Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Three

“Not now. Another time.”

“Please.”

“Just one then,” he said. “Sit here.”

I sat down beside him on the bed. He put the guitar in my lap. Placed three fingers on the finger board.

“That’s an E,” he said, and took his hand away.

I put my fingers where he’d had his.

“Good,” he said. “Now strum.”

I strummed, but not all the strings made a sound.

“You have to press harder,” he said. “And you have to watch your other fingers don’t catch the free strings.”

“OK,” I said and tried again.

“That was good,” he said. “That’s the way. Now you can do E.”

I passed him the guitar and got up.

“Do you remember which strings are which?” he said.

“EADGBE,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “Now all you need is a band.”

“But then I would have to borrow your guitar,” I said.

“You can’t have it.”

I said nothing because things could change so quickly.

“When do you start tomorrow?” I said instead.

“First hour,” he said. “And you?”

“No, at eleven, I think.”

“Think?”

“Know. Dad?”

“First lesson, dead sure.”

That was good news. I would be alone for a few hours.

I turned and went into my room. The new satchel was by the desk leg. The square, blue one I’d had for years had become too small and childish. The one I had now was dark green and made of some synthetic material that smelled wonderful.

I sniffed at it for a while. Then I put on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and lay back on my bed staring at the ceiling.

Getting so much better all the time!

It’s getting better all the time!

Better, better, better!

It’s getting better all the time!

Better, better, better!

Getting so much better all the time!

The music lifted me at once, I beat the air with one hand and rocked my head backward and forward, happy to the core. Bettåh, bettåh, bettåh! I sang. Bettåh, bettåh, bettåh!

There was the school building, black, with all its many windows glinting, as we stormed off the bus. We were among the older pupils now and knew both how to behave and what to expect. While the new kids, hair combed and smartly dressed, stood with their parents listening to the head teacher’s welcome talk by the flagpole, we swaggered around and spat or leaned against the wall of the wet-weather shed talking about what we had done that summer. Three cows on a farm was no longer good enough, but even if our only holiday trip had been to Sørbøvåg, where I had stayed with Jon Olav and the others, alone for a week, I definitely had something to offer because there had been a girl there, my second cousin, whose name was Merete, she had blonde hair and lived outside Oslo. I went out with her, I said, and although that was not quite as impressive as Liseberg in Gothenburg, northern Europe’s biggest amusement park, it was better than nothing.

Some of the girls unfurled their skipping elastic from what were to me hidden places and started jumping.

No, dancing.

We managed to persuade them to play the high jump instead, so that we could join in without losing face in front of the other boys. Two of the girls held the elastic between them, and then, one after the other, we ran toward it, launched both legs, and brought our feet down on it to land on the other side.

It was a pleasure to watch the girls as they took off, legs first, in their elegant, controled fashion.

Whoosh, you heard, and then they were safely on the other side.

Then the height was raised until there was only one person left.

I hoped it would be me because Anne Lisbet had joined us now as well, but it was, as so often before, Marianne.

Tap, tap, tap, you heard, as she ran forward, whoosh, you heard when she jumped, and then she was over.

She smiled shyly, swept her shoulder-length blonde hair to one side with a finger, and I wondered if she would be the one I fell in love with this year.

Probably not. She was in my class.

Perhaps it would be someone in the A class?

Or, hey, future of dreams, perhaps someone from another school?

After we had been given the schedule and some new books in the first lesson we had to tell the class what we had done over the summer, one after the other. In the second lesson we had to hold an election for the new student council. I had been the class rep with Siv in the previous year and I thought being reelected would be a formality until Eivind put up his hand and said he would also like to stand as a candidate. There were six names to choose from. Eivind’s involvement led to my breaking the unwritten rule that you never, under any circumstances, voted for yourself. I thought the election might be touch and go, so one vote could be decisive. I considered the chances of anyone finding out that I had voted for myself unlikely in the extreme. After all, it was a secret ballot, and the only person who would see what we wrote and could spot our handwriting, and could therefore expose me, was Frøken, and she wouldn’t say anything.

How cruelly mistaken I was.

I wrote KARL OVE in capital letters on the little scrap of paper, folded it, and gave it to Frøken when she came around with a hat. On the board she wrote the names of the six candidates, and then she called on Sølvi, of all people, to read out the ballot slips. Every time Sølvi read out a name she put a cross by the appropriate person on the board.

It was taking time for my votes to start coming in. At first Eivind got most of the boys’ votes. Then I realized to my horror that there were no more votes. I hadn’t received a single one! How was that possible?

But there. At last.

“Karl Ove,” Sølvi said, and Frøken put a cross behind my name.

“Eivind,” Sølvi said.

“Eivind.”

“Eivind.”

“And that must be it, isn’t it? Now let’s see. The class reps on the council this year are therefore Eivind and Marianne!”

I looked down at the desk in front of me.

One vote.

How was that possible?

And, to cap it off, the one vote was my own.

But I was the best student in the class! At least in Norwegian! And natural and social sciences! And in math I was the second best, or perhaps the third. But, altogether, who could be better than me?

OK, Eivind won. But one vote? How was that possible?

Hadn’t anyone voted for me?

There had to be a mistake somewhere.

No one?

When I opened our front door Dad was standing inside.

I gave a start of surprise.

How had he managed that?

Had he been waiting for me?

“You’ve got to go to B-Max for me,” he said. “Look.”

He passed me a shopping list and a hundred-krone note.

“I want all the change back, OK?”

“Yes,” I said, put down my satchel, and ran into the road.

If there was one area in this world where I was meticulous it was with Dad’s change. When B-Max had just opened Yngve returned home with less change than there should have been. Dad gave him the beating of his life. And that was no small matter because Yngve had been on the receiving end of quite a few beatings. Many more than me. Yes, I got off lightly with everything. Even my bedtimes were lenient compared with his.

I looked at the list.

1 kilo of potatoes

1 packet of rissoles

2 onions

Coffee (for boiling)

1 tin of pineapple slices

¼ kilo of whipping cream

1 kilo of oranges

Pineapple? Were we going to have dessert again? On a Monday?

I put all the items in a basket, stood flicking through some magazines on the shelf by the counter, paid, put the change in my pocket, and ran home with the heavy bag hanging from my hand.