!

Yes, another time.

So back we went and sat down in front of the TV to watch one band after the other while discussing what we saw and all the girls we would have liked to watch it with. Siv from our class, whom I hadn’t considered either, suddenly became the focus of our interest, we rang her doorbell, too. What would happen afterward we had no idea.